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  “What’s the story about?”

  “It has to do with some ancient law in England and a famous antiques market or something. Just talk to the guy. Really, it’s a weird story.” And he gave me a phone number.

  So I called Danny O’Sullivan. He agreed to meet, and when we did, he pulled up in a Cadillac. O’Sullivan has a wrestler’s build, with green eyes that twinkle beneath a pink domed forehead. He was carrying a folder filled with court documents and newspaper clippings. We sat down, and he smiled. “I think it’s a hell of a story,” he said. “Ready?”

  On February 26, 1993, around noon, Danny O’Sullivan and Jim Groves strolled into Bermondsey Market. It was Friday, when the market transforms into a thriving antiques trade. Hundreds of dealers from across Europe and the United Kingdom set up shop, hawking mountains of peeling furniture, rusting knick-knacks, and your great-grandmother’s candlesticks. It was the same place Ellis had come to retrieve his family heirlooms so many years ago, the same place Paul loved to off-load anything he needed to get rid of in a hurry.

  That afternoon O’Sullivan was just tagging along, on vacation from his salesman’s desk in Toronto at Quebecor, the Canadian printing behemoth. For O’Sullivan the noisy market was old hat. He’d grown up in London, working-class poor, the son of a truck driver who worked nights. He’d spent quality time with his father only on Sunday mornings. Sometimes they’d ride the bus an hour and a half to Petticoat Lane Market. In the crowd, little O’Sullivan would stay close to his father. He remembers his dad buying him a pair of shoes there for a pound. “After market we’d go to the pub. He’d have a pint, me, lemonade.”

  Jim Groves, O’Sullivan’s brother-in-law, was equally at home in the throng of shoppers. Groves was a native Londoner who worked for Westminster City Council. As far as O’Sullivan was concerned, Groves was a good guy, even if he had recently separated from O’Sullivan’s wife’s sister.

  The two men meandered the labyrinth of stalls filled with precisely the sort of stuff O’Sullivan disliked—junk. But it was junk that Groves prized: second-hand cake trays, egg cups, lighters, old furniture.

  Groves paused at a stall where an old portrait caught his eye. The face in the picture was solemn and dignified, properly English. O’Sullivan was ambivalent; he had no love of art, had never bought a painting in his life and probably never would. Still, back in Toronto he’d sometimes watch the Antiques Roadshow. The television program had taught him a valuable lesson: there was money to be made from other people’s junk.

  The stall’s dealer eyed Groves and sensed an easy sell, according to O’Sullivan. The dealer told Groves he had another painting in his car, stashed there to protect it from the rain. He retrieved it and unrolled it for them to see. It was another vintage portrait, larger than the first, more intensely pompous. Its subject wore a poofy grey-white wig. The face was older, double-chinned, punctuated by a left eyebrow cocked arrogantly. A well-fed body disappeared beneath officious orange robes. To O’Sullivan it was Monty Python fodder, but Groves was keen on both paintings and doled out £60 for the first and £85 for the second. The dealer wrapped them in brown paper and bade them farewell.

  Groves left Bermondsey feeling good about his purchase— he figured the paintings were a real steal. O’Sullivan had kept his money in his wallet, happy with nothing.

  Back at his flat, Groves showed the portraits to a couple of friends, who were distinctly unimpressed. One of them, though, pointed to a small set of initials in the corner and suggested Groves get a professional opinion.

  Groves invited O’Sullivan along on the field trip, to Sotheby’s. Just that week a Picasso had fetched $2 million on the auction floor. In Sotheby’s basement, hidden among the crates and boxes of fine art jetted in daily from across the globe, an art appraisal service was offered, free of charge. A woman working the appraisal desk unfurled Groves’s two paintings and froze. She recognized one of them.

  Then she told Groves, “I think these are stolen.” She summoned security guards and rang the police. O’Sullivan’s reaction was instantaneous. “I’m outta here.” Not that he wanted to abandon his brother-in-law, but this wasn’t what he’d signed up for. Groves stayed put. These were his paintings—he’d paid good money for them, and he wasn’t running.

  Scotland Yard arrested Groves on the spot, drove him to the station, and showed him into a cell. Officers were dispatched to search his flat. To make things even more confusing, the police kept asking him about a third painting, one he knew nothing about.

