Hot Art

by Joshua Knelman

  A few months after the Paris theft, a van Gogh painting titled Poppy Flowers (and worth more than $50 million) was stolen from a museum in Egypt. It was the second time that particular van Gogh had been stolen from the same museum. The first theft took place in 1978, and the painting was recovered two years later, in Kuwait. Now it was gone again. A few months later eleven employees from the Ministry of Culture were sentenced to prison for gross negligence and incompetence for not adequately protecting the van Gogh. The painting, though, remained at large. Paul noted that a reward was offered by Naguib Sawiris, an Egyptian billionaire, but it was puny compared to the actual worth of the artwork.

  Paul blogged:

  Can you believe the balls of this guy? He is a billionaire and the cheapskate offers $175,000 reward for a $55 million Van Gogh. That’s 0.3 % of the value. Get the fuck outta here. To be fair he is just following orders from art loss investigators and Egyptian authorities. It is called the psychology of low worth. Meaning if the thieves cannot hook into the stolen art underworld then the hope is they will become desperate and take anything that is on offer. The same thing happened on the Swiss art thefts in 2008 when the Cezanne and Degas were stolen from the eg Buehrle Collection, a private museum in Zurich and are worth $150 million. The reward offered by the eg Buehrle museum remains $90,000. I hasten to add the Cezanne and Degas have not been recovered to date. This guy Sawiris and authorities must have been smoking too much Egyptian hubble-bubble pipe, or been sucking on old Grandpa’s cough medicine. Drunk or stoned Sawiris and authorities cannot be serious, and if anyone comes forward they deserve all the jail time they will get. Who in their right mind is going to come forward with information when the prospect of actually getting this poultry reward is remote, to say the least, and added to that, $175,000 for a $55 million Van Gogh.

  It was classic Art Hostage: advice to criminals couched in prose worthy of The Sopranos.

  On September 1, 2010, almost four years after his first Art Hostage post, Paul added one more article to the site—and then his blog went unnervingly quiet. Several weeks passed with no new posts.

  This was very weird. Paul and “quiet” didn’t belong in the same sentence. I wondered where he had gone and sent him a few emails. There was no response. This was also weird. Paul was an attentive pen pal; he usually responded within the hour, if not the day. The art theft blogosphere started to feel lonely. Where would I go to read about the latest bizarre criminal news?

  In late October 2010, I emailed Richard Ellis asking for news of Paul. Ellis and Paul had had a complex relationship, but I knew they stayed in touch. I received a reply the next day from the former head of Scotland Yard’s Art and Antiques Unit:

  Paul (aka James Walsh) is at present on holiday staying at one of Her Majesty’s prisons on account of having been found guilty of Benefits Fraud. He ran as his defence an explanation for double claiming that he had been authorized to do so whilst acting as a registered informant for the police. As he had not been registered with the police for some years and had never been authorized by them to claim any benefits he was duly convicted and sent to prison for 15 months.

  I felt a knot in my stomach. Paul had been caught for theft twice and had told me he was extremely happy, relieved, that he’d never had to serve any time in prison. “I really never wanted to go to prison, and I never did,” he gloated once. “Art thieves get a slap on the wrist, that’s part of the problem.” It was hard for me to imagine Paul in a cell.

  By then I had been talking to him for close to three years. At various points I’d asked him if I could come and visit, and he’d said yes. For one reason or another, I kept having to postpone the trip. I emailed him again, but there was no response. The Art Hostage site was still up in cyberspace, but its archived collection of news articles and commentary were now frozen.

  Then, a few months later, I received an email from Paul: “Hi Josh, I’m back. Call me.”

  We scheduled another phone appointment.

  “Hal-loh? So, did you hear what happened?”

  Paul said he had been released on parole. As usual, he’d worked the system and become a model prisoner. He’d stayed for three and a half months at HMP Ford, where prison riots had broken out just before the New Year. Paul said he had helped put a man on a stretcher to be carried out. When we talked, he said he’d decided to cool off a bit before posting anything on Art Hostage. I asked him if this would be a good time to come and visit.

