TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/112591/1125400.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 11.2 KB | 234 lines

                                                                                ART, Page 86

It's a Steal


The world's cultural heritage is being looted by thieves who
often have ties to organized crime -- and even get help from
the art world

By JAMES WALSH -- Reported by Mary Cronin/New York, Victoria
Foote-Greenwell/Paris and James Wilde/Ankara, with other bureaus


    -- During the night of Feb. 2-3, 1990, masked men
surprised six unarmed guards watching a storeroom in
Herculaneum, ancient Pompeii's bedfellow in fate when Mount
Vesuvius erupted in A.D. 79. After breaking through a wall, the
thieves took four hours to select 223 of the most precious
antiquities, as if they had a dealer's catalog in hand.
Estimated value: $18 million. None of the relics have
resurfaced.

    -- On March 18, 1990, two thieves disguised as policemen
entered Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, trussed up two
guards and made off with a king's ransom: three Rembrandts, five
paintings by Degas, one Manet and one of only 36 known Vermeers
in existence. The Vermeer canvas was hacked from its stretcher,
leaving chips of paint on the floor. At an estimated total value
of $200 million, it may have been the most lucrative art theft
in history.

    -- On April 14, 1991, armed robbers raided Amsterdam's
state-run Van Gogh Museum at night, cut the alarm system and
spent 45 minutes picking out 20 works by the Dutch
Impressionist. Thanks to a flat tire on the getaway car, the
heist was short lived. Among the loot recovered 35 minutes
later: The Potato Eaters, which had also been stolen in 1988,
from another Dutch museum. Total worth of the take: about $500
million -- assuming that such famous hot potatoes could have
been resold.

    The art of the world is being looted. From New York to
Phnom Penh, from ancient ruins in Turkey to up-to-date museums
in Amsterdam, precious records of human culture are vanishing
into the dark as thieves steal with near impunity. Paintings,
prints, statuary, rare coins, rare books and cultural treasures
of every kind and all ages are being snatched.

    Why not? The auction market may be faring poorly this
season, but over the years an insatiable demand for artworks and
antiquities has kept the price trajectory rising well above the
rate of inflation. What used to be upheld as things of beauty
or objects of veneration are increasingly traded like
zero-coupon bonds or pork-belly futures. According to U.S.
government estimates, "art theft is a $2 billion-a-year
business," says Constance Lowenthal, executive director of the
nonprofit New York-based International Foundation for Art
Research. "But it could be much larger." Trace, a three-year-old
British magazine that tracks art crimes, reckons the value
worldwide at $6 billion a year.

    If Trace's estimate is accurate, the take from museum
burglaries, gallery heists, housebreaks and the looting of
archaeology sites would rank as the world's third most
profitable criminal enterprise, behind drugs and computer theft.
More and more, art is becoming a prey of organized crime.
Italy's single most valuable missing art work is a Baroque
masterpiece, Caravaggio's 1609 Nativity, which was stolen in
1969 from the Oratory of San Lorenzo in Palermo, Sicily.
Investigators in Britain are now convinced that the painting,
worth about $50 million today, has been used by the Mafia as
security for drug deals over the past 20 years. Kenneth Klug,
a deputy special agent for the U.S. Customs Service, says his
agency is "sure" that drug lords in Colombia's Medellin cartel
"have priceless works of stolen art hanging in their villas."

    Unless the thieves are caught in the act, stealing art and
then selling it is remarkably easy. Ill-gotten Greco-Roman
sculptures, Renaissance Bibles or friezes from an Egyptian
Pharaoh's tomb can be iced away for a time and realize a
generous return. In Switzerland, which treats goods in storage
with the same discretion as bank accounts, a work can come out
of a bonded free-port warehouse in Zurich or Geneva with clear
legal title to the possessor after five years. In Liechtenstein
and the Cayman Islands, the term is seven days.

    Police suspect the involvement of insiders in many artful
scores. Early this year the Grand Palais in Paris spent $1
million on extra security and $590,000 on insurance for a major
retrospective of Georges Seurat. The exhibitors grouped sketches
together in cases and bolted paintings onto the walls. But a
small Seurat drawing, Le Cocher de Fiacre, vanished after video
and alarm systems had been turned off and before guards had
started their rounds. The smell of a rat is even more pungent
in raids on storage rooms. According to a police survey, 57.8%
of all thefts of paintings and drawings from public collections
in France between 1979 and 1989 were from storage spaces,
usually with no sign of forced entry.

    If it were only a simple case of crooks vs. cops, art
theft might be easier to control. But complicity is rife within
the art world. Richard Volpe, who was an ace art detective with
the New York City police for 25 years, contends that "the least
guilty of all parties are the thieves." These "mules," he
insists, "couldn't do it without the cooperation of gallery
owners, flea-market purveyors, auction houses, museums,
insurers, security companies, collectors and finally
law-enforcement agencies. Everyone else either knowingly or
through neglect gives the thief a leg up."