  Lincoln’s Inn is one of four legal societies that every barrister practising law in London must join. On a Sunday evening in 1990, the only person at the Inn had been the warden. Creeping up on five o’clock, a series of blows had knocked him out. When he gained consciousness an hour later, his nose was broken, his hands were tied in wire, and his keys had been stolen. One man, maybe two, had unlocked the door to Lincoln’s Inn Great Hall, a lavish banquet room for judges and barristers, the walls of which are populated with historical portraits staring down at the long wooden tables and leather chairs. Three portraits were delicately removed from their ornate, heavy frames and whisked into the night.

  The next morning The Times reported that the stolen trio of portraits was worth £6 million. Police speculated it was a made-to-order job for an unscrupulous private collector. They had no strong leads (“Did anyone see a red sedan leaving the scene?” they asked).

  The police didn’t know what to make of Groves. Could it really be dumb luck? The unlikely collision of high art and flea-market penny-pinching? It had happened before. Groves was informed that the smaller portrait he’d first spied at Bermondsey lying face up in the rain was painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Reynolds founded the Royal Academy of Arts, and the portrait was of Francis Hargrave, the first treasurer of Lincoln’s Inn. It had been hanging in the Great Hall since Hargrave had sat for Reynolds in 1865.

  The second portrait, the one that had been rolled up in the dealer’s car, turned out to be the work of master portrait artist Thomas Gainsborough. Poodle-head was Sir John Skynner, a judge, whose painting was commissioned in 1786. The National Portrait Gallery, the Tate, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the San Francisco Museum all hold portraits by Reynolds and Gainsborough in their permanent collections.

  The third painting police kept questioning Groves about was a portrait of William Pitt the Younger, a prime minister of England, by Gainsborough’s nephew, Gainsborough Dupont, who had studied under his uncle. When the police found nothing but socks and underwear at Groves’s flat, he was released, charges dropped. The next day Groves accompanied police to Bermondsey, but the dealer who had sold him the portraits had vanished.

  Groves’s bargain-hunting instincts had proven truly stellar. His thanks? Being arrested, interrogated, and locked up in a cell while his flat was tossed. He was £145 poorer, and the paintings, rumoured to be worth millions of dollars, had been confiscated. No reward had been posted or offered to Groves.

  Danny O’Sullivan headed back to Toronto with a first-rate story to spin at the office. Still, for a salesman who loved the idea of a healthy return on investment, it was no Hollywood ending. Then Jim Groves received a phone call.

  As O’Sullivan later recounted, “a staffer at a major London newspaper realized there was a medieval law that applied to Jim’s case.”

  The law’s origins were murky. It was called “market overt,” and it predated the thirteenth-century reign of King John. In simple language, market overt stated that for any goods bought “between sunrise and sunset” and “in good faith” at certain open markets in London, legal title of ownership was allowed to pass onto the buyer, even if the goods in question were stolen. Groves perked up. Bermondsey Market, it turned out, was one of only a few areas in London still protected by the ancient law.

  “The newspaper,” O’Sullivan remembered, “said they would back Jim if he decided to test the law.” Market overt was an old loophole yawning into the twentieth century, and Grove
s could exploit it. Skeptical, Groves rang Stephens Innocent, a prominent London law firm, to get an expert opinion. Did he have a case? Innocent told him that, indeed, he had a case if he wanted to press it. Groves said yes.

  Stephens Innocent moved quickly and aggressively. The law firm filed a lien against Scotland Yard for confiscating what the firm pointed out was Groves’s property. The paintings slipped back into Groves’s hands.

  Then another interested party entered the fray: the insurance company that had paid hundreds of thousands of pounds to Lincoln’s Inn. The insurers had been quietly keeping tabs on the events, tapping their calculators, and consulting more lawyers. And they found a loophole in the loophole. Their argument: Groves could keep the Joshua Reynolds, but market overt didn’t apply to the Gainsborough. Why? Because the Gainsborough had been fetched from the car, and the car had been parked outside the limits of Bermondsey Market. Clever.

