Stolen Art Watch, Warhol To Westfries Museum, Via Pink Panthers & Rathkeale Rovers

FBI offers reward for stolen Warhol soup can prints

The FBI has announced a $25,000 (£17,500) reward for information leading to the recovery of seven Andy Warhol soup can prints stolen from the Springfield Art Museum in Missouri.

The prints, which are part of a set of 10, were stolen in a break-in at the museum in the early hours of 7 April.
The prints have been on display at the museum since 1985 are valued at $500,000 (£351,000).
The screen print collection is based on paintings created by Warhol in 1962.
Each print is individually framed and the ones stolen are for soup cans with the labels beef, vegetable, tomato, onion, green pea, chicken noodle and black bean.
Museum director Nick Nelson has praised the "outpouring of support of the Springfield community and the quick response of the Springfield Police Department and FBI".
"For those of us who work at the museum and in Springfield's art community, the theft of these iconic Warhol prints that the museum has had in our permanent collection for 30 years feels like the loss of a family member," he said.
"We appreciate any assistance the public can provide to law enforcement to ensure the return of these treasured pieces of art."
The museum is remaining open to the public and is looking at its security measures.
"The museum is working with the proper authorities and being proactive in our security efforts as we remain open to the public. We are confident that the measures we are taking will protect the museum's treasures, while still making art accessible to our community," Nelson said.
The FBI has a specialised Art Crime Team to recover stolen items and prosecute art and cultural property crime.

Stolen in '55, 'inverted Jenny' stamp resurfaces

This undated photo provided by Spink USA shows a 1918 "inverted Jenny" stamp. Stolen in 1955, the stamp surfaced last week at Spink USA, a New York auction house. Considered America's most famous stamp, inverted Jennies were worth 24 cents when issued, but they fetch hundreds of thousands of U.S. dollars today.

NEW YORK -- Opening a new chapter in an infamous stamp-world mystery, a valuable "inverted Jenny" stamp has surfaced six decades after it was stolen from a collectors' convention.
The stamp — one of the world's most famous pieces of postage — was among four of its kind taken from a 1955 collectors' convention. While two were recovered over 30 years ago, there had been no sign of the others until this one was submitted to a New York auction house this month and authenticated.
"It's one of the most notorious crimes in philatelic history, and there's a piece of the puzzle now that's in place," said Scott English, the administrator of the American Philatelic Research Library, which owns the stamp and is working with auctioneers Spink USA and federal authorities to recover it.
The would-be consigner, a man in his 20s who lives in the United Kingdom, said he'd inherited the stamp from his grandfather and knew little about it, said George Eveleth, head of Spink USA's philatelic department. He said authorities had told the auctioneers not to release the name of the consigner, who is in his 20s.
While it's unclear whether the man can shed any light on the long-cold trail to the thieves, the stamp was accompanied by an intriguing item: a 1965 letter about a monetary loan from a noted stamp dealer to a well-known auctioneer, both now dead, Eveleth said. The letter isn't necessarily connected to this stamp, however.
Still, the Bellefonte, Pennsylvania-based philatelic library hopes the stamp's discovery could lead to new clues.
"We're going to remain optimistic," English said. "Because think about it: Here we are, 61 years later, and a stamp has appeared."
Worth 24 cents when issued in 1918, inverted Jenny stamps fetch hundreds of thousands of U.S. dollars today. While other stamps are rarer, the Jenny is one of few that is readily recognized even by non-collectors, Eveleth said.
It made its way into popular culture in movies such as 1985's "Brewster's Millions," in which Richard Pryor's character uses one to mail a postcard, and television shows including "The Simpsons," in which Homer Simpson finds but disregards a sheet of them at a flea market. The Postal Service issued a commemorative inverted Jenny stamp in 2013.
The original was made to celebrate the launch of U.S. air mail. Some were printed with the Curtiss JN-4H "Jenny" biplane inverted, and a savvy customer bought a 100-stamp sheet before anyone realized the error.
Over the years, they were separated, coveted, counterfeited and narrowly saved from the blitzkrieg of London in World War II and from a flood in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.
A block of four was on loan to the American Philatelic Society when stolen from a display case at its 1955 convention in Norfolk, Virginia. The lender, who died in 1980, gave her rights to the stolen stamps to the society, which shares some ties with the American Philatelic Research Library.
Two of the Jenny stamps were recovered in the '70s and '80s from different Chicago stamp connoisseurs, who said they'd bought the stamps from people who had since died or whose names they didn't know, according to a 2014 article in American Philatelist, the society's journal.

Montenegro Probes Investigative Reporter for Drug Trafficking

Montenegrin investigative journalist Jovo Martinovic, work has exposed crime networks, war criminals and the Pink Panthers jewel thieves gang, is facing indictment for allegedly aiding a drug-trafficking gang.

Dusica Tomovic

BIRN

Podgorica

Martinovic worked with the Vice media group on the production of a documentary  series about the Pink Panthers and closely cooperated with Dusko Martinovic, who was one of the leading interviews in the series | Youtube screenshot.

The Montenegrin special prosecution is expected to decide next week whether to indict journalist Jovo Martinovic despite appeals from media watchdogs who argue that the authorities should consider his journalistic work as a possible explanation for his alleged contacts with drug traffickers.

Martinovic, who has worked as a contributing reporter for international media including The Economist, Newsday, the Global Post, the Financial Times and BIRN, has been in custody since October 22, 2015, on suspicion of involvement in a drug-trafficking scheme.

Martinovic, whose six-month custody remand is due to expire on April 22, was arrested alongside 17 other people from Montenegro in a joint operation with Croatian police.

They are suspected of membership of a criminal organization and drug trafficking.

Montenegro nationalist, Dusko Martinovic, a former member of an international group of jewel thieves known as the Pink Panthers, is suspected of being the mastermind of the crime gang.

During the operation, police staged raids in several towns in Montenegro and Croatia, seizing 3.5 kilogrammes of cocaine, 1.5 kilos of herion and 21 kilogrammes of marijuana. Criminal charges were filed against a total of 29 people.

According to the prosecution’s request for an investigation, which BIRN has seen, the 42-year-old reporter is suspected of “mediating in the setting up of a criminal group for drug smuggling”.

Martinovic has insisted he is not guilty, saying that his contact with the other suspects was linked to his journalistic work. His family and lawyer said they did not want to comment on details of the case until the prosecution decides whether to indict him next week.

Over the last 15 years, Martinovic has worked on a several high-profile journalistic research projects which have been published in the some of the world’s most influential media, exposing war crimes and organised crime across the Balkans.

But the authorities in Montenegro insist that his arrest was not related to his work as a reporter.
Martinovic’s work often brought him into contact with criminals including the main suspect in the drug case, former ‘Pink Panther’ Dusko Martinovic, who was also arrested in the same raid in October.

Over the last ten years, Martinovic has worked on several investigations into the Pink Panthers gang, most of whose members come from the former Yugoslavia. Some 60 Montenegrin nationals were suspected of belonging to the crime network, which reportedly involved a total of 800 people who were directly or indirectly linked to 370 robberies in 35 states.

Martinovic worked as an associate producer for the 2013 documentary about the gang, Smash and Grab.

He worked also with the Vice media group on the production of a 2014 documentary series about the Pink Panthers and closely cooperated with Dusko Martinovic, who was one of the leading interviews in the series.

Another suspect in the drug-smuggling case, Namik Selmanovic, is believed to be an extra in the Vice series.

During 2015, Martinovic continued his contacts with former ‘Panther’ Dusko Martinovic, acting as a local producer for a planned Hollywood film about his life.

At the time of his arrest, Martinovic was working as a fixer with the French production company, CAPA Presse, which had hired him to do background research and find sources for a documentary called La Route de la Kalashnikov.

The documentary, which aired on the French television station Canal Plus in January, exposed illegal smuggling of weapons from the Balkans into Western Europe.

Another suspect in the drug case, Namik Selmanovic, worked with Martinovic after being hired by the French production as a fixer on the Kalashnikov film.
According to prosecution documents, which BIRN has seen, at the time of the arrests, Selmanovic was at large and could not be found by the Montenegrin authorities.
CAPA Presse sent a letter to the Montenegrin prosecution in January, expressing deep concern over Martinovic’s continuing detention.

The letter confirmed that he was working for the company at the time of his arrest on the arms trafficking documentary, and had also worked on its film about the Pink Panthers gang.
The OSCE’s media freedom representative, Dunja Mijatovic said she wrote to Montenegrin Prime Minister Milo Djukanovic about Martinovic and got a reply that also said he was not detained over his journalistic activities.

“The letter [from Djukanovic] states that the charges against Martinovic are not related to his work as a journalist,” Mijatovic said a report to the OSCE Permanent Council last month.

The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists told BIRN on Thursday that it had written to the Montenegrin special prosecutor for organised crime, which is in charge of the case, to call for Martinovic’s release, and expressed “deep worry about Martinovic's prolonged and continued detention”.

