Hot Art Page 17

  For three months the Gainsborough sat in a New York gallery. When I called the gallery, the owner was not interested in talking about the Gainsborough. On the phone he said, “Do you know what this painting is?” Then he hung up.

  Maybe the stolen-art stigma had followed the painting across the ocean. Or maybe Americans have no love for portraits of British judges. After idling in New York, the painting returned to Toronto, where O’Sullivan’s patience was flagging. “It’s really tough having all that money tied up in a painting,” he said.

  Then followed a couple of teases, just to keep O’Sullivan guessing. The recently launched cruise ship the Queen Elizabeth 2 expressed interest but would not commit to a deal. And a mysterious buyer approached O’Sullivan’s lawyers with specific instructions: Drop the painting off at one of the large banks downtown (O’Sullivan won’t say which one) and leave it in the care of a third party. The client would then come and examine the painting. If the client was impressed, a lawyer would be in touch. O’Sullivan went along with it. The mystery caller never made an offer. The bank returned the portrait.

  Then Charles Lippman called, the first of what had by now evolved into O’Sullivan’s fleet of lawyers. Lippman sounded optimistic. He’d found a promising buyer, rumoured to be, of all things, an English judge. It was to be another secretive transaction; at this point nothing surprised O’Sullivan where the secrecy of the art market was concerned.

  The contact turned out to be a Lincoln’s Inn lawyer. That lawyer held funds in escrow while the portrait was once again shipped across the Atlantic, back home to England, to be inspected. Then it was over. The funds were released to O’Sullivan’s account—sold for $100,000 U.S. O’Sullivan had lost $25,000 on the deal.

  It had been nearly a decade since O’Sullivan and Groves had stumbled onto the paintings in Bermondsey Market. The two portraits had been owned by lawyers, stolen from lawyers, and haggled over by dozens of lawyers. They’d been instrumental in overturning the market overt law. For Danny O’Sullivan, it had been a series of financial pitfalls.

  The proceeds from the Reynolds and then from the Gainsborough hadn’t even covered the cost of O’Sullivan’s initial mortgage, which meant there wasn’t a dime left over for the £17,000 Groves had spent on his legal fees.

  When I asked O’Sullivan if he had any advice for anyone entering the art market, he required no time to search for an answer: “Buyer beware.”

  11.

  LAPD CONFIDENTIAL

  “I can get all the alarms I want, but that won’t do the job.”

  BOB COMBS

  DETECTIVE DONALD HRYCYK drove out to inspect the crime scene.

  His destination was a mansion in Encino owned by a real estate tycoon and his wife who had built a paradise in the hills, above the sprawl, like so many of the rich in Los Angeles. They had also spent half of the last century building a multimillion-dollar collection of paintings.

  Hrycyk noted that both victims were in their eighties. One was bedridden, the other had dementia, and they employed a large staff to help: gardeners, a butler, and twenty-four-hour caregivers. On the afternoon of August 23, 2008, the side door of their house had been left unlocked and the staff had been out—even the maid. At least one person, perhaps as many as two or three, had slipped in and stolen more than a dozen paintings, including Marc Chagall’s Les Paysans, Diego Rivera’s Mexican Peasant, and Arshile Gorky’s Cubist Still Life. The couple was in their bedroom and did not see anyone, or their paintings, leave. Some of the paintings were worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. The Chagall, Rivera, and Gorky were worth millions. “It was one of the largest art thefts in the history of the city,” Hrycyk told me. By this point in his career, the detective had developed a methodology for residential burglaries—a post-crime checklist.

  The mansion was a one-hour road trip from his desk at police headquarters. When he arrived, Hrycyk asked the owner if he had photographs of the stolen paintings. He did: detailed records of his art collection. This was rare, and it gave Hrycyk an advantage.

  Most L.A. detectives dealing in stolen property would feed their information into the giant electronic memory of California’s Automated Property System (APS), a database maintained by the Department of Justice, where all the missing things that all the people in California have had stolen live on for a time. But “the APS wasn’t built for unique items like artwork,” said Hrycyk. “It was designed for manufactured goods from the Industrial Revolution, engraved with serial numbers, like cameras, tvs, and computers.”

