Hot Art (16 page)

“Those were some of the most difficult days of my life,” Waterfield told me. “It really was a headache.”

And it wasn't the last time that painting was stolen. Two years later a man entered the gallery at night, breaking through a skylight, and pried the Rembrandt off the wall with a crowbar. The painting disappeared for three years. In 1986 it was recovered by police at a train-station lost-property office. “That's a story for another time,” laughed Waterfield.

Rembrandt's Jacob de Gheyn is small, just 29.9 by 24.9 centimetres. “It's easy to run away with and was worth over 20 million dollars that year,” Waterfield said. Today the painting's estimated value is $80 million, and rising. “People love to steal it,” said Waterfield. It's been stolen four times, making it, by most accounts, the most stolen painting in history. Currently on display at Dulwich Picture Gallery, it is the ultimate piece of headache art.

“Yes. I've seen that painting,” Paul told me. “It's called the Take-Away Rembrandt. A lot of art went missing from a lot of galleries in the eighties, and most of it wasn't taken off a wall. It came out of storage facilities and archives, quietly.” Paul said there was one detective in London, in particular, who made his reputation dealing with headache art cases.

8.

SCOTLAND YARD

“Let's say I'm a drug dealer, and you owe me money. Well, you can steal a painting. You then give me that painting as a down payment on the loan.”
RICHARD ELLIS

R
ICHARD ELLIS, the man who started Scotland Yard's Art and Antiques Squad—the second time—agreed to meet me at a wine bar called Hardy's one afternoon in 2008. When I arrived, Ellis was sitting at a corner table, the only person in the bar. He had a shaved head, strong, wide shoulders, and quiet, alert eyes. Alone, in the back of the bar, there was a little of the godfather about him. His phone number ended in 007, and when he answered his line, he didn't say hello or good morning; he simply said, “Double-O-Seven.”

As a detective, Ellis had been involved in a number of high-profile cases, including reclaiming a Vermeer from a criminal organizer in a chase that lasted seven years and spanned half a dozen countries. That case was chronicled thoroughly in
The
Irish Game: A True Story of Crime and Art,
by Matthew Hart. Long before that hunt, though, Ellis's first experience with the art-theft industry had parallels to the shady work that Paul was doing in Brighton, and it had a personal connection. “This story begins at home,” he told me.

Ellis joined London's Metropolitan Police in 1970. Instead of sleeping at the police barracks after a night shift, he often sought refuge at his parents' house. “The barracks were loud and chaotic,” he said. “My family house was set back from the road and stood alone on a large property. It was quiet at night. A good place to rest.”

One morning, about a year and a half after Ellis joined the force, he was asleep after a night shift when his mother woke him up. The house had been burglarized, she said. Ellis knew there had been an attempted break-in a few weeks earlier, but the thief had been scared off by the family dog. This time the thief had returned, peeked through the large dining-room windows, and seen that the door to that room was shut: the dog was neutralized. The thief drilled a hole through the Ellises' window, slipped a specialized tool through the hole to unlock the window latch, and tied the open window to the outside wall of the house so it wouldn't swing shut in the wind. He was experienced, and he brought the right skill set to this job.

Missing from the Ellis house were ceramic works, silverware, and two paintings Ellis describes as “of no great value.” It was probably the biggest mistake the thief could have made— stealing antiques and art from Richard Ellis. Ellis called police, reported the theft, and then went to work for the Thursday-night shift. He finished at six o'clock Friday morning. Instead of going to bed, though, he went hunting for his family's treasures. His first stop was Bermondsey Market, where his father used to take him to wander the stalls and survey the junk and thousands of antiques for sale. The market was only open on Fridays, so there was some logic to the Thursday break-in.

There were only so many ways to convert those antiques into cash. The easiest way was to sell them, very quickly, to an antique dealer at a market. The dealer paid a bargain price, then sold them straight from his stall to anyone who wanted to buy, including the hundreds of antique dealers from more expensive and respectable stores who picked up their stock at the markets.

