Hot Art

by Joshua Knelman

WHEN HRYCYK FIRST started working cases with Bill Martin, the learning curve was steep and resources were scarce. “Our recovery rate was lower” as a result, he told me. They also didn’t have a framework of like-minded organizations to help them. The fbi wasn’t dedicating any serious resources to the problem, the Internet was in its infancy, and the Art Loss Register didn’t yet exist. Interpol was the only resource they could use, and they didn’t know how to use it properly. “It was slow.” Hrycyk was also getting to know a whole new world within the city.

  “Even in those early days, without any experience at this kind of work, I knew immediately this work was different,” said Hrycyk. “I’d been working gangs and ghetto crimes. Suddenly I’m walking into museums and galleries asking questions. I was dealing with the rich and the powerful, the most influential people of the city.”

  Some of the wealthiest collectors in L.A. were incredibly irresponsible when it came to buying, selling, and storing their art. In many of the early cases, Hrycyk discovered, no records of transactions had been held on to. For a detective, a paper trail is vital; it’s a path to follow. In this new scene, often nothing remained to signify that any transaction had even occurred. “Just one person saying they had paid for a work, or another saying they had sold a painting,” he said. “It didn’t make any sense.”

  Another big difference from traditional property-crimes work was that even when there were suspects they often had no prior criminal convictions. “I found that a very high percentage of the cases I investigated involved people who had never been in trouble with the law before,” he said.

  The detectives theorized that stolen art was also unlike other property-crime cases when it came to time frames. If a stolen tv wasn’t found immediately, it might as well not exist. Paintings were different. A few years could go by, even a decade or two, and a painting could suddenly reappear at an auction house or a gallery. Information, then, became critical to solving these cases. Martin and Hrycyk wrote their reports by hand and filed them in blue binders. They started organizing those blue binders by year, and soon they had a few shelves’ worth. The blue binders were their database and their archive— whoever worked those cases in the future would need to rely on the information in those binders. Without those records, it would be as if the cases had never happened.

  “The art world as a whole is very secretive,” Hrycyk said. “Deals are done on a handshake, on a sense of trust, and on the basis of a relationship. I’ve run into many situations where people will enter into million-dollar financial deals based upon their personal relationship and evaluation of another person, just by eyeballing them.”

  Confidence, Hrycyk figured out, was a big part of the problem. In the art world, confidence often replaced good business practices and safeguards. The sums of money trading hands without records were large, and so were the egos.

  “Pride and reputation ruled the scene,” he said. “A lot of people in this city take pride in their judgment of character. Over the years I have seen that kind of pride in judgment be the undoing of many people.” He explained, “A stranger with a business card can walk into a gallery and say, ‘I think I have a client who would be interested in buying this painting.’ The gallery owner might take a chance on this stranger only because he possesses a business card. That stranger may be a con man.” The con man may ask to borrow a small piece of art, to see how it fits with the collector’s taste. He may do this several times, always returning the art to the gallery or dealer. By going through these motions, the con man creates a relationship, becomes a friend.

  “Then he might borrow a much more valuable painting, and simply disappear,” continued Hrycyk, who has investigated dozens of cases where a borrowed painting simply vanished. In those cases, when a detective asks for records or proof of purchase, the gallery owner often winces and shrugs. This leaves the detective powerless: “If a crime has been committed I can make an arrest, but the prosecutor must have evidence. If there is no paper trail, a prosecution might be impossible.”

  The art world, it turned out, was totally unregulated. It relied on a code of ethics that no longer applied to other business practices. “Art galleries and art dealers often don’t ask for everything they need. Instead, they decide they should appear to value their customer, and to treat them as royalty. Oddly, not asking for information seems to be a part of that world’s business practice.” Hrycyk had seen this kind of behaviour before, in South Central, watching drug dealers.

  “That model—no paper trail, business on a handshake—is the textbook example of how criminals buy and sell products: drugs, stolen items, et cetera,” he said. “There’s not a big difference between a criminal receiver and a person who is confidential.”

