A few days later Loeb bumped into the dealer and curator Jean-Yves Mock, who was out shopping for shrimp in the Sixth Arrondissement. Mock had worked at the Hanover for seventeen years as the business partner and close friend of gallery owner Erica Brausen. When she died in his arms in 1992, Mock had inherited her personal collection.
Loeb told him about Palmer’s conundrum and suggested Mock give her a call. With shrimp in hand, Mock strolled over to the association, where Palmer told him everything she knew about the forgeries and the photographs of the fake Giacomettis in the Hanover album. Mock looked over the material, inspected the Hanover label Palmer had photographed on the back of Bartos’s Standing Nude, and assured her that it was wrong. The gallery had never used the label for anything but mailing purposes.
Mock then picked apart a January 1958 letter that Brausen had allegedly written to Jacques O’Hana. “Dear Sir,” the letter began, and went on to say, “We have two paintings by Alberto Giacometti which you could show to your client. [One is a] Nu Debout 1955, 47 3/4 × 35 1/4 ins at pounds 1650—which we purchased from Pierre Loeb in 1955.” The letter bore the Tate archive stamp and was the one Booth had said predated the Tate’s files on O’Hana.
Mock told Palmer that her suspicions were well-founded. He had redesigned the gallery stationery shortly after his arrival in 1956, but the writer of this 1958 letter had used the old stationery. The salutation was another giveaway. O’Hana was a charming and quirky man who had built a small swimming pool in the center of his gallery. He and Brausen had been good friends, and she always addressed him as “Dear Jacques” in her letters, never “Dear Sir.” The signature looked right to Mock, but it could easily have been cut from one document and pasted onto another.
Neither Palmer nor Mock believed that Brausen would have fallen for a forgery in the 1950s. As Giacometti’s principal dealer in London, she had bought and sold more than six dozen of his works. They had all come from the galleries that represented him, either Gallery Maeght in Paris or Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York. She knew the material too well to let a fake slip by her. In addition, forgeries of Giacometti’s paintings were rare, if not nonexistent, in the 1950s. The artist was much more famous for his sculptures, which commanded far higher sums and were thus the first works targeted by forgers.
Palmer now felt she had a strong case that Bartos’s painting was a fake, but she wanted to nab the other Giacometti forgeries as well, both those she’d seen at the Tate and those that had recently come to her attention. With Mock sitting next to her, she carefully spread out the small stack of letters, photographs, and ledger pages she had collected over the past several years. Mock was unable to recognize the handwriting on several of the ledger entries, and as they studied the material together it occurred to Palmer that they were looking at both the puzzle and its solution.
Meanwhile, in New York, Armand Bartos was doing a slow burn. Palmer’s delays were inexcusable. He had bent over backward to provide her with all the necessary documentation. Early on she had hinted that she was deeply concerned about the painting, but she had failed to give a good reason. In Bartos’s opinion, the provenance was impeccable and the work was first-rate. He had contacted two other respected experts, and they had confirmed his belief that Standing Nude, 1955 was genuine. On the basis of their reports, the work had already been seen by two restorers, his own in New York and another in London.
But Bartos had also called Albert Loeb, who reported that he could find no record of his father’s having bought the painting from Giacometti or sold it to the Hanover. This had shaken Bartos’s confidence, so he called his runner, Sheila Maskell, and insisted that she provide an explanation for this gap in the provenance, threatening to demand his money back if she couldn’t.
Until then, Maskell had kept mum about the name of her source, the London-based runner Stuart Berkeley. Runners and dealers tended to be circumspect about their sources so that prospective buyers couldn’t bypass them and cut them out of their commission. Now Maskell pressured Berkeley to recheck the provenance and return to his own source to ensure that the painting was authentic. Berkeley did so, and then he called Bartos, suggesting that the dealer hire an independent researcher to examine the Loeb gap. He recommended a London-based firm called Art Research Associates.
