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The Art Hostage team undertakes a wide range of services, including due diligence, collection conservation and management, risk assessment and security as well as legal issues, recovery and dispute resolution involving art and artifacts. Through partnerships with leading organizations, the Art Hostage team can provide a complete service for all aspects of collecting and protecting art.
A fashion industry publicist avoided a jail sentence by pleading guilty
on Tuesday to stealing a drawing by the Surrealist artist Salvador Dalí from the wall of a newly opened Manhattan art gallery last year.
The publicist, Phivos Istavrioglou, 29, accepted a plea offer just a
week after he was charged in court. He admitted that he tucked the 1949
drawing into a shopping bag and walked out of the Venus Over Manhattan
gallery, on the Upper East Side. He took the drawing to his native
Greece, but after seeing news coverage of the theft, mailed it back to
New York in a cardboard tube.
“It was a stupid thing to do,” Mr. Istavrioglou said in court.
The drawing, “Cartel de Don Juan Tenorio,” was valued at about $150,000, prosecutors said.
Prosecutors had sought four months of jail time and restitution to cover
the costs of the investigation. But Justice Charles H. Solomon of State
Supreme Court in Manhattan offered a sentence under which Mr.
Istavrioglou would avoid additional jail time if he remained
incarcerated until his formal sentencing on March 12 and paid $9,100 in
restitution by that date.
Mr. Istavrioglou, who had been living in Milan when he was arrested, will be turned over to immigration officials and face almost certain deportation, said Jordan Arnold, an assistant district attorney.
“Quite honestly, Phivos wanted this done,” Mr. Istavrioglou’s lawyer,
David J. Cohen, said outside of court. “It has been tormenting him since
the first day.”
Art Hostage Comments:
Credit must be given to Mark Fishstein of the NYPD for his tireless efforts which resulted in the recovery of the Dali and the conviction of Phivos Istavrioglou. Thieves should think twice before targeting New York as Mark Fishstein will always be there waiting to apprehend those with stealing art on their mind.
The Bizarre Coincidences Surrounding the $50M Diamond Heist in Belgium
Great heists depend on exquisite timing, which is precisely the way an armed gang carried out the stunning diamond robbery at the Brussels airport
on Monday. Just as some $50 million worth of precious stones were being
transferred from an armored car to the hold of a commercial flight
bound for Switzerland, what looked like a couple of black police cars
with flashing blue lights drove onto the tarmac and eight men got out
brandishing assault rifles. They seized 120 parcels of diamonds, got
back in their cars, and were gone in less than five minutes, apparently
operating out of sight of the passengers—and of the airport police.
Sounds like a scene in a movie. But
there’s more. With a little imagination, there’s a whole screenplay.
And like any good script, this story already has a lot of twists and
turns—some of them probably blind alleys—including a few that even lead
back to … Hollywood.
Questions
about the timing of the Brussels Airport job did not end with the
action on the runway. Belgian crime reporters immediately thought back
to 10 years ago—exactly 10 years ago to the week—when an Italian gang
managed to break into what the world had thought was an impregnable
vault in the diamond district of Antwerp and make off with more than
$100 million worth of stones.
Those
middle-aged burglars were some of the best old pros in the business:
planners, locksmiths, electricians, and muscle known as the School of
Turin. Their leader, Leonardo Notarbartolo, was a ruggedly handsome
grandfather who’d been a thief all his life and was proud of it. As
robberies go, the 2003 heist in Antwerp was a work of genius, with just
one stupid mistake. The gang was done in when a farmer found some
suspect garbage and called the police. Among the incriminating bits of
evidence: receipts for some of the gear used in the heist and a
half-eaten sandwich with the ringleader’s DNA on it.
There are only so many master jewel thieves in this world, and only a
handful able to carry out such rigorous preparation and execution.
Notarbartolo
was convicted of the 2003 Antwerp job in 2005, but neither he nor any
of his partners ever revealed where the loot was hidden. And, proud as
he was of his larcenous vocation, for much of the time he was behind
bars he was trying to figure out how he could get a movie made about his
life. According to Scott Andrew Selby and Greg Campbell in Flawless, their
exhaustive investigation of the Antwerp job, Notarbartolo was hoping
the whole deal would be lucrative, or that it least it would help him
explain where he got his money if he started to look rich.
In 2009, Joshua Davis interviewed Notarbartolo in a Belgian prison and wrote a profile for Wired magazine.
“I may be a thief and a liar,” the thief and liar told him, “but I am
going to tell you a true story.” Davis, on his website, notes that he is
executive producer of “the diamond project,” a movie adapted from his article in Wired.
