Hot Art

by Joshua Knelman

  One of Paul’s new challenges was making sure that the thieves he hired came out with the prize he wanted. It was a quick lesson in communications. “I couldn’t tell a thief to go inside and take the nineteenth-century still-life painting, because they wouldn’t know what I was talking about,” he said. So instead of describing paintings or antiques formally, he found simple ways to order the items on his shopping lists. “For example: Okay, Mr. Thief, there’s a clock on the living-room table, and on the wall there are two pictures. There’s one picture of a man, and another picture with apples and oranges in it. I want you to take the clock, and I want you to take the picture with the apples and oranges.”

  Thieves were definitely not what Hollywood portrayed them to be. They were not dashing or rich, nor especially smart or cunning. They weren’t political or strategic. “These were lads out to have a good time. They didn’t care who painted what, and they didn’t give a fuck about the difference between Impressionism and Abstract Expressionism. Picasso who? They were oblivious to art history. Believe me, the thieves of Brighton had never tread the floors of an auction house. This wasn’t The Thomas Crown Affair. This was the opposite,” Paul said. “This was the bottom of the barrel.”

  The game, as Paul described it, was fast and dirty. It was about getting into the house, creeping through the dark, locating the material, staying quiet, getting out of the house again with the prize, into the cool dark air with the heart pumping. Getting into the car or the van and disappearing into the night without anyone ever having known you were there in the first place.

  After adding hired help to the equation, Paul reaped larger profits. “I’d hire guys to go in at night. I’d sit down the road in a van and wait for them to rob a house and deliver the stuff. Let’s say I paid them a thousand pounds for the job. Well, then I could turn around and sell what they’d delivered to me for three thousand pounds.”

  After a job was finished, Paul didn’t spend time with his workforce. He treated them like business associates and kept them at arm’s length. “I wasn’t down at the pub having a drink with them. A good organizer has no relationship with thieves. You do the job and go your separate ways,” he said.

  Paul told me about all kinds of talent he recruited. “Some of the men I worked with were incredible. There were specialists who could scale drainpipes, who could basically transform into the human fly. There were thieves so talented and graceful that they could sneak into a bedroom with a sleeping couple and take a watch off the husband’s wrist; we called these guys ‘creepers.’ There were guys with blowtorches who could melt the lead around the windows of the old country houses and then simply remove the glass. It didn’t really matter how they did it. As long as no one got hurt and the prize came out of the house, the business model worked and I made my money.”

  Paul liked thieves because they were exactly what they said they were. “Thieves might not be the sharpest tools in the shed, but they get the job done and that’s all that matters. The burglar doesn’t pretend to be anything else. As I learned in the art world, this was refreshing.”

  DEMAND WAS THE other side of the organizer’s job, and without the antique dealers in Brighton’s Lanes and North Lanes, the business model Paul was pursuing would have dried up fast. “That was where you could bring your loot and get rid of it,” Paul said. Stealing art and antiques was the easy part of the game; selling them required a network, and Paul had grown up with the network all around him.

  While knockers were busy off-loading their junk to dealers for small profits, Paul became more and more interested in higher-quality items. And, it turned out, so were the dealers in Brighton. “Ask a gallery owner or a dealer how much they paid for something. They won’t tell you. If you’re savvy and you can find out the price they paid, then you ask them the real question, which is how much money do they want to earn on it.”

  Paul remembered seeing, as a young boy, lines of cars and vans with furniture tied to their rooftops, waiting to sell their wares to the cabal of dealers at the North Lanes. According to him, they were low-level players, middlemen themselves, and crucial when it came to buying stolen art and moving that art back up into the legitimate system. Just as important, these dealers carried it out beyond Brighton’s circle of police.

  “A lot of the dealers didn’t care whether what I was selling them was stolen or not. They would turn a blind eye. Nobody asks questions in the art world. It’s all about what you’re bringing to them. Because for these dealers, what we were bringing them was incredible. We’re talking about antiques and art that hadn’t seen the light of day for decades, sometimes centuries.

  “Price always tells you whether something has been stolen. If it came from a heavy-duty robbery, the price is low. Price denotes legitimacy.” So, for example, when Paul brought a clock to a dealer, if he was selling it for a fraction of its price, the dealer would immediately understand that it was stolen. “But it doesn’t matter. This is a good deal. They always bought it. The dealers I dealt with didn’t care if it was pried from the dead hand of a grandmother.”

  Paul was also expanding his network of dealers, out of necessity. “I’d call recognizable stuff ‘sticky-out stuff,’ because it sticks out like a sore thumb. Paintings normally fall into this category. I would save a few things for foreign buyers. At the same time I was buying other recognizable stuff from other organizers and thieves, who knew I could handle it. I’d buy it for cheap. Recognizable material is always sold for a fraction of its worth. So, a stolen painting that might be worth $100,000 could be bought for $10,000. Ten per cent. Or if I bought it from a thief it would be even less. I’d pay $3,000 or $4,000, maybe 3 or 4 per cent of its value. It’s a hooky price.

  “Foreign buyers I sold to always knew if something had been stolen. I could tell them. Or, if I bent my finger a certain way, that was the sign. Crooked. A crooked finger. Get it?

