As young postdoctoral students in Europe, Harry and Ruth Bakwin were as devoted to their studies and to each other as their colleagues were to the quaint restaurants and pubs of their neighborhood—and it showed. The pair would go on to become accomplished and well-published pediatricians, and thanks to the time they spent together visiting galleries and museums viewing and learning about art, they amassed one of the most respected collections of paintings in the United States.
In 1929, the Drs. Bakwin traveled with their four children on their annual trip to Europe and ultimately made their way to Switzerland. The couple, still in the nascent stages of their lifelong love of collecting, visited the Galerie Thannhauser in Lucerne, where they made a significant purchase: Vincent van Gogh’s L’Arlésienne, Madame Ginoux.1 The painting is an essential work in the Dutch painter’s oeuvre, completed as Van Gogh convalesced from one of his many struggles with mental illness at the asylum in Saint-Remy, near Arles, during a period considered to be the zenith of the artist’s creativity.2 It was one of the six existing Van Gogh portraits of the cafe-owning Ginoux that was privately held, with the others hanging in some of the world’s most notable museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. L’Arlésienne, Madame Ginoux was one of the more important pieces of the more than 100 paintings and sculptures collected throughout the Bakwins’ lifetimes, in what would become one of America’s best collections of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art.
Throughout their lives, the Bakwins’ children would each develop an affinity for certain pieces of their parents’ collection, and Harry and Ruth saw to it that at the time of their respective deaths, each child would inherit a painting of their choice. For the couple’s eldest son the decision was easy. In 1987, upon his beloved mother’s passing, Edward Bakwin chose the Van Gogh from the collection that had come to include works by Picasso, Cézanne, Matisse, Gaugin, and many others. Less than 20 years later, however, Edward would make a decision that came with much more difficulty. He chose to sell the Van Gogh at an auction on May 2, 2006, through the famed auction house Christie’s in New York City. Though the painting would fetch Edward more than $40 million, it wasn’t money that motivated him, it was fear. “It was a very major decision of mine to sell it,” he said. “The risk of damage of any kind or robbery just felt a little too high. Much as I would have loved to continue holding it, it seemed to me too important to have hanging in a modest apartment in Chicago.”3
This fear was grounded in personal experience. Edward Bakwin had only to look to his own family to find good reason to worry that his painting could be targeted by thieves. In 1976, Edward’s younger brother Michael made his own selection from his parents’ collection. He, too, made what he felt was an easy choice, selecting Paul Cézanne’s Bouilloire et Fruits (Pitcher and Fruit). Michael Bakwin was not alone in his appreciation of the Cubist masterpiece. No less an expert on the medium than Pablo Picasso himself (whom the Bakwins met during their travels) called the painting one of the greatest pictures ever painted.4 Michael proudly and lovingly displayed the painting in the dining room in his home in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. There it hung, the crowning piece of his collection of paintings that made for one of the greatest displays of art in all the Berkshires, a region rich in great art and scenic majesty. That’s no small claim: the pastoral area lays claim to some of the nation’s best college museums and was the home of the great sculptor Daniel Chester French (whose most notable work was the Lincoln Memorial) and the twentieth-century American master Norman Rockwell. Rockwell, whose museum is located in Stockbridge, moved to the region in 1953 and left an indelible mark on the Berkshires, just as the Berkshires left its own on his works. His famous images bear the region’s unmistakable New England essence, and the people of Stockbridge and the surrounding area served as models for many of his works.
So to say that Cézanne’s Bouilloire et Fruits was perhaps the most valuable painting in Stockbridge truly meant something. That distinction came with good reason, for it is one of the great examples of his play with dimension and planes that so influenced the Cubist movement. At any moment, it seems, the fruit on the table in Cézanne’s painting might roll off. Yet it transfixes the viewer, just as the artist knew it would. “I will astonish Paris with an apple!” Cézanne famously foretold, and that he did. Though in his own lifetime he was denied the acceptance from the Salon in Paris—the official art exhibition of the Fine Arts Academy—that he deeply craved, his legacy is that of the leading forefather of Impressionism. The English literary master D. H. Lawrence called Cézanne “the most interesting figure in modern art, and the only really interesting figure.” For Lawrence, it was Cézanne’s constant struggle with the establishment that made him such an important figure, and he pointed to Cézanne’s portrayal of fruit—as in Michael Bakwin’s painting—as the key to his victory. “Cézanne’s apple is a great deal,” he wrote, “more than Plato’s Idea. Cézanne’s apple rolled the stone from the mouth of the tomb.”5 Of his influence on the movement that he would inspire, the great Pablo Picasso called Cézanne “the father of us all.”6 And here in tiny Stockbridge, Massachusetts, this seminal work hung along with others in Michael Bakwin’s multimillion-dollar collection, secured only by a rarely locked door.
