On
March 18, 1990, at 1:20 in the morning, two men dressed in police
uniforms demanded entrance to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. When
the guard at the front desk complied, they bound him and his partner in
handcuffs. “This is a robbery,” the intruders announced. “Don’t give us
any problems, and you won’t get hurt.” The senior guard was quick to
respond. “Don’t worry,” he said. “They don’t pay me enough to get hurt.”
Inadequate
funding was just one of many problems undermining security at the
museum when it was hit with the greatest art theft in history.
Bequeathed to the city of Boston by Isabella Stewart Gardner in 1924,
the art-filled palazzo had scarcely been renovated since her death,
restricted by a will prohibiting significant changes. Nor were the
guards well chosen: One of the night watchmen often conducted rounds
while high on marijuana. His partner used the vacant museum for trombone
practice.
As
Stephen Kurkjian shows in “Master Thieves,” the museum’s inadequacies
were matched only by the thieves’ carelessness. Major artworks by
Rembrandt, including “The Storm on the Sea of Galilee,” were thrown on
the floor to break their protective glass, and then sliced out of their
frames with knives. Though a first-rate Vermeer was also part of the
haul, the Gardner’s most valuable work, Titian’s “Rape of Europa,” was
completely ignored. Instead the thieves nabbed some of the museum’s most
trivial objects, like an ancient Chinese vase worth a few thousand
dollars.
“This
was not a surgical strike,” Kurkjian writes with understatement,
dismissing the popular notion “that there was a ‘Doctor No’ figure who
had commissioned the heist to get his hands on a favored painting.”
Working as an investigative reporter for The Boston Globe, Kurkjian has
spent much of the past couple of decades trying to figure out who the
crooks were and what they were after.
He’s
hardly been alone in this endeavor. Ranking the Gardner theft as one of
the world’s Top 10 art thefts, the F.B.I. has continuously investigated
the heist for the past 25 years. Yet despite countless man-hours and a
$5 million reward offered by the Gardner’s trustees, the paintings have
stubbornly remained out of sight. More than just a summation of all
that’s publicly known about the case — from the thieves’ false mustaches
to the F.B.I.’s sting operations — Kurkjian’s book is an impressive
attempt to solve the crime by reconsidering the evidence.
Kurkjian
does so by focusing on potential motives, starting with a bit of Boston
street wisdom, supplemented by an anonymous tip. “During the Mob’s
heyday in Boston,” he writes, “just about every criminal in the city
believed that the return of a valuable stolen artwork could shorten a
prison sentence or even make it go away.” In 1989, that wisdom was put
into action when a powerful gangster named Vincent Ferrara was convicted
of racketeering. Needing his protection from a rival Boston gang, a
fellow mobster named Robert Donati orchestrated the heist, Kurkjian
believes, in order to put Ferrara back on the street. However, according
to Kurkjian, the overwhelming response to the theft forced Donati to
hide the stolen art. Then he was murdered, and the paintings have been
missing ever since. And so when it comes to locating them today,
Kurkjian surmises, the intricacies of long-ago gang warfare “might just
unlock the mystery.”
It’s
a plausible theory, if not incontrovertible, and Kurkjian has shared it
with the F.B.I. and the Gardner Museum’s head of security, Anthony M.
Amore. There’s reason to believe that Amore might be sympathetic,
judging from how he characterizes art theft in his own new book, “The
Art of the Con”: “High-value paintings are rarely stolen by crooks that
can be characterized as professional art thieves,” he writes. “The
reason for this is simple: Highly valuable and recognizable masterpieces
. . . are exceptionally difficult to fence.” From the thief’s
perspective, priceless art is worthless. “The art of art theft is said
to be in the selling of the art, not the thievery,” Amore elaborates,
comparing it with the art of fraud, which he claims “is in the back
story, not in the picture itself.”
And
fraud is the central subject of “The Art of the Con.” Following the
formula of his first book, “Stealing Rembrandts,” Amore has compiled an
assortment of old cases, rehashing past crimes. Some will be familiar to
newspaper readers. (One chapter recapitulates the forgery scandal that
led to the 2011 closure of Knoedler & Company, one of New York’s
most venerable galleries.) Others are obscure for good reason. (Another
chapter describes how a Los Angeles art dealer named Tatiana Khan passed
off a forged Picasso pastel, claiming it came from the Malcolm Forbes
collection. She was caught and convicted, end of story.) Amore brings
little insight to these case histories, assembling his narratives from
newspaper articles, court records and the occasional interview with law
enforcement colleagues.
Nevertheless,
some frauds are so interesting that even Amore’s bland retelling can’t
quash them. For the manipulation of back story — or provenance, as art
professionals call it — few can best Ely Sakhai. In the 1990s, Sakhai
began buying second-rate paintings by first-rate Impressionists,
purchasing at auction in New York. He would have each of these artworks
meticulously replicated (including the back of the canvas and frame) by
a team of Chinese copyists. Then he would sell the copy with the
original certificate of authenticity and auction record to a Japanese
collector. Later he would have the original reauthenticated and resell
it in New York.
Wolfgang
Beltracchi was even more creative in his fabrication of provenance — as
he had to be, since his forgeries were never direct copies. Beltracchi
specialized in Modernists. Studying their style and using period
materials, he would paint the masters’ “unpainted works” (as he
provocatively phrased it), contributing new art to their oeuvres.
In
order to explain the sudden appearance of undocumented masterpieces,
Beltracchi cast his wife’s deceased grandfather as a prewar German
collector, claiming that the seller was the German Jewish dealer Alfred
Flechtheim, whose records were lost during the Third Reich. (Beltracchi
supported this provenance by sticking fake Flechtheim Gallery labels on
the back of his paintings.) Hundreds of Beltracchi’s forgeries were sold
in the 1990s and 2000s, often at public auction, for prices as high as
several million dollars. One fake was exhibited in the Metropolitan
Museum of Art. What brought Beltracchi down was neither connoisseurship
nor historical research but the detection of an anachronistic pigment in
one of his paintings.
Amore
attributes Beltracchi’s feat of deception to skill with paint and
cleverness with provenance. Less obviously, he credits Beltracchi’s
all-encompassing ego. “In fact, his hubris may have been the essential
part of his success,” Amore writes. It’s a point worth considering: Can a
kind of greatness be attained through delusions of grandeur?
But
if hubris is intoxicating to the art forger, it’s toxic for an art
investigator. All of Amore’s stories end in punishment, an unrealistic
representation of criminal activity. More misleadingly, Amore presents
scientific analysis as an infallible new weapon against fraud. In fact,
investigators’ overconfidence in scientific detection techniques has
been exploited by forgers for at least the past century.
Hubris
may even be what’s holding up the Gardner Museum investigation.
Kurkjian revealingly shows how the F.B.I. has systematically shut out
lower echelons of law enforcement like the Boston police, despite their
superior knowledge of local gangs. Journalists are held in equal
contempt: Kurkjian reports that neither the F.B.I. nor Amore has
bothered to follow up on his investigation of Robert Donati’s surviving
contacts and family.
What
makes Kurkjian’s book so gripping is precisely the quality lacking in
Amore’s: an accomplished investigator’s sense of open-minded humility.
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