A ‘courageous and intrepid’ journalist Award-winning journalist Michael Montgomery told BIRN that Jovo Martinovic played a key role in several investigations he conducted with Stephen Smith for American RadioWorks, BIRN and the BBC from 1999 to 2015. The stories spurred international criminal inquires that resulted in the prosecution and conviction of Serbian and ethnic Albanian paramilitaries for war crimes. “Jovo Martinovic is one of the most courageous and intrepid researcher-reporters I have ever known,” Montgomery said. Martinovic’s research also formed the bedrock for another investigation by Montgomery which has received intense media coverage - allegations of organ-trafficking and other abuses by the Kosovo Liberation Army.  As a direct result, the Council of Europe conducted an exhaustive inquiry headed by Special Rapporteur Dick Marty. This inquiry led in turn to the creation of a new special court in The Hague to prosecute perpetrators of crimes against civilians in Kosovo. “Until now, I have not publicized Jovo's role in this investigation out of concerns for his safety,” Montgomery said. He pointed out that one of Martinovic’s skills involves tracing underground criminal networks and interacting with members of these groups to elicit information of vital journalistic importance. “This is what he does, very effectively. Without Jovo, there would be no Marty report and no special court in The Hague,” Montgomery said. He said that he finds Martinovic’s continuing incarceration in Montenegro deeply troubling for a country aspiring to membership of NATO.

BIRN contacted the special prosecutor for organised crime, but it declined to say what stage the investigation against Martinovic has reached and whether a decision on his indictment has been made.

On Wednesday, an international media watchdog Reporters Without Borders told the Council of Europe that Martinovic’s job involved helping to trace underground weapons networks and interacting with members of criminal groups in the Balkans.

It said that he “was arrested on 22 October 2015 in relation to this assignment”.

Martinovic’s journalistic work in the 1990s also brought him into contact with a variety of sources, some of whom may have been involved in criminal activities at some point.

Martinovic’s research also formed the bedrock for another investigation by Montgomery and his colleague Stephen Smith, which has received intense media coverage - allegations of organ-trafficking and other abuses by the Kosovo Liberation Army. 

He worked on a radio documentary called Massacre at Cuska, which looked at the killings and deportations during the Kosovo war which prompted NATO’s air strikes against Yugoslavia.
The documentary explored a massacre of 72 civilians in and around the Kosovo village of Cuska in May 1999 and spurred several important war crime investigations that led to convictions in Kosovo and Serbia.

He also worked for over a decade with Matt McAllester, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, on several investigations related to war crimes and organised crime in the Balkans.

Their work included investigations of Serbian war crimes during the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo and a Global Post exclusive on the Pink Panthers gang.

Ukraine Recovers 4 Stolen Dutch Paintings

Ukrainian officials have announced the recovery of four paintings from a trove of Dutch Golden Age art that was stolen from a Dutch museum more than a decade ago.

At a Thursday briefing showing the four paintings, Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin said work will continue to recover other pieces of art burglarized from the Westfries Museum in 2005.

Klimkin said it's believed that other paintings are in the possession of criminals in eastern Ukraine, where fighting between separatist rebels and Ukrainian forces broke out two years ago.

There were no details on how the 16th- and 17th-century paintings were recovered.

The museum said last year that two people claiming to represent a Ukrainian nationalist militia had contacted the Dutch Embassy in Kiev, seeking a 5-million-euro fee for the paintings' return.

Art cops recover stolen Villa Giulia

23 of 27 items recovered, worth 3 mn euros

(ANSA) - Rome, - Carabinieri art police have tracked down and recovered items from the Castellani collection of precious gold jewelry that were stolen at Easter 2013 from the National Etruscan Museum at Rome's Villa Giulia, officials said Thursday. The objects were crafted in the 19th century, in part using material from the excavation of ancient Etruscan, Greek and Rome sites. "It's a great day, now the gold will return to the museum," said Culture Minister Dario Franceschini. Officials said the Carabinieri's crack Cultural Heritage Protection Unit - one of the world's most famous divisions of art police - had managed to recover 23 of the the 27 precious items of jewelry worth a total of three million euros stolen from Villa Giulia in April 2013. The operation led to the identification of the band of people who allegedly carried out the robbery and those who allegedly received the items. Six people have been notified that the investigation is over, a move that frequently comes before a trial request.
    The case was handled by Giancarlo Capaldo, coordinator of the crimes against cultural heritage group of the Rome prosecutor's office, and Tiziana Cugini, the prosecutor heading up the probe.
    Judicial sources said a rich Russian woman commissioned the theft of the jewels, which went through the hands of a Roman antiques dealer who acted as middle man.
    Capaldo and Culture Ministry Secretary-General Antonella Recchia revealed the details of partial results - the probe is ongoing - of the long investigation which led to 23 of tghe 27 stolen objects being recovered.
    The deal, which was meant to take the jewels abroad, went belly up, they said, amid the loud media clamour sparked by the heist.
    The woman, identified in the first days of the probe, was stopped and ID'd at Fiumicino Airport as she was leaving for St Petersburg.
    Accompanied by the daughter of the antiques dealer, was carrying a catalogue of the Castellani jewels and had on her i-Phone some photos of the museum room where the theft took place, with all the details of the surveillance system. Once the deal went south the thieves contacted local fences, Capaldo and Recchia told reporters.

WARWICK — Warwick attorney Phillip Landrigan is involved in a case over the ownership of a $25 million painting with ties to the Panama Papers.
Landrigan is representing the estate of Paris art dealer Oscar Stettiner, which is seeking to have the art-collecting London and New York-based Nahmad family return Amadeo Modigliani's “Seated Man With A Cane, 1918,” which it claims the Nazis seized during World War II.
The recently leaked Panama Papers confirm what the Stettiner family claimed in court years ago, Landrigan said, which is that the painting is held by International Art Center (IAC), a company owned by the Nahmads.
While the more than 11 million leaked documents from the Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca have implicated many of the world's most rich and powerful, several documents reveal that the Panama-based IAC has been controlled by the Nahmad family for more than 20 years.
Philippe Maestracci is the grandson and sole heir to the Oscar Stettiner estate.
“The ultimate goal is to let Philippe Maestracci gain possession of his grandfather’s painting, and what he does with it afterwards is up to him,” Landrigan said. “Just the historical justice, Philippe Maestracci should be able to spend whatever time he chooses in the same room as the painting that was stolen from his grandfather during the war, just as a matter of what’s right.”
According to BBC, Richard Golub, the lawyer for the family's leader David Nahmad, said it was "irrelevant" who owned IAC.
“What is pertinent is can the claimant prove that the painting belonged to his family,” Golub told Bloomberg News. “The answer we believe is absolutely not.”

The case

The family of Oscar Stettiner, a Jewish art dealer, originally owned the painting before fleeing Paris in 1939, according to Landrigan. The painting changed hands multiple times between 1940 and 1945, during the time Nazi Germany occupied France.
In 1946, Stettiner filed a claim in France, but died two years later while the court case was still pending.
Decades later, the piece was purchased in 1996 by IAC, according to court filings, at a Christie’s London auction for $3.2 million.
Golub said that Christie’s researched the previous ownership of the work and published it before the 1996 auction, according to Bloomberg.
“There was then not a shred of evidence in any registry or any database that referred to this painting as being a Nazi looted painting,” he said.
In 2005, the painting was exhibited at the Helly Nahmad Gallery in New York, which is owned by David’s son Helly. Valued at $18 million to $25 million, the painting was offered at auction at Sotheby’s in 2008 but failed to sell.
Currently, the painting is in a warehouse in Switzerland, according to court filings.
Landrigan said they believe IAC, the Helly Nahmad Gallery and the Nahmad family are one in the same, and that the Panama Papers confirm this. In addition, according to The New York Times, the art world has long associated IAC with the Nahmad family.

Connection to offshore accounts

lAC was incorporated in 1995 in Panama by Mossack Fonseca, “a law firm widely known as a creator of shell companies to aid individuals in circumventing international sanctions, and allowing their clients to conceal the empty shell nature of the companies and their assets,” as stated in the court filings.
“The significance of the connection to the Panama Papers is the use of these offshore entities as a mechanism for people to obscure their criminal dealings and dealing in stolen property is significant,” Landrigan said. “That significance is well beyond this case. We have the opportunity here to just do the right thing, which is to get this painting back to this family that it was taken from.”
The goal is to not only help Maestracci achieve some closure by gaining possession of his grandfather’s painting, according to Landrigan, but to also send a message to those trying to hide behind shell companies in Panama.
“The Panama Papers gives an opportunity to bring this to the front,” he said, “public awareness, and to let dealers know that they can’t continue to do it, and when they try hide in Panamanian shell companies that we’re going to find them.” - See more at: http://www.warwickadvertiser.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20160414/NEWS01/160419980/Warwick-attorney-involved-in-case-linked-to-Panama-Paper#sthash.hE5PK8yI.dpuf

Head of tomb raiding gang sentenced to death

The head of a tomb raiding gang was sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve, and other major gang members were given prison terms, a court in northeast China's Liaoning Province ruled Thursday.

