Hot Art (24 page)

During our first meeting at Parker Center, Hrycyk gave me a list of names and phone numbers to help me with my investigation. It was as if he'd recognized that, because of the secretive and sensitive nature of the art community, I'd have a difficult time getting anyone else to talk to me while I was in Los Angeles. I examined the list. It included a couple of high-end auction houses. I phoned them and left messages, but they did not return those calls. Also on that list was the name of a well-known art dealer, Leslie Sacks; the head of security at the Getty Center, Bob Combs; and one of the most famous artists in Los Angeles, June Wayne.

WAYNE LIVES IN
a beautiful low-slung house on Tamarind Avenue, across the street from the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, where lie the bodies of, among other stars, John Huston, Peter Lorre, and Rudolph Valentino. “Valentino is my neighbour,” Wayne told me. “Once a year I used to see one or two women dressed in black come to visit him, but now several hundred ladies in black show up. The cemetery partly supports itself by holding rock concerts. It also shows free movies projected on the wall of the mausoleum for the poor people of Hollywood, who show up with lawn chairs and beer. When that happens, a lot of my neighbours have a coronary. But this is Hollywood,” she laughed. “The fact of the matter is, the U.S. thinks it's a movie. Otherwise, you cannot explain the dramas that go on in this country now.” This afternoon Wayne is sitting on a white couch in her spacious living room, her catalogue raisonné recently printed and lying open on a nearby table.

Wayne was ninety years old when I visited her live-in studio, although she had the curious eyes and spark of a twenty-five-year-old. Her ninetieth birthday party, which Hrycyk and Lazarus attended, was featured as a “Talk of the Town” in the
New Yorker.
She told me that when she cancelled a recent lecture at
UCLA
, a few members in the closely knit arts community simply assumed she had died. “That's what happens when you reach my age,” she said, and smiled.

Wayne, one of the pre-eminent figures of the Los Angeles visual arts community, arrived in Hollywood around the same time that Lana Turner was crowned the first scream queen for her role in
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
and Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman were starring in
Casablanca
. “When I got here in the 1940s, Edward G. Robinson and Vincent Price were in charge of culture. Hollywood's rich and powerful supported the museums in New York, and even when this city built its own museums, the boards were controlled by people from other parts of the country. I remember there was actually an initiative to get board members who were from Los Angeles,” she told me.

“The community of artists here was very much affected by geography—this vastness of Los Angeles—and the fact that it's an automobile culture. So there were these clumps of artists, like clumps of bacteria on a petri dish. Bacteria, if they are close enough to each other, stimulate each other. If they are too far apart, they will die. So when we got together, it would be very intense. Los Angeles was large enough for many kinds of creative people to coexist without annoying each other: writers, filmmakers, musicians, and artists. And there was a tremendous influx of talent because of the refugees that Hollywood brought over, to save from Hitler—I'd visit Toscha Seidel and listen to him play chamber music. Have you ever gone to a Passover Seder with Aldous Huxley reading the Song of Solomon?”

Wayne proved instrumental in helping the artistic bacteria in Los Angeles to thrive. In the 1940s and '50s, she was focussed on the art of lithography. At a party in 1959, she met W. McNeil Lowry, director of the Ford Foundation. He was so impressed by Wayne's passion for lithography, he asked her to send a pitch to the foundation detailing what would be required to reinvigorate that art. Wayne told me she worked on that proposal for six months, sent it in, and the Ford Foundation said yes; she received $2 million in start-up funds. In 1961, four years before the Los Angeles County Museum of Art opened to the public, she opened her Tamarind studios, a haven in Hollywood where artists from across the United States and beyond could visit to work on printmaking. Tamarind became renowned as a global centre for lithography, and Wayne attracted some of the most exciting talent of the day.

“Back then print was the poor man's art,” she told me, “and part of my job at Tamarind was to bring the price of prints up. .. That was quite a test in market impact, and I was thoroughly excoriated by art dealers and curators here, who enjoyed being able to buy prints for five or ten dollars.”