  “Are you kidding? I have a tracer around my ankle, and can only leave the house between 7 AM and 7 PM. There’s never been a better time to come and visit. I have no choice, I am here ... a captive audience.” I booked a ticket to London.

  BEFORE I VISITED Paul, I scheduled a meeting with Richard Ellis.

  The former detective met me at the Wallace Collection, a private gallery that could not be more British-elite. Housed in a grand brick manor, it holds one of the finest collections of armour, swords, and shields in the United Kingdom. It also holds a number of masterworks by Rembrandt, Titian, and Velázquez. Ellis was sitting in the enclosed courtyard restaurant, just finishing up a meeting with a graduate student who was writing a paper about art crime in the U.K.

  Ellis was his usual self: quiet, observant, level-headed. He greeted me warmly and asked who else I was interviewing while in London. I mentioned Julian Radcliffe, and Paul.

  “You’re seeing Paul?” he said, surprised. “So he’s out of prison, is he?”

  “He is, apparently.”

  Ellis mulled it over. “I didn’t realize that,” he said. Then he smiled to himself. “Please tell Paul hello for me. Tell him, let bygones be bygones.”

  We spent about an hour together, during which we had a wide-ranging conversation about art theft. I asked Ellis if he really considered himself retired, and he said yes. Then his mobile rang; it was a detective from a police division outside of London. He said into the phone, “I just wanted to find out how the investigation was going on that burglary we were talking about.” He was obviously still engaged at ground level with art theft cases here in Britain, perhaps the world. He told me he kept in touch with Bill Martin, Hrycyk’s mentor, who had moved to Oregon and started a company. The two had become good friends and talked often.

  Midway through our conversation we left the Wallace and walked a few blocks to a small pub, where Ellis bought me a pint of Tribute, a beer made by the brewery his family started almost two hundred years ago. We raised our glasses. Ellis said he’d grown up in a solid middle-class family and that his parents had emphasized culture. “That’s helped me a lot in the art world. I’m not upper class, but I know my way around that world. I can get into that world when I need to. I am comfortable with that world.”

  I asked him if he’d ever come up against a situation where the powerful forces of the elite had aligned against his detective work. His answer was yes. Once, he’d been investigating a very large and influential company that was in possession of a valuable collection of stolen antiquities. The Art and Antiques unit spent months building the case, and just when it was set to go to court, word came down from above that there would be no prosecution. Instead, there would be an out-of-court settlement. “It was the first time I realized I was over my head.” Ellis smiled. “We had the evidence.” He said the out-of-court settlement was large—in the tens of millions. “But had we gone to court, it may have bankrupted the company,” he added, sipping his family beer.

  “I’m thinking of writing a book myself,” he said. “I’m not quite sure where to start, but I feel like I’ve got a book in me.” When we left the pub, Ellis shook my hand. Again, he said, “And you will say hi to Paul for me? Okay?”

  ON A GREY London morning I rode a train from Victoria Station an hour and forty minutes to Eastbourne, a retirement community shooting distance from the big city. Paul was standing at the turnstile. I waved from the platform, and he waved back. I’d seen pictures of him, and we had Skyped a couple of times. He looked different now, in pe
rson. He’d lost weight, was taller than I imagined, about six feet two, and had piercing blue eyes. His face still held the openness of a boy’s. He looked friendly and totally unthreatening. Paul stuck his big hand out. “Hal-loh. Ride okay? Come right this way, the car’s just there.”

  He pointed to a black Mercedes in the station parking lot, the most expensive car in sight. The licence plate read, OHO8 art. The OH stood for Oliver Hendry, his teenage son, who was in the front seat of the car, watching his father entertain what I’m sure was another in a long line of journalists, broadcasters, and other characters who journeyed to Eastbourne for a private audience with the online godfather of stolen art.

