The detective said that, in general, all crimes where art was involved were on the rise, and yet, from his experience interviewing art dealers, most dealers still saw almost no benefit in talking to the police, because it was “one-way information.” What the detective meant was that art dealers found that if they reported a crime or suspect behaviour or a stolen painting, the police often took that information but gave none in return. The dealers also complained that the police showed a lack of understanding when it came to the art world—the delicate relationships that dealers formed with clients, the value of being discreet, and a basic respect for the artwork itself.
In some cases, Lacoursière said, paintings suspected of being stolen were seized from a dealer or gallery by police but the police provided no way for the merchant to recoup the loss. There was also often little or no follow-up from police. On the subject of provenance, dealers and art galleries stated that they did not have the resources to conduct proper searches on work in their galleries. In the end this was about money and reputation, and police didn’t understand that.
Lacoursière’s summary of the relationship between stolen art and larger institutions, such as museums, was similar. Even with all the global media coverage of art thefts, museums were still reticent to report when a piece from their collection was stolen. There were many good reasons for that, he said, and they were similar to those of art galleries and dealers: attracting attention to the crime eroded the trust of donors or artists who gave their work to the museum to safeguard. This cult of secrecy, Lacoursière noted, was encouraged by some insurance companies, which struck quiet deals with museums, advising that going public after a theft damaged the museum’s claim and harmed the institution’s reputation. Some insurers even suggested that to reveal the criminal act encouraged art thieves. More importantly, it frightened away future donors.
This secretive behaviour was the exact opposite of how Lacoursière believed dealers and institutions should react to a theft. Silence, he said, was an advantage to thieves. “It has taken a long time for us to get gallery owners who have had art stolen to talk to us,” he said. “At first they didn’t want to. But for the past three years, they’ve started to. That’s why Jean-François and I have opened three hundred new cases in Quebec since 2004.”
Lacoursière had been investigating art thefts and related crimes for long enough that he was confident in his own knowledge and investigation skills. “We have a very good picture of what’s happening in the criminal world in terms of art,” he said, nodding. “Criminals use art in many different ways, for many different purposes. And we know who the criminals are. We know the Mafia and biker gangs have specialists for telemarketing, for fraud, for credit cards, and now they have specialists for art too.”
“You have to remember that for the most part police don’t have time for this kind of work, and they don’t know anything about this world. So the Mafia and biker gangs have been free to operate through galleries and auction houses for many years,” he said. “There are twenty-five full-time art thieves working in this country that I know of,” he added. “I arrested a guy who has been in prison in seven different countries, and he told me, ‘I like Canada. If I get caught here, you have the nicest prisons.’”
I next met Lacoursière on his home turf, on a damp June afternoon in 2007, inside a Montreal courthouse, the Palais de Justice. He was testifying against a con man who had stolen $100,000 worth of art from an artist. The man on trial was the boyfriend of a two-time Olympic gold medal winner, Myriam Bédard. Later that day, he was found guilty. The detective and I sat in the waiting area during a court break, and he looked around at the people leaving the court. “Criminals come here to learn,” he said. “To ask, ‘how did this person get caught?’ I saw a well-known art criminal here, at this trial, yesterday.”
When I asked what his most valuable asset is, Lacoursière reached into his suit jacket and extracted his phone. The detective’s compact computer held thousands of email addresses, including many of the world’s cultural experts, art lawyers, and agents with the FBI, Scotland Yard, and Interpol. It also held the email addresses, phone numbers, and in some cases photographs of dozens of criminals he’d arrested or made contact with over the previous fifteen years. “Every time I arrest a guy, I ask, ‘What’s your email address?’” His database included hundreds of pictures of stolen and forged artwork—all the information at his fingertips when he needed it. Lacoursière had mirrored Hrycyk’s Crime Alert system, independently. Both detectives had spent hours exploring the community and building their databases—gathering information. Lacoursière’s name for it even sounded like Hrycyk’s.
