[MSN] Robert Volpe-Art Theft Expert; NY Times

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Robert Volpe, Art-Theft Expert Dies at 63
by Douglass Martin
New York Times
December 5, 2006

Robert Volpe, a painter with a flowing mustache who gained street smarts
chasing drug smugglers as a police officer and then put those skills to
use as the New York City Police Department's one-man art-theft squad in
the 1970s, died on Nov. 28 at his home on Staten Island. He was 63.

The cause was a heart attack, his family said.

Mr. Volpe began his art career painting pictures of tugboats as a teenager
and selling them for $250. By the mid-1970s, after his work had turned
more abstract, he was selling paintings for $1,500 when he was not on the
job for the police, browsing galleries, attending auctions, lecturing at
the Smithsonian, traveling to Paris or Rome or tracking down fiendishly
clever criminals.

European law enforcement authorities have estimated that crimes involving
art and antiquities are third on the list of illicit trade, after drugs
and weapons. As epicenter of the art world, New York brims with priceless
art in museums and private residences, and according to Mr. Volpe, is the
world's clearinghouse for stolen art.

Before Mr. Volpe was unleashed in 1971 as the city's first and only art
detective, art crimes were handled by the burglary division and other
units. After his retirement in 1983, regular details took them up again.

Mr. Volpe's accomplishments as a painter and curator earned him a place in
"Who's Who in American Art," and his sweeping mustache, shoulder-length
hair and flamboyant clothing fit the part. He had an Armani suit to wear
to auctions and a Groucho Marx disguise for no known reason.

In later years he was an object of unwanted attention when his son, the
former police officer Justin Volpe, was convicted of brutalizing Abner
Louima in a Brooklyn station house in 1997. Mr. Volpe condemned his son's
action but publicly and repeatedly expressed his love for him. The New
York Daily News reported in 2004 that Mr. Volpe had found some peace
knowing that his son was creating art behind bars.

Mr. Volpe essentially created his detective's job after computer analyses
pinpointed art theft as a growing problem. Asked to make a survey, he came
back with actual arrests instead of a report - underlining the need for a
special effort.

He became that effort, making the New York Police Department the nation's
only one with a separate bureau for art crime. Around the department, Mr.
Volpe was known as Rembrandt. Fellow policemen sometimes put nude
centerfolds on his locker with the handwritten question, "But is it art?"

His cases included art thefts, dealer fraud, vandalism and forgeries. He
fielded 40 or 50 calls a day, as many from overseas as from Madison Avenue
and SoHo.

He recovered two Byzantine ivories worth $1.5 million, stolen from a
museum in Pesaro, Italy. A photo of Italy's foreign minister
congratulating him hung over his desk.


Robert Volpe was born in December 1942 and grew up in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.
He studied art at the High School of Art and Design, Parsons, and the Art
Students League. Fresh out of the Army, he joined the police to have an
"offbeat" job while he painted, he said in an interview with The New York
Times in 1977.

He first walked a beat on the Lower East Side, did undercover work on
organized crime cases, and was part of the narcotics squad that
investigated the heroin-smuggling operation known as "The French
Connection."

Mr. Volpe recovered art pieces that were stolen before he was born. Other
cases evolved faster: on Dec. 22, 1980, the British authorities notified
him about a missing candelabrum, dating from 1858 and once in the
possession of the king of Egypt. He recovered it by Jan. 2, 1981.

Detective Volpe saw a little bit of everything: from stolen pictures worth
$50,000 being sold on street corners, to suspected thieves eager to keep
up with art-market trends sitting next to him at lectures. He learned that
September and October were especially busy months, as the wealthy returned
from abroad to find their homes looted. He was frustrated more than once
when judges found convicted art thieves entertaining and romantic and
declined to sentence them.

Infrequently, his chases became dangerously dramatic, as when he pointed
his gun at thieves of a Russian icon.

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

In addition to his son Justin, Mr. Volpe is survived by his wife, Grace,
an art teacher; two other sons, Rob and Damian; two brothers, Andrew and
John; a sister, Jane Graziano; and four grandchildren.

Mr. Volpe told The News in 2004 how he taught Justin an artist's technique
called "visualization" when he was a boy. It is a way of imagining things
that are not there, then drawing them.

The method helps his son today. "Justin tells me he'll catch a glimpse of
the sky and then picture himself on a country road on his Harley," Mr.
Volpe said. "His art takes him to a different place."