Hot Art (10 page)

After Volpe retired in 1983, he continued to lecture about his insights into art crime at universities across the nation. He also spoke at the
FBI'S
training headquarters in Quantico, Virginia. But his position within the
NYPD
was never filled. New York City still does not have a full-time art detective on the force, even though it is considered the art capital of the world. Over his career, Volpe came to view New York as a depot for stolen art. The collectors who populated the penthouses of Manhattan act as a magnet, drawing the looted antiquities and stolen paintings to the island from around the globe. Volpe saw the holes in the system clearly and understood that criminals were already exploiting them.

He also identified the much larger challenge that he was powerless to act on: art theft was both a local and an international crime. The fingers of illegal activity that he found on Madison Avenue seemed to stretch far beyond his reach, outside of the city, across state lines, and in many cases across oceans to other art-market capitals, in Europe and Asia. Volpe died at his house on Staten Island in 2006, at the age of sixty-three, of a heart attack.

Laurie Adams, the author of
Art Cop,
learned about his death from the obituary in the
New York Times
:

As epicenter of the art world, New York brims with priceless art in museums and private residences, and according to Mr. Volpe, is the world's clearinghouse for stolen art.
   Before Mr. Volpe was unleashed in 1971 as the city's first and only art detective, art crimes were handled by the burglary division and other units. After his retirement in 1983, regular details took them up again.

For most of his career, Volpe was stranded in local bureaucracy with a small piece of a much larger picture and no support from within the department to uncover it.

Adams told me, “We only saw each other once or twice after the book was written. I think it's too bad that New York doesn't have an art squad. You need somebody infiltrating these areas—that's what Volpe demonstrated. Back then, the seventies, no one could have predicted that art prices would go up the way they did. It's always about the money.”

If not for
Art Cop,
there would be little record of Volpe's work. Because of Adams, though, L.A. Detective Donald Hrycyk figured out that he was sharing an experience, was now part of a much larger pattern—one that seemed to repeat itself. “I found parallels to the work we were doing. It was interesting,” Hrycyk told me. When Hrycyk sent me emails, it wasn't his name that showed up in the address bar. Instead, the sender name was displayed in capital letters:
LAPD
ARTCOP
.

ONE AFTERNOON
in 1987, Bill Martin and Don Hrycyk were called to investigate a theft at the residence of Howard Keck, a Los Angeles oil tycoon. Hrycyk noted the high walls surrounding the property, the advanced security system, and the twenty-four-hour armed guards. In the living room the detective also noticed the Thomas Gainsborough portrait above the fireplace mantel, easily worth over a million.

Keck's wife, Elizabeth, played cards in an anteroom within view of a painting by Swedish Impressionist Anders Zorn. The painting had been bothering her lately. Why? One day she walked up to it and touched her finger to the canvas. Her fingertip sailed easily across the woman's body, a comfortably smooth surface with zero texture. It was supposed to be oil on canvas, but what she was feeling was a photograph, perfectly sized inside the original frame. “It was incredible quality,” Hrycyk said.

Three months earlier the Kecks' butler had quit.

Rune Donell was a Swedish-born sixty-one-year-old who had worked at the Keck home for eleven years. When he left, he cited medical reasons. Elizabeth remembered Donell admiring the Zorn, and that he had once pointed out to her that the painting would probably sell easily at auction in Sweden, which he visited often. Hrycyk called Interpol, which contacted police in Sweden; they agreed to help. This was now an international effort. In Sweden, detectives found out that one year earlier, long before Elizabeth Keck had discovered the fake in her card room, her butler had showed up at a Swedish auction and sold a painting called
F
ê
te Galante
by French artist Jacques Sébastien Le Clerc.

Donell was living two lives. In Los Angeles, he was a lowly butler; in Sweden, he was a high roller. Hrycyk phoned the Kecks. Did they own a painting by Le Clerc? Yes. They searched their estate. No photograph replacement this time—it had simply vanished.

Swedish police also learned that Donell had visited the auctioneers again, this time with a photograph of the Zorn painting. Based on the date when Donell set foot back in Sweden with the painting, the detectives calculated that the photograph Elizabeth Keck had touched that afternoon with her finger had been hanging in her card room for five months. The real one had already been auctioned off in Sweden, for $527,000.

