Leif Lier, the Norwegian detective in charge of
John Butler headed up the three-man team that Scotland Yard sent to Norway to find
Charley Hill’s business card, for his role as wheeler-dealer Chris Roberts, “The Man from the Getty.”
Adam Worth, the renowned Victorian thief, provided the model for Sherlock Holmes’s nemesis, Professor Moriarty. Worth stole one of the most famous paintings of his day, Gainsborough’s
Thomas Gainsborough,
© The Devonshire Collection, Chatsworth. Reproduced by permission of the Chatsworth Settlement Trustees.
Perugia was arrested in Florence. Though convicted, he was sentenced to only twelve months, reduced on appeal to seven. Perugia, an Italian, argued successfully that he had been motivated by patriotism, not greed, and wanted only to see the
On a Monday morning in August, 1911, a day when the Louvre was closed to the public, a carpenter named Vincenzo Perugia sneaked out of a closet where he had hidden overnight. He hurried to the
David and Mary Duddin. A major-league fence, or seller of stolen goods, Duddin was dubbed “Mr. Big” by an English judge. Duddin once tried to sell a stolen Rembrandt. He wasn’t much impressed by the painting. “I wouldn’t hang it on me wall,” he scoffed.
Kempton Bunton, who was Mary Dud-din’s uncle, was in the art line himself. In 1961 he stole Goya’s
Rose Dugdale, an ex-debutante turned political radical, stole a Vermeer, a Goya, a Velasquez, and sixteen other paintings from Russborough House, a stately home outside Dublin. The theft was inept and all the paintings were quickly recovered. At her trial in 1974, Dugdale proclaimed herself “proudly and incorruptibly guilty.” She was sentenced to nine years in prison.
In 1986, a Dublin gangster named Martin Cahill robbed Russborough House yet again, pulling off what was then the biggest art theft ever. “The General,” as Cahill was known, was a vicious thug—he once took hammer and nails to the hands of a gang member he suspected of betrayal—who had a strange sense of showmanship. Here Cahill is led to jail; the gangster, who made a fetish of hiding his face, nonetheless flaunts a pair of boxer shorts and a Mickey Mouse T-shirt. Art thieves have attacked Russborough House four times so far.
Niall Mulvihill, a Cahill associate. Charley Hill, who recovered the two most valuable paintings stolen by Martin Cahill, negotiated their return with Mulvihill. (See photo insert p. 3.) In 2003 Mulvihill was shot to death by a gunman in Dublin.
One of the very few thieves who stole art for his own collection, Stephane Breitwieser was a French waiter arrested in the winter of 2003 for stealing perhaps $1.4 billion worth of paintings and other objects. When the police closed in, his mother sliced many of the paintings in tiny pieces and threw them away in the trash and tossed others into a canal near her home. Here police search the partly drained canal.
Arkan, a Serbian gangster and accused war criminal, was reportedly involved in the theft of two Turners, worth a total of $80 million, stolen in 1994 while on exhibit in Frankfurt, Germany. Above, on a tank captured by his “Tigers” unit, he poses with a tiger cub. Art thieves were once dashing figures like Adam Worth. Today the swashbucklers have been shoved aside by brutes like Martin Cahill and Arkan.
Whenever a world-famous painting disappears, police speculate that some master criminal, a real-life Thomas Crown, has ordered the painting for his private collection. Outside of Hollywood, Charley Hill insists, there are only wannabe Thomas Crowns like Stephane Breitwieser, never outsize figures on a Hollywood scale. One villain who supposedly assembled a collection of paintings stolen to order was the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin.
The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston was the site of the largest art theft ever—eleven paintings and drawings worth $300 million. The photo above shows the museum courtyard. The robbery, still unsolved, is the holy grail of art crime. The FBI reward in the case is $5 million. Ten years after the theft, the FBI admitted that “we haven’t got a clue,” and, after another four years, the agency remains stymied.
27
Front-Row Seat
Undercover work is not a spectator sport. Almost always, the only eyewitnesses are the participants themselves, and both cops and robbers have biases that distort their view. Dennis Farr, who was director of the Courtauld when thieves stole its ?2 million Bruegel—this was the “Peter Brewgal” affair—is one of the rare laymen who have seen an undercover operation.
Farr is a tall, thin man with elegant manners. He looks like a fluttery type, a bird-watcher perhaps, the sort of scholar who would go pale at the sight of a typo. As the Bruegel case played out, though, it fell to Farr to string crooks along on the phone (while Art Squad detectives at his elbow listened in and scribbled him instructions). He found he had a flair for the task. “One discovers one has a bit of a thespian bent,” he acknowledges shyly.
Charley Hill and Dennis Farr hit it off at once. Hill put on his best manners at their first meeting, deferring to “Dr. Farr” and chatting away about the Courtauld collection and art in general. Bruegel was one of Hill’s favorites. He grew animated when he discussed how Bruegel had painted the shaft of light that descends from the left and illuminates
Farr is no snob, and he had been taken with the other Art Squad detectives, too, but Hill intrigued him. “As soon as I met him,” Farr recalls, “I saw there was a maverick quality in Charles Hill. I said to myself, ‘He’s either going to end up commissioner of the metropolitan police, or he’ll quit the force altogether.’ “
The second time they met, Farr found Hill considerably changed. The plan was to rendezvous with the crooks, and Hill was in character. “I was a loudmouthed ‘Hey there, you old son of a bitch’ kind of guy,” Hill recalls. For this role, the point was