  “More and more foreign buyers started calling on me. It would work like this. Brighton was famous for its antiques, and so a foreign buyer might visit Brighton and hire a driver for the day. He might meet me on the street near the Lanes. I might have a van full of stuff. At the time, Volvo station wagons were a favourite. And foreign buyers loved us, because the knocker-boys were discovering stuff that really hadn’t been on the market before.” Foreign buyers helped spread stolen goods around the world. They were a great laundry machine. The groups Paul dealt with were mostly Americans, Dutch, and Germans, sometimes Italians, and the odd Portuguese buyer. “They were a line to the collectors of the world,” said Paul.

  “Most collectors from the middle to high range don’t actually go and collect themselves. They are not in the know. They have dealers that scout for them, and so the dealers who came over and bought goods could take them back to their own country and sell them for a huge profit. Once a work of art crosses an ocean it doesn’t matter if it’s stolen. It’s cleansed. You could have a dealer come to Brighton or London and buy a painting for $10,000. Then he might bring it back and sell it to a specialist in nineteenth-century paintings for $20,000, who then has access to a small group of collectors who value that type of painting and who are willing to pay substantially more for it,” Paul said.

  “Back then, you didn’t have the Internet. Crossing international lines really meant self-laundering stolen work. Foreign dealers have been working this way for 150 years. How do you think a lot of those antiques got to America? The whole point of moving stolen art is to get it to an end user—a rich person who will hang it up on their wall for years, maybe decades, maybe until they die. Then their children inherit the stolen painting. Then the trouble starts.”

  Paintings were different, though. “Paintings were a niche market. They were something I had to learn more about, because if you’re ever going to buy or steal a million-dollar work of art, it’s going to be a painting,” he said.

  “With almost every other piece of art or antique it would be obvious what it was worth,” Paul explained. “On paintings you co
uld make an amazing profit if the seller didn’t understand what they were in possession of. If someone had a painting in the family for two hundred years, they might not realize that it was special or valuable,” Paul said. “A diamond ring is obvious. A little ten-inch by six-inch landscape could be worth millions and not necessarily look like it at all.”

  Paul realized there were limitations to working in Brighton, and while he was selling to dealers, he was also studying their system. When he sold a piece to a dealer in Brighton, that piece might not stay with that dealer. Instead, it could be passed along the chain very quickly to other dealers in the vicinity, or it might travel to the other hub, London. “Pass the hot potato, right?” he said. Dealers, he figured out, were just another bridge to a vast network that had its own socio-economic structure. Paul’s success had always relied on circumnavigating, and soon he saw a chance to do that again.

  By 1981 Paul had saved up £10,000 from knocking, hiring thieves to steal on his behalf, and using the network of dealers in Brighton to launder his product. “I became very good at a bad thing,” Paul said. “Actually, I became ruthless. Margaret Thatcher had swept to power in Britain in 1979, her Conservative Party preaching an aggressive brand of capitalism. These were the eighties. It was a decade of excess, and I was a pure, cutthroat capitalist. We were a vacuous society. And we all regarded ourselves as Thatcher’s stormtroopers. If I’d grown up in a poor Cockney family in East London and made my way up the ladder, I would have been one of those aggressive stock traders who would do anything I could to earn a dollar. As it happened, I grew up in Brighton, and I became a handler of stolen art. It’s all about geography and politics. That was what Brighton had to offer me. I wanted to earn my daily bread. And if I had to do it dishonestly, well, I did.”

  Paul wanted to keep expanding his business, so he set his eyes on London, the economic centre of his new trade. “It was that dark road,” he told me. “I just followed that road, and it led me to London.” But as he knew by then, there were other criminals operating in the art world who weren’t willing to network or to use volume to earn a decent profit. Instead, some thieves were looking for big, easy scores. They walked into museums and art galleries and ripped paintings right off the wall. “Headache Art,” as Paul had coined it.

  He read about cases like these in the newspapers. “These kinds of guys can be real morons,” Paul said. “They don’t follow that golden rule: Stay under the radar.” Paul drove to London looking for a larger network and bigger profits, not quite sure what to expect.

  7.

  HEADACHE ART

  “Those were some of the most difficult days of my life.”

  GILES WATERFIELD

  GILES WATERFIELD, director of the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London, was supposed to be relaxing. He woke up in Scotland on his first holiday that year, excited about attending the Edinburgh International Festival—music, poetry, literature. He hadn’t even left a telephone number where he could be contacted by staff.

  Waterfield was out of bed by 9 AM and strolled from the art dealer’s apartment where he was staying to nearby Waverley train station, where he bought a copy of The Times. He scanned the front page of the most venerated newspaper in England. The date was August 15, 1981. “It was right there in bold letters: ‘Rembrandt Stolen for Third Time,’” remembered Waterfield.

  Waterfield and I met because my younger sister was studying art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. Waterfield was her professor and thesis adviser, and she mentioned to him that I was in the middle of writing a book about international art theft. “I didn’t realize that Giles was the director of Dulwich when it had a Rembrandt stolen,” she told me. “And apparently it was the third or fourth time that painting was stolen. If you want to talk to him, he said he’d be willing to tell you about his experience. I think it was a ransom case,” she said.

