Hot Art (2 page)

“Nothing here was finessed,” said Hrycyk.

He noticed some broken pieces of porcelain on the construction-zone floor. “Can we bag these?” Hrycyk said to the room.

According to Ramirez, the thieves had also stolen the tools stored by the construction workers, who were still waiting outside in the shade. They watched as the owner of the antique store arrived in a silver Porsche and disappeared up the driveway into the back lot.

When Hrycyk entered the antique store through its proper back door a few minutes later, Lazarus was already questioning the owner, who stood just inside the back door to his shop, beside a desk and computer that looked out onto the showroom floor.

The owner was dressed in a pale blue polo top, designer jeans, and brown loafers. He was in his late thirties and had just returned from one of his Italian expeditions with a tan and Calvin Klein–worthy facial stubble. He was sporty Euro ultra-cool. He agreed to let me stay and watch the investigation as long as I did not mention his name or the name of the store.

The owner explained that he dealt mostly in Italian Renaissance and French antiques and served a wealthy clientele all over the city. The room was still full of supply—a French nineteenth-century gilded mirror for $9,000; a neoclassical nineteenth-century Italian mirror for $13,500; a Tuscan walnut refectory table for $27,000. There was a nail on a wall where a painting had once hung. He told Lazarus that he visited Italy often, to hand-pick the pieces for his shop. A few of those pieces he carried with him on the plane home, and the rest arrived via shipping container.

While Hrycyk focussed on the scene, Lazarus focussed on the owner. Her voice as she questioned him was flat, and her questions were brief and pointed.

“Sir, where were you last night?”

“Sir, have you noticed anyone unusual around the store lately?”

“Oh, and sir, do you happen to have the only key to that lock on the fence?”

Lazarus kept steady eye contact with the owner. She was pleasant without being nice. I got the feeling from the speed of her questions that she was looking for inconsistencies in his answers. She was so direct and at ease while she worked that it was obvious she had done this a thousand times.

There didn't seem to be any inconsistencies. The owner remained calm, serious, and slightly detached from the whole scenario. He may have been in shock.

The large, dark wood antique table in front of them dominated the space. Its surface held precious pieces of evidence left behind by the thieves—those shoeprints. According to the owner, four large chandeliers used to hang above the table, each worth around $20,000. The intruders had climbed right up onto the table, using it as a stepladder, and removed the chandeliers from hooks on the ceiling. Hrycyk and Lazarus both noted that it would have required at least two people. Hrycyk also noted that this all would have happened with little light except from the streetlamps and the traffic passing by the front window, now bright with sunlight.

“This happened fast, and in the dark,” said Hrycyk.

“Yeah, no light,” said Lazarus.

The shoeprints were very faint, their shape formed by the dust from the construction site next door. It was hot in the store, and suddenly everyone looked a little sweaty. Lazarus wiped her brow and smiled just slightly with her eyes. “It's hot out, isn't it?” she said, to no one in particular.

The owner offered to turn on the air conditioning.

Lazarus thought about it, exchanging a glance with Hrycyk.

“No,” she said, “'cause we don't want the air to blow in here. Not until we get those shoeprints off the table. Would be nice, though.”

Lazarus continued to question the owner on his whereabouts, his business practices, and whether anyone might want to hurt his business.

Someone in the room commented that no one in the apartment building or any of the neighbours had called police. The break-in wasn't reported until the construction workers showed up for work that morning, noticed their tools were gone, and saw the new holes in the wall.

“It's unbelievable that no one called 911,” echoed the owner.

“People just don't want to get involved,” said Lazarus. “It's unfortunate.”

Hrycyk had produced a tape measure and was walking the length and width of the shop, jotting down notes after each trip. He drew a little diagram of the layout. The photographer snapped pictures then sat down in one of the plush, multi-thousand-dollar chairs.