When the gang, led by Yao Yuzhong, were arrested last year it was one of the biggest busts of its kind supervised by the Ministry of Public Security since the People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949.

Chaoyang City Intermediate People’s Court sentenced 22 members of the gang on Thursday.
Yao was found guilty of several offenses including tomb raiding, looting and selling stolen antiques.
The court heard that Yao’s gang was highly organized, and would source fund, explore, loot and trade relics. Among 32 artifacts retrieved by police, 16 were under grade-one state cultural protection.
The court on Thursday ordered that 77 relics still in the possession of the gang members must be returned.
Yao’s gang was among 12 organized gangs implicated in illegal excavations at Niuheliang, a Neolithic site in northeastern Liaoning. Police apprehended 225 people and retrieved a total of 2,063 artifacts.

Distinctive jewellery stolen in Petworth antiques shop burglary

Police are searching for thieves who stole jewellery valued at £25,000 in a burglary at a Petworth antiques shop.

Chequers Antiques in The Playhouse Gallery, Lombard Street, Petworth was broken into sometime between 5pm on Saturday 26 March and 10.45am on Tuesday 29 March. A suspect or suspects entered through a side window and stole the jewellery.

Police Investigator Martin Butler said: "If you were in Petworth over those days and saw anything suspicious in or around Lombard Street we would like to hear from you.

"We are also keen to hear from anyone who has been offered the jewellery. If you recognise any of it from the photos we are issuing, please call us.

"The items stolen included a number of gold rings with precious stones, a silver snuff box engraved with Russian writing and coat of arms and two pairs of gold cufflinks.

"You can contact us via 101@sussex.pnn.police.uk or call 101, quoting serial 436 of 29/03. You can also contact the independent charity Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111 (www.crimestoppers-org.uk)."

Nationwide appeal after £100k ornaments stolen

Police are issuing a nationwide appeal after ornaments worth around £100,000 were stolen near Lichfield.
The burglary happened between Thursday 10 March and Saturday 12 March in Little Aston.
The stolen ornaments included Capodimonte pieces such as The Last Supper worth £6,000, Cheats by Bruno Merli valued at £1,000, and Michael Angelo valued at £1,750 

DC Jamie Harris, investigating officer, said:

"The ornaments taken during this burglary are very specialist items. Some of these collectables are very rare and are worth a lot of money so we are understandably keen to reunite them with their rightful owner.
"It is highly likely they will be offered for sale out of Staffordshire and we want to issue a nationwide appeal to dealers of antiques and collectables to keep an eye out for any Capodimonte items being offered for sale under suspicious circumstances.
"If you become aware of any items you believe maybe from this stolen haul, or you have any information about the burglary, please get in touch."

– DC Jamie Harris

Romania, among the countries through which art works stolen by the Islamic State get to Europe

Art works stolen from the territories occupied by the Jihadi group the Islamic State (ISI)in Syria and Iraq could be found on the European market, being trafficked through Turkey and then, often, through Romania, Hungary or Bulgaria, stated for France Info Jean-Jacques Neuer, specialist in judicial issues regarding art works.

‘There is traffic which developed through Turkey, with entry in Southern Europe – Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria: there are sometimes on the market works which were stolen and then they take the direction of the big European cities – Zurich, Geneva, Paris, London, Munich then even the US- Chicago, Los Angeles, New York’ said Jean-Jacques Neuer, saying that, according to his opinion ‘ it is too eraly to say if on the market such objects could be found in a constant way’.

But the auction houses and the art traders from the whole world ‘ are extremely aware of what is happening that is why they are very careful ‘ the expert says, according to franceinfo.fr.

He said that the hiding of stolen art works is punished by harsh methods, especially in the US ; where it is considered that you allow the circulation of these objects this is support of terrorism’.

'Valuable' artworks found three years after Kiltullagh church theft

Police in the Republic of Ireland have recovered six "valuable" oil paintings that had been stolen from a church almost three years ago.

The paintings were part of a stations of the cross series, 14 works depicting the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.
They were taken from the Church of St Peter and St Paul in Kiltullagh, County Galway in June 2013.
Police found them in good condition during a search of wasteland in Edenderry, County Offally, on Tuesday.
The were taken away for forensic examination.
No-one was arrested over the theft.

Antiques stolen in Steyning burglary

Police are investigating a burglary in Steyning in which valuable antiques were stolen.
Between 6.20pm and 9.45pm on Monday 14 March a house was broken into in Cripps Lane, Steyning, and antiques, mainly silver, were stolen with a total estimated value of about £50,000.
Due to the large amount it is likely that the suspects have used a vehicle, and it is believed that two blue plastic basins, which also disappeared from the house, were used to carry away at least some of the items.
Some 27 items were taken, including a large number of silver items from the George III and IV periods, a Regency period bracket clock worth £5500, and a bronze bust of William IV, circa 1830, valued at £3000.
Ellie Mannan, Investigating Officer from the West Sussex Priority Crime Team said; "If anyone saw anything suspicious in Steyning that evening, or has any information about this burglary, please contact us by emailing 101@sussex.pnn.police.uk or phone 101 quoting serial 1503 of 14/03.
"You can also contact the independent charity Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111."

‘Rathkeale Rovers’ jailed for €73million rhino horn theft plot

THIRTEEN members of the criminal gang known as the “Rathkeale Rovers” have been jailed for almost seven years for plotting to steal Rhino horns and museum artefacts.

Seven of a 14 member traveller gang with connections to Ratheale in County Limerick were jailed at Birmingham Crown Court for their parts in a number of break-ins and plotting to steal the rhino horns with an estimated value of €73 million.
Richard Kerry O’Brien, John Cash O’Brien, Danny Flynn, Paul Pammen, Alan Clarke, Daniel Turkey O’Brien and Donald Chi Cheong Wong were sentenced by Judge Murray Creed,
Mr Wong was described in court as a London-based intermediary who would find buyers for the stolen items and made frequent trips to Hong Kong.
Judge Murray Creed heard that although the items stolen in two of the raids were valued at £17 million, police believe buyers would have paid upwards of three times that value on the illegal markets.
The judge said that the plans and the thefts were part of “an extremely sophisticated conspiracy”.
The judge said the operation to “plunder” rhino horn, carved horn and jade items started off on a “small-scale”basis in January 2012 but after initial failures and botched thefts – in one case the burglars forgot where they had hidden their haul – their planning finally paid off.
“It was serious organised crime. This criminal enterprise “involved very high value goods with significant harm caused to victims, both museums and members of the public who would otherwise have viewed the material stolen.
Describing it as a sophisticated enterprise that was both “skilled and persistent,” the judge said that it had spanned England, Scotland and Ireland adding that members of the O’Brien family, based in Rathkeale, had been at the heart of that conspiracy.
Richard “Kerry” O’Brien Jr, (31), of Cambridgeshire and also of Rathkeale, was jailed for five-and-a-half years.
John “Cash” O’Brien, (68), of Fifth Avenue in Wolverhampton in the West Midlands was jailed for five years and three months.
Daniel “Turkey” O’Brien, 45, Orchard Drive, Smithy Fen, Cottenham, Cambridgeshire was jailed for six years and eight months.
Daniel Flynn,45, and also of Orchard Drive, Smithy Fen, Cottenham, Cambridgeshire, was jailed for four years despite the judge saying he played a lead role in the enterprise. However his sentence was reduced based on “the fragility of his mental health”.

Donald Wong, (56) with an address in London was described by the judge as “a buyer, seller and valuer” and was jailed for five-and-a-half years.
Paul Pammen, (49), of Alton Gardens in Southend-on-Sea and Alan Clarke, (37) of Melbourne Road in Newham, London, were both jailed for five-and-a-half years each.
John “Kerry” O’Brien, (26), of Orchard Drive, Smithy Fen, Cottenham, Cambridgeshire – but also of Rathkeale, Co Limerick, was jailed for six-and-a-half years.
Terrence McNamara, of Marquis Street in Belfast, was jailed for four years.
Michael Hegarty (43), also of Orchard Drive in Cottenham, and Rathkeale, was jailed for six-and-a-half years.
Richard Sheridan, (47) of Water Lane in Smithy Fen, was jailed for five and half years.
Patrick Clarke, aged 34, of Melbourne Road, Newham, London, was also jailed for five-and-a-half
Ashley Dad, (35), of Crowther Road in Wolverhampton, was jailed for five years and three months.
The group’s targets included Durham University Oriental Museum, the Norwich Castle Museum in Norfolk, a robbery at Gorringe’s Auction House in East Sussex and a burglary at Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.
A 14th man had already been convicted and sentenced for his part in the crime, last year.
There is high demand for rhino horns in China, where they are used in highly controversial preparations of traditional Chinese medicine.
In recent years, prices of drinking cups made of sculpted rhinoceros horns also have soared in the Chinese art market.