In an email, we asked Davis if he had paid Notarbartolo for the Wired story, and he was categorical: “I never paid Notarbartolo anything, nor did Wired,”
he said. We followed up with a question about Paramount paying for
“life rights” to make a film, but Davis hasn’t gotten back to us on that
yet.
All
this would be so much minor gossip in the movie and publishing biz if
not, once again, for the strange question of timing. Notarbartolo got
out of prison on parole in 2009. According to the Belgian press, he
recently went to the United States to talk to people about a movie.
There have been some rumors around Rodeo Drive that “the diamond
project” was in trouble, which, if true, would typically mean a lot of
money promised wouldn’t get paid out, since it’s usually tied to stages
of script acceptance and production.
In
any case, Notarbartolo flew back to Europe on January 29. He promptly
found himself under arrest at the Paris airport, where he was about to
connect to Turin. He was then extradited to Belgium on Monday, as it
happens—the day of the heist at the Brussels airport—a coincidence that Flawless coauthor Selby calls “amazing.”
It
appears that Notarbartolo had had an arrest warrant issued for him in
November 2011 on the grounds he’d broken the conditions of his parole.
And one of the infractions, according to Belgian prosecutors quoted in
the local press, is that while failing to pay back “one penny” to the
victims of his crime, Notarbartolo made money off the story he gave to Wired.
His Belgian lawyer, Walter Damen, was not available for comment.
(Damen’s assistant told us he was visiting Notarbartolo in jail.) But
press reports of the bail hearing say Damen claimed in his client’s
defense that there was no proof he had any of the loot in his
possession, and he wasn’t really profiting from his crime through the Wired story because it was really fiction.
Now,
it may be that none of this really has anything to do with the heist on
the tarmac at Brussels airport. “It’s a pretty different M.O.,” says
Selby, an authority on the diamond business as well as diamond thefts.
The 2003 job run by Notarbartolo was very quiet—almost invisible—and not
discovered until the end of the Valentine’s Day weekend that year. The
Brussels job was, as the military likes to say, “kinetic”—all action,
with guns waving and orders shouted and people fearing for their lives,
although in the end nobody got hurt. Selby says he doubts there was any
direct link with Notarbartolo, but he was disturbed by so many odd
coincidences of timing. “It’s weird,” he said. “I don’t know what to say
about that.”
There
are only so many master jewel thieves in this world, and only a handful
able to carry out such rigorous preparation and execution. So suspicion
inevitably would have turned to Notarbartolo had he been free when the
heist took place. Fortunately for him, his arrest gives him the perfect
alibi. Almost as if he’d planned it that way.
It
will be a while before we get the full story about yesterday’s diamond
heist at Brussels Airport. So far, it sounds as though eight thieves,
dressed in police uniforms and carrying machine guns, drove two cars,
fitted with flashing police lights, onto the tarmac and stole the
diamonds directly from the cargo hold of a jet. Most reports have said
that the diamonds are worth around fifty million dollars (although one
source cited by the Wall Street Journal
has put their value as high as three hundred and fifty million).
Meanwhile, Anja Bijens, a spokesperson for the prosecutor’s office in
Brussels, said what officials always say in heist movies: “This was not a
random robbery. It was well-prepared—these were professionals.”
What exactly does it mean to be a “professional” diamond thief? That was the subject of David Samuels’s 2010 article, “The Pink Panthers.”
The Panthers are a gang of jewelry thieves, based mainly in Eastern
Europe, but with a global reach. Here’s a sample of their handiwork:
In March, 2004, Panthers targeted a jewelry store in
Tokyo. Two Serbs, wearing wigs, entered the store and immobilized a
clerk with pepper spray. They made off with a necklace containing a
hundred-and-twenty-five carat diamond. That same year, in Paris,
Panthers exploited a visit to Chopard by the wife of Prime Minister
Jean-Pierre Raffarin, and stole fourteen million dollars’ worth of
jewels from an unguarded display case. In 2005, a Panther team, dressed
in flower-print shirts, raided Julian, a jewelry store in Saint-Tropez.
The heist, which took place in broad daylight, lasted just minutes. The
thieves ran out of the store and down to the harbor, where they escaped
in a waiting speedboat.
All told, the Panthers have performed hundreds of robberies all over the
world. The gang’s cinematic name is an invention of the press: the
police, after raiding one thief’s apartment, found a blue-diamond ring,
worth seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars, hidden inside a jar of
face cream; a similar hiding place was used in one of the Peter Sellars
films.
What sort of person becomes a Pink Panther? To find out, Samuels travels
to Serbia and Montenegro, where many of the gang’s members grew up. In
Serbia, the corruption, violence, and economic privation of the
nineteen-nineties created a climate perfect for organized crime. (“Once
the Serbian state had transformed itself into a criminal enterprise,”
Samuels writes, “many Serbs turned themselves, willingly or reluctantly,
into criminals.”) Samuels travels to the Serbian city of Nis, which has
its own “faction” of Panther operatives.