The butler went back to Los Angeles, where Hrycyk arrested him and held him on $500,000 bail. Hrycyk searched Donell's West L.A. apartment and found evidence of money transfers from the sales, cameras, and film negatives of the paintings— as well as a receipt from a Redondo Beach storage yard. Hrycyk called the yard's manager: Donell was keeping a twenty-five-foot motor home there. In the motor home Hrycyk found two more enlarged photos of the Zorn painting, just like the one in the frame. He also found another photograph, exactly matching a different work at the Kecks',
Ducks on the Banks of a
River
by German painter Alexander Koester. Hrycyk asked Elizabeth Keck to check that the original painting was still on her wall. It was. The Koester had been Donell's next target.

Meanwhile, Hrycyk had managed to track down the shop where the prints had been made, Rossi Photography Custom Lab in Hollywood. Owner Tom Rossi remembered Donell. Rossi had spent months making dozens of high-quality large prints until Donell was satisfied. It was an expensive, time-consuming process, and it worked.

Donell was prosecuted on two counts of grand theft. He admitted that he'd sold the two paintings but claimed he did so as Elizabeth Keck's agent—that she had been keeping her asset sales secret from her husband. Donell said he'd given the money to Elizabeth Keck, except for a $90,000 commission. She was outraged and said Donell's accusation was “ludicrous.” But enough doubt was cast that Donell was acquitted. Elizabeth Keck sued Donell for $31 million. Meanwhile, the Swedish government held on to the paintings; under Swedish law, they said, auction buyers purchasing in good faith did not have to return the goods. Hrycyk sat back. He'd done his job, and everyone now knew where the paintings were.

WHEN HRYCYK FIRST
started working cases with Bill Martin, the learning curve was steep and resources were scarce. “Our recovery rate was lower” as a result, he told me. They also didn't have a framework of like-minded organizations to help them. The fbi wasn't dedicating any serious resources to the problem, the Internet was in its infancy, and the Art Loss Register didn't yet exist. Interpol was the only resource they could use, and they didn't know how to use it properly. “It was slow.” Hrycyk was also getting to know a whole new world within the city.

“Even in those early days, without any experience at this kind of work, I knew immediately this work was different,” said Hrycyk. “I'd been working gangs and ghetto crimes. Suddenly I'm walking into museums and galleries asking questions. I was dealing with the rich and the powerful, the most influential people of the city.”

Some of the wealthiest collectors in L.A. were incredibly irresponsible when it came to buying, selling, and storing their art. In many of the early cases, Hrycyk discovered, no records of transactions had been held on to. For a detective, a paper trail is vital; it's a path to follow. In this new scene, often nothing remained to signify that any transaction had even occurred. “Just one person saying they had paid for a work, or another saying they had sold a painting,” he said. “It didn't make any sense.”

Another big difference from traditional property-crimes work was that even when there were suspects they often had no prior criminal convictions. “I found that a very high percentage of the cases I investigated involved people who had never been in trouble with the law before,” he said.

The detectives theorized that stolen art was also unlike other property-crime cases when it came to time frames. If a stolen tv wasn't found immediately, it might as well not exist. Paintings were different. A few years could go by, even a decade or two, and a painting could suddenly reappear at an auction house or a gallery. Information, then, became critical to solving these cases. Martin and Hrycyk wrote their reports by hand and filed them in blue binders. They started organizing those blue binders by year, and soon they had a few shelves' worth. The blue binders were their database and their archive— whoever worked those cases in the future would need to rely on the information in those binders. Without those records, it would be as if the cases had never happened.

“The art world as a whole is very secretive,” Hrycyk said. “Deals are done on a handshake, on a sense of trust, and on the basis of a relationship. I've run into many situations where people will enter into million-dollar financial deals based upon their personal relationship and evaluation of another person, just by eyeballing them.”

Confidence, Hrycyk figured out, was a big part of the problem. In the art world, confidence often replaced good business practices and safeguards. The sums of money trading hands without records were large, and so were the egos.

