15

An Age-old Problem

What do get when you cross some Masonic chains from Edinburgh, ancient coins from Perth, rhino heads from Elgin and an acclaimed painting by the French artist Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and pull them all together? No, not a bad joke but, rather, a common thread which has run through the world of crime and punishment for generations.

That thread is one of art and antiquities – commodities which have attracted those of a less-than-honest persuasion like moths to a flame, for as long as museums and galleries have had locks on their doors. And Scotland has been far from immune to that shadowy world – as the da Vinci theft perfectly illustrated.

The art loss register, active in Britain since 1991, recorded in the region of 60,000 missing collectables in the space of its first 20 years. These staggering statistics were supported by research published in 2013 which claimed that organised criminal gangs are responsible for thefts of art and antiques totalling £300 million each year. It is second only to the proceeds of drug dealing in the criminal league table in Britain – and, most worryingly of all, police have pointed to the increasing use of violence in the pursuit of illegally acquiring valuable artefacts. The Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) was behind the research and members were growing so concerned about the problem that they produced a detailed strategy in response to the escalation. Their plan featured a national intelligence database and an increase in the number of officers allocated to investigating thefts.

One example was the theft of a rare medieval jug from the Stockwood Discovery Centre in Luton in 2012. It was one of only three known to exist and was valued in the region of £750,000. Known as ‘the Wenlok jug’, it was recovered and returned to its rightful home, although it had been damaged during the incident. A man arrested in connection with the jug’s disappearance was later jailed for handling stolen goods.

Andy Bliss, the chief constable of Hertfordshire and the man charged with leading ACPO’s heritage and cultural property crime working group, said: ‘Just a single item can be worth many millions of pounds and those sorts of items will appeal to criminals right around the world. They may major in art and antiquities but very often there will be links to money laundering, there’ll be links to violence and firearms, and often of course to drugs. Where there’s money to be made, organised criminals will move in if we don’t stop them.’

Detective Superintendent Adrian Green, involved in investigations across Britain, told the BBC in 2013: ‘This is top-level international organised crime and it runs into tens of millions of pounds. What we’re seeing is that the value of items is increasing but also the level of violence that they are prepared to use is increasing, which is obviously a major concern to law enforcement. It’s robbing our communities of their heritage but it’s also putting millions of pounds into the pockets of criminals.’

The grim warnings from leading police officers were noted far and wide. In the spring of 2013 officials at a museum in the north of Scotland were forced to take drastic and regrettable action, removing some of their most treasured artefacts from display in the face of a very real and very serious threat against the traditionally quiet establishment. The Elgin Museum, in Moray, had long given pride of place to two rhinoceros heads – brought back to Scotland as trophies by explorers in the 19th century. What hadn’t been appreciated up to that point was just how valuable the horns were. The black market stemmed from demand in China, where they are used in the production of medicines and each horn could be worth a considerable sum. The remedies are used to treat everything from impotence to headaches and even cancer. The material was also said to be used to make a powerful aphrodisiac. Powdered rhino horn was said to be more valuable than gold by a ratio of 2:1 and, on that basis, it was estimated that the pair of exhibits in Elgin were valued at £400,000. Each kilogram was said to be able to fetch £50,000.

There had been a clutch of thefts on the Continent and intelligence suggested Elgin was on the radar of thieves aiming to service that issue of supply and demand. This led to the difficult decision being taken to remove the heads from display and store them securely behind closed doors at the National Museum of Scotland’s facility in Edinburgh. Unlike the national premises, Elgin had only limited security protection and a policy of being safe rather than sorry was adopted on the back of 20 attacks on museums and auction houses in Europe.

Janet Trythall, vice-president of the Moray Society which operates the Elgin Museum, said at the time: ‘We were advised to remove the two rhino heads by the National Museum in Edinburgh and our mentors. Unfortunately we had no choice but to remove them from the museum as we didn’t want to put our staff, volunteers or visitors at risk from one of these attacks.

‘It’s one thing to have exhibits stolen and our safe broken into, but to have anyone injured in the process would be devastating. We’re gutted to have to lose them, they’ll be a huge loss to the museum but after reading the reports from the Museum Association we could clearly tell we couldn’t secure these precious items sufficiently.

