Rumours it was being held in the North of England, Newcastle was mentioned as well as the usual rumours of it being held as collateral.
Currently it is allegedly being held in the Republic of Ireland and the price for recovery is 20,000 euros. Just 0.2% of the current value of £8 million.
The Ashmolean Museum has refused to offer any reward or fee for recovery and Police have refused to engage with Charlie Hill other than if he is willing to just give names, location etc, whereby Police can go arrest a suspect and recover the Ashmolean Cezanne and certainly not pay a single penny for that recovery.
The BBC Radio Four programme Steve Punt PI has recorded an episode about the Ashmolean Cezanne, which Art Hostage was asked to contribute too.
However, knowing the way the BBC acts and the kind of negative narrative they pursue, Art Hostage declined.
Charlie Hill did however contribute and was recorded whilst taking a stroll through the Ashmolean Museum several weeks ago.
The latest is the Steve Punt PI programme has been delayed because of the current undercover operation, which has failed, according to BBC sources, to try and recover the Ashmolean Cezanne and arrest those who have information about the Ashmolean Cezanne.
Charlie Hill has finally succumbed to the Dick Ellis, of (QUINTONS FARM HOUSE GROVE LANE ASHFIELD STOWMARKET IP146LZ)
format of setting up people and was trying desperately to gain a glimpse of the Cezanne so Police could swoop and recover it and arrest those within a mile radius.
Sadly, for Charlie Hill and the Ashmolean Museum, this latest sting attempt, according to sources at the BBC, failed and the Cezanne remains elusive as ever.
So, if the news had broken the Ashmolean Cezanne had been recovered and arrests had of been made, those involved would only have had themselves to blame, as it has been pointed out time and time again
"There is no reward, no fee, no money at all for the recovery of the Ashmolean Cezanne and anyone thinking they can get any kind of payment is in for a rude awakening and will be arrested, charged and taken through the courts"
Anyone purporting to represent the Ashmolean Museum, Insurance company etc is always going to be Undercover Police and as soon as there was the slightest glimpse of the Ashmolean Cezanne or the whereabouts of the Ashmolean Cezanne had of been deduced, Police would have swooped and arrests would have followed.
This is common knowledge amongst the art crime underworld and has proven the case time and time again, so Art Hostage is certainly not revealing anything secret or covert.
Take this failed attempt as a warning that there are no rewards, no fee, no payments of any kind for the recovery of stolen art.
The recent civil court case of the Da Vinci Madonna proved beyond all reasonable doubt, the days of payments for recovering stolen art are well and truly over.
Back-story:
Watching the detective
Sunday 5 August 2001
If you need to track down a stolen masterpiece, call investigator Charlie Hill. John Wilson goes undercover (no cameras please...) with the scourge of international art thievery
If you need to track down a stolen masterpiece, call investigator Charlie Hill. John Wilson goes undercover (no cameras please...) with the scourge of international art thievery
A west London Greek-Cypriot restaurant on a sultry Saturday night. A
family place. Three birthday parties are in full swing, toasts are
joined from every part of the room, plates are hurled to the floor and
the man on the synthesiser pumps out a steady medley of Hellenic hits.
(This west London Greek-Cypriot restaurant is owned by the nephew of the infamous Bertie Smalls, the first Police Supergrass, with the code name Colin and Charlie Hill's top informant.)
If Thomas Crown really existed, you wouldn't find him here. Neither would you bump into Dr No, Captain Nemo or Raffles on their nights off from international art thievery. But according to my dining companion, Charlie Hill, one of the world's leading private investigators of stolen treasures, this ostentatious suburban eatery, owned by Charlie Hill's top informant, Colin, the nephew of the infamous Police Supergrass Bertie Smalls, is a favourite hang-out for a pool of villains who marvel at these fictional thieves' taste for Monet rather than money.
'They've seen the movies - Pierce Brosnan in the Thomas Crown remake or Sean Connery in Entrapment - and think it's cool, sexy,' Hill tells me. 'Look, even the less intelligent ones realise they can't sell a Monet or Cézanne to the local art dealer or ask Sotheby's to get the best offer. But that doesn't mean the work is worthless. It's about kudos. If you arrive for a drugs deal with masterpiece in your boot, the other team know you're serious.'