Norway Police Arrest Two Men Linked to Edvard Munch Art Theft

Police recovered a 1914 lithograph by Edvard Munch and arrested two men connected to the theft on Monday and Tuesday, The Guardian reports. The unidentified men are facing a pretrial hearing. Norwegian media confirmed they have criminal records.
Police spokeswoman Unni Groendal said the authorities believe the men handled the stolen work, but they are not suspected of the 2009 theft from Oslo’s Nyborgs Kunst gallery. The perpetrator stole the work titled Historien, which is valued at over $200,000, after smashing one of the gallery’s windows with a rock.
Munch’s work seems to be popular amongst thieves. Previously, a gunman stole masterpieces The Scream, 1893, and The Madonna, 1893–94, from the Munch Museum in 2004. A different version of The Scream was lifted from Norway’s National Gallery in 1994. In the latter incident, the thieves involved left behind a postcard that read: “Thanks for the poor security.”
All artworks have been recovered.

Valuable Picasso Art Pieces Confirmed Stolen from a German Bank

Art News• Ana Moriarty

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Heist alert! Picasso art stolen! A number of artworks, among which are the eleven lithographs by the famous Pablo Picasso, were reported missing from the Portigon AG corporate collection from North Rhine-Westphalia. Portigon AG is a financial services company which came to prominence back in 2012 as a legal successor of WestLB, the Western German state Bank. The eleven missing lithographs belong to the Picasso’s famous Bull series, and among the other stolen art is the painting The house, by the expressionist Gabriele Münter. On Friday, April 15th, 2016, the Portigon AG spokesman in Dusseldorf confirmed the art to be stolen. He stated to the Deutsche Presse-Agentur that the staff has noticed that the vault in which the artworks were stored was opened at unusual hours back in the winter of 2014 and the beginning of 2015.

WestLB was succeeded by Portigon AG after its bankruptcy via bloomberg.com

The Dusseldorf Mystery

According to Der Spiegel, the news magazine which had first reported about the case, the bank filed an official complaint, and the examination of the scene did reveal that the pieces were stolen. However, the German police ceased the investigation in early 2016. The police spokesperson stated that there was no probable cause found against any certain persons and that not enough evidence had been found. The missing Picasso and other art pieces are listed in the stolen art registry. The Portigon collection has been the focus of the public for years. The stolen artwork was stored in the premises of Portigon AG in Dusseldorf, however, even though the access was regulated by the state-of-the-art insurance system, apparently, more people had managed to access the chip which opened the doors of the vault. Deutsche Welle reports that the artworks had occupied the walls of WestLB before they were stored in the vault, but when the state-owned bank went bankrupt, it was legally succeeded by Portigon AG.

Eleven lithographs by Pablo Picasso were reported stolen via theguardian.com

The Ongoing Controversy

The Portigon AG collection was in the public focus back in 2014. Portigon was to sell its valuable collection which included the works of Joseph Beuys, Gerhard Richter, August Macke, and Sigmar Polke, among others. However, the Association of German Art Historians publicly spoke out against the sale, as they feared that the art sales from a state-owned collection could be used as a means of debt repayment. Finally, they came to a mutual agreement and left the multi-million-dollar collection in North Rhine-Westphalia and Portigon agreed to sell the artwork to a state-owned foundation. The stolen collection was estimated to an insurance value of around €1.1 million, which is roughly $1.2 million, however, the market value of these works could go much higher.

Pablo Picasso – The Bull, state VII (Le Taureau) December 26, 1945, Lithograph via moma.org

What’s Next for Stolen Picasso Art?

So, what can we expect to happen next? As we know, this is not the first time that the Picasso art was stolen. We wrote about the now-famous case of the original Picasso painting recovered in an undercover operation in Turkey. We know about the infamous case of the art dealer Yves Bouvier who sold Tête de Femme (1957) and Espagnole à l’eventail (1957) to a Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev. When will these eleven lithographs turn up and where? Will they be sold in the black art market or stored somewhere for a while until the heat dies down? If history really is the life’s teacher, especially when it comes to stolen art, these precious Picasso art pieces will eventually be found and returned to their place, but until then, all we can do is wait and trust that the authorities will do their job conscientiously and that the thieves will not in any way damage the invaluable works.

The Truth About The Stolen ‘Pop Icons’ By Andy Warhol

If you don’t know, now you know.

artnet

As most news junkies have heard by now, seven of Andy Warhol‘s “iconic” “paintings” of Campbell’s soup cans, estimated as being worth a $500,000 “fortune”, were recently stolen from the Springfield Art Museum in Missouri, which thereby lost some “rare” “masterpieces” of “Pop Art”. I got the images for today’s Pic from the FBI Web site, where a reward of $25,000 is on offer.
Sorry for all the scare quotes in the above paragraph, but they were needed to show how many of the “known facts” in the case are wrong. First of all, despite headlines in mainstream news outlets such as The Guardian, Daily News, MSN.com and CBS news, the stolen works weren’t paintings at all, but silkscreen prints, and not very rare ones at that: They were produced in an edition of 250. Hardly “ ‘claim to fame’ types of pieces,” which is how the Springfield police described them to The New York Times. That is why they are worth at very most the piddling sum of maybe $30,000 each ($500,000 would the maximum price for a full set of 10, and a broken set would fetch much less). That is, they cost less than you might pay for a piece of zombie abstraction by some kid painter fresh out of grad school.
If the stolen works were really from the series of truly iconic Campbell’s soup paintings that shot the unknown artist to fame in 1962, they’d be worth something like $10 million each — but those canvases will never come up for sale (or, one assumes, for theft) since all 32 of them are safely stowed away in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
The stolen prints are utterly different, even in look, from the hand-painted pictures at MoMA, which I’ve written about at rather great length. The prints are slick and hard-edged and quite faithful to the real soup packaging; the original paintings Warhol derived them from have lots of rough edges and weirdnesses, as well as a much more complex, idiosyncratic relationship to their supermarket sources.
The main reason for the difference is that the stolen prints were published in 1968, when Warhol had long since dropped his practice as a Pop artist in favor of underground films and all kinds of experimental art making: He offered to endorse any and every product, and count that as art; he designed rain and snow machines – again, as art. The year the soup-can silkscreens went on the market, Warhol was in fact stuck in a fallow moment and not sure where to head next – and then half-way through that year he was shot, setting his art back even further. Once he recovered, he found a way forward with what he went on to call “business art”, whereby the simple (or not so simple) act of earning money as an artist  would be his new medium. His art would be all about commodifying his own hand and brand, and turning them into the latest in American consumer products.
That wasn’t the only kind of art Warhol made for the last two decades of his career; he also turned out old-fashioned wonderful objects. But “business art”, Warhol’s autograph artistic sell-out, was an important part of what he got up to. Artists ever since have been playing Warholian games with the markets that depend on them, and feed them (q.v., “Damien Hirst“ and “Jeff Koons“).
The un-rare soup cans stolen in Springfield may not be masterpieces of Pop Art. They are barely even weak, late examples of that style. But, in their very multiplicity, they are important, quite early examples of the selling of self that Warhol perfected, and that still gives him such currency today. The Springfield soup cans really show Warhol appropriating his own earlier pictures and making good money – and new art – in the process.

Stolen paintings returned

Photo: The Canadian Press

Italian authorities have recovered three 15th-century paintings seized from an Italian-Luxembourg noble family during the Second World War.
Authorities on Monday unveiled the paintings, all by little-known artists, at the Brera Art Gallery in Milan, where they are currently housed.
The works were among property seized from the Borbone-Parma family after Italy entered World War II, making Luxembourg an enemy state and allowing seizure of properties under wartime law. Many of the family's treasures were recovered by the U.S. military after the war, but not these paintings.
Investigators for the Carabinieri state police unit charged with protecting cultural heritage only recently traced the works to two families in Milan who had inherited them. The works, which have not been valued, are in state custody after no living descendants could be traced.

Stolen Art Watch, Art Loss Register's Julian Radcliffe Exposed As Criminal Fraudster, Fox Guarding The Hen-House

Art dispute paints a murky picture

Britain’s leading “art detective” has been accused of running mistresses on expenses while court documents have shone a light on an industry where payments have allegedly been made to police officers to “oil the wheels” of painting recovery.

For two decades Julian Radcliffe, an Old Etonian who controls one of the most comprehensive databases of stolen art, has criss-crossed the globe tracing stolen treasures on behalf of the rightful owners.

Court documents have shed light on this shadowy unregulated world: an industry in which criminals may be paid indirectly from insurers and the rightful owners to return the paintings that they stole.