In May 1978, Michael Bakwin, his wife Doris, and her two children packed their car and traveled to Ossining, New York, for a Memorial Day visit to his parents’ home. Though they were known to travel often and at a moment’s notice, this particular trip was a welcome getaway for rest and relaxation before the busy summer months would bring tourists to the Avalock Inn, a small resort bought and operated by Michael Bakwin after a number of years working in the world of hotel and restaurant consulting.
When the Bakwins returned home at about 5:30 p.m. Monday night, they weren’t looking for any signs of trouble. After all, Stockbridge was a place where people rarely bothered to lock their doors and where crime was something folks could read about if they chose to peruse the Boston Herald American, the tabloid in the big city to the east; but it was rarely found in the Berkshire Eagle. Michael and Doris noticed nothing unusual when they turned in for the night after the long drive home. There was no mess, nothing ransacked, nothing broken. There were no signs that anyone had forced their way into the home. The next day, the couple set about making their appointed rounds, with Doris returning home first that Tuesday afternoon. Opening a sliding door that led into the dining room, she found the walls bare. Seven of her husband’s treasured paintings were gone, and the only evidence they had ever been there was a lonely, empty frame on the floor that had held the famous Cézanne. This was long before the era of the cell phone, and Doris frantically tried to reach her husband. Unable to locate him, she phoned the local chief of police and reported the crime. Upon arrival at the scene, the officers also noted an absence of signs of forced entry. The Bakwins could not recall whether or not they had locked the house when they left. They did note, however, that the spare key they often left beneath a ceramic frog in the yard was not present.7
Michael Bakwin remembers that he “sort of went into shock” upon arriving home. Virtually incapacitated by what he saw, Doris took control of the scene, dealing with the Stockbridge police, who were eventually joined by the Massachusetts State Police and, later, the Federal Bureau of Investigation.8 This show of force at the crime scene was fully warranted: the haul by the thieves from the Bakwin home amounted to the largest-scale home break-in in the history of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. In addition to the Cézanne, six other works were taken: Portrait of a Young Man and Girl in a Red Robe, both by Chaim Soutine; Flowers by Maurice Vlaminck; The Red House by Maurice Utrillo; and Boy in the Red Shirt and Head of a Woman by Jean Jansem. Of the lot, only the two Soutines and the Vlaminck were insured by Bakwin, and for a meager $47,000 at that. “Unfortunately, insuring paintings is extremely expensive,” he would later say, “and I was just a little bit too cheap to do so, and didn’t think anything would happen to them.”9
When an art theft occurs, motives are frequently either missed or misconstrued. Often, investigators tell the media that the crime was surely the work of professional art thieves, especially when police learn that the pieces stolen are of extraordinarily high values. In fact, high-value paintings are rarely stolen by crooks that can be characterized as professional art thieves. The reason for this is simple: highly valuable and recognizable masterpieces—like Cézanne’s Bouilloire et Fruits—are exceptionally difficult to fence. As a result, thieves who pilfer such works eventually learn the folly of their ways and turn their nefarious inclinations toward targets that are easier to unload. Masterworks are most often stolen by shortsighted first-timers who are certain they can sell their ill-gotten gains, only to learn that there are no buyers willing to fork over hundreds of thousands of dollars—or more—for something they can never show anyone. History is bereft of the oft-imagined evil billionaire sitting in his private viewing room with a stolen piece of art meant never to be shown to another living person. Such is the fodder of Hollywood scripts, not true crime. In reality, it’s almost impossible to find a buyer for highly valuable stolen art. And for thieves that’s a hard thing to accept. After all, if you’re holding a few million in stolen art (or at least that’s what the newspapers are saying) and you are accustomed to getting ten cents on the dollar for your stolen goods, it’s got to be difficult to walk away empty-handed with dreams of riches dancing in your mind.
So despite the strong interest in the crime from investigators at the local, state, and federal levels, the prospects of capturing the thief or thieves and returning Michael Bakwin’s treasured paintings to him were anyone’s guess. To be sure, Bakwin took his own steps to try to recover his art: he hired a lawyer and together they decided to post a reward of $25,000 for the return of the paintings in local newspapers; he contacted the International Foundation for Art Research in New York to provide them with records of the theft in case the paintings surfaced in a sale; he worked to spread the word of the theft by contacting auction houses and art galleries; and, later, he hired a private investigator to help recover his items. All of his efforts were to no avail.
