The Rescue Artist (26 page)

Arkan, a Serbian gangster and accused war criminal, was reportedly involved in the theft of two Turners, worth a total of $80 million, stolen in 1994 while on exhibit in Frankfurt, Germany. Above, on a tank captured by his “Tigers” unit, he poses with a tiger cub. Art thieves were once dashing figures like Adam Worth. Today the swashbucklers have been shoved aside by brutes like Martin Cahill and Arkan.

Whenever a world-famous painting disappears, police speculate that some master criminal, a real-life Thomas Crown, has ordered the painting for his private collection. Outside of Hollywood, Charley Hill insists, there are only wannabe Thomas Crowns like Stéphane Breitwieser, never outsize figures on a Hollywood scale. One villain who supposedly assembled a collection of paintings stolen to order was the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin.

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston was the site of the largest art theft ever—eleven paintings and drawings worth $300 million. The photo above shows the museum courtyard. The robbery, still unsolved, is the holy grail of art crime. The FBI reward in the case is $5 million. Ten years after the theft, the FBI admitted that “we haven’t got a clue,” and, after another four years, the agency remains stymied.

27
Front-Row Seat

U
ndercover work is not a spectator sport. Almost always, the only eyewitnesses are the participants themselves, and both cops and robbers have biases that distort their view. Dennis Farr, who was director of the Courtauld when thieves stole its £2 million Bruegel—this was the “Peter Brewgal” affair—is one of the rare laymen who have seen an undercover operation.

Farr is a tall, thin man with elegant manners. He looks like a fluttery type, a bird-watcher perhaps, the sort of scholar who would go pale at the sight of a typo. As the Bruegel case played out, though, it fell to Farr to string crooks along on the phone (while Art Squad detectives at his elbow listened in and scribbled him instructions). He found he had a flair for the task. “One discovers one has a bit of a thespian bent,” he acknowledges shyly.

Charley Hill and Dennis Farr hit it off at once. Hill put on his best manners at their first meeting, deferring to “Dr. Farr” and chatting away about the Courtauld collection and art in general. Bruegel was one of Hill’s favorites. He grew animated when he discussed how Bruegel had painted the shaft of light that descends from the left and illuminates
Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery
, the stolen painting. Farr took up the theme, and both men went on to a happy discussion of similar uses of light in Rembrandt and Vermeer.

Farr is no snob, and he had been taken with the other Art Squad detectives, too, but Hill intrigued him. “As soon as I met him,” Farr recalls, “I saw there was a maverick quality in Charles Hill. I said to myself, ‘He’s either going to end up commissioner of the metropolitan police, or he’ll quit the force altogether.’ “

The second time they met, Farr found Hill considerably changed. The plan was to rendezvous with the crooks, and Hill was in character. “I was a loudmouthed ‘Hey there, you old son of a bitch’ kind of guy,” Hill recalls. For this role, the point was
not
to come across as an art connoisseur but as someone so smug and ignorant that he was ripe for the plucking. “I wasn’t arty, but I was a trophy art type, some J. Ralston Ridgeway type from Dallas, Texas. Those guys are legion. They’re the ones who buy fakes and spend big bucks on overpriced paintings. They’re extremely wealthy chumps who see art as a way to establish their bona fides in society. So that was me, some asshole who’s got more money than sense.”

The meeting with the crooks was set for the Savoy, a grand old hotel on the Strand, overlooking the Thames. Ideally, the thieves would produce the painting, Hill would hand over a ransom, and a gang of cops would burst from hiding to make the arrests.

Farr was thrilled with his insider’s peek at all the planning and deception. Hill and Farr walked into Hill’s hotel room—a large and handsome suite, with a river view—and Hill started yelling almost at once. He’d been in a foul mood all day Hill was a big-picture thinker, not a detail man, he liked to say, but sometimes details did catch his eye. The police had showed up earlier in the day with the ransom money, £100,000 in £20 notes, stuffed in “a crappy police cardboard kind of thing.” Any crook would immediately start wondering what kind of high-roller he was dealing with. Hill insisted the police buy him a proper leather bag. Hill had won that battle, but his superiors had been horrified at the cost of a leather case intended as a one-time prop.

Now, in the suite, he saw at once that the carpet had been tamped down by the cops in the surveillance team. Size 12 footprints were everywhere, because the cops had been stuffing wires down every crevice they could find. “It looks like the Serengeti after the gnus have gone thundering past,” Hill complained to Farr.

Hill called for the cops. “Get somebody in here to get rid of these fucking footprints,” he shouted. “Those guys are going to come in here and see that, and then we’re all fucked!”

