Hot Art (3 page)

Homicides, drugs, violence, sexual abuse, organized crime—those were urgent affairs. Art theft was the opposite. That was why Hrycyk was such a rare find: a detective who had spent years specializing in art-theft investigations and who worked his cases with the patience of a scientist—playing the long game.

On that late afternoon in 2008, driving back through the pink haze of L.A. gridlock, Hrycyk's eyes flicked to the rearview. He'd been watching me take notes on the investigation all afternoon while he took notes at the crime scene. The detective asked, “So how did you get into all this?” He and Lazarus stared out the front window, listening to the former suspect in the back seat.

2.

LAW AND DISORDER

“Art is one of the most corrupt, dirtiest industries on the planet.”
BONNIE CZEGLEDI

I
T WAS
just after midnight when the phone rang.

A stranger's voice said, “It's ———. You've been looking for me.”

The name he'd given me clicked. Yes, I'd been looking for him.

“I thought you were in jail,” I said.

“I was,” he replied. “Now I'm out.”

Then the art thief listed off a few details about my education and my professional life. He told me he knew where I lived, and proved it by reciting my address.

“I've done my research,” he said.

He agreed to a meeting.

I was twenty-six in 2003 and working as a researcher for
The Walrus,
a Canadian magazine, earning enough to save some money while living with my parents. I was comfortable doing research, not being researched. I was also working on an article about a burglary at a small art gallery. It was supposed to be fun. Now the story was taking a turn I hadn't expected. After the conversation I was apprehensive, but I still wanted to meet the midnight caller.

A few weeks later, on a crisp afternoon, we sat down at a small table on an outdoor patio in Toronto. The patio was unoccupied save for us. The man across from me was in his late forties, of medium height and medium build, and wore a yellow windbreaker. He was good-looking, but not movie-star handsome. In fact, he looked like a middle-aged father, except there was an almost invisible edge to him, some heightened sense of awareness in his eyes that vibrated with tension. I didn't want to feel nervous, but I did.

“Hello,” he said. And we shook hands.

He opened our conversation by threatening me. He told me that if I wrote anything about his involvement in the art gallery theft I would be physically hurt. Specifically, one of his business associates would be sure to cross paths with me. At best his associate would break my legs. No names, he said. Then he reached down beside his chair. I hadn't noticed the long white papers rolled up in a red elastic band. He handed them to me across the table. The roll practically glowed in the afternoon sun. Not thinking, I reached out and accepted it. When my hand closed around the roll I knew I had made a mistake—fingerprints, possession of stolen property. His eyes flickered playfully.

“What's this?” I asked.

“They're for you. I can't use them. They're from the gallery,” he said.

I knew what I was holding, and I knew I shouldn't be holding it.

ON THE MORNING
of September 11, 2001, Chad Wolfond had woken up, skipped breakfast, and left on his usual ten-minute walk to his Lonsdale Gallery, a two-storey semi-detached house on a picturesque street in Toronto's upscale Forest Hill Village. At his desk on the second floor Wolfond tapped the keyboard of his computer, expecting it to power up. When the screen didn't glow, he glanced down to see that his computer tower was gone. Then he noticed a paper trail across the gallery floor leading to the filing cabinets where he stored his vintage pinhole photography collection. As Wolfond looked through the drawers his heart sank. The best works he owned, including those by leading French photographer Ilan Wolff, were missing.

Wolfond was shaken. He phoned the police. Then he phoned his wife. She sounded panicked.

“Do you have any idea what just happened in New York?” she asked. It was after 9
AM
, and the World Trade Center had been struck by hijacked passenger planes.

By noon officers were at the gallery, glued to their radios for the latest updates from New York and Washington. They dusted for fingerprints and inspected the hole that had been smashed through the drywall, from an attached store that was under construction. Before leaving, one of the officers told Wolfond that a detective would be in touch, and then added, “Chances are slim that you will ever see those photographs again.”

