In the 1966 film How to Steal a Million, the daughter of an art forger, played by the lovely actress Audrey Hepburn (dressed by Givenchy), and an insurance agent, played by the charming Peter O’Toole, conspire to steal a small statue from a French museum donated by Hepburn’s forger father. The movie illustrates an effective way to cause security procedures to be circumvented in a manner which has even worked successfully in a twenty-first-century burglary.
In the 1955 film To Catch a Thief, starring Cary Grant and future Princess of Monaco Grace Kelly, Grant is the highly romantic jewel thief who uses diversion and roof walking to garner diamonds from the incredibly wealthy (and therefore, less endearing as the victims of crime) vacationers who frequent the tiny casino town surrounded by city-block-sized yachts. The tale is as engaging as Robin Hood, but perhaps a tad more lucrative. This film was reprised in an American television show in the 1960s, It Takes a Thief, starring the equally appealing Robert Wagner, as an embodiment of the real American burglar, Alexander Mundy. In the television programme the character played by Wagner uses his skills to burgle for the purposes of the United States, so he is again a charismatic and ‘good’ thief.
In the 1999 film Entrapment, Catherine Zeta-Jones, an erstwhile art insurance investigator, is turned into a slinking burglar in a sexy catsuit, under the tutelage of the uber-masculine Sean Connery.
In the 1999 remake of the film The Thomas Crown Affair, the insurance investigator is changed into the intelligent and lovely Rene Russo, who falls for cat burglar Pierce Brosnan.
In the 2004 movie Ocean’s Twelve, a reprise of a gang of thieves led by the demi-gods and goddesses of Hollywood – George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Julia Roberts – plan the sequel to their Las Vegas Casino heist; this time they need to avoid an investigator doggedly on their trail from INTERPOL and steal a masterpiece worth at least $190 million before a French thief known only as ‘The Night Fox’ beats them to it.
The movie-going public enjoys thieves who are handsome and charismatic. They seem to gravitate to the idea that such charmers have committed a non-violent crime, and as such they are not a danger to the public and, well, they are exciting. In reality, they are people like the American burglar Myles J. Connor Jr, who wrote his bestselling memoir, The Art of the Heist,2 having relied on the fact that the general public enjoy a good ‘Robin Hood’ story. Interestingly, Connor, wishing to enhance his memoir, states that he had himself considered stealing art, especially Titian’s Rape of Europa for himself, from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Still, in 2016, it is the greatest unsolved art robbery in United States history. The Museum is presently offering a reward of $5 million for such masterworks as Rembrandt’s only seascape, Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee, and Vermeer’s The Concert. Connor has a literally iron-clad alibi as he was already incarcerated at the time of the Gardner heist for attempting to sell paintings stolen from the famous Woolworth estate to the FBI. Connor is typical of non-violent thieves who prey on the ‘unsympathetic’ rich victim. In the instance of the Gardner Museum armed robbery, two individuals dressed as Boston police officers managed to convince the guards to provide access to the Museum in the late hours after the celebration of St Patrick’s Day in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1990. Where non-violent crimes are concerned, incarceration is minimal, which suggests a greater opportunity for recidivism and career criminal teams. The defence against this type of individual is a redundant and well-designed physical security system and thorough documentation of your collection in the event of a theft, which I shall discuss later in this chapter.
Aside from the crime of armed robbery or burglary, the other crimes which target art include vandalism, such as the assault against the Poussin painting Adoration of the Golden Calf and Adoration of the Shepherds, both of which occurred in 2011 at London’s National Gallery, or those by serial art terrorist Susan Burns against Matisse’s The Plumed Hat and Gauguin’s Two Tahitian Women, each on a separate occasion at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in 2011.
Additionally, there are the theft of art and antiquities from archaeological sites, private collections and national museums; insurance fraud; and art held for ransom or ‘extorted’. These cultural crimes are often used to fund other enterprises such as pirated DVD and computer software sales, which again are interpreted as non-violent crimes and which therefore receive less attention from investigative authorities, both in the United States and abroad.
