Hot Art Read online

  Two more years passed, but Ellis never stopped following the Beit collection. In 1992, Ellis got a phone call from an Irish detective who had an informant of his own. Cahill was trying to move the paintings again. Ellis checked in with his informant in Cahill’s gang. The paintings were indeed about to move—the detective just didn’t know when, so they watched and waited.

  One day in 1993, Cahill arranged for the artworks to be wrapped in blankets and placed in the trunk of a car. The car travelled by ferry to Wales, and then to England. Ellis received another tip from an informant giving very specific information about where those paintings would be stored while in London, and he executed searches at a variety of locations across the city.

  Six officers from the Art and Antiques Squad and at least a dozen other police took part in the raids. The Rubens was found behind a couch in an apartment. Four more paintings were found in a factory, and another at Euston train station. But four slipped out of Ellis’s reach—including the Vermeer. Those paintings had stopped briefly at a car dealership in North London, and then continued travelling in the back of a truck on their way to Belgium, where Cahill had connections in the diamond industry. A diamond dealer in Antwerp had agreed to buy a share in the remaining paintings, and gave a cash advance of one million dollars to Cahill on profits that would be made on a later deal involving the paintings. The dealer moved the paintings to a bank vault in Luxembourg. “Cahill was using it as collateral for a cash advance with which to set up a money laundering bank to handle drugs money,” Ellis told me.

  Ellis and the Garda devised a plan: a Scotland Yard undercover agent, Charley Hill, would pose as an American art dealer and offer to buy the paintings. The cash offer would draw the Vermeer and the other paintings out of the bank vault. For that operation, Hill called himself Chris Roberts, and he started advertising the fact that he was in the market for a few incredible paintings. It worked.

  Hill was contacted and instructed to fly to Oslo for a meeting, obviously to check him out. His cover stayed intact on the trip, and he was told to fly to Antwerp. When Hill arrived, Cahill’s men led him to a car parked in the diamond district. There, in the trunk, was the unframed Vermeer. Hill took note—he was dealing with the right people. The car drove away.

  Ellis waited. The next meeting was scheduled three weeks later in Antwerp. Hill flew back to Belgium with a briefcase full of cash. The detectives knew the bank account where the money would be wired was in the Caribbean, where Cahill had bought a small bank to hold his new fortune. Three cars met at the airport. The trunk was opened. This time not only were all four paintings there, so were the Belgian police.

  After seven years underground, the Russborough paintings had been recovered. Cahill had not been at the meeting in Belgium. He was still AWOL, but that mattered less to Ellis. He’d recovered the artworks and made his reputation.

  One year later Cahill was shot dead at a traffic light in Dublin, either by IRA hitmen or by other criminal soldiers. “Stealing those paintings had done nothing but harm him,” said Ellis at the wine bar. “And the Cahill case proved that paintings weren’t just being ransomed back to museums or collectors for money or sold back into the system. Paintings, in fact, had a monetary value that went beyond the market. They could be used as criminal currency,” he said.

  “Let’s say I’m a drug dealer, and you owe me money. Well, you can steal a painting. You then give me that painting as a down payment on the loan. As a dealer, I know that it’s worth something, especially if it’s been written about in the newspaper. Those articles always say, so and so painting, worth so and so hundreds of thousands of dollars.” The use of stolen art in the black market had evolved.

  “You saw Cahill try and use all the avenues, over a period of years. First he tried to sell them on the legitimate market, then he tried to ransom the paintings back to the government, but we blocked that route. Cahill’s last and best means of resort was to trade the paintings for a cash loan on future criminal profits from drug dealing. That was new for us. It was another piece of the puzzle,” Ellis told me.

  One year after the paintings were returned to Russborough House, Ellis found another piece to the global black market puzzle.

