Major art thefts are redolent of the era in which they take place. The 1940s belong to the Nazis, who looted the great museums and homes of Europe with maniacal zeal, especially art belonging to Jews. More than twenty thousand stolen pieces were sent to Germany during World War II. Much of it was bound for the museums that Hitler dreamed about building once the thousand-year Reich was up and running, but the most coveted works landed in the private collections of Hitler, Goering, Rosenberg, and other party luminaries.
There is a famous photo of Goering in Paris’s Galerie Jeu de Paume, looking over a painting he has just stolen. He has it propped on a chair, and in order to view it he is crouched in what must have been an uncomfortable position for a man of his girth. He looks pleased anyway. His aide can be seen in the background, pouring him a glass of champagne.
The list of paintings stolen by the Nazis and still missing includes works by Cezanne, Renoir, Bonnard, Sisley, and Manet. In his book The Lost Museum, Hector Feliciano reveals the complicity of Swiss and French financial institutions, collectors such as the Swiss arms manufacturer Emil Bührle, and many Parisian galleries in the thefts. “The war was a godsend for Paris’s art market,” writes Feliciano. “It brought an end to the crisis of the 1930s, when art prices declined by as much as seventy percent from what they’d been earlier; forcing a third of Paris’s art galleries to close their doors.”
In the 1970s, people wore mood rings and puzzled over Rubik’s Cubes. Nixon shook hands with Mao, and Sadat shook hands with Begin. Smiley-face stickers competed with graffiti for public space. Airplanes were more like limousines than cattle cars. People dressed up for air travel. It had glamour and sex appeal. So did pilots and stewardesses.
The social conflicts and economic upheavals of the era were reflected in the art thefts as well as the art. The fake art scam that generated the Rockwell heist smacked of the oil jitters, a new form of anxiety that entered the culture with the OPEC embargo in 1973. Unlike disco balls and platform shoes, it came to stay.
The price of crude at the refinery level doubled in 1974. Gas lines, runaway inflation, and “stagflation” sent smart investors—and investors who just thought they were smart—hunting for a hedge.
Art galleries were one place they looked. Miami, the main entry point for cocaine, was another. Crude money-laundering schemes involving cocaine and art became commonplace as both commodities grew in value in counterpoint to an economy that was tanking. Cocaine, which cost about $1,500 per kilo to process in Colombia, sold for up to $50,000 per kilo in the United States. The problem was getting it into the country. Established distribution routes and sophisticated smuggling methods came later. It was a free-for-all in the 1970s, and major busts of airline employees occurred regularly at Miami International Airport. In 1977, Aero Cóndor Airlines of Peru almost lost its landing rights after two stewardesses were arrested in the act of smuggling cocaine. The method they employed is described in a court document relating to their unsuccessful appeal:
After determining that nothing was concealed on the upper portion of Afanador’s body, the female customs inspectors directed Afanador to lift her skirt and lower her girdle. After some confusion resulting from language difficulties, Afanador did so, revealing two packages, later determined to contain cocaine, one located on the body surface in the crotch area and one taped slightly below the waist. Afanador then removed the packages and handed them to the customs inspector. A similar strip search of VidalGarcia, conducted somewhat later, revealed two packages carried in the same manner.
Airline employees were reputed to be eager customers of art galleries in the 1970s, too. “It didn’t surprise me that a stewardess was involved in our situation,” says Bonnie. “Art as an investment was really in vogue around that time, and people who’d never been interested in art were buying and selling. It could be anybody with some disposable income, but people in the airline industry were really into it. I remember that there was a gallery set up in O’Hare Airport in the seventies, and there were always four or five uniformed pilots and a few stewardesses looking at paintings. It was a kind of bazaar, and somehow you got the feeling that art was being purchased there for quick resale at the next layover. Of course the opportunity for fraud was obvious. Most of them couldn’t tell an oil painting from a cheap print.”
The Elayne Galleries theft was emblematic of its time and its place, but it wasn’t the signature art theft of the 1970s. That honor belongs to a heist in Ireland engineered by a disaffected heiress acting on behalf of the Irish Republican Army.
Rose Dugdale was educated in private schools in England and France, earned an undergraduate degree in economics at Oxford, and by age thirty-three had become a militant feminist and devotee of many left-wing causes. Photos of her reveal a sharp-featured, dimple-cheeked young woman with sparkling eyes, a defiant grin, and a clenched fist raised above her flying locks. She’s usually standing outside a courtroom.
