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The Art Hostage team undertakes a wide range of services, including due diligence, collection conservation and management, risk assessment and security as well as legal issues, recovery and dispute resolution involving art and artifacts. Through partnerships with leading organizations, the Art Hostage team can provide a complete service for all aspects of collecting and protecting art.
Tuesday, March 21, 2017
Stolen Art Watch, Bulmer Art Heist, Police Pursue End Game & Art Crime Round Up March 2017
Gold coin worth $4 million stolen from Berlin museum
FILE PHOTO - Picture taken in Vienna,
Austria on June 25, 2010 shows experts of an Austrian art forwarding
company holding one of the world's largest gold coins, a 2007 Canadian $
1,000,000 ''Big Maple Leaf''.
A Canadian gold coin named "Big Maple Leaf" which bears the image of Queen Elizabeth II was stolen in the early hours of Monday morning from Berlin's Bode Museum.
The coin is made out of pure gold, weighs about 100 kilos and has a face value of around $1 million (794,344.27 pounds).
"The coin was stolen last night, it's gone," museum spokesman Markus Farr said.
Given the high purity of the gold used in the coin, its material value is estimated to be $4 million.
The
museum said on its website that the coin was issued by the Royal
Canadian Mint in 2007 and that it was featured in the Guinness Book of
Records for its "unmatched" degree of purity.
The coin, with a diameter of 53 centimetres and 3 centimetres thick, was loaned to the Bode Museum in December 2010.
Police
said it was probably stolen by a group of thieves who entered the
museum undetected through a window, possibly with the help of a ladder.
we have so far we believe that the thief, maybe thieves, broke open a window in the back of the museum next to the
railway tracks," police spokesman Winfrid Wenzel said. "They then
managed to enter the building and went to the coin exhibition."The coin was secured with bullet-proof glass inside the building. That much I can say," Wenzel added.
"Neither
I nor the Bode Museum can go into detail regarding personnel inside the
building, the alarm system or security installations."
The Bode Museum has one of the world's largest coin collections with more than 540,000 items.
Cops hunt thieves who stole £2.5million worth of art from Bulmers cider tycoon’s mansion while he was on luxury Barbados holiday
Gang fled with art, jewels and silverware of sentimental value to Esmond & Susan Bulmer in horror burglary eight years ago
COPS
have issued a renewed appeal for information on thieves who stole art
worth £2.5million from the home of an ex-Tory MP and cider tycoon eight
years ago.
Esmond Bulmer, 81, of the Bulmers cider dynasty, and his wife Susan,
75, were on holiday together in Barbados when the raiders broke into
their decadent mansion and made away with the luxury goods.
Fresh pleas … cops are calling for witnesses to come forward and help
Esmond Bulmer, 81, and his wife Susan, 75, find artwork taken from them
eight years ago
South West News Service
Cops have arrested 11 men in connection with the burglary at The
Pavilion, but are yet to recover the majority of stolen goods
They are alleged to have threatened to pour bleach over house-sitter
Deborah Branjum, and tied her to a stair banister before fleeing the
property with the priceless haul.
Some of the gang are believed to have fled with the paintings, while
others loaded the boot of the Bulmers’ Mercedes with a safe with
£1million worth of jewellery inside.
South West News Service
Italian landscape by Pieter Bruegel … just one of the 15 paintings taken in the raid has been recovered by cops
South West News Service
Edward Poynter masterpiece … Esmond Bulmer and his wife Susan were on
holiday in Barbados when thieves broke into their sprawling mansion
Up to 15 well-known artworks, along with jewels and silverware were stolen in the March 2009 raid.
The shocked house sitter was found at their house, The Pavilion near Bruton, Somerset, 18 hours after the break-in.
Cops have arrested 11 men in connection with the aggravated burglary.
All remain on bail pending further investigation.
The latest arrest was a 42-year-old man from Small Heath, Birmingham.
The unnamed man was arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to commit fraud, and conspiracy to handle criminal property.
South West News Service
Back with rightful owners … George Frederick Watts’s Endymion was recovered by private investigators
South West News Service
Still missing … Sir George Clausen’s Apple Blossom was among paintings stolen
South West News Service
Richard Buckner masterpiece … thieves broke into Esmond and Susan Bulmer’s mansion eight years ago
South West News Service
Thieves managed to get away with art worth £2.5million after allegedly threatening to pour bleach over a house sitter
Officials have previously arrested suspects in Gloucestershire, West
Midlands, London and the South East in connection with the heist.