  Paul nodded at the Mercedes. “I bought it from a former diplomat who had to get rid of it,” he told me. He opened the door to the tanned leather interior, and I climbed in. When Paul closed the door, he didn’t shut it all the way, so I opened it again and pulled harder. “No! No! These are automatic power doors,” he laughed. “See . . .” Then he opened the door and gently pushed it toward the body of the car. The door, as promised, closed on its own, locking into place with a quiet click.

  Paul pulled out of the station. “It’s about a fifteen-minute ride from here,” he said. As we cruised through Eastbourne he commented, “It’s a boring place, really. Not much to look at, wouldn’t ya say?” It reminded me of his rule—always stay under the radar.

  “So, you wound up in a retirement community?”

  “Exactly,” Paul said. “A sleepy little town. What better place for a retired thief to end up? I like it here. It’s very quiet, out of the way. I stay out of London if I can help it.”

  We turned down a small road with modest houses that ended at the sea. Paul’s house, the last on the block, faced the waves. There was an overcast sky, a pebble beach that reminded me of Brighton, and a pub just next door with a view of the water. Home. Paul parked the Mercedes in front of his house, between his front door and the sea. The outside doors and windows had drawn shades—every one. In the kitchen, beside a row of empty champagne bottles on the counter, he pulled up his pant leg to show an electronic bracelet fastened to his ankle.

  “I cannot take this off. I shower with it on. Everything. So they can track me at all times,” he said. “It’s not so bad. It’s better than prison.”

  Then we walked outside again. We looked for a moment at the water, and then went next door, for lunch. Inside, everyone knew his name. “Hey, Paul.” “Good afternoon, Paul.” “How are you, Paul?”

  “Do they know about your career?” I asked.

  “Most of them know,” he said. “They’ve seen me interviewed, with television crews and all that.”

  Paul ordered steak, shrimp, mashed potatoes, steamed greens, and salad for both of us. Then he got down to business. “So you’re finishing your book. That’s great news. You know I want to write my own book, and now I have an agent in Los Angeles. And, to be honest with you, I’m worried your book has too much in it about me,” he said. “I need to know there will be more to tell. That I can tell it.”

  I agreed that he was heavily featured in my book, and I had assumed that would be good news for him. “When we first exchanged emails,” I said, “you asked me to identify you as an expert on global art theft. Well, by the end of this book, that is exactly what I say you are. I say that you are one of the very few people on the planet who understands how global art theft works, and who can talk about the issues with a sense of confidence and expertise.”

  Paul cut into his steak. “Look,” he said. “To be honest with you, we’ve known each other too long to bullshit about these things. Am I right? I just want to make sure I can write my own book, my own story.” His book, Paul said, was just one in a series of commercial enterprises he was exploring. He told me he’d been engaged in negotiations, through his new agent, with a number of television producers on different ideas for projects. He also told me about a friend of his, a master jewel thief in Canada, who had sold his life rights for tens of thousands of dollars. Now that Paul was out of prison, he wanted to make some business decisions about how to move forward. He was, in a way, transforming himself once again. He’d come a long way from the cocky kid roaming the streets of Brighton. He was now hunting for a post–Art Hostage career.

  I asked him if he’d read Robert Wittman’s book, Priceless.

  “I’m expecting an autographed copy in the mail,” Paul said. “I hear he sold the movie rights.”

  We dropped the subject after lunch and walked back to his house. “I’ll give you the tour,” he smiled. The first thing I noticed was that there was art everywhere—on the walls, stacked up against the walls. It wasn’t what I was expecting.

  “This is all art that's been bought—honestly—over the years. I mean, the police have been through here a few times. You’ll notice some of the paintings have little round stickers on them. Those stickers are to show that they’ve already been inspected by police and are not stolen. It used to be that some of them had two or three stickers on them,” he laughed. “It’s like I told you. Don’t ever keep anything that’s stolen. Always pass it on immediately.”