The highway leading into town was empty, and lined with
stores selling motorbikes and diet supplements. The city felt far
removed from Belgrade, with its Austro-Hungarian façades and
well-ordered criminality. Nis was wilder, and had more of an ethnic mix:
Albanians, Macedonians, Gypsies. The city’s most famous landmark is the
Skull Tower, which was built by the Turks, in 1809, out of quicklime,
sand, and nine hundred and fifty-two skulls of Serbian fighters. On the
uneven sidewalks, girls in heavy makeup tottered along in high heels,
their loutish boyfriends following closely behind.… Groups of young men
drank beer in the street. One of them, a Serb, had a T-shirt emblazoned
with a brace of pistols and the word “Wanted,” in gaudy silver
lettering. A brand-new Audi was parked nearby.
Samuels sits down with the mayor, Milos Simonovic, who says that Nis has
been “a good place to have this merger between authorities and
criminals.” “Many younger citizens of Nis,” Samuels explains, “having
watched their parents lose their jobs, and growing up in an atmosphere
of wholesale corruption, have embraced the idea of going to Western
Europe and becoming thieves.” When they return home, ready to spend, the
police are happy to turn a blind eye to their faraway crimes. In
Montenegro, meanwhile, “hospitality to organized crime is so remarkable
as to merit comparison to the legendary pirates’ paradise of Tortuga.”
In the Montenegrin town of Cetinje, the mayor tells Samuels about a
local song about the thieves and bandits who operate in Western Europe.
It goes, “We don’t steal from Montenegro, we steal for Montenegro.”
Samuels spends much of the piece trying to meet with someone who is
relatively high-up in the Panther organization. Finally, in the
Montenegrin capital of Podgorica, Samuels meets with a Panther who goes
by the name “Novak.” (Samuels is instructed, via a cell-phone call, to
wait by the side of a mountain road; wear loose-fitting,
easily-searchable clothing, a voice tells him, and leave your phone and
tape recorder at home.) The Panthers, Novak explains, are loosely
organized: they get “orders from Belgrade,” Samuels discovers, which are
the product of “a centralized system for picking targets and assigning
crews to jobs.” Samuels asks Novak about how he became a Panther. “We
all come from normal families,” Novak says. “Our parents are normal
people. They are not in this kind of life.”
The thieves in his group had gone to Italy together and
saw how people lived there: “Some of us went insane and tried to have
everything at once.” The greedy ones wound up with long prison terms or
worse, he said. Others spent two or three years in Italian jails. He
said that the gang began stealing during the era of Western sanctions;
some of its members had connections to the Serbian security services,
which provided protection.
In the early days, Novak says, the group got tips from a male model, who
had grown up in the Balkans and was living in Antwerp. Later, they
developed their own intelligence network: “We have our bird-watchers,”
he says. “We have guys whose job it is to travel around and collect
tips.” The gang has included a computer whiz who sifts through
registries for planes and boats, looking for likely targets. (Russian
expats living in Western Europe are particularly attractive; they’re
probably in trouble at home, he says, and will be reluctant to go to the
police.) A technician, Samuels learns, has worked for the team,
creating “devices for bypassing alarm systems”; the man’s father, Novak
boasts, “is one of the most famous engineers in Serbia!” After they’re
stolen, the diamonds are taken elsewhere in Europe on speedboats: “You
can charter one for two Rolex,” he says. Eventually, the stolen diamonds
reënter the regular diamond market as though they were new.
We don’t know, of course, who stole the diamonds at the airport, or
where those diamonds are going. But we can guess about what the thieves
were like—“desperate and inventive men,” Samuels calls them, who are
thirsty for an anonymous prosperity. At the end of their meeting, when
Novak says goodbye, he invites Samuels to visit again. “He would show me
some ‘white glass,’ ” Samuels writes, “and perhaps a Cézanne.”
Subscribers can read the “The Pink Panthers” online, in The New Yorker’s archive. Illustration by R. Kikuo Johnson.
Diamond Heist, The Sequel: After Brussels Airport, Paris Department Store Hit
FRANCE 24, LE PARISIEN (France) Worldcrunch PARIS - A day after armed men pulled off a spectacular 50 million euro diamond heist at
Brussels Airport, two men made off with 3 million euros worth of
diamonds after holding up a popular department store in central Paris on
Tuesday night.
The heist happened in broad daylight – an hour before closing – at
the Printemps department store. The unsuspecting crowd of customers
remained oblivious to the entire incident, said France 24.
The Printemps is one of Paris’ oldest and most popular stores, in the
center of the city’s busy Opera shopping and business district .