  The insurers also dangled a finder’s fee in front of Groves—£10,000. All Groves had to do was return the Gains-borough; the lawyers and lawyers’ fees would vanish. Groves wasn’t interested. Why take a £10,000 finder’s fee when the painting might sell at auction for more than a million? The case seemed to be heading for court. A fresh round of headlines appeared in the tabloids. Then yet another player weighed in: Mark Dalrymple.

  Around the same time that Groves was making headlines, a woman purchased a watercolour at Bermondsey Market for £15 and hung it in her living room. A couple of days later a friend came for tea and looked at it with astonishment. It was a Paul Klee, probably worth over £30,000. The woman could have used the market overt defence, like Groves. Instead she settled for a finder’s fee of £3,500. “I didn’t want to have stolen art hanging in my flat,” she told a reporter.

  Mark Dalrymple handled her claim. For a decade Dalrymple had made it his mission to obliterate market overt. With all the publicity the Groves case was garnering, Dalrymple also found something he could exploit—public outrage. The media coverage fuelled Dalrymple’s crusade. The Observer ranted, “Antiques markets just a ‘charter for thieves.’” The Daily Telegraph: “The Ass That the Law Leads to Market.”

  One newspaper detailed the sad adventure of a burglary victim who headed to Bermondsey Market the Friday after the break-in only to find several of her bronzes and seventy-one pieces of her Chinese ceramic collection. The next day she went to Portobello Market, and then to Camden Passage. She returned to Bermondsey, where she recovered her harp. In total, she tracked down over two hundred items of her stolen collection at London flea markets. It was a national disgrace. Scotland Yard jumped on the cause and released a statistic claiming that one-fifth of all goods sold at London markets was loot from burglaries. Of market overt, Richard Ellis stated: “We would like to see it abolished.”

  On January 3, 1995, Britain’s House of Lords struck down the law of market overt, almost a thousand years after it had been created. Dalrymple was pleased, but in an article for Lloyd’s List he noted, “The change in law, unfortunately, [is] too late to benefit the insurers of two portraits, by Gainsborough and Reynolds, which were stolen from Lincoln’s Inn.” The law did not apply retroactively. Still, it was a serious blow to art thieves in England.

  O’Sullivan’s lawyer had a bright idea: find out how much the insurance company had paid out to Lincoln’s Inn and buy the Gainsborough from them. The suggestion played on the basic assumption that the insurance company, like O’Sullivan, was interested not in art but in money. O’Sullivan was shown a list of prices paid for Gainsboroughs at recent auctions. The numbers all had one thing in common: six figures, sometimes seven. The insurance company conceded it had paid £75,000 for the Gainsborough. Groves had already paid thousands on lawyers’ fees; he couldn’t afford that deal.

  But O’Sullivan decided he would risk it. He mortgaged his house and for the first time in his life bought a painting—an amazingly expensive one. “The insurers gladly let the Gainsborough go for the fee,” O’Sullivan told me. “Now we owned the paintings.” Then he added, “Again.”

  O’Sullivan flew back to London and joined Groves when the portraits went up for auction. He remembered, “There were forty or fifty people in the room, well-dressed Englishmen. White collars. Blue shirts. And everything happened very quickly. I was totally surprised. Paintings I thought were beautiful sold for peanuts. Paintings I thought were total garbage sold for thousands. An art auction is a strange place to go, I tell you. It really opens your eyes.” O’Sullivan was beginning to understand that the world of fine art seemed to operate on its own code, its own secret rules, of which he was grossly ignorant.

  The Reynolds sold as planned. The gavel rang down. Bang. “Sold, for £22,000. Next item!” O’Sullivan knew who bought it—Lincoln’s Inn. They’d offered to buy it directly from Groves and O’Sullivan for £20,000. He felt better right away, knowing it was gone from their lives. Then the Gainsborough came up, with a base price of £45,000. A gentleman bid £35,000. Silence. The gavel cracked. “Next item!”

  “I’d thought they’d sold the Gainsborough. Because of the way he banged the hammer down,” O’Sullivan said. “I thought, £35,000. Bang. Gone. I said to Jim, ‘That’s not too bad. We’ve sold it. At least we got some cash.’ And then Jim said to me, ‘No no no. We didn’t sell it. It didn’t meet the minimum.’”

  “Holy Mackerel,” said O’Sullivan.

