Hot Art (35 page)

The criminal system, though, has evolved too. “Some art galleries are owned by the Mafia, and other organized crime groups,” the detective explained. “It's a great business for them because there are very few people who understand the value of a painting. With art, you can just put an extra zero on the end and you've laundered money. Or you can pretend at income-tax time that you made all this money, or lost money, depending. You can pretend that you bought a painting for $1,000, but in reality it was a Riopelle and you sold it for $100,000. It's impossible for anyone to find out.”

In Quebec, art theft and crimes related to the black market are worth about $20 million annually, according to Lacoursière's data, but no statistics are available for any other province in Canada, because there is no other officer like him. That is why Lacoursière's work is so valuable. Just like Hrycyk, he's generating information where there was none. He echoes Robert Wittman's sentiments about recovery, which he says is more important than making an arrest. “My priority is always to get the stolen painting back. My bosses know that, though they don't always share my opinion,” said Lacoursière. The
FBI
's Art Crime Team reports its recovery rate at less than 9 per cent, but most international experts put the number far lower, below 5 per cent. Lacoursière said that thanks to staying in close communication with the arts community in Quebec, his recovery rate was now 15 per cent.

I also visited Lacoursière at his office at the Sûreté du Québec—a monolith of a structure surrounded by high barbed-wire fences in east-end Montreal. He was just a few months away from retirement and in the process of handing over the reins to Detective Talbot—his legacy. The two men came down to meet me at the security-check line, where I emptied my pockets and passed through the metal detectors. Lacoursière wore a loose-fitting black jacket, black shirt, black belt, black handkerchief, and his eyes were framed by black glasses; he looked like an artist.

He took me for a quick tour upstairs, on the second floor, where he and Talbot shared a space with the fraud squad—a bullpen. Lacoursière pointed to a painting by John Little that had been stolen in 1989 and recovered in 2007. It was worth about $25,000. Beside his desk was another painting that looked very much like a Riopelle—a beautiful fake he had confiscated.

Next we went down to the cafeteria, where Lacoursière and Talbot settled on a table near the back, facing a large window with sunlight streaming in. I asked the detectives to compare their departments with other police forces around the globe that have art investigators. Lacoursière listed the
FBI
Art Crime Team, Scotland Yard's Art and Antiques Squad, Italy's Carabinieri, and Interpol. He did not mention Hrycyk and the
LAPD
Art Theft Detail. He did note with surprise that Toronto did not have its own art theft squad, which was strange, because it was a larger market than Montreal—totally unpatrolled.

Lacoursière: “When I fly to Toronto for a case, I'm referred to the Fraud Squad. In the U.S., they say there are fifteen
FBI
agents working on this problem, but it's just not true. Most of those agents aren't specialized in art. They work other cases. In Montreal, we only have two full-time investigators, and we get into the scene. We visit each gallery and institution at least twice a year: 250 galleries, 100 museums, across Quebec. If we're looking for someone, we always bring photographs. Or we beam them out on email: ‘Do you know this guy?'”

Talbot: “Of course, the galleries and dealers want to protect their market. They want to protect their clients. But when we help them, they change their attitude.”

Lacoursière interjected, “We rarely need to expose a source. I will always burn myself before exposing a witness.”

The detectives told me the trend that year was break-and-enters: galleries, auction houses, and private homes. Those constituted 50 per cent of their cases, especially in high-end neighbourhoods like Westmount and Outremont.

Lacoursière: “They go there for the art.”

A recent gallery break-in during daytime hours involved three men. One came in first, just to look around. Then two more, with ski masks, entered, one of them carrying a gun. They settled on three paintings, which they shoved into a garbage bag. When they left the gallery, the three walked for half a mile through downtown Montreal then disappeared into the Métro.

Lacoursière sent out pictures captured on the gallery's security camera, using Art Alert. The men were identified by a secret source. One had a history of armed robbery, another was known for violent crimes, and the third had a history with the fraud squad. Criminals in Canada, Lacoursière was saying, were migrating from other areas of specialty to art theft. And because gallery security was soft, paintings were excellent targets.