  In May 1994 he was part of an international operation that recovered Edvard Munch’s The Scream, stolen from Norway’s National Gallery. That same year, he received a call from the British Museum: twenty-seven papyrus texts had been delivered to the museum for appraisal. Museum staff identified them as stolen; they’d disappeared from an Egyptian government storage facility. Ellis investigated and his suspicions landed on an antiques restorer named Jonathan Tokeley-Parry, based in Devon. Eventually, Ellis had enough evidence to raid Tokeley-Parry’s house. Under the bed he found a pair of doors from the tomb of Hetepka, a royal hairdresser. That tomb had been looted in 1991, and Tokeley-Parry had been in Egypt that year.

  The detective also found Customs documents and photographs of dig sites in Egypt. They revealed a system: raw material was being shipped from the Egyptian desert to Switzerland, then to London. “Tokeley-Parry showed up while the raid was happening, and he was fresh off a plane from Cairo,” said Ellis. He was carrying a briefcase, and in the briefcase was another stolen piece he’d picked up from his visit abroad.

  Tokeley-Parry, it turned out, was using his craft as a restorer to smuggle antiquities out of Egypt, including by disguising real antiquities as fakes, tourist junk. To get the head of Amenhotep iii out of the country, he dipped it in clear plastic and painted it black and gold. It was worth millions of dollars, but it looked like a piece of crap from a shop at the airport. Tokeley-Parry was convicted in 1997. He served three years of six. Before he went to prison, he tried to commit suicide by ingesting hemlock, just like Socrates.

  Ellis, seeing that a larger network was in place, kept following the paper trail, which led all the way across the Atlantic to a well-known New York antiques dealer who had been financing Tokeley-Parry. The dealer’s name was Frederick Schultz. Schultz owned a gallery in Manhattan and had an international network of contacts pulling in antiquities from across the world.

  It took four years, but the FBI prosecuted Shultz. He received three years in prison. He was, by far, the highest-profile antiques dealer ever to be convicted of stealing art in the United States.

  For Ellis, the Russborough case provided the link between stolen art and organized crime, diamond dealers, and a network that stretched across Europe. The Schultz case, which involved fourteen countries on four continents, proved that the stolen-art network was sophisticated and involved criminals at all levels of the trade, from the men who dig in the dirt to the men in the shops and galleries on Madison Avenue.

  Ellis retired from Scotland Yard in 1999. He told me his success as a stolen-art detective was primarily due to his ability to gather information. He relied on a network of informants to keep him abreast of what was happening in the criminal underworld. His squad of detectives paid cash for useful information. “Every Friday the calls would come in. Payday,” Ellis explained.

  Ellis told me that one of those informants was a former Brighton knocker who had made his name by scouring the country, draining houses of their treasures, and selling the stolen goods through a variety of available channels, including a few in London. Ellis had never caught him, but he had used his information. “No one knows how much art he stole over his career, but he certainly knows the field,” said Ellis. “It seems he was quite successful. We’ve had dealings on a number of occasions. He helped me out on a few things. I can’t really talk about that.”

  9.

  BUSINESS IN LONDON

  “Art theft is like a disease you catch from your friends.”

  JULIAN RADCLIFFE

  LONDON WAS not Brighton. London was the centre of the big bad empire: dark, epic, dirty, greedy, fast. For Paul, the city was a blur: men in bespoke suits, women in heels, the Tower of London and Big Ben looming over the little specks travelling at quick clips down twisting bric
k streets where even the dirt on the bricks felt historic. And those streets, always winding, opened up toward huge bridges that arched magnificently over the Thames. Or the hectic thoroughfares—Oxford Circus, Piccadilly, Trafalgar Square—jammed with blasting car horns and the roving red walls of double-decker buses that would fly within inches of your nose at the traffic light.

  Here, life was charged by claustrophobic tightness. Following the city’s streets, Paul could wind up anywhere— Soho, Buckingham Palace, Brick Lane, Brixton. “I smoked some incredible stuff in Brixton, you have no idea,” he told me. He rode the vibe: fast cars handling tight corners, the Underground beneath, the constant steel of clouds above, the slanted chimney skyline, the swelling of millions—a nerve centre that never shut down, sprawling, overcrowded, mazelike. It was a post-Dickensian urban fairytale: monstrously big, fluorescent, chemical-induced, loud, and, of course, expensive.

