When tombs continued to be raided, Egypt's ruling class regrouped. “Some priests-kings got together and said, âWe now rule this kingdom.'” These new pharaohs decided that the buried kings and their treasures were vulnerable, so they moved all of them into one tombâin the Valley of the Kings. Local thieves, though, quickly became a minor irritation compared to the invasions by a parade of foreign powers: Libyans, Nubians, Assyrians, Persians, and Macedonians. Alexander the Great fell in love with Egypt and wanted to be a pharaoh. Then the Romans arrived and carted off thousands of treasures to Europe. “Where are the most Egyptian obelisks found today? Not in Egypt. In Italy. So if you want to see an Egyptian obelisk, you go to Rome.”
When Napoleon invaded Egypt, he brought scientists from France to help him categorize and organize the artifacts he pillaged. Napoleon would never have considered it pillaging, though. “Both the Louvre and the British Museum started to collect around roughly the same time, so we know there was a healthy international trade in Egyptian artifacts.” The Louvre built up a lot of its early collection from Napoleon's Egyptian campaign, and after Napoleon was defeated by Lord Nelson, much of the loot was redirected to the British Museum.
“Archaeology and museums grew up together,” St. Hilaire explained. “It is important to understand that modern scientific archaeology is a relatively new idea. That practice started fairly late in human history, when the folks from Britain ended up in modern-day Iraq and Egypt. For many years, the difference between archaeology and treasure-hunting is indistinguishable. Looting was the norm.”
In the nineteenth century, Egyptomania hit Britain and other parts of the world full force. The aristocracy in London held mummy-unwrapping parties. Ancient Egyptians could not have predicted the value the world would place, thousands of years later, on the objects they created. Stealing cultural heritage became mainstream, and a group of collectors sprang up, first in the West and then in wealthy pockets around the globe. “What's important to remember is that there was nothing illegal about taking these artifacts. It was all a free market at that point.” This was
Indiana Jones
for real. Men came to the desert from far-off lands and carried pieces of it home with them.
In Egypt, that changed in the mid-twentieth century, when the country began to wrestle back control of its cultural heritage from foreign-interest groups. The Department of Antiquities was created to take stock of ancient treasures and move forward on archaeological work. Of the sixty-three tombs excavated from the Valley of the Kings when it was rediscovered in 1992, not one dig had been led by an Egyptian. But by 2002, Zahi Hawass, an Egyptian archaeologist and showman, had taken charge of Egyptian antiquities and seemed to rule the billion-dollar industry with the power of a pharaoh. Hawass, head of what's now called the Supreme Council of Antiquities, told a writer at
The New Yorker,
“To control all this, you have to make them fear you and make them love you at the same time.” He controlled the pyramids at Giza and all the archaeological digs in the country. He also began exporting Egypt's cultural heritage to the worldâfor big money. When you saw King Tut's treasure on tour, that was a Zahi Hawass production. Perhaps for the first time in the ancient kingdom's history, Egypt was profiting from its cultural heritage.
By this time, though, the world seemed addicted to “free” loot courtesy of Egypt, and stolen antiquities remained a major draw for thieves and corrupt dealers. Case in point: in 2005, a Manhattan-based art dealer was convicted of smuggling a bust of Amenhotep iiiâlikely King Tut's grandfatherâinto the United States. Frederick Schultz, who was sentenced to three years in prison, was linked to a vast network of middlemen spread out over a number of different countries. “There are constants in the history of human desire,” St. Hilaire told me. “There is a desire to loot that is constant. There's also a desire to preserve. In Egyptian history, both of those are plainly evident.”
On the last night of the conference, Bonnie Czegledi, Rick St. Hilaire, and I had dinner in a beautiful old restaurant in Cairo. We were all flying out the next morning. I said goodbye to St. Hilaire, who was staying at a smaller, less expensive hotel. When Czegledi and I returned to the Marriott, we decided to check out and then have a drink on the patio. We queued up at the front desk. When it was my turn, the desk clerk calmly informed me that I owed an extra $40 U.S. per night on my room. I felt a chill. “That can't be right,” I said.