Renewing their appeal for witnesses eight years on, Avon and Somerset
Constabulary said all but one of the 15 paintings taken have been
recovered by private investigators.
The outstanding painting is Sir John Lavery’s “After Glow Taplow.”
The jewellery and silverware taken in the heist have great sentimental value to the Bulmer family.
South West News Service
Sentimental value … the gang fled the scene with a number of jewels
and silverware which are of great personal importance to the Bulmer
family
South West News Service
The gang got lucky with a safe that contained around £1million in jewellery
Mr Bulmer is thought to have made £84million when he and his family
sold their stake in the family’s Hereford-based Bulmers cider-making
business.
Upon getting one piece of art back in 2015, Mr Bulmer, who was MP for
Kidderminster between 1974 and 1983, said he was “thrilled”.
Police are appealing for jewellers and antique and second-hand shop owners who may have been offered the items to come forward.
Anyone able to help should call the Operation Shine investigative team via 101, quoting reference Op Shine 3559609.
South West News Service
Woman sitting at a window by Paul Maze … up to 15 well-known artworks were stolen in the raid
South West News Service
Police have renewed their appeal for witnesses eight years on from the
burglary, in a desperate bid to return the goods to the distraught
family
South West News Service
One down, 14 to go … upon getting one of the 15 pieces stolen back two years ago, Mr Bulmer said he was ‘thrilled’
Stolen Van Goghs back on display after years in criminal underworld
They spent years
under wraps and out of sight in a criminal's safe - but two Van Gogh
paintings are now back on show in the Dutch museum they were stolen from
in 2002.
The canvases, Sea View at Scheveningen and Congregation
Leaving the Reformed Church at Nuenen, date from Van Gogh's early period
and are described as priceless.
However, Dutch culture minister Jet Bussemaker said their real value would be in the eyes of those who can now see them again.
Thieves
seized the canvases from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam - which
contains the world's largest collection of Van Gogh works with more than
200 paintings and 500 drawings - after breaking in through the roof.
One
of the men convicted over the theft, Octave Durham, has revealed that
he was actually after the artist's better known works, but they were
harder to steal. He told a documentary to be aired later that he found it "trivially easy" to break in to the museum.
"The heist took about three minutes and 40 seconds," Durham says in the film, the New York Times
reported. "When I was done, the police were there, and I was passing by
with my getaway car. Took my ski mask off, window down, and I was
looking at them."
He said he and his accomplice had wanted to steal Sunflowers but the artwork was too well guarded, Trouw
newspaper reported. They then turned their attention to The Potato
Eaters, considered the painter's first masterpiece, but decided it was
too big to fit through the hole they had entered through.
Durham
told the filmmakers he had selected the seascape because the thick paint
convinced him it would be valuable. He was arrested a year later in the
Spanish resort of Marbella and convicted in 2005, but had until now
maintained he was innocent.
The theft was a case of "art-napping" by an opportunist burglar, art investigator Arthur Brand told the BBC.
"No art collector will pay for stolen art they can't
display," he said. But stolen art could be used as leverage by
criminals who offer its return in exchange for reduced sentences for
their crimes.
Dutch criminal Cor van Hout - who became notorious
for kidnapping the beer tycoon Freddy Heineken for an estimated $10m
(£8m) ransom in 1983 - wanted to buy them but he was gunned down in a
gangland hit before the deal could be done.
Another potential
buyer met the same fate and the paintings were eventually sold to
Raffaele Imperiale, a low-ranking mafioso who was at the time running an
Amsterdam coffee shop.
Imperiale paid about €350,000 ($380,000;
£305,000) for the paintings and his lawyers told the New York Times he
had bought them because he was "fond of art" and they were a "bargain".
Imperiale
was among several suspected dealers arrested by Italian police last
January. Another suspected dealer arrested at the same time reportedly
told investigators the paintings were at Imperiale's house.
