Hot Art (25 page)

Hrycyk was finally granted permission to examine the Picasso. He pored over it. Bad luck. It was one of an unnumbered series consisting of 250 prints, all made in 1934; there were 249 others exactly like it. Hrycyk contacted the print's owner, who sent him an old photograph of it. The detective put it under high magnification and peered at Picasso's signature. When he enhanced the image, he saw something in the lower right-hand corner, cut off by the frame. “It appeared to be the number 92.” Hrycyk spent hours researching Picasso's series and hunted down 16 of the remaining prints from the same 1934 edition. None of them had a number in the corner.

Hrycyk went back and studied the auction house's Picasso. There was no number on it, but that didn't mean the number had never been there. Hrycyk noticed that the right-hand corner had “a disturbance” exactly where the number was on the photograph. The detective needed a pair of better eyes, so he photographed the mysterious corner of the auction-house Picasso and sent the images to an El Segundo aerospace corporation that conducts detailed photo-imaging analysis for the U.S. Air Force.

The analyst found what Hrycyk couldn't: a visible erasure had been made to a pencil notation in the corner. The super-magnified view clearly showed that someone had erased a number from the Picasso, and the erasure exactly matched the visible portion of the number on the photograph of the stolen print. What is amazing is that even after someone had erased the number, the aerospace analyst could see it clearly: what Hrycyk identified as a 92 was actually a 97. The lower part of the French numeral 7 had been cut off in the photo.

The analyst went further. He magnified the image of Picasso's signature on the photograph and corrected distortions caused by the angle at which the photograph had been taken and by the size of the image. He measured the exact position of various points in the signature in relation to the edges of the Minotaur image above it, which he then compared to the same reference points on the sixteen similar prints that Hrycyk had tracked down. When superimposed over the photograph, only one print matched the location and measurements of Picasso's signature—the print at the auction house.

Hrycyk doesn't sound self-satisfied when he tells this story. He's deadpan. The Picasso was returned to its rightful owner, but only because Hrycyk was stubborn, and because of aerospace technology. Hrycyk also found evidence that suggested enterprising criminals from various fields were becoming more interested in fine art. When the
LAPD
raided the home of a well-known drug dealer named Derek Wright, it found a cache of fine art along with drugs. Hrycyk was called in to make sense of it.

“Wright was fascinating,” he said. “He bought and sold drugs but stacked his home with art. We found over two hundred works stashed there when he was arrested, and there was evidence of selectivity. Apparently he'd put the word out, ‘If you bring me art and antiques, I will buy them from you.' He seemed to enjoy collecting other people's treasures.” Wright may also have been accepting art as payment for money owed to him, and it is possible that he was positioning himself into the middleman slot as handler, like Paul. “He was hoarding it, maybe trying to figure out what it was worth, and perhaps studying the various paths it could take while being laundered into the art market,” suggested Hrycyk.

UP THE FOOD CHAIN
, art galleries and dealers were also being burglarized. Before Hrycyk had first started out, in 1986, he'd rarely set foot in a gallery, but now he knew most of the dealers, and some were facing aggressive thieves. Hrycyk told me there were gangs who smashed their way in through front windows with blunt objects and drove away with the artwork: this really was the Wild West. That became clear to me when I rode along with him and Lazarus to the antique-store burglary on La Cienega Boulevard. But that was a sophisticated theft compared to some of the crime scenes the detectives were called to. “Sometimes these guys are just brutal,” said Hrycyk.

Leslie Sacks Fine Art is tucked into a strip mall in the upscale L.A. area of Brentwood. Its owner agreed to meet me one hot afternoon. The entrance to Sacks's gallery faces a parking lot, where a mounted flag advertises to the passing traffic:
MIRó, CHAGALL, PICASSO
. Sacks had been burglarized twice in two years. In both cases, the thieves smashed his windows— triggering the alarm—and quickly raided the room. After the first burglary, in which a David Hockney was stolen, Sacks paid for Plexiglas windows and doors, but his security measure wasn't enough. The thieves returned, and brought a giant steel pipe to smash the Plexiglas repeatedly until they knocked it out of its frame. That took a little longer and required more force, but even though the alarm was triggered in the process, they still had enough time to steal another Hockney. They walked right past a Picasso.

