Hot Art (27 page)

At the Getty, as a pre-emptive measure, staff had access to photographs of known “persons of interest.” Combs told me one of those photographs was of Banksy.

“Really, you have a picture of Banksy?” I asked. The idea of seeing a mug shot of the mysterious, globe-trotting graffiti artist, whose identity is a guarded secret, was thrilling.

Combs picked up his phone, dialled a number, and requested that the photograph be delivered to his office. Ten minutes later there was a knock on the door and a staff member entered. “We don't have a picture of Banksy,” he said to Combs.

“I thought we had a picture of Banksy,” said Combs.

“I don't think anyone has a picture of Banksy,” answered the staff member.

“Okay, thanks,” Combs said.

I was disappointed, but I was sure Banksy wouldn't be.

At the end of our interview Combs got up from his desk and walked into the larger administration offices of the Getty—all cubicles and desks. Framed photographs decorated a wall, and Combs stopped at one. “This is a portrait from 1909, taken at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in Copley Square.” It showed the haggard figure of a man with a handlebar moustache in a faded uniform—a tough-looking man. “He was a security guard at the Boston museum.” Combs added, “Imagine what his life was like back then. No iPod on the way to work. These guys worked their whole careers to pass the art they were guarding onto the next generation, and to our generation. We have to take care of the art, and pass it on.”

LATER THAT WEEK
I was due to spend another day with Hrycyk at Parker Center, discussing his casework. Instead I received a phone call from the detective.

“Something's come up,” he said. “An antique store in Hollywood has been burglarized, and Steph and I have to conduct a crime-scene investigation.” He paused. “Do you want to come along for that? It would give you a chance to see us work.”

The detectives picked me up in the unmarked Impala, and we headed toward La Cienega Boulevard. I shook hands with detective Stephanie Lazarus, whom I met for the first time in the car that day. It occurred to me, watching Hrycyk and Lazarus working at the antique store, that these two didn't seem to be seduced by the allure of headache art. They tackled each of their cases with the same focus, rigour, and determination—whether it was a stolen Picasso or a chandelier.

My visit with Hrycyk revealed a detective at the height of his powers. He had investigated hundreds of cases and developed contacts all over the Greater Los Angeles community and far beyond. He'd built a formidable database of information and a website that allowed him to interface efficiently with the public he served. He also had a partner he was training to replace him when he retired. All of this was his legacy.

And his legacy was instructive about cities beyond Los Angeles. When I met Bonnie Czegledi, she pointed out that because Toronto did not have a detective charged with patrolling the art market, it was impossible to know what was happening underneath that market's serene exterior. She suspected that theft and fraud were rampant and that Canada was a perfect place to steal and to sell stolen works. At that time, I wondered if her theories were plausible. Spending the week with Hrycyk confirmed for me much of what Czegledi suspected was unfolding in Toronto. And what was happening in New York? That was also a blank. “It's hard to know why New York doesn't have a dedicated unit,” Hrycyk told me. “I don't really understand how that is possible, considering how big that market is.”

Hrycyk's superiors, though, didn't always see the value of his work. He told me that after taking over the unit, he went long stretches of time without a partner, managing too many cases, and suffered from low morale. He remembered a stakeout he did alone, for hours, in a suspect's backyard. “Those were depressing days,” he told me. As recently as the early 2000s, management was talking about shutting down the Art Theft Detail.

Closing the Art Theft Detail would have been the wrong decision, considering that Hrycyk was the only detective in the United States on a municipal force in a large art market who had amassed the experience and knowledge—the power— to understand how art theft worked. Way back in 1986, at the same time that Hrycyk and Martin were prying into the art scene on the West Coast, another agent was coming up the ranks in the eastern United States, also learning about art theft. He wasn't on a municipal force, though—he was with a federal agency, patrolling a much larger theatre.

12.