  Instead, once the detective had gathered those photographs and was back at his desk, he emailed them to the Art Loss Register, the FBI National Stolen Art File in Washington, and Interpol. The faster Hrycyk fed them those images, the easier it was for an auction house anywhere in the world to identify the works as stolen. Check.

  The Art Loss Register, Hrycyk told me, provided him with a more specialized institutional memory than his own government database. He was in contact with Christopher Marinello, a lawyer with the ALR, who said that 491 artworks were registered as stolen in California. Almost half of those, 236, had been drained from private homes, and Marinello speculated that the paintings either would be found within a few months to a year or would head underground for a generation. It was an ominous prediction, and one Hrycyk agreed with.

  Next, Hrycyk tackled the media. Many art dealers and auction houses don’t look at lists of stolen art before they buy art, but they can’t ignore the news. The stolen paintings were by brand-name artists, and expensive, so there was some gritty glam to the story. “That really helps,” said the detective. There was also a carrot to dangle: a $200,000 reward. Hrycyk usually discussed the possibility of rewards with victims of art theft if there was an insurance company responsible for the claim. So far, he had been profiled in Los Angeles magazine, Art & Antiques, LA Weekly, and Artillery, and his cases had been reported in the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, and The Times in London. He wrote up a press release and beamed it out to his media contacts. Check.

  News of the Encino theft and photographs of a few of the stolen paintings appeared in papers all over the world, including the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Independent, and the Telegraph, and on the BBC. At my kitchen table in Toronto, I opened the Globe and Mail and read the story over a cup of coffee. Hrycyk’s press release was reported as far away as Taiwan, and the detective told me he did an interview with a radio station in Colombia.

  The Los Angeles Times article quoted Richard Rice, manager of Galerie Michael in Beverly Hills. Rice, a senior consultant and dealer to Hollywood celebrities, noted that L.A. art collectors were a particularly secretive bunch; they didn’t show off their collections. The good news was that this group of paintings was rare and would be difficult to sell in the open market, because only a small group of galleries in New York, London, Vienna, Paris, Zurich, and Geneva specialized in these artists. It’s a small world, Rice was saying. Not small enough, Hrycyk was thinking.

  While Hrycyk was fielding media inquiries and analyzing evidence from the mansion, he was also posting images of the paintings on the LAPD Art Theft Detail website. The website had evolved into another valuable tool and was a quantum leap forward for his two-detective unit. The Art Loss Register charges per search and the FBI website is searchable only to other law enforcement, but the LAPD Art Theft Detail website that Donald Hrycyk and Stephanie Lazarus built is free to anyone who wants to look at it, and information or pictures posted on it come up in Google searches. So when an auction house did a quick Internet search on any one of the stolen paintings, their names and images would pop up in the usual 1.23 seconds. The Art Theft Detail website had already yielded some impressive recoveries: Hrycyk estimated it alone had been responsible for finding over a half-million dollars’ worth of art.

  One example on the website: In 2003, an investment counsellor was moving offices—furniture, boxes, and an Andy Warhol print. An assistant told the moving company to be especially
careful with the print because it was valuable. The print never made it to the new office, and the investor didn’t realize for a few weeks that it was gone. Hrycyk investigated, and employed his system of recovery—including posting a photograph of the Warhol print and its edition number on his website. Almost a year later, an attorney representing an art collector walked into Hrycyk’s office and handed back the Warhol. The collector had bought it in good faith through an L.A. art dealer, said the attorney, but had recently spotted it on the LAPD Art Theft Detail site. Once the collector saw that it was stolen, he couldn’t enjoy its presence in his house any longer. (He was reimbursed by the dealer.)

  In addition to the stolen art databases, the media coverage, and the web presence, Hrycyk also sent out what he calls a “Crime Alert”—an email beamed directly to professional contacts, including art galleries, dealers, auction houses, and police forces in California and far beyond. The Crime Alert included all the information registered with the ALR, but it was sent directly to the places where a thief might try to sell the work—to the art community. Hrycyk has spent two decades developing these contacts, and every time he meets with a new auction house or art dealer, the information is absorbed into his Crime Alert list. Check.

