AP Photo/Peter Dejong
VAN GONE
Art detectives go deep inside the criminal underworld on hunt for stolen Van Gogh
When
a thief stole a multimillion-dollar painting by Vincent van Gogh from a
small museum in the Netherlands last month, Octave Durham almost
immediately found himself a person of interest.
“It’s
not a coincidence, because most of the time I did it,” Durham, who
spent 25 months in prison for his own Van Gogh heist, told Quartz. “But
now I’m retired.”
The
nighttime smash-and-grab robbery at the Singer Laren Museum, committed
in late March after it was closed due to the coronavirus pandemic, bore
many of the hallmarks of Durham’s infamous 2002 burglary at the nearby
Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, during which he stole two priceless paintings by the renowned artist. This time, the bandit broke through a pane of glass with a sledgehammer and was in and out in minutes.
“They
knew what they were doing, going straight for the famous master,” Jan
Rudolph de Lorm, the Singer Laren’s director, told reporters.
The thief escaped the museum with Van Gogh’s Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring, a painting valued at about $6 million. Dutch authorities this week released security video taken the night of the burglary, which shows the thief arriving by motorbike.
Roughly $6 billion worth of art is stolen each year, according to an FBI estimate, making it the third-most lucrative
criminal enterprise in the world after narcotics and the arms trade.
Some 30 Van Gogh paintings alone have been stolen in the Netherlands
since 1988. Police and insurance agents have recovered all but the most recent. Parsonage Garden,
which was on loan from another Dutch museum about two hours away, was
stolen on what would have been the painter’s 167th birthday.
“Octave was the first thing I checked,” Arthur Brand, a freelance art crime detective known as the “Indiana Jones of the art world,”
told Quartz. He is now helping Dutch police with the investigation.
Brand had tracked Durham for years and after Durham left prison in 2006,
the two struck up an unlikely friendship. “I thought, ‘Oh my god,
Octave—where the fuck are you?’ I gave him a call and couldn’t reach him
and thought, ‘Oh fuck.’”
Durham swears he had
nothing to do with it, and Brand says he has a strong alibi: Durham was
in the hospital when the painting was taken. Durham says he’s been out
of the game for about seven years. The risk-reward ratio for stolen art
is just not worth it anymore, he told Quartz. He is presently pursuing
movie deals and planning a speaking tour with Brand across Europe. There
will be no US leg because Durham, 47, is barred from entering the
country.
Courtesy Octave Durham
In search of the Parsonage Garden,
Dutch authorities are now combing the dark corners of a criminal
underground where stolen art can be used to feed egos and leverage
power. Where the thief went next, and the painting’s intended
destination, remains unknown. But Durham, Brand, and others who are
intimately familiar with the world of art theft have some ideas.
What they know
Dutch
police are still on duty during the coronavirus lockdown, but museum
staff are not and there were few potential witnesses on the streets.
Even before the pandemic, security guards at the Singer Laren never
worked overnight. A central alarm system instead flags a nearby police
station, which gives a thief some time to get in, get out, and get away.
Robert Wittman, a retired FBI agent who started the bureau’s Art Crime Team
in 2004, said criminals are always on the lookout for such weaknesses.
In the early morning hours of March 30—about two weeks after museums in
the Netherlands closed to slow the spread of coronavirus—circumstances
were pretty much ideal for a burglary.
“It gives an
opportunity for certain individuals…to go after certain high-value
assets, and that Van Gogh is certainly a high-value asset,” Wittman told
Quartz.
REUTERS/Piroschka Van De Wouw
For
law enforcement, the investigation always begins with the basics,
Wittman said. Once any fingerprints are lifted, and security camera
footage reviewed, museum staff and other insiders are brought in for
interviews. About 90% of art thefts in the US are inside jobs, he noted.
“You’re
[usually] going to find that somewhere along the line, somebody tipped
somebody off or was involved in some way,” Wittman said.
Museums
generally tend to “have terrible security” because it’s expensive and
“people like to donate to sexy things like buying new paintings, not
upgrading the security camera system,” Erin Thompson, a professor of art
crime at New York City’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told
Quartz. Being located in historic buildings can make it difficult for
many museums to meet modern security standards.
A
Van Gogh watercolor stolen in 2003 from the Whitworth Art Gallery in
Manchester, England—along with works by Picasso and Gauguin—turned up three days later with a note saying the heist was simply an attempt to expose the space’s “woeful security.”
“Turbo” Paul Hendry, a British stolen-art-handler-turned-consultant who today advises buyers, insurers, and investigators,
told Quartz the thief “must have done their homework to know the Van
Gogh was there,” as it was on loan and not a permanent fixture at the
Singer Laren. “Loan paintings are protected, but not in a permanent
manner, so gaps appear,” he said.
So far, Thompson said, there are few obvious clues as to why the thief targeted Parsonage Garden,
a little-known work from Van Gogh’s early period. If you’re going to
risk of stealing something that will grab international headlines and be
hard to sell, “at least do it for Starry Night and have a really great one instead of this murky, bottom-of-the-garden, depressing one,” she said.
