According to the seven-percent black market formula, the eighteen paintings Cahill stole could have netted him about $7 million. In fact, he managed to sell only one, and whatever it netted (the investigators never found out), it cost him far more. In 1987, Cahill tried to do business with a Dutch con man who had been turned by the Irish police. In September of that year he escaped the trap they set for him, and made the police look silly in the process, but he still hadn’t monetized the loot.
An arrangement he tried to reach with a crooked London art dealer resulted in the recovery of four of the paintings by Scotland Yard. He comforted himself with the knowledge that he had fourteen more, including the Vermeer. Over the next few years he tried to unload them several times, including one failed deal with the IRA. When that fell through he turned to a Protestant paramilitary group in Northern Ireland, the Ulster Volunteer Force. In 1989, he sold one of the paintings, Gabriel Metsu’s “A Woman Reading a Letter,” to the UVF.
A few months later, Turkish authorities arrested a UVF man and two Turkish art dealers in an Istanbul hotel room, where they had been tipped that a sale was taking place. The Metsu painting was recovered. Publicity around that bust put a dent in Cahill’s reputation. It seemed that the man whom many Dubliners lionized for his code and his courage was willing to do anything for a buck, even if it meant furthering the aims of a Protestant militia.
By 1993, the task of turning the paintings into something of value had Cahill’s full attention. A deal he tried to put together woke investigators up to the fact that the stolen-art market had changed.
Before their undercover agent told them what Cahill was doing, police believed that stolen art could be monetized in only three ways: (1) through prearranged sale to a fence, who would engineer its entry into the legitimate market by initiating a series of documented sales, thereby creating a provenance—a method that worked best when the art was desirable but not well known; (2) by stealing art on contract for a wealthy collector; and (3) by selling it to criminals for cash that needed laundering, the recipient’s goal being to resell it for clean cash. The Scotland Yard squad became aware of a variation on that method. They discovered that some criminals, most notably Colombian drug dealers, were collecting art for status. In their world, stolen art had more cachet than art that was legitimately acquired.
In 1993, Cahill introduced investigators to a fourth method, which solved the problem posed by masterpieces. Working through a crooked Belgian diamond dealer, he made a deal in which four of the Beit paintings, including the Vermeer, would be accepted as collateral on a drug transaction. In return for the paintings, he would receive one million dollars’ worth of heroin. It would be his choice whether to retrieve the art for that sum or leave the paintings as payment in full. Apparently the suppliers were confident in their ability to ransom the art, which raises the question, who has that kind of money and might be willing to part with it for such a purpose? The Italian Mafia is said to have identified one such entity.
The Vatican has all but confirmed rumors that it has been in off-and-on negotiations with mafiosi for decades, with the goal of recovering Caravaggio’s “Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence,” stolen from a church in Palermo in 1969. Governments, multinational corporations, and foundations are all considered approachable when a national treasure, or a painting such as the Vermeer (one of thirty-four the artist painted in his lifetime), are at stake.
Great art is timeless, and negotiations over its recovery, such as those between the Roman Catholic Church and the Mafia, can take on that same quality. One thing that prolongs them is the fact that the only real threat the possessors of the art can wield, that they’ll destroy it, is an empty one, so neither side is in any rush to make a deal. The negotiations take place between institutions that will outlive the individuals involved in the bargaining.