Unfortunately, thieves like Jonathan Tokeley-Parry, who extensively smuggled important Egyptian antiquities disguised as tourist souvenirs, and Giacomo Medici, who routinely sold Etruscan and Roman antiquities ripped from their historical context, preyed on the hubris, competitiveness and greed of scholarly experts. Most notable among the latter were Frederick Schultz, a former president of the National Association of Dealers in Ancient, Oriental and Primitive Art, who was convicted of selling stolen Egyptian art in New York in 2002; Marion True at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles; and the late Thomas Hoving at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.3
Tokeley-Parry, a graduate of Cambridge with a degree in Moral Sciences, is just one example of an ‘academic scholar’ gone bad. My friend and colleague, Dick Ellis, the founder of the London Metropolitan Police’s Art & Antiques Unit at New Scotland Yard, told me that Tokeley-Parry fled to North Devon before the prosecution could rest its case in the English trial, checked himself into a hospital and attempted suicide by drinking hemlock. Due to his temporary paralysis, a second trial was necessary in the summer of 1997. At that time, he was convicted of his crimes in England. Tokeley-Parry was incarcerated for only three years of his six-year sentence. He was also convicted in absentia in Egypt, where he was eventually sentenced to fifteen years of hard labour.
Thomas Hoving, the flamboyant former Director of the Metropolitan Museum, boasted of his own clandestine dealings in his very popular books King of the Confessors (Ballantine Books, New York, 1981) and Making the Mummies Dance (Touchstone, New York, 1994) while narrating the intrigue of his picaresque adventures acquiring smuggled antiquities, such as the Euphronios krater, or as he called it, ‘the Hot Pot’.4
While assigned to the Los Angeles FBI Art and Property Crimes detail, I interviewed Marion True on at least two occasions as the FBI Agent assigned to respond to an International Mutual Assistance Treaty Act request for investigation from the government of Italy to that of the United States. True blithely and shockingly spoke of ‘package deals’ in regard to her purchases on behalf of the Getty Museum, which at that juncture included an Etruscan tripod and an Etruscan chandelier. She stated that she required no statement of provenance from her ‘vendor’ since, on the prior occasion of the purchase of the Getty Kouros, the provenance information was entirely falsified. She could not recall the amount of value assigned to each object. She stated that she did not receive purchase invoices for this event either. When I asked how she explained the irregularity of these transactions to the Getty Board of Trustees, she stated that they were well aware of her activities and the ‘peculiarities’ of such purchases. At that time I noted that the publisher of the Los Angeles Times was a member of the Getty Board of Trustees.
There is also a general reluctance on the part of art museums and anthropological museums to report thefts from their collections. Unfortunately, even by American Alliance of Museums standards, collection inventories are only required to be conducted once every ten years, and that is if the museum is accredited by this association. Many are not. Since generally a museum exhibits less than 20 per cent of its collection at any given time, and the rest is held in ‘dead’ storage, the opportunities for loss by theft, especially in small institutions with overburdened staff, are plentiful.
In 1989, when a perfect, beautiful Native American basket by Washoe basket-maker Dat So La Lee appeared on the sales market, it was recognised by a scholar who in turn inquired of the chief curator at the Southwest Museum in Los Angeles why an important piece published as in their collection had somehow been deaccessioned. In fact it had not been. Quietly and cautiously, the chief curator conducted some due diligence and, immediately upon discovering other such irregularities, contacted the FBI. I began an investigation which expanded over three years and which ultimately involved art dealers and buyers in a dozen states. I suggested that the chief curator conduct as thorough an inventory as possible to determine whether this was an isolated incident or whether a broader problem existed. By the end of the inventory, we established that a systemised glean of the finest and most precious objects – paintings, blankets, baskets, ceramics and jewellery – had occurred. We relied on the talents of the not-for-profit organisation of art historians known as the International Foundation for Art Research in New York City to publish and circulate a special IFAR Bulletin, with photographs and provenance of the ‘missing’ exhibits, to determine their disposition. Ultimately, I recovered 25 highly identifiable artefacts recorded in that larger list of 127, from first-phase chiefs’ blankets to paintings donated to the Southwest Museum by the artist Maynard Dixon himself. In many cases the only record for the artefacts in question were obfuscated by entries in the inventory files that were contradicted by the newly organised video inventory, by independent studies of the collection by scholars and by a review of the museum’s own archives and glass-plate negatives. Ultimately, as I traced the path of each of the artefacts as they were identified, the sad truth emerged that the former Southwest Museum Director, Patrick Thomas Houlihan, who had already departed the Southwest Museum to take up the directorship of the Millicent Rogers Museum in Taos, New Mexico was, in every case, the person who removed the artefacts from collection storage and sold them to a network of his close friends who were art dealers. He personally profited from his thefts, having purchased a home in Arizona with the proceeds of the sale of a very rare Navajo serape poncho, and his sons were both put through an expensive private academy by Thomas N. Buffaloe, an art dealer in La Jolla, California. Buffaloe made a deal with the government to provide evidence to the court, rather than be charged with bribery and theft.