Art crime is ranked as the third-highest-grossing criminal enterprise behind drugs and arms with figures suggesting that in Britain alone in 2013 art and antiques worth more than £300 million were stolen from galleries and drawing rooms.

The allegations, which are denied by Mr Radcliffe, have emerged during a legal dispute between the London-based International Art and Antiques Loss Register (ALR), founded by Mr Radcliffe, and a rival organisation set up by his former general counsel, Christopher Marinello.

Both operate databases that auction houses and dealers pay to consult to check if the Van Goghs or Matisses, for example, in their possession are clean. They also follow up leads in pursuit of missing masterpieces from the greatest artists in history.

Mr Radcliffe claims that Mr Mari- nello “set up a rival business by exploiting [ALR’s] confidential information and business opportunities”. He said that Mr Marinello’s company had “unlawfully obtained a competitive advantage”. Mr Marinello denies the claims. He declined to comment.

Mr Marinello is defending the claims and in his counterclaim alleges that Mr Radcliffe, who is married to Frances Radcliffe, chairwoman of the Friends of Battersea Park, had been spending £10,000 a month on expenses partly to “pay for trips with his mistresses”.

Three women, whose identity The Times has declined to reveal, are named in documents. It is claimed that Mr Radcliffe pretended that one of the alleged mistresses was an employee of Christie’s auction house whom he had to repay for staying in a private club.

Mr Marinello is alleging that his payments from the company were reduced because Mr Radcliffe did not work “full time in the best interests of the business”. He claims that while telling his staff he was working, Mr Radcliffe was “instead spending time with one or more women who were not his wife”.

Mr Radcliffe does not dispute that ALR has not made a profit for the past six years but denies having claimed £10,000 in expenses each month. He described the allegations about the mistresses as “scandalous and abusive” and has filed a confidential schedule to the High Court on these matters.

The High Court papers also disclose that an ALR board member, Simon Wood, wrote an email about how cash had been given to the City of London police. The papers state that two members of the ALR board, Simon Wood and Eric Westropp, told Mr Marinello in August 2012 that they were “aware of Mr Radcliffe’s practice of making payments to enablers, and Mr Wood wrote in an email of that date that he had been “involved with giving cash to the City of London police … to oil the wheels rather than constitute a bribe or a material reward”.

The email exchange contained in the court papers do not explain what the alleged payment was for or how it was used by the City of London police. The force said that any allegations of corruption would be fully investigated.

Mr Wood declined to respond to a question about the payment while Mr Radcliffe’s solicitors said: “Neither Julian Radcliffe nor our client [ALR] have paid money to the City of London police or any other police force.”

Police officers have questioned the techniques used by Mr Radcliffe’s company, with a senior French officer claiming that his business had created “a dishonest market in stolen art that flows from the thieves”.

Mr Radcliffe has admitted to operating a “Balkans Strategy” whereby payments were made for stolen artworks that “might ultimately be received by those who were responsible for the theft”. He said this “aimed to limit the powers of foreign criminal gangs in the stolen art market”.

Mr Radcliffe also denied that the strategy of making payments “would have been regarded by reasonable people as dishonest or corrupt”.

The counterclaim also alleges that he did not inform “the police, the loss adjuster, the insurance underwriter, or the victim” when his company recognised that a painting being sold by Bonhams was stolen. The documents allege that he ordered a “kill” on the match because of the low value of the painting, and hence commission for the company.

Mr Radcliffe does not address this allegation directly in his response but has issued a blanket denial of the claims made during proceedings.
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The Murky World of the Art Detective

Alexi Mostrous
The theft of artworks is now the world’s third most lucrative crime. Old Etonian Julian Radcliffe tracks down stolen Picassos and Cézannes – so why is he such a controversial figure?

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/magazine/article4167385.ece

In December 2007, an art exhibition opened in Pfäffikon, a small lakeside town in Switzerland, around 20 miles east of Zurich. The exhibition included 20 original Picasso paintings, as well as more than 150 etchings, prints and linoleum cuts by the artist, all of which had been loaned to the Pfäffikon cultural centre by the Sprengel Museum in Hanover. This type of arrangement is not uncommon across Europe; large museums and galleries will often allow their works to be shown in smaller provincial institutions. But such generosity carries a certain amount of risk: big galleries used to showing precious artworks will often boast elaborate alarm systems and large numbers of security personnel. Smaller galleries will often not. Plus, owing both to their great number and great value, works by Picasso are stolen more often than any other artist’s. So when the paintings came to Pfäffikon, it was not just a boon for local art lovers, but a potential opportunity for thieves.

It was one they seized. On a cold Wednesday night in early February 2008, the alarm at the Pfäffikon cultural centre sounded. Police arrived to find that two of the Picassos were missing. One was Tête de Cheval (Head of Horse) from 1962, the other was Verre et Pichet(Glass and Pitcher) from 1944: works that, between them, had an estimated value of more than £2.5 million. The Sprengel Museum immediately offered a reward for any information leading to the recovery of the paintings. Investigators hypothesised that the thieves may have remained hidden inside the gallery until after it had closed, but they could not be sure. The authorities were left with no firm idea as to how the crime happened, who had carried it out or, most vitally, how to get the Picassos back.

This last question quickly came to be pondered by a raffish figure from within a shabby office in London. The International Art and Antique Loss Register occupies the first floor of an anonymous five-storey block in Farringdon and is considered by many, despite outward appearances, to be the world’s foremost art detection agency. Founded by Julian Radcliffe, a slender man aged 65, the Art Loss Register (ALR) claims to have returned more than £150 million worth of paintings, artefacts and sculptures to their rightful owners in the 22 years since business began.

Radcliffe’s pale face, though often inscrutable, breaks into a smile when discussing his own exploits, and he clearly enjoys the sense of danger that comes with his status as an internationally renowned art detective. He has a caddish charm and the sort of self-confidence you would expect of an Old Etonian. Throughout his anecdotes – which mix references to hardened European criminals and attempted arrests by South American police – Radcliffe portrays himself as a Briton trying to bring order to foreign chaos. An Oxford graduate, Radcliffe was first employed as an insurance broker for Lloyd’s, specialising in political risk, before going on to found a company that would evaluate security in dangerous countries and regions. He later spent some time working as a hostage negotiator. In his pinstripe suit, he’s a little like something from a Graham Greene novel.

Radcliffe formed the ALR following a conversation with a director of Sotheby’s auction house who bemoaned the lack of a comprehensive worldwide database of all stolen and missing artworks. Such a database would ensure that reputable art dealers and private collectors could check that any piece they were purchasing did not, in fact, belong to somebody else. Over the past two decades, Radcliffe has built the ALR into a vast roll-call of stolen art, with more than 400,000 objects currently listed. Dealers and collectors pay Radcliffe fees to check the register.

Were the ALR a business built solely around this database, then Radcliffe would be a useful, if uncontroversial member of the art world, something like a particularly proactive lost property clerk. But Radcliffe is no clerk, and he and his company enjoy a far more glamorous sideline, earning hundreds of thousands of pounds a year tracking down and recovering stolen art on behalf of insurers and victims of theft. It works like this: Radcliffe’s network of sources around the world tip him off about the locations of stolen paintings. For a substantial fee, they may provide “information” which somehow leads to the stolen artwork landing in Radcliffe’s hands. The ALR man has collected paintings left for him in the boot of a car and by a layby. It’s a system shrouded in mystery but then, Radcliffe claims, it gets results.

In 1999, Radcliffe identified and reunited with its owner a stolen Cézanne, Pitcher and Fruits, which had turned up in Panama and which went on to sell at auction for £18 million. This month, Christie’s will sell several Old Masters stolen in 1987 from the gallery of art dealer Robert Noortman, which were recovered thanks in part to the ALR. Radcliffe worked with Dutch police to set up a sting operation, resulting in two criminal convictions and the recovery of all but one of the pictures.

But what makes Radcliffe such a contentious figure is his work with a shady network of informants in Serbia, whom he uses to recover stolen artwork, sometimes without obtaining explicit police approval, and occasionally in the knowledge that part of the payments he makes to these informants will filter back to the art thieves themselves.

While the ALR states publicly that it never pays anyone involved in the original theft, privately Radcliffe admits to me that the situation is rather different.

“You have got to understand that we are operating in the real world,” he says, sitting back in an old leather chair in his office when we meet. “The law tries to treat all this stuff as black and white and actually, in most cases, it’s shades of grey. The public policy has to be: we don’t pay … But in certain cases some payments have to be authorised. We keep them to a minimum.”

Radcliffe estimates that 20 per cent of stolen art is destroyed or lost for ever. It’s a useful statistic to keep in mind; collectors and institutions want their paintings back in one piece, and often they don’t mind how this is facilitated.