I head for the lavatory to check whether the tiny minidisc recorder hidden in the lining of my jacket is still working and to make sure the button-hole microphone is picking up anything we're saying above the plate-smashing and drunken cheers. I rejoin Charlie Hill, try to affect a look of nonchalant disdain and not spill hummus down my shirt as I steer the pin mike in the direction of his stage whispers. Who are those heavies in the sports jackets?
'Serbs; one of them I know well. He doesn't know me luckily, except by reputation.' The crop-headed man in the fawn three-button is aware of our attention, but probably doesn't realise he has been identified as an international art thief by a private investigator.
'He was recently doing time in a Belgian prison for stealing a Van Dyck,' says Hill casually. 'Actually, it turned out to be the work of a student of Van Dyck, so when he was arrested and then found out it wasn't even the real thing, he felt doubly ripped off. I didn't know he was out already.'
The company the Serb chooses to keep - in the restaurant that will remain nameless for health and safety reasons - is multinational. Amid the Greek families celebrating noisily lurk small groups of middle-aged men, hunched conspiratorially across tables and casting an occasional wary eye round the vast room. This used to be part of Hill's uncharted territory when he was a detective with the Metropolitan Police's art and antiques squad. Working undercover, Hill would pitch up at the bar to make casual conversation with whoever was lurking.
'To them, I was a bar-room bore who worked in insurance. Very often I'd be offered jewellery and antiques. Then the eastern European crowd arrived and there'd be talk of religious icons and antiques, looted from churches. That stuff goes on here all the time, but occasionally you get the big fish, the ones who are looking to offload a painting, maybe worth millions.'
Hill's greatest claim to fame, though one he couldn't publicly take the credit for at the time, is as the undercover Scotland Yard art and antiques squad chief who recovered Edvard Munch's The Scream from the thieves who raided the national museum in 1994.
Cheekily, the robbers had celebrated their heist by leaving in the space vacated by that icon of existential angst a postcard depicting three men doubled up in mirth at some private joke. On the card was scrawled the message: 'Thanks for the poor security.'
The thieves stopped laughing when Hill, posing as a bow-tied representative of the Getty Museum and carrying a £500,000 'ransom' in a suitcase, was handed the painting and called in Norwegian police and Interpol officers to complete the sting.
Though Hill is quick to dismiss the James Bond parallels, his story - of fooling the robbers with a steady patter of Californian-accented art-speak, of seeing the Munch carried up from the cellar of a fjord-side chalet, of verifying its authenticity by the distinctive wax-splatter on one corner of the canvas ('Munch had blown out a candle as he was painting it') - is gripping stuff.
The Scream is back at home in Oslo. For a while, it joined a virtual gallery that, if collected together in a single room, would shame the Tates, Guggenheims and Gettys: 355 Picassos, 250 Chagalls, 180 Dalis, 120 Rembrandts and 115 Renoirs are among the staggering list of missing masterpieces.
Hill talks of stolen paintings, particularly Cézanne's Auvers-sur-Oise, lifted from the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford in an audacious millennium eve raid, Titian's Rest on the Flight to Egypt, taken from Longleat House, and two Turners, now in the hands of Serbian gangsters after being snatched from a Frankfurt gallery while on loan, with the passion of an art collector.
Acres of empty wall space has been left in galleries and homes around the world. Helping to refill those gaps gives him a purpose in life, Hill claims. The Charles Hill Partnership is an international detective agency specialising in tracing stolen art. Its website offers investigative services and advice on 'sensitive problems that fall outside the scope of mainstream advisers'.
Having served with the Met for 20 years, Charlie Hill knows that the police, whose scaled-down art squad now investigates art crime only within the London region, work within tightly reined financial and ethical limitations. By talking directly to the villains, and by making it clear to others within the art-crime community that informers will be paid, Hill knows he's wandering into tricky legal territory.
The fine ethical line that distinguishes a reward, which could end up in the hands of close associates of those holding the loot, and a ransom, which all agree must never be paid, is often difficult to discern.
