Hot Art (5 page)

“China, Afghanistan, all of Eastern Europe, now Iraq,” said Czegledi. “The statistic for looting actually went down in the Czech Republic recently. You know why? Because everything has been stolen. It's like a bad joke.”

In 2006, she flew to Brussels to speak on a conference panel about what Europe was doing to stem the tide of illegal imports, and discovered the answer: “Not much.” After the conference she met with a Brussels police investigator, who took Czegledi to a chic part of the city, where they toured antique stores. At one shop specializing in Chinese antiquities, they chatted up the owner. He explained how he got his merchandise. Sometimes he travelled to China, to a warehouse where all the looted antiquities were stored, and picked out whatever he wanted. He used a special cargo company to transport the illegal items to the borders of Belgium. It cost one euro per kilo. At the border he met the cargo himself, put the loot in his trunk, and drove it back to his shop. Sometimes, though, he went to China for longer to participate personally in excavating an archaeological site. He could buy items as they were lifted out of the ground. The dealer did not realize that he was speaking to an international art lawyer and a criminal investigator. The Belgian investigator was shocked at how comfortable the dealer was telling them how he ripped off China's cultural heritage. Nothing surprised Czegledi anymore.

Everything about the Problem was opaque: the relationships between the players, the cash transactions, the collision between high and low culture, between street thugs and elite collectors, between detectives' quest to learn and their access to information, between the urge to protect a work of art and the urge to possess it—all little pieces of the mysterious puzzle scattered across the globe. According to Czegledi, the war on art theft was being lost, and nobody even knew how big the war was or where the lines of battle were. She told me she came to see the Problem in terms of information—more specifically, as a lack of credible information. “How do we know how large the illegal economy in art is? There's simply not enough data,” Czegledi said. “Hello. This is the twenty-first century. How can that be?”

Interpol and
UNESCO
listed art theft as the fourth-largest black market in the world (after drugs, money-laundering, and weapons). But what did that mean? After I'd been following Czegledi's career for several years, one point was clear: don't look at the Hollywood versions of an art thief—the Myth. This is a bigger game, with more players, and the legitimate business of art is directly implicated. A lot of the crimes are hidden in the open. Stealing art is just the beginning. Then the art is laundered up into the legitimate market, into private collections, into the world's most renowned museums. In 2007, this was happening all over the world, and there was only this little group of lawyers who gathered in conference rooms, darkly bemused by the size and scope of the mess. Part of the Problem was that it had been allowed to become so big that it was everyone's problem and, therefore, no one's.

That year I went with Czegledi to see first hand what those rooms of lawyers were like. We travelled to an International Council of Museums conference in Cairo. There was a bonus: Egypt was one of the oldest civilizations in the world, had had its cultural heritage pillaged for thousands of years—every colonial power of note had stolen from Egypt—and was where the first recorded trial of an art thief took place. Egypt was the ultimate source country.

3.

EGYPT

“They shouted, ‘Look over here! The loot is inside us! Rob me!'”
RICK ST. HILAIRE

O
N THE
hot sand an Egyptian teenager in a dirty T-shirt runs after me with a tray of sunglasses. “Shades! You buy shades!” The Sphinx sits behind him. Dozens of air-conditioned buses are parked in the open sun, and around them hundreds of figures holler for camel rides and photo ops. It all feels insignificant compared to the giant stone triangles that rise, alien-like, out of the desert: the only remaining of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

Most tourists to Egypt come home with pictures of themselves standing in front of Khufu's pyramid—the Great Pyramid. When it was completed, in 2560
BCE
, it was the tallest structure on earth. It remained the tallest until the Eiffel Tower was built over four thousand years later. Astronauts can see it from orbit. The pyramid was supposed to allow Khufu to live longer than everyone else, in the afterlife. He spent two decades creating his get-out-of-jail-free card, with the help of thousands of labourers who lived in worker-camps on site. When Khufu died he was sealed inside his pyramid with his earthly possessions for what was supposed to be eternity. Now it is a tourist site, and Bonnie Czegledi and I are part of a large crowd standing in front of it.