The
BBC's James Reynolds in Rome says mafia members are not known for their
understated good taste and raids have often revealed a preference for
ostentatious, kitsch decoration, so Imperiale was unlikely to have
bought the paintings for display purposes.
They were found wrapped in cloth in a safe in a
house in the picturesque seaside town of Castellammare di Stabia, near
Pompeii, last September.
Van Gogh Museum Director Axel Ruger said it was wonderful to have the works back on display.
"I think it's one of the most joyous days in my career really," he said.
The museum has not made any comment on the upcoming documentary, Trouw said.
Why are the paintings significant?
Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890) is widely considered the greatest Dutch artist after Rembrandt.
Seascape at Scheveningen was one of only two seascapes he painted while he lived in the Netherlands.
It shows a foaming, stormy sea and thundery sky, and was painted in 1882 while he was staying in The Hague.
Congregation
Leaving the Reformed Church at Nuenen (1884) was painted for Van Gogh's
mother, but also partly for his father, who had become a pastor at the
church in 1882. When his father died in 1884, Van Gogh added
churchgoers, including a few women wearing shawls used for mourning.
Van Gogh committed suicide in France in 1890.
The 2002 Van Gogh museum raid was one of a series of thefts that shocked the art world.
In 2004, two Edvard Munch masterpieces, The Scream
and Madonna, were seized by armed men who raided the Munch museum in
Oslo. Several men were jailed and the paintings later recovered after
painstaking detective work in 2006.
Another version of The Scream
was stolen from the National Art Museum in Oslo in 1994 and that too was
later recovered in a sting operation by UK detectives.
In 2012, seven artworks were stolen from Rotterdam's Kunsthal museum, including paintings by Picasso, Monet and Matisse. Two thieves were later jailed, telling a Bucharest court that security at the museum had been lax. Some of the paintings were destroyed in an oven.
Earlier this year, four paintings out of a haul of 24 stolen from a Dutch gallery in 2005 were recovered in Ukraine.
As Stolen Van Goghs Return to View, a Thief Tells All
“View of the Sea at Scheveningen,” a van Gogh seascape stolen in 2002.Credit
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (State of the Netherlands, bequest of A.E. Ribbius Peletier)
AMSTERDAM — “Some people are born teachers. Some people are born footballers. I’m a born burglar.” So says Octave Durham, who stole two priceless Vincent van Gogh paintings on the evening of Dec. 7, 2002.
More
than 14 years after he and an accomplice clambered onto the roof of the
Van Gogh Museum here, broke a window with a sledgehammer and lifted the
canvases off the wall, Mr. Durham has finally come clean about his
involvement in one of the most infamous postwar art heists.
The
confession has no legal impact for Mr. Durham, who was convicted in
2004 and served just over 25 months in prison, but it sheds light on the
paintings’ tortuous journey and ultimate rescue, and on the
intersection of art theft and organized crime.
“The
heist took about 3 minutes and 40 seconds,” Mr. Durham says in the
documentary. “When I was done, the police were there, and I was passing
by with my getaway car. Took my ski mask off, window down, and I was
looking at them.”
He adds: “I could hear them on my police scanner. They didn’t know it was me.”
Mr.
Durham, in details that he shares for the first time, after years of
claiming innocence, brags of doing “bank jobs, safety deposit and more
spectacular jobs than this.” He says he targeted the museum not because
of any interest in art but simply because he could. “That’s the eye of a
burglar,” he boasts.
The works are of inestimable value because they have never been to market: “View of the Sea at Scheveningen” (1882) is one of only two seascapes van Gogh painted during his years in the Netherlands, and “Congregation Leaving the Reformed Church in Nuenen” (1882-84), showing the church where the artist’s father was a pastor, was a gift to the artist’s mother.
(Prices for van Gogh landscape paintings at auction range from about $10 million to about $70 million.)
But
Mr. Durham did not know the historical background of the paintings. He
said the paintings were the smallest ones in the gallery he targeted,
and closest to the hole through which he entered. He stuffed them into a
bag, and escaped by sliding down a rope he and his accomplice had put
in place. When he hit the ground, he came down so hard that he smashed
the seascape, chipping the paint. He left behind a black baseball cap. A
security guard called the police, but she was not permitted to use
force to try to stop the burglars.
