Hot Art

by Joshua Knelman

  Back at his desk Hrycyk surveyed the stacks of files and those thick blue binders, filled with hundreds of pictures and reports of vanished artwork.

  “The vast majority of these cases are not solved, although that depends on the time period you’re looking at. After one year, we might have one recovery. After five years, we might have another. When I teach at the academy I tell the detectives that, despite perceptions, art is one of the best types of property crime to recover. In the press I read all the time that art is something that is never found. That has not been my experience,” he said.

  This afternoon the detectives’ bullpen was mostly empty; everyone was out in the city working cases. The detective turned away from his computer.

  “Whenever Stephanie and I make a recovery, everyone in our department becomes an art critic. We bring the art upstairs and they’ll peer at it. Sometimes they can’t get over how much money these pieces of art are worth. To be fair, to the layman’s eyes, it might look like crap. The other detectives are always interested in how something was made, the history of it,” he said.

  “You have to remember that, off duty, a lot of these people are writers and artists. I know one detective who retired from homicide and opened an antique store. Art can be commercial and incredibly popular. There were lines going out the door for the King Tut exhibit, or when there’s a Picasso show. Art isn’t just appreciated by the intelligentsia of the nation, it appeals to the average person.”

  The detective took that thought further. “A large number of average people put aside part of their paycheque to buy something because it is beautiful, because they appreciate art and beauty and want it in their homes and in their lives. From that comes a desire to understand more about it,” he said.

  “What we have found is that art, to many of the owners, has become a comfortable old friend. A painting is not just an inanimate object. As a result, this is exactly the kind of stolen property worth tracking down, even if there’s no chance of finding or arresting the thief,” he said.

  “This unit has been in existence for two decades, and we’re still trying to figure out how to do this. You have to look at the future,” he added. “These artworks will outlive everybody in this building right now.”

  Over the next year I checked in with Hrycyk every few months. In the spring of 2009, almost a year after my visit, the detective told me about one of the weirdest cases to cross his desk. As usual, it started with a phone call, this time from the son of a very wealthy and respected family that had been integral in establishing the cultural reputation of the metropolis.

  “They ran one of the great art galleries of this city, as well as building up a massive collection of contemporary art, including a number of Andy Warhols,” the detective said. In the early 1980s the family home was burglarized and five original Warhols were stolen. Shortly after the theft, details of the crime were reported to the LAPD, and the FBI National Stolen Art File.

  The son had followed his parents into the art business. For a time he owned a gallery in Los Angeles, and even after it closed he remained a prominent figure on the art scene. It was the son who contacted the detective. He said he’d found some of his family’s stolen Warhols.

  “More than twenty years after the initial theft, he was flipping through a catalogue for Christie’s when he spied what he was sure were two of the stolen family Warhols,” said Hrycyk. The paintings had appreciated in value, one selling for $130,000 and the other for $150,000.

  The detective compared the catalogue photos to the theft reports. They appeared to be the same silkscreens. He executed a search warrant for the Christie’s office in Los Angeles. “The staff at Christie’s were very co-operative,” said Hrycyk. “We seized the artworks.” Christie’s also supplied the name of the consignor. He was not a regular customer, but he lived in Los Angeles. The detective looked him up.

  His suspect was surprised to be talking to the police, and surprised as well to learn who had initiated the investigation. According to the man sitting across from Hrycyk, it was the son who’d sold him the Warhols in the first place, shortly after they’d been reported as stolen. “We couldn’t believe it, what the consignor was telling us,” said the detective.

  Hrycyk couldn’t tell which man was lying.

  According to a lie-detector test, it was the consignor who was telling the truth. “The man who took the polygraph didn’t make any bones about how he got a hold of these things. The Christie’s catalogue had the provenance listed, and the name of the son was in that provenance.”

  According to the consignor, the two had been friends; they’d partied together. “When he was seventeen years old, the son stole these Warhols from his family home and apparently traded them for a small amount of cocaine and a small amount of cash. It turned out not to be a wise business decision.”

  Twenty years later, when the son spotted the Warhols he’d sold for drugs and money, he decided he might be able to make them pay again. “The son had no idea that this guy was still in possession of the paintings. He believed the Warhols had gone through a number of different hands and that he was never in jeopardy of being discovered,” said Hrycyk. It was a calculated risk.

  “The son finally confessed to what he did,” said Hrycyk. “The theft was past the statute of limitations. And even though the son ripped off his mom, she didn’t want to prosecute him, because it would mean sending her own son to jail,” said Hrycyk.

  Another twist emerged. The son had also bought the other three stolen paintings, from a local art gallery. He’d never told his mother. “Here he is, in possession of his mother’s stolen art, knowing that she had made a crime report on these things. The paintings may end up being returned to the mother, and when she dies, the son might inherit them.” No charges were laid, but the case was solved.

  “It’s a strange world out there,” Hrycyk added. “Sometimes it’s hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys.”

  Not long after our conversation Hrycyk’s world became stranger.

