Hot Art Read online

  Considering the number of articles that had been written about stolen art, it was amazing how few definitive facts were available about the illicit art trade, as opposed to, for example, the drug trade. I was at a loss.

  I checked in with Wolfond, hoping he would tell me he’d received a surprise delivery, but he had no news to report. I kept quiet and waited. Then one afternoon several months later I ran into the gallery owner at the Toronto International Art Fair. He was excited. A small miracle had occurred: the police had recovered a few more of his missing prints, undamaged.

  In 2005 the article I’d started about Wolfond was published in The Walrus, but it turned out to be not about the thief (although I did mention Wolfond’s burglaries) but a feature article about international art theft. A week later I received another phone call from the art thief. This time he left a message for me at work.

  “It’s me. I just wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed your piece,” he said.

  I never heard from him again. I should have realized, after my initial meetings with Wolfond, the midnight phone call, and my encounter with the thief, that this wasn’t a straightforward story. But what did I know? Wasn’t this what every young journalist dreams of—to be called in the middle of the night by a criminal and then threatened? In some ways, it was encouraging. I followed up with the lawyer, the one whose phone number Wolfond had given me, who turned out to be an avid follower of the global black market.

  BONNIE CZEGLEDI HAS many theories about why you might want to steal a work of art: because you fell in love with it; because it is fragile and needs your protection; because if you steal just one more, your collection will be complete; because you loathe the snooty cultural establishment; because strolling out of a museum onto a crowded street with a stolen painting under your arm is an adrenaline rush like no other; because hanging a stolen work on your wall will impress your friends; because you can reap a ridiculous profit; because no one will catch you.

  In April 2003, I met Czegledi at a coffee shop tucked into the base of one of the tallest towers in Toronto’s financial district, where she worked. Czegledi is striking—pale skin, angular cheekbones, straight black hair. Her eyes are large and dark with a slightly haunted quality. She wears elegant clothing punctuated by artful jewellery, colourful designer heels, and bright red lipstick. When she enters a room, people stare. She has the look of a Hungarian queen in exile and a confident, musical voice to match. “Hi, I’m Bonnie. So what do you want to know?”

  I told Czegledi I was writing about a small art theft at an upscale local gallery. She nodded and smiled. Yes, of course, she knew about that one. “Sorry to be the bearer of bad news,” she laughed, “but I get calls all the time from galleries that have had art stolen. The art world, as you probably know, is very secretive, and that only makes it easier for criminals. It’s the Wild West out there.”

  Czegledi wasn’t talking just about the violent museum thefts that seemed to be occurring with irritating frequency across the globe, and it wasn’t just Rembrandts and Picassos that were attracting thieves. “It’s everything,” she said. The world’s cultural heritage had become one big department store, and thieves of all kinds, at all levels, were shoplifting with impunity, as if the one security guard on duty was out on a smoke break. When artistic genius, money, and ego collided, morality quickly fell by the wayside. And sometimes criminals wore suits and ties and acted as if they were respectable members of the establishment.

  “Good, you have an empty notebook,” she noticed. Then she jogged through a list of travesties besieging the world’s cultural heritage: thousands of Holocaust-looted artworks still missing; the pillaging of antiquities from Egypt, China, Afghanistan, Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Turkey; the spectacular thefts of multi-million-dollar artworks from museums; thousands more unreported thefts from galleries and residences; the looting of underwater cultural heritage— shipwrecks and the like; the looting and destruction of Native artifacts; the use of donations to galleries and museums to launder stolen artwork into prominent institutions; the inability of dealers, galleries, and museums to adhere to a sensible system of provenance checks on the artwork they acquire; the total disregard of the legitimate art market for the big mess.

  “Have you looked at auction houses!” she boomed. Major auction houses played a role in laundering stolen art, she said, as did smaller ones and art dealers. They all served the demand of the market—the hunger of collectors.