Courtesy "Turbo" Paul Hendry
Where to look
Stealing
priceless art is the easy part, Durham says. In his words, it’s “like
taking candy from a kid.” The hard part is selling the piece for even a
tiny fraction of its value when the whole world knows it’s stolen, he
said.
“The big
problem in all these situations is not the stealing, it’s the selling,”
Wittman agreed. “What do you do with it once you have it? […] What are
you going to do with a Van Gogh that’s famous, that’s stolen from a
museum in the Netherlands? Is that worth 10 kilos of heroin? You can
sell [drugs] on the street and make some money. A Van Gogh? What good is
that?”
For some, it’s not about money. It’s about leverage.
After the murder of his original buyer
on the day of the planned sale, Durham managed to offload his pair of
stolen Van Goghs to Neapolitan mobster Raffaele Imperiale, who paid less
than $400,000 for the two paintings—a tiny fraction of their estimated
market value.
AP Photo/Peter Dejong
Imperiale, who claimed he bought them because he was fond of art, stashed them away
in the country house where his mother lived. When Italian police
finally caught up with him for drug trafficking, he offered the
paintings’ location as a trade for a lighter punishment. Cops found the paintings
wrapped in cloth, stuffed in a hidden wall space near the kitchen.
Prosecutors agreed to a deal, reducing Imperiale’s sentence from 18
years to nine. He is reportedly now in Dubai fighting extradition. The
Dutch drug lord Kees Houtman also tried in 2002 to trade three Van Goghs stolen a decade earlier for less time behind bars.
It’s
not out of the realm of possibility, Brand said, that the latest Van
Gogh theft was ordered by someone with a similar plan. Some criminals
view paintings simply as “get-out-of-jail-free” cards, and so commission
thieves to steal them. “If these guys who stole the Van Gogh have a
buyer already, it’s most likely a drug lord or mobster—maybe someday
he’ll need it to make a deal,” he said. “But it could also be they [did]
it like Octave did: they just steal it and then they try to find
someone willing to buy it.”
AP Photo/Peter Dejong
Drug
traffickers have also used stolen artwork as collateral. When ordering a
shipment of cocaine from Colombia, the Dutch mafia might send their
narco counterparts a masterpiece as a guarantee that they’re good for
the money, Durham said. “They know you want that painting back because
if you are in legal problems, this painting can help you. There is no
money that can help you but this painting will, so just make sure you
pay your bills and if you’ve paid them all, you get the painting back.”
This
has actually spawned a new market for fakes, according to Brand, who
says shady art handlers have begun offering counterfeits of stolen
masterworks to underworld buyers looking to ease future legal troubles.
“It’s a crazy business,” Brand said.
Courtesy Robert Wittman
Wittman
scoffs at the idea that a super-criminal might be trying to get their
hands on a stolen masterpiece to add to their own collection. He argues
that the last thing rich gangsters want is something on their wall that
can add years onto a criminal sentence if found in a police raid.
Some,
however, disagree. For crime bosses, ego can overcome cold logic,
Hendry said. “I think you will find [the] human nature of wanting to own
beautiful trophy things is universal,” Hendry said. “Authorities always
like to play down art crime as a haphazard crime of opportunity, with
no structure, when the opposite is true in many cases.”
French businessman Jean Michel Corvez is now doing time for his role in ordering
a major 2010 Paris heist. And Durham says he knows of wealthy criminals
who fill hidden rooms with pilfered treasures. “Now and then, they
smoke a big cigar and [look at] all these paintings and stuff they have,
and say, ‘You fuckers, you’ve been looking for this all over the world—I’ve got it,’” he said.
While
the typical buyer “may not be a reclusive billionaire on an island like
Dr. No,” Hendry said stolen art has turned up in the collections of
apparently unwitting buyers like film director Steven Spielberg, singer Boy George, Swiss industrialist Baron Heini Thyssen, and late designer Gianni Versace. Earlier this year, authorities fined
Spanish billionaire Jaime Botín, the largest shareholder in Santander
bank, $58 million for trying to smuggle an “unexportable” Picasso out of
the country.
REUTERS/Piroschka Van De Wouw
A
stolen artwork usually passes through many hands, Hendry said. It can
be smuggled in various ways, whether hidden inside a shipping container,
sent through the mail, or helped by corrupt customs officials. Wittman
once recovered a stolen Renoir—called “Young Parisienne”—that had been
sewn into a coat and smuggled into the US through Los Angeles
International Airport.
Stolen art is typically
“laid down” for a couple of weeks, then taken across the nearest border,
Hendry said. But he believes the Van Gogh stolen from the Singer Laren
is still in the area due to the coronavirus lockdown. With checkpoints
in place and regional security tightened, Hendry thinks moving it now
would be “foolhardy, to say the least.”
