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How to become a good art thief Eager that loyal readers of The Jackdaw should consider art theft a viable option as a part-time retirement career, it is my purpose here to provide you with the best possible introductory training for your new sideline. If you follow my advice you will not be caught – hardly anyone ever is – and your pension fund will increase at the modest though steady rate of £100,000 every three years or so. And remember, you’ll only be defrauding insurance companies who, let’s face it, deserve to be cheated. The art will only be on temporary loan to you from the gallery and, in any case, only bores will miss the indifferent works you target. Why does art theft make sense? Because it is the perfect option for those who think clearly; who are neither impatient nor greedy; who are used not to drawing attention to themselves; and who lack the brawn or savagery associated with other illegal activities. Art theft is entirely suitable for gentlefolk who, like myself, are no longer young but wish to wear purple in their dotage, and to profit from it. It also makes sense because museums are pruning staff and Scotland Yard consider art crime so unimportant they are running down their specialist Fine Art squad with a view to closure. Make no mistake, there is no time quite like the present to be an art thief, so please pay attention. Consider the following two stories. Readers may have been following press reports of a court case currently in process at the Old Bailey. For those of you who haven’t, seven – mostly lowlife – are on trial for their alleged roles in the theft last year of £53 million in cash from a security depot in Tonbridge. This crime has the distinction of being the country’s largest ever cash robbery and it was a real Hollywood production. According to police, a mission-impossible team of at least 30 was involved, including make-up artists, kidnappers, vehicle thieves and all those specialist petrol-dousers, pistol-whippers and other charming artisans of the armed robbery fraternity. The gang loaded a truck with the loot, leaving behind £100 million in cash because they couldn’t fit it onboard. As police unravelled this complex caper and hauled in peripheral flotsam for questioning, £21 million was recovered within a few days. The remainder is still missing. Key suspects – thought to be ‘the brains’ – are on the run. Two years ago four men in a white Volkswagen Golf drove up to Drumlanrig Castle in the Scottish Borders, the ancestral stately home of the Dukes of Buccleuch. Armed with a helpful guide purchased on a previous visit which showed the location of all the choicest heirlooms in the Duke’s collection, two of the team mixed with other paying visitors before overpowering a female guide. They ripped a small painting off the wall and left. CCTV shows these fellows walking to their vehicle and carefully placing the painting in the back seat before driving away. The video footage, shown on Crimewatch apparently, must be indistinguishable from a car advert: “Volkswagen Golf ... ideal for holiday touring ... rear legroom for the burliest adults with ample luggage space for the precious cargo... and plenty of poke with good grip on country roads in a getaway.” The painting concerned was Madonna of the Yarnwinder, an ugly panel attributed in part or whole to Leonardo da Vinci. This considerable rarity has not been seen since and was said at the time of its theft to be worth £50 million. Given recent price inflation this is now undoubtedly a conservative estimate of its value. Now ask yourself which you prefer... Would you rather get involved with a swamp of oiks, probably half of them police informers, who would grass up their terminally ill granny for a drunken month on the Costa del Crime? Or do you prefer the more leisurely, discreet pastime of nicking something virtually unguarded and easy to carry with the possibility of a cream tea and some tartan shortbread on the scenic drive home? Excepting perhaps precious stones, art is the only commodity in which such enormous value is condensed into a small, portable object. For older people, those with a titanium joint or two, a small painting is a comfortable load to bear. And don’t forget you have the perfect disguise. Thieves are expected to be young, bullet-headed and thick. No one will ever suspect you with your sensible shoes, waxed jacket and Queen’s English. There is another compelling reason why art theft makes good sense. Bear in mind the following two stories. A few weeks ago on a Sunday a small 17th century Dutch painting worth £750,000 was stolen from the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney during opening hours. This busy museum is the second highest attended in Australia and on the day of the theft it claimed to have had 6,000 visitors. Working quickly in a room with no security guard, no closed circuit surveillance and no alarms, the thief unscrewed the painting from the wall without anyone noticing. It being