Once the telltale footprints had been vacuumed away, Hill relaxed. He picked up the phone and ordered a bottle of champagne and a tray of smoked salmon sandwiches. Farr scanned the room to decide which sofa would be the best to hide behind, if anyone started shooting. (“Now, dear,” his wife had told him that morning, “don’t come home perforated.”) In the meantime, he rehearsed his assigned line time after time. “This is what we’re after,” Farr was to shout, and on that signal the cops in the next room would rush in.

Hill asked Farr if he had ever seen £100,000 in cash.

“No, let’s have a look.”

Hill unlatched his new case, which burst open, spilling money everywhere. The maid knocked on the door, with the smoked salmon. “And Charles Hill and I were sitting on this bloody briefcase,” Farr says, “trying to squash it flat.”

“The whole thing was marvelous,” Farr bubbles. “Hill was totally convincing. He dressed elegantly, not flashily, but he
exuded
money, shall we say. He just had this presence. You’ve met Charles Hill? So you know he’s a big, broad-shouldered chap, and he just… well, when he chooses, he can throw his weight about.”

Bullies like the one Hill was playing were new in Farr’s experience. He himself was fond of expressions seldom heard outside a boy’s adventure magazine of the type popular three-quarters of a century ago—his stories are full of “blighters” and “frightful chaps” and even “four-flushing swine”—and he watched Hill’s performance goggle-eyed.

Years later, he could still recite many of the exotically ugly phrases Hill had thrown around so casually. “I remember, he leaned over and tapped the case with the marked bills and said. ‘This money will stick to ‘em like dog shit,’ “Farr says gleefully. The line holds such appeal that he tries it a second time, like a mischievous schoolboy reading aloud a smutty scribble on the wall.

“Charles Hill knew just how to play a big, swaggering, loudmouthed American, if I may say that, saving your grace,” Farr says. “‘I can’t waste my time with this, I’m off to Europe tomorrow, I’ve got business all over the world, I can’t be dealing with little twits like you.’ “

Farr frets that his cultured accent drains this “good, coarse stuff” of virtually all its menace, but he replays his favorite lines nonetheless. “I’ve had it about up to here with your horseshit,” he growls, mimicking Hill.

Though Farr didn’t know it, that seemingly offhand line was far from casual. The key was the word “horseshit.” It is an Americanism, first of all, and reinforced Hill’s American persona. In the taxonomy of nonsense, “bullshit” is universal, but “horseshit” is unique to America. Second, the
r
sound emphasized Hill’s American accent and reminded him to keep hammering those r’s.

At the Savoy, Hill abused the thieves for the better part of an hour and then threw them out, even though he had yet to see the stolen Bruegel. Dick Ellis was hidden in a hotel room next door, eavesdropping as the tape recorders whirred.

Even Ellis and his fellow cops, as experienced with scenes like this as Farr was new to them, feared Hill had overdone it. “We were saying, ‘Charley, steady down. We’re gonna lose these guys.’ “

“He said, ‘Don’t worry, they’ll be back,’ “Ellis recalled.

“And he was absolutely right. They came back. They came back, they got arrested, and they got convicted.”

28
A Crook’s Tale

H
ill’s confidence in his ability to read crooks is a product of endless hours listening to their tales. Many are hard to draw out. Not David Duddin. A flamboyant, 300-pound crook who once tried to sell a stolen Rembrandt, Duddin recounts past misdeeds with the relish of a retired athlete recalling the first time he heard a delirious crowd shout his name.

The world that Hill navigates is replete with treacherous but useful characters like Duddin. Hill and Duddin go back several years; they met when Hill visited Duddin in prison, after the Rembrandt deal had gone bad. Hill hadn’t been involved in catching Duddin, but he hoped to cultivate him as a source.

Duddin lies with gusto and without scruple, for the sheer style of it. Convivial and self-absorbed, he talks freely about crime and crooks, with only the most perfunctory nods toward conventional morality. It’s all a bit of a lark. Where’s the harm?

One of his favorite roles is tour guide to the underworld. “I’ll let you make up your own mind how criminally minded you think I am,” he begins. “I don’t particularly think I
am
criminally minded, but having said that, I’ve been found guilty of six counts of handling stolen goods, so that’s me criminal record.”

This seeming confession is in fact closer to a boastful dig in the ribs, an invitation to share in the joke. “Who are you going to believe,” the tone implies, “me or some judge?” In Duddin’s world, the fundamentals of morality—tell the truth, keep your promises, pay your debts, and so on—are not rules to live by but a credo for suckers. To earn your living by the sweat of your brow is to proclaim yourself a sap.