  ON JUNE 5, 2009, Detective Stephanie Lazarus was sitting at her desk in Burglary Special when she received a call from a fellow LAPD detective. He had a man in the holding cell, a suspect in one of her investigations. Did Lazarus want to question him?

  Yes, she did. She headed downstairs.

  In the basement holding cell of Parker Center, Lazarus removed her firearm, as is required. She was questioned by homicide detectives and was then arrested for a murder in a cold case over twenty years old.

  In 1986, Lazarus was a rookie LAPD officer. That year, her ex-boyfriend’s wife was brutally beaten and killed. The only items stolen from the condominium building the night of the murder were the couple’s marriage certificate and their car. During the initial murder investigation, Lazarus was dismissed as a suspect, even though she knew the victim and, in fact, had been accused of harassing the couple.

  The victim’s father wrote long letters to the LAPD, pleading with them to investigate Lazarus. Those letters had been kept on file. No one was ever arrested for that murder.

  Hrycyk knew that in 1986 homicide cases were piling up in Los Angeles and that there were not enough detectives to work them. He’d seen the problem first-hand in South Central. By 2008 circumstances had changed. There was time now to open a few cold cases. The detectives at Homicide Special, just down the hall from Burglary Special, were still haunted by the letters from a grief-stricken father. They decided to take another look at the case, and almost immediately Lazarus came up as a suspect. Two detectives were moved out of Parker Center and started investigating their fellow LAPD detective.

  At times, it was revealed during pre-trial, they trailed Hrycyk and Lazarus. It is possible that during my visit the art detectives were being watched and followed. One day the homicide detectives collected fast-food utensils Lazarus had thrown into a trashcan. DNA samples from those seemed to match the DNA found on the body of the 1986 murder victim.

  Hrycyk had spent over three years traini
ng Lazarus. She was his personal choice to succeed him. In fact, Hrycyk and I had discussed the issue of a successor on a few occasions. He always said that it was a vital step for the continuation of the unit.

  Over the following months the Los Angeles Times published pictures of Lazarus standing in a courtroom wearing an orange prisoner uniform, and the Atlantic Monthly published a feature about the events leading to her arrest.

  Shortly before Lazarus was due to stand trial, I called Hrycyk and asked if he wanted to comment. He declined, saying that the case had no relevance to the art-theft investigations he was working on. I told him that I was interested in the legacy question, and asked him if he thought the LAPD would assign him another long-term partner. He was unsure. “It’s not a great time right now, because of the economy. The force is cutting back,” he said. California was reeling from debt. One person I knew, in San Francisco, had been receiving ious from the state government instead of unemployment insurance cheques. The LAPD academy was accepting fewer applicants, and an article in the New York Times ran with the headline “California, in Financial Crisis, Opens Prison Doors.” It detailed a plan by the government to reform its overcrowded prison system, with the hope of releasing convicts who pose little risk to the community.

  Hrycyk did have an uPDate for me: it concerned the old woman with all the television screens, and the Picasso on the couch. She’d come up in the news. Her name was Tatiana Khan, and she was the owner of Chateau Allegré gallery, where we had visited on that June afternoon. Hrycyk had been right to photograph the painting. Khan was a veteran art dealer, and she had sold the Picasso to a collector for $2 million. After buying it, the collector did some research on the painting, and it turned out to be a forgery. The FBI investigated, and in 2009 served Khan with a summons. In 2011, the art dealer pleaded guilty to making false statements to the FBI and witness tampering. Her attorney released this statement: “Mrs. Kahn has a 45 year career of selling antiques and fine arts and she’s accepting responsibility for making a false statement to an FBI agent in connection with one painting. She hopes to put this investigation behind her and move forward with her career.”

  ONE AFTERNOON AT the end of my 2008 visit, Hrycyk talked to me about how he would operate were he to cross the line and venture into the criminal trade. After all, he’d spent years learning to think like many different kinds of thieves, in order to successfully hunt them.

  “If I were going to plan a new career for myself as an art thief, I’d take lesser-known works by artists. I would find out which artists are popular in the market today, what kind of art people are buying, and stick to a certain dollar amount—$10,000 would be best, but I’d probably go as high as the twenty, thirty, or forty-thousand-dollar range. I could dispose of those works almost invisibly through smaller auction houses that won’t put stolen paintings on the cover of their catalogues.”

  He paused to think.

  “I would find an independent art dealer who would not exhibit the works I sold to him—a lot of art dealers work from their homes, and their sales are done behind the scenes, in the backrooms. There are still so many collectors out there who value their privacy and who do not want to draw attention to their art.”

  The detective said he would not steal from museums or larger art institutions, because that would pose too great a risk. “I wouldn’t want to attract attention to myself. I would be quiet,” he said. That was the mark of an educated thief: stay under the radar, just as Paul had always advised. Hrycyk, one of the most experienced art detectives in the world, was saying that after all his years of experience, his hundreds of cases, he had learned that Paul’s was the best approach.

  “If I stuck to those rules I would probably be quite successful as an art thief,” the detective said.

