The Rescue Artist (19 page)

News of the theft stunned Paris, and then the world. The headline in
Le Matin
was a single word in giant letters:
“INIMAGINABLE!”
Soon after, Valfierno approached his six clients. Still game?

“Yes” came the answer, six times. Valfierno sold six fakes, each for $300,000, roughly $6 million a copy in today’s currency. Then, having perpetrated the perfect crime, he vanished. None of the buyers—supposedly six Americans—knew Valfierno’s real name. Nor did Perugia. More than that, the marqués had never confided a word to Perugia about the con he had dreamed up. All that Perugia knew was that a well-spoken stranger had hired him to steal the
Mona Lisa
—payment to be made later—and he had done so. But, then, not a word of instruction and not a penny in payment! For two years, Perugia fretted and waited. During all that time, the
Mona Lisa
lay hidden in a box under the stove in Perugia’s apartment.

Chaudron, the forger, had good reason to keep quiet. And the buyers could not go to the police without acknowledging that they had tried to purchase stolen goods. Nor did Valfierno have to worry about what would happen if the real
Mona Lisa
ever surfaced. His victims had no idea how to find him, but what if they did somehow track him down? “Now let’s just calm down for a minute and think, shall we?” Valfierno could say. “What would you expect the Louvre to do, after they lost their most valuable painting, except to announce that they had marvelous news and they’d found it again? But you and I know who has the real
Mona Lisa
, don’t we?”
^*

Is the story of the six fakes true? No one knows. By definition, perfect crimes are beyond detection. The source of the story was a journalist named Karl Decker, a flamboyant and much-acclaimed Hearst reporter, who published the tale in the
Saturday Evening Post
in 1932. Decker claimed to have known the marqués, who told him the story on condition that it not be published until after his death.

Half a century later, in 1981, Seymour Reit’s book filled in the picture that Decker’s magazine article had sketched. Reit was a well-regarded writer, and the
New Yorker
, the
New York Times
, and
Art News
, among others, praised his book. Robert Spiel, a 20-year FBI veteran who specializes in art crime and the author of
Art Theft and Forgery Investigation: The Complete Field Manual
, cited Reit’s book in his bibliography and wrote that “if you can read only one true story of art crime, read this.”

Decker and Reit died years ago, and neither left behind any hint that he had pulled off a hoax of his own. Even so, Reit’s credits are curious enough that a skeptic might raise an eyebrow. Though Reit published such straightforward, well-received works as a history of camouflage in World War II, he also wrote children’s books. He was, as well, the creator of Casper the friendly ghost. Donald Sassoon, a historian whose
Becoming Mona Lisa
tells the story of how the painting became an icon, dismisses Reit’s story as an urban legend.

In any case, Perugia was arrested in 1913, when he tried to sell the real
Mona Lisa
to a well-known art dealer in Florence. His motive was unclear. (Perhaps he had despaired of ever receiving any money from the marqués.) The dealer contacted the head of the Uffizi, and the two men met Perugia at his shabby hotel in Florence. Perugia rummaged in a homemade wooden trunk, lifted out a bundle wrapped in red cloth, and handed over the
Mona Lisa
. Bowled over, the dealer and the curator stammered something about needing to take the painting to the Uffizi for a closer look. Perugia was to stay in his room and wait. As the two men rushed out the hotel door, the receptionist hollered at them to wait a minute. What was that they were carrying? They hadn’t stolen one of the hotel’s paintings, had they?

At his trial, Perugia defended himself on patriotic grounds. He had taken the
Mona Lisa
because it offended his Italian pride that France had possession of such a treasure. Perugia’s lawyer maintained that no harm had been done—no one had been hurt, and the painting was intact and even better-known than it had been. The public went along. Perugia was briefly a hero, lauded for his devotion to his native land. The court imposed a sentence of only twelve months, which was reduced to seven on appeal.

The
Mona Lisa
story comes with more than enough holes for a cynic like Charley Hill to dismiss it. But Hill has too much respect for history to ignore one story, this one indisputably true, from roughly the same era as the
Mona Lisa
theft.

Adam Worth was the greatest thief of Victorian England. He provides the single unimpeachable example we know of a thief who stole a beloved masterpiece and kept it locked away, for his eyes only. More than a century ago, Worth stole the world’s most expensive painting and kept it with him, without ever trying to sell it or telling a soul, for twenty-five years.

The story of Worth’s obsession, brilliantly told in Ben Macintyre’s
Napoleon of Crime
, began in 1876, when an American visitor to London bid a record-setting $600,000 (in today’s dollars) for Gainsborough’s portrait of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire.

Georgiana, an ancestor of Princess Diana, was sexy and scandalous, by reputation England’s greatest beauty. As notorious in eighteenth-century England as Princess Di would be two centuries later, Georgiana was a novelist, a compulsive gambler, the wife of the stunningly wealthy Duke of Devonshire (in a ménage à trois that also included Lady Elizabeth Foster), and mistress to a future prime minister. Georgiana died young, though she outlived her days of glory. “Before you condemn me,” she wrote near the end, “remember that at seventeen I was a toast, a beauty and a Duchess.”

