[MSN] Art for arms' sake

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 Art for arms' sake
A Texan blonde, shadowy 'charitable' organisations, stolen artworks that 
may have been used to fund the Falklands War and a trail leading from 
London to Taiwan to Buenos Aires... Simon Worrall investigates a 
real-life art heist more complex and unbelievable than a Frederick 
Forsyth bestseller
Published: 20 August 2006

In April 2001 a brassy blonde from Dallas, Texas, named Gabriella 
Williams, walked into Sotheby's, London, and pulled from her handbag 
photographs of 16 rare and valuable works of art. With her false 
eyelashes, big hair and dripping jewellery, Williams did not look like 
your typical art connoisseur. But she was also president of Humana Way 
International, a charity organisation registered in Texas. And like many 
good, Christian folks in George Bush's home state she wanted to do her 
bit to help those less fortunate than herself.

It was a mouthwatering collection: Renoir, Cézanne, Gauguin, Degas, 
Matisse... all the big boys. Of course, Sotheby's would be happy to 
provide an estimate of the value of the paintings. But, first, it would 
need to see them. Where were they? Williams explained that they were in 
Taiwan, and that they belonged to another charitable organisation, The 
De Lavor Trust, which was registered in Paramaribo - the capital of the 
tiny South American Republic of Suriname - by a wealthy timber merchant 
of Taiwanese extraction named Arthur Lung.

With a house in Los Angeles and vast timber concessions in his adopted 
country, Lung is one of the richest men in Suriname. Whether he is a 
good Christian like Williams, I have been unable to ascertain, but 
together these two munificent souls hoped to raise money for their 
respective charities using the paintings in what is known as a 
hypothecation scheme.

Say you have a pile of diamonds. You take them to a bank and the bank 
lends you a portion of their value. This money is then farmed out to an 
investor who plays roulette with it on the stock market hoping to make a 
windfall profit. The plan devised by Humana Way International and The De 
Lavor Trust, whose members sat on each other's boards, was to create an 
"Art Investment Program" by borrowing a large amount of money against 
the value of the art for "humanitarian operations" in Suriname and other 
parts of the world. This was only the beginning. A fax to one of Humana 
Way's German partners talked about a second project worth $650m (around 
£342m). Williams' and Lung's charitable intentions were positively 
Geldofian.

The De Lavor Trust's ownership of the paintings had been attested to on 
official, embassy notepaper by an "ambassador" of Suriname named Rupert 
L Christopher. And they had been valued at $350m (around £185m) by one 
Dr Henry Armand Venoaks of the Fine Arts Institution of Suriname. Now, 
it is true that Suriname is not the first word that leaps into one's 
mind when you say the phrase"19th-century French Impressionist art". It 
is better known for a hermaphroditic toad, known locally as a "pipa", 
about which Samuel Taylor Coleridge, that (omega) inveterate collector 
of arcanae, wrote in one of his notebooks; and for footballers such as 
Clarence Seedorf, Edgar Davids and Ruud Gullit, all of whom hail from 
this remote, Dutch-speaking republic, which nestles between Guyana and 
French Guyana in the far north of South America. So before they could 
get their hypothecation scheme rolling, Humana Way International and the 
De Lavor Trust (Lung and Williams) needed to get an "official" valuation.

In its time, Sotheby's has heard plenty of outlandish stories about the 
provenance of works of art. Why couldn't this one be true? Their 
curiosity aroused, two Sotheby's employees were duly dispatched to 
Taipei to meet with the "owner" of the paintings, Lung. Also present at 
the meeting were Lung's brother, Yunhuei Lung, of Taipei, Williams, and 
several other board members of Humana Way International, including 
Williams' British husband, Alan, and a specialist in Korean affairs 
based in Seattle named John Thorpe, who had been appointed president of 
Humana Way International for South and North Korea.

"I was totally gobsmacked when I saw the paintings," says Williams. They 
had been taken off their stretchers, which lowered their value. You 
could have rolled them up in a tin!"

Which is probably how they had arrived in Taiwan in the first place. 
Details, details... The important thing, as Sotheby's confirmed, was 
that the paintings were authentic. Unfortunately, the esteemed auction 
house's estimate of their value was rather lower than that provided by 
the mysterious Dr Venoaks. About $348m (around £183m) lower, to be 
precise. Though the artworks were by heavy hitters, they were in the 
main drawings and sketches. The most HWI and The De Lavor Trust could 
hope to squeeze out of their "Art Investment Program" was a couple of 
million bucks. "I can't work with anything like that," Williams tells 
me, sniffily, "it's too little."