mid-winter in Oz, he is likely to have concealed the picture under an overcoat. He might just as well have stopped for a snack in the cafeteria because all the gallery’s officials who actually noticed the picture was missing thought it had been removed to store; that is, until the following day when a curator actually checked and donged the Lutine bell. Police reckon that by the time they were alerted the picture was already safely on the other side of the world. In 1991 a thirsty vagrant woke up from a doze in Birmingham City Art Gallery. Short of cash for his lunchtime livener, he casually helped himself to a sketch for Henry Wallis’s The Death of Chatterton and ambled out unchallenged. He was apprehended when he tried to sell the picture for £65 to fellow passengers on the bus to Selly Oak, who naturally became suspicious. Did the gallery learn from its atrocious security lapse? Of course not. The following year the rarest painting in the collection, a tiny panel by Petrus Christus, a Flemish artist for whom only half a dozen signed paintings exist, was stolen. It was recovered a year later in Switzerland. The museum was very lucky because only ten percent of stolen art objects are ever recovered. Art to the value of £500 million is stolen in Britain every year and, after drugs and guns, art theft worldwide is the third biggest criminal trade and worth £4 billion annually. Why are these and so many other thefts like them happening literally every week? The answer, which should remain close to your heart and, mantra-like, frequently repeated, is that it is very easy indeed to steal art from museums. A German thief convicted several months ago stated in court that he considered it harder to steal a T-shirt from a supermarket than it was to lift a painting worth a million pounds from the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne, which at the time of his theft had two warders patrolling three floors. No prizes for guessing where the painting was taken from. When works by Van Gogh, Picasso and Gauguin were stolen during a Saturday night from Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester in 2003, police recovered them only following a tip-off from the thief himself who left them rolled up in a tube outside a lavatory adjacent to the gallery. An accompanying note stated that he had done it only in order to expose the non-existent security. Then there was Stephane Breitweiser, a 33-year-old Swiss waiter. In a five-year spree, he stole 239 works in six countries from small museums which he selected for their total absence of security. He got two years jail during which he set himself up as a security consultant. You are asking yourselves: do museums have any defences at all? The answer is usually yes, but some others don’t although they like to give the opposite impression. The problem for museums is that all security systems, whether bog standard or deluxe, are temperamental. They are set off accidentally by vermin, insects, poltergeists, draughts or, like car alarms, traffic vibrations. Those who operate these unpredictable devices are, therefore, often fed up with them, and only too ready to believe when they go off that they are dealing with a false alarm. Additionally, these systems are expensive to operate. During times of financial hardship (that is, all the time in Britain), the first economies are always in invisibles such as security. There will be fewer guards and alarms will be switched off because the staff to operate them have been naturally wasted. Always make a mental note of museums who are laying off staff – their security will have been seriously downgraded and may even be a dream. When trying to circumvent an alarm system, which may well be turned off in any case, bear in mind the cleverness of Kempton Bunton, who should become a role model for all us potential senior art thieves. In 1961, Kempton was a poor retired London bus driver living on £8 a week. This splendid chap was annoyed that Macmillan’s Government could find the unprecedented sum of £140,000 so the National Gallery could buy Goya’s portrait of the Duke of Wellington. He felt the money could have been better spent allowing pensioners and war veterans a reduced rate for their television licences, whose cost he considered iniquitous. Naturally, it was a short step from high dudgeon to a hardened resolve to steal the picture. During reconnaissance visits to the gallery he engaged warders in casual discussion and discovered that the alarm system was immobilised during the early morning to allow cleaners unhindered access. Incredibly, he broke a lavatory window at the crack of dawn and got away with it – although there are now those who doubt it was actually him who carried out the entry. It was the most infamous, audacious theft in British museum history and even featured in a James Bond film. Kempton demanded that to secure the picture’s safe return the Government must pay £140,000 to a charity dedicated to helping pensioners with their TV licences. No dice. The picture