This afternoon two guards in dusty blue uniforms stand outside the entrance of Khufu's pyramid. Up close, I can see the entrance is not so much a door as a dark crack in the tilting wall of ancient limestone that vanishes into the sunlight. The guards are stone-faced as well. Bad news, they tell the latest busload of tourists: cameras are not allowed. The guards collect dozens of them before allowing people to step into the darkness and crawl up a very narrow, hot passageway that leads into the centre of the ancient skyscraper. “This looks uncomfortable,” Czegledi says.

The tunnel is so small that sometimes we're forced onto our hands and knees. One line of tourists crawls up, another line clambers down. When the space isn't wide enough for both lines, there's a bottleneck of sweat, khaki shorts, and sandy running shoes—extreme claustrophobia. And just when I think I can't take it anymore, the tunnel opens into an almost perfectly square room with smooth black stone walls and a dim light hanging in the corner.

No sunlight penetrates here. It is eerily quiet. At the far end of the room rests a tomb, open and empty, where the body of a king of Egypt once lay. Bright flashes of light pulse. For every camera confiscated, a cellphone is retrieved from a pocket, a small camera from another. Trying to stop tourists from raiding the tomb with light is futile. There is no guard here—a person would go mad standing inside this room. And the only reason we're here at all is because thieves found the way in first.

My visit to the pyramids coincided with the gathering of some of the world's experts on international cultural crimes at the Marriott Hotel in Cairo. I was part of a Canadian group that included Czegledi, as well as two detectives from the Montreal art theft unit. The conference was supposed to be a chance for lawyers, law enforcers, and cultural specialists from around the world to trade information. And it was. We spent two afternoons in a dark, cavernous conference room in the Marriott. Each speaker presented a lecture and a Power-Point presentation.

The first speaker, from a museum in Greece dedicated to knives and guns, filled us in on how bad conditions were for the preservation of knives. By mid-afternoon, the man sitting beside me, who'd flown in from Britain to present on copyright law, was experiencing intense jetlag and, perhaps, was bored. He lay down on the floor, curled up under his chair, and fell asleep.

One of the conference organizers was a handsome Egyptian man in his mid-thirties. My first contact with him was shortly after I arrived at the Marriott. I'd made reservations for $100 U.S. a night through a travel agent. When I checked in, the manager on duty that morning said that as part of the conference, I should be paying $140 U.S. a night. We haggled for half an hour until he agreed to let me pay the $100 for the room. Then, on the first afternoon of the conference, I was approached by the Organizer. He was wearing a suit and was flanked by a couple of serious but subservient-looking men. The Organizer informed me that I had to pay the conference rate for the hotel, but instead of making up the difference by Visa, I could simply give him the difference in U.S. cash. I told him I'd already settled the issue with the manager. The Organizer waved his hand imperiously. He said that he would be speaking to the manager about the matter. His tone was threatening. You should pay, he said.

Later that evening, I ran into Detective Alain Lacoursière from Canada. He had had a similar interaction. The detective had been thinking it over when he returned to his room and found a note on his pillow asking again for the money and wishing him a nice stay in Cairo. “I decided to pay,” the detective told me. “To be honest, it scared me. I'm out of my world here, and I don't want to risk getting into trouble with anyone. So I paid.”

Unlike Lacoursière, I hadn't been sent to the conference by a company or a police force; I'd had to pay for my own plane ticket and room. It was already a stretch for me, and I couldn't afford the overhead.

Over the next few days, the Organizer hovered: at the conference, on the party boat on the Nile, on the Marriott's epic back patio. He was figuring out how to handle me, I could tell, but he wasn't ready to make a move. I wondered when he would. In the meantime, I'd met and was spending a lot of time with Rick St. Hilaire, at the time a county prosecutor in New Hampshire, who lectured on the impact of art theft in the United States and knew a lot about the impact of art theft on Egypt.