“It
was really a terrible day,” Nienke Bakker, a curator at the Van Gogh
Museum, recalled in an interview with The New York Times. “A burglary or
robbery is always traumatizing, but when it’s a museum and it’s art
that belongs to the whole community, and the whole world, really, and it
was stolen in such a brutal way, that was really a shock.”
When
he returned home, Mr. Durham said, he removed the frames and plexiglass
covers from the paintings. He tossed paint chips from the seascape into
a toilet. Later, he dumped the frames in a canal.
Mr.
Durham could not sell the canvases on the open market, but he put out
the word in the underworld. At one point, he said, he met with Cor van
Hout, who was convicted in the 1983kidnapping
of the beer magnate Alfred H. Heineken. Mr. van Hout agreed to buy the
paintings, but was killed on the day of the planned sale.
Photo
Axel Ruger, right, in Naples,
Italy, with the 1880s van Gogh painting “Congregation Leaving the
Reformed Church in Nuenen,” also stolen in 2002.Credit
Ciro Fusco/European Pressphoto Agency
Later,
Mr. Durham and his accomplice, Henk Bieslijn, contacted an Italian
mobster, Raffaele Imperiale, who at the time sold marijuana out of a “coffee shop”
in Amsterdam. He agreed to buy the two paintings in March 2003 for
around 350,000 euros (roughly $380,000), divided equally between the
thieves.
Mr.
Imperiale’s defense lawyers, Maurizio Frizzi and Giovanni Ricci in
Genoa, Italy, confirmed that Mr. Imperiale bought the paintings even
though he knew they were stolen, because “he is fond of art” and they
were “a good bargain.”
He sent them to Italy within two weeks, and never displayed them.
The
thieves spent the money over about six weeks — “Motorcycles, a Mercedes
E320, clothes, jewelry for my girlfriend, a trip to New York,” Mr.
Durham recalls.
Those
purchases helped investigators, who were already wiretapping him, catch
Mr. Durham. They went to his apartment, but he escaped by climbing up
the side of the building — a skill that earned him the nickname “the
Monkey.” They searched his house, but the paintings were long gone.
Mr.
Durham fled to Spain, where the police arrested him in Marbella, a
southern resort town, in December 2003. The next summer, Dutch forensic
investigators confirmed a DNA match from the baseball cap he left behind
during the museum robbery. Mr. Durham and Mr. Bieslijn were convicted
that year.
Mr.
Durham was released from prison in 2006, but still owed 350,000 euros
in fines; he has paid about 60,000 euros. He returned to prison after a
failed bank robbery. In 2013, he approached the museum and, although he
still insisted he was innocent, offered to help retrieve the works. The
museum rejected his offer because he suggested that they buy them back.
In 2015, he met the documentary filmmaker Vincent Verweij
through a mutual friend. Mr. Durham told Mr. Verweij that he wanted to
help find the paintings so that he could clear his debt to the museum
and abandon a life of crime. But he still maintained his innocence.
“I
told him frankly that I didn’t believe him,” Mr. Verweij recalled in an
interview. “One day he sent me a WhatsApp message and asked me to meet
him in a cafe, and he admitted that he’d told me a lie and that he did
the break-in.”
Mr.
Verweij began filming in earnest. Along the way he learned about a big
break in the case: Mr. Imperiale had sent a letter on Aug. 29, 2016, to
Vincenza Marra, a public prosecutor in Naples, informing them that he
had the paintings.
In
a phone interview, Ms. Marra said the letter merely confirmed a
“much-whispered-about” rumor that investigators had already begun
looking into.
“I
know that if we hadn’t handed the paintings over to the Dutch
authorities, they never would have found them,” she added dryly.
Willem
Nijkerk, a Dutch prosecutor, credited the Italian police with solving
the case, and noted that Mr. Durham played no role in the recovery of
the paintings.
Photo
Octave Durham, who stole the two van Gogh works, is the subject of a new Dutch television documentary.Credit
Vincent Verweij
Last
September, Italian investigators raided Mr. Imperiale’s mother’s home
near Naples, where the works were wrapped in cloth and tucked away in a
hidden wall space next to the kitchen. The recovery of the works made
global headlines. Italian investigators also seized about 20 million
euros in other assets, including farmland, villas and apartments linked
to Mr. Imperiale and an associate, prosecutors said at the time.
