It's A Steal

By JAMES WALSH

-- During the night of Feb. 2-3, 1990, masked men surprised six unarmed guards watching a storeroom in Herculaneum, ancient Pompeii's bedfellow in fate when Mount Vesuvius erupted in A.D. 79. After breaking through a wall, the thieves took four hours to select 223 of the most precious antiquities, as if they had a dealer's catalog in hand. Estimated value: $18 million. None of the relics have resurfaced.

-- On March 18, 1990, two thieves disguised as policemen entered Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, trussed up two guards and made off with a king's ransom: three Rembrandts, five paintings by Degas, one Manet and one of only 36 known Vermeers in existence. The Vermeer canvas was hacked from its stretcher, leaving chips of paint on the floor. At an estimated total value of $200 million, it may have been the most lucrative art theft in history.

-- On April 14, 1991, armed robbers raided Amsterdam's state-run Van Gogh Museum at night, cut the alarm system and spent 45 minutes picking out 20 works by the Dutch Impressionist. Thanks to a flat tire on the getaway car, the heist was short lived. Among the loot recovered 35 minutes later: The Potato Eaters, which had also been stolen in 1988, from another Dutch museum. Total worth of the take: about $500 million -- assuming that such famous hot potatoes could have been resold.

The art of the world is being looted. From New York to Phnom Penh, from ancient ruins in Turkey to up-to-date museums in Amsterdam, precious records of human culture are vanishing into the dark as thieves steal with near impunity. Paintings, prints, statuary, rare coins, rare books and cultural treasures of every kind and all ages are being snatched.

Why not? The auction market may be faring poorly this season, but over the years an insatiable demand for artworks and antiquities has kept the price trajectory rising well above the rate of inflation. What used to be upheld as things of beauty or objects of veneration are increasingly traded like zero- coupon bonds or pork-belly futures. According to U.S. government estimates, "art theft is a $2 billion-a-year business," says Constance Lowenthal, executive director of the nonprofit New York-based International Foundation for Art Research. "But it could be much larger." Trace, a three-year-old British magazine that tracks art crimes, reckons the value worldwide at $6 billion a year.

If Trace's estimate is accurate, the take from museum burglaries, gallery heists, housebreaks and the looting of archaeology sites would rank as the world's third most profitable criminal enterprise, behind drugs and computer theft. More and more, art is becoming a prey of organized crime. Italy's single most valuable missing artwork is a Baroque masterpiece, Caravaggio's 1609 Nativity, which was stolen in 1969 from the Oratory of San Lorenzo in Palermo, Sicily. Investigators in Britain are now convinced that the painting, worth about $50 million today, has been used by the Mafia as security for drug deals over the past 20 years. Kenneth Klug, a deputy special agent for the U.S. Customs Service, says his agency is "sure" that drug lords in Colombia's Medellin cartel "have priceless works of stolen art hanging in their villas."

Unless the thieves are caught in the act, stealing art and then selling it is remarkably easy. Ill-gotten Greco-Roman sculptures, Renaissance Bibles or friezes from an Egyptian Pharaoh's tomb can be iced away for a time and realize a generous return. In Switzerland, which treats goods in storage with the same discretion as bank accounts, a work can come out of a bonded free- port warehouse in Zurich or Geneva with clear legal title to the possessor after five years. In Liechtenstein and the Cayman Islands, the term is seven days.

Police suspect the involvement of insiders in many artful scores. Early this year the Grand Palais in Paris spent $1 million on extra security and $590,000 on insurance for a major retrospective of Georges Seurat. The exhibitors grouped sketches together in cases and bolted paintings onto the walls. But a small Seurat drawing, Le Cocher de Fiacre, vanished after video and alarm systems had been turned off and before guards had started their rounds. The smell of a rat is even more pungent in raids on storage rooms. According to a police survey, 57.8% of all thefts of paintings and drawings from public collections in France between 1979 and 1989 were from storage spaces, usually with no sign of forced entry.

If it were only a simple case of crooks vs. cops, art theft might be easier to control. But complicity is rife within the art world. Richard Volpe, who was an ace art detective with the New York City police for 25 years, contends that "the least guilty of all parties are the thieves." These "mules," he insists, "couldn't do it without the cooperation of gallery owners, flea- market purveyors, auction houses, museums, insurers, security companies, collectors and finally law-enforcement agencies. Everyone else either knowingly or through neglect gives the thief a leg up."

As investigators tell it, if a spectacular find comes with even the most thinly plausible paperwork documenting its origins, dealers generally leap at the chance to buy. Museums, those bastions of traditional culture, can also be compromised. Lowenthal points out that the Getty Museum, endowed by the late oil billionaire J. Paul Getty, has "enormous funds" and does not have to solicit donations to build its collection virtually from scratch.