Houlihan was released from his position at the Millicent Rogers Museum at the time of his indictment. He was convicted in state court in Los Angeles, California rather than Federal court because the United States federal law imposes a statutory five-year limit for the prosecution of a crime. Since Houlihan removed the artefacts at weekends, there was no positive proof of when, during his tenure, he had removed them. Under California state law, Houlihan could be prosecuted three years from the date of discovery of his thefts, or when they should have been discovered. Houlihan was convicted in a state jury trial of embezzlement from the collection and theft, and was sentenced to state prison. Though he served a mere six months of a three-year sentence in the Los Angeles County Jail, Houlihan was the first museum executive ever accused and convicted of theft from his own facility.
The recovered evidence stolen by Houlihan was ultimately returned to the Museum. The remaining collection of over a hundred unrecovered pieces remains out of the collection, but deemed forever stolen, under United States law. However, this case, and the destruction of a major part of the pottery collection (placed in the highest building tower by Houlihan during his leadership) by the Northridge earthquake of 1994 are generally acknowledged as the causes of the museum’s closure and the transfer of the collections to the Gene Autry Museum of Western Heritage (now simply ‘the Autry’) in nearby Burbank, California. The slight jail sentence given to Houlihan was the result of his only having been caught out in this one instance and of the fact that embezzlement is not considered a violent crime.
Losses from insurance fraud, in the United States at least, can be prevented by what is called a ‘pre-risk survey’. During this survey, the goods being insured, art, automobiles, jewellery, etc., are examined for authenticity, market value and ownership title.
In the case of an investigation I conducted into the alleged theft of Picasso’s Nude before a Mirror and Monet’s Customs Officer’s Cabin at Pourville from the home of ‘unlicensed’ California ophthalmologist Steven George Cooperman in 1992, ‘penny wise’ was indeed $17.5 million foolish. Though Cooperman had paid less than $2 million for both paintings together, not long before his reported loss, he was able to insure them with several major underwriters taking part in the deal for $12.5 million dollars. The value was based not on an evaluation by an appraiser, but on that which Cooperman himself wrote on a loan form to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Although the form itself stated, on the reverse side, that the value was ‘not to be used for insurance purposes’, Cooperman and the insurance underwriters did just that as Cooperman faxed only the ‘value statement’ side of the document to the insurers. No other appraisal or due diligence was performed by the underwriters. They simply based their loss amount on the fact that Cooperman was loaning the paintings to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and that the museum had accepted them, featuring them in their exhibition catalogue. In 1992, after the ‘burglary’ of his residence in Brentwood, California, Cooperman, accompanied by his attorney, made police reports and demands on their insurers for payment. When the facts and circumstances surrounding the loss were measured in hindsight, the insurers refused to pay, and Cooperman sued for the value of the policy and ‘bad faith’, which totalled a judgment of $17.5 million by the Los Angeles Court against the insurers. Ultimately, I conducted an investigation which not only recovered both of the paintings but also exposed Cooperman’s co-conspirators in the fraud. When Cooperman declined to serve his jail term of ten years in federal prison as given, but decided to cooperate with the investigation, the information he provided led to the successful prosecution of one of the largest civil law firms in the United States, as chronicled in Fortune magazine and the book Circle of Greed.5
Other universal criminal concerns are the intentional destruction of intangible cultural property, which could be a dance, a musical performance, a language, etc. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO’s) International Conference of Museums (ICOM) established its lists of Intangible Cultural Heritage with the aim of ensuring the better protection of important intangible cultural heritages worldwide.6 UNESCO ICOM also designates international World Heritage Sites – places listed as being of special cultural or physical significance. Following the Second World War, UNESCO adopted the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict (1954). This convention (discussed in detail elsewhere in this volume7) was the first international treaty aimed at protecting cultural heritage in the context of war and which highlighted the concept of common heritage.