  One week later Hrycyk received an anonymous tip from a man who identified a private residence in San Diego as the possible safe house for the stolen art. An LAPD officer was dispatched to knock on the door. “We explore all leads,” said Hrycyk. The woman who answered was a professor, and she agreed to a search of her house. There was nothing suspect, certainly no stolen paintings.

  Later that week San Diego police got a tip suggesting that a cache of weapons was being stored in the same house. San Diego PD couldn’t take any chances, and this time more force was used. The police turned the residence upside down. Nothing. The hunt was based on a bad piece of information. It turned out the professor had rented a room in her house to an ex-convict and the two had had a disagreement. She had kicked him out. “It was a revenge tip,” said Hrycyk, and then continued, “This is a tough case. No witnesses, little evidence, no informants, no video footage, and nothing to identify a suspect.” Hrycyk could only guess at the level of sophistication of the criminals he was dealing with. “If we get lucky we might come into contact with the thieves while they are trying to move the art. If that person hears about the reward, they could earn $200,000. That hasn’t happened yet. The thieves might sit on it awhile. If they aren’t desperate for money, that would be a good strategy.” He paused. “The paintings will turn up. It’s just a question of how long.” For now the detective would wait. He had learned to be a patient man.

  AT NIGHT LOS ANGELES is an electrified concrete field with giant patches of darkness that hover like storm clouds above its glow—the surrounding hills. As usual, Donald Hrycyk got up at 3:30 AM and cruised the freeway system into the asphalt heart of the glittering city. When he arrived at his desk the sky was still dark; sunrise this June morning hit at 5:40. A few hours later, after checking for uPDates on his cases, he left his desk and came to meet me.

  I visited Los Angeles during a heat wave in the summer of 2008, just a few months before the burglary in Encino. By mid-morning, the city had wilted under the open sun, the nicotine-coloured haze shimmered under a rusty blue sky. Hrycyk picked me up outside the Metro Plaza Hotel, a stone’s throw from Olvera Street, where the first house in Los Angeles was built. The street is now home to a cheerful alley of stalls selling Mexican American tourist trinkets and food, and is itself within view of Union Station, the gateway to the city before the airport was built.

  The detective shook hands with me. We’d spent hours on the phone, but this was the first time we’d met in person. Hrycyk’s uniform, I learned, was always the same: plain workmanlike slacks or jeans, a comfortably worn loose checkered shirt, black New Balance running shoes, the big digital watch—and an easygoing manner. His eyes are a pale shade of meridian turquoise, the same colour as the muscle car he drove in university, and cast a quiet, assured gaze. Hrycyk’s face holds the mark of a life lived under the powerful California sun, pale skin colonized by patches of pink. I pointed out the sun factor, and he told me about a machine at Venice Beach that can take a picture of a person’s face and reveal the years of sun damage under the surface. “It’s like the way you can put a painting under ultraviolet light and see all the years of damage to the canvas. To the eye it’s invisible, but the damage is there,” he said. “History.”

  Hrycyk studies people, isn’t quick to speak, and doesn’t project a hint of antagonism or machismo. He watches and learns. During our phone interviews before and after my visit, the detective never once interrupted a question I was asking, and he always took a moment to think before giving an opinion. He patiently corrected me a few times, when I said “robbed” instead of “burglarized.”

  “Robbery means to take by force or fear. Burglary is to enter a premises with the intent to steal. I work in Burglary Special,” he said. Of the art detectives I interviewed, he was the most transparent about his casework and the details of his investigations. He had the feel of an old-fashioned detective who loved his work and seemed to live for it. If I ever had something stolen, I would want Hrycyk to investigate. As we cruised through Los Angeles, he seemed as if he were a part of the city and not just a person working for the municipality.