The price of prints climbed, though, and Wayne's own work skyrocketed in value over the decades, while Los Angeles became the second-largest art market in North America. And along with the growth of the legitimate market came the criminals. Wayne told me she has had art stolen at different points in her career—at least eight major works, and many lesser-known, smaller pieces. In the early 1970s, she was creating large tapestries, one of which was purchased by the University of California at Los Angeles to decorate the lobby of the molecular biology department. Wayne supervised the installation herself. “It was built to last,” she said.

In 1975, the tapestry disappeared. “The thieves who did it must have worked hard. It was really high up, and bolted right to the wall,” she told me. “They used a ladder for sure. And because it was sewn on to a metal grid, they could not have rolled it up when they stole it. They would have been forced to walk it off campus. I have no idea where that one is,” she said. “My personal feeling was that it was an inside job, and I'm convinced it went directly from the wall to the airport onto an airplane to somewhere far away, like the Middle East.”

Wayne told me a stream of smaller prints had also been smuggled straight out of her studio. In fact, Wayne said, her dealer had spotted a few of those prints within the last few years at a well-known Los Angeles art gallery. Wayne wasn't sure what to do. “Years have passed since they disappeared,” she said. “This is not uncommon, though, in the art world.”

For decades, she has kept handwritten lists of all the artwork produced at Tamarind. “I lead an anti-art-theft life,” she said. That afternoon, she picked one of her notebooks off a shelf and opened it up on her lap. They reminded me of Hrycyk's blue binders. Her finger scrolled down a neat list with names of prints, dates, and status. “See,” she said, as her finger paused now and then on the page in front of us. Quite a few of the entries had the word “Missing” next to them.

Wayne met Hrycyk and Lazarus because she had shipped eleven pieces from her studio for a show at Rutgers University. The eleven tapestries went into eleven crates, but only ten crates came back to her. She called the police and was directed to the Art Theft Detail. “Within hours of those detectives getting involved, the image of my missing tapestry was all over the Internet.” One week later, Hrycyk and Lazarus walked through her door. “Those darlings came here with the tapestry in their arms. The tapestry was dusty and dirty but not damaged,” she said. The huge tapestry, part of a series she called Lemmings, hung on the wall above us, over the open staircase that leads to the second floor of her studio, dominating the space.

On that afternoon, we discussed the growth of the arts community and the impact of the rising prices paid for art on instances of theft. “The slippery part of art theft is the roiling art market,” she said. “The commoditization of fine art is the new way to make fast money. Art has turned into an international product. Things have changed.”

DURING MY VISIT
to Los Angeles, Donald Hrycyk dedicated many hours to giving me a tour of his empire of cases—his work was the most detailed example I found of a North American city interacting with the global black market.

The stories the detective told me had a ring of familiarity to them. Hrycyk didn't know the term “knocker,” but there were certainly knockers in Los Angeles. Paul's business model was practised here; prizes were being drained from houses and slipped into auction houses or galleries and then onto a collector's wall. Because Hrycyk often found himself face to face with some of the city's most prominent citizens, he was careful not to mention names unless it was necessary or there had been media coverage. Some of the cases he discussed were also posted on the Art Theft Detail website as examples of situations to avoid or be mindful of—cautionary tales for art dealers and collectors.

He told me about the Hollywood film producer who'd been raided of $400,000 worth of art, including a Tiffany lamp and a 1937 drawing by Pablo Picasso called
Faune
. When Hrycyk showed up at the mansion, it looked like a straightforward break and enter. The window of the back door had been smashed, and shards of laminated glass were still stuck to its frame. Laminated glass, though, stays stuck in the formation in which it is broken. Hrycyk noted that the shards on the door were bent outward, toward the garden. “The window was broken from the inside. So the thief had already had access to the house. He then beat the glass while standing in the dining room. This was an inside job,” he concluded.

The film producer, like the couple in Encino, employed a large staff: twenty-nine people, including nannies, maids, cooks, gardeners, and assistants. Hrycyk interviewed each of them, but no one knew or saw anything. He went through his checklist and waited. A few months later Christie's in Beverly Hills called. A man had walked into the auction house with a Picasso, valued at around $100,000. He said he was a football player who had some money to throw around and had bought the print on a whim. “It's ugly, though,” he said. When Hrycyk had beamed out his initial Crime Alert, Christie's had printed up the photos and kept them in a binder. The employee checked the binder, saw the match, and called Hrycyk. Keep the man there, Hrycyk said.