Sometime after the theft, there was a glimmer of hope for a recovery. The Bakwins received three phone calls from an individual who spoke of recovering the Cézanne for a fee. While it’s not uncommon for a person posting a large reward to be contacted by cranks and con men, the caller was able to provide bona fides, describing stickers from Europe on the reverse of the Cézanne that appeared to be accurate. However, there was a problem. “The trouble was that the people who stole the paintings didn’t know what they had stolen. They got a little bit nervous,” Michael Bakwin said.10 Though the caller eventually produced nothing, a mention was made of an individual identified only as “David.” This would prove important when a suspect in the crime emerged by that same first name.11
David T. Colvin was no stranger to trouble, and he was in it again—deep. He had lost $1,500 in a card game to an associate named Arthur Samson, who, after waiting a year and a half for Colvin to pay up, had run out of patience. Late in the evening of February 12, 1979, Samson, accompanied by Brian Matchett, a local legend with martial arts expertise and a license to carry a firearm, traveled to Colvin’s home in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, to collect his long-awaited winnings. The next morning, the pair met with Colvin in his home. Shortly after entering, an altercation ensued in which Matchett shot the hulking six foot four, 300-pound Colvin with the two .38 caliber hollow-point bullets that would ultimately kill him. According to the shooter, as Colvin lay bleeding he told him, “It doesn’t matter, I want to die anyways.”12
Some time after Colvin met his violent end, his attorney, Robert M. Mardirosian of Watertown, was in the attic of a property he owned across the street from his law offices. There he found a treasure worth millions: Michael Bakwin’s paintings. Mardirosian must have known what they were immediately. Shortly before his death, Colvin visited Mardirosian to discuss federal firearms charges he was facing, and during that meeting Colvin showed his lawyer the paintings he had taken. Mardirosian talked Colvin out of taking the art to Florida where he thought he could fence it, and the thief held on to the works. Rather than make the trek all the way back to Pittsfield, which was closer to Albany than it was to Boston, Colvin asked Mardirosian if he had a place he could crash for the night. Mardirosian offered him his attic next door. And it was there that Colvin left his bounty.
There’s a pattern that seems to emerge when highly valuable, highly recognizable art is stolen: hot masterpieces are either recovered very quickly because of snitches, hard-working investigators, and lucky breaks, or they turn up after a generation or so has passed, after the scariest member of the thieving gang has passed on or lost his fearsomeness and all involved have finally come to the realization that despite their best efforts, they simply cannot monetize their stolen art. Left with no options, the art is eventually returned. Here, in the hands of attorney Robert Mardirosian, Michael Bakwin’s paintings were at the crossroads of a quick recovery or being unseen for decades.
Mardirosian clearly understood the importance of what he had found. In fact, he was uniquely positioned to understand the paintings’ value both in terms of money and culture. Like Cézanne, Mardirosian’s avocation in the law could not suppress his love for art, and Impressionism in particular. In fact, in 1989 the attorney would eventually leave his law practice to become a full-time artist, using the name “Romard” to sign his works. “I understand color. I can make it sing for me . . . I’m not painting the subject, I’m painting the emotion that the subject evokes in me,” he would say of his technique. He counted among his influences Picasso, Van Gogh, Miró, and, of course, Cézanne.13
But despite his close familiarity with the sort of art he had found in his attic and exactly how it was procured, Mardirosian failed to return the paintings to their rightful owner in Stockbridge, betraying his responsibility as an attorney and officer of the court. Instead, he worked diligently to find a way to do the impossible: take well-known, high-priced, and stolen paintings and turn a profit with them. Thus, his was a unique sort of art scam: the art was legitimate, but his decades-long, illicit affair with it was anything but.
Clearly, this was an unethical and unconventional choice, but Mardirosian was no stranger to unorthodox ploys. In what was probably his most newsworthy criminal defense argument, he attempted to get a client—a gardener—cleared of a first-degree murder charge by arguing that the murderer was under the influence of the pesticides he had been mixing. It was the mixture that led the man to strangle his victim, Mardirosian argued in court. The jury saw past his claims and returned a guilty verdict.14
While that argument might have been outlandish, making a desperate argument in order to clear a client is nothing new for a defense attorney. Attempting to monetize a deceased criminal client’s stolen goods, however, is. But off went Robert Mardirosian on a trek that would span more than a quarter century and two continents.
Two decades would pass without Michael Bakwin hearing a word about his stolen treasures. With no new leads, no signs of life, no reason for hope, the idea that he’d ever again see his paintings, especially his precious Cézanne, had faded from his daily thoughts. Then, in 1999, things took a sudden and dramatic turn. On the other side of the Atlantic, Lloyds Insurance Company, the underwriter for the storied insurer Lloyds of London, rang the offices of the Art Loss Register with an inquiry about a number of paintings that were set to be shipped to London from Russia. Intrigued by the inquiry, the staff went to work researching the paintings to determine whether or not they were stolen. This was the work Julian Radcliffe, the organization’s founder, formed the ALR to do.