‘In my opinion, there’s no way we can have them back. It’s not like we don’t have security, but it would have been inappropriate to keep the rhino heads, we don’t have the resources. We could have replaced the horns with plastic replicas but it’s very expensive to do that. Besides, are thieves going to be meticulous? It’s possible they might strike first, then only to realise their mistake afterwards. The message we want to get across is that we have no rhino material on our premises any longer.’

The two heads, one of a white rhino and the other from a black one, had been part of the collection at Elgin since 1941. The white rhino was shot in Sudan in 1913 and claimed by the father of Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Menzies from the Arndilly House estate in the Morayshire village of Craigellachie. The black rhino was from Northern Rhodesia. In addition to the rhino heads, the museum also held an 18th-century cup made from rhino horn to the Edinburgh storage area. The late Ming dynasty piece hailed from China.

The decision in Elgin came a year after a gang had attempted to remove a rhino horn from a Norfolk Museum. Janet Trythall added: ‘We were obviously concerned that someone might try and steal the rhino heads. There have been reports of many thefts of rhino material from museums over the past couple of years, on the Continent and in England, often involving forced entry while the building has been occupied, and the use of CS gas spray. Many of these thefts have been violent thefts, and we had to think about the safety of our staff and volunteers. The horns are of sufficient value that people are prepared to take desperate measures to steal rhino horns.

‘We tried to find alterative solutions. We had installed a panic button at the door in the first instance, but after being contacted by a member of the staff from the cultural collections at the National Museums, we decided the exhibits just had to go. It’s awful to be dictated by these gangs as to what you are able to display, but we have to be realistic.’

Edinburgh’s museums had taken the same step and removed its items from public display, years earlier and Glasgow followed that lead in 2011 after an audit on security precautions.

Scotland’s links to the trade in illicit antiquities may be long established – as the McTear’s heist and previous attacks on museums and galleries have proven – but the subject has been given a modern twist and a previously unthinkable air of respectability.

The quartet responsible for that shift in emphasis hail not from an East-end pub or a shadowy underpass but rather from the teak and polish surroundings of the University of Glasgow. Simon Mackenzie, Neil Brodie, Suzie Thomas and Donna Yates were granted more than £1 million in funding by the European Research Council in 2012 to launch a four-year study into the global trafficking of cultural objects. They set up home at the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research and set about delving into one of the most profitable black market sectors.

One of the facets of the programme was to examine the potential links between what so often is viewed as one of the ‘softer’ crimes and organised crime as a whole. Simon Mackenzie observed: ‘Compared to the trade in narcotics, we know virtually nothing. The narcotics trade has been heavily researched. There are specialist areas within the fields – country experts, modes of regulation. There’s been all sorts of research into the people producing drugs, the mechanisms for supply and demand. For people studying cultural heritage traffic, its a good place to start.’

Mackenzie and his colleagues aimed to use their project to paint an accurate picture of the scale of the problem, not just in Scotland but globally.

He added: ‘The first largest international market is drugs. The second is arms. Third is everything else – wildlife says it’s the third largest, antiquities says it’s the third largest, several others also claim to be the third largest. The evidence disappears and nobody has any idea how big it is. Part of our project is to create more accurate sizing statistics.’

Regardless of the true size of the market for stolen antiquities, the University of Glasgow team believe there is little doubt that it represents an issue on a par with crimes perhaps considered ‘harder’ by popular consensus.

Mackenzie said: ‘There is clearly organized crime in the antiquities market, as we conventionally conceive of organized crime. The more interesting question is whether antiquities trafficking is in itself an organized crime. It’s not what we would think of as organized crime on its face [sic] because the actors are often quite respectable figures. It seems counter-intuitive to say that museums and auction houses are organized crime. But look at the definition of organized crime: three or more people operating over a sustained period of time in a serious criminal way. Antiquities trafficking meets that definition. So you can make a technical argument quite easily.

‘The more interesting question to ask is: why do we care whether it’s organized crime? The policy response to organized crime, the regulatory response, is much greater, more of an international threat. So the distinction can be quite important on a policy basis.

‘The reason why organized criminals are involved in the antiquities trade is because it’s under-regulated. But you can take the organized criminal out of the antiquities trade and you’ll still have looting. It’s a story of supply and demand on an international basis. The trade attracts organized criminals, but they don’t define the shape of it because it is created and sustained by more conventional trade actors.’

