Book Review: Looking at Art Theft from the Thefts of One Artist's Work

From The Dispatch, Columbus, Mississippi & The Golden Triangle: Looking at Art Theft from the Thefts of One Artist's Work

If you know about art heists from the movies, I hope you are not surprised to know that the movies have not instructed you factually on the matter. One of the themes in Stealing Rembrandts: The Untold Stories of Notorious Art Heists (Palgrave) is to show just how wrong the movies get it, and it is a delight to find out. The two authors are well qualified to break our movie illusions. Anthony M. Amore is the head of security at the Isabella Gardner Museum, site of one of the most famous heists of paintings (including three Rembrandts) in 1990, still unsolved. He assumed the job fifteen years after the robbery, but has researched it and other art thefts in order to come closer to solving the case. He is joined here by Tom Mashberg, a longtime Boston investigative reporter who has written continuing coverage of the Gardner robbery. The Gardner heist has been covered extensively, and is not a main subject of this book, which is a look at modern art thefts simply by attempts at the covetable works of one artist. It's a good choice, looking at Rembrandt thefts, because there are lots of Rembrandt works; although many of the famous paintings have been downgraded to "school of Rembrandt" since there are doubts about their authenticity, there are still over 2,000 paintings, drawings, and etchings that survive. He did some huge studies, like The Night Watch, but most of his works are small and so they are portable. A genuine Rembrandt can get millions at auction, though of course such paintings are seldom on the block. About eighty Rembrandts have been stolen in the past century, and looking at these particular thefts allows the authors to review means and trends in art crime, and to counter our Hollywood illusions.


Take, for instance, the most widely held misconception about art theft: Dr. No did it. Dr. No, in the 1962 James Bond film of that name, has a Francisco Goya painting deep inside his headquarters; it was a painting that indeed had been stolen months before the movie was made, and Bond does a double take and says, "So that's where it went." Mashberg has interviewed Myles J. Connor, Jr., a sophisticated and intelligent man who was responsible for robbing Boston's Museum of Fine Arts of a Rembrandt in 1975. Connor's remarks on this and other subjects are a highlight of the book. Asked about a painting offered to some Dr. No, Connor replied, "Would the Sultan of Brunei or Bill Gates or H. Ross Perot or the Emperor of Japan want to purchase it on the black market? Just in order to own it for selfish reasons? To show to close friends and concubines in privacy? I've never believed in that scenario, tempting as it is." He goes on to say no one has ever approached him for such a heist-for-hire. The authors can't confirm any Dr. No thefts.


What they do find is that art heists are carried out by middle-level criminals, closer to mere burglars than to ranking members of the Mafia. They have little resemblance to the playboy connoisseur like Steve McQueen played in The Thomas Crown Affair, or Pierce Brosnan played in the remake. They are small-timers, mere handymen who are looking for cash, frequently for a drug habit. They are often laughably incompetent, like Carl Horsley. In 1973, he took two Rembrandts from the Taft Museum in Cincinnati; he was coming up in the world, as he had previously been an armed robber of gas stations. When he was in the museum making the theft, he knew he wanted Rembrandts, because he knew the artist's name. He grabbed two of them while ignoring two much more valuable ones hanging nearby. He later explained that he had gone for the bigger pictures because big would be worth more than small. He was caught, and imprisoned, and after his release he was soon in trouble for shoplifting for his drug habit. Not all the criminals are such bozos, but few of them are smart enough to really know what they are doing. Horsley was even dumb enough to have pride in the job. He said that when he heard a radio report of this crime, "I hate to brag, but when the man said, 'This was obviously done by professionals' - well, you take a certain pride in your work, and that was gratifying, to tell the truth."


The thieves also are not acrobats; rappelling into a high museum window is good for building tension in the movies, but such gymnastics are rarely used. It may seem counterintuitive, but the best time for taking paintings may well be in the daylight hours. There are lots of people around and the alarms are off. The thieves take advantage of the openness that is necessary in museums; if you want to steal gold or cash, for instance, you may well have to crack a safe. Artworks in museums or homes, however, are right there on the walls and people are welcome to get close looks at them. In 1972, thieves entered the Worcester Art Museum, dressed as workers. It was daylight, and visitors assumed that as they used their tools to remove several paintings, including Rembrandt's St. Bartholomew, they were just doing their jobs. They succeeded in rushing the paintings out of the building. Better than acrobatics or high-tech gadgetry is to have an insider helping in the theft; the authors say about 80% of such crimes have help from a museum employee.



Time and again, the authors show that getting into the museum and getting the art out is the easy part; few of the crimes described here are thwarted while the theft is actually in progress. It is in trying to make the crime pay that the thieves get caught. There is no market for stolen Rembrandts: "They are quite simply too famous to sell." There are, again, no Dr. No types ready to buy such loot. With a million dollar canvas on their hands, the thieves often come to realize that the best they are going to be able to do is ransom the pieces back to the museums. They can try doing this to a third party, someone who will accept a "reward" for turning in the paintings, but even that subterfuge exposes them to capture. Often the thieves give up even hope of ransom, and reveal where the authorities can pick up the paintings. The museums will cooperate with ransoms up to a point, with the biggest worry that masterpieces will be harmed as they are tossed into car trunks or hidden under mattresses.


It is surprising that some of the thefts described here are not for money. Ink drawings by Rembrandt snatched off the wall of the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard in 1937 were recovered, and their theft seems to have been nothing but a student prank. A theft in Moscow in 1927 involved religious paintings, which subsequently underwent ritual vandalism. The press accounts blamed "some sort of religious maniacs." One of the strangest of crimes here was performed by Myles Connor himself. He was facing charges in one art heist, and so he robbed a Rembrandt from Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, and then offered to help the museum recover the Rembrandt in exchange for leniency in the first case. The brazen strategy worked.


Most of the stolen paintings are recovered, but there is an interesting bimodal aspect to the recovery. They are often found days or weeks after the theft, and if not then, then they are found a generation later, because statues of limitations expire, or the thieves die. Some of the paintings here are documented as being destroyed and gone forever, while most of the missing ones are simply out there somewhere, probably not being well cared for. Their absence and the damage to them represent real human losses. The authors have often combined these varied stories of thefts with a brief history of Rembrandt's wild arc of a career (including the sad descent). Interpol says that the underworld is bullish on art crimes (second only to trade in drugs and arms). The authors have given a fascinating review of a particular aspect of this particular crime, with introductions to a few remarkable, and mostly ordinary, criminals. You won't watch a movie art heist in the same way again.