  Groves approached the highest bidder after the auction, to ask if he was still interested. “The person said, ‘Maximum I go is thirty thousand,’” remembers O’Sullivan. “We said, no way we’re going to go for thirty thousand.” The Toronto tourist was out of pocket £75,000. “Now I have a mortgage. I realized, if something went wrong at work, I could lose my house.”

  The Gainsborough went home with Groves. O’Sullivan flew back to Canada with a sinking feeling. Two weeks later he received a cheque in the mail, the proceeds from the Reynolds. When he thinks back on it now, O’Sullivan admits they should have bypassed the auction house and just sold the Reynolds to Lincoln’s Inn for £20,000. “Not because it would have been the right thing to do, but because they would have made it 20,000 clean. The auction house charges a holding fee, insurance. They hit you with everything under the sun. We finished up with 17,500.”

  Two years passed. O’Sullivan says Groves hung the Gainsborough portrait of Judge Skynner at his flat. Groves’s divorce had come through, and as far as O’Sullivan could tell from his desk in Toronto, he made no effort to sell the painting, and certainly made no further payments toward O’Sullivan’s debt. O’Sullivan reached boiling point. “I told Jim, listen, give me the money you owe, or give me the painting.” Groves didn’t have any money.

  Unbeknownst to Danny O’Sullivan, they’d jumped right into another hot debate, this one raging around laws meant to keep masterpieces at home in England. The debate culminated when Canadian media mogul Kenneth Thomson outbid London’s National Gallery on a Rubens. Groves had applied for an export licence, and it was denied. The now former brothers-in-law, who weren’t exactly friends anymore, decided to skip the red tape. They became smugglers. O’Sullivan smiles coolly and shrugs his shoulders. “Jim took a flight over to Toronto. He carried the painting under his arm rolled up in a case.”

  Judge Skynner had never intended for his image to leave English soil, but almost two hundred years after his death, his portrait touched down at Toronto’s Pearson Airport. O’Sullivan was hoping that he’d have an easier time selling the Gainsborough in North America. He’d opened a tax-sheltered bank account in the Cayman Islands in anticipation of the huge sum of money he was expecting to collect. Nothing happened. His lawyer couldn’t seem to find a buyer. So O’Sullivan consulted another Toronto lawyer, Aaron Milrad, who specialized in art.

  Milrad advised O’Sullivan to have the painting restored and appraised. O’Sullivan, not thrilled about the idea of pouring more money into the Judge, decided to go along with it. He handed the portrait over to Laszlo Cser, a discreet and well-regarde
d Toronto-based restorer.

  I visited Cser at his studio in 2004. He is tall, with long black hair, and was dressed in a black shirt and black pants. The first thing he said to me was this: “Your success in life is directly proportional to the amount of risk you’re prepared to take.” Cser also said he was “one of the old dinosaurs. Self-taught.” But he qualified that statement: “I’m also the beneficiary of many lifetimes of work. I do not subscribe to luck. I believe in preparation and opportunity.”

  Cser said it took him thirty seconds to diagnose the Gainsborough. “It was a wonderful work by a great artist with a technical seamlessness in it. There was no strain or difficulty. I meet it directly, face to face, and develop a relationship with the painting on an intuitive level. You have to actually see what is in front of you. And to respect what the artist did when they created the work. That’s the low bow you have to take in this profession.”

  The Gainsborough had been rolled up quite a few times, and several cracks needed mending. The painting itself needed to be re-lined, due to its removal from the frame during the robbery, Cser surmises. A layer of surface dirt had also accumulated. Cser worked forty to fifty hours on the Gainsborough, which cost O’Sullivan close to $6,000. Cser justified that cost by stating, “When you have a heart operation, how long do you want the surgeon in there? I bring twenty-nine years of experience to everything I approach. Preparation and knowledge are essential. Danny went home happy.”

  Next on Aaron Milrad’s list was having the painting appraised. O’Sullivan was referred to Richard Alasko, the president of the American Society of Appraisers, who flew up from Chicago. His expert opinion cost O’Sullivan $4,500. Next O’Sullivan sent the painting to a gallery in New York. He did not fly it south in a garbage bag. Instead, he paid shipping costs and insurance premiums and filled out Customs forms. That meant more lawyers’ fees. The process cost him a few more thousand dollars. “The painting was hemorrhaging cash,” he said.