A century after Georgiana’s death, her portrait came up for auction. To judge from the commotion, she might never have been away. Crowds of gawkers clutched their tickets and waited in line at the Thomas Agnew & Sons art gallery on Old Bond Street to glimpse the painting. The Earl of Dudley coveted it, as did Ferdinand de Rothschild. In the end, no one could compete with Junius Spencer Morgan, the American banker, whose winning bid secured the Gainsborough as a gift for his art-loving son, J. P. Morgan. One condition of the sale, which hardly seemed worth mentioning, was that Morgan leave his new acquisition on exhibit a short while before taking it away.

A few weeks later, on a May night in 1876, a small man pried open a window of the Agnew Gallery and climbed inside. He cut Georgiana from her gilt frame, rolled her up, tucked her beneath his coat, and retreated as he had come.

The thief was Adam Worth, an American-born crook of such elegance and elusiveness that he served Arthur Conan Doyle as the model for Sherlock Holmes’s nemesis, Professor Moriarty. Worth had a younger brother, John, who shared his lack of morals but not his savvy. At the time of the theft, John Worth was in Newgate Prison on a forgery charge. Adam’s scheme was to work a trade: the painting that all London was hunting in exchange for his brother’s freedom.

But the plan skidded off course. John Worth’s lawyer proved better than anyone had anticipated. Before Adam Worth had even opened negotiations for his brother’s release, John’s lawyer had him out on the street on a technicality, a free man.

That left Adam Worth in a most peculiar spot.

For the next quarter century, Worth kept Georgiana with him. Even when he desperately needed money and the police seemed to be closing in and various shady characters came whispering that they had heard rumors about a certain item that perhaps they might help him with, Worth refused to consider a deal. “He turned them all down, preferring to face disgrace, penury, and imprisonment rather than part with the Duchess,” Macintyre writes. “The painting became his permanent companion…. When he traveled, she came, too, in his false-bottomed trunk.” At home in London, Worth slept with the portrait under his mattress.

In his old age, when Pinkerton detectives finally had him cornered, Worth at last handed his mistress over. Penniless despite a lifetime’s illicit income, Worth bartered the Duchess away for a never-disclosed sum—one account put it at $25,000—and a promise of immunity. The painting, then in the United States, was turned over to the son of the art dealer it had been stolen from originally. The rightful owner took custody of the long-missing portrait and set off for home with it, on the steamer
Etruria
, bound from New York to London. Among the passengers was one small man with a sad air, no longer able to acknowledge his beloved but secretly accompanying her on one last voyage nonetheless.

Today, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, is back where she belongs. In 1994, the present Duke of Devonshire bought the portrait and installed it in his ancestral home, Chatsworth. In the grand dining room where Georgiana held court in life, she presides triumphantly once again.

22
Gangsters

I
Norway, Charley Hill didn’t figure he was dealing with a modern-day Adam Worth. Johnsen and Ulving seemed too small-time. But he did worry about who might be behind them. Criminal gangs have discovered that art is easy pickings, and a trail that started with bumblers could well end with gangsters. Let your guard down and you might get your head blown off.

Violent and ruthless, the professionals have none of the endearing ineptitude of the small-time thieves. Worse still, from the police point of view, the pros may have more complicated motives for stealing than the amateurs do. If a gang steals a painting to send a message of some sort, and not simply to cash in, the odds of recovering it become even smaller.

The involvement of gangsters in art crime dates from the 1960s and took off two decades later, when the art market exploded.
^*
In May 1969, the Italian police announced the formation of the first-ever art squad. The mission of the grandly named Command for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage, the government proclaimed, was to safeguard Italy’s paintings and sculptures.

Five months later, thieves in Palermo, Sicily, broke into the Church of San Lorenzo, sliced Caravaggio’s
Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence
from its frame, and vanished. The church had no alarm system. A priest asleep in a nearby room heard nothing. The enormous painting, roughly six feet by nine feet, was one of the last that Caravaggio completed. (His life, filled with tumult, seems too crowded to have left any time for painting. In a six-year span, in his thirties, Caravaggio was arrested and tried eleven times, on charges ranging up to murder. In 1606 he killed a rival in a quarrel over a game of tennis; he died on the run in 1609 at age thirty-nine.) The
Nativity
had hung in Palermo since 1609. The painting is worth tens of millions, and it has never been seen again.

At once came rumors—endorsed by the police—that the Mafia was behind the theft. Along with the Mafia tales, the headlines screamed the usual rumors of an elusive Dr. No. “Who would take a painting like that?” scoffed General Roberto Conforti, head of the Italian art squad. “What would even the most unscrupulous art collector do with it? It’s huge. You couldn’t hang it anywhere where it wouldn’t be seen. No, what we suspected from the start was that this was a message from the Mafia. They wanted us to understand that they could take whatever they wanted from wherever they wanted in Palermo, and no one—especially not the police—could stop them. And we think they held on to it as a symbol.”

