Hot Art (20 page)
I asked Radcliffe about the art establishment's attitude toward the Art Loss Register. “I'm used to being one of the most controversial and reviled figures in the art world,” he said with a smile. Then he parodied an average art dealer's take on him: “Julian Radcliffe is the most eccentric man I have ever met and he hates the way I do business.”
Radcliffe's international roster of clients was slowly expanding. In 2000, he approached officials at the Maastricht art fair, one of the largest and most prestigious in the world. “That's where we made our mark,” he told me. Radcliffe and a team of six of his staff dug in and searched almost half of the items being sold that year at the fairâ6,500 searches on 15,000 items. They worked around the clock. Initially, Radcliffe wasn't paid by the fair, but because he found a few stolen items, he is now. (He wouldn't tell me what he found.)
“Christie's and Sotheby's now account for 35 to 50 per cent of the art market,” he said. And because of that, “20 per cent of all the art sold at Maastricht has
ALR
eady been through Christie's and Sotheby's. It's all interconnected.” After the success at Maastricht, Radcliffe approached the Grosvenor House Art and Antiques Fair in London. “Why don't you come and work out of the servants' quarters?” he remembered being told. He did, and the
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ran searches on one hundred items from the catalogue. Two turned up as stolen. “One of them was being sold from the stand of the chairman of the fair,” Radcliffe said. Other major art fairs followed: Art Basel and Art Basel Miami.
“The pattern is clear. Once we arrive somewhere, the number of stolen items reduces, because everybody is more careful,” he said. He cites Christie's and Sotheby's: “When we started, one of three thousand showed up as stolen. Now, one out of every seven thousand items is identified as stolen.”
Dealers were different. “These old dealers have survived for fifty years without me; they don't like my computers, my regulations, or the control.” He mimicked them: “Radcliffe, tell us, if one of our best suppliers gives us a stolen item and gets busted, why would they ever come to us again?”
By the time we sat down for our conversation, it was about ten years after
The Thomas Crown Affair
had been remade. In addition to battling the war against old thinking and against the myth of the rogue art thief, Radcliffe was also battling globalization. He could spend years tracking a painting and cover the planet doing so. But he was tenacious. He opened a data-entry office in India just to keep up with the constant stream of information flowing into the
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. The centre in India was important, he said, because the list was growing. When Radcliffe had bought the initial list from
IFAR
in the late eighties, it had stored twenty thousand items. By the time we met, the Art Loss Register held more than ten times that number.
“Art theft is like a disease you catch from your friends,” he said, and smiled.
“
IN
1985
I WAS
twenty-one years old and so was Mike Tyson,” Paul said. “And that's just how I felt. Undefeated.”
1985 was the sweet spot: pre-
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, and preâEllis's Art and Antiques Squad. He was weaving around the country at breakneck speed, fearless. The game was changing, expanding, and if he kept up he could make a fortune. Knockers and thieves had spread out far beyond Brighton, and for good reasons: the Sussex Police were actively investigating burglaries and the residents of Brighton had become more savvy about whom they let into their houses. The reasonable solution for thieves and criminals like Paul was to use Brighton as home base but to fan out across England in search of the prize.
That was the year Paul reached the height of his powers. He had a steady source of product coming in from thieves and knockers who knew him by reputation, so he no longer had to go out and get it himself, though sometimes he went knocking anyway, just for the fun of it.
Paul had a larger pool of dealers and auction houses to choose from now. He'd off-load different products in different places. He could use the dealers in the Lanes for anything that was replicated. For paintings, he could travel to London, to the auction houses. If he needed to get rid of something quickly, he could always use Bermondsey Market as a dumping ground.
“Everyone was a targetâno mercy,” he said.
