Art Theft – Page 8 – Illicit Cultural Property

More on the Roerich Thefts

The New York Police Department has released images of the works stolen from the Nicholas Roerich Museum back in June. As I posted yesterday, the works were taken from the museum, but were not immediately discovered. The small museum has limited hours and a small staff. Such a small museum is a good target for art thieves as it may not have sophisticated security systems, and limited visitors who may notice a theft.

Libby Nelson for the New York Times’ City Room blog notes:

The museum, at 318 West 107th Street, is open from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. every day except Sundays. The paintings were stolen during visiting hours on June 24 and June 28, the police said.

“A lot of people come here, and during the open hours, somebody stole one painting,” [Daniel Entin, the museum director, said]. “And then, maybe a day, later stole another.”

He said he believed that the same person, a woman, was responsible for both thefts.

. . .

The museum has had little in the way of conventional security since it opened in 1949. It relied on secure doors, windows and entryways to prevent break-ins, Mr. Entin said, and never had an art theft before.

“We had what was always considered a very secure place,” he said. “We were always more oriented toward prevention.”

Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

Two Thefts Discovered in New York

“If someone steals your car you can go get another one”. So says Daniel Entin The Executive Director of the Nicholas Roerich Museum in New York. The New York Post reports on the discovery of the theft of two works from the Nicholas Roerich Museum. A police officer noticed the initial theft in June:

A cop who happened to be visiting the museum was the first to notice a work was missing from the Nicholas Roerich Museum on West 107th Street near Riverside Drive.

It was 30 minutes before closing time on June 24 when he saw a blank spot on a wall where a picture was supposed to be.

“A police officer was just visiting, and he noticed there was a label and no painting,” said a museum employee.

Gone was a $20,000 piece called “The Himalayas,” a 10-by-14 inch pencil-on-paper drawing that Roerich, a Russian artist, sketched to mark his days in the 1930s when he was living in the foothills of the Asian mountains.

But then four days later an employee noticed “a work was missing from a wall in the same hallway, a 12-by-16 inch oil-on-canvas painting called “Talung Monastery,” valued at $70,000.” The difficulty the museum had in discovering the theft of the works probably speaks to how the thefts took place. The museum has only four staff, and receives about 25 visitors daily.

Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

Netherlands Returns Iraqi Objects

The BBC reports on the transfer of ownership of 69 objects from the Netherlands to Iraq which had been illegally removed from that country after the 2003 invasion.

The objects were taken from Dutch art dealers and will likely be displayed in the Dutch National Museum for Antiquities until they can be returned to Iraq.

Ronald Plasterk, the Dutch minister for education, culture and science, said the world should “cherish and honour” Iraq’s history as the cradle of civilisation.

“These objects lose a lot of their value if they are stolen from their site,” he said.

Mr Plasterk said the items were surrendered by Dutch art dealers once police informed them they had been stolen.

Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

Estimating Art Crime (UPDATE)

In her piece on the ARCA MA program for the New York Times, Elisabetta Povoledo may have done a number of cultural heritage scholars a disservice — myself included — when she criticized Noah Charney’s estimation that art crime is the third largest. The piece states:

“Citing Interpol, Mr. Charney said art crime was the third-highest-grossing illegal worldwide business, after drugs and weapons. Interpol itself says on its Web site (interpol.int) that it knows of no figures to make such a claim.”

However merely checking with Interpol did not give a full and accurate picture of the size of art crime, though Interpol is often used as the source. On the Interpol website, it states: “We do not possess any figures which would enable us to claim that trafficking in cultural property is the third or fourth most common form of trafficking, although this is frequently mentioned at international conferences and in the media.”

It is certainly true that Interpol no longer can estimate with any confidence even if it once did, that art crime is the third largest criminal enterprise. However the estimation has appeared in a number of sources, including this 2005 USA Today piece. It has been ranked as the 3rd largest, the fourth largest, and estimated between a few hundred million pounds up to billions of dollars annually by experts before the House of Commons Illicit Trade Advisory Panel.

