Hot Art (38 page)

In May 2010, five paintings worth more than $160 million vanished in a grand theft from a Paris museum. Then, in early June, Paul sent me an email with a subject line that read, “New York Times Article.” He wrote, “Long time no hear ???? thought you might like this article in the nyt Magazine for tomorrow. How you getting on with the book?” I followed the link to the
Times
site, to an article by Virginia Heffernan, Samuels's wife and at that time a columnist for the
New York Times Magazine
. Her piece was called “Heist School” and featured Art Hostage commenting on the Paris theft and the state of international art theft. Heffernan, it turns out, was a long-time fan of the blog. “Cheers, Turbo Paul, you scare me,” Heffernan wrote, and then a few paragraphs down, “The minute I saw the Paris heist in the news, I knew Turbo Paul would be psyched: traffic to Art Hostage would spike, his brain would rev high and he would get to peddle innuendo and what he presents as underworld intelligence. When news of big heists break, ‘I am at my toxic best,'” Paul had told her.

I phoned Paul that Sunday. “Hal-loh!” he said, once I said it was me. “Did you read the article in the
New! York! Times!
”

“Has traffic to the Art Hostage site spiked?” I asked.

“The web traffic is up from three hundred hits to three thousand, and America is five hours behind me!” Paul boomed. “It's gone absolutely berserk!” He then imagined what it must have been like for all the people who despised him to read the piece online. “How much coffee is dripping down flat-screen desktops! They read the
New York Times
and spat their coffee against their screens, threw their cups of coffee at their laptops in disgust, green with envy. I'm the person everyone hates! They say, ‘Art Hostage, I would never read that filth, that disgusting profanity. I wouldn't even dignify clicking on a link!' But they check my site three times a day!”

Paul also said that he was receiving a parade of emails from people who had previously dismissed or maligned him but who were now congratulating him on the attention. In classic Turbo-style, he said, “Now everyone's like, ‘Can I suck your cock? Would you like to fuck my sister?' Suddenly, because of an article in the
New York Times,
everyone wants to be my friend. At the end of the day, that's people,” he told me. “Art theft is a small, incestuous world, and people always come back to the same groups, the same affiliations. And I am always lurking there.”

I asked Paul how he felt about all the media attention focussed on the Paris theft, and about the quality of the analysis in the articles. “Art theft is like herpes,” he responded. “It lays dormant and suddenly it comes back every once in a while, and then everyone notices. But the virus is always there in the spine. As usual, there are those who are saying Dr. Nos don't exist. The art is too famous to sell? Well, c'mon, a hundred million dollars' worth of paintings! It's saleable. The initial thieves always sell them. If you're an armed robber and sell stolen art for $100,000 on a million, it's still a good day for you.”

Did the exposure from the
Times
article make him want to refine his blog at all, I wondered, based on the attention and the potential for audience growth? Paul laughed. “I'm the same as before. I've only got one gear, and that's turbo. What you see is what you get. No bells and whistles. The blog is about what's happening, and what I'm thinking. I'm a loose cannon, and no one knows what I'm going to do next,” he told me. “It would have been much nicer to get a PhD. Instead, I got a PhD in knocking. I have no regrets in that respect. With hindsight, we'd all have bought Microsoft shares for two dollars instead of three hundred dollars, right?”

During our many phone conversations, I never did find out how Paul earned money. As far as I knew, he had no job. Was he living on his savings from his knocking days? Surely the money would be running out. Paul didn't seem to worry about that. He focussed on his blog, on growing his international network, and on protecting his niche position as the “godfather of information.”

A few months after the Paris theft, a van Gogh painting titled
Poppy Flowers
(and worth more than $50 million) was stolen from a museum in Egypt. It was the second time that particular van Gogh had been stolen from the same museum. The first theft took place in 1978, and the painting was recovered two years later, in Kuwait. Now it was gone again. A few months later eleven employees from the Ministry of Culture were sentenced to prison for gross negligence and incompetence for not adequately protecting the van Gogh. The painting, though, remained at large. Paul noted that a reward was offered by Naguib Sawiris, an Egyptian billionaire, but it was puny compared to the actual worth of the artwork.