  “And there was money,” Paul remembered. Lots of money— lots of stupid people with lots of money. And Londoners didn’t really care who you were if you could help them make more money, so long as you added some glob of value to the throbbing machine that drove the economic boom Paul was now a part of. He knew this was a city where a person could simply disappear or get locked into a dreary life; pay the rent and subsist; be ground into history’s brick-grime—no.

  Or you could drive in, do your business; escape; reinvent your life; live the life; make a fortune; have a fucking blast— yes. To accomplish that, Paul’s talent for bullshitting had to come up a level. After all, London was a bigger game, with new players, more players. It had a different criminal history— Jack the Ripper, Jack the Stripper, the Krays, and his favourite bank robber, John McVicar. And there were new threats—the legendary Scotland Yard, which hunted down criminals and locked them up in Her Majesty’s Penitentiary System, or, as it was better known, the London Dungeons. Whatever happened in London, whatever trouble he got into here, Paul never wanted to end up in prison. His mission: make money, stay under the radar, avoid those dungeons, have fun.

  Paul arrived in 1981, just in time to exploit the greed, the excess, the cut-throat capitalism of that decade. For the poor, London was a psychological and physical prison. For the young and the rich, it was a party that never stopped. There was the infamous class system to contend with, of course, and Paul concocted a way to handle that ever-present social question mark—his working-class Brighton accent. Rather than try to change it, though, he simply reconstructed the circumstances of his youth to better suit his new environment. So, clinking a glass of champagne at an art show or snorting “class-A drugs” in a back room at a club, he talked his way up and around the higher echelons of London society. “Hell-oh, swee-tie. Wher’m’I from? Well, my father owns a lot of land.” Always the con man, he tweaked his persona to fit the desired image, he told me. “When I was spending time in London running in those circles, if people asked me what I did, where I was from, I told them I was the son of a farmer and that my father owned a lot of land. And that I was interested in art and antiques. It was plausible.” Paul explained away his position in life—what he was doing in that room, at that party, with those people. And why not mingle with them? When it came to art, he knew as much as or more than they did. “My favourite painting is at the British Museum, the Hay Wain, by John Constable.”

  London was the capital of England, but in 1981, it was also competing with New York as the capital of the global art market. It wasn’t just that London held a thriving gallery scene and mighty institutions like the British Museum, the Tate, and the National Portrait Gallery, with their millions of dollars of art treasures. Paul still wasn’t the least bit interested in stealing from museums. Headache art and ransom cases were not his style. He was interested in further expanding his business model.

  Hovering above and around all the museums, dealerships, and galleries were the rulers of the global art market: the auction houses, where the gods of art and money resided. Paul loved the crowds, the drugs, the women, the bullshit chatter, and the parties, but the prize in London was the business he could receive from auction houses—a destination for some of his special spoils. In the grand myth that was the art market, the big auction houses were the source of life. London was exactly the kind of place where a young man on the make could easily get lost. It had a million possible destinations, a million forks in the road to choose from. But when Paul arrived, he knew where he was going and why he was going there. He went straight to the source.

  “I always knew, with paintings, you go to auction houses,” he told me. “Without auction houses, you wouldn’t have a trade in art.” Over the course of our conversations, Paul described the economics of the art world as a series of small rivers, flowing to and from the bodies of the big auction houses. “I want you to imagine the big houses, Christie’s and Sotheby’s, at the centre, and all the tributaries that led away from them. One of those tributaries leads to the art dealers in London. Another one leads to the dealers in Brighton, and another to the collectors and buyers, local and international. If you are someone who wants to buy art, you go to an auction house. If you want to sell art, auction house. If you want to learn about the price of art, like I did, auction house. Everyone in the art world goes to the auction houses to feed off of them. I did.”