Two weeks later Bartos received a synopsis of ARA’s report. Over the course of twelve days, two purported researchers, Robin Coverdale and Bernard Cockett, had interviewed numerous gallery employees and combed the Tate and the National Art Library at the V&A for copies and originals of documents and signatures relating to the work, as well as clear evidence that it had been shown at the exhibition cited. In the O’Hana file they had discovered a typed list of paintings bought by the gallery in 1955. This list included the Standing Nude and mentioned that it had originally come from P. Loeb. In addition, Coverdale had uncovered another exhibition in which the work had been shown, this one at the Hanover Gallery. The original 1956 catalog was tucked away at the V&A.
“It is our considered opinion that the exhibition record demonstrates unequivocally that the ‘Nu Debout, 1955’ must be an authentic painting,” the report stated.
Bartos was both relieved and angry. That an exhaustive investigation had found the work “unequivocally” genuine vindicated his own critical judgment, but it also stoked his anger at Palmer. She had promised to look into the authenticity of the piece and get back to him, but she had been stonewalling him for months. He had spent far too much time and money trying to prove the work’s authenticity. Meanwhile, three potentially lucrative deals had fallen apart over the issue of authentication. If the painting was indeed a forgery, where had the provenance documents come from?
Bartos knew about the legal challenges facing the Giacometti Association since Annette’s death.25 He wondered if the art world gossip about Palmer was true, that she was stubborn and deficient in scholarship.
He sent her a copy of the newly discovered 1956 Hanover catalog, the list of paintings mentioning Loeb, and a curt letter. “It is your responsibility to state clearly the reason why you believe this work is not genuine.”
Palmer replied that she was still researching the documents.
Exasperated, Bartos called Sotheby’s in London and consigned the painting for auction. Nearly seven months had passed since his first request for a certificate, and nothing seemed good enough for Palmer. If the auction didn’t force her hand, at least he’d finally be rid of the piece.
What Palmer didn’t tell Bartos was that the Hanover catalog was yet another forgery. Predictably, it bore the stamp of the V&A and contained an illustration of Bartos’s Standing Nude. On the back cover was a photograph of another suspicious Giacometti, a 1956 Standing Nude, featured in an advertisement for an upcoming exhibition—also phony, no doubt.
In fact, a photograph of this same 1956 work had just crossed Palmer’s desk.
David Sylvester, who was a board member of the Giacometti Association, had sent her a photograph of the nude that he had received from a man named Howard Sussman, who lived in Reigate, a London suburb twenty-five miles south of the capital. Sussman said he represented the painter’s owner and wanted Sylvester to intercede on their behalf and get a certificate of authenticity from Palmer. The owner, Barbara Craig, the widow of a well-known collector, had been repeatedly rebuffed by Palmer’s office, Sussman claimed. His letter played on the legal problems Palmer was having with Giacometti’s heirs and hinted that if Sylvester didn’t help, Craig would take the “scandalous state of affairs” at the association to her cousin, “a newspaper proprietor who wishes to help her.” Craig was understandably “distraught,” wrote Sussman. “She is an elderly lady, and infirm. . . . [T]he sale of the painting is crucial for her.”
Sylvester asked Palmer if she thought the Sussman material was from the same family of fakes they had spoken about a few years earlier. It had all the telltale signs: an impeccable provenance attached to a fake and a letter reminiscent in tone and style of the
ones she had received from Drewe, Cockcroft, and Norseland chairman Cockett. Now it was connected to Bartos through the Hanover catalog.
And yet Sussman’s 1956 nude was backed up by two other illustrated catalogs from two separate galleries. One of them had a stamp from St. Philip’s Priory, and the second, which bore the official Tate stamp and was titled “The Contemporary Nude,” was from a Gallery One exhibition. Palmer double-checked with a Tate curator and was told that the Gallery One catalog was indeed in the Tate stacks.
She was sure this was another forged piece of provenance. She would have been surer if she’d known that Sussman was the surname of Drewe’s new wife.
