Hot Art (36 page)

It all started, Sazonoff told me, when he was a graduate student at New York University looking to make some money. “In the eighties, we were watching the infancy of Ted Turner's empire. One day there would be a dish the size of your hand that would pick up hundreds of television stations, and it was projected that America's greatest export would be entertainment. I thought, that's the field to get into—cable television, the five-hundred-channel universe. I came up with a portfolio of potential projects, and one of them was about stolen art.”

The idea had come to him in a university class. “We had a guest speaker one day, a professor named William Fash. He went on to become the chair of anthropology at Harvard and the director of the Peabody Museum. He talked about a theft from the Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City on Christmas Eve in 1985. The thieves cleared out everything, including the Funeral Mask of Pakal, a beautiful, unrivalled piece. If you saw the expression of pain on Fash's face, talking about the treasures of the world being stolen... It left a mark on me. So I decided to look into pitching a show, and called the
FBI
. They said, that would be a good idea,” Sazonoff remembered. “So I pursued it. The ups and downs of television production is a story for another day, but I found myself in a unique position, as someone between the worlds of art, security, and the media.”

Sazonoff's site was picking up viewers while Interpol and the
FBI
were still trying to figure out how to use the Internet. In Los Angeles, Donald Hrycyk was a few years away from setting up his own site. In fact, there was so little information about stolen art on the web in the nineties that Sazonoff's efforts were noted around the world. One morning he was woken by a phone call. It was Interpol. Calls kept coming: from Christie's, Pulitzer Prize–winning writers, the Archaeological Institute of America. He was invited to the Smithsonian's Christmas party, and was congratulated for his website list by the head of the institution's security, David Liston. When the
FBI
set up its Art Crime Team website, it borrowed freely from Sazonoff's pilot project, and called to thank him. That was the power of hosting a few choice pieces of information about a mysterious subspecies of crime.

“I started out building an electronic billboard to sell a
TV
show and ended up becoming an expert on stolen art,” Sazonoff said. A few years later, he joined another online effort, the Museum Security Network (
MSN
), which made use of the Net to gather together anyone working in museum security struggling with problems related to art theft.
MSN
, run out of an office in Amsterdam, was another project that developed a niche audience spanning several continents. Sazonoff eventually became its North American editor.

The genesis of
MSN
didn't have to do with making money; it had to do with one museum security official coping with the aftermath of an armed robbery at Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum. In 1996, Ton Cremers was head of security when a group of seventeenth-century paintings were stolen. Cremers felt isolated and vulnerable. To soothe his lonesome paranoia, he decided to start his own website, as a way to tell his story as well as a place to post articles from the world media chronicling the rising number of museum thefts. The articles were comforting to him, because they indicated that he wasn't the only museum security director dealing with violent criminals. Cremers's Web experiment hit a nerve with other museum security personnel, who began contributing their own stories to his site.

“If you only look at your own museum, there won't be too many incidents. But when you can see the big picture, the pattern is undeniable. Security staff started using the information from the site mainly to convince museum directors that this issue was important,” Cremers told me. “We owe this new world to Bill Gates, who gave me a communications platform that evolved into a news service about incidents of stolen art from museums. It cost nothing but a few hours per day,” Cremers said.

In 2000, Cremers held his first
MSN
conference, which attracted museum professionals from across the world, including the Getty's Bob Combs. In Toronto, Bonnie Czegledi signed up for the Museum Security Network and watched its progress, as did many of her colleagues in cultural heritage law. The information Cremers gathered indicated that thefts from museums were increasing globally. “In the 1970s and 1980s, there were some spectacular art thefts that were stealth operations, carried out quietly at night,” Cremers said. Those crimes were elegant in a way; they involved careful planning and strategy. But they were polite compared to what followed.

Cremers's data showed a change in trend, from elegance to brute force. “At museums around the world there has been one armed robbery a year since 1975,” Cremers said. “But since 2000, there has been a lot more. Ironically, I think this is caused by the increase of security at museums. Thieves are now aware that there are advanced camera systems, and they know they will be detected by computer alarm. So as museums become better secured, the only way to steal art is with an armed robbery—a hit-and-run crime. The only thing thieves need to do is beat the alarm response time. They aren't interested in the silent burglary anymore,” he said. “All those beautiful Hollywood films are out of date.”

Around 1995, the
New York Times,
the
BBC
, and the
Guardian
all developed Web-based platforms to showcase their news stories, so when a work of art was stolen and a news story was published, there was now an electronic record of those reports available through Web searches. Then, in the late 1990s, the
FBI
, the
LAPD
, and Interpol threw resources into their sites, and the Art Loss Register list grew rapidly. These developments made tracking stolen art a lot easier for anyone interested. It was all about access to information.

Art Hostage took advantage of this new flow of information on the Internet and began laying it out on his site in 2006, with the value-added feature of his own acerbic commentary. Just like Sazonoff and Cremers, he woke up every morning and trolled the Net for stories and information about art theft. He didn't just link to those stories; he copy-pasted entire articles. Amateurs borrow, professionals steal, as the saying goes.

Art Hostage was Paul.

IN JANUARY
2008, a month before our first phone appointment, there was a crash at Paul's front door. Eight officers from four different British police forces knocked the door right off its hinges and raided the house. They confiscated his computer and searched the grounds for stolen paintings and antiques but found none. The computer was returned a few days later.

“That was always the trick. I never kept stolen art in my house. I always sold it to a dealer or auction house as fast as I could.” Paul may have handled millions of dollars of stolen art, but he never kept any souvenirs. He was, though, back on the police radar. What were they looking for? Was it his Art Hostage website that had attracted their attention?