  In Brighton, Paul had spent time studying auction house catalogues—one of the ways he learned about the value of objects—and realized he could circumnavigate around the dealers in the Lanes and reap higher profits by selling direct, wholesale, to the main suppliers.

  Auction houses, Paul discovered, had created a system where everyone who needed to make money from the art world was forced to use them. “If you’re a dealer or a thief, where else would you go to find those clients?” he asked, sounding ever the small-business owner. “It has been this way since those auction houses started, hundreds of years ago.”

  Sotheby’s (at the time called Baker’s) held its first auction— a collection of old books—on March 11, 1744, during the reign of King George II. James Christie opened his auction house twenty-two years later, in 1766. Bonhams followed in 1793. In 1796 Harry Phillips defected from his mentor, James Christie, and opened his own house. These four establishments remain the reigning auction houses of the world, and have expanded. For the first 150 years the houses traded mostly in rare editions of books, prints, and coins; after Napoleon died in exile, his collection of books was auctioned at Sotheby’s. It wasn’t until the early 1900s that sales of paintings caught on and became the houses’ main source of revenue.

  That happened because Christie’s and Sotheby’s developed a strategy to convince the middle class to buy what most had thought they could never afford: something special to decorate the mantel. They brought art to the masses. The houses recognized in the 1950s what Paul would discover a couple of decades later: that art was a product, and that as a product its value could be artificially pushed higher by increasing demand. To do this the consumer must be convinced to buy the product—art, like many other economies, was a confidence game.

  Bonnie Burnham’s 1975 The Art Crisis recounts how, in 1959, Stanley Clark accepted a job at Sotheby’s. An outsider to the art world, Clark came to it with a fresh perspective. He crunched the numbers and figured out that people were buying objects that cost less than £100. So Clark decided that Sotheby’s should focus on this market, and his reasoning was simple: business didn’t need to just be about the big-ticket items. There was money to be made in the small stuff. Million-dollar profits in a single evening were tempting, but the auction house could rake in even more by focussing on the lower end of the market. Paul figured out that every house on the planet had a prize, and Clark figured out that all those home owners could be persuaded that they deserved a prize.

  “Most people back then had never heard of Sotheby’s,” Clark told Burnham. Before Sotheby’s, he had worked at the Daily Telegraph. He used his knowledge of the media to his advantage, and convinced the daily newspapers that
auctions should be featured in the news—that, in fact, what was happening at the auction house was news. In return, Sotheby’s began advertising free consultation services, which worked well when stories appeared about found treasures.

  For example: “A poverty-stricken old woman living on her small pension came in with a shoebox full of glass beads, begging that Sotheby’s give her two pounds for them. In the bottom of the box the Sotheby’s expert found an ivory Saxon reliquary, missing 400 years, which a British institution was delighted to buy for 40,000 pounds.” Burnham found dozens of examples of these “articles” in her research for The Art Crisis. The marketing worked, and Londoners started hauling their junk to Sotheby’s, with the hopes of a lucky find. It was the original Antiques Roadshow, and the campaign had the added benefit of giving antique and art dealers a fast-moving business: everyone was a winner.

  So while Paul was growing up in the wrong part of Brighton, Sotheby’s was developing the market he would reap. By the 1980s, that market experienced its first boom. Some paintings were selling for thousands of dollars, others for hundreds of thousands. And now, a few sold for millions.

  Clark’s theory had been dead on—the business was exploding. Added to that, the value of art and antiques kept rising. There were few if any checks and balances in the auction system, though, and Paul exploited every opportunity. He said that auction houses turned out to be just as irresponsible and greedy as the dealers in Brighton. “If a junkie showed up at an auction house desk with a dozen hypodermic needles sticking out of his arm but he had a great painting under his arm, it wouldn’t matter. They’d take the painting. Back then you could take a painting to any of the larger auction houses and sell it to them on the spot,” Paul told me.