9/11

“These works are permanent. We are fleeting.”
ROBERT WITTMAN

T
HE BLACK, unmarked Chevrolet Grand Prix was idling outside the Philadelphia Holiday Inn Express at 9
AM
, as agreed. The interior of the car was spotless—no empty cans or coffee cups, just the grapefruit-sized police siren, dark and red, lying on the floor of the passenger seat.

In the driver's seat was Special Agent Robert K. Wittman. His business card read
FBI
, Senior Art Investigator, Rapid Deployment Art Crime Team. Wittman is the first
FBI
agent in the history of the bureau to investigate art theft full-time, and he is a hard man to pin down. At first he said he did not want to be interviewed for this book, and an
FBI
public relations agent sent me an email saying just that. I replied with a longer email, stating that Wittman was one of the only people on the planet with experience in hunting and finding extremely valuable artworks—headache art was his specialty. I gave some context for my investigation and asked again for an interview. A few weeks later I was walking down the street in Toronto when my cellphone rang.

I picked up, and a smoky voice said, “This is Bob. Wittman. From the
FBI
.”

Toward the end of his career, Wittman was considered to be one of the most accomplished art detectives in the world. When we met in person, in May 2008, he had been working as an agent for twenty years and was six months away from retirement. We had had several conversations by phone, but whenever I scheduled a trip to meet him, he cancelled. Finally we agreed on the May date, but with this caveat: “You can come down here to Philly, but if I get called into a case, I could be gone. So I'm hoping I'll be here, but you never know.”

Many of Wittman's years with the bureau were spent immersed in high-pressure, undercover sting operations. There were no published photographs of Wittman in any magazine or newspaper when we met, even though many articles had been written about the agent's work, including profiles in
gq
magazine and the
Wall Street Journal
. When the
wsj
ran its feature, the accompanying photo depicted the back of a man's head, shielded by a white fedora. His guarded identity meant he could be the phantom buyer to any criminal selling a stolen masterpiece. Thieves knew him by reputation, and being friendly was one of his special talents. As he would say, it was one tool in his box. In person the special agent has a warm, open face that radiates comfort, and there's a soft-burn charm to his eyes. His thin, greying hair is cropped short. His skin is slightly tanned, and the tan didn't match the slate-grey Philadelphia sky. Wittman travelled.

This morning the special agent was wearing a white, button-down shirt under a blue blazer with grey slacks, a black leather belt, and black polished shoes. The shirt was unbuttoned at the collar for maximum mellow. His gun was tucked into a holster underneath the jacket. His dress code was chameleon cool. Wittman could walk into any room—a Denny's or a political fundraiser—and fit in.

“Welcome to Philadelphia,” Wittman said as he pulled the car into traffic and began cutting through the downtown grid of clean streets. In the distance, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, a giant poster of a Frida Kahlo self-portrait stared down at the former U.S. capital city. A few minutes later Wittman turned the car into the underground parking garage of 600 Arch Street, a standard-looking office building with trimmed hedges and mirrored windows and a nothing-going-on-around-here exterior. This is the Eastern Division Field Office of the
FBI
. In the garage Wittman closed the door to the black cruiser and strode toward the elevator. There's a bounce to his walk, a flow of energy moving forward. Think Al Pacino in
Heat
. On the way he passed another agent, and the two never broke stride as they smiled briefly in the dim fluorescence.

“Hey, Bob, you winding down?” asked the agent, alluding to Wittman's imminent retirement.

“Sort of. Feels like I'm waking up,” answered Wittman.

Upstairs at 600 Arch, Wittman had two desks. The first was in a bullpen of cubicles staffed with other, mostly younger, agents—the next generation. Like every
FBI
employee I met, this group was fit, cheerful, and courteous. Wittman's presence in the room felt paternal. “Hey, Bob,” they smiled.