Radcliffe, himself a former Lloyds employee who had worked for Britain’s security service MI5, started a firm called Control Risks in 1975 to provide guidance to governments, corporations, and families dealing with extortion attempts and negotiations related to kidnappings throughout the world. Then, in 1986, Radcliffe was asked to examine the feasibility of forming a separate company to deal with the problem of stolen art. There certainly exists a bustling market: the Federal Bureau of Investigation calls art theft “a looming criminal enterprise with estimated losses in the billions of dollars annually.”15 Radcliffe worked with the major auction houses, art dealers, and police from a number of countries and identified a need for a database of stolen art that could be used to vet art sales and auctions. To start such a database, Radcliffe turned to the International Foundation for Art Research in New York—the very same organization to whom Michael Bakwin had reported his stolen paintings in 1978. IFAR had already started a database of its own years earlier, but lacked the resources to grow the database and staff it to the point that it could serve the international market. Radcliffe cut a deal: IFAR would turn over its database to the ALR in return for a share holding of the new company. And thus a powerhouse in the fight against the illicit trade in stolen art was born. By 2008, the ALR would grow to 30 employees working with a database holding nearly 200,000 stolen works of art from around the world and conducting around 400,000 searches per year.16
Radcliffe’s team quickly came back with its findings: the paintings submitted by Lloyds were indeed stolen, and they were taken from the home of Michael Bakwin in 1978. This wasn’t the ALR’s first encounter with Bakwin: in the early 1990s, a Cézanne similar to the one stolen from Bakwin was put up for auction, and while performing its due diligence, the ALR contacted him to ensure that they had not come upon his Bouilloire et Fruits. But now, in 1999, it was certain that Bakwin’s Cézanne and his other paintings were on the market.
Radcliffe asked his associates to put him in touch with the man seeking insurance on the paintings that were awaiting transport, and then notified the FBI and British authorities. Next, the ALR contacted Michael Bakwin to advise him of this much stronger lead. Seeing an opportunity to recover his beloved paintings, Bakwin entered into what Radcliffe described as a “standard recovery contract” and chose to pay the ALR on a contingency basis. The ALR didn’t come cheap: the contingency plan called for Bakwin to pay the firm 15 percent of the first $75,000 of value of the art plus 10 percent of any value above that figure. Such an agreement would mean, for instance, that if the ALR returned, say, just $1 million worth of art to Bakwin, he would in turn owe the ALR $103,750. This, of course, far exceeded the $25,000 reward Bakwin had offered for a brief period shortly after the theft more than 20 years earlier. But he figured the gambit was worth it.
With a signed agreement in hand, the ALR went right to work. ALR contacted Scotland Yard, but because it didn’t appear that a crime had occurred on British soil, they referred the ALR to the FBI. After being briefed on what the ALR had found to date, the bureau recommended that they try to learn more about the individual who sought to insure the stolen paintings through Lloyds. Lloyds obliged and provided the ALR with the individual’s identity: Tony Westbrook. Soon enough, Radcliffe and a trusted deputy, Sarah Jackson, arranged to meet with Westbrook near the offices of Lloyds.
The trio sat in the London restaurant, discussing the art in question, where Westbrook revealed that he had been asked to sell the paintings in question and thus sought to bring them to London from Russia to have them appraised. Westbrook provided Radcliffe and Jackson with an odd story as to how he became involved with the paintings—he had registered in a hotel listing himself as an “architect,” which was somehow translated to mean “art expert,” and based on this, he alleged, he was asked to help with the sale of highly valuable paintings.
Radcliffe informed Westbrook that the paintings were run through the ALR database and determined to be stolen. This led to a series of meetings and telephone conversations between the parties. Westbrook inquired about a reward or payment for the stolen art. “I explained that no payment or reward could be made unless we were told who was holding the pictures and how they got them,” Radcliffe said, “and I explained my reasons for our position on that.”17 Radcliffe went on to inform Westbrook that the ALR, the insurance industry, and victims of crime are hesitant to pay what amounts to a ransom for stolen property lest they encourage such schemes. So, Radcliffe told Westbrook, a number of conditions would have to be met before any payments would be made to those currently holding the paintings. “The conditions included the fact that we must know the identity of the person to whom the payment was going to be made and have some understanding or assurance that they would not pass that payment on to any criminal. We also needed to know how the pictures had come into the possession of the person holding them. We needed to inform the police, and we needed to make certain that no payment was excessive and that the maximum intelligence for the police was obtained at the same time,” said Radcliffe.18
Perhaps seeing the writing on the wall, Westbrook inquired about the possibility of payments to him for his help. Seizing the opportunity to get Westbrook on his side, Radcliffe agreed to some payments dependent on his assistance. In other words, he co-opted Westbrook.
It proved to be a wise move. Westbrook opened up to the ALR with more insight into exactly who it was behind the operation. He reported that he was contacted only via telephone by an unknown person who was using him as a conduit for information. He could only confirm that the caller had a “mid-Atlantic accent” and called him in the evening, a fact that led the Londoner to believe his calls were coming from the United States because of the time difference. The only thing that Westbrook was sure of, though, was that the caller was insistent in his expectation that he receive “substantial payment” for any paintings he might turn over.19
Seeking to determine whether the anonymous party in the States was truly in possession of the Bakwin paintings, the ALR team requested proof of life. That’s when the holding party did something that proved it beyond any doubt: he provided photos of all seven works. Ordinarily, this wouldn’t be absolute proof, but unbeknownst to everyone but Bakwin, no photos of the stolen Utrillo existed. Not even the artist himself had photographed the painting. In fact, when Bakwin posted a notice of his stolen art back in 1978, he could produce only an image of a similar Utrillo painting. So when Westbrook produced the ALR with an image of Bakwin’s Utrillo, it was obvious the photo was taken post-theft, and thus it became clear that the man with the mid-Atlantic accent was for real.
