Hot Art (19 page)

By 1995 the
ALR
was in danger of going out of business. “The system was working but the art trade wasn't paying. There was also a recession in the art trade.” Sotheby's and Christie's, both with seats on the board of the
ALR
, took advantage of their leverage and drove down the price of searches. “It was, in a sense, another form of price fixing,” said Radcliffe. “The two powerhouses said they would pay half of what they'd been paying.”

A major stream of income was suddenly sliced off, and in the four years since he'd started the company, less stolen art was being found at major auction houses, not more. “Stolen work was often consigned to the auction houses by the criminal or someone near the criminal,” said Radcliffe. “We thought that as the database grew, we would find more stolen art. But not in London. We also had to expand our net, to other countries. But that takes time.”

Radcliffe needed to refinance the company in order to save it.
IFAR
couldn't refinance, so its share in the company had to drop. But
IFAR
wanted veto power on the board. “Once
IFAR
had veto power, everyone wanted veto power. So, everybody with 10 per cent got veto power,” said Radcliffe, who himself bought 10 per cent of the company, just so he could have a veto as well. He was now actively pressing dealers to sign up, but they weren't budging. Instead, he came up with another way to make up for lost revenue: ask for a 10 per cent recovery fee on any stolen artwork found through the
ALR
.

The auction houses were against that idea and, it seemed, against Radcliffe. “Auction houses wouldn't give us the names of the consignors when a red flag came up,” he said. “We were making matches on a regular basis but not getting any resolutions. They were still applying that code of secrecy to our work.”

Radcliffe, meanwhile, was sensing danger signs all over. An outside consultant was brought in to assess the company. “The consultant who was hired told me that they were going to try to fire me. Sotheby's had initiated it. They did not want the company to be active in recovery,” Radcliffe said. “Things became very unpleasant between 1998 and 2000.” It seemed certain that Radcliffe would be ejected from the Art Loss Register, but somehow he managed to strong-arm the board into accepting the idea of a recovery charge. Then he caught a big break.

One of the cases the
ALR
inherited from the
IFAR
list involved a group of valuable paintings stolen in 1978 from the Massachusetts home of Michael Bakwin, heir to a meat-packing fortune. Bakwin was on a holiday when $30 million worth of art was stolen from his home, including Paul Cézanne's
Still
Life with Fruit and a Jug
. The theft was one of the largest in the history of Massachusetts. In 1999, those paintings came up on the radar, courtesy of Sotheby's.

Sotheby's asked the
ALR
to run a search. Bingo—the system worked. The Cézanne was being sold by a mysterious entity called the Erie International Trading Company. Erie was registered in Panama, but no one knew who the owners were. Radcliffe jumped on it, and Erie agreed to hand over the stolen Cézanne, but only in exchange for a deal—as a reward for the Cézanne, Erie wanted legal title to the other stolen works from the burglary. Radcliffe was in a moral bind, so he engineered his own loophole.

The
ALR
would accept the deal on one condition: that the owners of Erie sign a legal document stating that they were not involved with the theft in Massachusetts. Erie agreed, and the document was signed and delivered to the office of a London-based lawyer who was acting as middleman.

The Cézanne was returned to Bakwin, by then in his eighties. Bakwin auctioned the painting off at Sotheby's for close to $30 million, and Radcliffe received a percentage of that, as a finder's fee—around $3 million. It was the payday he'd needed. The finder's fee allowed him to buy the company outright, for $2.5 million, and in 2000, Radcliffe was back in control. The
ALR
was now more than a stolen-art database; it had evolved into an active detective service, and Radcliffe was persistent— just like Richard Ellis, he stayed on the trail of a stolen work for years, waiting, keeping his eye on the prize. But even as the
ALR
database grew and he made other recoveries, Radcliffe watched for those other missing Bakwin paintings.

In 2005, Erie International tried to sell four of them at Sotheby's in London. Erie believed that, because of the deal struck with Radcliffe, it was immune to criminal charges. Radcliffe pushed back. He hired a lawyer and halted the auction, arguing that the deal to pass legal title to Erie was void because it was made under duress. A judge agreed. Erie hired its own legal team and requested that the matter be moved to arbitration in Switzerland. But Radcliffe wanted the envelope opened—the one that stated Erie was not connected to the initial burglary. Again, a judge agreed. Inside that envelope was a document signed at the bottom by a man named Robert Mardirosian.

Robert Mardirosian was a Massachusetts-based lawyer who, in 1978, was representing a man named David Colvin on a criminal matter. One night Colvin turned up at the lawyer's house with Bakwin's millions worth of art in a bag. He told Mardirosian he was planning to send the stolen paintings to a fence in Florida who could sell them for a decent price. Mardirosian told him it was a bad idea—if Colvin got caught with the paintings, it wouldn't look good. Colvin took his lawyer's advice. He left the art upstairs in Mardirosian's attic, where he slept that night. The next morning Colvin left, but the paintings stayed in the attic. Less than a year later Colvin was shot dead.

Mardirosian later said that he'd thought about returning the paintings in his attic. Instead, in 1988, he moved them to Monaco, and then to a Swiss bank, where they sat for years. Meanwhile, he defended drug dealers, violent offenders, and a few white-collars. In 1995 he retired and split his time between France and the town of Falmouth, Massachusetts. It appeared that he incorporated the shell company in Panama—Erie International—specifically to hold the paintings from the Bakwin theft. But when Mardirosian tried to move those paintings to London in 1999, he popped up on the radar, because of the
ALR
. He weaselled his way out of that situation but popped up again in 2005, the second time he tried to sell the stolen art. When a court date arrived, Mardirosian was a no-show and the judge ordered the paintings returned to Bakwin. Mardirosian was also ordered to pay $3 million in court fees. By then he was also being investigated by the
FBI
.

