climbed back in his car, made a U-turn, and double-parked. He tore off a piece of the cardboard. Joseph’s head, Titian’s brushwork. Bingo!
For his efforts, Hill earned ?50,000, half the reward money. The other half went to the informant. And how did Lord Bath feel about the recovery? “I felt several million pounds richer.”
Hill’s decision to leave the police force was not a matter of walking away from a thriving enterprise. Police interest in art crime, never intense (except in Italy), is nowadays tepid at best. Undercover operations, in particular, take so much planning and involve so many people that they gobble up time and money in great chunks. The sting involving
Now that he is off the police force, Hill’s acting days are over. His job these days is to work his underworld contacts in search of news about stolen paintings and then to negotiate their return. He knows who works which territory, which gangs steal paintings themselves and which hire local thieves to do the breaking-in, which gangs go for ladders and which prefer “ram raids” in which a driver crashes a car through locked doors.
His competition have gone about things in a different way. The best-known are not individuals but small companies. One is called Trace; a competitor is Art Loss Register. Both work roughly on the model of matchmaking services. At the heart of each company’s business is a vast, computer-searchable list of stolen paintings and furniture and the like, compiled from police reports and insurance claims. That list is compared, automatically, against the art and antiques on offer at countless auctions and art fairs and galleries. (Trace employs armies of typists on the Isle of Wight, where wages are low, to feed the computer listing after listing from an endless array of art catalogs and brochures.) When the computer red-flags a suspect item for sale, the companies step in to investigate. To find work better calculated to drive Charley Hill mad would take a long search.
The companies have different business models, but, in theory at least, they can make money in several ways: by charging a fee for listing stolen property in their database, by collecting a finder’s fee if they make a recovery, by charging art dealers for access to their records (dealers are required to exercise “due diligence” to make sure they are not selling stolen goods).
It hasn’t paid off yet. Trace is the pet project of an English billionaire and art collector, who can afford to swallow the considerable losses he has racked up. Art Loss Register says that its own losses will soon come to an end.
Both companies are small, but they are mega-corporations in comparison with the one-man band that is Charley Hill. (When he first left the police, Hill went into business with a partner, another ex-detective. The venture fared as poorly as anyone but Hill would have expected. The only relic of that short-lived era is a sign that Hill brought home and mounted on his bathroom door, identifying “The Charles Hill Partnership Meeting Room.”)
Hill figures that the freedom to set his own priorities is worth the financial risk he is running. Let someone else chase after silverware and stolen clocks. But the flip side of independence is isolation. Crooks are naturally not pleased to have Hill on their tail, and the cops are only marginally cheerier. The police see Hill as trying to show them up, and, in truth, that is not a role that would cause him many sleepless nights. “The police had seven years to get the Titian back. And the simple fact is, they didn’t get it back. Nor did the insurers through their various means. And I went out and cultivated people and got it back.”
This is treacherous territory, pocked with ethical traps, as Hill is quick to acknowledge. Hill’s underworld sources expect to be paid for their help. (The money comes from insurance companies or from the robbery victims.) The problem is getting those payments in the right hands or, more to the point, keeping them out of the wrong ones. Paying a reward to a source who has heard a rumor is one thing; paying a ransom to a criminal to buy back property he himself stole is another.
The police pay informants as a matter of course. The FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list, for example, dangles rewards on the order of $1 million (and, in the case of Osama Bin Laden, $25 million). But in the case of stolen property, tradition held that money was paid only if arrests were made. Many police officials believe that rule should apply to stolen art. Do that, Hill insists, and stolen paintings will never be seen again. The police may talk about integrity, he says, but their real credo is indifference.
Hill’s view, which is that in today’s world freelancers will have to do what the police cannot trouble to do, has won him slews of enemies. Who is he to authorize rewards? More important, how can Hill know if his “informant”—whose own hands are supposedly clean—was in truth one of the thieves who stole the painting in the first place or, almost as bad, a fence who bought it from the thieves?
Despite his swashbuckling ways, Hill steps carefully here. He consulted Sir John Smith, the University of Nottingham law professor who was Britain’s leading authority on the laws governing stolen property, and he has the great man’s imprimatur. The two key principles, as spelled out by Smith, are that Hill must act on behalf of the owner of the stolen painting—he cannot go running around the country on his own authority—and he can’t interfere with the police—he cannot make a deal where a crook hands over a painting in return for a Get Out of Jail Free card.
The black-and-white moralist has landed in a world of grays, but Hill lives with that contradiction as happily as with all the others. Far from waiting for a go-ahead signal from the police, he has his eye fixed, at any one time, on half a dozen major cases. At Christmas 2003, for example, he was looking for Jean-Baptiste Oudry’s
Always lurking in the background—often shoving its way into the foreground—are the $300 million worth of paintings stolen from the Gardner Museum. Hill has pondered the theft since the news broke, on March 18, 1990. He believes he knows who took the paintings, and why, and what they did with them. Most important, he believes Vermeer’s
In search of the Gardner paintings, Hill has spent endless hours cultivating contacts and chasing leads and pursuing men who very much do not want to be pursued. He is up against formidable competition; the advertised reward for finding the Gardner paintings (put up by Sotheby’s, Christie’s, and Chubb Insurance) is $5 million.
The FBI is by far the most prominent player in the hunt. The bureau has already followed up 2,000 leads in the Gardner case, it says, and has sent agents to Japan, South America, Mexico, and Europe. To no avail. At the ten-year mark, the FBI supervisor in charge of the case acknowledged that “we haven’t got a clue.” Today, another three years on, the picture is just as grim. “All logical leads have been followed through to conclusion,” the FBI admits, through clenched teeth, “with no positive investigative results.”
For a proud loner like Hill, no triumph could be sweeter than outwitting scores of rule-following, memo- writing FBI agents, all dutifully following “logical leads.” In the end, it may not happen. Hill’s efforts could all end in fiasco. It’s happened before.
But, then again, it might work. Hill has thought it through a thousand times. First a proper drink and a long, private look at the pictures. Then it will be a matter of picking up the phone and calling the director of the Gardner.
“It’s Charley Hill,” he’ll say. The tone will be light, casual, all in a day’s work. “I believe I’ve found some things you’ve been missing.”
AFTERWORD
SEPTEMBER, 2004
A month after I’d sent the manuscript of this book to my publisher, I sat in a Manhattan taxi stuck in traffic. It was a Sunday afternoon in August, and an idyllic day if not for the blaring of horns and the dentist-drill whine of the music on the taxi radio. “It’s 2:00. This hour’s top story. In Norway, thieves have stolen one of the world’s best- known paintings,