In the middle of the interview, a
UPS
deliveryman knocked on the front door. He held a package and waded through the crime scene to deliver it. Normal life intruded. The Scientific Investigation Division (
SID
) officer entered through the back door. Hrycyk and Lazarus had both been excited that they got to have a
SID
technician show up. Or rather, they seemed excited for me to see him work. “It's like magic,” Lazarus said. “Just like on
CSI
.
”

The
SID
was dressed in black slacks, a black T-shirt, and black cross-trainers with black laces. He had short, cropped black hair. His biceps bulged out of his T-shirt, just like on television. He surveyed the table and began to unpack his equipment. Hrycyk had already placed folded pieces of paper at four different points on the table: A, B, C, D. Hrycyk explained that the
SID
was using an electrostatic current to pick up a picture of the shoeprints and fingerprints.

The
SID
worked carefully. He chose his first spot on the table, examined it from a few different angles. Then he produced a square piece of foil, very thin, slowly placed the foil on top of a shoeprint, and used a roller to mash the foil into the surface. The foil was so thin it formed around the shoeprint, which was now visible in the metallic skin. He looked up at us and said, “You only get one chance, because once you apply and roll, the dust is gone.”

Then he took two wires, attached them to a small black box, and turned it on. There was a crackle of electricity. “Done,” he said, and moved on to point B. It was indeed magic: electromagnetic resonance.

An hour later Hrycyk and Lazarus walked out into the heat and looked up and down the sidewalk. At this time of the afternoon there was barely a soul. It was too hot. The detectives looked up at the rooftops and above the alcove doorways of stores.

“We're hoping one of these stores has a security camera,” Hrycyk explained.

“Can't see any,” said Lazarus.

“Let's go ask around,” said Hrycyk.

The two detectives spent the next two hours getting to know the neighbourhood. At the first store Hrycyk asked the owner directly if he had a camera. The owner was suspicious. He said no. Hrycyk thanked him. The owner said, “Next time show me a badge.”

A furniture store next door had no camera either. It sold slick stuff—expensive retro bookshelves, tables, and lighting. The woman working the cash said there was a gallery space upstairs. Hrycyk looked at Lazarus: “Want to go have a look?”

“Yes I do,” she replied.

The detectives went upstairs. The exhibit was photography from Iraq:
Eye of the Storm: War through the Lens of
American Combat Photographers
. There was a photograph of a boxing match, the ring surrounded by American soldiers in tank tops and camouflage pants. “That is a great picture,” commented Hrycyk. Then he noted, “It's good for us to look at what's being shown around town. You never know, one day we might be hunting for this work.”

At another shop there was a piece of meteorite for sale, a dark hunk of rock. It was 4.6 billion years old. It sat on a table almost right beside the front door, with a $18,500 price tag. The owner said he had a fake camera mounted out back. The man seemed happy to chat with the detectives. He said the store was moving: they'd been priced out of the neighbourhood. “Twenty-eight grand a month,” he smiled. “The fashion people are moving in. Marc Jacobs is down the street. They pay something like $32,000 a month.”

The detectives continued to search for cameras. The last place they tried was a giant old house surrounded by a perimeter of lush trees and bushes and guarded by a high iron fence. It looked like something out of a fairy tale. Lazarus rang the bell, but there was no answer. She shouted, “Hello! Police!” No answer. She raised her voice slightly and shouted again. “Hello! Police!”

The detectives walked around to the rear of the house. They found a door in the fence and slipped into the back garden, which was full of statues and plants packed tightly together. A narrow path led to a back door. They knocked. A Hispanic caregiver answered and invited them inside. The back hallway opened into a yawning room, two floors high. The room was packed full of antiques and paintings. It was chaotic; it looked like the piled-up remains of what once was a thriving antiques business.

An old woman sat in a chair near a row of television screens filled with images from cameras. Bingo. It turned out that she had just come out of a coma and her health was delicate. A voice somewhere screamed, “Hello. Hello. Hello.” It sounded very much like Detective Lazarus. “It's a bird,” said Hrycyk. And so it was, in a cage near the front door.

The detectives took an hour figuring out if the cameras had picked up anything useful, scrolling through tape. Nothing so far. They'd have to come back. Before they left, both Hrycyk and Lazarus had noticed what looked like a Picasso perched carelessly on a cluttered sofa. They inquired about it, and the woman told them it was a genuine Picasso worth a huge sum of money. Hrycyk surreptitiously took a photo of the painting with his cell.