There's £100,000 of Lord Bath's money up for grabs if anyone will point him in the exact direction of Titian's Rest on the Flight to Egypt, which was ripped from the walls of his ancestral home in 1995. It's widely accepted by art-theft investigators that the early sixteenth-century Italian masterpiece once admired by visitors to Longleat House is currently in the hands of new curators within the travelling community.
People within the same community, maybe neighbours or cousins, are also looking after Jean-Baptiste Oudry's The White Duck on behalf of Lord Cholmondeley until it's returned to Houghton Hall in Norfolk. Though he won't go into detail about the investigation, Hill reveals that he has spoken to those holding the Titian, though any appeal for return on aesthetic or altruistic grounds is hopeless. 'They just wouldn't understand,' he sighs.
The formation of the Charles Hill Partnership meant that the 'art-risk consultant' had to break cover after years in the murky sub-strata of criminal investigation. Hill used to adopt a variety of pseudonyms and guises, his favourite involving the bow-tie and the American accent. He preferred not to be photographed for this article.
Sipping Greek wine and dipping into his meze in the west London thieves' eatery, Hill now looks every inch the successful insurance salesman, in pastel colours, thick-rimmed specs and middle-aged spread.
The Charles Hill business website includes a CV that refers to a former career as a soldier. 'Oh, yes, that was Vietnam,' he explains, deadpan. 'Really?' 'Yes, really.'
The son of an American intelligence officer, Hill was born in Britain, moved to Washington as a boy and, after sitting out high-school classes in the company of a young, wannabe journalist called Al Gore, enlisted for the army.
While teenage contemporaries were marching on the Pentagon, Charlie Hill was stalking the jungles near the Cambodian border with a M16 in one hand and a book in the other. For the year he served with the 173rd Airborne Brigade - 'shooting people, being shot at, but never getting hit' - he was nicknamed 'the Professor' and regarded as a talisman by colleagues who marvelled at his ability to avoid the bullets.
Having volunteered for Vietnam to 'satisfy my intellectual curiosity', Hill won a Fulbright scholarship to Trinity College, Dublin, to study modern history. Spiritual curiosity nudged him next in the direction of a theology degree at King's College, London. Hill then joined the police. He worked undercover with various crime squads from the mid-Eighties, most notably the art and antiques squad, which, between 1994 and 1996, he led as chief superintendent.
As we talk, Hill glances around. He was introduced to this restaurant by a safe-cracker 12 years ago. In the old days, alongside the thieves, fraudsters and drug dealers, you'd find half of the CID sniffing round for leads, rubbing shoulders with the rogues.
'Police work? It's all about paper-work and conviction targets now,' he sniffs. Just as he begins to head off down memory lane, Hill interrupts himself. He has spotted another face, a man whose plans to lift the Alfred Jewel from the Ashmolean were rumbled.
The plan was resurrected on 31 December 1999, with Cézanne's Auvers-sur-Oise as the new target. The execution was perfect: an elegant drop through the skylights, a smokescreen using a grenade and a hand-held electric fan to fill the gallery with dense white smoke, all timed to coincide with millennial fireworks on the streets of Oxford.
'If that guy hasn't got the Cézanne, he knows a man who does,' says Hill.
As we head for door, I'm conscious that the wire of my mike has slipped and is swinging loose. I glance nervously around. Ashmolean man is laughing into his beer at some private joke.
• John Wilson presents Stealing Beauty on Tuesday, 8pm, BBC R4
If Thomas Crown really existed, you wouldn't find him here. Neither would you bump into Dr No, Captain Nemo or Raffles on their nights off from international art thievery. But according to my dining companion, Charlie Hill, one of the world's leading private investigators of stolen treasures, this ostentatious suburban eatery, owned by Charlie Hill's top informant, Colin, the nephew of the infamous Police Supergrass Bertie Smalls, is a favourite hang-out for a pool of villains who marvel at these fictional thieves' taste for Monet rather than money.
'They've seen the movies - Pierce Brosnan in the Thomas Crown remake or Sean Connery in Entrapment - and think it's cool, sexy,' Hill tells me. 'Look, even the less intelligent ones realise they can't sell a Monet or Cézanne to the local art dealer or ask Sotheby's to get the best offer. But that doesn't mean the work is worthless. It's about kudos. If you arrive for a drugs deal with masterpiece in your boot, the other team know you're serious.'
