Hot Art (31 page)

The lobby is bland and bureaucratic. Everything is corporate clean. Agents in suits and security tags hustle through the turnstiles. The only pictures on display are a series of portrait photographs: the Top Ten Most Wanted Men. Most of the pictures are grainy shots with block text under the mugs offering a $100,000 reward for information leading to their capture. The top left-hand picture when I visit is of Osama bin Laden. For him the government is offering $25 million, plus a $2-million bonus from the American Pilots' Association and the Air Transport Association.

Bonnie Magness-Gardiner meets me at visitor check-in. She's a slender woman, in her early fifties, wearing a blazer, blouse, and slacks, with glasses and chin-length greying hair. She looks distinctly like an elementary-school principal. If you saw her on the street you would never guess she leads the bureau's battle to fight international art crime.

The
FBI
unveiled its Art Crime Team in March 2005. Its official rationale for devoting resources, money, and agents to the cause of stolen art was the looting of Iraq's National Museum and the spread of that loot to American shores. The media's mourning of the ancient treasures had put a spotlight on the recovery efforts by Matthew Bogdanos and his team. The
FBI
and the cia had taken equal shares of the blame for being unable to prevent the 9/11 attacks, and it's possible that the
FBI
was searching for some much-needed positive pr. By mid-decade, the bureau was allocating much of its resources to counterterrorism, so it seemed an awkward moment to introduce a new cultural property squad. But that's exactly what the bureau did. My hunch is that Robert Wittman must have done some politicking, but the agent told me, with a smile, that he was sticking to the official explanation.

To launch the Art Crime Team, the bureau employed the tactics of a media-savvy corporation unveiling a new product. There was a cool new logo—a badge-sized circle with images of famous stolen art: the tormented head of Edvard Munch's
The Scream
in the bottom left, a stolen Iraqi antiquity near the top. At its centre sat the serene face of Leonardo da Vinci's
Madonna of the Yarnwinder,
the mother of Christianity holding her baby Christ. Stamped across the circle were three letters
ACT
emblazoned in a comic-book burnt orange. The outer rim of the circle was trimmed in a more conservative font and read “Federal Bureau of Investigation Art Crime Team.”

Over the next year, stories in the
New York Times,
the
Washington Post,
and dozens of other newspapers around the world carried the intended message: eight agents had been handpicked from hundreds of applicants for the new team and were supported by special prosecutors to handle the complexities of these cases—a fact undoubtedly noted by art thieves and by crooked dealers and collectors, who rarely saw the interior of a courtroom, much less a smear of their reputation, conviction, or a prison sentence.

The
FBI
also rolled out a new website. Its pages included a stroke of bureaucratic genius—the Top Ten List of Most Wanted Stolen Art. The “Top Ten” concept had worked wonders for most-wanted fugitives, so why not for paintings? It was sexy, by government standards, but it didn't quite work. Paintings and sculptures, after all, don't have the same allure as those grainy black and white mug shots of tough men out to destroy our pursuit of happiness.

Still, the announcement, the team of agents, the legal support, and the new website did more to focus attention on the problem of international art theft than any other law enforcement agency in the world ever had. This was the famous
FBI
, after all, which had busted Al Capone, killed John Dillinger, and, ultimately, infiltrated the American imagination. It was now officially hunting art thieves.

“Art and cultural property crime—which includes theft, fraud, looting, and trafficking across state and international lines—is a looming criminal enterprise with estimated losses running as high as $6 billion annually,” stated the
FBI
's website.

Although the Art Crime Team may have been a political pr manoeuvre, it gave Wittman a more secure position, a larger budget, a group of agents to work with, and more influence. There were now agents in cities across the United States being trained to investigate art crimes while they tended to their other caseloads. Wittman also got a dedicated manager.

Magness-Gardiner, a trained archaeologist, had served ten years with the U.S. State Department's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs before taking over the
FBI
's Art Crime Team. After the invasion of Iraq, it was Magness-Gardiner who was tasked with keeping an eye on that country's cultural heritage—including the National Museum and the ten thousand archaeological sites left unguarded during the war. “I talked to a lot of generals. They weren't always particularly interested in what I had to say,” she said delicately. She switched departments, was issued her
FBI
identification, and dug in at the Hoover Building.

Magness-Gardiner is not a field agent. She coordinates the act operation, analyses information, and, once a year, gathers her
FBI
team together to trade information. Agents like Wittman may crawl the globe busting art thieves, but it's Magness-Gardiner who is the guardian of the data they bring home to the bureau. The National Stolen Art File, which the
FBI
has been building for three decades, sits in a laptop under her desk.

“It was started in 1979, with cards in a drawer, not long after
IFAR
's list was created. In 1995, those cards were converted into electronic info.” The act manager told me that she accessed the database on a weekly basis, and added new items on a monthly basis. Compared to the Art Loss Register, which holds over 200,000 stolen works, the
FBI
's National Stolen Art File is relatively small, about 6,500.

Magness-Gardiner also dispenses and gathers information from across the globe. When we met, she'd recently spent a week in Macedonia, where members from a dozen different Eastern European police forces gathered to learn from her experience—officers and detectives from Romania, Poland, Albania, Serbia, Bosnia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Moldova, and Montenegro. “These are source countries,” she said, meaning they were exporters of looted art that usually had to cross a number of international lines to get to the buyers in Paris, London, and New York.

“Often their art is passing through other countries to move on. So these people meet, and they build a network.” The year before, she had trained a group of South American law-enforcement personnel in Bolivia. “And it's good for us, too, to make contact with those investigators. A lot of art crime in the U.S. has an international component,” she said.