Wittman's other desk sat in a large office he occupied alone. On the wall hung a few photographs of him shaking hands with dignitaries, and posters with motivational phrases. One read, “When You Think You Can't You Must.” The office was substantial, with a couch, chairs, coffee table, bookshelves, and a wide-angled window in front of the desk with a stunning view of the Liberty Bell, Constitution Hall, and Independence Hall, inscribed with “We the People.” The Benjamin Franklin Bridge floated in the distance.

He sat down at his desk, near the window. Wittman looked out this window every day, but often, the agent suggested, he was looking beyond, to the world. He had a prime view of art theft in the United States and as a global phenomenon. The U.S. business of fine art is worth an estimated $200 billion annually. “That's everything—antique markets, art fairs, auction-house revenue, gallery sales. It's a ballpark number, like most in the art world,” he said. “That market is totally unregulated.”

Figures for the black market were murkier: “$80 million in the U.S., annually,” he estimated. Over sixteen thousand works of art, antiques, and collectables were listed that year on the Art Loss Register as stolen in the United States. Over half of it had been stolen from private homes. The rest had been drained from art galleries and dealers, with 18 per cent from museums and other public institutions, such as libraries (rare books and maps are a constant target). Wittman said museum thefts were usually inside jobs, because it was the employees who held the “keys to the kingdom.” There was a lesson to be learned from the way the pyramids were looted thousands of years ago; experience had taught Wittman that usually it was the people who helped care for or build an institution who knew best how to steal from it.

“Art theft is an international industry,” he said. “It knows no boundaries.” Over the previous decade and a half, in his quest to understand how that black market worked, Wittman had been making friends all over the global village. “Fifteen years ago, when I started doing this, there was no Internet or speedy communication. You had to make personal contacts.”

Destinations Wittman had visited on business included Brazil, Peru, Denmark, Switzerland, France, Germany, Poland, Spain, France, Hungary, England, the Netherlands, Nigeria, and Kenya. Many of those countries were not centres of the art market but were instead source countries, or end points for stolen work that had been sold, or a great place to hide the art for a few years until everyone simply forgot about it. His passport was more cia than
FBI
.

Still, for such an international citizen he had the most American of names—Bob. Many people, of course, got to know the agent by a completely different name, or names. They usually figured out the “Special Agent” part too late. These were the criminals he hunted—the growing group of thieves and middlemen who had discovered that art taken off the wall had value beyond its aesthetic beauty and historical importance. The pattern was spreading and could quickly move out of range, too difficult for almost any other U.S. authority to follow. But Wittman had the budget, the reputation, and the skills to go hunting far beyond the borders of the United States, and he didn't often come back empty-handed.

Wittman's résumé of recoveries is supersized: about $215 million of stolen artwork, give or take a few million. These include an original copy of the Bill of Rights, three Norman Rockwell paintings, two Francisco Goyas, and one Rembrandt self-portrait.

The Rembrandt alone was worth over $36 million and became the largest notch on Wittman's big belt of missions accomplished. Some other interesting catches: three paintings by German painter Heinrich Bürkel, stolen near the end of World War
II
and found for sale in 2005 at an auction house in Philadelphia; rare books that had never been officially checked out from the library at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky—one of them a first edition of Charles Darwin's
On
the Origin of Species
.

Accolades and rewards have followed. In 2000 Wittman received the Peruvian Order of Merit for Distinguished Service, which was presented to him personally by the president of Peru. A year later U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft handed him the Executive Office for United States Attorneys' Outstanding Contributions in Law Enforcement Award. In 2003, the Spanish police force thanked him with the White Cross of Law Enforcement Merit Medal. The Smithsonian Institution applauded his efforts in 2004 with the Robert Burke Memorial Award for Excellence in Cultural Property Protection, an honour he shares with Detective Donald Hrycyk.

“I've investigated many types of federal violations, but the investigations that give me the most satisfaction are the ones that lead to the recovery of stolen artwork and cultural property,” he once said in an online chat with
USA
Today
. “Whether they are owned by an individual, or a museum, they represent the world's cultural heritage. That's worth saving.”