  “It is a director’s worst nightmare to have a famous painting stolen from their gallery,” Waterfield told me when we sat down at a pub around the corner from his apartment on a damp London afternoon. Waterfield is in his mid-fifties, trim, with a tuft of grey hair and very calm, considered blue eyes.

  Reading the article on the front page was slightly humiliating, he recounted: a high-profile theft, and of a painting that had previously been stolen—twice. Dulwich Gallery came off as irresponsible, and now one of the stars of its collection was gone for the third time. Waterfield clicked through the two earlier thefts, although both had taken place before he was director of Dulwich.

  “The first took place on New Year’s Eve 1966, I believe. Ten paintings, including the Rembrandt, were stolen.” A major bank robbery had also taken place in London around the same time. The stolen works were later recovered at Streatham Common, in a bag under a bush. “Much speculation was given to the idea that the bank robbers had stolen the paintings as an insurance policy and traded them with the police for a favour.” That was the rumour, but it was never proven. “Everyone was just happy the art came back.”

  The second time the Rembrandt was stolen was less sinister but more bizarre. “It was an eccentric theft,” noted Waterfield. The portrait disappeared in the middle of the day, during business hours. When staff members saw the blank space on the wall, they got into a car and drove around the neighbourhood, searching for a suspect. A few streets away they saw a man with a large beard riding a bicycle up a hill. There was a package in the bicycle’s basket, about the size of the stolen painting. A staff member pulled up the car beside the bicycle and asked, “Excuse me. What do you have in your bicycle basket?”

  The man admitted it was, in fact, Rembrandt’s portrait of Jacob de Gheyn iii. He didn’t try to outrun them on his bike. Instead he complained that the gallery was always closed at the most inconvenient times. He planned to copy it and then return it to the gallery. He didn’t understand what all the fuss was about. The police didn’t press charges.

  Now the painting was gone again—for the third time—and Waterfield’s vacation was over. He was on the next train back to London.

  Dulwich Picture Gallery sits back from the road on a lawn dotted with trees. Opened in 1817, it is widely considered to have been the first public art gallery in Britain. In 1981 Dul-wich had recently reopened after a renovation, and it was Waterfield’s mission to garner the gallery more attention. That wasn’t a problem anymore. “The media were all over us. And so were the police.” He remembered looking at the empty spot on the wall. “There was a sense of real violation,” he told me.

  Dulwich held a major old-master collection of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century paintings, and one of the main draws was the Rembrandt room, which held several paintings by the revered Dutch artist, including the now missing portrait. Staff knew it as Gallery Eleven. Waterfield had last seen the painting three days earlier. He knew it well: he’d spent hours looking at Jacob’s face. Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn had painted the portrait of Jacob de Gheyn on wood early in his career. Born on July 15, 1606, the artist was the son of a miller and a baker, one of nine children. He hit success young as a portraitist but died poor, outliving his wife and son. In death he became one of the most treasured painters in history, and one of the most popular among art criminals—close to two hundred Rembrandts are listed as stolen.

  The portrait at Dulwich was a well-known easy target. The frame hung on just two hooks, for a reason: “The hanging system was designed for easy removal so that even an idiot could move it if there was a fire,” explained Waterfield. When I strolled into Gallery Eleven, the portrait was the first in sight, facing me. It hung at chest level and was small compared to most of the works in the room. So small, in fact, that it was easy to understand the inclination to grab it off the wall and run. Jacob stares out darkly from the glistening canvas, almost daring you, “Take me.”

  “There was one piece of good news,” Waterfield told me. “Two of the thieves had been caught on camera.” But as the days passed Waterfield lost hope. The media decamped. So d
id the police. Dulwich went from circus to graveyard. For eleven days nothing happened. Every once in a while Waterfield would get a phone call from a friend wanting to commiserate. He got used to these calls. On the morning of Tuesday, August 25, Waterfield was sitting at his desk in the gallery when the phone rang. He assumed it was another pity call.

  “Is this the managing director of the gallery?” The voice was male, with a foreign accent.

  “Yes, I’m the director,” Waterfield answered.

  The voice said, “I am a German businessman and I act as a broker. I deal in pictures, sometimes for private clients in America interested in very high-quality works.” He told Waterfield that a person was offering to sell him a Rembrandt painting for a million pounds.

  “It is a portrait of Jacob de Gheyn,” said the voice. “I have looked it up in a catalogue of Rembrandt paintings, and I see it belongs to you.”

  Waterfield stayed calm, his voice steady. “It has been stolen from us,” he said.

  “Oh. I have not seen any newspaper report of the theft,” said the voice. “I would like to help you but I need to discuss it with you further.” Then he asked, “Can you fly to Amsterdam tomorrow to talk about it?”

  The question floated in Waterfield’s mind for a moment.

  “Yes, I think so,” he answered. Of course he could. It was his Rembrandt. He’d do whatever the man on the phone commanded.

  “Is the picture insured?” the voice asked.

  “No, because the premiums are too expensive for the gallery, but there is a reward.”