But art theft is rarely about the love of art or the cleverness of the crime, and the thief is rarely the Hollywood caricature—the reclusive millionaire with the stunning collection, accessible only by pressing the concealed button on the bust of Shakespeare, opening the steel door that reveals the private, climate-controlled gallery. The art thieves I met in my career ran the gamut—rich, poor, smart, foolish, attractive, grotesque. Yet nearly all of them had one thing in common: brute greed. They stole for money, not beauty.
As I said in every newspaper interview I ever gave, most art thieves quickly discover that the art in art crime isn’t in the theft, it’s in the sale. On the black market, stolen art usually fetches just 10 percent of open-market value. The more famous the painting, the harder it is to sell. As the years pass, thieves get desperate, anxious to unload an albatross no one wants to buy. In the early 1980s, a drug dealer who couldn’t find anyone to buy a stolen Rembrandt worth $1 million sold it to an undercover FBI agent for a mere $23,000. When undercover police in Norway sought to buy back The Scream, Edvard Munch’s stolen masterpiece known around the world, the thieves agreed to a deal for $750,000. The painting is worth $75 million.
Master paintings and great art have always been considered “priceless,” but it wasn’t until the mid twentieth century that their dollar value began a steep climb. The era opened with the 1958 sale of a Cézanne, Boy in Red Vest, for $616,000 at a Sotheby’s black-tie auction in London. The previous record for a single painting had been $360,000, and so the sale drew widespread press coverage. By the 1980s, when paintings began selling for seven figures or more, almost every record sale drew front-page headlines, imparting celebrity status to long-dead artists, particularly the Impressionists. Prices continued to spiral upward, approaching nine figures. In 1989, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles paid a then-shocking $49 million for van Gogh’s Irises. The following year Christie’s auctioned another van Gogh, Portrait of Dr. Gachet, for $82 million, and by 2004, Sotheby’s was auctioning Picasso’s Boy with a Pipe for a jaw-dropping $104 million. The record was shattered again in 2006 by the music mogul David Geffen, who sold Pollock’s No. 5, 1948 for $149 million and de Kooning’s Woman III for $137.5 million.
As value rose, so did theft.
In the 1960s, thieves started swiping Impressionist works from the walls of museums along the French Riviera and from cultural sites in Italy. The greatest was the 1969 theft in Palermo of Caravaggio’s painting Nativity with San Lorenzo and San Francesco. Such heists continued into the ’70s, but they spiked after the stunning van Gogh sales in the ’80s and ’90s.
The audacious 1990 Gardner theft—eleven stolen masterworks, including pieces by Vermeer and Rembrandt—marked the beginning of a bolder era. Thieves began striking museums across the globe, stealing more than $1 billion worth of paintings from 1990 to 2005. From the Louvre, they removed a Corot during a busy Sunday afternoon. At Oxford, they swiped a Cézanne in the midst of a New Year’s Eve celebration. In Rio, they took a Matisse, a Monet, and a Dalí. Bandits in Scotland posing as tourists stole a da Vinci masterpiece from a museum-castle. The Van Gogh Museum was hit twice in eleven years.
Feeling the swirl of jet lag, I drained my Scotch and headed up to my room.
The next morning, I arrived in time to get a decent seat for the opening remarks in the hotel conference center. Cradling my program and a cup of thick Italian coffee, I listened to the translation of the first speaker through wireless headphones. Stefano Manacorda of the Seconda Università di Napoli, a prominent Italian law professor with wild black hair and a wide purple tie, shuffled his notes and cleared his throat. He began with a blunt assessment that set the stage for the weekend meeting.
“Art crime is a problem of epidemic proportions.”
He’s right, of course. The $6-billion-a-year figure is probably low, the professor said, because it includes statistics supplied by only a third of the 192 member countries of the United Nations. Art and antiquities theft ranks fourth in transnational crime, after drugs, money laundering, and illegal arms shipments. The scope of art and antiquity crime varies from country to country, but it’s safe to say that art crime is on the rise, easily outpacing efforts to police it. Everything fueling the legitimate global economic revolution—the Internet, efficient shipping, mobile phones, and customs reforms, particularly within the European Union—makes it easier for criminals to smuggle and sell stolen art and antiquities.
Like many international crimes, the illegal art and antiquity trade depends on close ties between the legitimate and the illegitimate worlds. The global market for legitimate art tops tens of billions of dollars annually, with roughly 40 percent sold in the United States. With so much money at stake, hot art and antiquities attract money launderers, shady gallery owners and art brokers, drug dealers, shipping companies, unscrupulous collectors, and the occasional terrorist. Criminals use paintings, sculptures, and statues as collateral to finance arms, drug, and money-laundering deals. Art and antiquities, particularly pieces as small as a carry-on suitcase, are easier to smuggle than cash or drugs and their value easily converts in any currency. Stolen art is tough for customs agents to spot because art and antiquities moving across international borders don’t scream contraband the way drugs, guns, or bundles of cash do. Most stolen and looted pieces are quickly smuggled over borders, in search of new markets. Half the art and antiquities recovered by law enforcement is recaptured in another country.
Museum heists may grab the big headlines, but they represent only a tenth of all art crime. Statistics presented by the Art Loss Register in Courmayeur showed that 52 percent of all pilfered works are taken from private homes and organizations with little or no fanfare. Ten percent are stolen from galleries and 8 percent from churches. Most of the rest is spirited away from archaeological sites.
As another diplomat droned on about a rarely used codicil in some fifty-year-old treaty, I studied the Interpol figures in my conference packet. When I reached a chart on the geographic distribution of art thefts, I did a double take and took off my translation headphones: Interpol’s statistics asserted that 74 percent of the world’s art crime occurs in Europe. Seventy-four percent! That’s not likely, by a long shot. In reality, the numbers demonstrate only which nations keep good statistics—and this in turn may reveal the extent to which some nations truly care about policing art crime. The disparity between national art crime teams can be staggering. The French national art crime squad employs thirty dedicated officers in Paris and is led by a full colonel of the Gendarmerie Nationale. Scotland Yard deploys a dozen officers full-time and has deputized professors of art and anthropologists, partnering them with detectives investigating cases. Italy probably does the most. It maintains a three-hundred-person art and antiquity squad, a highly regarded, aggressive unit run by Giovanni Nistri, a general of the Carabinieri. In Courmayeur, General Nistri disclosed that Italy fights art crime using some of the same resources our DEA uses to fight drugs—it deploys helicopters, cybersleuths, and even submarines.