Hot Art (9 page)

His new assignment was mostly a stab at
PR
with the Madison Avenue set. It was a smart, easy play for the department and cost them no resources except one detective's hours for a couple of weeks. It was supposed to be reconnaissance: survey the art scene, gather information, and find out if there was an easy fix. Basically, file a report. When Volpe ventured out he was probably the first detective in North America ever to investigate art theft full-time, even if it was supposed to be a short tenure. To his fellow officers, the art investigation was the equivalent of working for the Bureau of Paranormal Activity. But Volpe jumped at the chance. After all, he was still allowed to wear blue jeans and a leather jacket. Even better, he was getting a paycheque to look at paintings. Instead of writing a report, though, Volpe started to open cases.

He arranged to meet with a curator at the Museum of Modern Art (
MOMA
), which had reported missing work to the
NYPD
, including works by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Pierre Bonnard, and Edward Hopper.
MOMA'S
print department welcomed a steady flow of public visitors—anyone who wanted to spend an afternoon looking at original prints could simply sign out boxes of them to examine in a room at the museum and then bring back the box when finished. But since they had to book an appointment, there was a list of names.

Volpe examined the list of people who had signed out boxes of prints and came up with a shortlist of names that coincided with the dates the prints had gone missing. Then he went through the motions that the thief would have gone through: he signed out boxes of prints and spent an afternoon leafing through them. The prints were brought to him in large cardboard boxes full of dozens of works, and he was left alone with them. He returned them when he was finished.

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art he did the same thing, and asked the Met whether they'd had any prints go missing. They didn't think so but said they'd check. A few hours later the Met called. Yes, prints were missing.

Volpe toured other museums around the city and examined their checkout systems. He visited the New York Public Library and chatted up the librarian. She remembered one man in particular, Ted Donson. Donson's name was on the
MOMA
list.

Next, Volpe did the rounds on Madison Avenue, skipping from one gallery to another. He asked about Donson—a man who turned out to be quite popular and who was, apparently, buying and selling prints. Actually, Donson was buying prints at one gallery and then selling them to another gallery for less. Why? Volpe's theory was that this was Donson's way of ingratiating himself to gallery owners and gaining access to their collections.

Related cases started opening up. At the Dain/Schiff Gallery on Madison Avenue, Volpe was told that a Pablo Picasso painting had been stolen. A man had walked into the gallery while Robert Dain was out and dropped the owner's name. While the assistant dealt with other clients, the man left, probably with the Picasso. Volpe remembered that one of the boxes Donson had signed out at
MOMA
was of Picasso's Vollard Suite. It turned out that Dain had done business with Donson.

“Has he gone to Zurich yet?” Dain asked Volpe.

Zurich?

That was when Volpe first made contact with Interpol, the international police agency. It is likely Volpe was the first North American police officer to specifically request the international police organization's help on an art theft case. Interpol didn't have much information for the
NYC
detective.

Volpe searched through newspaper archives. Donson had worked at a law firm on Wall Street and had been caught trying to sell a series of stolen letters, correspondence between Roswell Gilpatric and Jacqueline Kennedy, to an autograph dealer. He was fined $100; his lawyer called it a “mistake of youth.”

Volpe had a suspect. He called
MOMA
, the Metropolitan Museum, and the New York Public Library and told them to look out for Donson. Eventually, Donson called the Metropolitan to make an appointment. The museum called Volpe.

The detective arranged for a female undercover detective to be in the print room. She was leafing through a set of Paul Gauguin prints when Donson sat down with a briefcase. The detective watched as Donson opened the box and flipped through a few prints. Then she saw him take out his pen. He used his pen to quietly peel off the labels, then slipped a few prints from the box into his briefcase. Donson was arrested on the steps of the Metropolitan but later released without bail.

Less than two weeks after Donson's arrest, an anonymous caller contacted the
NYPD
and told the police department that they would find something they wanted in a locker at Grand Central Station. Volpe went to Grand Central, opened the locker, and found thirty-four original prints worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, as well as four rare books from the New York Public Library. The prints included work by Paul Gauguin, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Albrecht Dürer, a woodcut by Pierre Bonnard, and a reclining nude by Henri Matisse.

Then the case became even weirder: prints started showing up at museums all over the city, sent through the mail. At Cooper-Hewitt, a Rembrandt appeared in an envelope and the assistant who received it figured it must be a joke—the print was surely a duplicate. When the museum checked its records and inventory, it found that the Rembrandt was, in fact, from their collection. It had been stolen without the museum's knowledge.

A few days later a Degas appeared in the mail at the Brooklyn Museum. Two more Rembrandts arrived that same day at the Association of American Artists. A year later Ted Donson pleaded guilty to possession of stolen property, for the prints from the Metropolitan Museum, and was sentenced to five years' probation. No one was ever arrested for the prints that were returned by mail.

The case, though, was instructive: with an education and a little charm, a person could walk into the most prestigious museums in New York and steal prints by the most famous artists in the world.

Volpe received an extension to continue his work as an art detective and set off to further explore New York's world of artists, dealers, auction houses, and museums—wandering through the galleries in the East Fifties and up and down Madison Avenue, through the antique shops on First, Second, and Third Avenues, and through the newer galleries in Soho. He introduced himself as the police department's Art Identification Team.