The clerk assured me it was. There was a note attached to my account, he said. I asked to speak to the manager. The clerk looked nervous. I explained to him that I'd already had this conversation when I checked in, and the issue had been resolved. At first I was successful. He began preparing me a second bill, without the extra charge. Then he informed me that he had called the Organizer, who was coming downstairs to the lobby. “What does
he
have to do with this? Does he run the Marriott Hotel?” I asked. The clerk said, “Please wait here. He is coming soon.” Czegledi stood in the lobby while all of this unfolded. I watched as the new bill was printed up. I gave the clerk my Visa card and hoped the payment would go through before the Organizer arrived. Everything was happening very slowly. Finally, the card number was entered into a machine and the receipt began to print just as I saw the Organizer walk into the lobby.
“Did you pay?” he asked in a loud voice as he approached.
“Yes,” I answered, “I paid.”
He turned to the clerk and they had a quick, terse exchange in Arabic. It ended with him berating the desk clerk. Then he stepped very close to me, until our faces were just inches apart.
“You must pay the rate I told you to pay.”
“I've already paid the bill with my Visa card. The bill is settled.”
“I don't care about that bill. You will pay the rate I gave you.”
“Do you understand that I'm a journalist from North America, writing about the corruption in the art world?”
“I don't care what you are writing about,” he said. “You will pay.”
“I've paid. It's over.” I wasn't sure what to do. I stood still, didn't step back. But the Organizer stepped closer. The clerk, other staff in the lobby, and a few guests circulating near the desk looked frightened. Czegledi watched intently from a few feet away. I thought the Organizer was going to punch me. Instead he poked me with his finger.
“You haven't paid
me!
” he shouted.
I did not respond. His eyes were wide with rage, and he was shaking. We stood like that for what seemed like a long time, but it was probably less than a minute.
Then he collected himself and lowered his voice to a whisper.
“I am leaving now. I will leave instructions for you on your phone, in your room. They will include my room number. You will follow those instructions. You will follow those instructions and leave the money at the room that I tell you. There will be a message on your phone in your room.”
And then he left. I turned back to the clerk. He looked like a kid watching his father leave the dinner table after a fight. I didn't understand. How could the Organizer have power over the entire Marriott staff? Who was he? Czegledi and I went and had our drink on the patio. I was shaking from adrenaline. Later, on the way to our rooms, we had to pass through the lobby. The clerk approached.
“Sir,” he said politely. “Mr. âââ has instructed me to tell you he has left a message on your phone and you are to follow the instructions and deliver the envelope to his room. He wanted to make sure I told you this.”
I was worried now. I was staying in a hotel that seemed to be completely under the Organizer's control. What would happen if I didn't pay? He obviously knew what room I was in. He probably had a key-card to it. It was past midnight. Czegledi looked concerned as well. “What are you going to do?” she asked. “Do you think you should go to your room? He might be waiting for you.”
“I'm going to go to my room right now, grab my stuff, and sleep on your floor,” I said.
Czegledi agreed. Before I left my room with my bag, I looked at my phone. The message blinker was flashing hypnotically. Czegledi let me into her room. I was so tired I don't even remember hitting the pillow. The next morning we woke at 5:30 and went straight to the airport, then flew to London, where I stayed on for a week.
Before we'd said goodbye, I'd asked St. Hilaire about the size of the global black market. “I know in terms of dollar value that it's the fourth-largest crime, globally,” he said, “but it has remained a mostly invisible problem on the world stage. There isn't a lot of data out there, so it's very difficult to get models. What would be especially valuable is an anatomy of an art thief. Not the movie version of the billionaire who steals a Picasso. Just a thief who uses the giant black market to make a living.” As it turns out, there was someone just like that in the United Kingdom, and he wanted to talk.
“It's a marvellous time to be an art thief. Art theft has become one big game.”