Paul blogged:

Can you believe the balls of this guy? He is a billionaire and the cheapskate offers $175,000 reward for a $55 million Van Gogh. That's 0.3 % of the value. Get the fuck outta here. To be fair he is just following orders from art loss investigators and Egyptian authorities. It is called the psychology of low worth. Meaning if the thieves cannot hook into the stolen art underworld then the hope is they will become desperate and take anything that is on offer. The same thing happened on the Swiss art thefts in 2008 when the Cezanne and Degas were stolen from the eg Buehrle Collection, a private museum in Zurich and are worth $150 million. The reward offered by the eg Buehrle museum remains $90,000. I hasten to add the Cezanne and Degas have not been recovered to date. This guy Sawiris and authorities must have been smoking too much Egyptian hubble-bubble pipe, or been sucking on old Grandpa's cough medicine. Drunk or stoned Sawiris and authorities cannot be serious, and if anyone comes forward they deserve all the jail time they will get. Who in their right mind is going to come forward with information when the prospect of actually getting this poultry reward is remote, to say the least, and added to that, $175,000 for a $55 million Van Gogh.

It was classic Art Hostage: advice to criminals couched in prose worthy of
The Sopranos
.

On September 1, 2010, almost four years after his first Art Hostage post, Paul added one more article to the site—and then his blog went unnervingly quiet. Several weeks passed with no new posts.

This was very weird. Paul and “quiet” didn't belong in the same sentence. I wondered where he had gone and sent him a few emails. There was no response. This was also weird. Paul was an attentive pen pal; he usually responded within the hour, if not the day. The art theft blogosphere started to feel lonely. Where would I go to read about the latest bizarre criminal news?

In late October 2010, I emailed Richard Ellis asking for news of Paul. Ellis and Paul had had a complex relationship, but I knew they stayed in touch. I received a reply the next day from the former head of Scotland Yard's Art and Antiques Unit:

Paul (aka James Walsh) is at present on holiday staying at one of Her Majesty's prisons on account of having been found guilty of Benefits Fraud. He ran as his defence an explanation for double claiming that he had been authorized to do so whilst acting as a registered informant for the police. As he had not been registered with the police for some years and had never been authorized by them to claim any benefits he was duly convicted and sent to prison for 15 months.

I felt a knot in my stomach. Paul had been caught for theft twice and had told me he was extremely happy, relieved, that he'd never had to serve any time in prison. “I really never wanted to go to prison, and I never did,” he gloated once. “Art thieves get a slap on the wrist, that's part of the problem.” It was hard for me to imagine Paul in a cell.

By then I had been talking to him for close to three years. At various points I'd asked him if I could come and visit, and he'd said yes. For one reason or another, I kept having to postpone the trip. I emailed him again, but there was no response. The Art Hostage site was still up in cyberspace, but its archived collection of news articles and commentary were now frozen.

Then, a few months later, I received an email from Paul: “Hi Josh, I'm back. Call me.”

We scheduled another phone appointment.

“Hal-loh? So, did you hear what happened?”

Paul said he had been released on parole. As usual, he'd worked the system and become a model prisoner. He'd stayed for three and a half months at
HMP
Ford, where prison riots had broken out just before the New Year. Paul said he had helped put a man on a stretcher to be carried out. When we talked, he said he'd decided to cool off a bit before posting anything on Art Hostage. I asked him if this would be a good time to come and visit.

“Are you kidding? I have a tracer around my ankle, and can only leave the house between 7
AM
and 7
PM
. There's never been a better time to come and visit. I have no choice, I am here ... a captive audience.” I booked a ticket to London.

BEFORE I VISITED
Paul, I scheduled a meeting with Richard Ellis.

