Hot Art (40 page)

“This one is fake too,” the detective said. The forged Renoir was sold in 1984 through Sotheby's in New York. “The real one is in Paris,” the detective said.

He walked over to the closet and pulled out a small black satchel, holding it up. “This is a burglar's bag,” he said. “It was the only evidence left behind by a very smart man.”

A master thief had spent a lot of time carefully executing his plan to steal art from a major commercial art gallery in Los Angeles, in the Wilshire area. Apparently the first thing he did was go to the front door, jam a toothpick into the lock, and break its tip so it was hard to open. It bought him time in case the alarm was triggered. The gallery's alarm system was installed in the phone lines, so he cut the outside line. He then created his own entrance. He scaled an outside wall of the building, carrying a small battery-powered saw, and cut a hole in the roof.

“He had to cut through tar, plywood, and planks until he hit the open inside space,” said Hrycyk. “Then he used ropes to lower himself into the gallery.”

Hrycyk had examined the hole in the roof. “He could have spent all weekend there looting the place. It was just luck that he got away with only one painting.” The alarm was triggered when the phone line went dead, but the security person who arrived was stalled by the broken lock. That allowed the thief just enough time to slip back up through his entrance and out to the city. “He wanted all night, but instead he got away with a single painting,” said Hrycyk. “It was a Dubuffet worth $100,000. We've never recovered it.”

The burglar had left a souvenir—the workbag Hrycyk was holding. “He was good, but he wasn't planning on being in a rush.” The bag has a small logo on it, and over the following weeks Hrycyk used it to trace the bag north. “I found out it came from Alaska. But I couldn't get any further,” he said. “This man was incredibly smart,” said Hrycyk. The Dubuffet became another unsolved mystery in Hrycyk's list of open cases.

Yet another unsolved mystery for the detective was the absence of data. When we discussed the future of the Art Theft Detail, for example, he said, “We face the same problem as any police unit in any big city. We need data. Everything is driven by statistics, and statistics are very difficult to gather on art theft.”

Hrycyk said the
FBI
's statistics depend entirely on the number of stolen paintings entered into its National Stolen Art File. The Art Loss Register is good at spotting trends, though there are limits and barriers to the information it gathers. “These databases are still not commonly known by law enforcement agencies. If there was a way for me to capture all the cases that revolve around stolen art . . . but there is not,” he said.

I asked him about global statistics, and whether he agreed with the big number that was being thrown around in the law-enforcement community—the often-quoted figure of $4 to $6 billion for the annual global trade in international art theft. That figure, in one form or another, was published on the websites of the
FBI
, Interpol, and unesco. “Yeah, I've always been fascinated by that number,” he told me. Hrycyk once decided to apply his skills to hunting down the source of the figure. His first call was to the
FBI
. The bureau told him it wasn't their number and that he should contact Interpol. Hrycyk emailed Interpol, which told him to call the
FBI
. “It was circular,” said Hrycyk. “No agency or organization is willing to take responsibility for it. The truth seems to be that no one knows how large the black market for stolen art is. There simply isn't enough information on the subject. This is a phantom number,” the detective told me.

I'd emailed Interpol near the beginning of my research and requested an interview. They sent back a formal note saying that they rarely granted interviews to press because of the volume of requests from all over the world. I emailed Interpol again as I was finishing the book and said that three different people—Bonnie Czegledi, Richard Ellis, and Bonnie Magness-Gardiner—had suggested I get in touch. One day later I was on the phone with Karl-Heinz Kind, coordinator of Interpol's Works of Art Unit, under its Specialized Crimes Directorate. In Washington, D.C., Magness-Gardiner was the highest word on art theft in the United States; in Lyon, Kind was the highest word on earth.

“Hello... just a moment,” he said. “I'll shut the door.” Kind had been working for Interpol for over thirty years, first in Germany and then from its headquarters in France. We discussed the Myth: I was curious to know whether he'd seen
The
Thomas Crown Affair,
and whether people asked him about those sorts of scenarios often.

“Yes, I've seen the film, and I get those questions all the time,” he said. “That's a kind of stereotype reaction. It also makes no sense. If somebody is rich, he can afford to buy art. And from a psychological point of view, if someone possesses a high-value item, he's proud of it, and he wants to show it all the time, not hide it from his friends. I have no cases to confirm the existence of that kind of thief, in reality. I think that it's just fiction.”

Then we moved on to the reality. At the
FBI
, Magness-Gardiner had highlighted New York as a destination for the world's stolen art, as Robert Volpe had decades earlier. Another obvious major outlet was London. Did Interpol agree? Kind answered with stellar diplomacy.

“That is a statement I would subscribe to,” he said. “The motivation for theft in the vast majority of cases is financial gain. And if you want to achieve that, you have to put it on the market. I do not like to pinpoint one specific place, but the United States and the United Kingdom have the biggest auction markets. There are other opportunities, in Germany, France, and Italy, for example.” And when it came to the relationship between the black market and the legitimate market, he was equally diplomatic, though he clearly acknowledged their link.

“The boundaries are sometimes not very clear,” he said. “An honest art dealer should refrain from acquiring and selling items without provenance that is proved and documented. The standard answer—‘I didn't know. I didn't have the chance to check that it was stolen.' Well, now, it is your duty to check. And you have the tools to do it, and it is free of charge,” he told me, referring to Interpol's free database of stolen art. “You can't just turn a blind eye.” Of the way that dealers and collectors operated, he said, “We want to change their behaviour.”

Interpol pulled in reports from all of its 188 member countries and was having some success at gathering information about how large the problem of international art theft had become. I asked Kind if he could define the specifics of that scope for me, in terms of monetary value—and referenced the often-quoted number.