Following the proof of life, Radcliffe received a proposal from the shadowy figure through Westbrook. According to Radcliffe, the party holding Bakwin’s art notified him that “if we brought the pictures in to a neutral location, a bank in Switzerland, and they were inspected by an expert and proved to be the pictures stolen from Mr. Bakwin, then they would release those pictures, provided we pay $15 million.”20 So there it was: a price tag, and a rather exorbitant one at that.
Radcliffe immediately dismissed the proposal. He told Westbrook that his side needed someone—preferably an attorney—with whom the ALR could negotiate face-to-face. In mid-1999, Westbrook informed Radcliffe that a Swiss lawyer, Dr. Bernhard Vischer, would be entering the negotiations on behalf of the party holding the paintings, and within weeks the first of many meetings was held in Geneva at the offices of an attorney for the ALR. Vischer revealed to Radcliffe that the involvement of Russians, which had been cited during the initial overtures made through Westbrook, were false. He also let it be known that the party he represented—and refused to identify—expected payment for the return of the paintings. In response, Radcliffe spelled out again the ethical argument against paying what was essentially a ransom demand, since he had no way of knowing whether the party holding the paintings was one of the thieves or closely connected to them.
Bakwin’s team continued to work feverishly to determine who had possession of his art. Radcliffe submitted a number of questions to Vischer toward that end, but the answers provided were of little value. Finally, Radcliffe told Vischer that he would have to produce a statement stating to whom any payment would go. For instance, Vischer’s boss would have to attest to the fact that he was not the thief, nor a criminal, nor a member of the Bakwin family, and so on. This would provide Bakwin and the ALR with some assurance that they were not making unethical payments. Absent such a statement, Vischer would have to identify the individual who was controlling the stolen paintings. Finally, after further discussion, Vischer agreed to the latter demand.
With the promise of the statement from Vischer in hand, Radcliffe and his team came up with an idea that would nevertheless keep Michael Bakwin’s money out of the hands of this unscrupulous anonymous figure. Radcliffe successfully negotiated with Vischer a trade of sorts: in return for the Cézanne, ownership of the other six paintings would be signed over to Vischer’s client. Upon hearing of the deal, Bakwin told Radcliffe, “I think that’s extortion, but if we can get the painting back that way, I can’t believe that we could not also get the other six paintings.”21
The deal was to be consummated at the same Geneva offices of the ALR’s lawyer where Radcliffe and Vischer first met. The date was set for October 25, 1999. Radcliffe and a pair of art experts from Sotheby’s—Michel Strauss and Caroline Lang—arrived on time, eager to see if the proposal would go as planned and to inspect the Cézanne should it be delivered as agreed. Tensions were high as hours passed before Vischer finally arrived, looking “hot and bothered,” according to Strauss.22 The parties got right to work and reviewed the pertinent paperwork; seeing everything in order, Vischer made a brief phone call to an unknown party saying that he would be retrieving the painting to bring back to the offices.
Though Vischer instructed everyone to wait inside as he left the office to get the painting, Radcliffe followed at a distance and watched the goings-on. He witnessed Vischer proceed from the grounds of the office to a street corner where he waited beneath a tree. Suddenly, in a scene straight out of a John le Carré novel, a white car drove toward Vischer and stopped at the corner. An object wrapped in a black trash bag was passed through the car door. Once Vischer took possession, he headed back upstairs to the lawyer’s office as the mysterious white car sped away from the scene.
Paul Cézanne could never have imagined such a scene, and he likely never dreamed his precious Bouilloire et Fruits would be subject to such cloak-and-dagger intrigue, never mind ending up in a trash bag. But there it was as the bagged package was unwrapped and the painting inspected by experts in Impressionist paintings from Sotheby’s, both of whom confirmed that the painting was authentic. “Nervously impatient,” Strauss would later write, “I tore a small hole in the bin-bag with my right index finger, pushed aside the layers of soft padding and revealed about six square centimeters of paint. I was instantly in no doubt that this was the Cézanne in question, recognizing the patches of colour and the artist’s distinctive brushwork. Impatiently, I finished unwrapping the package and brought to light the stunning still life, unframed and in fine condition.”23
With that, Radcliffe agreed to sign a bill of sale on Bakwin’s behalf that read, “For value received, the undersigned transfers and assigns to Erie International Trading Company Panama (the company) all of the undersigned’s right, title and interest to the paintings described on schedule A.” Schedule A was merely a one-page document on an Art Loss Register letterhead listing the seven paintings stolen from Bakwin’s Stockbridge home in 1978, with a line scratched through the Cézanne and initialed by Vischer. A sealed envelope containing the identity of the anonymous individual behind both the Erie International Trading Company and the negotiations themselves was presented and, as agreed, given to the multinational law firm Herbert Smith for safekeeping.