The Blue Shield is the symbol used to identify cultural sites protected by this convention. It is also the source of the name of the International Committee of the Blue Shield (ICBS) that works to protect world cultural heritage threatened by natural and human-made disasters. In emergency situations, the ICBS encourages the safeguarding and the restoration of cultural property, the protection of threatened goods, and helps professionals from the affected countries to recover from disasters. The Second Protocol to the Hague Convention agreed in April 1999 gave a new impetus to ICBS’s role and that of its associated organisations. Indeed, ICBS is recognised as an advisory international organisation to the inter-governmental Committee for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict.
In very recent history, cultural sites have been destroyed in Syria by individuals who claim to represent an international terrorist sect, Daesh. The FBI and other international police organisations posit that some of the archaeological fragments destroyed and taken from their historical context are being sold through the free port in Switzerland to provide material financial support for terrorist activities internationally. The American Alliance of Museums8 is examining the possibility of a ‘safe haven’ policy for the protection and storage of antiquities which have been ripped from their historical context by terrorists and which are now appearing on the international art market for sale.
In 1998, following the Washington Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets, the United States Bureau on European and Eurasian Affairs released a statement regarding consensus on non-binding principles to assist in resolving issues relating to Nazi-confiscated art. The conference recognised that among participating nations there are differing legal systems and that countries act within the context of their own laws. The consensus of ideas, known as the ‘Washington Principles’, presents the following agreed-upon guideposts:
Their names are now disquietly familiar: Wolfgang Beltracchi, Han van Meegeren, John Drewe, John Myatt, Elmyr de Hory, Tom Keating, Ken Perenyi, Mark Landis – all artists of emulation, but not of creation and therefore motivated to exploit and perhaps even expose the hubris of the art scholars at auction, museums and privately owned galleries, everywhere.
How did Wolfgang Beltracchi manage to deceive the international art world for nearly 40 years by repurposing old flea-market canvases and forging paintings of early twentieth-century masters that sold for millions of dollars?
How did John Drewe and his accomplice, the artist John Myatt, manage to exploit the collection archives of the Tate and other British art institutions to plant falsified provenance documents to legitimise the hundreds of pieces they forged?
Why did Knoedler & Co., the oldest and perhaps the most respected art gallery in the United States, abruptly and unceremoniously close in November 2011, collapsing under the weight of the millions of dollars in lawsuits charging the gallery with selling forgeries?
Simply put, there is a growing lack of expertise, what used to be called connoisseurship, in the art market and minimal financial indemnification, and therefore no motivation, for the authors of catalogues raisonnés to place themselves under threat of legal action and financial jeopardy for merely providing their opinion. A number of villains, a few of whom I have named, have obviously exploited this reluctance for vetting art and objects, to their great advantage and profit.
The conceit of the forgery is perhaps the world’s second oldest profession, and is equally as popular. Most forgers are exceptionally talented artists who have not yet found their own artistic voice, because they first learn their craft through the emulation of acknowledged masters. The first acknowledged art historian, Giorgio Vasari, writing in the sixteenth century, expressed the level of expertise of both Michelangelo Buonarotti and Leonardo da Vinci in terms of their ability to forge artefacts very convincingly so that the buyers were duped into paying large sums for fakes.10 So how does the art market, the individual collector or an institution in the twenty-first century perform due diligence?
