The paintings recovered in the 2014 sting operation shown during a press conference
Man Who Tried to Sell Stolen Art in Los Angeles Gets 4 Years
A man who tried to sell stolen paintings worth a fortune, including works by Marc Chagall and Diego Rivera, was sentenced Friday to more than four years in state prison.
Raul Espinoza pleaded no contest to one count of receiving property stolen in 2008 from the Encino home of an elderly couple, Los Angeles prosecutors said.
The whereabouts of a dozen modern paintings from the home of Anton and Susan Roland remained a mystery for more than six years until a Los Angeles police detective got a tip in September that someone in Europe was trying to broker a deal to sell the art. Meanwhile, police said their investigation led them to a man named “Darko” in Europe. He had allegedly claimed to know the man who had the stolen art. Detectives said that man turned out to be Espinoza.
The FBI set up a sting and Espinoza, 45, was arrested Oct. 23 when he tried to peddle the works to undercover agents at a Los Angeles hotel.
He was asking $700,000 for works he said were worth $5 million, though the paintings have since been valued for as much as $23 million, said Ricardo Santiago, a spokesman for the Los Angeles district attorney.
Officers recovered nine of the stolen artworks, including paintings by Arshile Gorky, Emil Nolde and Chaim Soutine. Three works remain missing. Most of the paintings were works of expressionism.
The art was stolen Aug. 23, 2008 in broad daylight while the Antons, who had round-the-clock care, were in their bedrooms.
The heist occurred when the sole caretaker on duty went to the grocery store and left a side door unlocked. She returned less than an hour later and discovered the burglary.
"I believe the original burglary could not have been accomplished without the assistance of inside help from one of the employees who worked for the victims," detective Donald Hrycyk wrote in a search warrant affidavit to examine Espinoza's phone for more evidence.
The FBI is still investigating and there's a $25,000 reward.
Espinoza, who has prior burglary convictions, is due in court March 25 for a restitution hearing.
The Antons have since died and their children could not be reached Friday for comment. The works were insured by Lloyd's of London, according to a police report.
Art Crime Team Celebrates 10th Anniversary Part 1: A Decade of Successful Investigations and Recoveries
02/09/15 To commemorate the 10th anniversary of the FBI’s Art Crime Team, FBI.gov recently discussed the team’s history, mission, and accomplishments with Bonnie Magness-Gardiner, who manages the Bureau’s art theft program. Q: How did the Art Crime Team get started? Magness-Gardiner: The FBI has always had agents who investigated frauds and thefts related to art, but in 2003, there was substantial looting of Iraq’s National Museum in Baghdad. Thousands of works were stolen. Because of the U.S. presence in Iraq at the time, it was clear that somebody would have to investigate. It was also clear that the U.S. government didn’t have a team organized, in place, or with the expertise required to do that kind of investigation. But the need for such a team was apparent, and the FBI took that on. The Art Crime Team was formed a year or so later. Q: What were those early days like? Magness-Gardiner: When I first arrived, the team consisted of eight agents located in field offices around the country, as well as three trial attorneys from the Department of Justice assigned to assist with prosecutions. Today, the agent component has almost doubled to 15 men and women. One of the great benefits of having the agents located in so many cities in the U.S. is that we literally cover the country. Q: Describe some of the team’s accomplishments over the past decade. Magness-Gardiner: One of our earliest successes was the recovery of a Rembrandt self-portrait valued at $40 million. The painting had been stolen from the Swedish National Museum in Stockholm in 2000. We recovered it during an undercover operation in 2005. Since the Art Crime Team’s creation, we have made more than 11,800 recoveries, and the value of those recovered objects is estimated to be more than $160 million. We have also helped to convict more than 80 individuals for a range of art crimes.
Q: The National Stolen Art File has also been a success, hasn’t it? Magness-Gardiner: Yes, and particularly since it went online on FBI.gov in 2010. The National Stolen Art File is a database listing art stolen primarily in the United States. To be included in the file, the art must be valued at $2,000 or more, and we require a theft report and a description of the work providing its unique characteristics. Unlike automobiles, for example, art does not have a serial number on it. So we need specific descriptors that allow us to positively identify the works. Most submissions to the file come from local police departments or from victims. Currently there are about 8,000 listings, everything from fine art to collectibles—anything that has a cultural value that can be uniquely identified. Q: Is there a particular kind of art that is more susceptible to being stolen or forged? Magness-Gardiner: Unfortunately, it’s an equal opportunity market for thieves and fraudsters. Over the last 10 years we have dealt with everything from fossils stolen from South America to modern art that’s been forged and put on the market in New York. We have investigated cases involving fine art, manuscripts, letters, baseball cards, and textiles from pre-Colombian to modern. Everything that you can imagine that has a monetary value or cultural significance is subject to theft or fakery. Next: Investigators use team approach, time-tested methods.
