Hot Art (23 page)

In addition to the stolen art databases, the media coverage, and the web presence, Hrycyk also sent out what he calls a “Crime Alert”—an email beamed directly to professional contacts, including art galleries, dealers, auction houses, and police forces in California and far beyond. The Crime Alert included all the information registered with the
ALR
, but it was sent directly to the places where a thief might try to sell the work—to the art community. Hrycyk has spent two decades developing these contacts, and every time he meets with a new auction house or art dealer, the information is absorbed into his Crime Alert list. Check.

One week later Hrycyk received an anonymous tip from a man who identified a private residence in San Diego as the possible safe house for the stolen art. An
LAPD
officer was dispatched to knock on the door. “We explore all leads,” said Hrycyk. The woman who answered was a professor, and she agreed to a search of her house. There was nothing suspect, certainly no stolen paintings.

Later that week San Diego police got a tip suggesting that a cache of weapons was being stored in the same house. San Diego
PD
couldn't take any chances, and this time more force was used. The police turned the residence upside down. Nothing. The hunt was based on a bad piece of information. It turned out the professor had rented a room in her house to an ex-convict and the two had had a disagreement. She had kicked him out. “It was a revenge tip,” said Hrycyk, and then continued, “This is a tough case. No witnesses, little evidence, no informants, no video footage, and nothing to identify a suspect.” Hrycyk could only guess at the level of sophistication of the criminals he was dealing with. “If we get lucky we might come into contact with the thieves while they are trying to move the art. If that person hears about the reward, they could earn $200,000. That hasn't happened yet. The thieves might sit on it awhile. If they aren't desperate for money, that would be a good strategy.” He paused. “The paintings will turn up. It's just a question of how long.” For now the detective would wait. He had learned to be a patient man.

AT NIGHT LOS ANGELES
is an electrified concrete field with giant patches of darkness that hover like storm clouds above its glow—the surrounding hills. As usual, Donald Hrycyk got up at 3:30
AM
and cruised the freeway system into the asphalt heart of the glittering city. When he arrived at his desk the sky was still dark; sunrise this June morning hit at 5:40. A few hours later, after checking for u
PD
ates on his cases, he left his desk and came to meet me.

I visited Los Angeles during a heat wave in the summer of 2008, just a few months before the burglary in Encino. By mid-morning, the city had wilted under the open sun, the nicotine-coloured haze shimmered under a rusty blue sky. Hrycyk picked me up outside the Metro Plaza Hotel, a stone's throw from Olvera Street, where the first house in Los Angeles was built. The street is now home to a cheerful alley of stalls selling Mexican American tourist trinkets and food, and is itself within view of Union Station, the gateway to the city before the airport was built.

The detective shook hands with me. We'd spent hours on the phone, but this was the first time we'd met in person. Hrycyk's uniform, I learned, was always the same: plain workmanlike slacks or jeans, a comfortably worn loose checkered shirt, black New Balance running shoes, the big digital watch—and an easygoing manner. His eyes are a pale shade of meridian turquoise, the same colour as the muscle car he drove in university, and cast a quiet, assured gaze. Hrycyk's face holds the mark of a life lived under the powerful California sun, pale skin colonized by patches of pink. I pointed out the sun factor, and he told me about a machine at Venice Beach that can take a picture of a person's face and reveal the years of sun damage under the surface. “It's like the way you can put a painting under ultraviolet light and see all the years of damage to the canvas. To the eye it's invisible, but the damage is there,” he said. “History.”

Hrycyk studies people, isn't quick to speak, and doesn't project a hint of antagonism or machismo. He watches and learns. During our phone interviews before and after my visit, the detective never once interrupted a question I was asking, and he always took a moment to think before giving an opinion. He patiently corrected me a few times, when I said “robbed” instead of “burglarized.”

“
Robbery
means to take by force or fear.
Burglary
is to enter a premises with the intent to steal. I work in Burglary Special,” he said. Of the art detectives I interviewed, he was the most transparent about his casework and the details of his investigations. He had the feel of an old-fashioned detective who loved his work and seemed to live for it. If I ever had something stolen, I would want Hrycyk to investigate. As we cruised through Los Angeles, he seemed as if he were a part of the city and not just a person working for the municipality.