Ms.
Bakker, the Van Gogh Museum curator, recalls receiving a call in late
September asking her to travel to Naples the next day. She wasn’t given
details, but she had her suspicions. She grabbed her files on the
paintings.
“When
I was on the plane, I remember thinking: I hope they’ve been preserved
well and people haven’t taken them off the stretchers,” she recalls.
At
the Naples police station, members of the Guardia di Finanza, the
Italian police agency for financial crimes, took her to a room where the
paintings had been placed on blue-and-white cloth on a table.
“I
immediately thought and knew that these were the paintings from our
museum,” she said. “But I took another few minutes to convince myself.
They were all waiting and standing for me to say the words. I did say
them, and then there were cheers.”
Ms. Bakker was surprised that the works seemed in relatively good condition.
“When
I saw the damage in the lower left corner of one of the paintings, it
was substantial, but I looked at the rest and realized it was the only
big damage, and I was very relieved to see that,” she said of the
seascape. “It was really like being in some weird movie, with all these
police officers around me and this strange Mafia story they were telling
me.”
After
they were recovered, with much fanfare in Italy, the works were first
exhibited for three weeks in February at the National Museum of
Capodimonte in Naples, and will be restored to the walls of the Van Gogh
Museum on Monday.
Mr.
Imperiale left the Netherlands for Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates,
in 2013 or 2014. In writing to the prosecutor, he may have hoped for
leniency, but in January he was sentenced to 20 years in prison. The
Italian authorities are seeking his extradition. His lawyers said that
he was not sure if he would return to Italy.
“He
is homesick for his parents, but in Dubai he’s a free man,” Mr.
Imperiale’s lawyers said through an interpreter in a telephone
interview.
The
Van Gogh Museum remains furious at Mr. Durham and did not cooperate
with the documentary, which was funded by the Dutch national broadcaster
KRO-NCRV. (Mr. Durham, who lives in Amsterdam and works mostly as a
driver and an assistant for his daughter, a successful musician, was not
paid for his participation, the filmmaker said.)
“The
last 14 years have been a roller coaster of hope, disappointment and
agony,” the museum’s director, Axel Rüger, said in an interview. “All
the time this man is sitting on this information. He knew exactly what
he had done and he never breathed a word. To us it feels as if he is
seeking the limelight.”
He added: “The museum is the victim in this case, and I would expect very different behavior from someone who shows remorse.”
Mr. Verweij acknowledged the tricky ethics of giving Mr. Durham a platform in the documentary.
“The
interesting thing is that you never see documentaries or articles about
art theft from the perspective of the thief,” Mr. Verweij said. “It’s
always the experts, the museum people, the prosecutors, but never the
ones who actually do it, and I think that’s a unique perspective. It’s
not meant to be a glorification of this guy.”
16 Years Later, Stash of Stolen Paintings Found Near Crime Scene
This painting by Carl Vilhelm Holsøe showed up in the U.S., and led to the thief in Denmark.
The Art Loss Register announced yesterday, March
14, that a stash of stolen paintings was located in Denmark 16 years
after their theft. The paintings were found with the help of local
police only 50 miles from the scene of the crime.
Last fall, a painting that had gone missing from a
private residence in Denmark re-surfaced at an auction in the United
States. The work, by the Danish painter Carl Vilhelm Holsøe—which was
consigned by a Danish auction house—came up on the Art Loss Register
(ALR) in a routine search of the auction catalogue.
Working together with the Danish police,
the ALR were granted a warrant to search the original
consignor’s residence, who first sold the painting to the Danish auction
house, located just an hour away from the place of theft.
There, police found seven additional paintings that had been reported stolen from the same private residence over 16 years ago.
With the Danish police unable to find
either the paintings or the thief when the theft of eight paintings was
initially reported in December 2000, an insurance company paid out the
loss and the works were registered in the ALR’s database for lost and
stolen art.
When the Holsøe painting came up
during a routine search as part of the auction house’s due diligence,
the ALR notified the auction house, the insurer, and the Danish Police.
After seizing the remaining seven artworks, the Danish policereturned
them to the insurer as the rightful owner, while the portrait by Holsøe
remained in the U.S. auction for the benefit of the insurer.
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