  The detective describes a classic drug deal: “The buyer of the drugs doesn’t know who the supplier is. The buyer only meets with the middleman. Cash is paid. There are no records. The transaction is invisible. It never happened,” he said. Hrycyk then described the process of someone selling a work of art: “The person selling that painting is probably not the actual owner of that painting to begin with. Instead, he is a middleman, acting as a broker for the owner.” Just as often, the person acting as the buyer isn’t the actual buyer. “It is considered rude to ask questions about the provenance of an artwork—who owned it, where it came from. Embarrassment is often one of the leading factors for secrecy,” he said. Sometimes this comes down to practical social etiquette—the people selling their beloved artwork could be going through a divorce or have simply fallen on hard financial times. They don’t want the community to know the details of their personal or financial lives. The painting gets bought and moves from one collector to another. The middlemen take their cut. But “the action is invisible.”

  Hrycyk noted that the idea of the rich and famous falling into financial trouble hadn’t occurred to him before he began investigating art thefts. One afternoon he was visiting a Beverly Hills pawnbroker who bought and sold art to the Hollywood jet set. Hrycyk recognized a movie star loitering in the store, looking depressed.

  “I suddenly realized that a lot of very famous people run into cash-flow problems, so they pawn their jewels and their art. It is done quietly, to avoid attention and embarrassment.” The more Hrycyk learned, the closer he was able to build profiles of different art thieves. His work expanded: he wasn’t just dealing with burglaries anymore. He was dealing with con men, fraud, fakes being bought for large amounts of money. His conclusion: thieves of all kinds were taking full advantage of the art market. “Once they understood that the system was unregulated, they could manipulate it to serve their needs,” the detective said.

  “One thing I found was that when I first started going to these art galleries, I’d glance around and see colours and shapes. As the years went on, my eyes would go to an artwork and I would know: that’s a Salvador Dalí.”

  In 1989, after working with Martin for three years, Hrycyk transferred jobs again, and went to work in the police chief’s office. At that time, the LAPD Art Theft Detail was the only unit in North America dedicated to investigating art thefts. There was a problem in Los Angeles, and from Art Cop, Hrycyk knew that the same pattern was playing out in New York. But where had it come from? Who else was seeing cases like these? The only example from law enforcement that Hrycyk and Martin could point to in the English-language world was across the Atlantic, in England. Scotland Yard’s unit, they believed, was the first one in the world to hunt stolen art. But that honour actually went to a much smaller force—the Sussex Police, who had jurisdiction over a swath of the south coast of England, including Brighton.

  6.

  BRIGHTON KNOCKERS

  “I became very good at a bad thing.”

  PAUL

  PAUL HENDRY, a.k.a. Paul Walsh, a.k.a. Turbo Paul, a.k.a. the Turbocharger, was born in Brighton in 1964, one year before the first Art and Antiques police squad in the English-language world was established there.

  I visited Brighton on a couple of oc
casions: wandered from the train station down through the Lanes to the pebble shore, where the grand white Brighton Pier stretches out over the sparkling water. On a sunny day it feels like a perfectly formed and packaged childhood memory from an old movie. The pier is white, like a big cruise-ship deck, and weighed down with stalls hawking doughnuts and hot chocolate, piles of candy, carnival rides, and games. Across the water, in the distance, lie the remains of a second pier. That pier was destroyed by fire; many residents suspect arson. Its charred husk lies deteriorating, a half-sunken pirate ship abandoned in the shallows—and a perfect physical symbol of the split personality that is Brighton. In one sense, Brighton is an easy getaway from the sprawling gloom of London—cheerful, relaxed, and semi-quaint. But there’s a darker edge to its cheerfulness, and it was on that edge that Paul grew up.