“The only thing I care about is my artworks, and Mr Radcliffe can do what he wants with whom he wants,” says Jean-Louis Loeb-Picard, a millionaire property developer. Loeb-Picard had employed the ALR following the theft of more than €3 million (£2.3 million) worth of art from his Parisian apartment, and under such circumstances he was not squeamish about Radcliffe’s methods. “It’s my right to do what I have to do to recover my works,” he maintains.

To use police language, theft victims are allowed to pay rewards “for information leading to the recovery of a stolen object”. That is not in itself controversial, even when payments amount to thousands of euros and the informants have criminal records.

Indeed, having a good network of informants is crucial to Radcliffe and other art detection companies’ ability to track down stolen art. Both the police and private companies regard the payment of rewards as often the only way to recover paintings.

But while rewards are uncontroversial, paying money to anyone directly or indirectly involved with the original theft is anything but. Some payments may not only be illegal but, like a government paying a kidnapper to turn over his hostages, may actually fuel art theft rather than prevent it.

The art recovery industry, murky and unregulated though it may be, is further boosted by the fact that police budgets for fighting art crime have been slashed, leaving organised gangs – especially gangs from Eastern Europe – able to tap into a global market worth billions. Art crime is now ranked the third highest-grossing criminal enterprise, behind drugs and arms dealing respectively. In 2013 figures suggested that thefts of art and antiques in the UK alone totalled more than £300 million. “I am not naive,” says Loeb-Picard. “I don’t insist on the matter. I know. Why would the criminal give back the works if they are not paid? But I asked two different lawyers, ‘Am I right to give money to Julian Radcliffe, knowing that part of the money may be going to criminals?’ My lawyers said I could do what I want.”

Radcliffe’s methods have provoked criticism at the highest level of European law enforcement. Some criminal investigators view him as little more than a fence, one who provides a means for the very people who stole the art to sell it back to their victims.

“Radcliffe ruins everything,” says Thomas Erhardy, head of the BRB (Brigade de Répression du Banditisme), the Parisian police force tasked with investigating serious crime. “He doesn’t play by the rules. All he wants is his percentage. He’s in contact with thieves. I simply don’t trust him.”

The Frenchman has crossed paths with Radcliffe several times. He accuses the ALR of creating a dishonest market in stolen art, one that flows from the thieves who steal it in European cities, through Serbian intermediaries, onwards to Radcliffe and the ALR, and finally back with the insurance companies or victims themselves.

Radcliffe bats away the criticism. “Erhardy may call me tomorrow and ask me to help on a case,” he says. “But for very good political reasons, he’s got to be critical of us in public.” He denies Erhardy’s claims, however, saying he has never handled stolen goods or himself acted illegally, and insists that he seeks permission from relevant police forces before paying over money.

In some rare cases, the ALR accepts that money will be paid directly to criminals, but only as part of what they have come to term the “Balkan strategy”. This approach involves secretly offering sums of money, which the ALR claims are relatively small, to criminals to recover pictures on behalf of their rightful owners, while at the same time using its extensive database to make it impossible for those same criminals to sell to anyone else. Radcliffe insists that no payment has been made for thefts after 2010 and that his strategy has been effective at reducing crime.

“There are fewer than 12 cases out of more than 1,600 in the past 21 years in which we suspect the payments made to intermediaries might have been passed on to those involved in the original theft,” says Radcliffe.

“We absolutely understand that some of the cash paid results in money going back to people who may have been involved in the original crime. No one is fooling anyone about the fact that [an intermediary] will pass on some of the money.”

Radcliffe says he has taken legal advice and the position is not always clear. Ultimately, “It comes down to intent. A prosecutor would find it very difficult to say what you are doing was wrong if it was part of a clear strategy to reduce crime.”

Thanks to a series of internal aides-memoire written by Radcliffe between 2004 to 2012, and leaked to The Times, it is possible to reveal for the first time just how far the ALR is willing to go to recover stolen masterpieces.

In 2011, on the trail of the Pfäffikon Picassos, Radcliffe flew into Belgrade to meet some of his contacts who claimed they knew of the paintings’ whereabouts. A few hours after arriving, he found himself being hustled into a car by a young Serb he knew only as “X”. The Serb had already warned Radcliffe “No police”. They drove in silence into the hills behind the Serbian town of Krusevac.

“We climbed up through open fields with a small church just on the right,” Radcliffe wrote afterwards. “‘X’ told me not to remember where we were since the pictures would only be there for ten minutes. At a junction we went into a house which he seemed to know well.”

The pair then entered a garage where they were met by a heavy-set man, who moved aside a lawnmower before carrying out two pictures wrapped in a large zipped cover. Radcliffe examined the contents. One was Tête de Cheval. The other was Verre et Pichet. He had been led to the missing Picassos.

The question is, who had helped get him there in the first place? After seeing the two stolen masterpieces for himself, Radcliffe met three of his Serbian contacts at a nearby restaurant. The first was a tough-talking man called Wolf Minic, a 48-year-old chain-smoking private detective with contacts deep within the country’s criminal underworld.

Minic introduced Radcliffe to a prominent Serb businessman aged about 60, whom everyone knew simply as “the Boxer”. He boasted of once fighting Evander Holyfield. According to ALR notes, the Boxer had “financed many gangs of thieves overseas” and had “directed criminals to steal in Zurich”. But now, apparently, he wanted to “go clean”. The final contact was a young café owner called Marko, who appeared to be in charge. He showed Radcliffe pictures of other allegedly stolen artworks, telling him: “There are many other cases if we give him a list of what we are after.” As the men talked, Radcliffe noticed a man standing guard with a submachine gun. Eight months after he first met him, Serbian police filed criminal charges against Marko “due to the fact that he possessed stolen paintings”, according to a spokeswoman for the Ministry of the Interior in Serbia.

Through Minic, the ALR paid them tens of thousands of pounds for information on a number of stolen artworks.

Speaking today, Radcliffe says he then had “no grounds to suspect” that any of his Balkan contacts had any direct involvement in art theft – although Marko was obviously in contact with people who were – and that he was comfortable doing business with them. Minic says that, “Marko is trusted by both sides,” and, “The Serbs know that he was not involved with the crime.” That same year, the three men helped Radcliffe locate Constructivo Blanco, a painting by Uruguayan artist Joaquín Torres-García, a work worth a six-figure sum. After the painting was returned, its insurers, Catlin Insurance, paid the ALR €60,000 in fees and expenses. €30,000 of this was kept by the ALR and the other half distributed between the Boxer’s group and the “criminal holders”.

Radcliffe says that the insurance company knew this was the case. In a note of his meeting with a Catlin representative, Radcliffe recorded that he and the insurance company agreed that at least some of the money would go “to the thief”. A Catlin spokesperson strongly denied this, and said the company would never have authorised such a payment. Radcliffe’s response is to suggest that the established art world authorities – the police, the insurers – cannot afford to admit what everyone else knows is the truth.

“Catlin have got to take that public position,” he says. “We kept the insurers fully informed and they knew that some payment would eventually end up with criminals.” Catlin continues to deny this.

When it comes to art recovery, Radcliffe is by no means the only game in town. Despite locating the two missing Picassos, it was not the Old Etonian who would ultimately take the credit for the safe return of the paintings. Radcliffe tried to obtain a contract to recover them with AXA Art, the insurers, but was rebuffed. AXA preferred to deal with a competitor of his, Dick Ellis, with whom it had a long-standing relationship. Ellis is a former police officer who set up the Art and Antiques Squad at Scotland Yard and now runs his own art recovery business, the Art Management Group. In person, Ellis exists as an almost exact counterweight to Radcliffe: ruddy-faced, bald and thickening where his competitor is pale, slender and with a sweep of well-groomed hair. You wouldn’t have to guess who is the ex-policeman and who is the aesthete.

Ellis even used the same contacts – Marko, the Boxer and Minic – to obtain information about the Picassos’ whereabouts. In fact, Ellis has an even closer relationship with the three. In 2011, he set up a company in Serbia called Art Management DOO with the Serbs listed as directors and equal owners. Like Radcliffe, Ellis maintains that these men are simply intermediaries in a part of the world where the legitimate and the illegal often intertwine.

“If you are investigating crimes and using information, then it’s quite common for the informants to have criminal connections,” says Ellis. “Marko is clearly well connected, but the degree to which he’s criminally involved is unclear to me. Despite my having provided law enforcement investigators with his details I saw no evidence to connect him criminally with any of these activities.” (He declines to say if he was aware that charges had been filed against Marko in 2012, however.)

The line between paying a ransom to a crook and paying a reward for information leading to a painting’s recovery is, in this world, easy to blur. Radcliffe believes that Ellis knew perfectly well that some of the fees he paid his contacts during recovery of the two Picassos would end up in criminal hands.

“AXA stated publicly that they had not paid criminals, on the rather shaky grounds that the payments were for information, not for stolen art,” he noted. Ellis says this description is “manifestly inaccurate and wrong”.