Dugdale’s career in crime began in 1973, when she and her boyfriend stole paintings and silver valued at more than $150,000 from her family’s estate. They were soon arrested and brought to trial. Dugdale chose to defend herself, which gave her the opportunity to cross-examine her father. When the judge objected to her inquiries about the origins of the family’s fortune, she replied: “This is a political trial. My father’s life represents something alien to my own.”
After the jury found her guilty, she thanked jurors for helping her transform herself “from a recalcitrant intellectual into a freedom fighter.” That statement might have settled any doubts about her intentions. Nevertheless, she received a fine and a suspended sentence, while her boyfriend got four years. The judge explained that, in his opinion, Dugdale was an impressionable girl who had been led astray, and it was unlikely that she would commit another crime.
His Honour’s deference must have infuriated her, but she buttoned her lip. She had taken up with an IRA man named Eddie Gallagher during the trial, and prison would have disrupted their plans.
In January 1974, three men and a woman posing as tourists booked a helicopter for a sightseeing trip over the Donegal area of Ireland. The pilot didn’t ask why they brought four milk cans aboard, but he found out soon enough. They commandeered the aircraft shortly after takeoff, swooped down, and tried to hit a Royal Ulster Constabulary station with two of the cans, which were loaded with explosives. They missed, jettisoned the remaining cans when they began smoldering inside the helicopter, made a wobbly landing, and escaped. Based on the pilot’s description, warrants were issued for the arrests of Dugdale and Gallagher.
The pair eluded the police, and not long after, Dugdale and three accomplices pulled off one of the century’s biggest art thefts. The choice of victims was consistent with their dim view of the British ruling class in general, and Brits who buy Irish estates in particular.
Russborough House, where they struck, was the ancestral home of the Leesons, descendants of an officer in the army of William of Orange, a family that owed its fortune to the Protestant ascension. It is situated in the Wicklow Hills, a secluded region long cherished by Irish poets and Irish gangsters for the same reason: it’s easy to get lost there.
Lord Alfred Beit, heir to a South African diamond fortune, bought Russborough in 1952 to house the extensive art collection he and Lady Beit had accumulated. They purchased it on the basis of a photo, but once they laid eyes on their nineteen-room Palladian mansion, they decided to move in, along with their Rembrandts, their Goyas, their Vermeer, and a king’s ransom in silver, bronze sculpture, and antique furniture. The value of art fluctuates considerably, but the collection was consistently estimated at more than $200 million. Nevertheless, they didn’t give a thought to security, and for twenty-two years they didn’t need to.
On the afternoon of April 26, 1974, Dugdale knocked on the service door of Russborough House and told the footman that her car had broken down. As she and the footman stood in the doorway, Dugdale’s accomplices rushed in, waving pistols and demanding to be led to Lord and Lady Beit. They were guided to the library, where, amid shouts of “capitalist pig” (a ruse meant to suggest that Maoists were the culprits, not Irish nationalists), nobles and servants alike were bound hand and foot and gagged with stockings.
Dugdale showed her accomplices which paintings to snatch off the lavishly hung walls. The theft took ten minutes. They exited with nineteen works, including a Rembrandt sketch, Goya’s portrait of Dona Antonia Zarate, and possibly the single most valuable painting in the world, Vermeer’s “Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid.” News reports estimated the value of the stolen art at eight million pounds.
The paintings were meant to be held hostage for the freedom of IRA prisoners. It might have worked, but the moment the footman described the young woman who knocked at the service door, investigators knew who they were looking for. The thieves were captured and the paintings recovered a week later. At trial, Rose Dugdale pled “proudly and incorruptibly guilty” and was sentenced to nine years in prison.
That was the end of her career as an art thief (to date), but the well-publicized robbery she organized caught the eye of culprits with more conventional motivation. Russborough House was robbed three more times, most recently in 2002.
The thefts from Russborough House are chronicled in two books, The Irish Game by Matthew Hart and The Rescue Artist by Edward Dolnick. Both authors had access to Charley Hill, the Scotland Yard detective whose undercover work finding stolen art has made him internationally famous. Both books are excellent reads if you like true crime, and The Irish Game is even better if you’re interested in a true criminal. Hart goes into some detail about Martin Cahill, the Dublin gangster who engineered the second theft. Cahill, aka The General—a nickname derived from his ability to assemble a gang for major heists—has been the subject of several biographies, a film, and a memoir by his daughter.