Radcliffe instructed Strauss to transport the Cézanne to London immediately, and after insuring the piece for transit for nearly $20 million, the team left that evening on a London-bound flight with the painting still wrapped in the trash bag and on the aircraft floor at Strauss’s feet.24
Soon thereafter, Michael Bakwin was reunited with his prized Bouilloire et Fruits, the painting that he had not only urged his parents to buy, but had described as the most beautiful thing in the world.25 The reunion, however, was bittersweet. Faced with an enormous bill from the ALR, whose fee was based on the value of the painting, and concerned about his ability to safeguard a painting of such historic and monetary value, Bakwin came to the sad realization that he would have to sell his beloved Cézanne at auction. He instructed Sotheby’s to sell the painting as soon as convenient. The famed auction house was able to include it in its December 1999 sale, where it brought Bakwin more than $28 million. In an affidavit, Bakwin stated that he then paid the ALR approximately $2.6 million.26
The recovery of the Cézanne in 1999 was a major victory for Radcliffe. Indeed, it was the biggest and most important recovery of a stolen painting that the ALR had ever accomplished. But Radcliffe and Bakwin did not intend to rest on the laurels of the Cézanne return and went back to work to regain ownership of the six paintings signed over to whomever was behind Panama’s Erie International Trading Company. In fact, on the very night of the Cézanne recovery, with the painting safely en route to London, Radcliffe joined Vischer for a drink and posited to him that the agreement he had signed earlier that same day might not stand up in court. He told Vischer, “They should never try to sell the pictures, they should come back to us, and . . . we should negotiate now to get those pictures returned” before law enforcement began putting pressure on Vischer and his principals at Erie International.27 Within months, with Swiss authorities allegedly stirring over his involvement in the case, Vischer withdrew from further negotiations.
For the next six years, the ALR continued to pursue the remaining six Bakwin paintings. Negotiations with Tony Westbrook, who had resumed his role as intermediary with the unnamed holder of the paintings, continued but moved glacially. Meanwhile, the anonymous holder of the paintings approached a prominent Massachusetts businessman, Paul Palandjian, seeking his help in selling the six remaining Bakwin paintings. Palandjian was told that though the paintings were once stolen, title for them had been subsequently cleared. In January 2005, Palandjian traveled to Geneva, Switzerland, and met with an affluent Swiss banker, Henri Klein, and took delivery of the paintings. With the help of Klein, Palandjian stored the paintings in a Swiss bank vault while he approached Sotheby’s about selling the artwork. Sotheby’s informed Palandjian that they were interested in selling four of the works—the two Soutines, the Vlaminck, and the Utrillo.28
Then, in the spring of 2005, Julian Radcliffe received a call from Sotheby’s in London about four paintings they planned to include in an upcoming auction. This was hardly unusual: running checks through the ALR prior to sale was by then accepted as a key step in performing due diligence on an artwork’s provenance. But Radcliffe’s interest was piqued when he was asked if title was clear on four of the six stolen Bakwin paintings. For the second time, Michael Bakwin’s paintings were at a critical crossroads. If Radcliffe told the Sotheby’s representative that the pictures could not be legally sold, they’d likely disappear again for untold years. So he made a key decision: he told Sotheby’s the paintings were clear for sale. A month later, with the paintings’ whereabouts—London—now known, Radcliffe and Bakwin filed suit in a British court to stop the sale, arguing that the 1999 agreement to, in essence, trade ownership of six of the paintings for the return of the Cézanne was made under duress. The High Court of London agreed with Bakwin’s argument and not only awarded ownership of all of the paintings to him but ordered that the identity of the man behind Erie International Trading Company be revealed. On January 23, 2006, Bakwin was given the elaborately sealed envelope that had previously been entrusted to the law firm Herbert Smith. Within, he finally learned the name of his tormenter: Robert Mardirosian, the attorney who had found the stolen paintings in his attic decades earlier. There was another key component to the High Court’s judgment: Mardirosian was ordered to pay Bakwin $3 million to recoup his costs.29
In response to the judgment, Mardirosian embarked on a curious public relations mission in the United States. He granted an extensive interview to the Boston Globe in which he made no qualms about what amounted to his criminal behavior. And he went to the airwaves to tell his side of the story on Boston’s National Public Radio station, WBUR, in an interview with host Bob Oakes. It was the latter that proved most damaging to Mardirosian. Oakes asked Mardirosian, “You knew they [the paintings] were stolen; your client [Colvin] told you that.” Mardirosian answered, “That’s right.” Mardirosian went on to state that he had held onto the paintings so he could get a reward or finder’s fee and had moved them overseas years earlier for safekeeping.30
FBI Special Agent Geoff Kelly of the agency’s Boston Field Office received a call from Julian Radcliffe some time after the British High Court had issued the injunction halting the sale of Bakwin’s paintings. Radcliffe requested a meeting with Kelly to discuss the latest developments in the case, which the bureau had been monitoring for years. Agent Kelly is everything you’d expect from an FBI agent and more. A SWAT team operator assigned to the Violent Crimes Task Force who can sit at a piano and play Rachmaninoff, Kelly was particularly qualified to deal with the Mardirosian art-related matter. He had spent years investigating complex fraud cases with the economic crimes unit and was a member of the FBI’s exclusive Art Crime Team. Perhaps most notably, Kelly was the FBI’s lead special agent investigating the infamous 1990 heist at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum—by far the largest art theft in history. He was just the man to work in pursuit of stolen masterpieces.