  Czegledi was respectful of most art collectors but insisted that a cabal of them acted like psychopathic stalkers: they would do anything to get their hands on a specific work of art. Collecting art, she explained, had started as a hobby of the aristocracy in the eighteenth century and had grown into a multi-billion-dollar business driven by obsessive behaviour. “Some of these collectors and dealers operate like a cult. If you possess something that is special, you become special,” she said. “It’s about power. And there are no checks and balances in the art world. Police aren’t trained to investigate art thefts, and lawyers aren’t trained to prosecute them. Meanwhile, the criminal network is international, sophisticated, and organized.”

  The “Problem,” as Czegledi called it, had been building for decades and had infected the entire global system. “If the legitimate business of art were to suddenly be made transparent, the entire industry would simply collapse,” she said. What Czegledi meant was that over the course of the last century, so much stolen art had been absorbed by the legitimate market, and so much was continuing to be absorbed, that if the stolen goods were identified, the industry would be forced to reevaluate the entire way it operated. I thought back to the art thief, his fingers circling the tabletop.

  Czegledi’s passion had personal roots. Her family came from a famously bloody region of Eastern Europe, near Dracula’s birthplace—Hungary’s Carpathian Mountains. The mountains were once populated by hundreds of small tribes, and Czegledi is descended from one of those. The Székely were almost wiped out in what Czegledi calls a slow, torturous genocide by Romania. Her tribe’s language, art, music, and traditions were destroyed.

  “There’s almost nothing left of my people except a few songs collected by Béla Bartók,” she said. “The best way to destroy a civilization is to erase their cultural heritage. The Nazis, for example, understood that very well.”

  The Czegledis moved to Canada before the genocide, and Bonnie was born in Toronto, where she began painting when she was ten. Her mother, though, wanted her to pursue a more practical profession. Czegledi hid her drawings under her bed but continued to paint even while she studied law at Toronto’s prestigious Osgoode Hall. In 1987 she graduated and joined a corporate firm. When a fellow artist needed a contract examined or paperwork for an exhibition looked over, she did so—often for free. Word of her interest in the area of art and law spread quickly through the community, and soon she began to receive phone calls about cultural heritage law.

  One afternoon Czegledi answered a call from a lawyer representing a client selling a valuable antique tapestry, worth in the neighbourhood of $20,000. The lawyer wanted Czegledi’s opinion: the tapestry had been stolen during World War II and was on a war-loot list. He wanted her to tell him how to sell it on the legitimate market without being caught. Czegledi was shocked, and laughed into the phone. She told him that it was a criminal act to sell the tapestry and that his client should restitute it to the rightful owners or country of origin. The lawyer berated Czegledi for being self-righteous and hung up on her.

  “You shouldn’t be selling a piece of art if it’s been stolen!” she told me. “And you don’t need to be a lawyer to understand that.” But soon she figured out that his attitude was the norm— it was her own that was deviant. The phone call came near the beginning of Czegledi’s steep learning curve. “Over a period of a few years, I discovered that the business of art is one of the most corrupt, dirtiest industries on the planet. There are no regulations and theft is rampant. It’s not pretty. The patina of
loveliness that most people associate with art didn’t exist in the reality that I found. It was filled with criminals—and a lot of different kinds.”

  Instead of being scared off, though, Czegledi became intrigued. She decided she wanted to know everything about stolen art and the law around it. There were no courses she could take, so she would have to educate herself. She soon learned there was at least a fuzzy regulatory framework in place.

  In Lyon, France, there was Interpol, the international police organization established in 1923, which issued posters and CDS listing stolen artwork from across the globe. It had a database of stolen art. She flew to Lyon and met with Interpol staff.

  In Paris, there was the International Council of Museums (ICOM), founded in 1946, which provided guidelines for the buying practices of museums in most countries, but it was loosely organized. She met them too.