  His collection was varied: a lot of older works, portraits, some pre-Impressionist paintings, and, in the stairwell, a collection of French military portraits. “This is the whole collection of this series,” he said. “If you possess one or two, they’re not worth very much... but the more you have in one series, the higher their value. This is the entire series here,” Paul explained, pointing at French soldiers on horses, carrying bayonets. We passed them on the way up the stairs to his bedroom, which was also crowded with art: portraits and landscapes, some of them in beautiful ornate frames. What’s that? I asked, pointing at one. “It’s from the school of Renoir. You know, all these artists had students, and young painters would mimic their work. From the school of ...”

  Paul showed me his Rolex watches, as promised: one silver, one gold. “I don’t really wear them often anymore,” he said. “Too flash for me now, to be honest with you.”

  Then he led me back downstairs. We went into a room populated by a series of large works by Joseph Maxwell, a Scottish artist with whom Paul had become friends years ago. Every painting in the room was a large work, and one, he pointed out, was unfinished. On a desk were framed photos of Paul and Oliver in Maxwell’s studio. Paul showed me one of the letters the artist had written to him. I noticed that it was addressed to Paul Walsh. I had come to know Paul as Paul Hendry.

  “Yah, that’s just another name I go by sometimes. Hendry, Walsh, it’s a long story, and has to do with my complicated family upbringing. . . The adoption and all that.” Next to the Maxwell room was the living room, with a couch, ashtray, and large-screen television. He turned it on. “I usually have this tuned to Bloomberg during the day, while I’m at work,” he said. “But, if I hear a knock at the door. . .” He pressed a button on the TV remote and the screen transformed into four security-camera views showing various angles of the outside of his house. “That’s impressive,” I said. “So, you know who’s out there at all times.”

  “It’s just an extra precaution,” Paul said. “I was in the middle of having the system installed when the police raided my house.” He laughed. We both eyed the perfect view of the Mercedes parked outside.

  “So let me show you the study where it all happens,” he said. “This is where Art Hostage lives.” And he led me into a small room with a desk, a computer, a plush office chair, a broken-down couch, and a built-in bookshelf crammed with books about art theft. Titles included Art Cop, Museum of the Missing, The Irish Game, Thieves of Baghdad, The Gardner Heist, and The Rescue Artist, by Edward Dolnick. There was also a copy of The Lost Museum by Hector Feliciano, and The Rape of Europa, by Lynn Nicholas, considered the most authoritative investigation on Holocaust-looted artworks. Lying on the couch was The Encyclopedia of Popular Antiques.

  On the wall behind the desk were two framed diplomas from the University of Sussex: one for a ba in America
n Social Studies, the other for an MA in Contemporary History. On the wall directly across from his desk was a large poster of Vermeer’s The Concert, the painting stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

  Beside the desk, near the door, was a beautiful wooden display case. “Irish secretary bookcase,” Paul explained. “And in decent condition.” Then he looked at the objects in the room and his eyes landed on his desk. “And, if you’re curious, that’s a California-model desk ordered from Staples.”

  He sat down at his computer, which a friend had custom-made for him. “It’s a powerful machine, packed with terabytes. It’s fast,” he said.

  Paul opened up his Art Hostage account. He had ways of seeing who visited the site, he said, and kept files on some of his viewers—their email addresses and IP information. “See, I can pinpoint pretty closely who’s watching,” he said. He showed me some of his more interesting followers. There were hits from the FBI, the Justice Department, the U.S. military. Someone from Jerry Bruckheimer Films had been reading his blog. Eyes from all over the world checked Art Hostage: Canada, Switzerland, Russia, Bosnia, Serbia. “The Montenegro hits are probably from someone in the Pink Panthers,” Paul said. “Remember, thieves have egos too. And they like to know what’s being written about them.”

  I asked Paul how it was that he could easily see that the FBI was looking at his site. “They are so funny. They don’t turn off their cookies function. So some guy at the FBI is at his laptop, and he’s leaving fingerprints all over his Internet searches,” said Paul. “I mean, to be honest with you, if I can gather all this info, and I’m just me, some guy in a room in England who doesn’t have all that much education into technology, imagine what someone who knows what they’re doing could be gathering. Like terrorists, right?”