I head for the lavatory to check whether the tiny minidisc recorder hidden in the lining of my jacket is still working and to make sure the button-hole microphone is picking up anything we're saying above the plate-smashing and drunken cheers. I rejoin Charlie Hill, try to affect a look of nonchalant disdain and not spill hummus down my shirt as I steer the pin mike in the direction of his stage whispers. Who are those heavies in the sports jackets?
'Serbs; one of them I know well. He doesn't know me luckily, except by reputation.' The crop-headed man in the fawn three-button is aware of our attention, but probably doesn't realise he has been identified as an international art thief by a private investigator.
'He was recently doing time in a Belgian prison for stealing a Van Dyck,' says Hill casually. 'Actually, it turned out to be the work of a student of Van Dyck, so when he was arrested and then found out it wasn't even the real thing, he felt doubly ripped off. I didn't know he was out already.'
The company the Serb chooses to keep - in the restaurant that will remain nameless for health and safety reasons - is multinational. Amid the Greek families celebrating noisily lurk small groups of middle-aged men, hunched conspiratorially across tables and casting an occasional wary eye round the vast room. This used to be part of Hill's uncharted territory when he was a detective with the Metropolitan Police's art and antiques squad. Working undercover, Hill would pitch up at the bar to make casual conversation with whoever was lurking.
'To them, I was a bar-room bore who worked in insurance. Very often I'd be offered jewellery and antiques. Then the eastern European crowd arrived and there'd be talk of religious icons and antiques, looted from churches. That stuff goes on here all the time, but occasionally you get the big fish, the ones who are looking to offload a painting, maybe worth millions.'
Hill's greatest claim to fame, though one he couldn't publicly take the credit for at the time, is as the undercover Scotland Yard art and antiques squad chief who recovered Edvard Munch's The Scream from the thieves who raided the national museum in 1994.
Cheekily, the robbers had celebrated their heist by leaving in the space vacated by that icon of existential angst a postcard depicting three men doubled up in mirth at some private joke. On the card was scrawled the message: 'Thanks for the poor security.'
The thieves stopped laughing when Hill, posing as a bow-tied representative of the Getty Museum and carrying a £500,000 'ransom' in a suitcase, was handed the painting and called in Norwegian police and Interpol officers to complete the sting.
Though Hill is quick to dismiss the James Bond parallels, his story - of fooling the robbers with a steady patter of Californian-accented art-speak, of seeing the Munch carried up from the cellar of a fjord-side chalet, of verifying its authenticity by the distinctive wax-splatter on one corner of the canvas ('Munch had blown out a candle as he was painting it') - is gripping stuff.
The Scream is back at home in Oslo. For a while, it joined a virtual gallery that, if collected together in a single room, would shame the Tates, Guggenheims and Gettys: 355 Picassos, 250 Chagalls, 180 Dalis, 120 Rembrandts and 115 Renoirs are among the staggering list of missing masterpieces.
Hill talks of stolen paintings, particularly Cézanne's Auvers-sur-Oise, lifted from the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford in an audacious millennium eve raid, Titian's Rest on the Flight to Egypt, taken from Longleat House, and two Turners, now in the hands of Serbian gangsters after being snatched from a Frankfurt gallery while on loan, with the passion of an art collector.
Acres of empty wall space has been left in galleries and homes around the world. Helping to refill those gaps gives him a purpose in life, Hill claims. The Charles Hill Partnership is an international detective agency specialising in tracing stolen art. Its website offers investigative services and advice on 'sensitive problems that fall outside the scope of mainstream advisers'.
Having served with the Met for 20 years, Charlie Hill knows that the police, whose scaled-down art squad now investigates art crime only within the London region, work within tightly reined financial and ethical limitations. By talking directly to the villains, and by making it clear to others within the art-crime community that informers will be paid, Hill knows he's wandering into tricky legal territory.
The fine ethical line that distinguishes a reward, which could end up in the hands of close associates of those holding the loot, and a ransom, which all agree must never be paid, is often difficult to discern.