“This is all part of what I call ‘Art Alert,’ an early-warning system,” he said. The idea was, of course, to share as much information as possible with as many people in the art community as possible, fast, in order to keep up with the organized criminal element that was trading in stolen art. One case Lacoursière was tracking at that time involved four men with links to organized crime who had used stolen credit cards to go on a shopping spree, visiting over thirty art galleries across Montreal and buying dozens of paintings with a total value of over $2 million. According to a source, Lacoursière said, some of those paintings had already been smuggled to Israel and Australia. “I can’t fly there myself at a given moment. That’s what Art Alert is for. It’s faster for me to send an email to a contact there. But first I have to have made a contact.”
Lacoursière knew who was running the international operation: a criminal mastermind he’d been hunting for years, someone who moves in global circles. “We can’t touch him, though. He’s out of reach. Higher up. A collector. We know him well, and he knows us. He calls us by our first names. This man is a distinguished citizen of Montreal, and we’ve received information about him before, but we can’t move on it. It’s information that comes from a criminal source, and what’s the word of a criminal worth against a distinguished collector?”
Lacoursière and Talbot had tracked their suspect’s movements all the way to Costa Rica, but when they contacted the police there they received resistance. “The police in Costa Rica told me, this family you’re looking at, they are well known and well respected.” In fact, the hunt for seemingly respectable citizens was a recurring theme for the detective.
Lacoursière remembers serving an arrest warrant once at an opening at the Musée des Beaux-Arts. “I ran into the director of the museum at the party, and he said to me, ‘Hi Alain, what are you doing here?’”
“I came to serve an arrest warrant,” Lacoursière answered.
The director looked surprised and asked to whom. The detective pointed to a man across the room.
“No, no, there must be some mistake,” said the director. “I know him well.”
Just like Hrycyk, Lacoursière invented his Art Alert system as a way to pry open the often-closed world he was trying to clean up. When a painting is stolen he sends an email to everyone in the world he thinks should be aware of the theft, including his roster of international criminals. “So that they know that I know,” he said, and raised an eyebrow.
“You see, we reversed the system. We take it straight to the criminals. We get a tip by email and we get it out there, to all the criminals in my database, as well as the gallery owners and dealers.”
Art Alert emails are accompanied by a message from the detective, in both French and English, that drives home his emphasis on community policing:
Welcome to the new interactive tool implemented by the Sûreté du Québec to support the exchange of information between the art market community and art investigation services. You will receive emails on a regular basis providing up-to-date information on art theft, fraud and forgers, safety precautions for protecting your property, or any other relevant information relating to your functions. In return, we expect full cooperation on the part of all members of the artistic community receiving these messages, enabling us to collect any relevant information relating to our functions. Only by
truly cooperating will we manage to reduce art theft, fraud and trafficking, thereby also reducing the impact of these crimes on your activities.
The detective admits that in the murky black market of art, “we are always a few steps behind the criminals. But five years ago we were ten steps behind. Now we’re three steps behind,” he said. “We have our own tools now. We go to gallery openings, because that’s where you find the crooks.”
Lacoursière continued, “Criminals now have a lot of tools. They use auction houses and art galleries, and they are fast. A painting can be stolen here and sold across the world in a day. In those cases, it doesn’t work if I file a report to Interpol and wait for them to send out that information. That can take months. With Art Alert, I can email the auction houses directly. When I want to know something, I email Christie’s or Sotheby’s in New York and in London. They know me now, and they get back to me immediately.”
The criminal system, though, has evolved too. “Some art galleries are owned by the Mafia, and other organized crime groups,” the detective explained. “It’s a great business for them because there are very few people who understand the value of a painting. With art, you can just put an extra zero on the end and you’ve laundered money. Or you can pretend at income-tax time that you made all this money, or lost money, depending. You can pretend that you bought a painting for $1,000, but in reality it was a Riopelle and you sold it for $100,000. It’s impossible for anyone to find out.”