After Paul retired, in 1993, he moved to a quiet seaside town on the south coast of England not far from his stomping ground in Brighton, where he had once wreaked havoc. Compared to those days, his schedule was calm. Instead of driving halfway around the country every week, playing extreme
Antiques Roadshow
with thieves and con men, he woke up around eight o'clock, prepared tea and toast for breakfast, and sometimes looked at the waves from his kitchen window. After breakfast he moved to his computer, went online, and crawled around the Internet, searching for media stories about art theft. He had become addicted to these stories; in a way, they were a continuation of his own coming-of-age story.

Art theft should have been on the decline with the invention of the Internet, the appearance of intelligent, experienced art detectives like Robert Wittman and Donald Hrycyk, databases such as the Art Loss Register, and other massive strides in communication technologies. But, as the Art Hostage blog made clear, the opposite had happened—art theft had exploded around the world.

Paul and I explored two narratives during our many conversations: his rise from the streets of Brighton as a knocker and the current state of international art theft. These stories were linked, and the more Paul told me about his rise as a thief, the more I understood the context of the present-day stories I was reading on his blog. The events being reported in the media were part of a larger pattern that had taken decades to evolve. Paul had retired, but the Brighton knockers had not.

Just four years after he'd called it quits, a 1997 headline in the
Independent
read: “If your antiques have been stolen, head to Brighton.” The article stated, “London has a rival for the dubious title of clearing house for the country's stolen antiques: Brighton. Dozens of gangs and crooked dynasties in the pleasant seaside town have perfected systems to divide up the country and go on thieving raids, say police. Because the heirlooms in question are of middle- and lower-ranking quality, owned by ordinary people, they never make news.” The article told how detectives had tracked antiques stolen from the duke and duchess of Kent to a Brighton dealer.

It was amazing reading articles like that, because they referenced Paul's criminal descendants. Paul was one of the few people on the planet who could dissect the problem, categorize the types of thieves, and assess the effectiveness of law enforcement. Sussex Police had utterly failed to contain the problem, and its art and antiques squad was quietly disbanded in 1998. The knockers were thriving and had even mutated into new forms of thugs who were striking smaller towns and big cities across the United Kingdom with impunity. There were now crews of knockers calling themselves art dealers.

There was Lee Collins, who grew up in Brighton but worked London, pulling the same scams as Paul had, except with a new twist: he posed as a high-end antique dealer. Collins talked his way into the homes of at least thirteen wealthy seniors, including the 17th earl of Lauderdale, who was ninety-four years old when Collins showed up at his door. He paid the earl £200 for an eighteenth-century urn estimated to be worth six times as much. Collins also went knocking on the door of Audrey Carr, a wealthy London widow, and tried to persuade her to sell an Edward Seago oil painting worth £15,000. Carr wouldn't go for it, so Collins lifted the painting off the wall while she watched, just like the Los Angeles case told by Hrycyk. Collins also persuaded the widow of artist Charles McCall to sell him hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of her late husband's art for a paltry sum. He was caught, convicted, and served time, and then, in 2010, went back at it and was sent to prison again.

Paul posted an article about two criminal “art dealers” who talked their way into a home and forced a ninety-four-year-old man to part with two paintings by L.S. Lowry,
Children on
a Promenade
and
Family of Three
. They ignored the protests of the pictures' owner, Dr. Percy Thompson Hancock, removing the canvasses off the wall and leaving a cheque for £10,400. Talk about tough negotiators. Later, Dr. Thompson Hancock received a cheque for £6,000 in the mail. Eight months after the theft, the doctor's granddaughter was passing a gallery on London's Bond Street and saw the paintings prominently displayed in the window, selling for £215,000. She found out that just a few months after they'd been stolen, the paintings had been sold at Bonhams auction house in London for £78,000. The two thieves were tracked down, tried in court, and sentenced to four years. The judge told them, “What you men did was despicable.” One had had a previous conviction; the other had had a list of court appearances dating back twenty-eight years, including a charge of stealing £9,000 worth of antiques from the home of a ninety-year-old deaf and bedridden man. “These people are addicted to this,” said Paul.

Paul apologized to the husband in the hallway of the house he broke into in 1980, but his successors were not nearly as kind—some knockers resorted to violence. There were the thieves who showed up at the home of Tom and Sarah Williams, threatening to pull out the Williamses' fingernails with pliers if they didn't give up their antiques. The thieves beat Mr. Williams down and kicked him repeatedly in the ribs. The antiques were later traced to an art dealer, Phillip Capewell. Art Hostage posted about a dozen articles on the trial, and Capewell was convicted and sentenced to five years. After the trial, a detective on the Sussex police force pointed out, “Phillip Capewell is a sophisticated, professional handler of stolen goods . . . Without such people, thieves are unable to make a profit for their crimes. The sentence handed down today sets a clear message that men like Phillip Capewell will be treated seriously by the courts.” But Art Hostage pointed out that Capewell had already been to court five times for handling stolen art.

Still, these knockers were quaint compared to gangs like the Johnsons, who approached house burglaries like soldiers at war. Paul loved talking about the Johnsons because they were like supervillains—utterly fearless and relentlessly ambitious. They weren't interested in striking deals with police forces; they weren't being polite, and they didn't stay under the radar. Between May 2003 and April 2006, the Johnsons, a family operation of brothers, cousins, and friends, smashed their way into English country homes, reaping art and antiques that some estimates valued at $160 million. They used 4x4
SUVS
to ram the gates of estates. They wore balaclavas. They were worthy of a James Bond flick, and in fact they targeted an estate formerly owned by Ian Fleming, Bond's creator, removing steel bars from the windows and disconnecting the alarm system. They studied their targets for weeks at a time and often left no evidence. They hit the lords and manors that Paul had always felt were too risky to steal from. And they used any means necessary to get the prize. Police marvelled at the gang.