In 2007 Mardirosian was indicted on charges of transporting, possessing, and trying to sell stolen goods that had crossed U.S. borders. He was arrested as he was getting off a plane from France. A few months later he was found guilty.

That single case had a lifespan, from theft to conviction, of almost thirty years, and it demonstrated the power that a global institutional memory could serve in recovering stolen art. Even so, prying back those paintings from Erie required many players: Radcliffe and the
ALR
, the
FBI
, London police, and Michael Bakwin, who shouldered most of the legal costs.

On a rainy evening in 2008, I met Julian Radcliffe at the
ALR
office on Hatton Garden, a street that houses London's Diamond Row. At dusk, its shop windows are aglow with iron bars, bulletproof glass, and glittering diamonds. It's a fitting location, and the
ALR
operates with the same security as the diamond traders. Visitors are announced and buzzed through a locked, windowless door. Inside, under a low ceiling, are a few computer terminals, filing cabinets, and three glass-windowed offices with their shades drawn. In an adjacent room more computer terminals are staffed by young workers, feeding and searching the ever-growing database of stolen art. Radcliffe's assistant led me into a large room, bare save for a table with a few chairs and a steel safe that looms in the corner.

When Radcliffe entered a few minutes later, he took the chair closest to the safe, such that during the interview he seemed to be guarding its contents. He looked like a character out of a John le Carré novel: tall, lean, a wisdom-lined face, a grey pinstripe suit, crisp white shirt, and red tie.

Radcliffe said that his rogue entrepreneurial streak had led him on a crooked career line through the worlds of intelligence, insurance, and finally to this delicate junction of criminals, the business of fine art, and the world's richest collectors. The
ALR
's record stands for itself: over $200 million in art-theft recoveries, including the Cézanne stolen in 1978 and recovered in 1999, an Edouard Manet still life stolen in 1977 and recovered in 1997, and Pablo Picasso's
Woman in
White Reading a Book,
stolen in 1940 and recovered in 2005.

The Picasso was a Holocaust loot case that came up in 2002, when a French collector about to purchase the painting asked the
ALR
to run a search on its provenance. Sarah Jackson, an
ALR
staffer at that time, examined two lists: the
ALR
's and the Repertoire des biens spoliés en France durant la guerre, 1939– 1945, comprising art looted from France during World War
II
. Nothing came up on the
ALR
search, but the Repertoire held a grainy photograph of
Woman in White
and said that the painting had been stolen from the home of Justin Thannhauser, a prominent Paris art dealer. The same Picasso was now being slated for sale by David Tunkl Fine Art in Los Angeles, consigned by a family that had owned it for twenty-six years. Over four years, Jackson traced the history of
Woman in White,
and this is what she found.

Woman in White
had been painted by Picasso in 1922 and bought from the artist's Paris dealer by Alfred Flechtheim, who later sold it to Carlota Landsberg, a German Jew. Landsberg fled Germany during the war but left her Picasso in the care of a friend, the art dealer Thannhauser. A letter from Landsberg to Thannhauser proved the transaction. The
ALR
obtained a photograph of the Picasso in Thannhauser's estate files. On the back of that photograph were the words “Stolen by Germans” and “Landsberg.” Jackson then found a letter Thannhauser wrote to Landsberg in 1958, where he confessed to her that in 1938 or 1939 his family had fled the country, leaving her Picasso hanging on their living-room wall. In 1940, during the Nazi occupation of Paris, the Thannhauser home was looted; the painting vanished.

The Picasso next turned up at a gallery in Paris, in 1975, and was sold to an art dealer in New York, who sold it to the family that currently owned it, the Alsdorfs. Jackson also found out what happened to Carlota Landsberg. She moved to New York and had since died, but the landlady at her last residence remembered the name of her grandson, Thomas Bennigson, who had visited her. Bennigson lived in California. He eventually received a portion of money from the sale of the painting, as did the
ALR
.

“Famous paintings are just a small percentage of what is being stolen,” Radcliffe told me. He echoed Paul, almost to the word. Radcliffe told me that most of the art on the
ALR
list are minor paintings and antiques, and fewer than 1 percent of those are ever recovered. He could patrol the big and mid-sized houses to a certain extent, and he could monitor the major art fairs, but there were still plenty of other ways to launder stolen art.

Art dealers, for example, often played the innocent. “If they bought a painting for a cheap price, it was just luck thrown their way,” Radcliffe said. “When the Register first started up, there were a lot of cases where art dealers searched a title, found that it was stolen, and did nothing about it. They didn't want to get involved. Those dealers might not buy that painting, but they might turn around and suggest someone who would be interested in buying it.”

Radcliffe also knows that art thieves like to search his database. He gets phone calls from people who want access to a search but won't give their names. It makes sense. If thieves search the database for a painting they've stolen and it doesn't come up, they know they can sell it through an auction house. It wasn't rare for busted art thieves to be caught with catalogues from the Art Loss Register, he told me.

In the over one thousand recoveries Radcliffe has enjoyed, in only three cases was the thief not after a paycheque 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, i.e., ‘sale of the property of a gentleman,' 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. “That doesn't mean that a painting won't eventually wind up at one of the superstar auctions; it just may take years, even decades, to get there.” About half of all stolen art recovered by the
ALR
was found in a different country from where it was originally stolen.

“Any art and antique dealer who purchases stolen art is helping these criminals,” Radcliffe said. “We have heard some extraordinary excuses by dealers, collectors, and museums justifying their purchase and retention of stolen art in the most blatant cases, including that they will provide the best home for the item, that they have researched it, that the original victim was insured, or that the law is simply unfair.” Radcliffe pointed out that it was always those same dealers who change their tune when they become the victims of art theft.