The two men, who wore bulletproof jackets but no balaclavas, carried
out their hold-up very discretely, without firing their handguns, said
France 24.
They asked a salesperson from the De Beers counter to open two
jewelry cases, emptied the contents into their bags, and exited through a
service staircase in the back of the department store, reports le Parisien.
French police believes this could be an inside job. The men’s faces
were uncovered even though the store has an extensive video-surveillance
system.
The Printemps Department store in Paris, Wikipedia
De Beers, a Dutch company, is one of the world’s leading diamond
firms. A spokesperson confirmed clients and personnel were safe and that
they were cooperating with the police.
In a stunning raid on a loaded commercial aircraft, eight armed robbers
got away with as much as $350 million of gems. WSJ's Daniel Michaels
explains why it looks like the thieves had inside help in breaching very
tight security.
BRUSSELS—Twenty-nine passengers sat aboard a
Zurich-bound flight here Monday evening waiting for the last bags to be
loaded, when heavily armed robbers raced up to the plane and stole more
than 120 packages of diamonds whose value is estimated as high at $350
million.
Some of the eight masked assailants stood in front of the Helvetic
Airways jet plane with machine guns, pointing laser sights at the pilots
inside the cockpit while others forced ground staff to open the plane's
cargo doors, according to Belgian prosecutors and other people familiar
with the events.
The robbers snatched specific consignments and sped off in minutes
without firing a shot, said Belgian prosecutor Ine Van Wymersch. "It was
well-prepared and very professional," she said.
The heist passed so quickly and quietly that travelers on the plane
and inside the terminal barely knew what had happened. "It wasn't
something you'd expect to see in real life," said Brussels Airport
spokesman Jan Van der Cruysse. "It was something you'd see in the
movies."
The thieves appeared to have detailed information about both the
cargo and operations at Brussels Airport, said aviation security
specialists, and likely had help from people at the airport. That
underscores worries by international law-enforcement officials that, in
spite of many years of improvement in airport security, the many workers
at these facilities continue to pose a threat for their potential to
help not only criminals, but also terrorists.
The brazen heist is Europe's highest-value and most dramatic tarmac
holdup in a decade, said aviation security specialists. But because it
wasn't yet clear what was stolen, estimates of the actual value varied.
The declared value of the stolen diamonds, a mix of rough and polished
stones, was about $50 million, according to a spokeswoman for the
Antwerp World Diamond Centre, a coordinator for diamond traders in the
city. Another person familiar with the events said the jewels could be
worth up to $350 million. Ms. Van Wymersch, the prosecutor, declined to
place a value on the stolen gems.
Swiss International Air Lines, for which Helvetic operated the
flight, said in a statement that the heist "was evidently aimed at
valuables" on the plane, including diamonds. Neither the passengers nor
the four crew members aboard the Fokker 100 jetliner were hurt, Swiss
said.
At 7:47 p.m. Monday, two black vehicles with blue police-style lights
pulled up to the plane, which had just been loaded, according to the
prosecutor, Ms. Van Wymersch.
The robbers apparently knew that one segment of the airport's
perimeter, protected by two layers of 10-foot-high fencing and concrete
blocks, could be crossed more easily due to construction, said a person
familiar with the events. The fences were cut before the Audi A8 and
Mercedes van, models typically used by Belgian security forces, reached
the airport, this person said. The assailants slipped onto airport
territory between security patrols, said another person familiar with
the events.
The assailants then appear to have waited and only proceeded after
receiving word that the valuables were loaded onto the plane from an
armored truck, which arrived at the airport with an armed escort, the
first person said. The robbers' disguises were precise down to armbands
worn by airport police, this person said.
One vehicle was later found thoroughly burned and "was probably used"
in the theft, Ms. Van Wymersch said. "At this stage of the
investigation, everything is still possible."
The robbery was unusual for its boldness and for the number of people
involved, said Robert Read, global head of fine art at specialist
insurers Hiscox Ltd.
HSX.LN+1.68%
in London, who has handled hundreds of theft claims.
"Eight armed
men is a mini army," said Mr. Read, who estimated that the entire team
involved in organizing and working as lookouts was about 20 people.
Mr. Read said that while the gang "got lucky" that their heist
proceeded without violence or problems, "the theft is the easy part."
Laundering so many diamonds won't be simple, he said. "It's hard to move
that much without raising eyebrows."
Brussels Airport is a gateway for diamonds and gold coming in and out
of Antwerp, a world hub for trading in gems and precious metals. About
$200 million in diamonds enter and leave the city daily, with about 99%
of that moving through the Brussels Airport in several shipments each
week, according to the spokeswoman for the Antwerp World Diamond Centre.