Around the same time in New York, another investigator was hunting for information about the black market in cultural property. Bonnie Burnham was born in Florida, graduated from the Université Paris–Sorbonne, and worked at the International Council of Museums in Paris, where she published
The Protection of Cultural Property: Handbook of
National Legislation
. She followed up with a 1975 book called
The Art Crisis,
which was meant to be a wake-up call for the art industry. Burnham had tried to cover the industry from a number of angles—black-market antiques, blockbuster heists in Europe, and the expanding worldwide network of art dealers and auction houses being used by criminals. She pointed out that art prices were rising at rates never before seen and that the higher prices climbed, the more thieves became interested in fine art.

“When I was working on
The Art Crisis,
it was a time when there had been an explosion of these violent heists from museums and private collections,” she told me in the spring of 2011. “It was a direct outgrowth of the significant expansion of the art market.” After
The Art Crisis
was published, Burnham went to work for the International Foundation for Art Research and, based on her research, decided to conduct a study of art theft in the United States. “There was not very much information at that time,” she said. “We found out from museums that they did not usually report thefts, because they thought it would be embarrassing and not conducive to their relationships with collectors and donors. They also didn't have the kind of real face-to-face relationship with law enforcement, so calling the police just didn't sound like something pleasant. Everybody in the art world prefers to keep their business to themselves.”

Under Burnham's direction, ifar released the report
Art
Theft: Its Scope, Its Impact and Its Control
. She also started
IFAR'S
Art Theft Archives, a list of stolen works based on items from those initial surveys to museums and dealers. “Most institutions had things missing from their inventory. It was mostly smaller, unobtrusive pieces—collections of objects that were similar to each other,” she said. “Then auction houses began to support us. I had connections with Interpol. We went to the New York Police Department and the fbi. It was never anything official, though—in terms of information. There was no way to get to that level. Up until then, trading in the art market was always based on trust. But this issue changed things—whether you liked it or not—and a lot of people in the field didn't like it at all. The issue divided the art community and created a very unpleasant environment in what used to be a collegial world.”

Bonnie Burnham and Robert Volpe crossed paths. “Volpe had a flamboyant career, ” she said. “I knew Volpe for a number of years. We would exchange war stories.” Both Burnham and Volpe noted that the art market was just beginning to wake up to how large and insidious a problem art theft was, and by the time Burnham left
IFAR
for a position at the World Monuments Fund, in 1985,
IFAR'S
list of stolen art was climbing toward twenty thousand registered items. “At the time the art market was just trying to hide from it and pretend it didn't exist,” Burnham told me. She added, “The art market was complicit.”

Volpe's early scouting missions allowed him a chance to size up the nature of the particular scene he was dealing with. The cast of characters was entirely new to the former narcotics detective, and he started to divide them into categories and profiles. There were the dealers, whom Volpe considered to be the priests of the art world, because almost every art dealer in New York had a front room for the public and a backroom for more trusted clients. In these backrooms the dealers kept their magical wares—works of art or antiques that seemed to possess a power that drew the rich to them and that collectors would pay vast sums of money to own. The dealers decided when to reveal the art, and to whom.

The collector was the character with the will to possess, some more obsessively than others. Collectors needed dealers to provide them with their fix. It was the wallets and the desires of the collectors that pushed the art market along. The collectors provided the demand, while the dealers gathered and guarded the supply.

Another player in this new world was the museums, which Volpe considered to be the cathedrals of the art world. His take on them was that they managed to remain aloof from the bustle of the art trade. They served a higher force: the public good.

Volpe noted that his new cast of characters was vulnerable to another, more sinister character—the art thief, “a despoiler of our national and international sacred trust.” Volpe believed that the only way to combat this breed of criminal was to maintain an art theft unit within the
NYPD
. To do this, Volpe needed to train a few more detectives who were able to “enter and exit the world of art with perfect ease.” That never happened.

Volpe's investigations included burglaries, robberies, and consignment frauds—when an artist or patron would lend a piece of work to a gallery and the gallery would vanish or refuse to return the art. He believed that art theft in New York in the 1970s had reached the same stage as narcotics a decade earlier. “The criminals who dealt in art were on the rise. This was true on a local level, nationally, and internationally. More and more the criminals were familiarizing themselves with the ins and outs of the art market as they had once done with the drug market.” Volpe theorized, “More money is reported stolen in New York in art than dollars stolen from banks.”

He found the new field of crime to be epic: the entire art world seemed to be open to corruption—it was full of fakes, and it was self-policed. “If all the old French furniture was real,” Volpe told the
Christian Science Monitor,
“there would never have been a French Revolution. Everybody in the country would have been too busy making furniture.”

Volpe's department gave him the okay to take a course with Parke-Bernet, a New York auction house that has since been absorbed by Sotheby's. But the revolving door of his superiors meant that his position as an art detective was under constant threat. He garnered even less sympathy from his fellow detectives—he once found a nude centrefold stuck to his locker with the handwritten note, “But is it art?”

The recovery rate for stolen art was at best, Volpe guessed, 10 per cent. He lamented to
Time
magazine that judges rarely gave harsh sentences to art thieves, and he attributed this fact to Hollywood. “An art thief is entertaining, romantic,” Volpe said, referring to the ever-present challenge of the Myth. “I've seen cases where the thief has pleaded guilty and gotten no sentence at all.”

The public attention to some of his early cases shielded Volpe from the ire of his commanding officers, and the detective took advantage of the protection by learning more about trafficking stolen art. There was only one other police organization in the English-speaking world investigating art thefts with any authority, and that was Scotland Yard, in London. Volpe sent a detective to London to spend time with the Yard, to learn what they were learning. As it turned out, London was suffering from similar cases. By 1972 the British force was recovering on average £75,000 worth of fine art a year. Its advice to the
NYPD
was to publicize stolen art and train more officers.