Then the spectre of Lacoursière's imminent retirement came up. He had spent fifteen years building his unit.

Lacoursière: “I'm retiring at the end of this year. That's it. I give up.”

Talbot: “He's retiring, or at least he says he is. Who knows when he'll do it. Maybe at the end of this year, maybe at the beginning of the next.” Talbot will take the lead of the art investigative unit. “I'm supposed to get a new partner, and a civilian who can manage the database,” said Talbot.

Lacoursière: “When I needed a partner, I had a choice. I hope it's the same for Jean-François.” Talbot has a minor in psychology, which he said was very important for “understanding Alain.” He smiled.

Lacoursière: “I still don't understand myself.”

Talbot: “We've worked together for five years and put together all the systems we need. They are all in place. And Alain will be available.”

Lacoursière: “Sure I will, for approximately $250 an hour.”

LACOURSIÈRE RETIRED
at the end of 2008. A year and a half later I attended a museum security conference at the Ontario College of Art & Design in Toronto. Two detectives from the Quebec squad were guest speakers. Jean-François Talbot was their boss, but he was not there that afternoon—the unit had expanded under his guidance and now employed three full-time art investigators. The two detectives had prepared a PowerPoint presentation for their lecture, and they covered a few of the cases that Lacoursière and Talbot had worked as well as a few new ones, including a stolen painting from Alberta that had travelled across the country, sold from dealer to dealer, and been recovered after five years.

Even though almost everyone in the room spoke only English, the host of the conference had agreed that the presentation could be made in French, and it was unclear how much information the audience actually picked up from the half-hour talk. My French is weak, but I followed along. The picture these detectives painted of the stolen art market in Canada was the same one depicted by Donald Hrycyk in Los Angeles, Richard Ellis in London, and Bonnie Czegledi in Toronto.

Their lecture opened with an error, though. The Quebec detectives said proudly that, except for the
FBI
, their squad was the only art investigation unit in North America. It was a sad statement, and it drove straight to the heart of how disorganized art recovery is. Had they really never heard of Hrycyk?

After the talk I caught the two detectives with their luggage in tow, in the hallway. I asked them if they had ever heard of the
LAPD
Art Theft Detail. Neither had, but they were intrigued. I told them to look up the website. A few weeks later, I received a Crime Alert and an Art Alert on the same day, with the same picture of a Montreal suspect. The two groups had made contact; it had taken only twenty years.

The Montreal team should be a global example of how an art theft unit can work, but it's isolated by language and by geography. Lacoursière developed an entire strategy around the black market, and it was effective. He should be touring the country—in fact, the globe—giving seminars on the information he mined and the cases he worked. Instead, he wrote a book, published only in French; when I went to my neighbourhood bookstore in Toronto, they did not have it in stock and would not order it, because they don't deal in French titles.

Jean-François Talbot is a perfect example of how a legacy should work. He was brought in early, trained for five years with Lacoursière, had the support of the department, and was given resources and additional staff when Lacoursière retired. The Montreal unit is a law-enforcement gem, hidden away in the second-largest art market in Canada. In 2010 and 2011, I received almost fifty Art Alerts from Talbot. He was keeping busy, but he had still not built a website for his unit. On so many levels, this was a missed opportunity—as Hrycyk had demonstrated. In Los Angeles, the Art Theft Detail website had been directly responsible for millions in art recoveries. And, as any kid these days knows, if you want the world to see you and pay attention, you need to build a website and start blogging: the stronger your opinions, the better.

15.

ART HOSTAGE

“All those beautiful Hollywood films are out of date.”
TON CREMERS

I
N SEPTEMBER
2006 an anonymous blogger called Art Hostage slipped onto the Internet, armed with controversial opinions about the state of international art theft. His Web page wasn't attractive: no flashy advertisements, no electronic bling, just a business card–sized rectangle with the words
Art
Held Hostage
in a crooked font. The
g
in
hostage
was a drawing of a pair of handcuffs. At the top of his homepage, Art Hostage had put a banner: “The only blog to do what it says on the tin, reveal the truth about art crime investigation.”