27
THE ART SQUAD
At New Scotland Yard, the Art and Antiques Squad was down to a few desks and a couple of phones. The unit operated within the larger and more powerful Serious and Organised Crime Unit, which took up most of the fifth floor of the Yard’s twenty-story headquarters in Westminster. Among the unit’s other subdivisions were the Flying Squad, trained in high-speed chases and street ambushes, and the Kidnap Unit, whose varied tasks included the rescue of hostages and potential suicides. The Art Squad’s cramped quarters in this macho milieu reflected its status as a poor cousin. Since its founding as a philatelic unit in 1969 after a series of holdups of stamp dealers, the squad’s relevance and jurisdiction had been subject to close scrutiny by the Yard’s upper echelons.
In contrast to the swagger of the Organised Crime Unit, the Art Squad was regarded as a kind of pantywaist protection force for the elite. If a wealthy Knightsbridge aristocrat awoke to find his Titian gone, the case was given a lower priority than, say, a mugging in Stepney. Art crimes were generally considered the stuff of light comedy, filler items for the BBC News entertainment segment. The unofficial position of the Yard’s commissioner was that pretentious victims of art crime probably got what was coming to them, that the few Londoners who could afford great art could also survive the occasional loss, and that such relatively small misfortunes were best left to the wealthy and their insurers.
The Art Squad had known even worse times. When London was hit by a wave of armed robberies and muggings in the mid-1980s, the unit was disbanded altogether. It was a hasty decision on the part of the top brass, because the art market was heating up during this same period. Once prices rose it was only a matter of time before the trade in stolen art followed suit.
By the end of the twentieth century Interpol was ranking art crime as one of the world’s most profitable criminal activities, second only to drug smuggling and weapons dealing. The three activities were related: Drug pushers were moving stolen and smuggled art down the same pipelines they used for narcotics, and terrorists were using looted antiquities to fund their activities. This latter trend began in 1974, when the IRA stole $32 million worth of paintings by Rubens, Goya, and Vermeer. In 2001, the Taliban looted the Kabul museum and “washed” the stolen works in Switzerland. Stolen art was much more easily transportable than drugs or arms. A customs canine, after all, could hardly be expected to tell the difference between a crap Kandinksy and a credible one.
By some estimates, art crime had become a $5 billion a year business. While New Scotland Yard largely ignored the implications of the upsurge, other cities took action. In Washington, the FBI reached out to the art community to help solve fraud cases. In Italy, the Carabinieri placed three hundred officers at the disposal of its stolen art unit. In Manhattan, a former abstract painter and art student turned police detective ran his own one-man art crime investigative unit. His name was Robert Volpe, and he was an unorthodox, Serpico-like figure with a Dalí mustache and an Armani suit. Dubbed “the Archangel of the Art Scene,” he specialized in gallery theft and went after forgers, crooked auctioneers, dealers who defrauded their own artists, and collectors who shopped at the black market. Fellow officers at the station house considered him an eccentric—some of his colleagues once hung a nude centerfold in his locker with a note that asked the eternal question “Is it art?”—but Volpe saw himself as a guardian of patrimony.
London art dealers and auctioneers soon began to demand the same level of protection that other cities provided their art communities. They pointed to the fact that London’s art market was second only to that of the United States and needed much better security because of the huge sums of money involved. In appealing to the police commissioner for help, dealers and gallery owners even offered to pay the salaries of a specialized art squad and to train police in the basics of the art market. More than once, they were turned down. Finally, in 1989, the Yard relented and reinstated the Art Squad. By 1995, its skeleton staff of four detectives had many more cases than they could handle properly, and the squad was seriously underfunded.
The Art Squad was run by Dick Ellis, who had grown up around amateur painters and antiques collectors. As a young officer, he had his first brush with art thieves when his parents’ home was burgled. Ellis headed down to Bermondsey antiques market, where thieves had sold their goods with impunity for years. He spotted the family silver in one of the stalls and soon collared the culprit.
Because it was so understaffed, the Art Squad chose its cases carefully, and was often forced to ignore perfectly decent leads. Among its successes: It tracked a cache of stolen manuscripts to an East London parking lot; recovered thirteenth-century Arabic documents and philosophical works by a Sufi saint; ferreted out books purloined from an ancient Anatolian library; nabbed a larcenous collector dubbed “the Astronomer,” who was addicted to original manuscripts by Copernicus and Ptolemy; and busted a multimillion-pound operation that imported looted treasure from Russia and Poland.