ended up missing for four years until Kempton divulged to a newspaper that it could be found in the left luggage office of Birmingham New Street railway station. He gave himself up to police and escaped a jail sentence. Inside information is not always necessary when human nature is so predictable and the shopfloor worker so disposed to shirking. When Benvenuto Cellini’s Saliera – the so-called Mona Lisa of decorative art – was stolen from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna the gallery was undergoing renovation. The thief was provided with a helpful scaffold erected right next to the window of the targeted gallery. He didn’t even have to supply his own ladder. The alarm system, however, was the dog’s bollocks, top of the range at B&Q, and as he dropped to the floor and smashed the cabinet containing the salt cellar it sounded loud and clear. And then it stopped. The security man heard the alarm but on the grounds that it frequently tripped without cause he switched it off without checking and went back to sleep. The theft was discovered four hours later by a cleaner. The poor guard got his P-fünf-und-vierzig p-d-q. A similar example is the theft of Edward Munch’s Scream from the National Gallery in Norway, a country whose art thieves are impressively stupid. This was the classic art theft: a ladder against the wall, a broken window, an escape, a burnt-out vehicle. Once again the alarm sounded and was immobilised by a guard who said that the bells sounded twice a week without cause. It turned out that he was also watching the television because that very evening was taking place the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics at Lillehammer, just up the road. The attention of every Norwegian was captured by this momentous event. The thieves were so proud of themselves they left a note on the gallery floor thanking the authorities for the abysmal security. They made their first mistake by contacting police almost immediately and demanding a £5 million ransom. As days passed so desperate did they become to cash in that their demand dropped as low as fifteen grand. Realising they were dealing with petty crooks who had struck lucky, the fuzz sat tight. The picture was recovered in a matter of weeks when a British police detective famously posed as a curator from the Getty Museum. If the front of house security in museums is lamentable, that behind the scenes is farcical. If you can gain access to the store-rooms of museums, perhaps by posing as a researcher, theft becomes easier than stealing sweets from a baby. A space on a wall in the gallery will be noticed sooner or later, but a small gap on one of many densely hung sliding partitions in the basement will be checked by no one. In recent years the V & A, the National Maritime Museum and the Government Art Collection have had to confess to dozens of paintings simply going missing. So atrocious is museum record keeping that not only can they not account for their disappearance, they can’t even pinpoint a specific year when some works were lost. Why steal art when you can’t sell it on the open market? Good question, even though selling is not your purpose. Remember – and I repeat – you are a gentleman and wish only to defraud an insurance company, which, as recent statistics testify, is now perfectly respectable. There is no known example of a rich art lover having major works salted away to order. Most stolen art disappears into the underworld where its use is documented as a way of establishing bona fides in criminal transactions. Pictures are also used as goodwill gifts between gangs. A more recent phenomenon is the tactic of stealing a work as an insurance policy – a criminal might use the promised return of a stolen painting in exchange for a lower sentence. An intriguing new development was the reason why a second version of Munch’s Scream was stolen two years ago from the eponymous Museum in Oslo. Bank robbers had the work stolen in order to divert police attention from their trail. This was only the second occasion on which firearms had been used in a theft and demonstrated compellingly that any work on public display is at the mercy of determined armed robbers. There is no defence against it. The main reason for stealing art is extortion, which is increasingly closely related to the murky world of ransoms and rewards. The payment of a ransom is illegal in Britain though, as a Scotland Yard officer once confided to me, “We know it goes on”. If an insurance company or a former owner pays a ransom, they turn a blind eye considering it a crime solved. Insurance companies love paying ransoms. They would rather pay a hundred grand as a ransom than a million to the owner. You will exploit to your advantage their common sense on this point. The payment of ransoms is legal in certain parts of the continent, Holland for example. Of course, this willingness to pay up and ask no questions is almost an incentive to steal, and there is indeed one painting in Holland which is thought to have been