The former detective met me at the Wallace Collection, a private gallery that could not be more British-elite. Housed in a grand brick manor, it holds one of the finest collections of armour, swords, and shields in the United Kingdom. It also holds a number of masterworks by Rembrandt, Titian, and Velázquez. Ellis was sitting in the enclosed courtyard restaurant, just finishing up a meeting with a graduate student who was writing a paper about art crime in the U.K.

Ellis was his usual self: quiet, observant, level-headed. He greeted me warmly and asked who else I was interviewing while in London. I mentioned Julian Radcliffe, and Paul.

“You're seeing Paul?” he said, surprised. “So he's out of prison, is he?”

“He is, apparently.”

Ellis mulled it over. “I didn't realize that,” he said. Then he smiled to himself. “Please tell Paul hello for me. Tell him, let bygones be bygones.”

We spent about an hour together, during which we had a wide-ranging conversation about art theft. I asked Ellis if he really considered himself retired, and he said yes. Then his mobile rang; it was a detective from a police division outside of London. He said into the phone, “I just wanted to find out how the investigation was going on that burglary we were talking about.” He was obviously still engaged at ground level with art theft cases here in Britain, perhaps the world. He told me he kept in touch with Bill Martin, Hrycyk's mentor, who had moved to Oregon and started a company. The two had become good friends and talked often.

Midway through our conversation we left the Wallace and walked a few blocks to a small pub, where Ellis bought me a pint of Tribute, a beer made by the brewery his family started almost two hundred years ago. We raised our glasses. Ellis said he'd grown up in a solid middle-class family and that his parents had emphasized culture. “That's helped me a lot in the art world. I'm not upper class, but I know my way around that world. I can get into that world when I need to. I am comfortable with that world.”

I asked him if he'd ever come up against a situation where the powerful forces of the elite had aligned against his detective work. His answer was yes. Once, he'd been investigating a very large and influential company that was in possession of a valuable collection of stolen antiquities. The Art and Antiques unit spent months building the case, and just when it was set to go to court, word came down from above that there would be no prosecution. Instead, there would be an out-of-court settlement. “It was the first time I realized I was over my head.” Ellis smiled. “We had the evidence.” He said the out-of-court settlement was large—in the tens of millions. “But had we gone to court, it may have bankrupted the company,” he added, sipping his family beer.

“I'm thinking of writing a book myself,” he said. “I'm not quite sure where to start, but I feel like I've got a book in me.” When we left the pub, Ellis shook my hand. Again, he said, “And you will say hi to Paul for me? Okay?”

ON A GREY
London morning I rode a train from Victoria Station an hour and forty minutes to Eastbourne, a retirement community shooting distance from the big city. Paul was standing at the turnstile. I waved from the platform, and he waved back. I'd seen pictures of him, and we had Skyped a couple of times. He looked different now, in person. He'd lost weight, was taller than I imagined, about six feet two, and had piercing blue eyes. His face still held the openness of a boy's. He looked friendly and totally unthreatening. Paul stuck his big hand out. “Hal-loh. Ride okay? Come right this way, the car's just there.”

He pointed to a black Mercedes in the station parking lot, the most expensive car in sight. The licence plate read,
OHO8
art. The
OH
stood for Oliver Hendry, his teenage son, who was in the front seat of the car, watching his father entertain what I'm sure was another in a long line of journalists, broadcasters, and other characters who journeyed to Eastbourne for a private audience with the online godfather of stolen art.

Paul nodded at the Mercedes. “I bought it from a former diplomat who had to get rid of it,” he told me. He opened the door to the tanned leather interior, and I climbed in. When Paul closed the door, he didn't shut it all the way, so I opened it again and pulled harder. “No! No! These are automatic power doors,” he laughed. “See . . .” Then he opened the door and gently pushed it toward the body of the car. The door, as promised, closed on its own, locking into place with a quiet click.

Paul pulled out of the station. “It's about a fifteen-minute ride from here,” he said. As we cruised through Eastbourne he commented, “It's a boring place, really. Not much to look at, wouldn't ya say?” It reminded me of his rule—always stay under the radar.

“So, you wound up in a retirement community?”