Provenance_ How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art - Laney Salisbury [90]
The Art Squad was run by Dick Ellis, who had grown up around amateur painters and antiques collectors. As a young officer, he had his first brush with art thieves when his parents’ home was burgled. Ellis headed down to Bermondsey antiques market, where thieves had sold their goods with impunity for years. He spotted the family silver in one of the stalls and soon collared the culprit.
Because it was so understaffed, the Art Squad chose its cases carefully, and was often forced to ignore perfectly decent leads. Among its successes: It tracked a cache of stolen manuscripts to an East London parking lot; recovered thirteenth-century Arabic documents and philosophical works by a Sufi saint; ferreted out books purloined from an ancient Anatolian library; nabbed a larcenous collector dubbed “the Astronomer,” who was addicted to original manuscripts by Copernicus and Ptolemy; and busted a multimillion-pound operation that imported looted treasure from Russia and Poland.
In the dusty cabinets of a London barrister, the squad found a thirteen-hundred-year-old gold headdress stolen from an ancient Peruvian tomb. In 1993, it recovered a Vermeer and a Goya stolen from a collector by a brutal Irish gangster known as “The General.” Most famously, in May 1994, it recovered a version of Edvard Munch’s The Scream that had been lifted out of a window of Norway’s National Gallery in Oslo on the opening day of the Winter Olympics. The thieves had left a handwritten postcard: “Thanks for the poor security.”
Success, however, did not lead to additional staffing for the Art Squad. Part of the problem was that London’s art thieves had a peculiar working pattern: They would lie in wait for a good haul for months at a time and during these slow periods the squad would be reduced to issuing alerts on tchotchkes of little value, pink-and-blue horse-drawn carriages, tortoiseshell tea caddies, ancient Hungarian fiddles, and lost dinosaur eggs. Inevitably, the villains would reemerge as if from a winter’s hibernation and go after everything that wasn’t nailed down.
Europe’s criminals favored the London scene: Fences were unusually civil and one could unload just about anything. For art thieves and forgers, the city had become one of the world’s great crossroads for dodgy canvases. For Ellis that meant there were always too many important cases to deal with.
In September 1995 he was in the thick of things. He and two of his detectives had been working almost exclusively for more than a year on the case of a British-born Egyptian tomb raider, a former cavalryman and self-proclaimed antiquities restorer with a Cambridge degree in “moral sciences,” or philosophy. Ellis had been shuttling around Europe, North Africa, and the United States trying to shut that ring down, but recently a new case had sprung up that was too rich to ignore. There was a palpable link between the contents of the briefcase Detective Higgs had sent him, the flood of calls he’d been getting from dealers warning about a rash of forgeries, and a case the Art Squad had investigated just the previous year, involving a certain John Drewe and some paintings allegedly stolen by the Mafia.
Ellis had also received a worried call from Sarah Fox-Pitt at the Tate Gallery. She was concerned that one of their patrons—John Drewe—might be using the museum in a scheme to sell fraudulent art. She told him about her archivist