One of the first stories Hrycyk told me on that visit wasn't about art theft or any of the cases he had handled: it was about the character of Los Angeles itself. Earlier that week, a young girl selling lemonade in front of her house was startled when a man ran up to her homemade stand and ran off with her change jar. The twelve-year-old didn't hesitate. She called 911 on her cellphone and ran after him. The girl followed the man for more than ten blocks in the white heat while keeping police updated on his location. The
LAPD
cornered the lemonade-stand thief in patrol cars while the girl watched. She got back her money. “That's Los Angeles,” said Hrycyk. “People here are fighters.”

On the drive to his office, Hrycyk took me through the downtown limbo that locals call Skid Row, where lines of men camp out on the curb, barely dressed and washed. “This is the corner where hospitals sometimes just leave unwanted patients with no health coverage. They drop them here with nothing but their hospital gowns,” he said. “There's a fire station near here and the trucks actually have decals stencilled on the side that read ‘Skid Row Fire Department.'”

Our destination was the Parker Center, then the police administrative compound, a white concrete building guarded by high metal fences at 115 North Los Angeles Street. It was squeezed into a neighbourhood between Little Korea and Chinatown not far from the Civic Center. From the roof of the parking garage off San Pedro Street, Hrycyk pointed to a set of old row houses in the near distance. “Raymond Chandler used to live in one of those.” Right around the corner there is a major collection of art—the Geffen Contemporary at
MOCA
(the Museum of Contemporary Art).

Out of the bright sun, inside the blue and white hallways of Parker Center, officers and detectives clipped past us. Hrycyk pointed out that parts of the police compound had been transformed into an art gallery of sorts; we looked at a series of crime-scene photographs from the fifties, sixties, and seventies on display in the halls. The photos had been found in a storage closet decades after they were taken by crime photographers. There's a mug shot of Charles Manson taken after he was arrested for the murder of Sharon Tate; an old getaway car riddled with bullet holes; a stark field, where the body of the Black Dahlia, murder victim Elizabeth Short, was found— the case James Ellroy turned into his most famous crime novel,
The Black Dahlia
(adapted to the film starring Josh Hartnett). There were portraits of the Hat Squad of the 1940s and 1950s, detectives wearing cream suits and cream fedoras staring out from sepia-toned prints—think
L.A. Confidential
. History.

One case Hrycyk had investigated stretched back to Hollywood's golden age, the 1940s, he told me. “Lana Turner had commissioned Peter Fairchild to paint a full-length portrait of her.” Fairchild worked on Turner's portrait for weeks, and was close to finishing when one day it simply vanished. In 1994, it surfaced in the collection of a person who had purchased it twenty-five years earlier from an auction house. “That case was so old that there was no original crime report or paper trail to fall back on,” Hrycyk said. “At the time the portrait was found, Lana Turner was in hospital. She was dying.” Turner's daughter decided to let the matter go, and the painting remained with its owner. Hrycyk noted that Turner's portrait had never left Los Angeles—it had been hanging, hidden from the public, on a collector's wall.

Burglary Special is just down the hall from Homicide Special, and each door to a division has taped to it a piece of 8½-by-11 paper run off a photocopier, with bold black letters announcing its title. Hrycyk opened the door to Burglary Special. The room is bare-bones, cubicles pushed together in sections of four or six, a few shelves stuffed with papers and books, filing cabinets, and a row of windows to let in natural light, which softens the glare of the fluorescents strung along the ceiling. Behind Hrycyk's desk there's a crack in the wall that runs floor to ceiling—a souvenir from an earthquake.

This is where Hrycyk spent his days, across from his partner, Stephanie Lazarus. “Steph isn't in the office today,” he told me. “But maybe you'll meet her later in the week. In the old days Burglary Special was primarily made up of teams of two detectives working on one problem,” Hrycyk explained. “The tradition of detective work has always been to work in teams of two, with one higher-ranking detective taking the lead and mentoring a lower-ranked detective. It's one of the ways we learn.” Los Angeles
PD
has been working this way for over 150 years, since it was first formed in 1853.