The detective never materialized. Wolfond remained on edge, and rightly so. One month later the thief returned and stole more art. All told, Wolfond had been stripped of photographs valued at over $250,000. This time a detective visited and took notes. He said he couldn't do much.

Wolfond became paranoid. He had trouble sleeping and left his gallery every day with a sense of dread. He phoned a few other gallery owners for advice. Most told him not to alert the media or talk to anybody about what had happened. Some hinted that they too had been stung by theft but had mourned the loss in private. News of the break-ins, they argued, would only damage his reputation as an art-gallery owner.

One of them, however, suggested Wolfond call a lawyer named Bonnie Czegledi, who specialized in cultural property law. She gave Wolfond the opposite advice.

“Go to the media,” Czegledi told him. “Do everything you can to promote those stolen pictures. Publicizing your stolen art will make the works impossible to sell. Contact Interpol. Get listed on the Art Loss Register.”

Interpol? The Art Loss Register? Wolfond had never heard of them.

About a year and a half later, when I showed up at the Lonsdale Gallery to write a piece about the burglaries, Wolfond hadn't taken Czegledi's advice: he was still nervous about moving his story into the public arena. He had settled the insurance already and was fearful of the thief's reprisal if he spoke openly about the burglaries. Still, I got the sense from him that he wanted to talk. He was warming up to the idea of a story but obviously needed more time. He told me to come back, and I did.

At our second meeting Wolfond disappeared into a back room and brought out the file he'd kept on the burglary—twelve inches of paperwork. He flipped through the file and showed me some photocopies of a few of the photographs that were still missing. He also told me that, by fluke, a man had been arrested who was in possession of some of Wolfond's stolen art.

“I remember being simultaneously pissed off and mildly flattered after the first theft,” Wolfond told me. “The thief had left photos that I also thought were inferior. I doubt I'll see the rest of them again. I really don't know much about this world of art theft.” Before I left he scribbled down the phone number of the detective who was working on the case and of the art lawyer who had advised him—Bonnie Czegledi. “You should talk to her,” was Wolfond's advice.

I phoned the detective a couple of times, and we finally connected. I told him I would be interested in talking to the thief's lawyer and gave him my number. The detective said he would pass the message on. I figured I'd never hear anything; at best, if the thief's lawyer got in touch, I could get a quote, maybe a little more information about the case. Instead I got the late-night phone call, and now I was apparently holding some of Wolfond's stolen artwork and looking across the table at the thief.

“I can't accept these,” I said, dumbstruck.

“They're yours now,” he said. “Hang them up. Or hide them. If you don't take them, I might have to destroy them.” That didn't sound like the best choice. I imagined telling Wolfond that I'd seen some of his missing art and that it was now probably a pile of ashes.

“Isn't there another option?” I asked. “You can return them to the gallery through a third party, anonymously. That way everybody is happy. Otherwise I might have to call the police.”

“A third-party arrangement might work,” he said, after a moment. “Let me think about it.”

I handed back the roll, and he placed it beside his chair on the concrete patio. I wondered why the art thief would even consider destroying the prints. After all, he'd gone through the trouble of breaking into the gallery, sorting through the flat files in the dark, and stealing works he'd carefully chosen. He had what he wanted, didn't he?

The thief told me that keeping the art was too much of a risk. He didn't want to go back to prison, and he didn't have a buyer lined up. Add to those problems the journalist sitting across from him asking questions. Clearly, he had agreed to meet with me only to neutralize one of many things that were going wrong.

He seemed to be educated in art history and to have a collector's eye, because he'd stolen specific works and bypassed other, less valuable ones in the mess he'd left behind. He was also, I discovered, manipulative. At one point I went inside to the washroom. When I returned, the thief had vanished but the roll of stolen art was still on the concrete beside his chair, unattended. What should I do with it? I pictured myself showing up at the gallery and handing the artwork back to Wolfond, trying to explain how I'd got hold of it. Or ending up in a police station for a day while a detective questioned me. I wouldn't want to mention the thief: my legs. I stood there staring at the roll of paper on the ground for a few seconds, and my face probably looked nearly as white as the paper.