Gang Who Smuggled Antiques Have Been Caught After Being Accused Of Selling Stolen Antique To Support Islamic State Terrorists
A gang of alleged antique smugglers have been arrested after being suspected of selling stolen Egyptian relics to fund Islamic State terrorists. Spanish police claim the network were operating out of mosques in Barcelona after they raided a shipment which they believe originated in Egypt. They added that the gang had gone to great lengths to try and hide what they were smuggling – which included human figurines, animal figurines and small bronze statues worth several hundred thousand euros. The plundering of antiquities, particularly from the Middle East, has sky-rocketed since the fighting, with much of the money landing in the pockets of terrorists, say archaeologists and international watchdogs. Treasures: Police have recovered Egyptian relics that were allegedly being sold by the network Priceless pieces of history snatched from illicit diggings or swiped from museum cases have become one of the four most common commodities – next to drugs, weapons and human beings – to be trafficked by smugglers, according to United Nations investigators. Iraqis have been urged to protect the nation’s trove of antiquities as assaults waged by the jihadist group Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) left relics there at risk from looting. UNESCO has also reported that in Egypt, terrorist attacks in recent years have targeted pieces of cultural heritage. Officials from the Spanish civil guard who carried out the operation said they believed money raised was going directly to fund jihadists. Terrorism: Spanish police believe the money was being used to fund ISIS Four Egyptian men and one Spanish man were arrested in the city as a result of the police operation that also led to the seizure of 36 pieces of artwork in Valencia, which are believed to have originally come from Egypt. Experts from the National Archaeological Museum in Madrid say they suspect the antiquities had been looted from sites around the Egyptian towns of Saqqara and Mit Rahina south of the capital Cairo. They were in a container that came from the northern Egyptian port city of Alexandria and was being shipped to Barcelona. Arrests: Police held a press conference for an update on the investigation A police spokesman said: “This gang had gone to extreme lengths to avoid discovery. They operated in a network that was centred around mosques and other venues located in downtown areas in the city of Barcelona.” They said that the one Spanish man arrested had been a dealer in antiquities who appeared to be the gang”s local contact and who was supposed to sell the items on the black market. Those arrested face charges of smuggling cultural goods, money laundering, and membership of an international criminal organisation. Spanish police also confirmed that they were stepping up monitoring ports, airports and border control points following fears that there would be an increase in similar types of smuggling in particular with regards to shipments from the Middle East where conflicts are being fought.
Gauguin Painting Is Said to Fetch $300 Million
Gauguin’s “Nafea Faa Ipoipo (When Will You Marry?),” from 1892, was sold by a collector in Switzerland in a private transaction.Credit Artothek/Associated Press
LONDON — A sensuous Paul Gauguin painting of two Tahitian girls has been sold from a Swiss private collection for close to $300 million, one of the highest prices believed to have been paid for an artwork, according to European and American art world insiders with knowledge of the matter.
The sale of the 1892 oil painting, “Nafea Faa Ipoipo (When Will You Marry?),” was confirmed by the seller, Rudolf Staechelin, 62, a retired Sotheby’s executive living in Basel, Switzerland, who through a family trust owns more than 20 works in a valuable collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art, including the Gauguin, which has been on loan to the Kunstmuseum Basel for nearly a half-century.
Two dealers with knowledge of the matter, who declined to be named because of concerns over client confidentiality, said the painting had been purchased by a Qatari buyer, but Mr. Staechelin would not say whether the new owner was from Qatar, a tiny, oil-rich emirate. “I don’t deny it and I don’t confirm it,” Mr. Staechelin said, also declining to disclose the price.
The Qatar Museums (formerly the Qatar Museums Authority) in Doha, the emirate’s capital, did not respond to calls and emails seeking comment.
Guy Morin, the mayor of Basel, acknowledged news of the sale of the Gauguin and bemoaned its loss. On Tuesday, The Baer Faxt, an art world insiders’ newsletter, said Qatar was rumored to be the buyer of the Gauguin at $300 million, which would exceed the more than $250 million that Qatar reportedly paid for Paul Cézanne’s “The Card Players” in 2011.