Radcliffe laid out what he knew of the saga to the savvy street agent, and Kelly went to work investigating the matter. After reviewing evidence including a shipping invoice produced by Radcliffe listing the consignor of four of the paintings in question as Palandjian (who described himself as an “agent of an undisclosed owner”), and the document naming Mardirosian as the owner of Erie International, Kelly was confident he had enough to establish probable cause for the arrest of Mardirosian. Still, the agent recalls being shocked when he heard the Mardirosian radio interview in real time during his commute to work one morning: “I was listening to NPR, as is usual, and I almost drove off the road when I started to listen to Bob Oakes’ interview with Mr. Mardirosian. As I was listening, my cell phone started to go off from a number of my colleagues who were listening to NPR as well.” Kelly recalls that during the radio interview, Mardirosian helped make the FBI’s case against him. “One of the issues I anticipated with regard to a prosecution was proving intent relating to the substantive charge of possessing stolen property,” Kelly later recalled. “It was incredible that Mr. Mardirosian, a defense attorney, was speaking to a reporter on live radio acknowledging that he was aware that the artwork was stolen.”31
Armed with his findings, Kelly made the short trip from his office in Boston’s Government Center over to the John J. Moakley Courthouse for a meeting with assistant U.S. attorney Jonathan Mitchell, the federal prosecutor assigned to look into the Mardirosian matter.
Mitchell, a graduate of Harvard and Georgetown Law School who would go on to become the mayor of New Bedford, Massachusetts, had himself heard Mardirosian’s interview with Oakes on WBUR and could hardly believe his ears. “Here was a criminal defense counsel who has told innumerable clients to keep their mouths shut,” Mitchell said, “yet he went on the air and admitted knowing the paintings he held for decades were, in fact, stolen.”32 Like Kelly, Mitchell believed that a crime had been committed and he sent the agent out to interview Mardirosian. When Kelly tried to interview him at his home in Cohasset, he was told that Mardirosian had obtained a lawyer, Jeanne Kempthorne, a one-time federal prosecutor who had served the District of Massachusetts alongside Mitchell years earlier.
Mitchell contacted his former colleague and arranged a meeting to discuss her client’s plight. Mitchell and Kelly met with the defense counsel at the Moakley Courthouse, and the feds asked Kempthorne if her client was interested in disposing of the case mounting against him. Perhaps, Mitchell posited, a deal could be reached between the government and her client against whom there appeared to be an open-and-shut case. Kempthorne, however, surprised the feds by replying that there was no case to be had against her client. Aware that Mardirosian’s home on the French Riviera made him a serious flight risk, Mitchell asked Kempthorne to have her client turn over his passport as the meeting came to a close. When about a week had passed with no word from Kempthorne about the passport, Mitchell told Kelly to arrest Mardirosian. That’s when the other shoe dropped: Kelly found that, just two days after the meeting between the feds and his lawyer, Robert Mardirosian had departed the United States for France.33
Nine months passed before Mardirosian finally agreed to come back to the United States. While his return would later be depicted as a voluntary return at the request of the federal authorities from an innocent sojourn, it’s arguable that Mardirosian came home because his passport and visa had expired and he risked running afoul of the French. On February 13, 2007, upon his arrival at Logan International Airport in Boston, Mardirosian was arrested by FBI agents waiting for him in the U.S. Customs and Border Protection inspections hall.
Less than a week before his return and arrest, FBI agents and Falmouth Police led by Special Agent Kelly went to Mardirosian’s home in Falmouth with a warrant to search the premises. Finding no one within and hoping to avoid unnecessary damage to the home, Kelly contacted Mitchell before making a forcible entry. Mitchell reached out to defense attorneys, who contacted Mardirosian’s 51-year-old son Marc. They called back Mitchell with a curious message: Marc was at Wood’s Hole (about a ten-minute drive) and wouldn’t be back for two hours, so the agents could go ahead and make a forcible entry. One would think that he’d have come straight home given the fact that federal agents with a search warrant were prepared to knock down the door to get inside, but the message from Mardirosian’s son was that it was fine for them to do just that.