  One of the first stories Hrycyk told me on that visit wasn’t about art theft or any of the cases he had handled: it was about the character of Los Angeles itself. Earlier that week, a young girl selling lemonade in front of her house was startled when a man ran up to her homemade stand and ran off with her change jar. The twelve-year-old didn’t hesitate. She called 911 on her cellphone and ran after him. The girl followed the man for more than ten blocks in the white heat while keeping police updated on his location. The LAPD cornered the lemonade-stand thief in patrol cars while the girl watched. She got back her money. “That’s Los Angeles,” said Hrycyk. “People here are fighters.”

  On the drive to his office, Hrycyk took me through the downtown limbo that locals call Skid Row, where lines of men camp out on the curb, barely dressed and washed. “This is the corner where hospitals sometimes just leave unwanted patients with no health coverage. They drop them here with nothing but their hospital gowns,” he said. “There’s a fire station near here and the trucks actually have decals stencilled on the side that read ‘Skid Row Fire Department.’”

  Our destination was the Parker Center, then the police administrative compound, a white concrete building guarded by high metal fences at 115 North Los Angeles Street. It was squeezed into a neighbourhood between Little Korea and Chinatown not far from the Civic Center. From the roof of the parking garage off San Pedro Street, Hrycyk pointed to a set of old row houses in the near distance. “Raymond Chandler used to live in one of those.” Right around the corner there is a major collection of art—the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA (the Museum of Contemporary Art).

  Out of the bright sun, inside the blue and white hallways of Parker Center, officers and detectives clipped past us. Hrycyk pointed out that parts of the police compound had been transformed into an art gallery of sorts; we looked at a series of crime-scene photographs from the fifties, sixties, and seventies on display in the halls. The photos had been found in a storage closet decades after they were taken by crime photographers. There’s a mug shot of Charles Manson taken after he was arrested for the murder of Sharon Tate; an old getaway car riddled with bullet holes; a stark field, where the body of the Black Dahlia, murder victim Elizabeth Short, was found— the case James Ellroy turned into his most famous crime novel, The Black Dahlia (adapted to the film starring Josh Hartnett). There were portraits of the Hat Squad of the 1940s and 1950s, detectives wearing cream suits and cream fedoras staring out from sepia-toned prints—think L.A. Confidential. History.

  One case Hrycyk had investigated stretched back to Hollywood’s golden age, the 1940s, he told me. “Lana Turner had commissioned Peter Fairc
hild to paint a full-length portrait of her.” Fairchild worked on Turner’s portrait for weeks, and was close to finishing when one day it simply vanished. In 1994, it surfaced in the collection of a person who had purchased it twenty-five years earlier from an auction house. “That case was so old that there was no original crime report or paper trail to fall back on,” Hrycyk said. “At the time the portrait was found, Lana Turner was in hospital. She was dying.” Turner’s daughter decided to let the matter go, and the painting remained with its owner. Hrycyk noted that Turner’s portrait had never left Los Angeles—it had been hanging, hidden from the public, on a collector’s wall.

  Burglary Special is just down the hall from Homicide Special, and each door to a division has taped to it a piece of 8½-by-11 paper run off a photocopier, with bold black letters announcing its title. Hrycyk opened the door to Burglary Special. The room is bare-bones, cubicles pushed together in sections of four or six, a few shelves stuffed with papers and books, filing cabinets, and a row of windows to let in natural light, which softens the glare of the fluorescents strung along the ceiling. Behind Hrycyk’s desk there’s a crack in the wall that runs floor to ceiling—a souvenir from an earthquake.

  This is where Hrycyk spent his days, across from his partner, Stephanie Lazarus. “Steph isn’t in the office today,” he told me. “But maybe you’ll meet her later in the week. In the old days Burglary Special was primarily made up of teams of two detectives working on one problem,” Hrycyk explained. “The tradition of detective work has always been to work in teams of two, with one higher-ranking detective taking the lead and mentoring a lower-ranked detective. It’s one of the ways we learn.” Los Angeles PD has been working this way for over 150 years, since it was first formed in 1853.

  The history of Burglary Special stretched back almost that far, and its name means exactly what it advertises. The detectives here hold citywide knowledge of their areas of crime—they view burglary through a wide-angle lens. When there is a complex pattern of burglaries that stretches across more than one division, that case is passed to this room. Art theft fell into this category.