Art Hostage seemed to be on a mission to expose the hypocrisy of the art world—a business that he said was secretive, corrupt, and full of criminals who craved respectability. “From top to bottom there is a dishonest chalk-line running through the Art and Antiques trade, therefore one could come to the valid conclusion, the whole Art and Antiques trade is rotten to the core,” he wrote. On another occasion, “The grubby, rancid Art and Antiques trade is one of the last bastions of cash dealings. Whilst other trades have had to comply with money laundering laws the Art and Antiques trade not only still enjoys the dark practice of cash transactions, but also provides a haven for money launderers to wash their ill-gotten gains without scrutiny.” This was insider information, he proclaimed, from someone who had intimate knowledge about how the criminal world connected with the legitimate business.

Who was this guy? He seemed like a blowtorch in the basement of the art world spewing flames and crying foul at the establishment. He was a troublemaker, but he was fun, and his commentary had a no-bullshit-I'm-telling-it-like-it-is style.

His tone was condescending and irreverent, and like any respectable art critic, he wasn't out to make friends. His scorn applied equally and intensely to both thieves and detectives, but there was one group for which he reserved an especially profound loathing: art dealers. His de facto slogan was “The term ‘honest art and antique dealer' is an oxymoron.”

The Art Hostage site provided a valuable service. For anyone reading one or two newspapers, articles about art theft came in a local trickle. From Art Hostage, who now kept track on a global level, it was a heavy stream. And he couldn't have launched his site at a more opportune time. In 2006 the prices art collectors paid for famous paintings had become outrageous. That year, U.S. music mogul David Geffen sold Jackson Pollock's
No. 5, 1948
for $140 million. Ronald Lauder picked up a Gustav Klimt for $135 million. More private jets were rented for Art Basel Miami than for the Super Bowl. Sotheby's and Christie's seemed to be on steroids; the combined sales of the two auction house giants that year were over $7.5 billion.

According to
Artprice.com
's 2006 annual report, in that year alone the price of paintings shot up by 27 per cent in the United States. The fortunes that the world's elite was willing to pay for a painting climbed faster in the five years between 2001 and 2006 than in the previous twenty-five. A handful of investment firms were now selling fine art as a portfolio. Art had exploded into a trillion-dollar global business. The market hadn't seen days like this since its winning streak in the 1980s. William Ruprecht, president and chief executive officer of Sotheby's, said, “The reason people say this is different from the last boom is that in the 1980s, the market was driven by Japanese real-estate wealth. When that fell apart, the art market fell apart. Now we have Russian wealth, Chinese wealth, Japanese wealth, hedge fund wealth, entrepreneurial wealth, real-estate wealth. There is a huge concentration of wealth at the top of the economic pyramid, a bigger concentration than anyone has experienced before.” As usual, the auction houses were at the centre of the money and the trade.

Most of this information can be found in a
Financial Times
article posted on the Art Hostage site; Art Hostage was obviously interested in the latest seven-digit sales of brand-name masters. But his raison d'être seemed to be the dark undercurrent running just below the glittering waterline of the record-breaking auction-house sales. With his simple format, Art Hostage managed to do a better job of demonstrating exactly how crazy art theft had become than had any media outlet or any one law enforcement agency, including Interpol and the
FBI
. All he did was post articles on his blog for everyone to read, and, of course, he commented on some of the stories. He was contributing a new chapter to the short and strange history chronicling art theft on the Internet, which had begun in earnest when a U.S. grad student had a similar idea eight years earlier.

IN 1998, JONATHAN SAZONOFF
assembled a list of stolen art from around the world and put it online. He called his website The World's Most Wanted Art. It was primitive, but it did the job—showing a stark, clear list of items that had been stolen in decades gone by. Sazonoff also u
PD
ated the site to show when works had been recovered. In a section called Major Art Thefts he listed, among others, the Vermeer stolen from the Gardner Museum in 1990 and the lost masterpieces from Montreal's Musée des Beaux-Arts in 1972. By most accounts, this was the first example of a notable public list of stolen art to appear on the World Wide Web, accessible by anyone with an Internet connection.