By the time the detectives climbed back into their Chevrolet Impala, they had spent a total of four hours at the crime scene and canvassing La Cienega. During that four-hour period they had both been standing or walking, but even though they had started their day at dawn, neither seemed tired. The car slipped into a traffic jam on Sunset, which ate up more time. The light cut harshly across the rush-hour traffic. They would drive back to the office to transfer their written notes into a computer file, check messages and updates on other cases, and make a few calls.

THAT WAS LATE
June. Three months passed. In September, Hrycyk received a call from the Los Angeles District Attorney's office. They'd been following the activities of a gang of Armenians, through an informant working for the
DA
. The informant had identified the gang for the antique-store job on La Cienega. This was organized crime, not a simple break-and-enter: the Armenian gang was under surveillance because it was involved in a host of criminal activities. The da passed along an address to Hrycyk, for a house they believed the Armenians were using to store, among other material possessions like drugs and money, the antiques stolen from the shop on La Cienega.

After a search warrant was secured, the house was raided. The
DA
was right. The search turned up a cache of the stolen loot. It wasn't everything, though. “We've seized that stuff and we're still looking for the rest,” Hrycyk told me.

“This particular gang was known for stealing from tobacco stores, so the upscale antique store was new for them. The gang was using the Italian antiques as furniture. That's the problem with stealing art or antiques. If you don't know the art market—in this case the Italian antique market—then it's going to be difficult to move it,” Hrycyk said. “The Armenians weren't connoisseurs of antique Italian furniture. What they were interested in was money. They're into anything that is a commodity and that can be sold.” The gang got sloppy and kept stealing from the same locations before they moved on to antiques. “If you keep hitting the same place, police put it together,” the detective said.

For Hrycyk, the case was a prime example of the strides made possible by co-operation and an efficient flow of information. It was also another indication that organized crime was interested in art. The trial took place in May 2009, and a number of the men were convicted. For the detective, it was a small victory.

Hrycyk had seen all the movies about art theft, but his experience was different from the films being churned out by the city he patrolled. According to Hollywood, art thieves are dashing, educated, incredibly rich, obsessive, and cunning, and the world is their playground. Art theft, in fact, is a sub-genre of heist films—films like
Once a Thief, Entrapment, The
Score, The Good Thief, Ocean's Twelve,
and, of course,
Hudson
Hawk,
starring Bruce Willis and a gang of whistling fools out to steal an invention by Leonardo da Vinci. Mostly, these movies star the thief as sympathetic protagonist—and we want the thief to get away with the crime.

There is no film that has done more to push the myth of the dashing art thief—or the rogue collector—than the remake of
The Thomas Crown Affair,
starring Pierce Brosnan. As Mr. Crown, Brosnan embodies the ultimate art thief: a Wall Street mogul, lover of champagne, women, and fine art. Crown has money and toys but he is bored, so for fun he rips off a hundred-million-dollar Claude Monet from a New York museum (think the Metropolitan Museum of Art). Later, at his mansion, he knocks back some red wine and laughs in self-satisfied glee while gazing at the Impressionist master's blood-orange sunset—now his alone to enjoy. Rene Russo plays the sexy insurance agent hot on his tail, but Crown seduces her as he seduces the audience, who, like him, are captured by Russo's fiery beauty. The Monet, it turns out, isn't the artistic centrepiece of the film; Russo is. Hollywood knew that fine art wasn't enough to keep the public, or Crown, aesthetically engaged.

At the end of the film, Crown slips the Monet back into the museum, undetected. He has a conscience: the restless billionaire wreaked havoc on the museum, got away with his crime, and then made good—a happy ending. John McTiernan directed
The Thomas Crown Affair,
based on the 1968 Norman Jewison cult classic starring Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway. McTiernan changed one important detail: Jewison's Thomas Crown was a bank robber. McTiernan, though, felt that audiences wouldn't be sympathetic to a hardened criminal knocking over your local teller, so he changed Crown's crime of choice to something more palatable—stealing art from a museum. The new version got at least one fact right: police, mostly, do not rank stolen art cases as a high priority. In one of the last scenes of the movie, a New York City detective admits, “I don't really give a shit. The week before I met you I nailed two crooked real estate agents and a guy who was beating his kids to death. So if some Houdini wants to snatch a couple swirls of paint that are really only important to some very silly rich people, I don't really give a damn.”