  Paul told me he was given away by his birth mother and adopted into a family on the outskirts of the resort town. He was raised as part of the lower class that serviced the hotels, shops, and restaurants where the rich paraded in the summer months. His family lived in a three-bedroom apartment in the council estate of Moulsecoomb, built in 1918 for English soldiers returning from the First World War. He remembers seeing posters advertising the units as “Homes Fit for Heroes.” That wasn’t how Paul perceived his circumstances.

  “People who are born poor stay poor,” he said. “The place where I grew up was built for cannon fodder. And that’s what I was supposed to be—fodder for a consumer society.” As a kid Paul played around on the piers, did cartwheels on the beach, and ate doughnuts in the sun. And because he lived on the seedier side of town, he recognized early that Brighton was a transient place.

  “A lot of people would come to Brighton and do things they would never do in London. It’s the kind of place you’d take your mistress for a dirty weekend. Brighton is certainly not the kind of place that inspires work. There’s always someone wandering around on holiday,” he said. Paul would see the “English gents” strolling along the piers, but he also saw the hookers at three o’clock in the morning “with bright red lipstick and short cut skirts, rubbing their crotches.” On its surface Brighton was its own postcard, as advertised, but on the edge of that picture was a carnival of souls.

  Paul dropped out of school and had no prospects. He had little formal education, few skills, no contacts, and he didn’t have a vision. He was, though, attracted to the wealth that he could see all around him, in the pockets of the tourists flooding his home turf.

  “I wanted money. And in my neighbourhood, there was the right way to make money, and there was the fast way. I found the fast way much more attractive,” he said. “You have to understand the history of the place to know that the criminal element was right there, all around me, waiting for me.”

  Brighton is only seventy kilometres south of London, and its beach is famous for all-day, all-night rock festivals. Fat-boy Slim played here in 2002, in what turned into a legendary party—more than 200,000 people showed up to dance. The beach got trashed.

  The shore was first settled around 1000 CE, but it was the rock stars of the eighteenth century who made it famous— royalty. In 1783, England’s Prince Regent visited Brighton, and he fell in love with it. Later, after he was crowned King George IV, he constructed an extravagant Royal Pavilion in the centre of Brighton that functioned as a sanctuary during his reign. George was famous for womanizing, and he probably did a lot of that in Brighton. The king often retreated to Brighton’s shores during his rule of the expanding empire, while his ships brought back amazing riches from the far reaches of the planet—bronze, silver, gold, and other treasures from conquered civilizations.

  His presence acted as a magnet for the British aristocracy, who flocked to Brighton and constructed summer mansions. In 1841, a new railway made the trip from London to Brighton more comfortable and faster. Weekend trips from the capital were now possible. A steady flow of urban visitors arrived, as did row upon row of manors and houses, their facades painted in bright colours—whites, creams, yellows, pale pinks, and blues—like lines of seashells leaning toward the sea. The rich moved in, and so did their service industries: dressmakers, courtiers, and antique dealers.

  The dealers set up shops in a labyrinth of narrow streets just a stone’s throw from the king’s pavilion. That area became known as the Lanes, and as the population and reputation of Brighton grew, so did the steady stream of customers in the Lanes. The merchants there did a fast business with the aristocracy and the upper middle class, who needed to decorate their new homes.

  “A long time ago these lords and ladies built these big houses on the seafront, and they furnished them with antiques and paintings,” said Paul. “That’s where it all started. Antiques were always big business in Brighton, and there’s always going to be someone who figures out a way to exploit that.”

  By 1864 the Grand Hotel faced the sea, and other hotels followed. Construction began on two great piers that stretched out into the water, first the West Pier in 1866, then the Palace Pier in 1899. These elegant white structures that floated above the waves became the symbols of Brighton’s cheerful disposition, as were the candy shops that sold the now famous Brighton Rock—long sugary-white sticks infused with swirls of reds, blues, and greens (they are delicious on a sunny day).

