Gainsborough, two Rubens, the works.
The next day Coyle phoned Hill.
“Gee,” Hill said, “that
Hill and Coyle arranged to meet in London to discuss the Russborough House bounty. Coyle flew in from Dublin, Hill (supposedly) from the States, and they rendezvoused at the Post House Hotel, near Heathrow Airport.
Coyle came up to Hill’s room. Hill had been told to offer drinks, and the two men filled their glasses and sat down to chat. “Yeah, I’d be interested in buying the paintings when the heat dies down,” Hill said. “Some of them, not all of them.”
They talked about the paintings and sipped their drinks. Coyle, pleased with his prospects, finished his drink and prepared to leave. Hill and Coyle shook hands. Someone knocked on the door. A waiter, with four glasses on a tray, room service stuff. “Afternoon, gentlemen. Everything all right?”
“Yeah, we’re good.”
The waiter took away the glasses Hill and Coyle had used and replaced them with clean ones.
The room service waiter was a cop, and he hurried the crook’s glass to a fingerprint lab. Within a day Scotland Yard had a positive ID on the man trying to peddle the Beit paintings. From there, the trail led straight to Martin Cahill.
The industrial diamonds, it turned out, came from a General Electric plant outside Dublin. Martin Cahill and his gang had been stealing them and selling them in Antwerp, and now they were looking for new business opportunities. Stolen art was a venture into a new market.
Cahill’s own taste in art ran to cheery scenes like the dime-store print in his living room of swans on a river, but he believed that Sir Alfred’s stolen paintings would bring him a fortune. “He’d been reading how there were all these really eccentric art lovers around the world who were prepared to pay millions of pounds for art and stash them in their basements,” said Paul Williams, Cahill’s biographer. “He reckoned he would get millions, countless millions, of pounds for them on the black market.”
With his new money, Cahill intended to make a major move into the drug importing and distributing business in Britain. The elaborate scheme involved setting up a “brass plate” bank in Antigua, a bank in name only, to launder the drug money that would soon be pouring in.
For a year, all attempts to recover the stolen paintings fizzled. Then came a break, or so it seemed, though in the end it nearly proved fatal. It was February 1987. The Dublin detective in charge of the Russborough House case, Gerry McGarrick, had a contact in the FBI named Tom Bishop.* McGarrick was an old pro. Weathered, able, reserved, he reminded Charley Hill of John Wayne. Bishop was a much-admired undercover agent. He had scored his greatest coup in the Abscam sting in the late 1970s, playing an aide of a supposed Arab sheik and handing out bribes on the sheik’s behalf. The sting netted four congressmen and a senator, most memorably Florida representative Richard Kelly, caught on film stuffing $25,000 into his pockets and then asking an FBI agent, “Does it show?”
McGarrick’s plan was for Bishop to play a big-shot American gangster who wanted some trophy paintings to hang on his wall. Hill, in his role as Charley Berman, served as go-between and vouched for Bishop to Cahill’s gang.
Bishop flew to Dublin to meet Cahill’s men. He took with him a folder of photos showing him with Joe Bonanno and other Mafia big shots. The pictures had been snapped secretly by the FBI, but they looked like photos a crook might display on his desk.
Included in Bishop’s show-and-tell pack were some pictures of stolen paintings he’d recovered, by Georgia O’Keefe and some others. Bishop planned to pass them off as things that belonged to him. Hill and Bishop went through the packet one last time. Impressive, they both agreed. Both men overlooked one crucial item.
Bishop met Cahill’s crew. He handed over his photos. One of Cahill’s men flipped through it. The others looked on. Suddenly the crook stopped his flipping, pulled out a piece of stationery from the stack, and waved it in the air. The top of the page bore the FBI logo. Underneath was a handwritten note: “Tom, don’t forget these.”
Cahill’s men stood up and left the room. The gangsters walked out without pausing to shoot Bishop, which was some consolation. (If the meeting had been held in the gang’s own territory rather than in Bishop’s hotel room, the outcome might have been different.)
“The Tom Bishop screwup put an end to Charley Berman,” Hill recalled years later, “because if Tom Bishop is a Fed, then Charley Berman, who brought him in, is a no-good son of a bitch, no matter where they think he’s from, okay? End of Charley Berman.”
Three years went by. Then, in May 1990, Turkish police in Istanbul arrested a Scottish criminal from Dundee who was trying to buy a shipment of heroin to sell in Britain. His down payment for the attempted purchase: Metsu’s
The London recoveries left four paintings still missing, including the Goya and, most valuable of all, Vermeer’s
In the meantime, Charley Hill had kept in touch with Gerry McGarrick, the Dublin detective heading up the Russborough House case. At some point in the early 1990s, Hill was in Dublin, and the two detectives met over a drink. By now some of the Beit paintings, though not the best, had begun turning up in London. McGarrick told Hill that he’d heard from informants that all the paintings had left Ireland and that the ones that had already been recovered in London were the only ones still in Britain. He’d heard rumors that the rest were somewhere in Belgium.
“At the time he said it to me,” Hill recalled in 2002, “it was as good as saying, ‘Kiss ‘em goodbye.’ “
11
Encounter in Antwerp
As time passed, other informants picked up rumors of a Belgian connection. The story emerged piecemeal but the pieces seemed to fit together: Cahill’s gang, which had been selling stolen diamonds to a dealer in Antwerp for nearly a decade, had now handed that same dealer some of the missing paintings—no one was certain which ones. With the paintings as collateral, the dealer had loaned Cahill $1 million. Cahill planned to turn his newfound money into heroin and then back into more money.
A million dollars was nowhere near the paintings’ true value, but, after all, the thieves hadn’t paid a penny for them. Outsiders who ponder art thefts always get it wrong: they focus on the gulf between a number like Cahill’s $1 million and the $20 million that a masterpiece might fetch on the open market, and conclude that the thieves have blundered. Thieves sneer at reasoning like that. The proper comparison, as they see it, is not between $1 million and $20 million but between $1 million and zero, which is what the paintings had cost them.
The diamond merchant had locked the paintings in a bank vault in Luxembourg, knowing they would keep their value. (Unlike stolen cars or computers, which lose value by the week, stolen paintings by top-flight artists can safely be laid down as investments, like fine wines.) Presumably he intended to sell them someday, or to barter them for drugs or arms or counterfeit bills or some other black market commodity.
