Loss database one answer to art thievery
Indigo Ace
Loss database one answer to art thievery
Art Loss Register has helped in the recovery of more than $138 million
in purloined works
By Stevenson Swanson
Tribune correspondent
Published October 4, 2006
LONDON -- Your Degas has disappeared. Your Van Gogh has vanished. Your
Pollock has taken a powder.
Who are you going to call?
Apart from the police, you might try Julian Radcliffe.
Radcliffe is the founder and chairman of the Art Loss Register, the
world's largest private database of stolen art and a central
clearinghouse of information about the shadowy underworld where
purloined masterpieces may linger for decades, waiting to be sold or
ransomed back to their owners.
The 15-year-old register contains records of more than 175,000 stolen
objects, from paintings and sculptures to jewelry and rare antiques.
Since its founding in 1991, the company has been involved in the
recovery of more than $138million in purloined art, according to
Radcliffe. At any given time, the staff of about 30 employees is
juggling roughly 150 active cases, with the result that the register
is involved in about three recoveries of stolen artwork in a typical
week.
"We just found a pair of cannon on eBay--French 18th Century," said
Radcliffe, whose paper-strewn office bears witness to the volume of
cases the register handles. "EBay is just stuffed full of stolen
goods."
High-profile cases
Several high-profile cases have put the rarefied world of art thievery
in the spotlight recently. Oslo's Munch Museum has displayed two
paintings by Norwegian master Edvard Munch, including his iconic "The
Scream," that were recovered in August. Masked gunmen stole the
paintings from the museum in broad daylight two years ago.
And in one of the most spectacular art heists in Russia's history, a
curator at St. Petersburg's famed State Hermitage Museum was
implicated in July in the theft of 221 artworks valued at $5 million.
Earlier this year, the Art Loss Register played a key role in a
28-year-old case involving seven paintings valued at more than $30
million that were stolen from the Massachusetts home of collector
Michael Bakwin. As a result of seven years of complicated, high-wire
negotiations with a lawyer who claimed to have been given the
paintings by a client, Radcliffe has secured the return of five of the
paintings, including a Cezanne in 1999 and four other paintings in
January.
That demonstrates that the Art Loss Register is more than a passive
repository of information. Radcliffe, whose background is in the
insurance business, frequently flies around the globe to meet with
lawyers or other middlemen with knowledge about the location of stolen
works.
"We are leading the campaign against art theft," said the
well-tailored Radcliffe. "I think we're having an effect. I don't want
to overstate that, but I think that's the case."
As for eBay, the Internet auction site deals with such a huge volume
of goods that it cannot check to determine whether something is stolen
property before it is listed, according to spokeswoman Catherine
England. But if someone reports seeing a stolen item on the site to
the police, eBay cooperates with law-enforcement agencies by turning
over the would-be seller's personal information.
Nazi-looted art
The register and a year-old competitor called Swift-Find also have
made a specialty of tracking artwork that was seized from Jewish
owners during the Nazi era.
Last year, Chicago collector Marilynn Alsdorf agreed to pay $6.5
million to settle a claim that a Picasso painting she bought in 1975
had been looted from a Paris home by Nazi officials. The painting,
called "The Woman in White," showed up on the register's database when
Alsdorf put it up for sale.
The company charges owners of stolen pieces about $50 to register
their missing artwork, and collectors who are considering buying an
object pay up to $100 for searches of the database to learn whether it
is listed as stolen. In addition, the register gets a commission of 10
percent to 15 percent when it's involved in reuniting a piece with its
rightful owner.
Bonnie Magness-Gardiner, who runs the FBI's program to catch art
thieves, said the register's database complements the two big
law-enforcement databases of stolen art, maintained by the FBI and
Interpol.
"I find them quite a valuable resource," she said. "And when
law-enforcement agencies ask me to put information in my database, I
recommend that they also notify the Art Loss Register."
But the register's records are not available to everyone. To prevent
thieves from using it to see if a work has been reported as stolen,
the company requires anyone who wants to run a search to agree to
cooperate with the company if it finds a match in its records. And its
database cannot be accessed over the Internet.
"We will not do searches for people who will not say who they are,"
said Radcliffe, 58, who earlier started a company that specialized in
anti-kidnapping protection and hostage negotiation. "If we were to put
all our information on the Internet, guess who'd spend all their time
looking at it? The thieves."
The register's crowded London headquarters is in a modern office
building in a quiet neighborhood not far from bustling Fleet Street.
In addition to London, the company has offices in New York, Germany,
the Netherlands and India, where many of the searches are done.
Searches done by key words
Searches are conducted by key words such as the artist's name and
descriptive words, but not a work's title, which can be easily changed
or subject to misinterpretation.
A large number of matches come up for some well-known artists.
Rembrandt has 252 items listed, including a painting of Christ and his
disciples on a stormy Sea of Galilee that was stolen in 1990 from the
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.
But the artist whose work has found the most favor with thieves is
Picasso, whose name generates 540 matches. That large number is due in
part to the fact that he not only painted but also drew and created
sculpture and ceramics. And he lived a long time.
That the database contains more than 175,000 items is an indication
that art theft is a bigger, more persistent problem than the
occasional high-profile robbery suggests.
The FBI has estimated that theft of all kinds of collectible objects
amounts to as much as $6 billion a year worldwide. Art experts
question whether it's that much, but pinning down the size of the
problem is admittedly difficult.
"We could never achieve the firm kind of number that you'd like
because it's an illicit activity," said the FBI's Magness-Gardiner.
"And it could vary from year to year. It depends on whether a $50
million Rembrandt has been stolen."
As a measure of the effect databases might be having in controlling
art theft, Radcliffe said that when the register first opened for
business, about 1 in 3,000 items offered for auction at the two
leading houses, Christie's and Sotheby's, turned out to be stolen.
Lately that figure has dropped to about 1 in 7,000 items.
"Thieves have learned not to consign to the auction houses, and that
is depressing the price, because they are having to wait longer to get
a stolen item into the market," Radcliffe said. "I think we are
helping to make the art market transparent in the best possible way."
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soswanson;@tribune.com
Copyright © 2006, Chicago Tribune
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