As it was, a bombshell was about to drop in her lap.

When Williams first walked into Sotheby's London office in April 2001, 
the auction firm did not immediately check on the paintings' provenance. 
A spokesperson for the firm claims that this was perfectly normal. But 
to those of us who live in the real world, this would seem a peculiar 
way to proceed. It costs a lot of money to fly people to Taiwan, put 
them up in hotels, wine and dine them. Sotheby's also pays a significant 
sum each year to a firm called Art Loss Register, which possesses the 
world's largest electronic database of stolen art. And yet it was not 
until over a month after William's initial visit that Sotheby's 
contacted ALR to check if the paintings had been stolen - several weeks 
after its two employees had flown to Taiwan.

The report that came back from ALR was explosive. Far from belonging to 
The De Lavor Trust, the 16 artworks had been stolen from the Museum of 
Fine Art in Buenos Aires more than a quarter of a century earlier. In 
extremely murky circumstances.

It was the middle of the night on Christmas Day 1980, as the rest of 
Argentina slept off its Yuletide excesses, that thieves climbed through 
the roof of the Museum of Fine Art - a two-storey building fronted by 
Greek columns in the centre of Buenos Aires. At the time, the 
second-floor gallery was being remodelled and construction workers had 
removed parts of the roof. Ladders had been left standing against the 
walls and it is believed the thieves used these to gain access to the museum

They came with a detailed shopping list, cherry-picking items from both 
floors, while leaving behind other, more valuable works. Even then, it 
was a major heist: 16 French Impressionist paintings and drawings, 
including Ballerina, a pastel and charcoal study by Edgar Degas regarded 
as one of the finest of the painter's studies of dancers. The pictures 
were removed in their frames and loaded into a waiting truck. The 
thieves also used blowtorches to cut open metal cases containing 
valuable Chinese vases and carvings. The total value of the haul, even 
then, was estimated at $25m (around £13m).

Though of disparate genres and quality, the stolen artworks had one 
thing in common: they were all part of what was known as The Santamarina 
Collection. Antonio Santamarina, who died aged 92 in 1974, was one of 
Argentina's richest estancia owners, with vast cattle ranches all over 
the country. He also had a pretty good eye for art and, during trips to 
Europe from 1895-1930, he had amassed what was regarded as the finest 
private art collection in Latin America. Highlights of the collection 
included a 1876 work by Renoir, showing the artist among a group of 
friends in his studio and Manet's Isabelle au Manchon.

The collection became the subject of a bitter legal battle with the 
Argentine government when, in 1974, the Santamarina family took many of 
the best works out of Argentina to London, where they were auctioned at 
Sotheby's. The Argentinian government tried to prevent the sale, 
claiming that the paintings were part of Argentina's "patrimony" and 
that they had been illegally removed. But the auction went ahead and a 
bitter legal battle ensued regarding the remainder of the collection. 
Finally, the widow of Antonio Santamarina agreed to donate what remained 
of the collection to the nation. And it was these paintings that were 
removed on Christmas Day in 1980.

Rumours immediately began to circulate about the true identity of the 
thieves. The two security guards on duty that night had been held for 
questioning and, according to some accounts, given a roughing up by the 
notoriously brutal state security service, the Secretaría de 
Inteligencia del Estado (Side). But few believed that a couple of 
nightwatchmen could have organised such an audacious and skilful art 
theft. It was rumoured that a military lorry had driven up to collect 
the paintings; and that the paintings had subsequently been seen in the 
office of Otto Palladino, the head of Side. And that behind the 
operation lurked the most brutal henchman of Argentina's Dirty War, 
Anibal Gordon.

"His nickname was El Coronel [the Colonel]," says Maria Lara Avignolo, 
an Argentinian journalist who has written about the case. "He worked for 
the secret services, mounting special operations. He was also involved 
in numerous kidnappings and ran a concentration camp called Orletti, in 
the suburbs of Buenos Aires, where The Disappeared were taken. He was a 
violent and sadistic person. A true criminal."

