The Rescue Artist

that they wouldn’t do this for just anybody. They didn’t want the Des Moines, Iowa, sheriff’s department ringing them up to say, ‘Can you give us a hand here?’ But in the end they cooperated brilliantly.”

Ellis had brought a photo of Charley Hill to California with him, along with Charley’s birth date and other background information. If the Getty was going to lend its cover to this operation, Hill would need a new identity.

In short order, Charley Hill had vanished, and one Christopher Charles Roberts had arisen to take his place.^* Most of the trappings were routine. Hill was provided with an American Express card in Roberts’s name, a Getty Museum employee ID with his photo, and, for flashing at the appropriate moments, business cards and personalized stationery. A second layer of preparation was more defensive in nature. The Getty’s internal records—notably the payroll files for the past several years—had to be doctored in case anyone began snooping into Christopher Roberts’s bona fides.

The risk wasn’t so much that a suspicious crook might phone the Getty and learn anything useful. Even in ordinary circumstances, most institutions clam up when strangers ask questions about their employees. “But criminals will always check out the people they’re dealing with,” says Ellis, “and you have to be prepared for them to pay somebody within the institution to get them the information they want.”

That possibility raised another danger. What if someone on the crooks’ payroll began looking for Getty employees who knew Roberts? How to explain that no one did? To ward off such trouble down the road, the Getty concocted in-house records that listed Roberts as a roving scout permanently assigned to Europe, and working directly (and exclusively) for the director.

Unless you were in the very top tier of management at the Getty, Hill saw delightedly, you couldn’t counter the argument that he was anything other than a proper employee. It was that good. Hill gave his new credentials an enthusiastic thumbs-up. “Everything looks perfectly pukka … kosher.”

The translation of English slang into American was almost instantaneous, unusual only in that Hill spoke both idioms aloud. Usually Hill shifted on the fly, seamlessly denouncing some hapless twit as an “asshole” or an “arsehole” depending on whether his listeners were Americans or Brits. (Bilingual cursing was especially demanding, since so often it came in the heat of the moment. Hill’s time in the Army, when he had worked on sounding “like a redneck from Fayetteville, North Carolina,” had given him good practice.)

Hill is bilingual only in American English and British English, but within those narrow confines he is masterful. (On rare occasions he will venture as far afield as Canada. For an undercover job in the Czech Republic, Hill spent hours practicing broad vowel sounds so that he would sound authentically Canadian. Almost certainly this detail would be lost on the mobsters he was dealing with, but it reflected craftsmanship and professional pride, akin to a carpenter’s taking pains to align all the slots in his screwheads in parallel.)

Hill chose the name “Christopher Charles Roberts” as a mnemonic—the r sounds served as a reminder to himself to enunciate r’s whenever he came to them, as Americans do, rather than to swallow them English-style. The use of his own name as a middle name was a precaution; with some fast talking, Hill might be able to wriggle out of trouble if by bad fortune someone he knew happened to call out to him on the street.

“Hi there,” he’d say aloud to himself, like a singer practicing scales, “I’m Chris Roberts.” There were key sounds and phrases and mannerisms that you had to get right. Do it wrong or overdo it, like Dick Van Dyke playing an Englishman, and you’d be caught the minute you opened your mouth.

The role of Chris Roberts, Getty sleazebag, would soon put Hill’s skills to the test. The grading, it is worth bearing in mind, would be done by professional criminals.

9

The General

Hill was the natural choice to star in the Scream story because he had just scored a giant triumph. In 1986, seven years before the theft of The Scream, a brutal Irish gangster named Martin Cahill had pulled off what was then the biggest art theft in history. Among the eighteen world-class paintings that Cahill grabbed from a mansion outside Dublin, Vermeer’s Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid was the gem of gems. Its value on the open market can only be guessed at; $50 million would not be a surprise, and $100 million would not be out of the question. In 1993, Hill went undercover and brought it back, undamaged. The coup catapulted him to the top of his field and made him a star.

Six months later, The Scream vanished. For the Art Squad, the timing was ideal. If it could rack up a second huge success in a case sure to be splashed across the world’s front pages, the Art Squad would be safe (at least for a while) from the in-house attacks that always came its way. For Charley Hill, too, the timing was fortunate, and not only because he was at the top of his game. Hill had decided that his undercover work in the Cahill case could serve as a model he could apply to going after The Scream.

Short, bald, chubby, unkempt, Martin Cahill looked like a down-market bartender or the night clerk at a fleabag hotel. In the 1970s and 1980s, he was, in fact, the top man in Dublin’s underworld.

Decades ago, many art thefts were stylish, the province of smooth-talking villains with dubious morals and elegant manners. In recent years, the advent of big money has transformed a gentleman’s sport into a serious, and dangerous, business. Raffles, the “gentleman thief” of Victorian England, has been shoved aside by thugs and criminal gangs whose expertise is in drug peddling and money laundering. Cahill, an armed robber, a kidnapper, and a car bomber, was typical of the new breed. Thomas Crown would have run away screaming.

Before Cahill, crime in Dublin had been largely a helter-skelter affair. Martin Cahill, who had more organizational skills and fewer scruples than any of his predecessors, changed the rules. “The General,” as he was known, instituted weekly meetings to plan future robberies. He kept a sharp eye on the money that came in and how it was paid out. He took on giant jobs that had been deemed impossible; he headed, for instance, a 10-man team that pulled off what was then the biggest robbery in Irish history, a ?2 million theft of gold and jewels from a closely guarded and fortress-like factory. In Dublin under Cahill, the term “organized crime” took on real meaning.

Just as important in consolidating his hold on power, Cahill took over terror tactics from the IRA and turned them on the police. This had nothing to do with politics—Cahill had no political views except that anyone in his way was a blood enemy—but it brought violence into territory that had always been off-limits. When prosecutors found evidence that placed Cahill at the scene of an armed robbery, for example, Cahill planted a homemade bomb under the car of James Donovan, the state’s chief forensic expert, who was slated to testify in court. For weeks before the attack, Donovan had been under siege. His phone rang at all hours with criminals mouthing threats or simply waiting, silently, on the line. As Donovan drove home from his forensics lab one night, with a policeman sitting in the car next to him for protection, he saw he was being followed. Donovan considered driving to police headquarters but decided that, no matter where he went, Cahill’s men would simply shoot him and flee to safety. “So I decided to drive home because I’d like to die at home, and it would be easier for my wife to have to identify the body in our own house.”

Donovan pulled into his driveway. Cahill’s man drove up behind him and waited. And eventually drove off. But three weeks later, at 8:30 on a January morning, Donovan pulled onto the highway on his way to work and the heat of his car’s engine detonated a crude bomb. “I suddenly saw a mushroom cloud in front of my eyes, and at the center a great big tongue of flame,” Donovan recalled. “I saw the smoke first, then the fire, and then I went blind. My eyes had been scored by the pieces of metal and then I heard a massive explosion. I tried to move my right hand and I couldn’t. It was paralyzed. I put my left hand down and just past my knee found bits of squelchy material—tissue.”

Astonishingly, Donovan lived. He returned to work after enduring a series of operations, maimed and partly blinded. Cahill was never charged in the attack.

Cahill had started out as just another thug. He had been convicted for the first time at age twelve, of larceny. A few years later, in the hope that it would straighten out his wayward boy, Cahill’s father sent the young man to a