Central Antwerp has implemented strict security measures over recent
years, including extensive video surveillance, requirements for diamond
merchants to have alarmed safes and close cooperation with local police.
Reports of suspicious incidents can be sent to police online. "It's
safe to say we're the safest diamond center in the world," the
spokeswoman said.
But she said Antwerp diamond merchants are "concerned" by the airport
heist, she said. Shipments to and from the airport, in armored
vehicles, are accompanied by armed escorts, but once they enter the
airport they lose their armed escort, she said.
Findel Airport in tiny Luxembourg, next to Belgium, is working to
attract valuable goods by creating a high-security zone far away from
most airport activities. Planes will taxi past for loading of precious
cargo, such as art and jewels, which will take only a few minutes,
according to the airport and people familiar with the plans.
"There's massive demand" for such a facility, said Mr. Read at Hiscox.
The precision of the Brussels heist indicated extensive help from
airport insiders, said air-security experts, who noted that all airports
employ thousands of low-paid workers and face high staff turnover.
People handling air freight are aware of valuable consignments because
every cargo shipment carries a waybill, which is similar to a
passenger's boarding pass. Waybills must move openly through cargo
systems so handlers can plan how to load freight.
In February 2004, six armed robbers working on inside information
raided a warehouse at London's Heathrow Airport and escaped with £1.75
million ($2.7 million) in cash. The men were later caught and convicted.
Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, law-enforcement
officials have grown increasingly concerned about security threats posed
by people working inside airports or other sensitive facilities. U.S.
President Barack Obama in November issued a presidential memorandum on
the National Insider Threat Policy, which aims to combat dangers such as
espionage, violence and "unauthorized disclosure of classified
information," according to the memorandum.
Security officials acknowledge that events such as the Brussels
robbery may be impossible to completely prevent. "You can minimize
access to information, but you can never eliminate the threat," said one
European official involved in security.
Since Sept. 11, airport holdups have dropped significantly due to
measures aimed at potential terrorists. Brussels Airport suffered a
string of dramatic robberies more than a decade ago, prompting airlines
and insurers to press the Belgian government and the airport company to
tighten security around the facility.
Before European countries began adopting the euro in 2001, airport
robberies were more frequent because national currencies were frequently
transported among countries, aviation-security officials have said.
In the decade through 2002, armed robbers staged at least 10 major
heists on the tarmacs of European airports and robbers who didn't pull
guns executed many more thefts of cash, diamonds and other valuable
cargo from high-security areas, according to airport-security
specialists.
Monday's theft was the first at the airport since 2002, said Ms. Van Wymersch, the prosecutor. Write to Daniel Michaels at daniel.michaels@wsj.com
Armed robbers have made off with a "gigantic" haul of diamonds after a rapid raid at Brussels Airport.
They broke through a fence on Monday evening and stole gems
which could be worth 50m euros (£43m; $67m), as they were being loaded
from a Brinks security van onto a Swiss-bound plane.
They escaped back through the same hole. Police later found a burned-out vehicle close to the airport.
Police are looking for eight men, a prosecutors' spokeswoman said.
Caroline De Wolf, of the Antwerp World Diamond Centre,
estimated the haul at 50m euros, saying: "What we are talking about is
obviously a gigantic sum".
AFP quoted an unnamed spokeswoman at the same Antwerp centre calling the robbery "one of the biggest" ever.
She said that the diamonds were "rough stones" being transported from Antwerp to Zurich.
Antwerp is the hub of the world diamond trade - about 150m
euros' worth of stones move in and out of the city every day, the
spokeswoman added. No shots
Brussels prosecutor's spokeswoman Anja Bijnens said the
thieves were masked and well armed, but no shots were fired and no-one
was hurt in the raid.
They used two vehicles, the raid was over in a matter of minutes, and they made off into the night.
An airport spokesman, Jan Van Der Crujsse, said the robbers
made a hole in the perimeter fence and drove up next to the Swiss
passenger plane that was preparing to leave.
He could not explain the security breach. "We abide by the most stringent rules,'' he said.
A man charged with the theft of the Wenlok Jug pleaded guilty at Luton Crown Court today (February 11).
Ronald Nash, 23, of Pitwood Green in Tadworth,
Surrey was charged with handling stolen property and being concerned in
the supply of class A drugs after Bedfordshire Police launched a covert
operation to retrieve the jug.
The 14th century jug was taken from a high-security display cabinet at Stockwood Discovery Centre in May last year.
Louis
Kybert, 25, from Surrey, who was arrested in the same operation
pleaded guilty to the possession of two stun guns and being concerned in
the supply of class A drugs.
The Wenlok Jug is valued at
£750,000, is made of bronze, weighs 6.1kgs and is decorated with coats
of arms, badges and the inscription: “MY LORD WENLOK”.