Mackenzie has dismissed the notion that the theft of art and antiquities is in any way victimless, believing preserving items of historical significance is a vital function of modern society. He added: ‘It’s difficult. The general public is not particularly interested in the context of any particular object dug up in a far-flung corner of the world. And yet, museums and cultural debates are a strong current full of voices who feel very strongly about people’s culture and human rights. So in one sense, it’s certainly true that sometimes people don’t get that broken old pots are important to mankind. But when you elevate that to a greater concern with history and culture and knowledge and civilization, what that means and how we might find our way forward, people do care quite deeply about that. These are fundamentals.’

How the issue is tackled is something the academics do not yet have a definitive answer for, although work is being undertaken to find a solution to that thorny problem. Mackenzie said: ‘Most criminologists agree that supply-side interventions are going to be problematic, particularly on their own. The drug trade and prohibition are pretty good examples of trying to control something where there’s a high level of demand in a globalized economy. None of these have particularly good records of success.

‘Most of the current ideas seems [sic] to be about reducing demand or, alternatively, taking an end-to-end type solution – take both ends seriously and start to unwind the economic cultural and social forces underpinning the market. Once you see that, strict legal responses begin to look problematic. It’s very difficult for the law to seriously engage with an entrenched, large-scale global trade.

‘The nature of regulatory intervention in the cultural heritage market has largely been legal. Mostly its [sic] been about UNESCO, passing laws in source countries, prohibition of theft, and passing laws in market countries to prevent purchase. The interesting question for regulation is how do we build up systems around these laws we have.

‘Some scholars . . . have argued that increasing regulation produces the black-markets – that regulators are culpable for the illicit trade. I’ve never really bought into that. It’s a dead end: if you believe that, what do you do, stand back? You can talk about decriminalizing cannabis use, where the moral limitations are so widely disputed so there’s a general debate about whether it should be a crime. But not many people would seriously argue that knowingly stealing cultural property is ok. It’s reasonably clear that all sides say it’s wrong. Therefore the idea that we should decriminalize it doesn’t seem to do much except legitimate illicit stuff. It wouldn’t stop the illicit trade. It might make it worse.’

To suggest that all crimes involving antiquities were related to significant gangs would not be accurate. In 2001, a museum attendant was jailed for six months after admitting he had stolen antique coins worth £160,000 from an unlocked safe at the Perth Museum and Art Gallery. They had been sold on to dealers for far less – one of the items alone, a 14th-century coin, was worth £100,000. An audit at the museum pinpointed the missing pieces and an investigation was launched. It was revealed in court that the offender had received just £8,000 for the entire haul as he attempted to raise cash to feed a heroin addiction. Organised crime, this was not.

On a similar theme, in 2012 it became clear that no institution was sacred. It was then that the Masonic organisation’s Roman Eagle Lodge on Johnston Terrace in Edinburgh was targeted by a thief who masqueraded as a workman to gain access to a committee room and promptly made off with a set of ceremonial gold chains from a display cabinet. They dated back to the 1920s and were described as ‘irreplaceable’ by officials at the lodge. In more tangible terms, the precious metal was said to be worth £5,000.

Lodge secretary Harry Wilson told reporters: ‘When I walked into the committee room I got the shock of my life. I thought the display cabinet had just fallen off the wall when I saw the blank space. But as I walked over to it I saw the back had been ripped off and the masonic jewels had been taken out. I think I saw the guy but didn’t pay any attention to him because we had workmen coming in and out of the building doing up the windows. I thought it was one of the workmen who was bringing materials in. I suspect he has been in the building before either as a visitor or to one of the Burns Suppers which we had in February, because he seemed to know what he wanted and made a beeline for the committee room where the jewels were exhibited. According to CCTV, he was in and out within three and a half minutes. It would be such a shame if they were melted down for the value of their gold – that would be ridiculous.’

Not all items stolen are lost forever. Early in 2011 there was a major breakthrough for officials in charge of Glasgow’s collections when three paintings of special significance were recovered. Worth more than £200,000, they were just about to be sold at auction when details were spotted in a catalogue by an eagle-eyed member of staff at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum. He alerted police and the pieces were quickly seized. Wooded Landscape, a painting by Frenchman Jean Baptiste-Camille Corot was due to go under the hammer at the Edinburgh auction house Lyon & Turnbull but was immediately withdrawn when management were alerted to its dubious background.

Investigations revealed that the individual who had put the painting up for sale had already sold a painting by the Scottish artist Samuel John Peploe. It was tracked down to the premises of an innocent art dealer, who had bought it in good faith, and then taken by police to return to its rightful owner. A third piece, entitled The Infant Christ and created by Italian Renaissance artist Federico Barocci, was found when police moved in and raided the home of the individual who had put the items up for auction.