“Pride and reputation ruled the scene,” he said. “A lot of people in this city take pride in their judgment of character. Over the years I have seen that kind of pride in judgment be the undoing of many people.” He explained, “A stranger with a business card can walk into a gallery and say, ‘I think I have a client who would be interested in buying this painting.' The gallery owner might take a chance on this stranger only because he possesses a business card. That stranger may be a con man.” The con man may ask to borrow a small piece of art, to see how it fits with the collector's taste. He may do this several times, always returning the art to the gallery or dealer. By going through these motions, the con man creates a relationship, becomes a friend.

“Then he might borrow a much more valuable painting, and simply disappear,” continued Hrycyk, who has investigated dozens of cases where a borrowed painting simply vanished. In those cases, when a detective asks for records or proof of purchase, the gallery owner often winces and shrugs. This leaves the detective powerless: “If a crime has been committed I can make an arrest, but the prosecutor must have evidence. If there is no paper trail, a prosecution might be impossible.”

The art world, it turned out, was totally unregulated. It relied on a code of ethics that no longer applied to other business practices. “Art galleries and art dealers often don't ask for everything they need. Instead, they decide they should appear to value their customer, and to treat them as royalty. Oddly, not asking for information seems to be a part of that world's business practice.” Hrycyk had seen this kind of behaviour before, in South Central, watching drug dealers.

“That model—no paper trail, business on a handshake—is the textbook example of how criminals buy and sell products: drugs, stolen items, et cetera,” he said. “There's not a big difference between a criminal receiver and a person who is confidential.”

The detective describes a classic drug deal: “The buyer of the drugs doesn't know who the supplier is. The buyer only meets with the middleman. Cash is paid. There are no records. The transaction is invisible. It never happened,” he said. Hrycyk then described the process of someone selling a work of art: “The person selling that painting is probably not the actual owner of that painting to begin with. Instead, he is a middleman, acting as a broker for the owner.” Just as often, the person acting as the buyer isn't the actual buyer. “It is considered rude to ask questions about the provenance of an artwork—who owned it, where it came from. Embarrassment is often one of the leading factors for secrecy,” he said. Sometimes this comes down to practical social etiquette—the people selling their beloved artwork could be going through a divorce or have simply fallen on hard financial times. They don't want the community to know the details of their personal or financial lives. The painting gets bought and moves from one collector to another. The middlemen take their cut. But “the action is invisible.”

Hrycyk noted that the idea of the rich and famous falling into financial trouble hadn't occurred to him before he began investigating art thefts. One afternoon he was visiting a Beverly Hills pawnbroker who bought and sold art to the Hollywood jet set. Hrycyk recognized a movie star loitering in the store, looking depressed.

“I suddenly realized that a lot of very famous people run into cash-flow problems, so they pawn their jewels and their art. It is done quietly, to avoid attention and embarrassment.” The more Hrycyk learned, the closer he was able to build profiles of different art thieves. His work expanded: he wasn't just dealing with burglaries anymore. He was dealing with con men, fraud, fakes being bought for large amounts of money. His conclusion: thieves of all kinds were taking full advantage of the art market. “Once they understood that the system was unregulated, they could manipulate it to serve their needs,” the detective said.

“One thing I found was that when I first started going to these art galleries, I'd glance around and see colours and shapes. As the years went on, my eyes would go to an artwork and I would know: that's a Salvador Dalí.”

In 1989, after working with Martin for three years, Hrycyk transferred jobs again, and went to work in the police chief's office. At that time, the
LAPD
Art Theft Detail was the only unit in North America dedicated to investigating art thefts. There was a problem in Los Angeles, and from
Art Cop,
Hrycyk knew that the same pattern was playing out in New York. But where had it come from? Who else was seeing cases like these? The only example from law enforcement that Hrycyk and Martin could point to in the English-language world was across the Atlantic, in England. Scotland Yard's unit, they believed, was the first one in the world to hunt stolen art. But that honour actually went to a much smaller force—the Sussex Police, who had jurisdiction over a swath of the south coast of England, including Brighton.