Gordon was also a key player in Operation Condor, the clandestine 
campaign of assassination, counter-terrorism and intelligence-gathering 
operations implemented by the right-wing dictatorships of the Southern 
Cone, which meant he had extensive contacts all over South America. Most 
explosive of all was the rumour that the paintings had been used to 
procure arms from Taiwan for the Falklands War. "There was an arms 
embargo against Argentina at the time," explains Avignolo, "and the 
Junta worked a lot with Taiwan, because it was the only country willing 
to break the embargo. Taiwan was also a triangulation point for other 
countries - the Junta even had an ambassador in Taiwan, and military 
attachés, which was very unusual."

Was this how the paintings had ended up in Taipei?

Stolen art has little value if it stays inside so-called grey, or 
criminal, markets. For it to fetch a high price, it has to get into the 
legitimate art market. As it passes from hand to hand, it is 
progressively "cleaned" of criminal associations. In the process, it can 
move around the world, from country to country.

The journey taken by the artworks lifted from the museum in Buenos Aires 
in 1980 en route to Sotheby's in 2001 was particularly labyrinthine. 
According to Julian Radcliffe of Art Loss Register, the art had been 
transferred from Buenos Aires to Brazil and thence to Lung in Suriname. 
 From there the paintings were moved to Hong Kong, and thence to the 
care of Lung's brother, Yunhuei, in Taiwan. Yunhuei Lung was also in the 
timber business. His company, Lung Yow Woods Corp, makes blockboard and 
other kinds of finished wood products for the Taiwanese construction 
industry. Radcliffe believes he is also closely connected to the 
Taiwanese Ministry of Defence.

The De Lavor Trust had been established by Arthur Lung on behalf of a 
Brazilian Senator named Pedro Mansueto de Lavor, who was born in 1933 in 
a town called Barbahla in northern Brazil and was the first Socialist 
senator ever elected in Brazil. How he had become the "owner" of stolen 
Argentinian art I could not ascertain. In 1998, just around the time 
that Arthur Lung, with or without his permission, established The De 
Lavor Trust, Mansueto de Lavor died of cancer.

Despite numerous calls to Suriname, I was also unable to verify the 
existence of Dr Venoaks, the "art expert" who had valued the paintings 
at $350m. "I know Venoaks as a surname," says Henry Illes, Suriname's 
ambassador to the US, when I reach him at his office in Washington DC, 
"but I don't know anyone of that name." Illes has also never heard of 
the Fine Arts Institution of Suriname. Nor has the Attorney General's 
office in Paramaribo or the bureau of home affairs. But Rupert L 
Christopher, the man who attested to The De Lavor Trust's ownership of 
the paintings, did exist. According to Illes, he had been in the 
diplomatic service in the 1990s. In Brazil.

It is 9am in Texas when I reach Williams at her home in Bedford, an 
upmarket community between Dallas and Fort Worth. Born in Germany in 
1954, of an American father and a German mother, Williams has been 
living in the US since 1980. Prior to that she worked in Germany as an 
interpreter at Nato and has formerly been married to a US Army colonel. 
She is now married to Alan Williams, an Englishman who had once worked 
at Hawker Siddley, in Coventry.

"I was contacted by someone called John Thorpe," she tells me when I ask 
her how she had got involved in this affair. "He said that he had 
someone who had paintings that belonged to a Brazilian senator and they 
wanted to get a line of credit on them. They wanted to do a joint 
venture with us by getting a line of credit from a foundation. Which 
could have made a few bob and helped a lot of people. We trusted the 
thing because it had an insurance policy and these ambassadors' 
signatures, so I flew to Taipei to meet Arthur Lung."

Humana Way International was registered in the state of Texas as a 
charity in 1998, with Williams as its president and CEO, in the same 
year that Arthur Lung registered The De Lavor Trust. Its charitable 
status was revoked in 2000 for failure to file a tax return. It was 
reinstated later that year.

Williams repeatedly states that she had no idea the paintings were 
stolen. "I was in total shock when we found out." (Later, she calls me 
back to repeat how devastating the discovery had been.) Yet she also 
tells me that when she asked Lung for proof of ownership, he did not 
have any. "He explained he was friends with this senator in Brazil who 
was too ill to travel."

You weren't suspicious that he had no title to the paintings?

"We thought Arthur was an honourable person. I trust everyone until they 
prove me different. Though in the business I work in 99 per cent of the 
people are gangsters."

I ask her what that business was exactly?

"It involves getting lines of credit," she explains. "Arthur was going 
to put up the paintings for a line of credit. He could have touched the 
yield that came out of it. He was going to do humanitarian work." She 
pauses, then adds... "Allegedly."