On a clear winter’s day, I meet a third player in this field, at a café beside Richmond Bridge in London. Charley Hill has operated as a private art investigator since 2002, having previously worked with Ellis at Scotland Yard. In 1994, he posed as an American collector as part of a sting to recover The Scream by Edvard Munch, which had been stolen from the National Gallery in Oslo. Today, he is seeking to recover a number of gold snuffboxes stolen from Lord Rothschild’s Waddesdon Manor home, collectively worth £5 million, goods that Radcliffe also happens to be on the trail of.

A mild, bespectacled figure, Hill boasts good contacts within the traveller community, and has enlisted James Quinn McDonagh – a championship bare-knuckle boxer – to set up introductions with individuals connected to the Rothschild thefts. “He and I are after all of Jacob Rothschild’s gold boxes, the Ashmolean Cézanne, and the Caravaggio stolen in Palermo in 1969,” says Hill. “He gets me into the travellers.” There is no suggestion that McDonagh had any involvement in the snuffbox thefts, but the very presence of a bare-knuckle boxing champion only serves as a reminder of the types of characters often involved in the recovery of artworks. In 2004, Radcliffe’s own notes show him visiting the Hyatt Regency Belgrade to meet someone known only as “the Boss Man”.

“He had thin aquiline features, slim build, balding, speaks Russian, certainly knowledgeable about where the pictures were stolen,” he noted. The Boss Man’s associates took Radcliffe “to a ground-floor office with a caged locking door where they showed me a Van Dyke stolen from a castle”. On another occasion, Radcliffe met a Bosnian general and an arms dealer, both of whom “controlled” stolen works of art, he said. He paid one group of “holders” €50,000 and another €25,000, ALR documents record.

Again, you wonder whether these artworks would ever be recovered without paying such people. “Paying criminals a ransom has to be wrong,” says Hill. But paying people for information “leading to the recovery of masterpieces” would be in the public interest. “You wouldn’t get it back any other way,” he says. “None of us are fools.”

Two individuals close to the Art Loss Register told me that Radcliffe’s forays into the Balkans were as much a desperate attempt to wrestle his company into financial health as an idealistic endeavour. The ALR, which has not made money for six years, had liabilities of more than £1 million in 2012.

“Distributing money to these individuals in Serbia I thought was wrong,” says one source close to Radcliffe, who wishes to remain unknown. “It’s in an absolute financial mess. If it wasn’t for Julian’s personal cash infusions the company would be insolvent.” (Radcliffe says he is confident the ALR will eventually make a profit.)

Last year, the ALR’s general counsel, a man called Chris Marinello, defected in order to set up his own art detection agency, Art Recovery International. He too questioned the methods of his former company. “The direction of the ALR, with these ingrained practices and questionable affairs of its management and board, was not aligned with my vision of how a due diligence business (or any business for that matter) should be run.” Upon announcing the creation of Art Recovery International, Marinello stressed that his own company would be run “ethically, responsibly and with respect for the rule of law”. Radcliffe is not surprised a competitor would criticise the ALR.

But even an experienced police officer such as Erhardy has, in a roundabout way, benefited from information sold by men like Marko. In November 2012, a Serbian thief called Goran Arsic stole a €500,000 Delacroix painting called The Arabs of Oran from a gallery near the Louvre. In May 2013, Dick Ellis travelled to Paris to seek permission from Erhardy and a French judge to recover the painting. When this was granted, Ellis travelled to Belgrade where, with the assistance of Marko, he was able to locate the stolen painting. Even though telephone records linked Arsic to Marko, Erhardy states he was satisfied that Ellis had acted appropriately. “His goal can help my goal,” the Frenchman says. A year after the original theft, Erhardy arrested Arsic in Paris.

Nevertheless, Erhardy maintains that the very nature of the art recovery industry means it is unlikely ever to become less murky. “Everyone is happy and everyone gets money,” he says, speaking of the cycle of theft, recovery and payments. “But you have to stop the situation otherwise you are encouraging more thefts.” Which may be true. But then, if you were to wake to find that two of your Picassos had gone missing, who would you call? There is no shortage of men ready to help you get them back. At least, for the right price. 

Tracking Stolen Art, for Profit, and Blurring a Few Lines

"Everyone agrees there’s a real need for this kind of organization," says Julian Radcliffe, owner of the Art Loss Register, a private company that tracks stolen artworks. Credit Martin Cleaver/Associated Press

Early in the morning of May 11, 1987, someone smashed through the glass doors of the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm, removed a Matisse from a wall and fled.

All it took was daring and a sledgehammer.

The whereabouts of the painting, “Le Jardin,” remained a mystery until the work was found last year and made a celebratory trip home in January.

But law enforcement played no role. The return was facilitated by the Art Loss Register, a London-based company that over the last two decades has evolved into a little-noticed but increasingly integral part of art investigation around the world.

The brainchild of Julian Radcliffe, an Oxford-educated former risk consultant who speaks of once spying for British intelligence, the Register helps fill a gaping void: billions of dollars’ worth of art is stolen every year, according to an F.B.I. estimate, but law enforcement has too few resources to prioritize finding it.

For Mr. Radcliffe, whose other company helps recover stolen construction equipment, this presented a natural opportunity. Since it began 22 years ago, the Register has developed one of the most extensive databases of stolen art in the world, enabling it to recover more than $250 million worth of art, earning fees from insurers and theft victims.

Along the way, the company has drawn criticism from those who say its hardball tactics push ethical, and sometimes legal, boundaries. Even so, the Register continues to count law enforcement agents among its supporters. “To me, they’re very important, a very useful tool,” said Mark Fishstein, the New York City Police Department’s “art cop.”

Mr. Radcliffe’s company operates in the dim recesses of the art world, where the prevalence of theft, fakery and works of murky provenance has given rise to many businesses that promise to help clients navigate this lucrative but largely unregulated market.

But for the Register, despite its official-sounding name and pivotal role as a monitor, profits have not come easily, and the company’s future looks increasingly cloudy, threatening a core player in the recovery of stolen art.

Mr. Radcliffe said that he hopes the Registry will break even this year, but that it has lost money for the last six and has stayed afloat only thanks to his cash infusions. Now the company is losing talent, too.

During the past year, two key employees resigned; additionally, the company’s general counsel, Christopher A. Marinello, who has been as much a public face of the company as Mr. Radcliffe, says he is leaving at the end of this month, with plans to start a rival business.

Among the incidents that have drawn criticism, the Register misled a client who wanted to check the provenance of a painting before he purchased it, telling him it was not stolen, when in fact it was, so that he would buy it and unwittingly help the company collect a fee for its retrieval.

It has been known to pay middlemen and informers for leads on stolen works, a practice that troubles some in law enforcement, who say that it can incite thefts. And the company often behaves like a bounty hunter, charging fees of as much as 20 percent of a work’s value for its return.

These fees do not bother the insurance companies and other clients that hire the Register to find a work. But the company has approached people and museums with whom it has no relationship. In several cases, people say the Register contacted them, told them of a lead on a stolen work, then refused to divulge any information until the subject agreed to pay a fee.

Officials at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Orleans, France, for example, said that the Register approached the museum in 2003, asserting that it had information about an Alfred Sisley painting that had been stolen from the museum. The company said it could retrieve the work if the museum agreed to its fee. Unable to afford the payment, the museum called the police instead. The work was never recovered.

“Sometimes we have to deal with the fact that, under French law, we could charge them,” said Corinne Chartrelle, the deputy for a French law enforcement unit that tracks stolen art. She was not involved in the Orleans case, but said she knew of similar instances where the Register had tried to leverage its knowledge to extract a fee.

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The Art Loss Register listed Norman Rockwell’s “Russian Schoolroom” as stolen. Credit Erik Jacobs for The New York Times, Norman Rockwell Family Agency

“They are keeping information to themselves,” she said.

Mr. Radcliffe contests these allegations, noting, for example, that police investigators routinely pay informants, and adding that such disputes are rare but inevitable, given the number of players involved.

“Everyone agrees there’s a real need for this kind of organization,” he said.

Indeed, even some of the company’s harshest critics say they do not welcome the prospect of an art market devoid of the Register and its resources.

“They do serve a purpose — they’re the only private database,” said Robert K. Wittman, a private art investigator who formerly led the F.B.I.’s Art Crime Team. “When they get into trouble is when they overstep that role and try to act as if they’re the police.”

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Mr. Radcliffe, who is also a gentleman farmer, shrugs off suggestions that his business could be faltering.

“I am very patient,” he said. “I grow trees. I raise cattle. Breeding cattle takes 20 years. If I think something is the right thing to do, I will do it as long as it takes.”

Few Competitors

Outside the movies, art crime can be awfully mundane.