When Hrycyk investigated, he noted that fact. “It was possible they were filling an order for a Hockney, or that they were smart enough to know that a Hockney would be easier to sell on the open market than a Picasso... less recognizable. Either way, the gang responsible was savvy.” They have not been caught, and the Hockneys have not been recovered.

On the afternoon I visited, Sacks Fine Art was displaying works by David Hockney, Frank Stella, and Jasper Johns, ranging in price from $20,000 to $60,000. “The entire business of dealing art is based on trust,” Sacks told me. “And there will always be dealers who violate that trust and who take advantage of people's greed and vulnerability. Good dealers with good sources are the ones to use because this reduces the risk for the buyer.” For Sacks, good business is all about building personal connections and knowing the people with whom he is doing business. “When a painting is stolen, it has to be laundered,” he said. “There are two ways to do this. One is to send it to Japan or to another country very far away. The other way is simply to hide it somewhere for a very long time, until anybody who would recognize the stolen painting is dead or has long forgotten it.” The art market is self-policed, Sacks admitted. “That system works most of the time, because a dishonest dealer will be ostracized from the community.” He remembered one man he once did business with who turned out to be a con man. The man built up a sense of trust with Sacks over a period of many years. “I later found out he lied about every aspect of his work. He generated false invoices and false artworks. I offered him a chance to give me back what was stolen from me.” In this case, it was money. “I said give me half of what you owe me. He laughed at me.” Sacks informed his colleagues about the man.

As Sacks pointed out, art isn't the only industry to rely on trust. “Diamond dealers function in the same way,” he said. And it was because of that trust factor that he thought buying at auction houses was a risk. “Would you buy a diamond at an auction? Would you buy brain surgery at an auction?” Sacks called the entire trade around auction houses “the Las Vegas complex.” He felt that there were too many backroom deals and that it was impossible to know what was actually happening inside those businesses. “Every Picasso is different, every invoice is different,” he said.

Later, Sacks stood at his gallery's front door between a pair of large bay windows in a blade of six-o'clock sunlight that cut harshly through the glass. He watched a mechanical wall of bars lower over his gallery windows—the new countermeasure. It was something of an iconic image: an independent gallery owner, a self-made man, protecting his business.

He talked to me about what happens to stolen paintings by well-known artists, like the Hockneys taken from his gallery, but he approached the issue from a philosophical point of view. “In America everybody wants everything now, and everybody believes they can have it right now,” he said. “This is not the case in many cultures around the world. In the Middle East or China, time is viewed very differently. A person could buy a famous work of art, a Picasso, say, and not worry about having to do anything with it right now. That person may wrap up that stolen painting and hide it away in a cellar or a safe and not plan on touching it during his lifetime. He may view that stolen painting as an inheritance—not even for his own children, but for his grandchildren.”

A few minutes later we were gliding down Santa Monica Boulevard. Sacks was at the wheel of his Porsche, its windshield refracting a hazy pink sunset. He turned to me and said, “The art world is way stranger than you could possibly imagine. But maybe you've figured that out already.”

Later that week, Hrycyk pointed out that it wasn't just the art inside galleries that vanished—sometimes it was the gallery itself. He told me about one gallery that had accepted work from hundreds of clients over a number of years. Then the gallery disappeared. “Not a single victim phoned the police,” said Hrycyk. “It's a great example of how people can lose things and just keep going, as if they're made out of Teflon.” Hrycyk heard the story almost by accident. An
LAPD
officer from another division had brought a photograph of her recently deceased father into the gallery to have it framed. When the officer went to pick it up, the gallery was gone. Her partner said, “I think there's a unit in the
LAPD
that deals with this kind of stuff.” Hrycyk sent out a Crime Alert and was eventually contacted by thirty victims. “Some of those victims went back to 1999,” he said. He found evidence that the gallery owner was moving around the country, attending travelling shows, home shows, “lotus blossom shows.”