  Just months after Hrycyk had recovered one set of Warhols, ten more were stolen. The Warhols were taken in 2009 from the Los Angeles mansion of Richard L. Weisman, a prominent businessman who had personally commissioned the series from Warhol. Weisman had asked the pop artist to create portraits of a series of super-athletes, including Jack Nicklaus, O.J. Simpson, and Muhammad Ali. It was a multi-million-dollar theft from his living room, while he was travelling. The game never ended.

  The detective listed the stolen works with the Art Loss Register, the FBI, and Interpol. He followed his system. The Crime Alert arrived in my inbox: another case, another file opened. And after he sent out his press release, articles about the L.A. theft appeared in newspapers around the globe.

  Across the ocean, Art Hostage posted one on his site.

  EPILOGUE

  IT WAS spring of 2011, and I had just finished an update session with Donald Hrycyk when Bonnie Czegledi’s name came up on my cellphone.

  “Hello... Bonnie?”

  “I’m in Toronto for a few days,” she said.

  By then Czegledi’s book, Crimes against Art, had been published, with an introduction by John Huerta, general counsel for the Smithsonian. The book detailed the rise of art theft and the rise of cultural heritage law; it also served as a how-to for lawyers interested in the field. After she had finished her book, she sold her house in Toronto and moved to France. She owned a farmhouse in the south, where she could advise on matters of law and paint—she was, after all, also an artist.

  During one of our first meetings, when Czegledi was trying to explain how big the Problem was, she’d asked me if I’d ever heard of the mysterious Vent d’Autan, a wind that came from North Africa and blew all the way through the French countryside, shaking the windows of her house. “That wind actually carries grains of sand to my kitchen from the African continent. It doesn’t care about international boundaries, just like the black market,” she laughed. “I think that’s what the art world needs. A storm so powerful it blows open all the secrets.” If not for Czegledi’s guidance and education, my story would have started and ended with the Lonsdale Gallery burglary. But she had been generous with her contacts and her enthusiasm during my learning process.

  We met at the Coffee Mill, a Hungarian restaurant in Yorkville, not far from a gallery that had been burglarized in a smash and grab a few weeks earlier. It had made headlines in the Toronto Star. When Czegledi arrived, she was carrying a press package from Interpol. She placed a photograph on the table. It showed a group of about a dozen people from countries around the world standing in the grand atrium of the international police headquarters in Lyon. There she was on the left-hand side of the photo. Czegledi had been asked to become a member of Interpol’s new stolen cultural property think tank.

  “So you’ve made it all the way to the top of the international law-enforcement system,” I smiled. “How long did that take?”

  “Only a decade,” she said. “I think it can help get things done. It’s a step toward changing things.” I thought back: she’d joined the American Bar Association Cultural Property Committee in 2000 and the International Bar Association Cultural Property Committee in 2001; in 2004, she’d opened her own law offices and become the co-chair of the aba Cultural Property Committee. It was clear when we met that she was determined to move up the ranks, to learn, and, as corny as it may sound, to change the world. Now she was associated with Interpol, the highest vantage point on the global law-enforcement totem.

  I looked at the picture again, of the group standing on the Interpol insignia, which is embedded into the floor like the cia logo in movies. Then I asked her what they’d discussed at that meeting.

  “Here’s the thing. . . I can’t tell you,” she said, and paused. “But if you go to the website, you can see the press release.” Then she added, “They are very careful with security.” Czegledi mentioned that while she was at Interpol, she’d put in a good word for me. I told her I’d emailed them and they had declined to be interviewed. “I’m not sure if they’ll talk to you,” she said. “They don’t talk to a lot of press. But you could try emailing them again.” Her advice was correct, and Karl-Heinz Kind granted me an interview. It was the last interv
iew I conducted for this book.

  Czegledi and I had first met just days after the United States had invaded Iraq—me with my empty notebook. A few days after our meeting in Yorkville, Osama bin Laden was killed. I watched the celebrations on TV that night, live from Washington, D.C., and New York. At Bonnie Magness-Gardiner’s office, at the Hoover Building, the word “deceased” was added to bin Laden’s photo on the wall in the lobby. Interpol removed him from its most-wanted list. It was strange now to think of the domino effect bin Laden had had on the world of art theft, starting with the invasions of Afghanistan and then Iraq, the pillaging of that country’s cultural heritage, and the formation of the FBI Art Crime Team—the art detectives of tomorrow.

  Before Czegledi had moved to Europe, I’d asked the lawyer the same question I’d asked every member of the law-enforcement community: Are you training someone to replace you? Czegledi thought about it for a moment.

  “No,” she said, and gave me a strange look, as if I was missing the point. Our conversation on art theft had been running for more than seven years. Then she asked, “Is your book almost finished, or what?”

  After I had been learning from Czegledi for a few years, she presented me at the end of one of our meetings with an antique bronze key. “It’s from France. I collect them,” she said. “I give them to people I trust.” The key was heavy, and it looked as if it had once unlocked a giant door, somewhere far away. When I got home I placed it on a shelf in my kitchen, above the table where I write. It’s now a piece of art in my home, and it’s worth more to me than its monetary value. From Paul’s perspective, it probably wouldn’t be the prize—if anyone ever comes knocking.