Provenance_ How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art - Laney Salisbury [89]
She was sure this was another forged piece of provenance. She would have been surer if she’d known that Sussman was the surname of Drewe’s new wife.
27
THE ART SQUAD
At New Scotland Yard, the Art and Antiques Squad was down to a few desks and a couple of phones. The unit operated within the larger and more powerful Serious and Organised Crime Unit, which took up most of the fifth floor of the Yard’s twenty-story headquarters in Westminster. Among the unit’s other subdivisions were the Flying Squad, trained in high-speed chases and street ambushes, and the Kidnap Unit, whose varied tasks included the rescue of hostages and potential suicides. The Art Squad’s cramped quarters in this macho milieu reflected its status as a poor cousin. Since its founding as a philatelic unit in 1969 after a series of holdups of stamp dealers, the squad’s relevance and jurisdiction had been subject to close scrutiny by the Yard’s upper echelons.
In contrast to the swagger of the Organised Crime Unit, the Art Squad was regarded as a kind of pantywaist protection force for the elite. If a wealthy Knightsbridge aristocrat awoke to find his Titian gone, the case was given a lower priority than, say, a mugging in Stepney. Art crimes were generally considered the stuff of light comedy, filler items for the BBC News entertainment segment. The unofficial position of the Yard’s commissioner was that pretentious victims of art crime probably got what was coming to them, that the few Londoners who could afford great art could also survive the occasional loss, and that such relatively small misfortunes were best left to the wealthy and their insurers.
The Art Squad had known even worse times. When London was hit by a wave of armed robberies and muggings in the mid-1980s, the unit was disbanded altogether. It was a hasty decision on the part of the top brass, because the art market was heating up during this same period. Once prices rose it was only a matter of time before the trade in stolen art followed suit.
By the end of the twentieth century Interpol was ranking art crime as one of the world’s most profitable criminal activities, second only to drug smuggling and weapons dealing. The three activities were related: Drug pushers were moving stolen and smuggled art down the same pipelines they used for narcotics, and terrorists were using looted antiquities to fund their activities. This latter trend began in 1974, when the IRA stole $32 million worth of paintings by Rubens, Goya, and Vermeer. In 2001, the Taliban looted the Kabul museum and “washed” the stolen works in Switzerland. Stolen art was much more easily transportable than drugs or arms. A customs canine, after all, could hardly be expected to tell the difference between a crap Kandinksy and a credible one.
By some estimates, art crime had become a $5 billion a year business. While New Scotland Yard largely ignored the implications of the upsurge, other cities took action. In Washington, the FBI reached out to the art community to help solve fraud cases. In Italy, the Carabinieri placed three hundred officers at the disposal of its stolen art unit. In Manhattan, a former abstract painter and art student turned police detective ran his own one-man art crime investigative unit. His name was Robert Volpe, and he was an unorthodox, Serpico-like figure with a Dalí mustache and an Armani suit. Dubbed “the Archangel of the Art Scene,” he specialized in gallery theft and went after forgers, crooked auctioneers, dealers who defrauded their own artists, and collectors who shopped at the black market. Fellow officers at the station house considered him an eccentric—some of his colleagues once hung a nude centerfold in his locker with a note that asked the eternal question “Is it art?”—but Volpe saw himself as a guardian of patrimony.
London art dealers and auctioneers soon began to demand