Unfortunately, scholarship does not necessarily imply connoisseurship. At the time of writing, the Knoedler & Co. forgery trial in the New York court (further discussed later in this chapter) has just emphasised this fact. Stephen Polcari, PhD in art history by the University of California at Los Angeles, testified that he is an Abstract Expressionist scholar, ‘strong on Rothko’, though he was never asked for his ‘opinion on their authenticity’, and was paid $3,000 for ten essays he wrote for Ann Freedman, the Knoedler Gallery Chief Executive Officer. Indeed, although he is the author of an ‘acclaimed’ book, Abstract Expressionism and the Modern Experience, published by the University of Cambridge in 1991, Polcari is reported to have ‘admitted that in many cases he can’t tell two Rothko paintings apart, or which way to hang them, [although] he maintained that this is part of Rothko’s appeal’.11
In the matter of the alleged discovery of a Leonardo drawing which had bounced about in the auction trade in New York and was later christened La Bella Principessa by Professor Emeritus Martin Kemp of Oxford, for instance, the stakes are quite high.12 Otto Naumann, a prominent New York dealer in old masters, valued this drawing at $150 million, ‘contingent upon uncontested attribution’.13 Klaus Albrecht Schröder, director of the Albertina in Vienna, stated that he had been asked to exhibit the drawing: ‘We decided we would not show it because we are not convinced that it is an authentic drawing by Leonardo. It was examined by our own research center, our curators, our restoration department, and the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. No one is convinced that it is a Leonardo.’14 Carmen C. Bambach, curator of drawings and prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is an expert on Leonardo and organised the exhibition ‘Leonardo da Vinci, Master Draftsman’ in 2003. An item in the New York Times in 2008 quoted her as saying that, based on a photograph of the portrait, the ‘work does not seem to resemble the drawings and paintings by the great master’.15 Bambach stated: ‘Not everyone’s opinion carries the same weight. It’s like in medicine, where a heart specialist looks at the heart and another specialist looks at the kidneys.’ She added, ‘With Leonardo, you need the niche specialist.’16 Bambach pointed out that there is no other example of Leonardo having drawn on vellum.17 Ultimately, in the heated debate that ensued discreetly between the controverting expertise, Professor Kemp turned to the untrained, self-styled fingerprint examiner, the Canadian art restorer Peter Paul Biro, perhaps to bolster the faith of his opinion. Biro claimed that he could not only identify fingerprints on art work with his proprietary optics system, but that he could also make a positive identification from a generally unacceptable, blurred fingerprint.18 Ultimately, Biro was exposed as a fraud by the New Yorker magazine and failed in his libel suit against the periodical.19
The conundrum now, in the face of these issues, is whether the art market can survive these perils of collecting.
At an international congress at the Hague in 2014 titled ‘Authenticity in Art’, organised to deal with the growing issues of fakes, authentication and civil legal proceedings, I discussed this issue with Oxford Professor Emeritus Martin Kemp, an internationally acknowledged Leonardo scholar. Kemp advised me that he does not provide an opinion and nor is he paid for an opinion. Instead, he stated that he provides his research reports and the interested party may draw their own conclusion.
The Art Newspaper pointed out, in January 2012, that researchers at London’s Courtauld Institute of Art cancelled a conference about a group of alleged Francis Bacon drawings because they feared legal repercussions for their opinions. Around the same time, several artist foundations, including Andy Warhol’s and Keith Haring’s, shut down their authentication boards for similar reasons. Consequently, under the duress of extended lawsuits, experts have been coerced to withhold their opinions, thereby playing into the hands of the corrupt. In the case of the Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts in New York, the Foundation was sued for refusing to issue new opinions. Until recently, the Authentication Board of the Foundation was the arbiter of questionable Warhols. However, in 2011, it was revealed that the Board spent $7 million over three years to defend itself from a lawsuit by collector Joe Simon-Whelan, who sued when the Board refused to authenticate a Warhol portrait he owned.20
In 2015, the State Legislature of New York was presented with proposed legislation which would be the first of its kind to finally permit some small measure of protection for established art experts. Under the proposals, plaintiffs (who previously muted the voice of art scholarship and scientific analysis) would have to articulate specifically what errors they believed the expert had committed. They would also have to show that the chances of proving such allegations true were higher than 50 per cent. Additionally, if the lawsuit were brought to court and the defendant were to win, the bill would allow him or her to recover all legal fees from the plaintiff. While this legislation is certainly not bullet-proof protection, it would certainly offer some protection against insidious suits. However, it has not been passed at the time of writing. Why would anyone oppose such legislation? Perhaps we should ask the art dealers, who might prefer that the ‘scholars’ and ‘authorities’ keep their opinions to themselves.