stolen and ransomed three times... Which reminds me of the so-called ‘Takeaway Rembrandt’ at Dulwich Picture Gallery, a small portrait which was stolen four times in 35 years and was found variously on the back of a bicycle, in a Streatham graveyard, on the seat of a taxi and in the left luggage office of Munster railway station in Germany. Currently, but who knows for how long, it is hanging where it should be. It is legal in Britain to offer a reward. This is an amount payable for information leading – in theory – not only to the return of stolen property but to the apprehending of those who took it. As police have grown indifferent to art crime, a grey area has developed between ransoms and rewards. Because ransoms are illegal those who pay sums which lead to the return of the pictures but not to the indictment of the thieves are now routinely calling their transactions ‘rewards’. For example, the £3 million paid in two cash wedges to ‘middlemen’ by the Tate, which led to the return of two Turner paintings stolen whilst on loan to Frankfurt in 1994, but which led to no one being charged, is optimistically referred to by the gallery as a reward. It was in fact a payment identical in every particular to a ransom but, hey, who’s arguing, important pictures are back where we can see them. In my view it was £3 million well spent. No one was arrested. And finally, here is your cribsheet: 1. Choose a regional museum or country house, preferably one you have already visited and which as far as you know has not been the recent target of thieves. Choose one known to be broke and possibly under threat of mothballing or closure. If they have security it will probably be switched off in order to save money. Download maps and floorplans from their website. If possible consider a museum where renovations are taking place (watch out for the publication of lottery grants for museum extensions, upgrades etc.) because you will be provided with ladders, scaffold and, it follows, disconnected alarms. 2. Choose your moment carefully. Avoid the summer when news is slow. You want as little publicity as possible. A winter weekend is best, and Sunday, it would seem, never fails. Security staff might not be able to check with absent curators and on Sunday morning gallery personnel, recovering from the night before, will be even more docile than usual. Warders will be either late, skiving or snoring in the corner. Choose a weekend coincident with a major diversion; an important sports event such as the opening of the Olympics, bonfire night, Halloween, Christmas... Thieves turned over the Ashmolean in Oxford on New Year’s Eve at the Millennium because fireworks and high-spirited celebrations muffled the noise of their breaking and entering. The Cézanne they stole is still missing. Night is best for concealing identity and no one would dare accost the elderly. 3. Select a small and inconspicuous and definitely not a famous painting. Even mediocre Old Masters are these days worth half a million. Don’t be greedy, for greed has undone many art thieves. Either they want their money too quickly or, having realised how easy it is, they try to get away with it too frequently and become sloppy. Select a lightly framed work on canvas – significantly lighter than panel. If you have time, take a second pocket-sized work as well, for reasons I’ll explain below. After a downpage notice in the paper, your theft will disappear into the backlog of similar unsolved crimes and within days will be forgotten. Follow assiduously from an internet café all web-coverage of the theft. Take note of any references to an insurance company, which will be one of only a handful of specialist underwriters. 4. The actual theft is the easy part. You take the work to a safe place, wrap it up and place it in, say, the bottom of a wardrobe. At this stage your real genius kicks in. Inevitably, the police are clueless, neither do they care that much because it’s only art. Patience at this point is the art thief’s greatest virtue. 5. Do nothing. Forget about it. Three years to the day after the theft you contact the insurance company. Send them a photograph of the two pictures with a copy of the day’s newspaper. Believe me they are gagging to hear from you because they are about to stump up the significantly higher insured value to the owner. You explain in forthright terms that the price is a non-negotiable £100,000 in unmarked, untraceable cash. As evidence of your decency you offer them the second work gratis whilst making it clear that any fancy footwork whatsoever on their part and the painting will never be seen again. You will arrange to have your ‘reward’ collected from a bus stop in, say, Twickenham. Having checked the cash you will advise them by phone where they can pick up the painting. Don’t worry. It sounds too easy, but it works. This was exactly how the Longleat Titian was recovered two years ago. No one was arrested. Everyone was happy. Good luck. David Lee | |||||
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