All three paintings had disappeared more than a decade earlier but museum chiefs had opted against publicising their absence. A spokesman for Glasgow Life, the organisation which runs the city’s galleries and museums, would only say: ‘We’re very grateful for the work of the police in bringing these paintings home. However, every praise should be reserved for our senior curator whose keen eye illuminated the fact that the stolen Corot was up for auction. Without his wealth of knowledge and expertise, the works may still have been hanging elsewhere. We will continue to work with UK police forces to ensure any stolen item is returned to Glasgow and we are grateful to the galleries who have readily assisted in this matter.’

A further 10 pieces of art, with the combined value said to be potentially in the millions, remained undiscovered. They had vanished from storage at the Kelvingrove, the Museum of Transport and a site in Maryhill during the 1990s, their theft having been discovered following an audit. Among those missing were paintings bearing the signatures of John Constable and the Scottish landscape artist William McTaggart. How they had been spirited away was unclear.

Glasgow’s attractions have been regularly in the headlines due to the misdemeanours of a minority. In 2012, a bronze sculptured head valued at £20,000 was whipped away from a display stand at the Kelvingrove. It was removed at 3.45 p.m. on a Sunday afternoon in February but it took fully 45 minutes for the alarm to be raised, when an employee spotted a space where the head should have been. Entitled Dreaming, it was created by the late Gerald Laing – an acclaimed British pop artist who had completed the bronze in 1979 and seen it snapped up for display in Glasgow’s museums two years later. It weighed a hefty 12.8kg and would not have been easy to manoeuvre away from its first-floor resting place. But it was.

Police had hours of CCTV footage to look through as they set about trying to track down the culprit. At the time, a spokesman for Glasgow Life said: ‘This was a deliberate act. Someone has stolen from the people of Glasgow. As with all of our collections, this work belongs to them. We are working with the police and other agencies and would appeal for the safe return of this work of art. Since reopening after refurbishment in 2006, we have welcomed more than nine million visitors to Kelvingrove and had no incidents of work being taken from public view. Thanks to the quick action of staff, we have been able to identify a short timeframe where we believe the bronze was stolen and are in the process of examining CCTV footage from across the museum to identify those responsible.’

The bronze was recovered shortly after it had disappeared, after an anonymous tip-off led to its discovery. It was found close to the gallery in the West end of the city and was undamaged. Detective Constable Ian Thomson, of Strathclyde Police, said: ‘We are continuing our inquiries to trace those responsible for the theft of the statue. I would ask that the person who contacted police anonymously last night to get in touch again. I would also like to thank the public for their help in ensuring that this work of art can now be returned to its rightful place, on show to the public.’

That was a happy ending – unlike in the case of more than 600 other items which were registered as ‘missing’ from Glasgow’s city collection at around the same time. They had disappeared over the course of decades and included paintings, sculptures, weapons from Egypt, First World War artefacts and even Roman pieces.

More modern collectables have not been ignored. In summer 2012, two men were arrested after an Edinburgh art dealer was targeted and paintings valued at £16,000 were stolen during a robbery in the dead of night. The price tags were less significant than the signatures which adorned those pieces – with five by the acclaimed artist Peter Howson among the half dozen removed from the Art Mart on the capital’s London Road in May that year.

Police had given chase to two men who fled the scene and quickly traced them, as well as the loot. The duo pleaded guilty to the crime but art dealer Douglas Fyfe, the owner of the gallery, voiced concerns that the paintings had been stolen to order. He claimed: ‘They were organised. One painting was hidden behind some of the others and couldn’t have been seen from outside, so I think someone had been in before to check out the place. I have been there 13 years and it’s the first time anything like this has happened. It’s very rare, I haven’t heard of anything like this at all in Edinburgh or Scotland even.’

The premises had been locked and were also protected by a metal gate secured with two padlocks, but the thieves forced their way in. Fortunately none of the paintings were damaged during the raid or subsequent police chase and the prosecution which followed brought that particular case of somewhat chaotic art theft to a satisfactory conclusion.

Unfortunately, across Britain, tens of thousands of owners have been less fortunate and their treasured items remain nothing more than a statistic on a growing list of missing artworks and antiquities. Missing, presumed stolen.