[MSN] Where You Going With That Monet?

[MSN]

Where You Going With That Monet?
By RANDY KENNEDY

THE plots of art heist movies are about as multifarious as the canvases of
the paintings pilfered by their main characters — the postmodern heroin-cool
of Nick Nolte in “The Good Thief”; the playboy-billionaire boredom of Pierce
Brosnan in “The Thomas Crown Affair.” But one thing art theft movies tend to
have in common is that they dwell on the heist and not on the aftermath, for
reasons that are probably more than cinematic: art is an exceedingly dumb
thing to steal.

The most valuable examples, usually paintings, are also the most highly
recognizable and therefore almost impossible to resell or to display
anywhere. When thieves try they are often caught. And so most real art
bandits don’t exude quite the élan of a Nolte or Brosnan or even of a good,
methodical jewel thief. In fact, they are often found pretty far down the
ladder of professional purloining, acting on impulse or opportunity in a
world in which museums are still relatively unguarded public spaces. And in
many cases, to put it bluntly, art thieves are just not very good.

They are more like a Dutch man named Octave Durham — a k a the Monkey — who
was sentenced to prison in 2004 for stealing two paintings from the Van Gogh
Museum in Amsterdam two years earlier. He and an accomplice had little
trouble breaking into the museum but then left behind a feast for crime
scene investigators — ladders, ropes, cloths, hats — that easily provided
the DNA evidence that led to their arrests.

In the latest heist to shake the art world, three men wearing ski masks
walked into the E. G. Bührle Collection in Zurich on Feb. 9, grabbed a
Cézanne, a Degas, a van Gogh and a Monet together worth an estimated $163
million, and tossed them into a van and sped off. Though one thief
brandished a gun, there were signs that the job was probably not up to
robbery’s highest standards: the most expensive of the collection’s
paintings were left behind (the four that were stolen were in one room) and
the police said the stolen paintings appeared to be poking out of the back
of the white van the men used to make their getaway.

“No one theory can fit all examples of art theft, but I think it’s often an
I.Q. test for not-so-smart criminals, and a lot of them fail,” said James
Mintz, the principal of a corporate investigations firm with offices in New
York, London, Zurich and other cities that has handled art cases.

Many of the most notorious art thefts in past decades bear him out and
illuminate a strange disconnect between the enduring mystique of art theft
and the reality of its perpetrators. The theft in Vienna in 2003 of a
gold-plated saltcellar made by Benvenuto Cellini, valued at $60 million, was
traced to a 50-year-old alarm-systems specialist with no criminal record.
The police, who caught him after he tried to ransom the sculpture, called
him a “funny guy” who had decided to take the Cellini more or less
spontaneously. A divorcé who lived alone, he kept the sculpture under his
bed for two years.

Just last year, two men suspected in the theft of two paintings and a
drawing by Picasso from the Paris home of Diana Widmaier-Picasso, a
granddaughter of the artist, were caught on the street carrying the
paintings, estimated to be worth more than $60 million, rolled up in
cardboard tubes.

Law enforcement officials and officials with the Art Loss Register, a
private database of lost and stolen art, emphasize that there are,
certainly, highly effective art thieves at work around the world, in an
enterprise that the Federal Bureau of Investigation estimates at about $6
billion a year in stolen goods. The marquee example remains the 1990 robbery
of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, the biggest art theft in
American history, with a value estimated as high as $300 million.
Speculation has run high for years that the crime, still unsolved and the
art unrecovered, might have been carried out by the organization of James
“Whitey” Bulger, the Boston crime boss, who remains a fugitive.

In rare cases, it even appears that the most movie-like of scenarios — the
made-to-order theft — may happen. A suspect in the December theft of two
paintings in Brazil told the authorities that the works were to be delivered
to a collector in Saudi Arabia. Derek Fincham, a lawyer who runs the Illicit
Cultural Property blog (illicit-cultural-property.blogspot.com), calls this
the “Dr. No situation,” after the 1962 James Bond movie in which Sean
Connery does a double-take upon seeing a recently stolen portrait by Goya
hanging on a wall in Dr. No’s lair.

But most art theft experts say that the idea of such an evil connoisseurs’
black market is largely a myth, and that many art thefts are committed with
insurance company shakedowns in mind. (In such schemes, art is held ransom
while backdoor demands are made for insurers to pay the thieves something
less than the insurance value of the work; investigators point to cases in
which art is recovered with little public explanation offered later about
how the return was accomplished or who committed the crime.)

The mundane reality is that many art thieves are simply not the sharpest
grappling hooks in the toolbag; the smart ones choose to steal things that
can be much more easily converted into money — or just money itself.

Thomas McShane, a retired F.B.I. agent who led many art investigations in
the 1970s and 1980s, said the motivations and methods of many of the thieves
he came across could only be described as humorous. One man tried for years
to fence a Rembrandt stolen in 1971 from a museum in France, dropping his
street price from $5 million to $25,000, Mr. McShane recounted in his 2006
memoir “Stolen Masterpiece Tracker,” written with Dary Matera. “His only
accomplishment,” Mr. McShane wrote of the criminal, a would-be Mafioso
nicknamed Johnny Rio, “was expanding the ever-widening circle of people who
knew he had it.” (He was caught and served a short prison sentence.)

And while thieves in other lines of goods tend to know what they’re
stealing, many art thieves often seem not to have set foot in a museum or
gallery before trying to knock one off.

Mr. McShane recalled a 1986 case in which a Queens man, Daniel Kohl, the
owner of an Upper East Side antique shop called Old King Kohl’s, was caught
with accomplices in the act of trying to steal more than $20 million in
antiquities from a Queens warehouse. In news accounts at the time, the caper
sounded quite cinematic. But prosecutors later surmised that much of the art
they planned to steal was probably fake.

“Let me tell you,” said Mr. McShane, “Danny had about as much knowledge of
art as your local hot dog stand man. ‘The Thomas Crown Affair’ it was not.”

http://www.nytimes.com/