Hot Art (22 page)

“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-regarded 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.

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

D
ETECTIVE 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.)