Then there was a knock from inside the window, beside the patio. The thief hadn't disappeared, only moved inside, but he'd left the stolen art for me. I picked up the roll and carried it inside to his new table. I placed it next to his chair, on the floor. He smiled. He was in control, said his smile.

He decided to change the subject. He wanted to tell me more about how art theft worked as an industry. He seemed to be trying to figure out ways to trade information with me, to get me away from the specifics of his story. There is a larger story, he explained. He discussed how poor the security systems were at most of the major cultural institutions and, of course, at mid-sized and smaller galleries. That made his job easier. So there was that angle—art galleries and museums weren't adequately protecting themselves against pros like him.

Then he veered in another direction.

“Okay, this is how it works,” he said. “It's like a big shell game. All the antique and art dealers, they just pass it around from one to another.” He moved his fingers around the table in circles and then looked up. “Do you understand?” He looked very intense, as if he had just handed me a top-secret piece of information, but I had no idea what he meant. What did art dealers have to do with stealing art? But our meeting was over.

We got up from the table. He picked up his roll of stolen art. We paused at the door and shook hands. There were people inside the café, but even so, the thief repeated his earlier threat in a casual whisper and then looked at me coldly, in silence. I watched him walk up the street, just another shopper on a busy afternoon, and I never saw him again.

I'd now sat across from a criminal whose income was, at least partly, earned from the black market in stolen art. True, I didn't know how that black market worked or who the players were or where stolen art went. I had learned that there seemed to be more to the booming illegal trade than just the Hollywood myth, but how did it all connect? Some fine art had been stolen from a gallery and the person who'd stolen it had tried to give it back to me. He had also said he might destroy it. It was confusing and didn't add up to a coherent narrative. I walked away feeling as if I knew more about art theft but quickly came to feel as if I knew even less.

When in doubt, read. I started looking at articles from the
BBC
, the
New York Times,
the
Guardian,
and other papers from around the globe, articles usually written in response to the theft of a work of art from a museum. I encountered what seemed to be the opposite of Wolfond's case—high-profile stories that chronicled the sometimes-violent raids on cultural institutions for famous artworks. These stories provided the basic facts: what had been stolen, in some cases how it was stolen, and always how much it was estimated to be worth. Millions of dollars stolen off a wall at gunpoint made for exciting copy. Usually there was a quote from a detective saying the authorities were “following all leads.” Sometimes a corrupt billionaire collector was mentioned—“Dr. No,” he was usually called, in homage to the James Bond villain. This was the fallback position for art-theft stories—a very rich, unscrupulous person had hired a thief to steal a work of genius. There was usually no follow-up reporting. The story vanished, just like the painting. And no billionaires were arrested.

Considering the number of articles that had been written about stolen art, it was amazing how few definitive facts were available about the illicit art trade, as opposed to, for example, the drug trade. I was at a loss.

I checked in with Wolfond, hoping he would tell me he'd received a surprise delivery, but he had no news to report. I kept quiet and waited. Then one afternoon several months later I ran into the gallery owner at the Toronto International Art Fair. He was excited. A small miracle had occurred: the police had recovered a few more of his missing prints, undamaged.

In 2005 the article I'd started about Wolfond was published in
The Walrus,
but it turned out to be not about the thief (although I did mention Wolfond's burglaries) but a feature article about international art theft. A week later I received another phone call from the art thief. This time he left a message for me at work.

“It's me. I just wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed your piece,” he said.

I never heard from him again. I should have realized, after my initial meetings with Wolfond, the midnight phone call, and my encounter with the thief, that this wasn't a straightforward story. But what did I know? Wasn't this what every young journalist dreams of—to be called in the middle of the night by a criminal and then threatened? In some ways, it was encouraging. I followed up with the lawyer, the one whose phone number Wolfond had given me, who turned out to be an avid follower of the global black market.