Ellis's instincts were correct. He was at Bermondsey for less than half an hour before he spotted a merchant laying out his family's wares. “I recognized instantly the silver, having spent so many bloody hours cleaning it as a child. I arrested the store owners immediately.”

The officer investigating the burglary of his parents' house sped to Bermondsey to interrogate the antique-stall owners, but Ellis was already doing that. They confessed to a mysterious supplier and admitted that they were expecting another delivery shortly. Sure enough, the supplier arrived with another haul of silverware, and he too was arrested. His name was Henry Wood, and he was on the cusp of turning sixty-five. The new shipment turned out to be silverware from a house just up the street from the Ellises.

Wood took police on a drive across London—a tour of his life's work as a criminal. He pointed out hundreds of homes he'd burglarized over a ten-year career. It was an efficient system: steal from homes, then off-load to dealers at Bermondsey on Friday—a system that would sound familiar to Paul. Wood was sentenced to eight years in prison, and Ellis received a commendation for his fast footwork. He moved up the ranks, working in some of London's toughest neighbourhoods, investigating armed robbery, rape, and homicide. But he had his eye on a different department in the Yard.

In 1974, something was awry in London's tightly knit community of stamp collectors. Stamps were a subset of the antiques trade, and the industry was populated by meticulous minds who loved to pore over the tiny details of these micro-artworks—used and abused by the mail system and saved by a small circle of conservationists and historians. Scotland Yard was muscled into forming a new squad by a tiny population of philatelics who were increasingly finding fakes or being robbed. They may have been detail-oriented nerds, but they were a vocal bunch. A few detectives were pulled from their regular duties to look into the matter and make a few arrests. The formation of the Philatelic Squad was intended to be an act of goodwill with a quick result—smart public relations, like Robert Volpe's exploration of the art-theft scene in New York. And as with Volpe, that wasn't what happened.

The unit began investigating stamps but was quickly sucked into the larger criminal vortex of the unregulated antiques industry. The Philatelic Squad found, unsurprisingly, that the industry was ripe for fraud. Its staff branched out, began collecting information on the booming business of antiques and art, and eventually evolved into London's first Art and Antiques Squad. Ellis applied to join that squad but was rejected. “At that time, at Scotland Yard, if you knew something about a subject and expressed interest in it, you were considered at risk for corruption,” he told me. “So instead I was transferred to East London, a hard area.”

Ellis kept track of the squad's status. The Metropolitan Art and Antiques Squad investigated cases for nine years before it was quietly shut down in 1984. London police were overstretched. Crime rates had soared. It was stolen paintings versus riots and gangland murders. The unit's files, a few cabinets filled with index cards, each holding the name of a stolen work of art, were left to gather dust.

During those years, Ellis applied his skills to investigating homicides, gangs, armed robberies, and rapes at a police substation in Tottingham. He crashed down doors on bank robbers, and the work wore on him. He wanted something more intellectually challenging. The same year the Art and Antiques Squad was dissolved, Ellis was transferred to the upper-middle-class division in Hampstead. His new job involved looking into a number of break-ins at private residences where paintings had been stolen. One afternoon he received a phone call from someone who had spied one of those stolen paintings—
Two Ladies at a Racecourse,
by Sir Alfred James Munnings, one of England's most exciting horse painters—in the collection of Richard Green, a prominent London art dealer.

Ellis looked into it and found out that Green had bought the stolen painting at auction, at Sotheby's in New York. Ellis, getting tougher every year, decided to seize the painting from the dealer. Green wasn't having it, and the art dealer dialled his lawyer. The investigation devolved into a legal scrap between the Metropolitan Police lawyers, the victim of the original theft, and the art dealer, who wanted the painting he'd paid for. Green argued that he had bought the painting in good faith, and threatened to sue the previous owner of the painting for sullying his name. Ellis looked at the facts: the painting had been stolen in England, moved across the ocean to Sotheby's, and sold to Green, who shipped it back to London and placed it in his shop window. Ellis thought it through and decided to make the political move of his career.