Beverly Hills police surrounded the auction house in unmarked vehicles and seized the Picasso, wrapped in a dirty T-shirt, from the trunk of a
BMW
. Hrycyk examined the Picasso, and the man. “We'd met before,” he told me.

Sammie Archer
III
had almost become a pro football player but was, in fact, the movie producer's chauffeur. In Archer's pocket Hrycyk found a list of art and antique stores. One of the antique dealers had bought most of the movie producer's stolen art from Archer, no questions asked, for cash—except for the Picasso. By the time Hrycyk showed up at the antique store, the dealer had sold the Tiffany lamp to a dealer in New York. Hrycyk followed the chain of sales. He learned that in just a few months the lamp passed through five buyers, almost quadrupled in value, and crossed an international boundary. “It had been appraised for $75,000, but it had been sold to a Canadian collector for $275,000,” Hrycyk told me. “And every time it moved, it got more expensive, and cleaner. If I hadn't found this guy [the chauffeur] at that particular moment, we probably would never have recovered it.”

Auction houses were a frequent destination for artwork stolen from home invasions, just like in the United Kingdom. Hrycyk told me about a married couple who answered an ad in a newspaper placed by an art dealer interested in appraising and buying art collections. The dealer arrived, but the husband was late getting home from work, so only the wife was home. She was polite, invited the dealer into their house, and showed him a work by American artist William Aiken Walker, famous for his depictions of eighteenth-century cotton-field workers in Virginia. “The painting was a beautiful example of Walker's signature work,” noted Hrycyk. A few minutes later she felt a chill of fear when she realized the “dealer” didn't seem to know anything about art. She went into the kitchen to turn off the oven. When she came back, the “art dealer” was leaving, with the Walker. He walked out the front door, got into his car, and drove away.

A few months later Hrycyk was looking at a photograph of the same Walker, gracing the cover of an L.A. auction house catalogue. Hrycyk called, attended the auction, waited for the thief to show up, and arrested him. “If he'd held on to it, or taken it out of the area, we might not have caught him,” he told me. Like Sammie Archer
III
, the thief had been caught because of his impatience, greed, and lack of imagination.

I got the sense from Hrycyk that dealing with auction-house cases could be tricky and required equal measures of diplomacy and grit—that L.A. fighter spirit. He told me about a brawl he got into with a prestigious house. That case had started when a New York art collector returned to his apartment to find a window pried open and works by Picasso, Miró, and Chagall stolen. The
NYPD
didn't turn up any suspects, but the collector was enterprising. He printed up a flyer with pictures of his stolen art and sent it to auction houses and art dealers across the country. One of his flyers landed on the desk of a major auction house in Los Angeles; Hrycyk wouldn't say which one. Close to a year later the auction house received an unframed Picasso aquatint from the Vollard Suite entitled
Minotaur aveugle guidé par une fillette dans la nuit,
valued at $50,000.

A staff member still had a copy of the flyer, and it looked like the same print. She'd dealt with Hrycyk before and rang to let him know. When Hrycyk called back he was directed to the auction house's attorney. “It didn't go well,” he told me. “It was clear the lawyer was more concerned about protecting clients than the prospect that his business might be used to launder stolen artwork.”

Hrycyk tried to schedule a meeting to inspect the Picasso, but the meeting kept being moved or cancelled. He realized the delays were a play for time—the attorney had contacted the New York consignor of the print and informed him that the police were investigating. “So this attorney decided to make himself the arbiter, to determine if the print was stolen and whether the consignor was criminally culpable. That's my job,” said the detective. “By alerting the suspect, the attorney had allowed him precious time to conceal any other pieces he might have been in possession of—the Chagall and the Miró stolen in the same burglary. He now also had time to rehearse a story that might sound plausible, knowing he would soon be interviewed by the police.” Instead, the seller stuck to a ludicrous explanation: that he had bought the Picasso from a man on the street.