It was Bonnie Czegledi who first mentioned Bonnie Magness-Gardiner to me. The two Bonnies had met at international conferences while Magness-Gardiner was with the State Department. They struck up a professional relationship. When Magness-Gardiner took over the Art Crime Team, I got her contact information from Czegledi. “She knows a lot,” Czegledi told me. “She is definitely someone you need to talk to.” After I exchanged emails with the
FBI
PR
department, Magness-Gardiner agreed to a series of phone interviews over several months. I then requested an in-person interview. We met in the fall of 2009, in Washington, D.C., just days before the U.S. capital was paralyzed by snowstorms.

That interview was a chance for me to cross-check information from interviews with Paul Hendry, Donald Hrycyk, and Robert Wittman. They were players working ground games, whereas Magness-Gardiner had the intelligence job. My questions to her focussed on the challenges of understanding and policing the enormous black market.

I asked Magness-Gardiner if it was fair to say that no one had a handle on how large the black market in stolen art had become. “Yes, that's fair to say,” she answered. “It's an illicit trade, and we don't really have very good statistics. Not all art thefts are reported, but roughly, it's a $4- to $6-billion industry globally. Those numbers were produced by British-based insurance companies a decade ago. It would be extremely difficult to come up with any solid number,” she explained. “When we say ‘black market,' really what we mean are those stolen items that are in the legitimate market and shouldn't be there. The black market isn't separate. So we're talking about items that have no history. The collectors, the museums, and the dealers all partake on some level.”

Magness-Gardiner was hinting at the unregulated art market. Czegledi had driven home that point in our early interviews; thieves like Paul and agents like Wittman had agreed. But I wanted to hear the head of the
FBI
Art Crime Team state it clearly, and she did.

“Art is one of the biggest unregulated markets in the U.S. The business of art tends to be very closed and secretive. It is still business done on a handshake. Financial transactions are quite difficult to track, because you don't have a paper trail. How art is bought, sold, and moved is a challenge in itself to understand. When a piece of art is bought or sold, there is the movement of the physical object from one location to another. There is also the transfer of money from one bank account to another. There is nothing to link those two events.” She was confirming Hrycyk's observation that some art dealers act like drug dealers.

“Another problem built into a business-on-a-handshake model is the issue of provenance. The first thing we tell a new agent to do is to find out whether or not the work of art that has been stolen is, in fact, real. Where does it come from? Where are its records? We don't know until we do a background investigation on the piece of art.” She continued, “Looking at the authenticity of a piece is always detective work. Unlike most other material items manufactured today, art does not have serial numbers. Lack of a serial number is one element that really distinguishes art from other types of property theft. The only parallel is jewellery and gems—difficult to trace because they don't have a serial number either, and so they are particularly valuable to thieves,” she said.

“The middlemen and the dealers don't want other people to know their sources. This can stem from a legitimate business concern, because if other dealers find out who their sources are, they could use those same sources.”

I asked Magness-Gardiner about the myth versus the reality of the international problem. Early on, Paul and I had discussed the motivations of art thieves, and he had stuck to his point that criminals steal art for money, first and foremost. The Dr. No theory had dogged everyone, but did Magness-Gardiner agree with the British thief?

“Thieves usually steal art because they want the money. They are burglars, not art specialists. They need to have a method of turning the objects they steal into money. They'll take it to a pawnshop, a flea market, or walk into an art gallery and try to sell it. They don't have a sophisticated network,” she said. “But when you're dealing with high-end art, there's a network. It moves from the thief to a middleman. It's the middleman who knows how to get it to the market without tipping off the market or the police.” She described Paul's middleman model perfectly. If that was the case, and thieves were so easily exploiting the holes in the unregulated market, why did the market itself not bend to regulations? After all, wouldn't that go a long way toward fixing the problem?

“They don't want to be regulated,” Magness-Gardiner said. “Nobody wants to be regulated. Anyone who is faced with regulation will resist it. In the U.S. we've made a case for regulating weapons, and there were people who complained. We still do it. In the art world they would say, ‘There's no harm in these transactions. This is a free market economy, an open market, and we're exercising our right to sell something.'” It was the same speech the Art Loss Register's Julian Radcliffe had heard, ad nauseam, from dealers and galleries that didn't want to pay his search fees. “But the system has its consequences,” Magness-Gardiner pointed out. “You can sell works of art, and they cross state and international boundaries fairly easily. We do demand importation documents, but we do not regulate.”

The actual transportation, she says, isn't the issue. “It's the transaction—when you sell it, transfer it, trade it, or give it to someone else. That's why art has become an excellent vehicle for money laundering. For example, you can take a Picasso out of the country and sell it at an auction. The person who sold it might have earned $20 million and put it into a Swiss account that we don't know about. With other objects, like a car or a house, a person has some sort of document that identifies them as being the legitimate owner. That does not exist with art. You wouldn't sell a $5-million plane without a document, would you? With art, there is no document. I'm constantly amazed.” She sounded just like Hrycyk.

I veered the questions toward the interaction between dealers and thieves. From my discussions with Paul, it seemed as though the crucial point of contact between the crime and the legitimate market was the first trade. “The dealer who handles stolen art usually buys it from somebody he knows. He may suspect that this work of art is not quite legal, but he is not required to ask if what he is buying is stolen,” Magness-Gardiner said. “As long as that dealer doesn't ask the question, the seller doesn't have to tell him. There is no law that requires a dealer to ask if something he is buying is stolen. So now he's bought a work of art for a bargain-basement price, and there is no evidence that he knowingly bought it as stolen property. How do we prosecute him?”

Then she pointed out, “It's very easy to move lesser-known paintings into the legitimate market. Once it gets to the second person, and they handle it, nobody will notice that painting moving further into the market. It's the thief, and that first contact he sells it to, who knows that the artwork has been stolen. By the second transaction nobody knows anything, and nobody asks questions.”