  In New York, there was the International Foundation for Art Research (IFAR), a private foundation established in 1969 that mainly represented the interests of archaeologists in studying the impact of the massive looting of cultural heritage across the earth. IFAR lobbied governments, hosted conferences, and had started to make its own list of missing pieces of art. Czegledi attended its conferences.

  In London, there was the Art Loss Register, a private company started in the 1990s that had created the world’s largest international database of stolen artworks; collectors, auction houses, museums, and galleries paid a fee to search it. So far, the database contained over 100,000 stolen pieces of art, including hundreds of Picassos. Czegledi met the owner, Julian Radcliffe, and brought one of alr’s staff to Toronto to speak to the art crowd.

  The most important international treaty was the unesco 1970 Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property (Czegledi can say that really fast). Canada accepted the convention in 1978, the United States in 1983. “Basically, it says, if you’re a member of this treaty, you cannot knowingly bring stolen artwork from another country into your country. Doesn’t that sound fair?” Czegledi said.

  By the time she received a call from Wolfond, she’d travelled to dozens of conferences around the globe and met the leading lawyers in the field, including Lawrence Kaye and Howard Spiegler, at Harrick, Fienstein, in New York, who were making strides in efforts to restitute Holocaust-looted artwork; John Huerta, General Counsel for the Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, D.C.; and Norman Palmer, the London-based figurehead of the cultural property law community. There weren’t many cultural property lawyers Czegledi could seek out: “We could all fit in one very small room,” she said. By then she knew enough to tell Wolfond about the Art Loss Register and Interpol. She had also started receiving calls from Toronto police officers, who wanted to learn more as well: they didn’t understand this world, they told her.

  “The issues I was encountering were local and current, or historical, like the Holocaust or the Russian Revolution, or international, dealing with imports and exports. There were all these layers and levels,” Czegledi said. By 2003, she was teaching a course in international art law at the University of Lyon’s Faculty of Law. This was around when we met in Toronto’s financial district and she barraged me with information. She’d been storing it up.

  After our meeting, as promised, my notebook was full; and that evening, when I turned on my television, art theft was the news. Images from the looting of the National Museum of Iraq flashed across all the major networks: the museum was in ruins; display cases had been smashed, humanity’s earliest tools and art looted. The world watched, including museum curators, who had warned of the incident in advance, and hundreds of archaeologists, who were ashamed at and tormented by the sight. It wasn’t a shock to Czegledi.

  “Give me a break,” she said. “The whole world knows this museum is going to be looted, and then, surprise—it’s looted! Talk about pathetic.” As far as anyone could tell, this was the largest museum theft in history. She told me those stolen pieces would be moving fast through Jordan and Kuwait to the art markets in Geneva, London, New York, and Toronto— wherever the money was. There was an efficient shadow transportation system in place, Czegledi assured me.

  I called the Royal Ontario Museum a few months later, and a curator there confirmed that he had been offered the chance to buy some Iraqi antiquities. The institution declined. “We will never see some of those pieces again,” Czegledi said. “Iraq’s two greatest non-renewable resources: oil and antiquities.” About a year after we met, Czegledi moved out of her corporate law practice and dedicated herself full-time to cultural heritage law. She rented an office on the first floor of a brick house on a tree-lined street and bought a domain name, czeglediartlaw.ca. On her website she posted a list of provenance requirements and tips for staying clean in the art market. Her new digs quickly became a hub for local artists and gallery staff who’d been struck by theft. One afternoon, Tarah Aylward, director of Toronto’s Ingram Gallery, met with Czegledi to discuss the thefts that had beset the gallery.

  “You feel very alone,” said Aylward. “Where do I turn, who do I go to? I get emails from galleries across the country saying they have been robbed.” Aylward, like Wolfond, was experiencing paranoia. “I keep thinking I’m going to walk into a gallery or someone’s condo and see these artworks. I want the gallery to be secure. But are people going to come in if there are bars on the windows, if it’s all gated up? At openings, I’m suspicious now. The thieves who do this work are not street criminals. They are sophisticated, polished, and certainly they are successful.”