Paul had transformed himself. He'd bought a suit and expensive shoes. He wore a Rolex, and he had a few. He had developed expensive tastes and opinions. “Guys who wear a solid gold Rolex during the day are announcing themselves as nouveau riche. What you want for the day is steel and gold. It wears better. In the evening you can wear your Rolex Prince.” He smoked a pack a day, and he didn't have a business card or a schedule. He was working sixteen-hour days, always looking for new targets, new sources, new dealers, and new networks. He had created an illusion and he wanted to sustain it. “The idea was to make people think I was someone else. My goal was to come off like an English country gentleman. I was moving around the country a lot. I could wind up in any town or city, in a hotel room dealing with thieves, or at the desk of an auction house in London. I was practically on my way to becoming a yuppie,” he laughed.
Paul would wake up in Brighton, but his days could lead him anywhere. He would get in his car and drive, following the flow of knockers and thieves: Manchester, Birmingham, Yorkshire, Liverpool, Newcastle, Wales, Plymouth. London was a ninety-minute drive from Brighton, Scotland a twelve-hour drive. Wherever the criminals went that week, Paul would follow.
“It's called working local: You drive to a place where you don't live. You do a job. You go home before the local police ever know about it.” He added, “It was quite a geography lesson for a young man.” He bought a Ford Granada and after six weeks noticed that he'd clocked eleven thousand kilometres. “It was the biggest Ford you could buy. I installed a ladder on the roof.” Long-term storage was never a problem. He out-sourced everything and sold as much as he could as fast as he could. When he arrived in a town or city, he would check into a hotel and open for business. Word got around, so he didn't need to go out as much anymore. “That year I was the prince of thieves,” he said. “My hotel room would be like a demented Tupperware party.”
As an organizer he had to be better educated than thieves and able to evaluate art in a rough and quick way. “It didn't mean I had to have a degree in art history, but I had to be able to recognize quality.” That wasn't as hard as he'd imagined. “Quality sits up and slaps you in the face,” he said.
He'd rent a suite, tip the doorman, and execute his most charming smile. Paul talked to the staff as if he were one of them. He was from their world, so they were on his side. When thieves came calling with stolen goods he'd “cash 'em off.” “Once I had a whole truckload of stolen antiques in the lobby of a hotel. It wasn't a problem. The trick is to act like what is going on is normal. And if the staff know and like you, that helps a lot.” In those days there was no Internet. For every fifty art thefts, maybe one or two would be reported. Paul had come a long way, but he always went home to Brighton.
“Nineteen eighty-five was my most successful year as an art thief,” he said. That year he made close to a million dollars in profit from stealing and handling stolen art. “I was pissed off I never crossed that million-dollar mark,” he laughed. “Fuck me it was a wonderful life. Those were the days.”
Paul told me he worked the system until about 1993. That was the year he decided to retire. Success depended on a number of factors: his connections as a middleman, access to thieves, a steady supply of product, a network of dealers who acted as bridges into the legitimate art market, and access to big auction houses. It was essential while Paul was doing business that he stayed under the radar, but evading police wasn't always possible. To stay in the game, Paul says, he was forced to collaborate with police forces more and more often, acting as an informant. This was his insurance policy against serving prison time.
In fact, his role as informant had started with the Sussex Police, but the more time he spent in London, the more time he spent in the sphere of Scotland Yard.
Paul won't say how he met Richard Ellis, only that it was under “interesting circumstances.” Ellis told me that one day he got a call out of the blue from Paul, who wanted to act as an informant. When Ellis looked into it, he found out Paul was already an informant for the Sussex Police, “so there was a conflict there,” he told me. “Still, we kept in touch.”
He and Ellis formed a tenuous relationship. Sometimes Paul provided the head of the Art and Antiques Squad with information, but that, Paul said, didn't rule out being arrested. “Richard Ellis was chasing me for more than a decade, but he never caught me.”
Still, Paul had mixed feelings about working with detectives. “Show me a stand-up guy who's never had to deal with the police and I'll show you someone doing twenty-five to life. When you become successful, you show up on the radar,” he said. “In order to sustain that success you have to work with police or you yourself become the target. All top criminals do this.”