What else can one do?
The trend in art history education since the time of Bernard Berenson (who merely held a baccalaureate from Harvard and no advanced degree) has been focused on rhetoric, philosophy and criticism rather than actually looking at art. More often than not, PhD graduates never actually handle art unless they are able to accept a low-paying internship or decide to study with Sotheby’s, which tends also to utilise them as interns and for their family social connections to promote business.
Authenticators have struggled to explain their evaluative process, their ‘eye’. Thomas Hoving spoke of the ‘ineffable sense of connoisseurship’.21 The art historian Bernard Berenson described his talent as a ‘sixth sense’:
It is very largely a question of accumulated experience upon which your spirit sets unconsciously,’ he said. ‘When I see a picture, in most cases, I recognize it at once as being or not being by the master it is ascribed to; the rest is merely a question of how to fish out the evidence that will make the conviction as plain to others as it is to me.22
The epistolary narratives of the relationships between Bernard Berenson, Mary Berenson and Isabella Stewart Gardner reveal there were many errors in his selections, downright obfuscations of facts, and outright smugglings of paintings (a Giorgione, on one occasion, smuggled from Italy.23
While the careers of both of these individuals, Hoving24 and Berenson, were mired by illegal smuggling, both acquired their expertise from handling objects and not mere art history rhetoric. The use of actual art and artefacts in art history instruction, rather than the politics of rhetoric, will permit earlier detection of fakes and frauds and foster greater appreciation of art in general. The fact that an individual like Wolfgang Beltracchi knows more art history, more about the artists and how they painted, what they painted and why, is more than embarrassing to scholars.
The oldest gallery in the United States, Knoedler & Co., was founded by the French print firm Goupil, Vibert & Cie in 1848. It was initially managed by Michael Knoedler, until he purchased the gallery in 1857. In November 2011 it suddenly closed its doors by way of a memorial-style notice on its internet home page. The FBI discovered that the gallery had folded under the burden of lawsuit claims in the millions of dollars, asserting that Knoedler sold forgeries. Ann Freedman, the CEO of Knoedler, had purchased multiple paintings in the style of several artists from a woman from Long Island, New York, named Glafira Rosales. Rosales later admitted to have sourced the paintings, resold by Freedman in the millions of dollars, from a Mr X Jr. The painter of all of the works sold as forgeries by Rosales to Freedman was determined to be a 73-year-old Chinese national named Pei-Shen Qian, who has since returned to China.
Although Freedman was the head of the Knoedler Gallery, she had no formal education or scholarship whatsoever in fine art or the history of art. She had started her climb in the New York gallery trade as a receptionist at another gallery and then moved to Knoedler as a salesperson.
I do not wish to imply that all art dealers lack scholarship and expertise. I merely suggest that if you are considering paying an amount higher than you would pay for a lithographed poster, you would do well to inquire of the dealer as to their education and experience, what scholarly books and articles they may have authored, and what experience they have in another gallery or working with artists, before relying solely on their expertise. Can they provide affirmation in writing, either directly from the artist or from the acknowledged expert for the artist? For a high-priced investment, this, together with proper documentation of the collection history, should accompany your purchase and should be kept in a safe repository in a location separate from the art work. It should certainly not be attached to the back of the work.
The International Foundation for Art Research in New York offers a free database of the authors of catalogues raisonnés on their website.25 Does the piece you are purchasing appear in the artist’s catalogue raisonné or an addendum to it? Some catalogue raisonné authors may be deceased, but their scholarship stands. You might find a catalogue raisonné in a university library in the History of Art section, or sometimes you can find one online to purchase and review. If the expert accepted your work as genuine, you should be able to identify it in the catalogue.
Legitimate scholars are more than happy to tell you how they arrived at their expertise. They want to establish a long-term rapport with you as a collector. A salesperson is just motivated to close a deal as quickly as possible. Since this is not an industry regulated by licences and proven expertise, you should be a good advocate for yourself and perform your due diligence first.