When the Art and Antiques Squad had been active, it had circulated a list of stolen paintings to galleries, dealers, and auction houses in the London area. Any dealer who received the report would have been on the hook for buying a painting he knew was stolen. When the squad was disbanded, so was the list.

Ellis advised the victim of the theft to write a letter to Scotland Yard, stating exactly those facts. That letter bounced around the department and eventually landed on the desk of Ellis's manager. “I hope you know what you're doing,” he told Ellis. The letter gathered momentum. It essentially stated that by disbanding the Art and Antiques Squad and not circulating a list of stolen artwork to dealers and collectors in London, Scotland Yard could be on the hook for the price of the painting Green had bought.

The letter finally wound its way to the desk of the deputy solicitor, who, according to Ellis, “considered its meaning with increasing nausea.” That single letter forced Scotland Yard to reopen the Art and Antiques Squad. Ellis was invited to head the new unit. He accepted. It was 1989, and his dream had come true.

As team leader, Ellis had a partner and not much else: a few contacts and what was left of the previous squad—the filing cabinets and a cue card system. He also had contacts at Sotheby's and Christie's, and he knew his way around the art market. But he didn't have to use that knowledge to find cases: the art market came to him.

One of his first significant cases involved the art collection at Russborough House, an Irish manor that had been pillaged a few years earlier—again. Russborough held a major collection of art assembled by Sir Alfred Beit, and it had already been burglarized once, by Rose Dugdale, who had hoped to use the stolen art as ransom in exchange for Irish Republican Army (
IRA
) prisoners. Dugdale's attempt had failed, but the target was now well known to the criminal community.

In 1986, an Irish criminal organizer named Martin Cahill decided to try his luck with Russborough. Cahill was feared, because he was known to be vicious; his nickname was “the General.” He had started out as a street thug in Dublin, then moved on to stealing diamonds, jewellery, and gold. Now fine art. His gang looted Russborough of eleven paintings, including works by Vermeer, Rubens, Gainsborough, and Goya. The paintings were easy to steal but, as Cahill learned, hard to sell. First he tried to sell them directly into the legitimate market, but that route was blocked by the Irish Garda, who orchestrated a sting operation. That operation failed to retrieve the paintings, so Cahill adjusted his plan. That's when he attracted the attention of Ellis and Scotland Yard.

One afternoon at his new office Ellis received a phone call from a London art dealer. The voice was tense. A stranger had called the dealer earlier that day—a new client. The caller asked that he authenticate eleven paintings. To do this, the dealer would have to fly to Dublin, and for this service he would be paid £500,000. The stranger added that if the dealer did not authenticate the paintings, he'd be shot in the head. “Well, this wasn't exactly typical,” remembered Ellis.

Ellis called in an elite squad to wire the dealer's apartment and start surveillance. The dealer scheduled a meeting with the caller at a flat in Notting Hill. When the man showed up, so did Ellis and Scotland Yard. His name was John Naughton, and he had been recruited by Cahill. The plan had been to have the dealer authenticate the paintings and then ransom them back to the Irish government. But Cahill was in over his head; the paintings weren't insured and the Irish government would never have paid a ransom, according to Ellis. Instead, Naughton was arrested and sentenced to two years in prison. The paintings remained missing, but now Ellis was watching for them.

Ellis kept track of Cahill, and witnessed the evolution of a criminal mind grappling with how to profit from stealing famous paintings. “At the time of his stealing the paintings he had no idea how to dispose of them, but through a process of trial and error he explored all the possibilities ... starting from the totally naive point of trying to sell it on the open market for its true value, he moved to selling it on the black market,” Ellis told me.

Cahill tried to sell the paintings to other organizations. First, the General attempted to sell them to the
IRA
, but the
IRA
considered Cahill a liability, and didn't want to do business with him. In fact, the
IRA
was killing off Cahill's drug dealers. Cahill next contacted the Ulster Volunteer Force (
UVF
)—Protestants from Northern Ireland. Cahill didn't care about friends or politics. He wanted money.