But the
Singer Laren theft was unusual, Thompson said—thieves rarely target
museum galleries. Normally, stolen art is lifted less dramatically from
the homes of private collectors or museum storage, which may not be
inventoried for years.
“It’s tricky because people
have to know that something is missing,” Thompson said. “So if you’re a
museum and you haven’t gotten into that storeroom for a couple of
decades, you might not have any idea—which happens more often than you
might think.”
AP Photo/Peter Dejong
Recovering
art stolen in this way is often more difficult. A private owner might
not keep strong documentation, or even a photograph of the work to
publicize in a recovery attempt. “You have to be really careful in
recovering art to make sure you’re not getting sold a forgery,” Thompson
said. “And that’s why it’s important for museums to always have
photographs of the backs of paintings.”
If the
painting was taken on a whim, and not by a sophisticated criminal,
there’s a chance it will meet a more tragic end. “[You] get the sort of
clueless thief who knows that art is valuable and takes it and then
panics,” Thompson said. “Sadly, sometimes they destroy the paintings to
get rid of the evidence.”
In 2006, Mireille
Breitwieser took extreme measures in an apparent attempt to protect her
son, prolific French art thief Stephane Breitwieser, whose personal
stash was valued at $1.4 billion. She was sentenced to 18 months in prison in 2006 for throwing dozens of old masters, including works by Brueghel, Cranach, Watteau, and Boucher, into the Rhine-Rhone canal.
The insurance angle
In his 2011 memoir,
Wittman described posing as a corrupt art broker to make deals with
international drug kingpins on mega-yachts in Miami and well-connected
Corsican mobsters in Geneva. A likelier outcome for the Singer Laren’s
Van Gogh, Thompson argued, is that it will be recovered in a more
prosaic fashion—by its insurer.
“It’s always the
least exciting thing to say that the art world is about taxes or
insurance, but it’s true in this case,” she said.
Many
European museums have insurance policies offering about 15% of the
value of a stolen painting to anyone who returns it, with no questions
asked, she said. “You steal a Van Gogh. You know that if you ever need
to recover 10% or 15% of its value, you can give it to your girlfriend
or your mom or something, and they can be like, ‘I found this on the
street,’ to the insurance company,” Thompson said. “And then you get
that money.”
American museums tend to eschew the
policy because they think it encourages theft—and it’s not always a sure
thing in Europe since museums don’t tend to advertise having this
insurance clause. “You must be taking a risk. Either that or you have
cultivated some sort of insider information on who has what policy,”
Thompson said.
The insurance companies themselves
tend to pay out fairly fast once they’ve confirmed the policy was
properly followed and there was no “hanky panky,” said William
Fleischer, principal of Art Insurance Now, a New York-based broker.
“There’s a small amount of insurers that do art, so if you do something
in a negative way, people will find about that and say, ‘We don’t want
that carrier.’” Fleischer estimated the annual insurance premium for the
recently stolen Van Gogh would have been somewhere between $6,000 and
$8,000.
Insurance firms usually keep paintings that
are recovered. “There are a lot of companies that have amazing
collections,” Fleischer told Quartz.
In some cases, the original owner can do some arbitrage once their painting is found. A Picasso that Brand recovered
last year in the Netherlands was insured at the time of its theft in
1999 for $4.5 million, the purchase price paid 20 years prior by Sheikh
Abdul Mohsen Abdulmalik Al-Sheikh of Saudi Arabia. After it turned up
again, Hendry said Al-Sheikh used a clause written into his insurance
policy to buy the Picasso back from his insurer for the original $4.5
million, plus expenses. In the two decades that passed, the Picasso had
increased in value dramatically. “The sheik now has a $70 million
Picasso, a real happy ending for him,” Hendry said.
What comes next
Wittman is certain Parsonage Garden
will eventually resurface, most likely when someone tries to bring it
to market. Whether that will be during an undercover police operation,
with a cop posing as a buyer, or a sharp-eyed gallery owner who calls
authorities after being approached for a sale, no one knows.
Durham
believes the police already have a solid lead, declining to provide
further details for fear of interfering with the investigation. “These
guys made a big mistake,” he said. “When I heard it, I was laughing.”
For
Brand, the Van Gogh theft at the Singer Laren is almost something of a
“personal attack,” since it was swiped virtually in his own backyard.
“Sooner
or later—it can take one year or it can take 10 years—somebody’s going
to talk,” Brand said. “I have people in the criminal underworld all over
the world from mobsters in Italy to drug lords and other people and
sooner or later I might get a call.”
Incredibly,
this isn’t a movie plot: A Van Gogh was stolen in a late-night
smash-and-grab job. The most obvious suspect says he’s retired from the
art heist game. So whodunit? Justin Rohrlich and Max de Haldevang take
us on a wild ride through a world inhabited by thieves, drug
traffickers, counterfeiters, rich gangsters, art detectives, museum
security, and insurance companies. My question is, who will option this
article for the screen?
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