The history of Burglary Special stretched back almost that far, and its name means exactly what it advertises. The detectives here hold citywide knowledge of their areas of crime—they view burglary through a wide-angle lens. When there is a complex pattern of burglaries that stretches across more than one division, that case is passed to this room. Art theft fell into this category.

Hrycyk provided a quick tour. There was the “hotel theft detail”: self-explanatory. The Interstate Theft Task Force, which dealt with, for example, Colombian gangs that conducted professionally choreographed baggage thefts at lax. He explained, “The jewellery salesman leaving the airport will stop at a red light. One thief slips out and ice-picks the back tire. The salesman pulls over to the side of the road. The thieves get out. One helps the salesman with the flat tire. The other helps by taking the briefcase with the jewels. The salesman won't even know what hit him until they're out of sight. Half a million in stones, gone, just like that.”

Like all the desks in Burglary Special, Hrycyk's is equipped with a worn brown phone. I pointed out that his phone looked like an antique. He laughed. “Yeah, these are very old phones,” he said. “They are made from parts that aren't actually manufactured anymore, so when one breaks down we have to cannibalize others to keep it working.”

His desk is piled with art theft case files and is separated from Lazarus's by a wall of thick blue binders, each one labelled by year: 2007, 2006, 2005. Across the room is a rickety set of simple brown bookshelves packed with dozens more blue binders that go back to the 1980s; these are the binders Bill Martin began.

Detective Martin retired in 1992, and for a time another detective picked up his art theft cases. In 1994, though, Don Hrycyk was recruited to return to the Art Theft Detail—to lead it. When Hrycyk took over, he was surprised to learn that all those blue binders had been moved to a storage warehouse, with a date of destruction. One of the first things he did was retrieve the binders he was now holding in front of me. “If I hadn't, they wouldn't exist.” The detective flipped through a couple of pages. The notes were handwritten, sometimes with photographs of artwork paper-clipped to a report.

“A formal case always begins with a piece of paper,” he explained. “A report is written down from notes taken from the crime scene, as well as witness statements. Once the report is filed, there is a record that can be accessed in the future.” Hrycyk's blue binders represent hundreds of unsolved cases. Without those reports, there would be no record in the department that those crimes ever took place—it would be as if they had never happened. When Hrycyk took over the unit, his challenge lay in finding the time to transfer the information from the binders into a computer database where he could actually sort and use the data.

“When I started at the
LAPD
there were no computers,” he said. “Everything was handwritten. My handwriting was so bad that I was looking for a way out.” Hrycyk brought the first computer into Burglary Special. “Now we've turned into the computer nerds for the squad room. We're always investing our own money buying stuff so that we can try to keep relevant.” When Lazarus joined the Art Theft Detail in 2006, the two detectives dedicated volumes of time to data transfer. “I'm not sure how many hours Steph and I spent transferring names of suspects, contacts, and names of stolen artworks into the computer system. Hundreds of hours.” It was administrative grunt work, but with a payoff.

Hrycyk's careful preservation of information resulted in a comprehensive list of art thieves from all over the world. As a test, I asked him to look up the name of the art thief I had met in Toronto, and I gave him only the first name. The detective punched a few details into the keyboard, waited a second, then scrolled down the list for about a minute, and stopped.

He turned and said, “Is his name ——— ?”

Hrycyk was correct. I thought of Paul saying, “He who controls the information controls the world.”

When I asked Hrycyk to speak generally on the subject of art theft he did so cautiously, and always with a waiver: “Almost every case we work is unique. We learn from each of our cases,” he said, looking at his computer. Most of the cases Hrycyk investigated fell into the category of home burglaries and usually didn't make the news; they slipped under the media radar because the art wasn't famous enough or the victims didn't want to go public. Hrycyk, though, with his bird's-eye view of the problem, saw art disappearing from all over the city, and he noted that thieves were evolving, becoming more aggressive, even though the art community had not adjusted accordingly. It was as it had always been—secretive.