Todd Levin, a New York art adviser, said of the Gauguin, “I heard that this painting was in play late last year.” He added, “The price quoted to me at that time was in the high $200 millions, close to $300 million.”
In recent years the Qatar royal family and the museums authority have been reported to be expansive buyers of trophy quality Western modern and contemporary art by Mark Rothko, Damien Hirst and Cézanne. In a move that jolted Basel as news of the sale trickled out, Mr. Staechelin said that his family’s trust was ending its loan to the Kunstmuseum as a result of a dispute with the local canton. He said that he was searching for a top museum to accept the Staechelin collection — which also includes works by van Gogh, Picasso and Pissarro — on loan, without a lending fee, with a promise to integrate the pieces into permanent exhibitions.
The works were amassed by his grandfather, a Swiss merchant also named Rudolf Staechelin, who befriended artists and made most of his purchases during and after World War I. Later, the elder Mr. Staechelin advised the Kunstmuseum, which accepted the loan of his collection after his death in 1946.
The grandson said that the works had never been hung in his family’s home because they were too precious and that he saw them in a museum along with everyone else. He has decided to sell, he said, because it is the time in his life to diversify his assets. “In a way it’s sad,” he said, “but on the other hand, it’s a fact of life. Private collections are like private persons. They don’t live forever.”
On the last few days before closing last weekend for renovations through 2016, the Kunstmuseum opened its doors for free and drew a record crowd of 7,500 people, many of whom caught the last glimpse of the Gauguin in its longtime home.
Gauguin’s Tahiti-period paintings are among the most admired and coveted artworks of the Post-Impressionist period. This particular piece, focusing on the enigmatic interplay between two girls in a Polynesian landscape, was painted during the first of the artist’s two spells living in Tahiti.
The painting will still be on display at a special Gauguin exhibition opening this month in Basel at the Beyeler Foundation and then the collection will travel to the Reina Sofía museum in Madrid and the Phillips Collection in Washington. The buyer will take ownership next January, Mr. Staechelin said.
Local institutions in Basel, which learned definitively about the loss of the collection on Thursday morning, were still trying to come to grips with the news. The Kunstmuseum issued a brief statement about the loss saying, in part, “We are painfully reminded that permanent loans are still loans.”
Mr. Morin, the mayor, said in a statement that the canton tried to persuade Mr. Staechelin to bring back the collection when the museum reopened in April 2016. But for months the canton and the family trust squabbled behind the scenes over an existing loan contract.
Mr. Staechelin said that he had sought a new contract after the museum announced plans to shut down. When canton officials failed to budge on a new contract, he said, he canceled the existing one because of a provision that requires that the artworks be on public display.
“The real question is why only now?” Mr. Staechelin said of the Gauguin sale. “It’s mainly because we got a good offer. The market is very high and who knows what it will be in 10 years. I always tried to keep as much together as I could.” He added, “Over 90 percent of our assets are paintings hanging for free in the museum.”
“For me they are family history and art,” he said of the artworks. “But they are also security and investments.”
James Roundell, a director at the London dealership Simon Dickinson, said that in the roiling global art market, “a new category of super trophy is emerging.”
“These items are generally in museums and they’re being sold privately, which explains the very high prices,” he said. “If they were offered at auction, would there be competition at that level?”
Thief may not know value of stolen paintings worth £100,000 say police
Thieves who stole two paintings worth £100,000 may not recognise the value of their haul, according to police. The artworks by celebrated St Ives painter Bryan Pearce were taken from an isolated cottage in West Cornwall last month. Police say they are keeping an open mind, but do not initially believe that the works by the artist were stolen to order or taken by a specialist art thief. A spokesman for Devon and Cornwall Police said two cottages had been raided where near to Zennor, which is a tiny village on the cliff tops between St Ives and St Just. The thief had forced open a ground floor window and search both premises, taking nothing from one but four paintings from another, including the two works by Pearce, White Jug and Catkins and Portreath, both painted in 1960 and worth an estimate £50,000 each. Pearce, who died in 2007, was recognised as one of the UK's leading naive artists whose flat style featuring bright colours and heavy outlines might appear almost childish to someone unaware of his work. As a result, the police spokesman said: "It is possible the thief does not know the value of what they have."
A surveillance camera image of the robbery in Switzerland. Photo: Police
'Pink Panther' fences arrested in Vienna
Police in Vienna have arrested three Israelis and a Serbian suspected of acting as fences for the notorious international Pink Panthers jewel thieves gang.
