Provenance

At New Scotland Yard, the Art and Antiques Squad was down to a few desks and a couple of phones. The unit operated within the larger and more powerful Serious and Organised Crime Unit, which took up most of the fifth floor of the Yard’s twenty-story headquarters in Westminster. Among the unit’s other subdivisions were the Flying Squad, trained in high-speed chases and street ambushes, and the Kidnap Unit, whose varied tasks included the rescue of hostages and potential suicides. The Art Squad’s cramped quarters in this macho milieu reflected its status as a poor cousin. Since its founding as a philatelic unit in 1969 after a series of holdups of stamp dealers, the squad’s relevance and jurisdiction had been subject to close scrutiny by the Yard’s upper echelons.

In contrast to the swagger of the Organised Crime Unit, the Art Squad was regarded as a kind of pantywaist protection force for the elite. If a wealthy Knightsbridge aristocrat awoke to find his Titian gone, the case was given a lower priority than, say, a mugging in Stepney. Art crimes were generally considered the stuff of light comedy, filler items for the BBC News entertainment segment. The unofficial position of the Yard’s commissioner was that pretentious victims of art crime probably got what was coming to them, that the few Londoners who could afford great art could also survive the occasional loss, and that such relatively small misfortunes were best left to the wealthy and their insurers.

The Art Squad had known even worse times. When London was hit by a wave of armed robberies and muggings in the mid-1980s, the unit was disbanded altogether. It was a hasty decision on the part of the top brass, because the art market was heating up during this same period. Once prices rose it was only a matter of time before the trade in stolen art followed suit.

By the end of the twentieth century Interpol was ranking art crime as one of the world’s most profitable criminal activities, second only to drug smuggling and weapons dealing. The three activities were related: Drug pushers were moving stolen and smuggled art down the same pipelines they used for narcotics, and terrorists were using looted antiquities to fund their activities. This latter trend began in 1974, when the IRA stole $32 million worth of paintings by Rubens, Goya, and Vermeer. In 2001, the Taliban looted the Kabul museum and “washed” the stolen works in Switzerland. Stolen art was much more easily transportable than drugs or arms. A customs canine, after all, could hardly be expected to tell the difference between a crap Kandinksy and a credible one.

By some estimates, art crime had become a $5 billion a year business. While New Scotland Yard largely ignored the implications of the upsurge, other cities took action. In Washington, the FBI reached out to the art community to help solve fraud cases. In Italy, the Carabinieri placed three hundred officers at the disposal of its stolen art unit. In Manhattan, a former abstract painter and art student turned police detective ran his own one-man art crime investigative unit. His name was Robert Volpe, and he was an unorthodox, Serpico-like figure with a Dalí mustache and an Armani suit. Dubbed “the Archangel of the Art Scene,” he specialized in gallery theft and went after forgers, crooked auctioneers, dealers who defrauded their own artists, and collectors who shopped at the black market. Fellow officers at the station house considered him an eccentric—some of his colleagues once hung a nude centerfold in his locker with a note that asked the eternal question “Is it art?”—but Volpe saw himself as a guardian of patrimony.

London art dealers and auctioneers soon began to demand the same level of protection that other cities provided their art communities. They pointed to the fact that London’s art market was second only to that of the United States and needed much better security because of the huge sums of money involved. In appealing to the police commissioner for help, dealers and gallery owners even offered to pay the salaries of a specialized art squad and to train police in the basics of the art market. More than once, they were turned down. Finally, in 1989, the Yard relented and reinstated the Art Squad. By 1995, its skeleton staff of four detectives had many more cases than they could handle properly, and the squad was seriously underfunded.

The Art Squad was run by Dick Ellis, who had grown up around amateur painters and antiques collectors. As a young officer, he had his first brush with art thieves when his parents’ home was burgled. Ellis headed down to Bermondsey antiques market, where thieves had sold their goods with impunity for years. He spotted the family silver in one of the stalls and soon collared the culprit.

Because it was so understaffed, the Art Squad chose its cases carefully, and was often forced to ignore perfectly decent leads. Among its successes: It tracked a cache of stolen manuscripts to an East London parking lot; recovered thirteenth-century Arabic documents and philosophical works by a Sufi saint; ferreted out books purloined from an ancient Anatolian library; nabbed a larcenous collector dubbed “the Astronomer,” who was addicted to original manuscripts by Copernicus and Ptolemy; and busted a multimillion-pound operation that imported looted treasure from Russia and Poland.

In the dusty cabinets of a London barrister, the squad found a thirteen-hundred-year-old gold headdress stolen from an ancient Peruvian tomb. In 1993, it recovered a Vermeer and a Goya stolen from a collector by a brutal Irish gangster known as “The General.” Most famously, in May 1994, it recovered a version of Edvard Munch’s The Scream that had been lifted out of a window of Norway’s National Gallery in Oslo on the opening day of the Winter Olympics. The thieves had left a handwritten postcard: “Thanks for the poor security.”