A third man aged 47 was arrested in connection with this investigation but he was released without further action.
Nash and Kybert will be sentenced at Luton Crown Court on March 15.
DI
Martin Peters said: “This was a high profile case which involved the
theft of a national treasure and attracted a lot of public interest. The
amount of evidence gathered by officers has meant that the offenders
had no alternative but to plead guilty.”
"Crass ineptitude": Two thieves who stole priceless antiques and then couldn't find them are jailed
Lee Wildman and Adrian Stanton hid their £2MILLION haul on wasteland but were never able to locate it.
'Inept': Adrian Stanton (left) and Lee Wildman
Durham Police
Two inept thieves who made off with antiques worth £2million and then couldn't find where they stashed them, have been jailed.
Lee Wildman, 36, was jailed for nine years and Adrian Stanton, 33,
was handed an eight-year term for planning and carrying out a raid at
Durham University's Oriental Museum last Easter.
They had planned the break-in well, choosing the night before Good
Friday when the campus was quiet, using cloned number plates and
chiselling a hole through a brick wall to get in and out quickly.
From the display cabinets, they picked out just two items - a 1769
jade bowl and a porcelain figurine - worth up to £2 million, Judge
Christopher Prince told them.
Stolen: One of the artefacts
Hole in the wall: The scene of the robbery
Durham University
But their plan was flawed because after hiding the items on
wasteland, Wildman could not find them when he returned two days later.
He was seen by a witness searching the plot, speaking in an agitated manner on his mobile, as the light faded.
Judge Prince told the defendants they had shown "crass ineptitude" in being unable to find their haul.
"Thank heavens you could not, because they may have been lost," he said.
Just weeks before the pair from Walsall had received suspended
sentences for a night-time break-in at an amusement arcade in Rhyl,
where they cut a hole in a roof and broke into slot machines.
Durham University
On that occasion police stopped their car on the way back to the Midlands, and found them to have over £10,000 in coins.
That was in their minds when they decided to hide the Chinese artefacts and collect them later, the judge said.
Both men had shown no remorse and had told "transparent" lies during a
two-day hearing at Durham Crown Court in which they tried to play down
their roles in the burglary, the judge said.
It was hard to put a price on the items, the judge said.
"The financial value of artefacts such as these is perhaps the very least important factor," he said.
"These items have got a historical, cultural and artistic value that is quite simply immeasurable.
"Their loss has had the most enormous detrimental effect on the
university, both in expenditure they have had to make in improving their
security and in the loss of potential confidence from benefactors."
Recovered: Artefact
Durham University
The items were found following a finger-tip search of the waste area
after a witness who read some of the widespread publicity about the case
recognised she had seen Wildman in the area.
Four others who helped the offenders while they tried to lie low from police will be sentenced later.
A week before the break-in, Wildman and Stanton were caught on the
museum's CCTV, testing security during a visit within opening hours.
When he was shown the footage later, Wildman told detectives: "It's not a crime to visit a museum."
Both men were to be paid a "fixed reward" for stealing the items,
which was nothing like their real market value, Ben Williams, defending
both men, said.
They both have lengthy criminal records stretching back to when they were juveniles, the court heard.
When they were arrested with their girlfriends and an accomplice at a
Walsall hotel, Wildman was found to have £5,746 in cash and Stanton
£4,930.
Peter Makepeace, prosecuting, praised the media for publicising the theft which led to vital information from the public.
"It is right to say that local press coverage in particular was very
useful because witnesses were able to make identifications from
photographs that had been published," he said.
The raiders were probably not acting alone, and were carrying out the thefts "to order", he said.
Portrait of an art detective: The intriguing investigations carried out the world over to return lost masterpieces
'I've met with a criminal who's been holding onto some very valuable artwork for over 30 years several times at a cafe in Paris'
Art theft - after the trade in drugs and arms - is the highest grossing criminal activity, according to the FBI.
The
crimes that come to the public's attention are usually only the big
cases, like the theft of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa in 1911 and
Edvard Munch's The Scream, stolen in Oslo in 2004.
Both were recovered and it is thanks to the dogged
determination of people like Christopher Marinello that such
masterpieces are returned to their owners and galleries around the
world. For he is an art detective.
His official title is
executive director at the Art Loss Register, and in his role he has
found more than £160million of stolen artwork for individual collectors,
museums and galleries around the world. One of his recent successes
was recovering a Matisse painting in Essex worth more than £1million,
25 years after it was stolen from the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm.
Yahoo! News UK and Ireland interviewed Mr Marinello in his London
office.