  As if to prove Czegledi’s point about ineptitude, a Toronto lawyer was busted with a condominium full of stolen art. Czegledi attended some of the court proceedings. The Crown had flipped one of the lawyer’s associates, who in turn agreed to testify against the accused lawyer. During the trial, it was revealed that the man who had been flipped was a convicted art thief. His credibility as a witness was destroyed by the defence. In exchange for his testimony, though, the art thief had secured immunity. The judge acquitted the lawyer, and because of the deal with police, the art thief was free to go. “So there’s a condo full of stolen art, but everyone gets off the hook,” Czegledi said.

  “There are only a handful of detectives in the entire world who have the experience and the training to investigate art thefts properly,” she told me, and most of them were in her Rolodex. In the United States there was a unit of two in Los Angeles; in Canada, a unit of two in Montreal; in England, Scotland Yard’s Art and Antiques Squad; in Italy, a unit with the Carabinieri charged with preventing the theft of Italian antiquities, which was rampant. Paris had a unit, and some officers in the Netherlands kept a list of stolen work. The fbi had a famous undercover agent named Robert Wittman, with whom Czegledi consulted once in a while. The “Problem,” though, ignored borders and jurisdictions. Countries across the globe were being drained of cultural loot for the markets in New York and London, which in turn served collectors in wealthy enclaves across the planet.

  “China, Afghanistan, all of Eastern Europe, now Iraq,” said Czegledi. “The statistic for looting actually went down in the Czech Republic recently. You know why? Because everything has been stolen. It’s like a bad joke.”

  In 2006, she flew to Brussels to speak on a conference panel about what Europe was doing to stem the tide of illegal imports, and discovered the answer: “Not much.” After the conference she met with a Brussels police investigator, who took Czegledi to a chic part of the city, where they toured antique stores. At one shop specializing in Chinese antiquities, they chatted up the owner. He explained how he got his merchandise. Sometimes he travelled to China, to a warehouse where all the looted antiquities were stored, and picked out whatever he wanted. He used a special cargo company to transport the illegal items to the borders of Belgium. It cost one euro per kilo. At the border he met the cargo himself, put the loot in his trunk, and drove it back to his shop. Sometimes, though, he went to China for
longer to participate personally in excavating an archaeological site. He could buy items as they were lifted out of the ground. The dealer did not realize that he was speaking to an international art lawyer and a criminal investigator. The Belgian investigator was shocked at how comfortable the dealer was telling them how he ripped off China’s cultural heritage. Nothing surprised Czegledi anymore.

  Everything about the Problem was opaque: the relationships between the players, the cash transactions, the collision between high and low culture, between street thugs and elite collectors, between detectives’ quest to learn and their access to information, between the urge to protect a work of art and the urge to possess it—all little pieces of the mysterious puzzle scattered across the globe. According to Czegledi, the war on art theft was being lost, and nobody even knew how big the war was or where the lines of battle were. She told me she came to see the Problem in terms of information—more specifically, as a lack of credible information. “How do we know how large the illegal economy in art is? There’s simply not enough data,” Czegledi said. “Hello. This is the twenty-first century. How can that be?”

  Interpol and UNESCO listed art theft as the fourth-largest black market in the world (after drugs, money-laundering, and weapons). But what did that mean? After I’d been following Czegledi’s career for several years, one point was clear: don’t look at the Hollywood versions of an art thief—the Myth. This is a bigger game, with more players, and the legitimate business of art is directly implicated. A lot of the crimes are hidden in the open. Stealing art is just the beginning. Then the art is laundered up into the legitimate market, into private collections, into the world’s most renowned museums. In 2007, this was happening all over the world, and there was only this little group of lawyers who gathered in conference rooms, darkly bemused by the size and scope of the mess. Part of the Problem was that it had been allowed to become so big that it was everyone’s problem and, therefore, no one’s.