A Look at Stolen Art

Fellow appraiser and new ISA President Cindy Charleston Rosenberg, ISA CAPP sent me a link to an interesting NY Times Magazine article on art theft.  It is a rather long and in depth article which covers both theft and how the art is handled afterward.  In touches the two main types of art thieves, those less sophisticated thieves without a plan for selling and those who are more sophisticated in their planning. Disposing of stolen art, especially famous works is difficult, so avenues beyond outright sales can be used to profit such as used to bargain with insurance companies and even be used in the underworld as collateral.

The NY Times reports

Dick Ellis has operated in this art-theft underworld for decades. A retired Scotland Yard detective with a stocky frame and a wry grin, Ellis spent much of his career on the Metropolitan Police’s fabled Art and Antiques Squad — which was responsible for, among other coups, the return of Edvard Munch’s “Scream,” three months after it was stolen from the National Gallery in Norway in 1994. He now works as a private detective and has been retained by the firm that insured the Kunsthal’s “Avant-Gardes” exhibition, to investigate the possibility of retrieving its stolen paintings.

Ellis told me that works with a high open-market value are often used by serious criminals as collateral. A painting doesn’t need to be sold at auction to hold value, he explained. Even if it stays forever on the black market, it can be used as a kind of promissory note in a weapons or drug deal. Career criminals also believe they can extort a ransom from insurers or use the stolen work as a bargaining chip. A prison sentence, for instance, might be reduced in some jurisdictions in exchange for a criminal’s help in retrieving a missing Monet. In effect, an unframed canvas, easier to move across borders than its equivalent in cash or drugs, acts as a high-value and extremely pretty bank note.

Ellis gave an example from his own experience. After Martin Cahill — the Irish gangster known as the General — stole 18 paintings from the Beit Collection at Russborough House in County Wicklow in 1986, the artworks led an extraordinary life. One painting was sent to Istanbul, where it was used as part of a payment for a heroin deal. Four other paintings — including a Gainsborough, a Goya and a Vermeer — were taken to Antwerp, where a diamond dealer accepted them as collateral and advanced Cahill a large sum of money, with which he tried to start an offshore bank in the Bahamas. The Antwerp paintings were eventually recovered after an undercover sting in which Charles Hill — Ellis’s colleague in the Art Squad — posed as an American buyer.

Still, the concept of art as collateral is tricky. The best chance for a painting to express a monetary value would seem to be from a ransom. But how often do insurers make payouts to criminals? Robert Korzinek, the fine-arts underwriter who insured the Kunsthal claim, says that his organization is not in the business of paying for the return of stolen art. It sometimes pays for “information leading to the return” of a painting, but the sums involved are small and distributed only with the approval of local law enforcement. The underwriter says there is a belief among criminals, however, that large payments are made regularly, and because of this, they often use paintings as part of their “complex trades.”

“All markets work on confidence,” Korzinek says. “If you have a perception that there will be value attached to that object, then you can use it as a commodity. . . . I can sit here and say we don’t pay ransoms, but people don’t believe it.”

Source: NY Times