Success, however, did not lead to additional staffing for the Art Squad. Part of the problem was that London’s art thieves had a peculiar working pattern: They would lie in wait for a good haul for months at a time and during these slow periods the squad would be reduced to issuing alerts on tchotchkes of little value, pink-and-blue horse-drawn carriages, tortoiseshell tea caddies, ancient Hungarian fiddles, and lost dinosaur eggs. Inevitably, the villains would reemerge as if from a winter’s hibernation and go after everything that wasn’t nailed down.

Europe’s criminals favored the London scene: Fences were unusually civil and one could unload just about anything. For art thieves and forgers, the city had become one of the world’s great crossroads for dodgy canvases. For Ellis that meant there were always too many important cases to deal with.

In September 1995 he was in the thick of things. He and two of his detectives had been working almost exclusively for more than a year on the case of a British-born Egyptian tomb raider, a former cavalryman and self-proclaimed antiquities restorer with a Cambridge degree in “moral sciences,” or philosophy. Ellis had been shuttling around Europe, North Africa, and the United States trying to shut that ring down, but recently a new case had sprung up that was too rich to ignore. There was a palpable link between the contents of the briefcase Detective Higgs had sent him, the flood of calls he’d been getting from dealers warning about a rash of forgeries, and a case the Art Squad had investigated just the previous year, involving a certain John Drewe and some paintings allegedly stolen by the Mafia.

Ellis had also received a worried call from Sarah Fox-Pitt at the Tate Gallery. She was concerned that one of their patrons—John Drewe—might be using the museum in a scheme to sell fraudulent art. She told him about her archivist’s suspicions, the call from Booth’s colleague at the British Council, and a recent call from Drewe’s ex-partner, Batsheva Goudsmid, who claimed to have incriminating documents proving that Drewe was trafficking in forged and possibly stolen artwork.

Ellis picked up the phone and called Goudsmid. She sounded angry and upset, “a woman scorned,” as he would later recall his initial reaction. He made plans to meet her at Hampstead station, and then he made another call, one that was almost second nature.

Ellis depended on detectives from the other units to help the Art Squad when it was swamped, and the most reliable and talented of these outside resources was Detective Sergeant Jonathan Searle, a Cambridge-educated art historian who worked at Special Branch, the muscle behind British intelligence on national security and espionage.

Searle was as skilled at spotting fakes as he was at grilling thugs. When Ellis told him he was interviewing a possible witness to a daring and complicated art crime, Searle was all ears. Could he put everything aside and come down to the Hampstead precinct? Ellis asked. He just wanted Searle’s gut reaction. He didn’t say much else, and Searle didn’t ask.

Through the glass partition, Detective Sergeant Searle observed the woman in the interrogation room. She was slight, almost bird-like, and appeared to be extremely harassed, demure one moment and raging the next. She stared at the floor, then at the wall. When he went inside, she refused to look him in the eye. When he began asking pointed questions, her expression conveyed barely restrained anger when she mentioned Drewe. In anguished, staccato bursts, she retailed old grudges and stories of criminal activity on the part of her former common-law husband. Most of what she said was irrelevant to the reason for Searle’s visit, but he thought some of it might be useful.

During nearly twenty-five years with Special Branch Searle had had occasion to question all manner of villains. His unit, originally called the Special Irish Branch, had been established in the late 1800s to fight Irish nationalists, but it had expanded over time. It had spied on Lenin, guarded Churchill, interrogated cold war spies, and protected IRA targets. Searle could usually tell when someone was trying to put something over on him. Goudsmid was obviously angry, but he didn’t think she was lying, although the murder accusation did seem a bit extreme. He would have to ask Ellis about it. Meanwhile, he guided her back to her story gently.

Recently, she said, she had been getting angry calls from Drewe’s clients, complaining about fake paintings and saying that they wanted their money back. She had been cleaning out her attic when she found bags filled with incriminating papers belonging to Drewe. Most of them had to do with art, but a few were more personal. Among them were old pay slips from an Orthodox Jewish school near Golders Green where Drewe had taught physics in the early 1980s—the same years, he had told Goudsmid, that he was a military consultant. There was also a three-page letter he had written to the police, explaining why he had fired a gun in the school’s playground. (He claimed he was conducting a physics experiment that “incorporated ballistics to study the motion of projectiles using both electronic timing, and more advanced stroboscopic methods.”) Soon after the incident, he was fired from the school, though he was never charged. Goudsmid had also found documents indicating that Drewe resigned from teaching physics at another school after his academic credentials were challenged by a colleague.

Searle asked Goudsmid what specific evidence she had to back up her claims that Drewe was involved in theft or forgery. She took him and Dick Ellis out to the parking lot, led them to her black BMW, and opened the trunk to show them two black trash bags filled with documents. In one of the bags Searle found letters from the 1950s, some bearing the Tate Gallery archive stamp, along with ledger pages, gallery stationery, and photographs of paintings purportedly by Giacometti, Dubuffet, and Nicholson. The other bag contained a handful of pen-and-ink sketches and a group of color photographs of paintings of the Crucifixion, each a different color—yellow, green, pink, and dark blue. Searle recognized them as Graham Sutherlands, though it wasn’t clear whether they were genuine.