Cahill was a genuine eccentric. His connubial arrangement included his sister-in-law. His income from crime was said to be six figures per month, but he habitually broke into ordinary middle-class homes, alone, in the dead of night, and pilfered small objects for the thrill of it. His experiences growing up in a Dublin slum led him to conclude that there was no percentage in talking to a cop, a jailer, or anyone else in authority, ever, and as a teenager he reputedly ignored every word the warders uttered throughout an entire two-year stretch in an Irish reformatory. The police brought him in for interviews frequently as his career as the leading figure in Irish crime was getting under way, but they finally had to admit that his capacity for remaining silent exceeded theirs for making him talk, and they quit trying.
Thumbing his nose at authority was Cahill’s primary motivation. It also seems clear that, in his mind at least, he was in an ongoing rivalry with the IRA to see who could defy the law more audaciously. He had been hearing of the 1974 robbery of Russborough House since he was a juvenile delinquent, and he knew that a second theft was right up his alley. The fact that the Beits had decided to make a gift of some of their most valuable works to the Irish National Gallery played into his hands as well, although it only became known in the aftermath of the crime. In the event, he not only robbed an iconic Irish estate of items of huge value, he robbed Ireland itself.
By the time he decided to make his move, in 1986, security at Russborough House was marginally better than it had been in 1974, but as if to counter such precautions, the Beits had decided to open their mansion to the public from Easter to November. In April, Cahill paid the one-pound admission and took the guided tour, taking note of where certain pieces were hung and which exits were handy. It is believed that he figured out how to foil the alarm system during this visit.
On the night of May 17, he and his gang broke into Russborough House and stole eighteen paintings. Their haul included the Vermeer that Dugdale and her IRA cohorts had stolen and a Goya, both of which were destined for the National Gallery.
Cahill had made off with fewer paintings than Dugdale, but their net worth exceeded the earlier robbery’s because the art market had improved and so had the provenance of one of the key paintings. The Vermeer had been stolen and recovered, which has the perverse effect of raising the value of a work of art. Couple that with the fact that the day after the robbery, Lord Beit told the press about the impending gift to the National Gallery, and Cahill could boast that he had bested the IRA.
He hid the paintings in the Wicklow Hills and began flaunting his success in a manner calculated to enrage the Irish police. They knew he was the culprit, and he knew they knew. What Cahill didn’t know was that a flying squad of art recovery specialists from Scotland Yard would be leading the investigation, and they would bring their own cadre of snitches and undercover operatives with them.
Cahill’s competition with the IRA blinded him to something that Hart calls “the snag that lies beneath the smooth surface of art crime.” Art may be easy to steal, but it is hard to sell. That is especially true of the quality of art Cahill stole. The ownership of a globally acknowledged masterpiece is carefully documented. No one with an interest in art can acquire it and claim ignorance. That doesn’t mean it can’t be monetized, but doing so is far more difficult than selling a lesser-known work to an unwitting buyer at face value.
For the purposes of the stolen-art commerce, the news stories a major robbery generates serve as an appraisal. Headlines in the UK said the loot from Russborough House was worth in excess of $100 million. Seven percent of estimated value is about what thieves can expect from the black market when masterpieces are on offer. All they have to do is find a buyer.
Such a person didn’t exist in the Dublin underworld, so Cahill began putting out feelers through his connections on the mainland. Thus began a cat-and-mouse game that would take place on turf unfamiliar to him. He ultimately failed to monetize the art, but the methods he employed as he tried shed some light on the difficulties encountered by whoever came into possession of the Rockwell paintings.
The Rockwells presented a unique problem. They were as recognizable as any masterpiece, but the artist’s work never had the same value in Europe that it has in the United States. After an initial spike following Rockwell’s death, the prices his paintings commanded in the United States drifted downward. They surged again with the outpouring of patriotic sentiment that occurred after the attack on the World Trade Center and have continued to increase since, but between 1986, when the paintings left Detroit, and 1991, when they appeared in South America, his most sought-after work was selling in the mid-five figures.