Finally, a quarter-century after the disappearance of the Caravaggio, word came from the Mafia itself. In November 1996, Italy’s former prime minister Giulio Andreotti was on trial for corruption. A Mafia
pentiti
—a supposedly penitent criminal who had agreed to testify against his former colleagues—was on the stand, hidden behind a screen.

Francesco Marino Mannoia was a dangerous man with a harmless appearance. “Mozzarella,” he had been nicknamed, in mocking tribute to his bland manner and quiet voice. Mannoia had a storehouse of knowledge that made him a prized witness for the state. Hidden inside an armored car, he had taken police on a tour of Mafia hideouts and heroin-processing facilities in Palermo. He had turned over a thick account book listing payoffs to politicians and other local bigwigs. Mannoia knew, literally, where the bodies were buried and had flown over Palermo in a helicopter with police, pointing out Maña “graveyards.”

It took a month for word of his cooperation with the police to leak. One November evening in 1989, Mannoia’s mother, aunt, and sister left their house and settled into the family car. All three women wore black, because they were in mourning for Francesco’s brother, a Mafia gunman, who had himself been gunned down by underworld rivals. Mafia lore has it that women are exempt from retaliation. Not so. Hitmen killed the three women and sped off.

Now Mannoia, who was serving 17 years for narcotics trafficking, was on the stand in the Andreotti case. In a trial focused on political scandals at the highest level of government, the theft of a painting two decades before seemed almost incidental. “I’ve stolen some paintings in my time,” Mannoia told the court, in response to a question about his criminal career. “Some modern stuff, and Antonello da Messina. Oh, and remember that Caravaggio that disappeared in Palermo in 1969? That was me, too.”

He and his fellow thieves knew nothing about art, Mannoia testified. The Caravaggio was so big that the thieves had folded it to make it easier to carry. “When our buyer saw it,” Mannoia said, “he burst into tears and wouldn’t take it.”

Mannoia may have been lying, for reasons of his own. (The “illustrious figure” who wanted to buy the painting and wept when he saw how it had been damaged, according to Mannoia, was Giulio Andreotti, the former prime minister and the very man on trial for corruption.) Still, no one disputes the central claim that the Mafia was tied up in the theft in some way.
^*
“We don’t believe that Mannoia was lying,” says Conforti, the head of the art squad. “He was telling the truth. Except that, according to our investigations, he was not referring to the Caravaggio but to a similar work that was stolen in a nearby church in the same period.”

The lone indisputable point is that Caravaggio’s painting, if it still exists, has never reappeared.

The involvement of the Mafia and other criminal organizations in art crime means that the risks have grown formidable. Once a respite from “real” crime and an almost cozy world unto itself, art theft now carries all the ugly trappings of organized crime.

“These guys are different,” says one British art investigator with 30 years’ experience, newly returned from his first trip to the former Soviet bloc. “Your average criminal in England, even some of the nasty ones, if they’re stung by another criminal, then, yeah, they’ll kill him. But the Serbs and the Albanians will kill his family as well. And his kids, and the dog, and the cat. And then burn the house down.”

The twin marks of the new era are more violence and more volume. “In Europe,” says Lynne Chaffinch, head of the FBI’s art theft program, “criminal gangs are moving just
massive
amounts of art. In Russia, the intelligence people told me they’d identified over forty organized crime groups involved in art theft. At the border, they’ve caught a whole
train-
load of icons and other stolen art.”

With the collapse of the Soviet Union and then the opening of borders to the west, eastern Europe became a free-for-all. Thieves who had quickly caught on to the delights of private enterprise scrambled to loot churches and museums. In the Czech Republic, in 1996, Charley Hill helped break up a ring of art thieves run by former secret police officials who had held power in the bad old days. In the end, Hill and his detective colleagues recovered some two dozen old masters, including such hugely valuable works as Lucas Cranach the Elder’s
Ill-Matched Lovers
, which had been pulled off the wall of the National Museum in Prague. The venture climaxed in an armed confrontation between a German SWAT team and a band of Czech thieves headed by a gold-toothed killer named Kittler.

In time, old-style gangsters like Kittler or Martin Cahill, the Dublin crime boss, may come to seem quaint. In 1994 in Frankfurt, Germany, for example, thieves stole two Turner paintings on loan from the Tate Gallery in London. The renowned paintings,
Shade and Darkness
and
Light and Colour
, near-abstractions on the theme of the biblical flood, had a joint value in the neighborhood of $80 million. At some point in the several years the paintings were in limbo, they apparently passed into the control of the Serbian gangster and warlord known as Arkan. The commander of a private army of several thousand men and a pioneer in ethnic cleansing, Arkan was an indicted war criminal.

A century before, art thieves looked like Adam Worth, the dashing Victorian who fell in love with Gainsborough’s
Duchess
. By the end of the twentieth century, Worth had given way to the likes of Arkan, who was, in the words of one UN diplomat, “a psychopathic mass murderer.”

He met his end in fittingly violent fashion, gunned down with two bodyguards in the Intercontinental Hotel in Belgrade. The fate of the Turners was happier. Just in time for Christmas 2002, the Tate held a joyful news conference to announce that it had recovered both paintings, only slightly damaged.