[MSN] Robert Volpe in Washington Post

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Robert Volpe; World-Renowned 'Art Cop'
By Adam Bernstein - Friday, December 1, 2006; B07 'The Washington Post' /
Washington, DC


Robert Volpe, 63, a painter, sculptor, gallery owner and New York Police
Department detective who became internationally known as the "art cop" for
tracking purloined art on the black market, died Nov. 28 at his home on
Staten Island, N.Y., after a heart attack.

For years, Mr. Volpe was a singular figure in police work as the only
detective in the country assigned full-time to investigate stolen or
forged artwork as well as dealer fraud and vandalism in museums.

With his dungarees, long hair and thick, handlebar moustache, he looked
less like a cop than an art school bohemian, and he endured peer ridicule.
Police colleagues once placed a nude centerfold in his locker with a note
asking, "But is it art?"

A former art school student and narcotics investigator, Mr. Volpe was
asked in 1972 to gauge the usefulness of an art squad. Until then, art
thefts were lumped into burglary or larceny caseloads.

"Instead of coming back with a report, I started coming back with arrests
and recoveries," he told the New York Times.

He scoured auction houses, raided homes of collectors suspected of going
bad and sometimes went undercover to negotiate with thieves about
returning art.

Once, he portrayed a gay Rhode Island art dealer named Damien Renar. When
he arranged to meet the thieves, he was dressed in a white linen suit, and
he relished the dramatic showdown, he said, when he could pull his police
revolver from its holster and shout, "Freeze, you [expletive]!"

"Grade B movie stuff," he told the Times. "You find you have to behave
that way. You don't come off with authority, you're done."

When he retired in 1985, he estimated that he had recovered tens of
millions of dollars worth of Byzantine ivories, Oriental rugs, Greek
marble heads, Tiffany glass, Matisses, Raphaels and other treasures. For a
period, he noted a particularly high trade in faux antique French
furniture.

"If all the old French furniture was real," he told the Christian Science
Monitor, "there would never have been a French Revolution. Everybody in
the country would have been too busy making furniture."

As a detective and later as a private art-security consultant, he shared
information regularly with Interpol and other police agencies in London,
Paris and Rome. He added that thieves were just as likely to help in order
"to knock out the competition."

Mr. Volpe was born a banker's son Dec. 13, 1942, in Brooklyn. As a
teenager, he painted the tugboats he saw from his Bay Ridge neighborhood.
When a local art dealer exhibited the works, Mr. Volpe was shocked to see
them sell for $250.

He went on to graduate from the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan
and to attend the Parsons School of Design and the Art Students League,
both in New York.

After Army service, he joined the police department in 1964 to support his
art. He was put to work investigating organized crime and drug dealing.

With his superiors noting the rise in art thefts, he was chosen for his
new assignment. He was the subject of Laurie Adams's 1974 book "Art Cop"
and, as his fame grew, he was occasionally summoned abroad.

He said the Hungarian government once requested his help in finding two
stolen Raphaels and five other paintings taken from the country's fine
arts museum. He concluded that only a rich collector would risk stealing
$40 million worth of government property behind the Iron Curtain, and
contacts in London told him that a Greek olive oil merchant was the
probable culprit. Police arrested the culprits and recovered the art.

Overall, he said, the recovery rate for stolen fine art was at best 10
percent. He lamented to Time magazine that judges rarely gave harsh
sentences to art thieves.

"An art thief is entertaining, romantic," he said. "I've seen cases where
the thief has pleaded guilty and gotten no sentence at all."

In 1997, Mr. Volpe reentered the news when he came to the defense of his
son Justin, a New York police officer who pleaded guilty to sexually
assaulting Haitian immigrant Abner Louima in a Brooklyn police precinct
station house. Louima had been taken into custody after police responded
to a fight outside a club.

Mr. Volpe's son received a 30-year prison sentence, and a Staten Island
newspaper reported that Mr. Volpe traveled every month to visit his son at
a federal prison in Rochester, Minn.

Survivors include his wife, Grace Volpe; two other sons; two brothers; and
a sister.