Yahoo!: What is the Art Loss Register? Christopher Marinello:
The Art Loss Register (ALR) was established in 1991, it has a database
of 360,000 stolen art items. Rather than just maintaining a list of
stolen items, we actively search the marketplace for whatever is on our
list. I not only recover artwork; I mediate title disputes. For example,
if one millionaire is buying a Degas from another millionaire and the
Degas belongs to Holocaust victims, I facilitate the sale by working out
a solution that satisfies the original owners.
Yahoo!: How often do you find database matches? CM:
Every week. Say if you're a collector who sees an antique clock on
Portobello Road - you can contact us to make sure it's not stolen. I get
calls all the time from people who claim to have leads on stolen work.
Many aren't plausible like a recent call from someone saying that a
well-known country singer has paintings from a famous Boston Museum
heist.
Yahoo!: When you find a missing work, do you alert the police or meet with suspected art thieves yourself? CM:
I deal with criminals if I have the permission of the authorities. If
artwork was stolen recently, the police are usually keen to get
involved. If the theft happened 25 years ago, the police aren't as
interested and in those cases I'm given permission to handle the case
myself.
Yahoo!: Is that what happened with Le Jardin,
the Matisse painting that you recently recovered in Essex and returned
to the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm? CM:
Yes - a private art dealer in Essex was approached by a guy in Poland
to sell it in the UK so he contacted us to see if it was on the Art Loss
Register. We saw it was stolen so we told the art dealer that we'd
check the painting on delivery and to tell the Polish seller that he was
going ahead with the sale. I also alerted Scotland Yard, just in case
we needed to seize it at the border. Once it was back in the country,
the art dealer was shown all the Interpol and police notices to prove it
was stolen. We drafted a release which he signed and we got the
painting back.
Yahoo!: So the case ends there - you don't try to find out who the thieves are? CM:
We told the police everything and if they want to investigate the
Polish seller and solve the crime, they can do so. Or the Swedish police
could try to solve the crime.
Yahoo!: But in 25 years, the painting
probably changed hands so many times that it could be very difficult to
trace the original thieves? CM: You never
know. In a case I'm working on now, I've met with a criminal who's been
holding onto some very valuable artwork for over 30 years several times
at a cafe in Paris. I want to resolve this thing because the family
still wants their artwork back. We can prove who owns the artwork but we
can't prove he's done the crime so it's a matter of trying to persuade
him to give us the artwork.
Yahoo!: How closely do you work with Interpol and other art crime organisations? CM:
Very closely, although Interpol is not a force, it's an organisation
that helps officers in one country deal with officers in other
countries. On the other hand, the FBI art crime squad is an actual squad
of 14 agents. The Italian Carabinieri are a serious art crime squad
with 300 officers.
Yahoo!: Are there any new cases you can tell us about? CM: We've
got some really exciting unsolved cases on our books now including
works by Modigliani, Braque, Leger, Matisse and Picasso from the Paris
Museum of Modern Art theft in 2010 and work from the recent Kunsthal
museum heist. We are also working on getting back a Matisse for a
family of Holocaust descendants in New York which is now in a museum in
Norway. The documentation we have is signed by Hermann Goering ordering a
gallery in Paris which had this Matisse to be closed in 1941. Goering
then had the artwork seized and sent the family who owned the gallery to
Auschwitz. Because Goering didn't like Matisse, he traded the piece to
other dealers in Paris to get the Old Masters that he wanted. That's how
it returned to the open market.
Yahoo!: What missing artwork would you really love to find? CM:
The ultimate recovery would be to find the work from the Isabella
Stewart Gardner Museum heist in Boston. During the 1990 St Patrick's
Parade where every police officer was at the parade, thieves dressed as
police stole Vermeer's The Concert (at $200 million, the most valuable
stolen artwork in the world), Rembrandt's Storm on the Sea, Manet's Chez
Tortoni and 10 more pieces– artwork now valued at half a billion
dollars. The museum is so keen to get the work back that they're
offering a $5 million reward and anyone returning the work will not be
prosecuted for the crime.
Yahoo!: Have the profiles of art thieves changed over the years? Are they getting more difficult to track down? CM: Thieves
are always going to be thieves. Art thieves are common thugs. There's
no romance there. The same people who'd steal your wallet would steal
artwork. The internet has made it easier track but it's easier for the
criminals as well. I can't go undercover anymore for instance because my
picture is everywhere. The key is to get more people who buy and sell
art to check the Art Loss database.
Stolen Carpet
For your verification, the carpet can be seen on the FBI’s NSAF.
The owners contacted us to help facilitate a private search using our
industry contacts and launching a website for them to possibly aid in
recovery – AntiqueSilkRug.com
The latter is to be promoted on all websites and social networking outlets as the receiving point for leads as well as serve as confirmation for reward(s).
