The Rescue Artist

streetwise in their dealings with their colleagues. They’ll buy a mobile phone and throw it away the next day [to foil eavesdroppers]. They can smell your standard undercover cop a mile away.

“But when it comes to these big-time paintings, they smell money and a profit and they get a hard-on, as we say”—Dalrymple raises his eyebrows as if to acknowledge the lapse in taste—”and the streetwise approach goes right out the window.

“These people come up with the most extraordinary ideas,” Dalrymple marvels. “They’ll think they can sell the painting to a drug baron in South America, or to a friend who’s in with some mafioso in Miami. Or they’ll think, Ah, well, I know some Albanians who like this sort of stuff, and they’ve got some handguns. Maybe we can do a deal.’ Or they might try to ransom the painting back to the original owner. Or keep it for a year and then see if they can collect from the insurance company. Or they may be in it for the reward.”

Dalrymple affects a tough guy accent. “‘If they’re offering 100,000 quid, I’ll tell ‘em where it is, and I get the reward, and they get their bleedin’ painting back.’

“Even so,” Dalrymple continues, “many of them get away with it. Along the line, there are people making money. There are always going to be people making money. That’s why they do it.”

Cops and their allies, like Dalrymple, prefer the bumblers to the pros. They love to swap tales of hapless amateurs, especially if they are meeting colleagues from far-off jurisdictions. Sitting over drinks in crowded bars, the cops play can-you-top-this. They tell true stories like the one about the Los Angeles thief who, in 1998, stole a $10,000 abstract metal sculpture and ended up selling it to a scrap dealer for $9.10.

The police tell the stories for laughs, but the laughter is bittersweet because the underlying message is so dismaying. Art theft is such an easy game and the penalties for getting caught are so low, the stories make plain, that the most hopeless sap can play. Take Anthony Daisley, who, one fine December day in 1991, staggered into the Birmingham [England] Museum and Art Gallery almost too drunk to walk. He pulled Henry Wallis’s Death of Chatterton off the wall, stuck the six-inch-by-ten-inch painting under his arm, and reeled out the door with a ?75,000 prize. (The museum had recently spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on electronic security, but the alarms were designed mainly to foil thefts at night, when the building was empty.) Another museum visitor saw the theft and called a guard, but it was too late.

Daisley pulled himself aboard a passing bus and showed his fellow passengers the painting. He had just stolen it, he explained, and now it could be theirs for a mere ?200. The thief asked where the bus was headed. “Selly Oak,” he was told. That was no place for him, Daisley cried out, because his ex-wife lived there. He stumbled off the bus, taking his painting with him. Five days later, police following up a tip found the stolen painting hidden in a house in Birmingham. A judge let Daisley off with a warning to stay out of trouble for twelve months, and the head of the Birmingham Museum issued him a public invitation to come back and visit the art he so clearly admired.

Charley Hill relishes such stories, partly because they buttress his view that the human race is composed largely of ninnies but mainly because he takes personal offense at the widespread belief that art thieves are masterminds who spend their days plotting elaborate heists. “The thieves who steal works of art,” he says, “were usually stealing hubcaps a few years earlier.”

Hill’s hubcap remark was, in one ?2 million case, the literal truth. In 1982 a thief ran out of London’s Courtauld Institute Galleries clutching Bruegel’s Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery to his chest. (Bruegel produced a great many paintings, but in the nearly four and a half centuries since his death all but forty have been lost.) For the next eight years, the painting passed from thief to thief.

Somehow it fell into the hands of four small-time crooks. Two were failed businessmen who had run into debt; a third stole cars and credit cards; the fourth stole hubcaps.

One of the four had stumbled on the Bruegel, but he’d had no idea that it was special, no inkling at first that here in his hands was the big ticket he and his mates had all been dreaming of. The painting is an odd one, quite unlike Bruegel’s famous, sprawling, colorful depictions of everyday life. Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery is a small, somber work painted in grisaille, entirely in shades of gray. Christ and the other figures look almost like stone carvings. A layman might glance at the dark biblical scene and quickly pass by. “Our great fear during all those years,” recalled the director of the Courtauld, “was that whoever had it would get bored of the whole thing and chuck it into a dustbin.”

The four crooks rounded up an art expert to tell them whether the painting was worth anything. At this point some of the gang had yet to lay eyes on it. One of the four, a car dealer named Bobby Dee, took his first peek. “I picked it up to look at it and said, ‘You got to be joking!’ I was worried because I thought these people would think we were idiots. I thought this picture was nothing, just a wind-up.”

The art expert arrived. “Then this old bloke came in. He was blabbering on about something. He turned round to look at the picture and then he fainted. I thought, ‘Bleeding hell, it must be something proper.’ “

Armed with the delightful knowledge that they had landed something big, the gang recruited a front man to do the talking for them. On a Friday afternoon in April 1990, the director of the Courtauld, Dennis Farr, was working at his desk. The phone rang.

“This is Peter Brewgal,” the caller said. “I’ve got something you haven’t seen in a long while. I think you’ll be interested.”

“Brewgal” rhymed with “bugle.” The caller’s odd name and his south London accent threw Farr for a moment—when Farr tried to mimic the caller later, he sounded like Alistair Cooke impersonating Sylvester Stallone—but then he caught on: Pieter Bruegel.

Mr. Brewgal offered Farr the chance to buy back his own painting. The price was ?2 million.

Farr called the Art Squad. They devised an elaborate sting, starring Charley Hill as a rich and loudmouthed boor who wanted to buy himself a “trophy painting.” All such subterfuges proved beside the point. Unbeknown to both the Art Squad and the thieves, a second group of cops had been tipped off as to the painting’s whereabouts. They raided a house outside London. In a bedroom, they found the Bruegel wrapped in a pillowcase on top of a chest of drawers, and undamaged despite its wanderings.

21

Mona Lisa Smile

No matter how he tries, Charley Hill has never managed to dispel the Dr. No stories. What do you expect? People always prefer glamorous bullshit to mundane truth. They still trundle off to Scotland, for Christ’s sake, to look for a sea serpent in Loch Ness.

But a taste for the exotic is not the sole reason that the belief in stolen-to-order art persists. Another is that people are suspicious of naysayers who are, like Hill, perfectly happy to romanticize the good guys but insistent that crooks are nothing more than violent, grubby men. Hill is, after all, a cop. Maybe thieves come in more varieties than he is willing to concede.

And if Hill has never seen anyone who would qualify as a Dr. No, that’s hardly conclusive. A billionaire who collects stolen paintings would be unlikely to invite the neighbors in. Even so, names do surface occasionally. “Idi Amin was one of the biggest collectors of stolen art,” according to Allen Gore, onetime head of security at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. “He had a French connection and took stuff out of Marseilles. He commissioned people to do it.”

Maybe. But no one ever produced any evidence to back Gore’s claim. (Masterpieces have occasionally turned up in the homes of South American drug lords, but there is no evidence that they were stolen to order rather than purchased legitimately; the paintings seem to be trophies on a par with the helicopters and hippopotamuses that ornament these private kingdoms.)

Even Hill admits that there have been thieves who were also collectors and who stole art they particularly coveted. The problem is deciding what to make of such tales. We know that (a very few) thieves have stolen paintings for themselves. Does it follow that there are collectors who commission others to steal particular