Duddin is no sap. Straight society is something to plunder, not to join. He explains matter-of-factly, for example, that although art is always easy to steal, stealing from Britain’s grand and stately homes (like Russborough House) is easiest of all. The homes are colossally expensive to keep up, and many of the owners have decided that their only chance of survival is to open up to ticket-buying visitors. “Picture your own house,” Duddin says. “Would you take several thousand people around it, and then think it was secure? You wouldn’t, would you?

“I’ve spoken with people—and bear in mind that where I’ve been, I’ve been with some of the heavier criminals in the country—and they say, ‘If somebody’s going to show you something and tell you it’s worth millions, well, then, you’re going to take it.’

“It’s natural. It’s normal. It’s redistribution of wealth.” This last grand phrase is a mocking joke, and Duddin rolls the words around his mouth voluptuously, savoring the syllables.

Massive and slow-moving, with arms like hams, Duddin is a great Buddha of a man, albeit a Buddha who favors such touches as gold Rolexes and bright red jackets and gleaming red shoes to match. His criminal ambition was as outsized as the man himself. At his peak, Duddin drove a Rolls-Royce (“a Roller”) and gave his wife a BMW as a Christmas present. The judge who sent him away for selling the Rembrandt and a host of other stolen treasures said Duddin was the biggest handler of stolen goods in England and dubbed him “Mr. Big.”

In his early days, Duddin ran a jewelry business. The illegal buying and selling took place in a back room. Duddin presided from behind a large, nearly bare desk. Neatly arrayed atop the desk were a scale and an eyepiece, a Kellogg’s Cornflakes box stuffed with cash, and a shotgun. No one ever mentioned the shotgun, which faced outward, but it did seem to cut down on haggling over the prices Duddin offered his clients for their wares.

He has lived all his life in Newcastle, in the north of England, and he speaks with the thick local accent. “I was blind out of me skull,” he says, fondly recalling one monumental bender, and, to American ears, the stretched-out vowels give his speech the wavery sound of a tape played on a malfunctioning machine: “I was blaind oot of me skool.”

Duddin’s wife, Mary, is always by his side. She is tiny, though she teeters on colossal high heels, and she has bright red hair and a tiny voice, too, pitched in a high squeak. Mary looks as if she has just wandered in from a rehearsal of
Guys and Dolls
, but she is shrewder than her husband, and far too shrewd to acknowledge that she knows it. As Duddin talks, Mary plays the role of the attorney who whispers a helpful word into her client’s ear while he covers the microphone and turns away from his senatorial prosecutors.

Mary’s family, too, is in the art line. In 1961, in one of the notorious art thefts in recent history, someone stole Goya’s
Portrait of the Duke of Wellington
from the National Gallery in London. The theft generated enormous publicity because the museum had purchased the painting only weeks before, after a great kerfuffle. The painting had been in private hands and had sold at auction to an American oilman for £140,000. Furious at the prospect of losing a famous painting of a national hero to a foreign buyer, Parliament and a private foundation came up with £140,000 of their own. The American gave in, the painting stayed home, and the National Gallery put it on exhibit. Eighteen days later, it vanished.

In 1962, with the portrait still missing, the first James Bond movie opened. This was
Dr. No
, and the plot, such as it was, had to do with a villain who hatched evil schemes at a secret lair in the Caribbean. Dr. No took Bond on a house tour, which led past a portrait mounted on an easel. Lest anyone miss the joke, Bond did a double-take and the camera moved in for a close-up of the
Duke of Wellington
.

The real portrait finally turned up in 1965, unharmed but without its frame, lying amid a jumble of forgotten suitcases in the lost-luggage office of the train station in Birmingham. Six weeks later, the thief turned himself in, apparently convinced that the world would want to hear his story and that no one would punish a person for stealing something that was back where it belonged. The self-proclaimed thief was an unemployed taxi driver named Kempton Bunton, a Newcastle man who looked a bit like Alfred Hitchcock.

Bunton, a clumsy, eccentric man in his sixties, was Mary’s uncle. “Only an uncle by marriage,” she clarifies, “me auntie’s husband. Well, I don’t know how he got the painting home, but he put it in his cupboard in the bedroom. And Auntie made a joke the night he turned himself in. ‘I’ve been sleeping with the Duke of Wellington for four years,’ she said, ‘and I’ve never even known.’ “

At his trial, Bunton explained that he had stolen the painting as a political protest. He had no interest in commercial gain; his sole aim was to remedy a gross injustice. The government charged everyone who owned a television set a yearly fee, which went to support the BBC. Not even the elderly were exempt. Bunton was beside himself. What kind of government charged its citizens to watch television and then lavished £140,000 on a bloody
painting?