PAUL
P
AUL BROKE INTO
a house for the first time when he was sixteen years old, in Plymouth, a small city in the English countryside not far from where he was born.
A different teenage boy had already visited the house, posing as a door-to-door merchant who was trading in junk. The scam was called “knocking” because it began by knocking on a stranger's door. It was a more sinister version of the encyclopedia-salesman routineâa cold call with malice.
The whole point was to get inside the house and look around. If possible the knocker would buy something cheap from the familyâmaybe a few pieces of grimy silverware or an old watch. Once the family had allowed the boy in, he could figure out what he really wanted but could not buy, items too valuable or too prized by the family to sell. Jewellery, cash, antiques.
Now it was late at night and the first boy was sitting in the car outside the house, waiting for Paul to finish the job. Paul stepped around the back to a window he knew was unlocked. The first boy had provided the intelligence: no alarm system, no dogs. The residents were old and had retired to bed early. It should have been easy. The problem was that Paul was not agile or quiet. In fact, he was surprisingly clumsy. Nothing went according to plan.
Instead of lowering himself gracefully through the window, he decided to jump. “I was so stupid,” he remembered. The minute Paul landed inside he had a sick feeling in his stomachâ fear and adrenaline. Everything happened in fast forward.
The residents of the house awoke. The lights flicked on. In the hallway, Paul was confronted up close by the husband. They stared at each other, not knowing what to do. Violence was not an option. Paul didn't know the first thing about violence. He was unarmed. “Guns weren't part of the art theft game when I started,” he said. Instead he did what came naturally. He was charming and upbeat. He smiled apologetically and relied on his practised innocence, the shock of his young face.
“I'm so sorry to disturb you,” Paul said. “Obviously I am terrible at this. You have my word that I will never break into another house again in my life.” Then he ran. He fled out the front door and into the waiting car, which disappeared into the blackness of the countryside. It was a failed mission, but Paul had learned a valuable lesson, and his bold promise to a frightened man in the middle of the night turned out to be true.
Over the next decade and a half, as Paul climbed the criminal ranks from small-town hoodlum to major handler of millions of dollars in stolen paintings and antiques, he never did break into another house. After all, why should he? Breaking into houses was what professional thieves were for, and there was always one willing to be hired for a straightforward, if dishonest, night's work.
I EMAILED PAUL
on February 28, 2008, although I didn't know his name at the time. I'd found him online, where he had been interviewed under a pseudonym for the magazine
Foreign Policy
. The interview identified him as a former art thief advocating for stronger laws and more severe sentences for anyone caught stealing art from a major museum or gallery. It struck me as funny, and counterintuitive, that an art thief would be pushing for harsher sentences for art thieves. Paul, it turned out, loved to shock, and counterintuitive was his middle name. (He had a few names.)
In my email I explained that I was a North American journalist writing an investigative book, hoping to shed light on the world's mysterious and increasingly violent black market for stolen art. It was an earnest note that requested a phone appointment at his convenience. The thief's email address was a Hotmail account registered in the United Kingdom.
The same day I sent that email, Sotheby's auction house in London broke records again, this time for its famous fall contemporary art sale. Every year the two reigning auction houses (the other being Christie's) commanded higher and higher prices for paintings. On the podium at Sotheby's that night, Francis Bacon's
Study of Nude with Figure in a Mirror
sold for $39.7 million U.S., and three self-portraits by Andy Warhol sold for over $20 million. The evening's total sales exceeded $145 million. As usual, most of the buyers were anonymous. Bidders at auction are often not named, and multi-million-dollar sums are promised via assistants on cellphones.
Earlier that month the world had been stunned by two blockbuster art thefts. They had occurred within five days of each other in the heart of a country that happened to be the world's most safely guarded bank vaultâSwitzerland. The first theft took place on February 6, when two works by Pablo Picasso had been lifted from a small gallery in a tiny town. Those two paintings by the reigning brand name in art were estimated to be worth $10 million U.S.ânot bad for an evening's work.