In Quebec, art theft and crimes related to the black market are worth about $20 million annually, according to Lacoursière’s data, but no statistics are available for any other province in Canada, because there is no other officer like him. That is why Lacoursière’s work is so valuable. Just like Hrycyk, he’s generating information where there was none. He echoes Robert Wittman’s sentiments about recovery, which he says is more important than making an arrest. “My priority is always to get the stolen painting back. My bosses know that, though they don’t always share my opinion,” said Lacoursière. The FBI’s Art Crime Team reports its recovery rate at less than 9 per cent, but most international experts put the number far lower, below 5 per cent. Lacoursière said that thanks to staying in close communication with the arts community in Quebec, his recovery rate was now 15 per cent.
I also visited Lacoursière at his office at the Sûreté du Québec—a monolith of a structure surrounded by high barbed-wire fences in east-end Montreal. He was just a few months away from retirement and in the process of handing over the reins to Detective Talbot—his legacy. The two men came down to meet me at the security-check line, where I emptied my pockets and passed through the metal detectors. Lacoursière wore a loose-fitting black jacket, black shirt, black belt, black handkerchief, and his eyes were framed by black glasses; he looked like an artist.
He took me for a quick tour upstairs, on the second floor, where he and Talbot shared a space with the fraud squad—a bullpen. Lacoursière pointed to a painting by John Little that had been stolen in 1989 and recovered in 2007. It was worth about $25,000. Beside his desk was another painting that looked very much like a Riopelle—a beautiful fake he had confiscated.
Next we went down to the cafeteria, where Lacoursière and Talbot settled on a table near the back, facing a large window with sunlight streaming in. I asked the detectives to compare their departments with other police forces around the globe that have art investigators. Lacoursière listed the FBI Art Crime Team, Scotland Yard’s Art and Antiques Squad, Italy’s Carabinieri, and Interpol. He did not mention Hrycyk and the LAPD Art Theft Detail. He did note with surprise that Toronto did not have its own art theft squad, which was strange, because it was a larger market than Montreal—totally unpatrolled.
Lacoursière: “When I fly to Toronto for a case, I’m referred to the Fraud Squad. In the U.S., they say there are fifteen FBI agents working on this problem, but it’s just not true. Most of those agents aren’t specialized in art. They work other cases. In Montreal, we only have two full-time investigators, and we get into the scene. We visit each gallery and institution at least twice a year: 250 galleries, 100 museums, across Quebec. If we’re looking for someone, we always bring photographs. Or we beam them out on email: ‘Do you know this guy?’”
Talbot: “Of course, the galleries and dealers want to protect their market. They want to protect their clients. But when we help them, they change their attitude.”
Lacoursière interjected, “We rarely need to expose a source. I will always burn myself before exposing a witness.”
The detectives told me the trend that year was break-and-enters: galleries, auction houses, and private homes. Those constituted 50 per cent of their cases, especially in high-end neighbourhoods like Westmount and Outremont.
Lacoursière: “They go there for the art.”
A recent gallery break-in during daytime hours involved three men. One came in first, just to look around. Then two more, with ski masks, entered, one of them carrying a gun. They settled on three paintings, which they shoved into a garbage bag. When they left the gallery, the three walked for half a mile through downtown Montreal then disappeared into the Métro.
Lacoursière sent out pictures captured on the gallery’s security camera, using Art Alert. The men were identified by a secret source. One had a history of armed robbery, another was known for violent crimes, and the third had a history with the fraud squad. Criminals in Canada, Lacoursière was saying, were migrating from other areas of specialty to art theft. And because gallery security was soft, paintings were excellent targets.
Then the spectre of Lacoursière’s imminent retirement came up. He had spent fifteen years building his unit.
Lacoursière: “I’m retiring at the end of this year. That’s it. I give up.”