Thieves were the most expendable people in the system, and if Paul sometimes had to give somebody else up, he did so. Over the course of his career Paul was caught twice, but in both instances he received a “slap on the wrist” and never saw a prison. For all the paintings he pushed through auction houses, all the antiques and art he sold to crooked dealers, he managed to evade any serious consequences.
In 1993 he had a son, and his perspective shifted. “I didn't want him to have the same life I'd had,” he said. That year, Ellis and Paul had a conversation by phone. The detective had some advice for the thief. “Retire,” he said. “Quit while you're ahead, Turbo. It's a good time to leave.”
Paul decided the detective was right. He told me that when he made the decision to get out of the business, “I burned as many bridges as I could to the criminal world. I didn't want to leave myself a way back,” he said. This probably means that he became a known informant to police, and therefore a person no one trusted.
Looking back on his career, Paul noted, he pushed himself up the ladder, from knocker to organizer and handler, but there was one threshold he never dared cross. “I know of a few men who started out as knockers and petty criminals and who worked their way up to become dealers. A few of them are quite successful,” he said. It makes sense, considering that those handlers and organizers had access to a steady stream of art product. Paul saw it a different way. “I never tried to become a dealer. The other dealers would have seen me as a threat. In fact, I always knew that those dealers in London were vicious and competitive and that if I'd ever tried to move into the legitimate trade they would have crushed me.”
Instead, Paul elected to stick to his golden rule of staying under the radar. He admits he's been lucky. He'd escaped the Brighton projects, toured the country, and penetrated London society. Not bad for a high school dropout. “Art and antiques were my way out,” Paul said. “They saved my life. If the Brighton Council hadn't outlawed that marketplace when I was born, I might have been a fruit and vegetable seller. Or any number of menial positions that go nowhere in life. Instead, I made a fortune by stealing art.”
What happened to Paul in Brighton was, in part, the birth of a model for the trade in stolen art that reached far beyond the shores of England. Paul's way of making a living has been exported around the world. “When you read a story about a theft in America, in England, or in India for that matter, you might as well substitute Brighton's name. It's all the same system. A work of art is stolen and, once that happens, the entire purpose then becomes about moving that work of art back up the ranks to the legitimate art market to an end user.”
Paul said that during his heyday he laundered such a massive amount of stolen art that it would have been impossible to keep track of. “Over those years, if you lined up all the antiques and artwork that passed through my hands, you could fill a container ship. Some weeks I'd be buying two or three vans full,” he said.
Once I asked him if he ever had a crisis of conscience about all the people he'd stolen from, all the lives he fed off to make his living. “Do I feel guilty? Good question. Let me tell you something. When you're wearing a Rolex and a diamond pinky ring and you're driving a Ferrari and you've got a tasty bird on one arm and another one sucking your cock and you're shovelling cocaine up your nose, you don't feel guilty,” he told me. “Think about it. Where I came from I was meant to be shovelling roads and eating cabbage soup. This was my way of fighting back,” Paul said.
“I can tell you exactly what my frame of mind was during those years: The world is one big pussy and I'm going to fuck everyone. I didn't want to mess around with a few hundred dollars. I wanted thousands and thousands, and I didn't give a fuck what I had to do to get it. And the thing that made all of this possible for so long was that there was high-value stakes with very little risk, and it all happened under the radar.”
In 1993, Paul slipped away, under the radar.
“It was a good time to go,” he said. He even contemplated going back to school.
Paul told me there were a few incentives for his departure from the life of crime: Richard Ellis and the Scotland Yard Art and Antiques Squad; Julian Radcliffe and the establishment of the Art Loss Register; and the clampdown at Bermondsey Market that same year, in 1993. “Ya right, do you remember that? Those fucking morons who bought those paintings? What a bullshit story that was,” Paul said. “I just don't believe that story. Do you?”