“I may disappoint you,” he said. “I don't have a good answer to this question. You can certainly study archives, and reports in the media. Very often you find figures that the illicit trade is six billion annually, but there is no solid ground for that estimation. I would never use that figure.”

He agreed with Hrycyk that it was a phantom number.

“Those numbers are just based on previous reports that have been published somewhere. If they are often enough repeated, they become truth. We never use this number, because we know it is not true. What I know from my experience is that there is a lack of basic information,” he said. “Every year we send out requests to member countries, asking for statistical information. Basic questions: number of thefts, and number of stolen items; what kinds of items. Only 30 per cent of those countries send an answer, and a lot of those answers are courtesy replies without substantial information. It's clear we're not getting the real picture.”

Kind was direct when it came to what he didn't know, and he acknowledged a point that Czegledi had raised in our first meeting, way back in 2003, when she had been pointed to the absence of data.

“A lot of information is unknown,” Kind told me. “Some police officers have experience with the specific cases they deal with, but to see a general picture ... There is a problem. It is a big problem. And it's not just reduced to certain countries.

This affects all countries, and all the regions of the world. But if you want to speak of a concise picture, I think it is still a big mystery.”

WHEN DETECTIVE
Bill Martin retired from the
LAPD
in 1992, his legacy was Hrycyk. The only problem was that Hrycyk didn't have a partner; he was a unit of one with a rapidly expanding caseload working with rotating staff in Burglary Special. He was at the mercy of department politics. His superior officers changed constantly. “That battle never ends. That revolving door affected my ability to retain a partner, which in turn affected my ability to collect data and solve crimes,” he told me.

“I remember two different captains, at different points in a decade, coming in and meeting me and expressing surprise that the Art Theft Detail even existed,” he said. Hrycyk was a specialized detective with skills only a few in the world possessed, but in Los Angeles he was on his way to becoming irrelevant. At times he did receive a partner, but it was always short-lived. Someone would be shipped in, spend a year working with him, and then move onward and upward. “I've had a number of very good partners over the years, but they were transient. I'd spend a year training them and then suddenly they'd be sent over to work stolen cars. That's time and energy wasted in this kind of work.”

Hrycyk said that for a time the Art Theft Detail even acted as a punitive limbo. “I can think of at least two people who were assigned to me as part of a punishment. They were brought over to this unit and really had no desire to work on art.” Going hunting with Hrycyk for missing paintings was, for them, the equivalent of sitting in the corner with the dunce hat on.

Here's one more story Hrycyk told me: Once, he was invited to attend the art theft conference held by Interpol. Every two years, the world's top law-enforcement officials, cultural lawyers, and agents are invited to Lyon, to what is by far the most important meeting of minds on the subject. Hrycyk requested funding from the department to fly to France. The occasion would have been an unparalleled chance to connect with his international peers, expand his network, and learn from others. The department said yes. Then his funding was withdrawn. A higher-ranking
LAPD
official heard about the invitation, bumped Hrycyk off the trip, and flew to Europe for a week himself, with some extra time booked in Paris.

“I've had eight different commanding officers over the last few years. I'll get a new captain who is very supportive, but sometimes support is not enough.” One captain pushed very hard to get Hrycyk a long-term partner he could train. “We had a meeting with the deputy chief, and he said to us, ‘Hold off on that for now. It could be that the department decides that an art theft unit is a luxury.'”

He continued, “So here we are talking about a unit that has now been around for close to a quarter of a century, and suddenly somebody has done some sort of review and come up with an opinion that it might not be important.” His resources were cut to a bare minimum, and it looked like the end of the Art Theft Detail. Then his superior changed, and so did Hrycyk's fortunes.

“In 2006 I was given the job of selecting somebody to work with. I'd been working art theft for two decades at that point and had acquired a body of knowledge. There was no one else in the department who conducted these kinds of investigations. I'm saying to them that we, as an organization, need to find somebody to train, because it will take years for me to get this new person up to speed,” he said. “If we don't find someone, that knowledge will be lost when I retire. It won't exist.”

Hrycyk interviewed a dozen detectives and picked a partner he thought would be suitable for the job—Stephanie Lazarus. At forty-six, she was a twenty-five-year
LAPD
veteran. Lazarus, like Hrycyk, had worked in several divisions, including major crimes and homicide. For six and a half years she served as the night detective, fielding calls and conducting preliminary investigations in the darkest hours while the day-shift detectives slept. Her duties included driving to the crime scene, assisting with initial interviews, and collecting evidence. Among her special skills was information management, which she taught at the
LAPD
training academy. That was exactly what Hrycyk required. He had volumes of information and needed to find someone to help him make sense of it. Larazus did that.

Hrycyk and Lazarus spent hundreds of hours transcribing handwritten information from the blue binders to the database and the website. And they worked the cases. Hrycyk also began to transfer his hard-earned knowledge of art theft investigations to her. While Hrycyk took a vacation one Valentine's Day, a bronze statue was stolen. Lazarus conducted the investigation solo and solved the crime before Hrycyk was back at the office. When we met that summer, in 2008, I got the sense that Lazarus was content to stay in the background. Rarely was she quoted in articles about the unit's successes. She didn't seem to be about the glory, but she was to be Hrycyk's legacy.

For a presentation to his superiors, Hrycyk compared the results of his team of two against the combined results from all the detectives in Los Angeles working property crimes. He included a little diagram: ninety stick figures, representing the ninety detectives in all twenty-one divisions, and the value of their recoveries between 1993 and 2008: $64 million. The art theft unit was represented by only two stick figures, and beside them was the value of their total recoveries over the same period of time: $77 million. Hrycyk and Lazarus had recovered more value than ninety detectives, by more than $12 million.

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.