Both judge and jury seemed to find Bunton endearing, and they apparently had doubts about whether he really was agile enough to have taken the Goya from the museum by climbing out a window in a men’s bathroom, as he claimed. The jury performed a contortionist’s trick of its own. Bunton was not guilty of stealing the painting, they found, but he was guilty of stealing the frame. The judge imposed a sentence of three months.

Mary does not believe that her uncle stole the portrait. His two sons did, she says, and then he horned in on their glory. (The family, she says, was “all a bit nuts”—
“a bit noots.”)
It is a convincing if not ringing defense: her uncle was too fat to steal, not too honest.

Duddin’s world and the conventional one are not self-contained. They meet occasionally, as the lion’s world sometimes meets the antelope’s. But in ordinary times the two worlds
are
isolated from one another, and Duddin betrays surprise when it becomes clear that yet another commonplace feature of his life is strange to an outsider. Mundane questions—How big a bag does it take to hold £20,000 in small bills? How long would it take to count?—throw him off-stride for a moment, as if an earnest visitor had asked him to explain how to make a sandwich or dial a phone.

A broader question that seems absolutely fundamental to a layman—Why steal a masterpiece?—leaves him frustrated and befuddled. Art is worth stealing because it’s valuable; what valuable
means
is “worth stealing.”

Speaking slowly and emphatically, Duddin strives to make matters clear. “If it’s very easy to take,” he says, “it doesn’t matter if you’ve got a buyer for it or not. If it’s
difficult
to take, you’re going to make sure there’s a market for it, because you’ve got to put extra work into it.”

But what do you do with it?

Driven to distraction, Duddin resorts almost to baby talk. He has been sipping his drink, but this calls for a pause and a deeper swallow. “Mr. Burglar, all right, goes and steals a painting that he’s got no market for. If he’s a professional burglar, then he deals with people regular. Someone who regularly steals antiques, we’ll say, will have an antique dealer that he deals with. So he goes to that antique dealer and says, ‘I know this isn’t your kind of meat, but I’ve got this’—Duddin lowers his voice to a stage whisper—
‘and it’s worth a fortune
. All I want is twenty grand on something that’s worth two million.’ “

Here Duddin interrupts himself to add an explanatory note. “All they want is enough money to live on for the next six months, what they call ‘working money.’ Enough money to go and look at other things and do something that’s easier sold.”

“I didn’t realize ‘til I went to prison,” Duddin says, with feigned coyness, “that people that burgle houses for a living consider they’ve got a purpose in life. They consider it their job. It’s a job of work, isn’t it? No different than a doctor going to hospital every day.”

It is not just work but hard work. “It costs money to burgle houses,” Duddin says wearily. “You’ve got to go and look around, you’ve got to set it all up, you’ve got to have transport. It’s like a building contractor, isn’t it?”

Duddin is as disdainful as Hill of the notion that reclusive tycoons commission thieves to steal for them. “Do you honestly think there are people who have millions of pounds, and art collections worth millions, who would risk going to prison for a painting?” he scoffs. “Are you addled? Would
you
, if you had that sort of money? It doesn’t make sense, does it?

“Freedom’s not worth much if you’ve got nothing,” he says. “If you’re sleeping rough under a tree and thinking somebody’s going to put you in a cell instead, well, that might even be an improvement. But when you’ve got a lot, your freedom’s worth a lot more, isn’t it? If you’re living in palatial surroundings and eating lobster and drinking champagne, you don’t want to go to prison, do you?”

Now Duddin turns his attention from the thief who steals a painting to the middleman he sells it to. “A dealer will lend Mr. Burglar £20,000, £50,000, whatever the figure might be, according to the article. It’s no different from a bank, is it, when you think of it? Even though he hasn’t got a use for it, he’s got security for his money, hasn’t he? He might have something worth several million”—Duddin’s voice rises in incredulity—”so it’s
good
security, isn’t it?”

Wearying of logistics, Duddin raises his sights and turns briefly to philosophy. “Let’s say you’ve got one prize possession, a painting. If someone stole that painting from you, you’ve lost the majority of your possessions. But if someone stole a Rembrandt from the Earl of Pembroke”—as someone did in fact steal the Rembrandt that Duddin tried to fence—”he’s probably got several hundred times that left. So why should it be so important? And that’s the ethics of it.”

Duddin shifts ponderously in his chair and leans back, pleased with the case he’s made. “You understand the difference? You haven’t stolen
all
of somebody’s wealth, even though you’ve stolen a great deal
more
wealth. You don’t break into an old lady’s house and take her pension book when that’s all she’s got.”

The theory of relativity, criminal version.