There is an absent-minded quality about her delivery, as if she is 
reading a magazine at the hairdresser's while she speaks. But when I say 
that I haven't been able to find anything about Humana Way International 
on Google, her baby-doll voice takes on an edge of steel. "I don't need 
to show off what I do," she snaps. "I don't do this work to draw 
attention to myself. I do it for the people who need help."

She talks a lot about all the people in the world who need help and how 
she wants to help them. But when I ask her to describe one of Humana 
Way's past projects, all she can offer is that, since 1998, when she set 
up the organisation, she has "closed one project with a gentleman in 
Croatia".

And what did they do?

"They rebuilt Croatia."

Rebuilt Croatia?

"They didn't rebuild the whole country," she says, back- pedalling. 
"They helped with the reconstruction of some churches and hospitals."

I ask her whom she worked with there.

"He was a very high clergyman in the church," she replies.

What is his name?

There is a pause. In the background, I hear what sounds like crockery 
crashing to the floor.

"He's dead now," she says icily.

I ask her if and when we here in the United Kingdom could look forward 
to benefiting from her munificence.

"I've got some things in mind," she says, vaguely. "Churches that need 
restoring... old people. There are so many people that need our help."

When I press her to name some other projects or people, she grows testy. 
"I wouldn't tell you if you were God. These things are done in God's name."

At this point, her husband comes on to the phone. Williams listens on 
another handset, occasionally breaking in to (omega) clarify something. 
Long pauses between my questions and their answers suggest a 
considerable amount of semaphore going on in the background.

"We took it on face value," says Alan Williams, when I ask him why he 
had got involved with a deal that sounded fraudulent at best and 
criminal at worst. His accent - like his wife's - is a strange hybrid: a 
mixture of the nasal, Black Country whine of his native Coventry 
overlaid with a Texas drawl. "Remember we met with Sotheby's, and they 
gave us no hint that the paintings were stolen. The artwork was never 
going to be sold. Our aim was to get an insurance policy on which we 
could get a line of credit from a bank. We wanted to get an appraisal 
from Sotheby's to get an insurance policy. And they said the works were 
authentic."

He explains that the profits from the hypothecation scheme were to be 
distributed among the people involved, including Arthur Lung in 
Suriname; but that "90 per cent" of the Williams' cut was going to be 
used for one of Humana Way International's projects. I ask him to 
describe to me a specific project that HWI had been involved with.

There is a long pause.

"It was going to be used to set up mobile first-aid stations."

Where?

Another long pause.

"South Africa," he says, as though he has just stuck a pin in a map of 
the world.

"And Zimbabwe."

I sense his wife signalling to him from the other side of the room. "And 
orphanages," he adds.

So exactly what were the names of the projects Humana Way had 
established in the past? I ask.

His answers are as vague as his wife's.

"I can't name any because we've never made any money. Like this deal, 
which never came to fruition."

In other words you cannot name any verifiable projects that Humana Way 
has carried out? I press him.

"We've helped people out," he says. "Flood victims... things like that. 
We've helped poor people in different countries."

Is there someone I could talk to, I ask, some objective source who could 
tell me about and verify any of Humana Way's humanitarian projects?

"Well, there is one man in Africa..." says Alan Williams finally, "... 
but he's dead."

"I always assumed it [Humana Way International] was a scam," Radcliffe 
tells me as we sit in his cramped, file-strewn Art Loss Register office 
in London's Hatton Garden."As was The De Lavor Trust. They were trying 
to get money for charitable purposes that would never be used for charity."

With his bespoke suits, long, skinny legs and lean face, Radcliffe might 
give the impression of being a typical City gent. But behind those 
grey-blue eyes there is a glint of steel that Radcliffe acquired during 
a stint in military intelligence in Northern Ireland and the Middle 
East. It was this experience that gave him the skills to found the 
world's leading kidnap and hostage negotiation company, Control Risk; 
and then, in 1990, the Art Loss Register.

"It's a database of stolen art," he explains. "We have 170,000 items 
listed from all over the world. We charge people a small fee to register 
losses and a fee of 10 to 15 per cent if we get the item back. We also 
charge searchers a fee. These are buyers, auction houses and art 
dealers. And, on average, we recover about three items a month."