I attempted to clear up some of this confusion with an Op-ed piece, though I was informed the paper does not publish Op-ed pieces which respond to pieces from the paper. I also submitted a letter to the editor, but received no response. I have decided instead to publish my response here. As I argued in the letter below and the longer op-ed, art crime is difficult to estimate but there is broad agreement that Charney and others are correct, that art crime is the third largest illegal trade. But we need more concrete statistics and education to highlight the problem. Povoledo’s comment about Interpol raises this issue, and I think we need better statistics and we won’t get them without increased awareness.

Here is the Letter to the Editor:

RE “A Master’s in Art Crime (No Cloak and Dagger)” July 21, 2009:

Gauging the loss we all suffer when antiquities are looted or art is stolen will always be difficult. In her piece on the Association for Research into Crimes against Art (ARCA), Elisabetta Povoledo challenged the assertion made by Noah Charney that art crime is the third largest illegal trade after drugs and weapons. In doing so she highlighted one of the biggest obstacles law enforcement officers and researchers must navigate when they look at art crime. Though Interpol certainly has made no claim to that figure, the estimate has appeared in countless media outlets and works of scholarly research.

Newcomers to the art trade are often surprised to discover that basic information such as who buys art, how much they pay for it, and who has owned an object in the past is intentionally obscured from view by the market. Also, valuation of art itself is difficult. If we reflect on the generation that has been unable to see Vermeer’s The Concert, which was stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990, how large is that loss? If we were to collect all of the stolen works of art into one museum, that museum of art theft would easily eclipse the Met or the Louvre or any of the World’s great museums.

If we value our collective cultural heritage, art crime is certainly at least the third-largest illegal trade; and we need solid empirical data to lend support to the anecdotal evidence. One of the difficulties is law enforcement agencies all over the world do not consistently track art crime. Italy reports the most art crimes because their Carabinieri pays careful attention. As a result of this problematic and sporadic reporting and filing, we don’t have good statistics, and need to rely on the experiential and anecdotal information of people in the field, like police, and the partial statistics available through institutions like Interpol. Though it is difficult to place a firm estimate, the broader public who enjoys and supports the arts should press for more education and awareness of the devastating consequences art crimes inflict upon our collective cultural heritage.

Derek Fincham, New Orleans Louisiana, July 24, 2009
Fellow at Loyola University New Orleans College of Law, illicit-cultural-property.blogspot.com

UPDATE:

Mark Durney at Art Theft Central responds to this post by noting:

Another obstacle facing those who study art crime is the public’s fascination for the myth of the Dr. No, or the Thomas Crown, scenario. Certainly, clearing this hurdle also requires educating the public. In my experiences as a gallery officer at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum I have heard from countless museum patrons who are convinced the Dutch Room’s missing paintings are “hanging on some millionaire’s wall.” Accordingly, raising awareness regarding how the illicit art trade operates is equally as important.

That is a great point I think; initially those kinds of stories help attract attention. However they aren’t at all an accurate picture of art thieves and in the long run may help to explain why the penalties for art crime (broadly defined) are so meager, and why continued efforts, advocacy and education are so badly needed.

Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

Gerstenblith on Schultz and Barakat

Patty Gerstenblith has posted a recent article, Schultz and Barakat: Universal Recognition of National Ownership of Antiquities, which appeared in the recent issue of Art, Antiquity and Law, Vol. 14, No. 1, Apr. 2009. She discusses the two recent cases in the United States and United Kingdom which lay out the requirements for how courts in these two nations view national ownership declarations of art and antiquities by other nations of origin. Here is the abstract:

Two decisions, one in the United Kingdom and one in the United States, decided just about five years apart, are significant for universalising the principle that vesting laws – laws that vest ownership of antiquities in a nation – create ownership rights that are recognized even when such antiquities are removed from their country of discovery and are traded in foreign nations. This basic principle has proven to be very controversial in the United States and has been subjected to bitter criticism; yet virtually the same legal principle, when decided in a British court, received little comment or criticism. Compounding the interest of these two decisions is that, although both decisions came to virtually the identical conclusion, they did so utilizing different methods of analysis.

Although laws regulating cultural heritage have a long history, nations have enacted national ownership laws since the nineteenth century for the dual purposes of preventing unfettered export of antiquities and of protecting archaeological sites in which antiquities are buried. When ownership of an antiquity is vested in a nation, one who removes the antiquity without permission is a thief and the antiquities are stolen property. This enables both punishment of the looter and recovery of possession of the antiquities from subsequent purchasers. By making looted antiquities unmarketable, these laws reduce their economic value. National ownership laws thereby deter the initial theft and the looting of archaeological sites that causes destruction to the historical record and inhibits our ability to reconstruct and understand the human past. While reinforcing these goals, the Schultz and Barakat decisions also bring uniformity to the national treatment of this central legal principle.

Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

More on the Picasso Sketchbook Theft

The director of the Picasso Museum in Paris, Anne Baldassari has asked thieves to return the sketchbook stolen last week. Though initial reports indicated the display case was unlocked, it seems special tools were used to remove the book from the locked case. She tells Farah Nayeri of Bloomberg, “It’s an interesting notebook from a scholarly standpoint, as documentation . . . . On the market, it’s worth nothing, especially since it was stolen.” She noted that the book may be broken up, “The only people interested in this sketchbook are major museums: We recently bought a sketchbook ourselves, to prevent it from being destroyed and dismembered . . . . It allows us to preserve all evidence of the work of Picasso.”

Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

These things are three-times cursed

That’s what Joseph Sisto said to his father with respect to the 3,500 objects in the elder Sisto’s Illinois home according to Rosalind Bentley in a piece in the Atlanta Journal Constitution on Sunday.

These things are three-times cursed, Sisto, of Duluth, would tell his father, John. Cursed once because they were stolen, cursed twice because they were smuggled, and cursed thrice because concealing the cache in their home had robbed the family of its peace of mind.

And there are more details on how the objects came from Italy to the United States. I think one curious thing to pick up on here, are all the crates of antiquities and other objects which were shipped from Italy. Customs agents in both the United States and Italy were unable to detect these objects which were certainly illegally exported, and some were perhaps stolen. I’m left wondering how many crates of objects are still being shipped which are undetected. And I don’t think its a case of authorities not taking this problem seriously, or a lack of legal restrictions; rather I think there are limits to what we can reasonably expect of law enforcement and customs agents.

Collectibles and old texts fascinated the elder Sisto. By the time Joseph was an adolescent, his father was taking him on regular trips to Italy to visit family. The trips were often more drudgery for Joseph than pleasure. Italian summers were interminably hot, and Joseph and his dad would spend hours looking for rare books and manuscripts in musty old castles and homes in the country. Often, his father would either leave with purchased packages or he’d wind up buying the entire contents of the place.

Months after the Italian visits, crates would arrive at the brick bungalow in Berwyn. Scores of crates, almost never just one or two. That’s when the real work began. Joseph, his younger brother and his father would spend every minute of their spare time unloading dirty, messy crates. Instead of playing softball outside with friends or just hanging out, Joseph and his brother had to stay inside and catalogue the contents. But instead of selling the items on the black market (which the FBI said had been part of an original plan), John Sisto kept almost everything.

He converted the second floor of the bungalow into a veritable archive. He had dozens of bookshelves installed. He filled the attic. Then he learned how to read and translate Latin to better appreciate what was in his trove. He quietly and cautiously sought out curators to learn how to properly preserve ancient documents, always taking his absolute worst and most insignificant piece for the consultation so as not to arouse suspicion, Sisto said.

Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

Picasso Sketchbook Stolen in Paris

http://quotationsbook.com/assets/shared/img/5703/730px-HotelSale_CorpsLogis.JPG

More evidence that Picasso is a favorite among art thieves. A sketchbook containing 33 drawing by Pablo Picasso was stolen from the Picasso Museum in Paris. The theft was discovered this afternoon. It is believed that the book was held in an unlocked (!) display case on the first floor of the museum. There are not many details at this point, but I wonder if perhaps a visitor walked off with it? Or it may have been an after-hours break-in.

Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

1,600 Objects Bound for Italy

There were some terrific images released yesterday at the FBI press conference announcing the return of 1,600 objects found in John Sisto’s home when he died in 2007. He had amassed thousands of documents and objects, all stored in his Berwyn, Illinois home.

Of the 3,500 objects found in Sisto’s home when he died in 2007, the FBI has determined that 1,600 of them were stolen or illegally exported from Italy and must be returned. Despite the estimated value of the objects, perhaps as much as $10 million, there will be no prosecution in Illinois, though perhaps some Italian prosecutions may take place. The staggering fact is the owners of the nearly 2,000 other objects is unknown, and will be returned to the family.

Among the items to be returned are religious relics, manuscripts written by Mussolini, figurines from the 4th Century B.C., letters written by popes, and other objects.

In a Chicago Tribune piece by Margaret Ramirez and Robert Mitchum, they note these objects had become a point of contention with Sisto’s son:

In the mid-2000s, Joseph Sisto learned that many of the items were likely illegal and confronted his father, telling them that the artifacts should be returned to Italy.

But his father refused, provoking a family dispute that separated him from his father during the final years of his life, he said.

When his father died, Joseph Sisto asked Berwyn police to enter the home with him, knowing that the thousands of artifacts would need to be investigated by authorities.

Berwyn Police Chief William Kushner recalled the incredible sight when he first entered the home in 2007. Kushner said the house was filled with hundreds of boxes, many piled 5 feet high and all labeled in Italian. Upstairs and in the attic, precious paintings covered the walls, protected by large sheets of cardboard refrigerator boxes. Immediately, Kushner knew he had to call the FBI art crimes unit. He ordered his officers not to touch anything.

The FBI believes many of the objects were taken from the Bari region of Italy, where John Sisto was born. Paul Barford wonders if perhaps this may become an increasing trend if “many children of today’s no-questions-asked accumulators of archaeological artefacts (not to mention dealers) will be faced with similar dilemmas.” One can’t help but see parallels with the sale of William Kingsland’s art collection, who died in 2006, and it was revealed that many of the works found in his home had been stolen.

One wonders as well how he came to acquire these objects; as surely Sisto didn’t steal all of these objects himself. Why was it possible for him to acquire them. The FBI speculates that the objects may have been shipped to the U.S. between 1960 and 1982 by Sisto’s father, who was still living in Italy. Perhaps the objects were taken from private collections or elsewhere.

Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

3,000 Object Slated for Return to Italy

Today the FBI and the Berwyn Police Department will hold a news conference announcing the return of 3,000 religious objects, books, and antiquities that were illegally removed from Italy and found in a home in Berwyn. This comes two years after John Sisto’s, the homeowner, died. On Friday the FBI said “many of the items … were determined to have been removed illegally from Italy and will be repatriated to Italian authorities later next week.”

“The house was filled with old books . . . ,” said Berwyn Police Chief William Kushner. “I am told that there are also papal documents dating back to the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries.”

Authorities have been researching the authenticity of the items and trying to determining how Sisto came to have them.

“We can’t question a dead man,” said Kushner. “We are just going to return the items to the Italian authorities.”
Sisto was born in Bari, Italy and immigrated to the United States at 29. After the items were discovered in his home in March 2007, the tidy brick bungalow was under constant protection by police for 15 days.

FBI agents contacted Italian authorities, and agents specializing in stolen art were seen entering the home. Rumors that the Swiss Guards of Vatican City were coming to the working-class suburb to collect their items caused media and neighbors to swarm the block for days, but the Swiss Guards never came.

When he lived in Chicago in 1958, Sisto had complained that someone stole 72 rare books worth $40,000 from the basement of his home. Many of them were later recovered.

He told police the books were given to him by his father, Giuseppe Sisto, a history and geography professor at the University of Bari.

Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com