by Catherine Sezgin, ARCA Blog Editor
(You may find the first two parts here and here)
In London, Julian Radcliffe,
founder of the Art Loss Register, a private company originally funded by auction
houses and insurers to create a database of stolen art, tells Knelman of his
effort to establish a stolen art database for art dealers and auction houses. The company also reported over $200
million in art theft recoveries by 2008, including recoveries of paintings by
Cézanne, Edouard Manet, and Pablo Picasso.
“Famous
paintings are just a small percentage of what is being stolen,” Radcliffe told
Knelman, [adding that] most of the art on the ALR list consists of minor paintings and
antiques, and fewer than 1 per cent of those are ever recovered.
Radcliffe explains that art
dealers often didn’t question why they could purchase a painting cheaply. Sometimes if art dealers found out the
art was reported stolen on ALR, they would not buy the work but refer it to someone
else. Even art thieves like to
search the database to see if a painting has been reported stolen.
In the over
1,000 recoveries Radcliffe has enjoyed, in only three cases was the thief not
after the paycheck for the stolen art, and most of the art that wasn’t
immediately passed on to a dealer or auction house was stored in a vault, a
closet, an attic, or a basement.
“Transactions in
the art world are often carried out anonymously … and this cult of secrecy can
be taken advantage of by criminals,” said Radcliffe. “The art trade is the least regulated and least transparent
activity in the commercial world, and the portability of the times and their
international market make them very attractive for moving value, unobserved.”
Radcliffe said
that the average value of stolen art is under $10,000 and that thieves will
pass these items off to fences, who will then move them into the outlands of
the art market: to small auction houses or galleries, or across oceans…. About
half of all stolen art recovered by the ALR was found in a different country
from where it was originally stolen.
In the United States, Knelmen meets
Special Agent Robert K. Wittman, then a Senior Art Investigator for the Rapid
Deployment Art Crime Team for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Wittman was six months away from
retirement. The 1996 law, The
Theft of Major Artwork had made it a federal crime to steal from a museum or to
steal a work of art worth more than $5,000 or older than 100 years. Knelman tells how Wittman recovered a
Norman Rockwell painting in Brazil just three months after helping with the recovery effort after the attacks on the World Trade Center.
Knelman meets Matthew Bogdanos
who had lived one block from the WTC on 9/11. The assistant U. S. district attorney, a Marine reservist, led the art theft
investigation of the National Museum of Iraq after looting in 2003, and
established an amnesty program to recover the stolen antiquities.
In the fall of 2009, Knelman
meets Bonnie Magness-Gardiner, head of the Federal Bureau of Investigations’
Art Crime Team which had reorganized in response to the looting of the Iraqi
museum. Magness-Gardiner echoes
what Knelman heard in his first meeting with an art thief in Toronto six years
earlier about an unregulated and undocumented art market based on secretive
transactions involving millions of dollars.
I asked
Magness-Gardiner if it was fair to say that no one had a handle on how large
the black market in stolen art had become. “Yes, that’s fair to say,” she answered.... “When we say ‘black market,’ really
what we mean are those stolen items that are in the legitimate market and
shouldn’t be there. The black
market isn’t separate. So we’re
talking about items that have no history.
The collectors, the museums, and the dealers all partake on some level.”
Magness-Gardiner
explains:
“Art is one of
the biggest unregulated markets in the U. S. The business of art tends to be very closed and
secretive. It is still business
done on a handshake. Financial transactions
are quite difficult to track, because you don’t have a paper trail. How art is bought, sold, and moved is a
challenge in itself to understand.
When a piece of art is bought or sold, there is the movement of the
physical object from one location to another. There is also the transfer of money from one bank account to
another. There is nothing to link
those two events.”
Magness-Gardiner addressed the
lack of information about the collecting history or previous ownership of an
object of art or cultural property:
“Another problem
built into a business-on-a-handshake model is the issue of provenance. The first thing we tell a new agent to
do is to find out whether or not the work of art that has been stolen is, in
fact, real. Where does it come from?
Where are its records? We don’t know until we do a background investigation on
the piece of art.” She continued,
“Looking at the authenticity of a piece is always detective work. Unlike most other material items
manufactured today, art does not have serial numbers. Lack of a serial number is one element that really
distinguishes art from other types of property theft. The only parallel is jewellery and gems – difficult to trace
because they don’t have a serial number either, and so they are particularly
valuable to thieves,” she said.
“The middlemen
and the dealers don’t want other people to know their sources. This can stem from a legitimate
business concern, because if other dealers find out who their sources are, they
could use those same sources.”
Knelman dedicates a chapter to
the art crime investigator, Alain Lacoursière, who had worked on art thefts as
part of his police job until he retired. When Knelman met the new generation of the Quebec Art Squad they didn’t know of the work of the LAPD Art Theft
Detail until Knelman told the French-speaking detectives of Hrycyk’s work.
In Hot Art, Knelman successfully brings a personal narrative
navigating the disparate international world of art theft and recovery that
almost unknowingly tell of the same story of theft and laundering stolen art
through the legitimate market and the limited resources to combat the problem. From England’s first art investigative
team, the Sussex Police’s art and antiques squad, in 1965 to information flourishing
on the internet through blogs such as Art
Hostage (written by the former Brighton Knocker Paul "Turbo" Hendry),
and information dispersed by Interpol, the LAPD’S Art Theft Detail, Quebec’s
Art Crime Squad, and the Museum Security Network, who in the English-speaking
world will be the next law enforcement officers to continue the work of its
pioneers?
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In order to encourage continued awareness of the growing field of art crime and cultural heritage protection ARCA will host its fourth-annual conference in Amelia.