The carpet was stolen from the original owner in suburban New York.
This was the only item stolen, and it was specifically targeted. There
is reason to believe the carpet is still in existence and efforts to
circulate this information is now timely. The high reward is to
encourage individual(s) with information that providing a legitimate
lead resulting in recovery comes with benefit to all parties. For the
owners, recovery of the original carpet will provide resolution, and the
return of an item with great sentimental value.
Fine silk Tabriz carpets such as this are highly collectible in
pristine condition. There are few of this type of carpet in existence,
and those which survive often obtain high premiums when in original
condition and sold with legitimate provenance. This particular carpet,
titled the “Wedding Carpet”, features several unique attributes making
it unusual and rare:
It is large in size while still relatively manageable as a show piece.
Among 19th century carpets, it is an exceptional example.
The carpet is quite fine, and features a consistent theme through its pictorial imagery.
It is a one-of-a-kind carpet, as uniquely identifiable as a fingerprint.
An antique Persian silk “Figural” Tabriz made in Iran, size 2.62m x 3.70m.
Most unique are the woven illustrations of courting scenes between Persian [Sassanian] King and Armenian Princess: The love story of Khosrow and Shirin. Each of the thirteen panels in the field are elaborate and ornate, with specific symbolism surrounding the two lovers. Largest of all, the central focal point: A tree-of-life, stemming from a decorative vase, which connects each illustrated cartouche.
There are few carpets of this type and age which combine such a wide range and variety of imagery in such detail. The illustrations together complete an elaborate story. Other included imagery (from the top field down): lanterns of the Orient on either side of an armorial shield, bowls of fruit, pheasants, reclined and seated human figures, and a border illustrating crouching deer. The carpet has many colors; those of which are most prominent include an ivory ground at the center, a redish-rust color of the field background and border, and a third dominant color in abrash ranging of light to medium blue throughout the entire piece.
The carpet is also thin and fine in weave, with characteristics similar to a tapestry or fabric, but having a thin pile. The carpet is also pliable, with the ability to fold up similar to how a blanket may be stored.
Size: 8 feet 7 inches x 12 feet 2 inches
2.62 meters x 3.70 meters
An antique Persian carpet made in Tabriz, Iran. Hand woven of silk pile and silk foundation. Cream colored fringe at each end of the 8’7″ width.
In the center of the carpet appears a large tree of life design stemming from an ornate base. The tree of life is portrayed against a cream colored background.
Under the center tree of life, three panels illustrate reclining male and female figures.
The basic color of the carpet is an orange-red or rust, although the carpet is replete with multi colors, especially dark and light blues.
Also depicted in the carpet are the following: – Bowls containing a variety of fruits – Oriental lamps in the two upper corners. The border of the carpet contains alternating medallions of flowers and crouching animals / deer. Read more about this carpet
Reward for information leading to recovery. Even if you do not have information, see how you can raise awareness.
Guilty plea over badge theft from museum
TWO men accused of burglary and theft from the
Inniskilling Museum in Enniskillen have pleaded guilty to their lesser
charges of stealing six helmet plate badges from the property.
57-year-old Carlo Holmes of Clonard Court, Belfast and 33-year-old
James Daniel Carlin, also from Belfast but currently in custody,
appeared at Enniskillen Crown Court yesterday (Wednesday) admitting the
theft on March 6 last year as well as a further charge of criminal
damage to a display case belonging to the museum.
The charges of burglary and theft for both men still remain on the Court's books.
Holmes also faces an additional charge of assault on police, relating to the same date.
After he was rearraigned his defence barrister, Des Fahy applied for a change to one of his bail conditions.
Explaining that Holmes had to report to Grosvenor Road Police Station
at 3pm each day, Mr Fahy asked whether his client could have the time
changed to 5pm instead. "He would like to collect his godson from
school," explained the barrister, "He is trying to build a relationship
with him."
The prosecution outlined why police were objecting to the
application: "Reporting in the middle of the afternoon rather than later
allows his movement to be less 'free' during the course of the day.
"Police are concerned about the fact that his criminal history is not
confined to one particular area. The middle of the afternoon reporting
suggests he cannot go too far from the area where he resides."
Crown Court Judge Melody McReynolds believed however, that altering
the time to 1.30pm was acceptable, particularly since the ongoing flag
protests in Belfast were making it harder to get in and out of the city
anyway. Both men are to appear again at Laganside Court tomorrow
(Friday).
Here we go
again, "according museums have the thieves nothing from
Catharijneconvent stolen monstrance". Oh yeah? Yet the thefts on. Of
course they have something that monstrance. Insured for € 250.000,00 and
then in a showcase that can quickly turn into? That regulates the
nearest jeweler around the corner better.