    As investigators tell it, if a spectacular find comes with
even the most thinly plausible paperwork documenting its
origins, dealers generally leap at the chance to buy. Museums,
those bastions of traditional culture, can also be compromised.
Lowenthal points out that the Getty Museum, endowed by the late
oil billionaire J. Paul Getty, has "enormous funds" and does not
have to solicit donations to build its collection virtually from
scratch.

    Since 1988 the Getty has been embroiled in a dispute over
a 7-ft.-tall marble beauty: a magnificent early 5th century
B.C. Greek statue of a goddess, perhaps Aphrodite. Italy claims
it was furtively unearthed in 1979 from the archaeological dig
at Morgantina, Sicily. Some experts doubt that Morgantina, a
onetime Greek colony, was the specific origin, but Italy is
convinced the statue came from somewhere under its soil.

    The Getty bought the Aphrodite for an undisclosed --
certainly thumping -- sum. Beforehand, it insists, it had sent
out form letters reporting the acquisition to various
Mediterranean countries. When Italian authorities later heard
what the sculpture looked like, they blew a loud whistle. Since
they had no conclusive proof, however, the Getty put its goddess
on display. Says Jack Josephson, chairman of the U.S.
Information Agency's Cultural Property Advisory Committee: "The
museum's holier-than-thou attitude is in contrast to the facts.
Where do they think it came from?"

    Together with the U.S. Customs Service, Josephson's agency
has helped stem the smuggling of archaeological loot from one
region: Latin America. Plunderers of pre-Columbian sites used
to have a field day rifling covertly excavated Mayan, Olmec and
Incan ruins and shipping the artifacts north to a voracious U.S.
market. In 1970 the UNESCO convention on cultural property
established an international framework to curb pillage and the
illicit trade in artifacts. Among the rich countries that are
the biggest markets for stolen works, however, only the U.S. and
Canada signed the treaty. Britain, France, Germany, Switzerland,
the Low Countries, Scandinavia and Japan remain holdouts today.

    "Our major concern," Josephson explains, "is that looting
destroys the site where artifacts are found, thus wiping away
a page of history forever." Turkey fears that an encyclopedia
of history will be wiped out. Since the Neolithic Age, the
Anatolian peninsula has been a crossroads of conquerors and
civilizations. By official count, it is home to 20,000
monuments, 10,000 tombs, 5,000 mounds that may conceal buried
settlements and 3,000 ancient cities belonging to 36 various
pre-Turkish cultures. It is a virtual supermarket for
antiquities -- and looters take their fill.

    "Nowhere in the world can you find such a quantity and
variety of ancient art," says Ozgen Acar, a Turkish
investigative journalist. In the "open-air museum" that is his
homeland, he says, farmers go into hock to buy metal detectors,
while Sotheby's and Christie's catalogs "sell better than
Korans." One Turkish case, tied up in litigation since 1986,
involves the country's claim on the Lydian Hoard, a famous
collection of 250 gold and silver wares. New York City's
Metropolitan Museum of Art, which bought the pieces, does not
acknowledge that they came from Turkey.

    Source countries themselves bear some blame. Turkey,
Egypt, Israel, Greece, Italy and other nations claim state
ownership of all artifacts underground, but cannot afford what
they promise to pay for any finds. Says Josephson: "An Egyptian
farmer will not report an archaeological find for fear his
fields will be confiscated. So he either throws the object away
or sells it to a cousin in Cairo." Though a peasant who finds
an artifact makes a small fraction of its retail value -- one
contraband Cambodian Buddha head on sale in Hong Kong recently
carried a $37,000 price tag -- it is better than nothing.

    Unidroit, a Rome-based intergovernmental organization, is
drafting codes that would harmonize many countries' cultural-
property laws and make the UNESCO treaty more acceptable.
Interpol and other enforcement agencies are hoping that computer
files -- once the many different police computers can talk to
one another -- will help further.

    Yet the attitude of purchasers to whom the illicit trade
panders is not something laws can change. When taxed with blame,
art connoisseurs and dealers grow philosophical: they insist
that they are rescuing pieces from an uncertain fate, that they
are better equipped to maintain and protect much artwork and
that in general, cultural property ought not to recognize
frontiers. Lowenthal herself admits, "A heritage is also a
splendid ambassador of the country's culture to the rest of the
world."

    J.H. Merryman, a Stanford University law professor who
specializes in cultural property, declares, "The misty-eyed
romantic sophomores who contend that everything should go back
because it is Greek or Turkish patrimony are irrational. Museums
have a purpose. Collectors and dealers can be engaged in
legitimate activity. The fact that a piece came from a
particular country does not automatically give that country an
overpowering right to it. It might be better taken care of,
better displayed, seen by more people, in a museum in a
different country."

    His point is not idle, and many scholars would rush to
defend it. Still, when an Etruscan tomb is emptied, a church
desecrated, a Mayan temple bulldozed and a museum Vermeer yanked
from its frame, it is hard to see how rich societies, let alone
poor ones, can enjoy art in peace for long. In turning a blind
eye to the canker that feeds on it, the art world is losing
security, losing art and losing its soul.