Since 1988 the Getty has been embroiled in a dispute over a 7-ft.-tall marble beauty: a magnificent early 5th century B.C. Greek statue of a goddess, perhaps Aphrodite. Italy claims it was furtively unearthed in 1979 from the archaeological dig at Morgantina, Sicily. Some experts doubt that Morgantina, a onetime Greek colony, was the specific origin, but Italy is convinced the statue came from somewhere under its soil.

The Getty bought the Aphrodite for an undisclosed -- certainly thumping -- sum. Beforehand, it insists, it had sent out form letters reporting the acquisition to various Mediterranean countries. When Italian authorities later heard what the sculpture looked like, they blew a loud whistle. Since they had no conclusive proof, however, the Getty put its goddess on display. Says Jack Josephson, chairman of the U.S. Information Agency's Cultural Property Advisory Committee: "The museum's holier-than-thou attitude is in contrast to the facts. Where do they think it came from?"

Together with the U.S. Customs Service, Josephson's agency has helped stem the smuggling of archaeological loot from one region: Latin America. Plunderers of pre-Columbian sites used to have a field day rifling covertly excavated Mayan, Olmec and Incan ruins and shipping the artifacts north to a voracious U.S. market. In 1970 the UNESCO convention on cultural property established an international framework to curb pillage and the illicit trade in artifacts. Among the rich countries that are the biggest markets for stolen works, however, only the U.S. and Canada signed the treaty. Britain, France, & Germany, Switzerland, the Low Countries, Scandinavia and Japan remain holdouts today.

"Our major concern," Josephson explains, "is that looting destroys the site where artifacts are found, thus wiping away a page of history forever." Turkey fears that an encyclopedia of history will be wiped out. Since the Neolithic Age, the Anatolian peninsula has been a crossroads of conquerors and civilizations. By official count, it is home to 20,000 monuments, 10,000 tombs, 5,000 mounds that may conceal buried settlements and 3,000 ancient cities belonging to 36 various pre-Turkish cultures. It is a virtual supermarket for antiquities -- and looters take their fill.

"Nowhere in the world can you find such a quantity and variety of ancient art," says Ozgen Acar, a Turkish investigative journalist. In the "open-air museum" that is his homeland, he says, farmers go into hock to buy metal detectors, while Sotheby's and Christie's catalogs "sell better than Korans." One Turkish case, tied up in litigation since 1986, involves the country's claim on the Lydian Hoard, a famous collection of 250 gold and silver wares. New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art, which bought the pieces, does not acknowledge that they came from Turkey.

Source countries themselves bear some blame. Turkey, Egypt, Israel, Greece, Italy and other nations claim state ownership of all artifacts underground, but cannot afford what they promise to pay for any finds. Says Josephson: "An Egyptian farmer will not report an archaeological find for fear his fields will be confiscated. So he either throws the object away or sells it to a cousin in Cairo." Though a peasant who finds an artifact makes a small fraction of its retail value -- one contraband Cambodian Buddha head on sale in Hong Kong recently carried a $37,000 price tag -- it is better than nothing.

Unidroit, a Rome-based intergovernmental organization, is drafting codes that would harmonize many countries' cultural-property laws and make the UNESCO treaty more acceptable. Interpol and other enforcement agencies are hoping that computer files -- once the many different police computers can talk to one another -- will help further.

Yet the attitude of purchasers to whom the illicit trade panders is not something laws can change. When taxed with blame, art connoisseurs and dealers grow philosophical: they insist that they are rescuing pieces from an uncertain fate, that they are better equipped to maintain and protect much % artwork and that in general, cultural property ought not to recognize frontiers. Lowenthal herself admits, "A heritage is also a splendid ambassador of the country's culture to the rest of the world."

J.H. Merryman, a Stanford University law professor who specializes in cultural property, declares, "The misty-eyed romantic sophomores who contend that everything should go back because it is Greek or Turkish patrimony are irrational. Museums have a purpose. Collectors and dealers can be engaged in legitimate activity. The fact that a piece came from a particular country does not automatically give that country an overpowering right to it. It might be better taken care of, better displayed, seen by more people, in a museum in a different country."

His point is not idle, and many scholars would rush to defend it. Still, when an Etruscan tomb is emptied, a church desecrated, a Mayan temple bulldozed and a museum Vermeer yanked from its frame, it is hard to see how rich societies, let alone poor ones, can enjoy art in peace for long. In turning a blind eye to the canker that feeds on it, the art world is losing security, losing art and losing its soul.

With reporting by Mary Cronin/New York, Victoria Foote-Greenwell/Paris and James Wilde/Ankara, with other bureaus