Provenance documents should be copied, and stored not with the art or jewellery concerned but in a separate, secure location. Keep multiple copies of the documentation and any ‘live’ conducted appraisal by a certified appraiser. The appraiser does not authenticate art, but provides the current market and insurance value for your art or object. All art work and valuable property should be well photographed (not video) front and back, carefully. The photographs should be taken by a high-definition camera and not a mobile telephone. It is recommended to have multiple sets of complete descriptions and photographs of your collections so that in the unfortunate event of a burglary or robbery, copies of your documentation are readily available to be distributed to police and insurance representatives.
In the event of a loss either by robbery or burglary, you should refrain from touching or moving anything in the area of the theft to prevent loss of potential evidentiary material. You should provide a report to the local police immediately as well as your insurance representative and rely on the police and the insurance company to decide whether (or not) to publicise the loss. In some instances, if the thief decides that discovery of the loss may not be imminent, they may try to sell the objects in a public venue such as an auction or show right away. Often stolen goods are recovered in this manner. Allow the police officers to take the initial report and collect evidence and the detectives to conduct their investigation as soon as possible after the loss. As you are now a well-prepared witness, the chances of recovery of your property are greatly enhanced.
Simultaneous to the investigation, the police detective can make a free report of your stolen property if provided with a copy of your inventory report and supporting documentation. If indeed the evil-doer is found and your property is recovered, the court may request your original documents for trial – but you should receive a receipt for these.
If you reside in the United Kingdom, the police detective may avail him- or herself of the assistance of the Metropolitan Police’s Art & Antiques Unit at New Scotland Yard, who can alert the appropriate authorities and circulate the particulars both in the UK and through INTERPOL and Europol. If you reside in the United States, you follow the same procedure, but in speaking with the detective, you may inform him or her that the FBI maintains a National Stolen Art File database in their headquarters in Washington, D.C. and that they can either file a report directly on the FBI.gov site, or better still, especially in the event of a high-dollar loss, contact their local FBI Office and tell them that you wish to place the easily identifiable property in the National Stolen Art File. This database will accept stolen property alerts to all identifiable art valued at a minimum of $2,000. This is a separate, but very similar database to the one used to find stolen guns and cars. If you reside in another country, your local police can still make a theft report and report it to INTERPOL and Europol to be placed in their databases.
There are also two private databases which will actively scour international auction catalogues in an attempt to locate your stolen property: the Art Loss Register and the Art Recovery Group.26 These firms charge a fee to take your report and they also charge a fee to help recover your property. This fee may be a percentage of the insured value of your property. Additionally, they offer a service whereby registered individuals, such as legitimate buyers and sellers, will pay for an inquiry to their database to determine whether they are being offered stolen goods. The Art Loss Register, headquartered in London, issues a certificate to the subscriber making the database inquiry when their database has been searched for a particular property and it is not found in the database. A police agency may also register stolen art with the Art Loss Register at no charge for the registration. According to its website, the Art Recovery Group is a private company that provides free cooperation with law enforcement and provides due diligence, dispute resolution and art recovery services to the international art market and cultural heritage institutions. It is also headquartered in London but maintains additional offices in Milan and New Delhi. Founded in 2013, the company initially specialised in the recovery of stolen and claimed works of art. In 2015 Christopher Marinello, formerly of the Art Loss Register, launched the ArtClaim database as a new art market due diligence resource. The Art Recovery Group cautions that in the course of its work, it will not:
Thus far, the Art Recovery Group has marked some success in the recovery of stolen art. There is also an informal network of international, experienced, former art crime detectives who have conducted criminal investigations which have led to the discreet and successful recovery of stolen art and jewellery and the successful prosecution of thieves. You might initiate your search for a consultant based on police recommendation or perhaps even a search of social media for professionals, such as LinkedIn.
Virginia Malloy Curry is a licensed private investigator and security consultant. A retired FBI Special Agent, she was a charter member of the FBI Art Crime Team and frequently instructs a seminar, ‘The World of Art and the Fine Art of Crime’. She is a GIA Graduate Gemologist and holds three master’s degrees in Italian, Spanish and Art History, and is presently a doctoral candidate in Aesthetic Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas.