in the media – Illicit Cultural Property

Art Cops: Overworked and Under-resourced

Over the weekend in the Baltimore Sun Tricia Bishop reports on the current state of heritage policing in the United States:

America is the largest consumer of artwork in the world, with a 40 percent share of the $200 billion global industry. It’s also the scene of nearly half of the illegal art trade estimated to be worth another $7 billion worldwide.

Yet other countries pay far more attention to art fraud. Italy has several hundred detectives on its Carabinieri Art Squad, and Greece, France, Germany and Belgium all have national units working the detail.

In contrast, the FBI’s Art Crime Team, co-founded by a Baltimore native whose father ran an antiques shop on Howard Street, is made up of one archaeologist and 13 agents, who work the beat on the side. And the Los Angeles Police Department’s Art Theft Detail consists of just one investigator, a man who is delaying retirement because he’s afraid the division will die if he leaves without a trained successor.

The piece looks at three of the main groups tasked with art crimes in the United States: The Art Crime Team, the Archival Recovery Team, and Don Hrycyk at the LAPD. As I said in the piece, these folks have an essential job, and given the fact these crimes are still relegated to the status of non-violent property crimes in many cases, they don’t rise to the level of illegal narcotics or terrorism or other priorities law enforcement must tackle. But there is a fundamental difference between property and historical objects and art, and more attention should be paid to them. America as a country might be thinking too much about owning and buying these objects, and not enough about acting as stewards.

Tricia Bishop, Art investigators: Saving the country’s cultural heritage, one recovered work at a time, Baltimore Sun, October 23, 2011, http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/baltimore-city/bs-md-history-thieves-20111007,0,443863,full.story (last visited Oct 26, 2011).

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

Two Forfeited Works Returned to Brazil

“Modern Painting with Yellow Interweave”, Roy Lichtenstein

Art crime does not just include the theft of works of art or the looting of antiquities. The value and portability of works of art make them a very convenient way to launder money as well.
I am quoted in a piece for NPR affiliate WNYC discussing the return of two objects to Brazil.

This work by Roy Lichtenstein and another work by Joaquin Torres-Garcia were returned to the government of Brazil today during a ceremony in New York (press release). The works were once owned by the disgraced Brazilian banker Edemar Cid Ferreira who was convicted and sentenced to 21 years in prison in 2006 for financial fraud.

A judge in Brazil ordered Ferreira to surrender his unlawfully-gained assets. In an attempt to conceal some of these assets, these works were shipped to the Netherlands and then to New York where they were sold to unsuspecting buyers. The paperwork accompanying these works valued them at only $200, while they may be worth as much as $12 million.

This is an example of the use of civil forfeiture in policing the art and antiquities trade. The “Portrait of Wally” settlement reached earlier this summer was also reached via forfeiture. Forfeiture allows prosecutors to bring a suit against an object which was part of a crime, and all claimants to the object come forward to challenge the forfeiture. It is a powerful tool for prosecutors, as the burden of proof is far lower than the typical “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard typically involved in prosecutions. Historically, federal prosecutors have intervened on behalf of origin nations or claimants when they have potential claims. Yet it has also been a useful tool in policing organized and white collar crimes.

Marlon Bishop, Lichtenstein and Torres García Paintings On the Way Back to Brazil, WNYC, September 21, 2010, http://culture.wnyc.org/articles/features/2010/sep/21/us-returns-brazilian-art/ (last visited Sep 21, 2010).
Erica Orden, U.S. Returns Valuable Paintings Seized From Ex-Banker to Brazil, wsj.com, September 21, 2010, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704129204575506181973997368.html (last visited Sep 21, 2010).

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

More on the Security Breakdown in Cairo

The stolen work, “Poppy Flowers”

A week ago today the 1887 work Poppy Flowers, by Vincent van Gogh was stolen from a Cairo museum. Hadeel Al-Shalchi has a very good piece reporting on the security (or lack of it) at the Mahmoud Khalil museum in a piece for the AP which you can read on MSNBC.

I’m quoted at the end of the piece, noting that the best way to protect works of art is not necessarily with an elaborate electronic security system. Those alarms and sensors certainly play an important role, but for a nation like Egypt, an active, engaged security guard who isn’t dozing off as these guards perhaps were, would seemingly have been a successful deterrent for the thieves. They apparently walked in and cut the work from the frame during hours the museum was open. And I want to make clear that when I was quoted in the piece saying “It’s not an exciting job, but you need to take it seriously”, I mean that security staff at museums are professionals, and should be given that status. In Cairo, these guards were certainly not expected or required to maintain an adequate standard, and the theft and damage of this artwork is the unfortunate result. But hopefully Egypt will learn from this crime, and enact some sound security procedures to ensure more works of art are not stolen in the future.

When Ms. Al-Shalchi called me to discuss the theft, she told me she had learned that many of the guards may have been praying—this is still Ramadan—while the theft was taking place, that they may have been dozing off, and that the museum was not heavily visited on the day of the theft. But perhaps most troubling of all were the breakdowns in technology at the museum. As the piece states, there were no working alarms, only seven of the 43 cameras were in operating condition, and video from the cameras is recorded only when a guard “senses” an incident may be taking place. As Ton Cremers, founder of the Museum Security Network says, this is not a good state of affairs for the protection of such valuable artworks: “The value of the van Gogh is $40 (million) to $50 million . . . A complete security system of that museum would be $50,000, and to keep it running would cost $3,000 a year. … Need I say more?”

Also of interest will be the arguments against repatriation of other classes of objects—such as the bust of Nefertiti—on the grounds that Egypt is not going to be able to adequately care for the object when it is returned. yet Art theft occurs in every nation, and bad security is bad security whether the museum is in Egypt, Europe, or North America. Thieves will exploit obvious gaps in security. As Mark Durney, current moderator of the Museum Security Network, asked this week “Why are some national collections not as well protected as others? Who, in addition to the thief, is responsible for the theft?” I think that is the right set of questions to ask, yet they need to be asked whenever a museum is unprepared for a theft, whether that museum is in Egypt, or France—where the security system at the Modern Museum may have not been in working order earlier this summer when five works were stolen.

Hadeel Al-Shalchi, Security problems abound in Egypt’s museums, Associated Press, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38884911/ns/technology_and_science-science/ (last visited Aug 28, 2010).

(cross-posted at http://art-crime.blogspot.com/)

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

"Peru v. Yale: A Battle Rages Over Machu Picchu"

I’m quoted in David Glenn’s article for the Chronicle of Higher Education on the dispute between Yale University and Peru over artifacts taken from in and around Machu Picchu by Hiram Bingham between 1911 and 1916. The piece is behind their subscription wall, but it really is worth the effort to get your hands on a copy. It’s a good overview of the dispute, with a timeline and an overview of the parties’ public statemetns which gives us an idea of the competing legal claims.

The dispute draws some of the important ramifications the dispute has for repatriations generally. We are all eagerly waiting for Yale’s responses on the merits. At this point the parties are still disputing the proper federal court for the dispute. If and when the dispute reaches some of those important substantive points, whether the action was timely will likely be a prominent issue, as I speculate in the piece.

One of the important potential ramifications of this dispute may be whether nations of origin have the right to try to reach back and challenge some of these past agreements.

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

More on Dr. Julius No

A warm welcome to everyone who’s clicked through from Randy Kennedy’s excellent piece which appeared in yesterday’s New York Times. He managed to add some analysis and even novelty to a subject which often gets the same treatment whenever a high-profile art theft takes place.

I think he contrasts nicely the idea of an alluring art thief with the reality that “art is an exceedingly dumb thing to steal.” That certainly seems to be the conventional wisdom. But of course because “art museums are still relatively unguarded public spaces”, these thieves will continue to have the opportunity to take objects. The ultimate tragedy would be if we had to run a gauntlet of airport-like security checks to view works of art. However if these thefts continue, that may be a step certain institutions may decide to take. I particularly like the comments he elicited from Thomas McShane, the former FBI agent whose memoirs I reviewed here.

The reason myself and others like to speculate about a “Dr. No” when an extremely valuable and well-known work is stolen can be traced to the very first bond film. Dr. No was of course the unwanted son of a German missionary and a Chinese girl, and a member of the Special Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion (SPECTRE). The film makers, in a throw away moment, capitalized on the theft in 1961 of of this work by Goya, Portrait of the Duke of Wellington. Bond does a double-take when he reaches the island home of Dr. Julius No. He sees the painting and remarks “So that’s where that went”.

Hugh McLeave’s Rogues in the Gallery details the perhaps more bizarre reality. The real thief may have been a man named Kempton Bunton. He was a disabled British pensioner who confessed to committing the crime. Bunton was a retired bus driver. In 1961, Charles Wrightsman purchased the painting for £140,000. He wanted to take the work to the United States, but of course the UK’s limited export restriction applied, and money was raised to purchase the work and it was displayed at the National Gallery. At this time a great deal of press attention was paid to the work, and Bunton, upset at the amount of money he had to pay for his TV license, may have decided to break into the museum early in the morning and steal the work.

After chatting up the security guards, Bunton allegedly learned the electronic security system would be turned off early in the morning. He used tape and paper to insure the door and a window in the toilet would be unlocked, and made his way around back early in the morning and took the painting. He later said “I raced back to the lodgings. Taking the picture from behind the wardrobe, I stood it on the bed with the frame leaning against the wall and looked at it in triumph. Wellington returned my stare with cold contempt and I swear I saw his lips move, with the imaginary voice that said: ‘thou low-born wretch, I’ll break thee for this.’ And somehow I believed he would.”

Bunton seemed to be after some notoriety and fame. Letters were soon sent to newspapers, one asked for donations to charity to allow the poor to pay for TV licenses.

In 1965, four years after the theft, Burton reportedly returned the painting via a left luggage office at the Birmingham New Street Station. Soon after he went to the police and confessed to the crime. The police initially rejected him as a suspect, as they didn’t think a pudgy 61 year-old disabled man could have committed the crime. However charges were soon filed and the jury only convicted Bunton of the theft of the frame, which was not returned. Judge Aarvold explained to the jury that if they thought he meant to return the painting if a ransom bid failed, they must acquit him. If they felt he would keep it until he got the money, they would have to convict. The jury found Bunton not guilty of stealing the painting, but guilty of stealing the gilt frame, which was never returned. Bunton served only three months in prison.

The law was changed soon after as a direct result of this light sentence. A provision in the Theft Act 1968, sec. 11 makes it a crime to remove without authority any object displayed or kept for display to the public in a building to which the public have access. It does not require an intention to permanently deprive.

As for Bunton, there are some indications that he may have perhaps been innocent. In 1996 the National Gallery released an unsolicited and simple statement that he may have been innocent. What actually happened is still subject to some speculation.

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

"A Silly Thing to Steal"

So said my cab driver on the way down to the BBC’s Aberdeen studios bright and early this morning to talk about the recovery of the Da Vinci yesterday. A stream of the interview is available here.

I’m not sure I was able to offer much more insight. Details on this recovery are still sketchy. The FBI estimates the size of the illicit trade in art and antiquities at $6 billion, which is quite a sum. A better estimate may be the idea put forth by Simon Houpt in the excellent Museum of the Missing that if we were able to collect all the stolen works in one single museum, it would be the world’s greatest by a good measure.

Why then was the work stolen? This question will surely be answered in the coming months, but there are three reasons usually given. First it may have been a theft to order. This seems the least likely. If you have a masterpiece you want to show it off and put it on display. Second, the thieves may have been unaware how hard this kind of work might have been to sell. Finally, and most likely I think is the thieves may have wanted to ransom the work back to the Duke of Buccleuch or to the insurance company. This is just idle speculation, but I wonder if the passing of the Duke last month may have encouraged the thieves to think they could dispose of the work.

In any event this is a fantastic recovery. Police recovered the work yesterday from the law offices of HBJ Gateley Wareing; and arrested a partner in the firm and three other men. At this point there are far more questions than answers. An interesting issue may be whether the lawyer committed any wrongdoing, or if he in fact alerted the authorities to the location of the work. I’ll confess to a total ignorance of the professional rules of conduct for lawyers in Scotland, but I would venture a guess that assisting a client in committing a crime is frowned upon. Various news reports have speculated that the lawyer may have been assisting in repatriation, or looking at how to draft a contract under Scots law to allow the return of the painting.

There are other initial questions I have. For starters has the work been damaged? Will the work return to Drumlanrig Castle? What is the insurance agreement regarding the work? If an insurance policy has been paid out, the insurer now may have title to the work, but the Duke’s estate may be able to trade the money paid for the work, depending on the agreement.

The four men will appear at Dumfries Sheriff Court this morning, so more details should be forthcoming this afternoon.

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

Radio and TV Interview, BBC Scotland (UPDATE)

If everything goes as planned, you should be able to hear an interview with me on TV and on the Radio here in Scotland on Tuesday. You can hear the interview on BBC Radio Scotland tomorrow on the Good Morning Scotland show sometime between 6 and 9 . There will be a TV segment as well on BBC Scotland’s Reporting Scotland at 18.30. Streaming video of the whole newscast should be available here.

A few weeks ago I had the great pleasure in being interviewed by a reporter for the BBC, David Marsland, here in Scotland at the Aberdeen Art Gallery. I talked about my research, why I decided to study here in Scotland, and the current state of protection for Scottish art museums and historic houses.

UPDATE:

To listen to the radio segment, click here.

It seems the TV segment has been preempted, but I’ve been assured it will air in the near future. I’ll post more here when I know more.

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