In the dusty cabinets of a London barrister, the squad found a thirteen-hundred-year-old gold headdress stolen from an ancient Peruvian tomb. In 1993, it recovered a Vermeer and a Goya stolen from a collector by a brutal Irish gangster known as “The General.” Most famously, in May 1994, it recovered a version of Edvard Munch’s The Scream that had been lifted out of a window of Norway’s National Gallery in Oslo on the opening day of the Winter Olympics. The thieves had left a handwritten postcard: “Thanks for the poor security.”
Success, however, did not lead to additional staffing for the Art Squad. Part of the problem was that London’s art thieves had a peculiar working pattern: They would lie in wait for a good haul for months at a time and during these slow periods the squad would be reduced to issuing alerts on tchotchkes of little value, pink-and-blue horse-drawn carriages, tortoiseshell tea caddies, ancient Hungarian fiddles, and lost dinosaur eggs. Inevitably, the villains would reemerge as if from a winter’s hibernation and go after everything that wasn’t nailed down.
Europe’s criminals favored the London scene: Fences were unusually civil and one could unload just about anything. For art thieves and forgers, the city had become one of the world’s great crossroads for dodgy canvases. For Ellis that meant there were always too many important cases to deal with.
In September 1995 he was in the thick of things. He and two of his detectives had been working almost exclusively for more than a year on the case of a British-born Egyptian tomb raider, a former cavalryman and self-proclaimed antiquities restorer with a Cambridge degree in “moral sciences,” or philosophy. Ellis had been shuttling around Europe, North Africa, and the United States trying to shut that ring down, but recently a new case had sprung up that was too rich to ignore. There was a palpable link between the contents of the briefcase Detective Higgs had sent him, the flood of calls he’d been getting from dealers warning about a rash of forgeries, and a case the Art Squad had investigated just the previous year, involving a certain John Drewe and some paintings allegedly stolen by the Mafia.
Ellis had also received a worried call from Sarah Fox-Pitt at the Tate Gallery. She was concerned that one of their patrons—John Drewe—might be using the museum in a scheme to sell fraudulent art. She told him about her archivist’s suspicions, the call from Booth’s colleague at the British Council, and a recent c
all from Drewe’s ex-partner, Batsheva Goudsmid, who claimed to have incriminating documents proving that Drewe was trafficking in forged and possibly stolen artwork.
Ellis picked up the phone and called Goudsmid. She sounded angry and upset, “a woman scorned,” as he would later recall his initial reaction. He made plans to meet her at Hampstead station, and then he made another call, one that was almost second nature.
Ellis depended on detectives from the other units to help the Art Squad when it was swamped, and the most reliable and talented of these outside resources was Detective Sergeant Jonathan Searle, a Cambridge-educated art historian who worked at Special Branch, the muscle behind British intelligence on national security and espionage.
Searle was as skilled at spotting fakes as he was at grilling thugs. When Ellis told him he was interviewing a possible witness to a daring and complicated art crime, Searle was all ears. Could he put everything aside and come down to the Hampstead precinct? Ellis asked. He just wanted Searle’s gut reaction. He didn’t say much else, and Searle didn’t ask.
Through the glass partition, Detective Sergeant Searle observed the woman in the interrogation room. She was slight, almost bird-like, and appeared to be extremely harassed, demure one moment and raging the next. She stared at the floor, then at the wall. When he went inside, she refused to look him in the eye. When he began asking pointed questions, her expression conveyed barely restrained anger when she mentioned Drewe. In anguished, staccato bursts, she retailed old grudges and stories of criminal activity on the part of her former common-law husband. Most of what she said was irrelevant to the reason for Searle’s visit, but he thought some of it might be useful.
Goudsmid described Drewe as a clever manipulator who was running a profitable forgery business in oil paintings and was likely involved in other crimes. She said she could prove it.
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