Talbot: “He’s retiring, or at least he says he is. Who knows when he’ll do it. Maybe at the end of this year, maybe at the beginning of the next.” Talbot will take the lead of the art investigative unit. “I’m supposed to get a new partner, and a civilian who can manage the database,” said Talbot.
Lacoursière: “When I needed a partner, I had a choice. I hope it’s the same for Jean-François.” Talbot has a minor in psychology, which he said was very important for “understanding Alain.” He smiled.
Lacoursière: “I still don’t understand myself.”
Talbot: “We’ve worked together for five years and put together all the systems we need. They are all in place. And Alain will be available.”
Lacoursière: “Sure I will, for approximately $250 an hour.”
LACOURSIÈRE RETIRED at the end of 2008. A year and a half later I attended a museum security conference at the Ontario College of Art & Design in Toronto. Two detectives from the Quebec squad were guest speakers. Jean-François Talbot was their boss, but he was not there that afternoon—the unit had expanded under his guidance and now employed three full-time art investigators. The two detectives had prepared a PowerPoint presentation for their lecture, and they covered a few of the cases that Lacoursière and Talbot had worked as well as a few new ones, including a stolen painting from Alberta that had travelled across the country, sold from dealer to dealer, and been recovered after five years.
Even though almost everyone in the room spoke only English, the host of the conference had agreed that the presentation could be made in French, and it was unclear how much information the audience actually picked up from the half-hour talk. My French is weak, but I followed along. The picture these detectives painted of the stolen art market in Canada was the same one depicted by Donald Hrycyk in Los Angeles, Richard Ellis in London, and Bonnie Czegledi in Toronto.
Their lecture opened with an error, though. The Quebec detectives said proudly that, except for the FBI, their squad was the only art investigation unit in North America. It was a sad statement, and it drove straight to the heart of how disorganized art recovery is. Had they really never heard of Hrycyk?
After the talk I caught the two detectives with their lu
ggage in tow, in the hallway. I asked them if they had ever heard of the LAPD Art Theft Detail. Neither had, but they were intrigued. I told them to look up the website. A few weeks later, I received a Crime Alert and an Art Alert on the same day, with the same picture of a Montreal suspect. The two groups had made contact; it had taken only twenty years.
The Montreal team should be a global example of how an art theft unit can work, but it’s isolated by language and by geography. Lacoursière developed an entire strategy around the black market, and it was effective. He should be touring the country—in fact, the globe—giving seminars on the information he mined and the cases he worked. Instead, he wrote a book, published only in French; when I went to my neighbourhood bookstore in Toronto, they did not have it in stock and would not order it, because they don’t deal in French titles.
Jean-François Talbot is a perfect example of how a legacy should work. He was brought in early, trained for five years with Lacoursière, had the support of the department, and was given resources and additional staff when Lacoursière retired. The Montreal unit is a law-enforcement gem, hidden away in the second-largest art market in Canada. In 2010 and 2011, I received almost fifty Art Alerts from Talbot. He was keeping busy, but he had still not built a website for his unit. On so many levels, this was a missed opportunity—as Hrycyk had demonstrated. In Los Angeles, the Art Theft Detail website had been directly responsible for millions in art recoveries. And, as any kid these days knows, if you want the world to see you and pay attention, you need to build a website and start blogging: the stronger your opinions, the better.
15.
ART HOSTAGE
“All those beautiful Hollywood films are out of date.”
TON CREMERS
IN SEPTEMBER 2006 an anonymous blogger called Art Hostage slipped onto the Internet, armed with controversial opinions about the state of international art theft. His Web page wasn’t attractive: no flashy advertisements, no electronic bling, just a business card–sized rectangle with the words Art Held Hostage in a crooked font. The g in hostage was a drawing of a pair of handcuffs. At the top of his homepage, Art Hostage had put a banner: “The only blog to do what it says on the tin, reveal the truth about art crime investigation.”
Hot Art Page 26