Rare is a thief like the dapper one played by Pierce Brosnan in “The Thomas Crown Affair,” who choreographed robberies of Monets from the Metropolitan Museum of Art with his bowler-hatted accomplices. Instead, doors are forced, windows smashed and valuables grabbed in a hurry, often by petty criminals.

As clumsy as the crooks might be, the value of stolen art is still huge compared with the law enforcement resources devoted to its recovery.

A few countries, like Italy, place a high priority on art theft, but they are the exception.

New York City and Los Angeles, hubs of the art trade, each have one detective dedicated to art crime. The F.B.I. has assigned 14 agents with special training to investigate art crimes, though most have other duties as well. Scotland Yard’s arts and antiques unit has three officers.

“It’s not violent crime,” said Saskia Hufnagel, a research fellow at the Australian Research Council Center of Excellence in Policing and Security. “There are no victims, at least ones the public would consider victims. A lot of the loss is covered by insurance.”

The authorities are also hobbled by limited and incomplete data.

The database managed by Scotland Yard lists some 57,500 stolen objects. Interpol’s database of stolen art includes about 40,000 works. The F.B.I.’s database has fewer than 8,000 objects on it, partly because the bureau relies on local police to fill in the blanks.

“It is not an absolutely complete database,” said Bonnie Magness-Gardiner, who manages the F.B.I.’s art theft program. “We get what they choose to send us.”

Each database lists items based on individual protocols, and most police agencies don’t communicate with one another; thus, someone checking whether a work is stolen would have to speak to multiple agencies.

The Register, by comparison, reports that its database includes more than 350,000 stolen, looted or missing works. In addition to an in-house staff of about 10, the company uses an Indian company to search the world for matches between the database and items for sale at auction houses and art fairs.

Theft victims pay to list their items with the Register, which also charges dealers, collectors and insurers fees to search the database to see whether a work is clean.

To law enforcement, the Register’s resources are clearly helpful. Police search the database free, and the company has helped train the F.B.I.’s Art Crime Team.

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Judy Goffman Cutler, who sold the Rockwell painting to Steven Spielberg, did not appreciate the label, contending that the company harassed her for years: “They knew better but chose to follow the greedy path.” Credit Erik Jacobs for The New York Times

As a result, some police agencies develop close relationships with it, even recommending that victims register stolen works there.

“If I went to the A.L.R. and said, ‘Did you have any information about this painting?,’ they would give me 30 documents,” said James McAndrew, a former federal agent who tracked stolen art. “They’d have all that, where the cop on the beat would not even know to ask.”

Private Eyes, and Fees

For a man who one day would become an essential figure in the art market, Mr. Radcliffe had little exposure to art growing up, beyond some family portraits that were handed down through the generations.

In the early 1970s, he worked in London as an insurance broker specializing in political risk and later helped to found a company, in which he still has a minority stake, that, among other things, provides advice about security in dangerous countries.

He became involved with art sleuthing in 1991, a few years after a director at Sotheby’s mentioned that auction houses, whose businesses are built on consumer trust, could use a list of stolen artworks to ensure that they were not selling purloined items. It turned out that such a database already existed, managed by a tiny nonprofit organization in New York called the International Foundation for Art Research. Mr. Radcliffe persuaded the foundation to form a partnership with him, though they later split after disagreements over strategy and issues of control. (The foundation still licenses its database to the Register.)

Mr. Radcliffe now owns 68 percent of the Register; Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Bonhams are among the other owners. Last year, he said, it took in $1.25 million, mostly in fees for database searches, and much of the rest in recovery fees from theft victims and insurers that had already paid off claims. But lucrative recoveries are rare, he said, with the median value about $20,000.

Mr. Wittman, the former F.B.I. investigator, said that the appeal of the business goes beyond revenue for Mr. Radcliffe, who enjoys his access to law enforcement and his image as an art world James Bond.

“He wants to be the supersleuth,” he said.

A tall, pale, wraithlike figure with a beak nose and a poker face, Mr. Radcliffe, 65, has a taste for cloak-and-dagger theatricality. Pressed last year, for example, to divulge more about a case in the Balkans, he said: “Maybe the answer is to take you out there one day and introduce you to some of the people concerned and see what happens.”

Then he laughed sardonically.

Certainly, his efforts and others have led to a good number of successful recoveries by the Register, including the return of a valuable Cézanne, one of seven works stolen from a home in Stockbridge, Mass., in 1978.

It was found more than 20 years later after Lloyd’s of London contacted the Register with a query: A Panamanian company was trying to insure a Cézanne painting for transport. Was it stolen?

The database reflected that it was, so Mr. Radcliffe approached its owner, Michael Bakwin. His art had been located. Was he willing to pay a recovery fee?

Mr. Bakwin agreed, and Mr. Radcliffe negotiated a settlement with the Panamanian company. Mr. Bakwin got his Cézanne back in 1999. He sold the work, “Pitcher and Fruits,” a few months later at Sotheby’s for $29.3 million. The Register pocketed a $1.6 million fee.

Years later, when some of the other works appeared on the market, the seller was unmasked as Robert M. Mardirosian, a retired lawyer from Massachusetts who had once represented the thief and came into possession of the paintings when the thief was killed in 1979. He then created the Panamanian shell corporation to hide behind, according to court records.

In 2008, Mr. Mardirosian was convicted of possessing stolen property and forced to return the paintings.

Mr. Radcliffe acknowledges that to pull off this coup, he resorted to some sleight of hand. When the additional paintings surfaced, and Sotheby’s asked him whether they were stolen, he lied, saying they were not. This allowed them to be shipped to the Sotheby’s in London, where they were seized.

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Christopher A. Marinello, general counsel of the Art Loss Register, with “Le Jardin,” a Matisse stolen in 1987 and returned this year. Credit Ray Wells/Art Loss Register, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Mr. Radcliffe said he has only lied twice about whether paintings were stolen, and is not apologetic, likening the tactic to the police’s misleading a suspect during an investigation.

“When you’re doing a sting operation, for example,” he said, “you don’t say, ‘By the way, I’m lying to you.’ ”

Questionable Tactics

Of course, the Register is not the police, a fact that its critics suggest it too often forgets.

Judy Goffman Cutler, an art dealer who became entangled in a Register hunt for a Norman Rockwell painting, has sued the company twice, contending that it harassed her for years in its zeal to collect a fee for recovering the work.

Mrs. Cutler had clear title to the painting in 1989, when she sold it to the director Steven Spielberg. Later it was mistakenly listed as stolen by the F.B.I. and, consequently, the Register, which tried for years to recover it.

Mrs. Cutler said that the Register pursued her even after company officials had reason to know she had done nothing wrong. Neither of her suits against the company succeeded, and she is still angry.

“They knew better but chose to follow the greedy path,” she said.

The Register has characterized its dispute with Mrs. Cutler as a misunderstanding based on faulty information it received from the F.B.I. and others that suggested that the painting was stolen.

In another case, a woman named Gisela Fischer, whose family’s Pissarro was looted from their Vienna home by the Gestapo in 1938, accuses the Register of a bait-and-switch. It first offered, she said, to find the painting at no cost, citing a longstanding policy to work pro bono to recover art stolen by the Nazis. Years later, though, when the Register developed a lead on the painting, it demanded she sign a new contract, agreeing to its fee. She refused.

“I felt I was being put in the position of a victim,” she said.

Mr. Radcliffe said that the Register must charge fees to underwrite its efforts and that its conduct is no different from that of lawyers who charge to bring restitution cases. But critics said zealousness has marred other efforts by the company.

In 2004, for example, it drew criticism over efforts to recover a 15th-century painting by an Italian artist, Giovanni da Modena, that had been stolen from a Paris gallery.

Mr. Radcliffe approached the gallery with a simple message, according to people involved in the case: He knew where the painting was and could get it back for a fee. The gallery agreed, and the painting was returned.

But the Paris police were livid when they found out that Mr. Radcliffe had used the information to extract a fee, instead of turning it over to investigators tracking the theft.

Mr. Radcliffe said he had provided details of the case to the police — but it was the Italian police, because the case was connected to a string of other robberies they were investigating. He assumed, he said, that the Italians would pass on the information to their French counterparts and could not recall the names of the officers to whom he had spoken. In any event, he said, his police supporters outweigh his detractors.

“On balance, we’re pretty helpful to them,” he said. “You know, they may not like what we do on Case A, but on Case B and C. I mean, we’ve done some very good work for the French police.”

However testy the Register’s relationship with law enforcement, people continue to use the company for one powerful reason: a lack of alternatives. Mr. Marinello, who is leaving at the end of the month to pursue his own art recovery business, said he may try to create a competing database of stolen art. For now, the Register’s place in the market is unique — and many say crucial.

“There have been questions over the years about its financial structure and the potential conflicts of interest there, but if it was to be said that it couldn’t be run because of that, what are we left with?” said Ivan Macquisten, the editor of the British publication Antiques Trade Gazette. “I can’t see that anyone in the last decade has come up with a better idea.”