The Argentinian case presented particular problems for Radcliffe, not 
the least of which was the fact that Argentina was in the midst of the 
worst financial crisis of its history. Recovering stolen paintings was 
hardly a priority when civil servants were not being paid. There were 
also international sensitivities. In July 2001, a few months after the 
case had resurfaced, Tony Blair became the first British Prime Minister 
to visit Argentina since the Falklands War. The Foreign Office was keen 
to help the Argentinians recover the paintings as a tangible sign of 
British goodwill towards its former enemy. But the suspicion that the 
paintings had been used to procure arms during the Falklands War was 
hardly likely to help usher in a new dawn of fraternal relations between 
the countries. The Argentinians were also wary of what skeletons 
Radcliffe might find in the closet.

"A rather telling point was that when I was in the office of the British 
ambassador in Buenos Aires with two (Argentinian) women civil servants," 
recalls Radcliffe, "and I said do we need to tell the police about this? 
They looked embarrassed and said: 'No, we will deal with this ourselves.'"

Eventually, a private donor was found in Argentina to cover Art Loss 
Register's fees. By then, Arthur Lung, in Suriname, had indicated that 
he and his brother might be willing to surrender the pictures. And, in 
January 2002, Radcliffe flew to Taipei to meet Arthur Lung's brother, 
Yunhuei.

"I met him at a hotel in Taipei with a translator," recalls Radcliffe. 
"He was about 50, a businessman type in an open-necked shirt. Tough, 
heavily built, monosyllabic. He smoked all the time. He said: 'Why are 
you coming here when you British pillaged China?' He then said he had 
close contacts with the Taiwanese Ministry of Defence and that he could 
not surrender the paintings without the government's agreement." 
Radcliffe pauses. "That surprised me."

Radcliffe was even more surprised when, six weeks later, he received a 
call from a gallery in Paris asking for information on three paintings 
which had been offered for sale by a young Taiwanese concert promoter 
named Yeh Yeo Huan and his gay lover, a French classical pianist who 
tours Asia under the stage name "Lada". Radcliffe informed the gallery 
that all three paintings - Renoir's Tête de Jeune Fille au Ruban Bleu 
(Head of a Young Girl with a Blue Ribbon); Gauguin's Le Cri (The Cry); 
and a watercolour by Cézanne called La Route (The Way) - had, in fact, 
been stolen from the Museum of Fine Art in Buenos Aires back in 1980.

"Yeh was a nephew of the Lung brothers," explains Radcliffe. "When I met 
him in Paris with his lover he became very upset. He got up and 
gesticulated. They must have been pretty concerned because I was saying 
they smuggled these pictures in without declaring them to Customs."

The three pictures were seized by the French police on behalf of the 
Museum of Fine Art in Buenos Aires and negotiations for the return of 
the other 13 began. But there was to be one final twist to a story that 
spanned a quarter of a century, half a dozen countries and a cast of 
characters straight out of a Frederick Forsyth novel. On the day that 
the agreement for the return of the rest of the paintings was due to be 
signed, Maitre Boulin, the defence lawyer hired by the Taiwanese, was 
arrested in the centre of Paris for alleged gold smuggling.

Finally, in November last year, amid much popping of champagne corks and 
flashbulbs, the three pictures were unveiled to the public in the Museum 
of Fine Art in Buenos Aires. Negotiations are continuing for the return 
of the others, though the chances of success are slim. Argentina has no 
extradition treaty with Taiwan. There are also unlikely to be any 
prosecutions. As a result, we will probably never know exactly how the 
paintings got from Buenos Aires to Suriname and then to Taiwan; how a 
Brazilian senator became involved with a Taiwanese timber merchant; and 
if they were, indeed, part of a clandestine arms sale. Anibal Gordon and 
others who may have been involved in the theft are dead. Nestor 
Kirchner's current Argentine government has other priorities.

Arthur Lung and his brother Yunhuei declined to respond to emails 
requesting clarification of their role in the affair. But, although 
nothing has emerged to tie the Taiwanese to any specific arms deal or 
the original theft of the works in 1980, the circumstantial evidence 
suggests that the paintings were given as a finder's fee for a secret 
arms deal involving the Taiwanese Ministry of Defence.

"If you look at the map, Suriname is next door to Belize and not that 
far from Panama, both traditional transit routes for arms and 
contraband," explains Radcliffe. "Lung might have taken the paintings as 
his commission for securing the arms. The arms could have been put in a 
container full of timber and shipped to Suriname."

"The link is military," insists Maria Lara Avignolo. "But I don't think 
that we will ever know the full story."

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