He tracked her movements through Oregon and New Mexico and eventually found her in Dallas. He issued an arrest warrant, and when the thief was caught, Hrycyk went to Dallas himself to interview her. She was sixty-eight years old, and during the interview she admitted that she'd kept most of the art in a storage locker on the outskirts of Dallas. There Hrycyk found hundreds of canvasses. He rented a U-Haul, piled all the stolen art into it, and drove it to the evidence warehouse in Los Angeles.

On a stifling afternoon I was honoured to get a vip tour of the evidence warehouse, not far from Parker Center. The warehouse sits on a near-lifeless industrialized corner in downtown Los Angeles. The building is unmarked, with a thirty-foot-high fence crowned by razor wire, and for good reason: it's a giant safe, stocked full of valuable goods. Past the security gate, inside the open hangar, thousands of boxes line tall metal shelving units stretching deep into a department-store kind of limbo. It was sort of like a Walmart, except all of this stuff had been seized from criminal investigations across the city.

In the area near the garage-door entrance, the cardboard boxes on shelves are organized into loose categories: ammo, watches, baseball bats, cellphones, knives, foreign currency. When I visited, one box held dozens of walking canes. There was a box of fake badges, of course. And there were a couple boxes of books, sorted into two categories: literature and self-help. In literature was a novel by Dennis Lehane, and a Harry Potter book. We veered to the left, down a long aisle of shelves that opened into an area occupied by a neat stack of paintings and sculptures on the floor. Hrycyk lifted an abstract painting. He was careful handling the art, but not delicate. “This was supposed to be a de Kooning,” he said. “It's homemade. A man named Dr. Likhite was trying to sell this for $15 million.”

Vilas Likhite was a doctor. His father had been a teacher to the family of a maharaja in India but had relocated to the United States. When Hrycyk interviewed Likhite, he told the detective he remembered playing with the maharaja's children. “He wanted the status that he'd been in the presence of all his life,” said Hrycyk. “So he started to buy cheap art, and transformed those works into signed art from the modern masters.” Likhite found people in Australia who specialized in forging provenance papers, and suddenly he became a source of million-dollar artworks. The elite of his community flocked to him.

“This art represented power and status,” said Hrycyk, pointing to a sculpture. It was a fake
. Likhite's price tag: $28 million. He pointed at a statue of a Buddha. “Likhite was selling that for $48 million,” he said. “He claimed it was made out of jade from the eleventh century, from China. Obviously, it was not.”

Hrycyk received some complaints, did some investigating into Likhite, and decided to conduct a sting operation. He arranged for a fellow
LAPD
officer to go undercover, posing as a businessman from mainland Korea who wanted to bolster his art collection. “Likhite had this old-world charm,” Hrycyk remembered. “When the undercover officer walked into the room, Likhite stayed on his feet, and asked for permission to sit down.” When the deal was done, Likhite was caught in a hotel room in possession of twenty-four fake canvasses, including a wannabe Jasper Johns and a fake Mary Cassatt.

Later, when Hrycyk executed a search warrant on Likhite's house, the detective turned up more fake art—all of it now sitting in the pile we were looking at in the warehouse. “The irony of the case was that he didn't need to sell anything,” said Hrycyk. “He had a good life.” Hrycyk stared down at the canvasses for a moment, and then walked across the warehouse to an even larger open area at the very back. He stopped and looked at hundreds of stacked canvasses, prints, and framed paintings. They took up a residential garage worth of floor space and appeared to be enough art to stock a mid-sized commercial gallery. Some of this art was the work he had hauled back from Dallas, from the art gallery that had disappeared.