“Egypt,” he said, “is a great place to start with the history of art theft.” St. Hilaire has a boyish face and says he gets teased all the time about how young he looks. He got hooked on art theft in university, when he took an elective about Egyptian art and architecture. Several years later, when he was a prosecutor, he reconnected with his professor, Dr. John Russell, who told him to look into the black market. He did, and, like Czegledi, he was astounded at what he found—a giant mess, with billions of dollars of stolen work traversing the world, summarily ignored by most of the world's police forces.

St. Hilaire's eyes are green, friendly, and energetic, and he loves talking about Egyptian history. He also possesses the rare gift of being able to summarize huge swaths of history in easy-to-digest narratives. Just like Czegledi, he is a natural teacher, and on a day off from the conference, St. Hilaire took me for a tour of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo for a crash course on the history of art thieves. We strolled through Tahrir Square. It's hard for me, even now, to believe that just a few years later the square would be filled with thousands of citizen-revolutionaries facing off against President Hosni Mubarak's thugs. On that day, it was relatively peaceful and sunny. Crowds of men smoked and hung out in the garden in front of the museum.

The museum is grand and dusty, and its 177 halls are crammed with more than 120,000 artifacts, remnants of great dynasties taken from the pyramids and temples of the ancient royalty of Egypt. Also here are the preserved bodies of 27 of those kings and queens, some of them more than 5,000 years old. They lie in climate-controlled chambers under soft light, protected by thick coffins of Windex-clear glass: Ramses iii, Seti i. Some of the mummified corpses still have the hair they died with, brittle as straw. Their bodies were wrapped in cloth and locked in the black centre of pyramids. Now lines of tourists look down at their dead faces, gawking.

“This wasn't the plan,” explained St. Hilaire. “Ancient Egyptians had no word for art. These were tools, and they served a purpose. The pyramids and their treasures were all part of an elaborate machine that the ruling families of Egypt devised to move safely from their lives on earth to a world beyond death.” The afterlife was as real to them as water, sand, or stone. “The machine gets them to the other world and lets them live well there. But only if the machine stays intact,” St. Hilaire said. “The pyramids, unfortunately, were also these great big beacons to thieves, to the poor of Egypt. They shouted, ‘Look over here! The loot is inside us! Rob me!'”

He pointed to a stone statue in a glass case. It was tiny, about two inches tall. “Khufu was an ancient king, and one of the most powerful kings in the history of the world, but that little statue is the only image we have left of him.”

Khufu had one of the largest tombs, and it was probably heavily looted. “The entrance to Khufu's pyramid wasn't created by the king; it's a looter's entrance,” St. Hilaire told me. “Most of the early looting in Egypt happened by locals.” The history of Egypt, he explained, was a history of plunder—first by Egyptians, and then by the world.

Locals started raiding the pyramids around 2200
BCE
, while Egypt was still reeling from the reign of Pepi
II
, considered to be one of the longest-reigning kings in history (somewhere between sixty and eighty-four years). After Pepi's rule, Egypt fell into what is now banally titled the First Intermediate Period, which means that Egypt was in chaos; with no one in charge, society collapsed.

“Think Iraq, after the fall of Baghdad,” St. Hilaire said. “There was no social structure in Egypt to make sure looting didn't happen. The common person who lived in Egyptian society knew that the king was buried in the pyramid, with lots of great stuff in there. He also knew that the king had a special gate, to travel into the afterlife. And now there was no one stopping them.”

St. Hilaire paused in front of a large statue—of the pharaoh Djoser—with empty eye sockets. “This statue used to have beautiful crystal-rock eyes. You rarely find the glass eyes intact. Stolen,” he said. “Well, take the eyes out, and how does the king see? That's why the punishment for looting was severe.” A few minutes later he pointed to a small scrap of something like paper, in a glass case. “That's papyrus. It was the predecessor to paper.”

One of the earliest recorded trials of a thief in human history occurred during the New Kingdom Period in Egypt, and its details were captured on papyrus, after the man was caught stealing from a tomb. His punishment was death on the stake. “It's not a great way to go,” mused St. Hilaire with a smile, “but gruesome punishments didn't stop the looting.”