Rather than bust down the door, Kelly popped out a window adjacent to the door, which allowed the team entry. Once inside, they found good reason, one could speculate, for Mardirosian’s son to wish to avoid driving home to unlock the premises. Agents discovered weapons, including two shotguns, a vial of cocaine, and three trash bags containing more than 50 pounds of marijuana—one of the biggest pot seizures in Falmouth history. Like his father, Marc Mardirosian remained at large until authorities were able to track him down.34 But he was not convicted of any wrongdoing.
The federal trial of Robert Mardirosian began on August 12, 2008. Assistant U.S. attorney Ryan DiSantis provided the direct examination of Michael Bakwin, and the man who was victimized for the better part of three decades by Mardirosian served the prosecution well by coming across as a sympathetic figure. This was no small feat. Yes, Bakwin had been robbed and kept from his prized possessions, but at the same time he also testified that he had sold the Cézanne at auction and walked away with more than $28 million. That’s a figure that could easily alienate some jurors. DiSantis recalls that in order to show the jury that Bakwin, despite his wealth, was a person not so unlike themselves, he had him “describe his early work history at the outset of his direct examination, which included a five-year period in which he worked his way up in the hotel and restaurant business. His jobs during that time included work as a waiter, steward, and chief steward.” In addition, DiSantis spent considerable time doing extensive preparation for the trial with his subject, a fact that left Bakwin more relaxed on the witness stand. “His personality also came through,” DiSantis said, “which I believe allowed him to connect with the jurors.”35
On the cross-examination of Bakwin, Mardirosian’s defense attorney Kempthorne attempted to put the focus of the case on the victim, but it was for naught. Mitchell called Radcliffe to the stand, and, through the director of the Art Loss Register, Mitchell was able to keep the focus of the trial on Mardirosian and the intricate scam he clumsily constructed to try to squeeze money out of Bakwin. Mitchell skillfully led Radcliffe through a recounting of the underhanded behavior of Mardirosian and the subsequent epic negotiations that had begun back in 1999. The defense had worked hard to characterize Radcliffe as a greedy, unethical opportunist, and only Mitchell’s deft handling of the witness kept them from succeeding.
The centerpiece of the case, as Mitchell saw it, was established when Mardirosian made his damning statements in his radio interview. WBUR readily handed over the recording to the prosecution without a subpoena, a key development in the case. “Subpoenaing a media outlet requires the approval of the United States Attorney General, which is rarely granted,” Mitchell said, “but WBUR rightly provided it to us.” Why a seasoned defense attorney would make such admissions on air is difficult to understand, but Mitchell has a theory. “At some level and at some point, he had deluded himself with the belief that what he had done was just fine, that he broke no law, and that the entire transaction was lawful. He would have been better off throwing himself on the mercy of the court” than going to trial, the prosecutor believes.36
In the government’s closing argument, DiSantis delivered a riveting narrative that had the jury on the edge of their seats. At 4:45 p.m. on August 18, 2008, the trial ended with the court in recess for the jury. At 5 p.m. that same day, the jury returned its unanimous verdict: guilty. DiSantis described his feeling when the verdict was read as “satisfying.” He added, “Having a hand in righting a wrong that had persisted for over a generation was a very rewarding experience.”37
Four months later, Mardirosian was back before the court for sentencing. Judge Mark Wolf sentenced the 74-year-old—who was by now claiming to be suffering from the beginning stages of dementia—to seven years in federal prison for his crime, a substantial penalty that surprised even Michael Bakwin. “He’s my age,” he told journalist Gretchen Voss. “He shouldn’t be in jail. I feel awful. An old guy my age in jail? He should have to pay some other way.”38
But pay he would. In 2011, a Massachusetts state court ordered Mardirosian to pay Bakwin $3.1 million in damages for the whole sordid affair. It was a final justice for Bakwin, who was finally able to recoup the costs of recovering his possessions. But a question remains in the case: Could Bakwin have circumvented all of the intrigue by going straight to the FBI with a plea for help when the paintings had first surfaced back in 1999? An FBI sting operation, after all, would have cost him nothing at all, and that might have been the best route from the very start for Bakwin. As Kelly said, “I cannot speak for Mr. Bakwin and why he chose to go through [Mardirosian’s] extortionate deal for the Cézanne; however, I’m confident that if the FBI had been allowed to work the investigation to its logical conclusion when it was first brought to our attention [when the Cézanne resurfaced], quite likely, all of the pieces would have been recovered and Mr. Mardirosian would have been identified much earlier as the subject behind the illegal deal.”39 Indeed, the case might have ended much sooner—and at a far lesser cost.