There's £100,000 of Lord Bath's money up for grabs if anyone will point him in the exact direction of Titian's Rest on the Flight to Egypt, which was ripped from the walls of his ancestral home in 1995. It's widely accepted by art-theft investigators that the early sixteenth-century Italian masterpiece once admired by visitors to Longleat House is currently in the hands of new curators within the travelling community.
People within the same community, maybe neighbours or cousins, are also looking after Jean-Baptiste Oudry's The White Duck on behalf of Lord Cholmondeley until it's returned to Houghton Hall in Norfolk. Though he won't go into detail about the investigation, Hill reveals that he has spoken to those holding the Titian, though any appeal for return on aesthetic or altruistic grounds is hopeless. 'They just wouldn't understand,' he sighs.
The formation of the Charles Hill Partnership meant that the 'art-risk consultant' had to break cover after years in the murky sub-strata of criminal investigation. Hill used to adopt a variety of pseudonyms and guises, his favourite involving the bow-tie and the American accent. He preferred not to be photographed for this article.
Sipping Greek wine and dipping into his meze in the west London thieves' eatery, Hill now looks every inch the successful insurance salesman, in pastel colours, thick-rimmed specs and middle-aged spread.
The Charles Hill business website includes a CV that refers to a former career as a soldier. 'Oh, yes, that was Vietnam,' he explains, deadpan. 'Really?' 'Yes, really.'
The son of an American intelligence officer, Hill was born in Britain, moved to Washington as a boy and, after sitting out high-school classes in the company of a young, wannabe journalist called Al Gore, enlisted for the army.
While teenage contemporaries were marching on the Pentagon, Charlie Hill was stalking the jungles near the Cambodian border with a M16 in one hand and a book in the other. For the year he served with the 173rd Airborne Brigade - 'shooting people, being shot at, but never getting hit' - he was nicknamed 'the Professor' and regarded as a talisman by colleagues who marvelled at his ability to avoid the bullets.
Having volunteered for Vietnam to 'satisfy my intellectual curiosity', Hill won a Fulbright scholarship to Trinity College, Dublin, to study modern history. Spiritual curiosity nudged him next in the direction of a theology degree at King's College, London. Hill then joined the police. He worked undercover with various crime squads from the mid-Eighties, most notably the art and antiques squad, which, between 1994 and 1996, he led as chief superintendent.
As we talk, Hill glances around. He was introduced to this restaurant by a safe-cracker 12 years ago. In the old days, alongside the thieves, fraudsters and drug dealers, you'd find half of the CID sniffing round for leads, rubbing shoulders with the rogues.
'Police work? It's all about paper-work and conviction targets now,' he sniffs. Just as he begins to head off down memory lane, Hill interrupts himself. He has spotted another face, a man whose plans to lift the Alfred Jewel from the Ashmolean were rumbled.
The plan was resurrected on 31 December 1999, with Cézanne's Auvers-sur-Oise as the new target. The execution was perfect: an elegant drop through the skylights, a smokescreen using a grenade and a hand-held electric fan to fill the gallery with dense white smoke, all timed to coincide with millennial fireworks on the streets of Oxford.
'If that guy hasn't got the Cézanne, he knows a man who does,' says Hill.
As we head for door, I'm conscious that the wire of my mike has slipped and is swinging loose. I glance nervously around. Ashmolean man is laughing into his beer at some private joke.
• John Wilson presents Stealing Beauty on Tuesday, 8pm, BBC R4
Let me tell you the truth about Dick Ellis.
ReplyDeleteHe has stood in a court of law and committed perdury on more than one occasion.
Nobody can lie better than Dick.
He has stolen money, He has stolen paintings.
He was very very lucky I never had a tape recorder on me when talking to him once otherwise he would have got three years for perdury.
How he has never been arrested is amazing.
How he sleeps at night I dont know.
Just had a thought ask Mr Dick Ellis to take a lie detector test, questions to be asked 'have you ever committed perdury in a court of law'.
Let the real Dick Ellis stand up.
You are a crook who has managed to get away with it for years.
You will not make any complaints about what I have written Dick because you know if you were to take the lie detector test you would be found out.