  Between 1800 and 1900, Brighton’s population swelled from 7,000 to 160,000, and after the First World War the population grew again, this time with returning soldiers and their families searching for the same qualities that a king had once craved: a quiet, clean, bright place to live near the sea. The British government supported this less affluent class of newcomers with affordable housing. The estates of Whitehawk and Moulsecoomb—where Paul grew up—soon dotted the outskirts of the city.

  A group of those returning soldiers formed the core of a new criminal element that operated in the shadow of the resort culture, providing the kind of perks some vacationers were looking for—drugs, girls, gambling: all the obvious vices to entertain a tourist for a weekend. This was Graham Greene’s territory, the underworld he chronicled in Brighton Rock. “All of this criminal history came before me, and it was part of the foundation that formed me. That became my world,” Paul said. It was the other Brighton, of housing projects and petty criminals who circled tourists and subsisted on pickpocketing and scamming.

  “That was the beginning,” Paul told me. “But it kept growing. During World War II gangs of scavengers and mercenaries used Brighton,” making it their jumping-off point for quick trips into London during the Blitzes, to raid and pillage empty houses while the population took refuge in bomb shelters. They stole furniture, antiques, food-ration coupons, and anything else that was valuable. “They’d steal the shoes off your feet if they could,” said Paul. “But they always came back to Brighton, a safe haven where they were out of reach of London police and the British military.”

  Many of the criminals who took refuge in Brighton during the war found it comfortable, as so many other people had before them. Brighton’s air and water became legendary as a healing ground for tired urban souls. Tourism remained its lifeblood, but by 2000, the population of Brighton had almost tripled from the turn of the previous century, to over 450,000.

  “So there were these two worlds,” said Paul. On its surface Brighton was idyllic. It was a sunny slice of real estate in a famously rain-swept country where the upper middle classes of London could retreat during the summer months for fresh air and fun in the sun, to stroll down the beautiful white piers sucking on a piece of Brighton Rock. In the other Brighton lived the merchants and families who worked the service stalls, as did the bourgeoning criminal class.

  “By the 1960s, Brighton attracted hundreds of thousands of tourists a year, some of them from as far away as America, who were drawn specifically to the Lanes, to tour the antiques,” Paul told me. For almost two centuries these two worlds—the upper crust and the working class—existed quietly beside each other, conveniently detached. In 1964, the year Paul was
born, those two spheres collided in a new way.

  “THIS IS HOW it happened,” Paul said. In the middle of Brighton, just a few minutes from the train station, is a big shopping mall called Churchill Square. Outside the mall are about a dozen food vendors, including one that sells delicious Cornish pasties. The mall itself is pure suburbia. Before the mall, there had been a large open-air market, filled with hundreds of stalls, where locals could stroll to buy fresh produce. “That market was home to all these fruit and vegetable sellers, before my time,” Paul said. “They had a singsong patois: ‘I got strawberries-strawberries-strawberries-for-sale.’”

  The market was loud and dirty and served a community need. It also provided vital employment for its vendors and their families. But as Brighton grew and commercialized, the city council had ambitious plans. In 1964 it voted to close the market and make way for the massive American-style shopping centre—progress.

  “The vendors suddenly found themselves unemployed and, according to city planners, obsolete. Those vendors weren’t about to go quietly. They’d been hawking produce to Brighton for decades,” Paul told me. “Something unexpected happened. Something unforeseen. The vendors adapted. They were forced into becoming entrepreneurs overnight.”

  In the following weeks and months, a sound echoed all over Brighton: fists knocking on doors, up and down the rows of cheerfully painted houses. The merchants were still singing, but they were wandering through the streets, roving door to door, selling their fruit and vegetables direct. The residents of Brighton enjoyed the new service. Why not? It was a welcome convenience—free grocery delivery.

  “What happened next happened quickly,” said Paul, who had heard the story told many times. “The fruit sellers realized that some of those people were less interested in buying produce and more interested in selling the junk that they’d accumulated for more than a century in their homes—cracked dishes, old fridges, scrap metal, a set of old chairs, peeling silverware, and all sorts of trinkets. Stuff.”