[CPProt.net] How theft and ransom have changed the art market

[Museum Security Network / Cultural Property Protection Net (Ton Cremers)]

How theft and ransom have changed the art market
By Helen McCormack
24 May 2005


Art thieves used to carry out risky assignments. Organised gangs would
exploit weak security in galleries and homes, targeting valuable antiquities
in the knowledge that they would be able to sell them for vast sums of
money.

Stolen manuscripts, sculptures and carvings would change hands, eventually
passing from the black market into the legitimate international art market
to end up in the homes of wealthy buyers unaware of the illegal trail their
prized art had travelled.

But changes to legislation, together with police crackdowns,have spelled an
end to the days when a stolen work of art could command a high price, the
conference in London heard.

In response, the black market has itself grown more sophisticated, according
to Mark Dalrymple, director of Tyler and Co loss adjustors.

Stolen works of art are now much more likely to be employed as a form of
currency within the criminal underworld.Rather than returning to the open
market, they may be used as a financial guarantor, or as payment for drugs
or arms.

In one case, a criminal from the north of England was known to have put up a
Titian painting to secure a £50,000 cash advance for a bail bond, Mr
Dalrymple said.

With paintings harder to sell, the prices thieves can command have been
driven down. It is perhaps these more stringent circumstances which have
allowed for some remarkable returns of high-profile works to their rightful
owners in recent years.

In 2002, a Titian masterpiece, Rest on the Flight Into Egypt, was recovered
in a plastic bag at a bus stop. The painting, worth £5m,had been stolen from
the Marquess of Bath's Longleat estate in Wiltshire seven years previously.
Its return followed a secret operation involving a former Scotland Yard
detective and a mysterious figure described as a cross between the
television characters Arthur Daley and Lovejoy. The recovery came after Lord
Bath made an appeal on the radio, offering a £100,000 reward.

Mr Dalrymple suggested that even a painting such as Madonna of the
Yarnwinder by Leonardo da Vinci, stolen from the Duke of Buccleuch's
Drumlanrig Castle two years ago, was probably sold for as little as £20,000
within a day or two of the theft.

"People are realising it's not so easy to launder money by using art and
antiques," he said. The investigation into the theft of the Renaissance
painting, which had been in the family for 250 years, continues, and they
have put up a £1m reward for its safe return.

At the time of the theft it was assumed professional criminals were
responsible, but detectives now believe the painting was stolen by an
opportunist thief.

Galleries are notoriously reluctant to reveal any arrangements privately
made for the recovery of stolen works. In mysterious circumstances, the Tate
recovered two Turner paintings years after they were stolen from a museum in
Frankfurt in 1994.
   24 May 2005 22:55

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