The four men (aged between 35 and 40) were arrested in a Vienna hotel with €500,000 worth of luxury watches and jewellery which had been stolen in a robbery in Montreux, Switzerland on January 15th.
They are not thought to have carried out the robbery themselves, but acted as the receivers of the stolen goods, and were planning to sell the watches to wealthy clients.
"This is the first time in Austria that we have managed to identify and arrest members of the Pink Panthers redistribution channel," Ewald Ebner from the Federal Criminal Police Office said at a press conference.
Police got a tip-off that a courier from Serbia was travelling to Vienna in order to buy luxury watches. After he crossed the border into Austria police put him under surveillance and he was observed meeting up with a Vienna-based Israeli man in the city's 2nd district, who drove him to a hotel.
After money had changed hands and the Serb emerged from the hotel with €57,000 in cash police swooped and arrested him, along with two Israelis who are resident in Belgium and had been involved in the sale of the watches.
In the hotel room police found a 37-year-old Israeli man carrying a suitcase with a false bottom which contained 25 watches. One of the watches was valued at about €53,000.
Ebner said that the men were "uncooperative" when they were arrested and pretended they knew nothing about the seized loot. If found guilty of handling stolen goods the men could face between six months and five years in prison.
The operation was carried out in cooperation with Belgian, German, Serbian and Swiss police.
The Pink Panthers gang is known for lightning-fast armed robberies targeting high-end jewellery stores in Europe, the Middle East, Asia and the United States.
They are believed to have carried out robberies worth in excess of €500 million since 1999.
Many gang members are known to originate from the former Yugoslavia, but they work across countries and continents. The Pink Panthers have been responsible for several robberies in Austria.
Three paintings stolen from the University of Toronto
Toronto police are investigating the recent theft of three paintings from the University of Toronto, including one by the 18th-century Italian master Francesco Guardi, two of whose works have sold for tens of millions of dollars at auction in the last four years.
At this stage, police believe the thefts, done between Jan. 30 and Feb. 10, are likely the work of the same person, a spokesperson said Friday. The Guardi, a Venetian view painting titled Church of Santa Maria della Salute, was taken from Trinity College on a date a Trinity official declined to reveal Friday. The others – Morning at Peggy’s Cove by William E. deGarthe and CreditRiver by Yee Bon – were removed on, respectively, Feb. 3 and the Feb. 7-8 weekend from Victoria University, according to Gillian Pearson, curator of the collection. In each instance, the thief or thieves left the painting’s frame behind.
It’s presumed the Guardi is the most valuable of the trio. Just how valuable, however, is unclear as information on its dimensions, date of creation (Guardi lived from 1712 to 1793), exhibition history and provenance have yet to be disclosed.
A huge Guardi from the early 1780s, A View of the Rialto Bridge Looking North, 115 centimetres by 200 measurement , sold for a record $41.2-million at auction in London in 2011. Another, smaller painting (70 cm by 100), Venice, the Bacino di San Marco with the Piazzetta and the Doge’s Palace, went for $18.1-million at Christie’s auctioneers London last July.
The missing Yee Bon, an early autumn landscape, is 29.5 cm by 35.5 and was painted in 1931 or 1932. It came into Victoria’s collection as a bequest in the late 1940s. In recent years, the painting was stored in a room “that’s usually locked,” Ms. Pearson said, “but it’s also used for events and [on Feb. 7-8] there were a number of groups in.” Born in China in 1905, Yee came to Canada in 1918, enrolling in art school in Toronto in 1931. He lived in Hong Kong from 1935 on, returning in 1956 to mainland China where he died in 1995. Individual paintings by the artist tend to sell in the mid-five figures.
The Finnish-born deGarthe spent most of his life in Nova Scotia, dying at 75 in 1983. His stolen work, an Impressionist-like view of his beloved Peggy’s Cove, is 16 cm by 21. Painted circa 1956, it too entered Victoria’s collection as a bequest, in the early 1990s, and was housed just out of security-camera range at the university’s E.J. Pratt Library. A 46-cm-by-61-cm deGarthe sold at auction in Canada in 2011 for $2,340.
Interpol ranks art theft as the world’s third biggest criminal activity, behind drugs and arms-trafficking. By some estimates, the value of the art stolen each year is in excess of $6-billion.
However, it’s rare for thieves to score a big payday from their loot. Serious collectors like their purchases to have clear title, good provenance and, more often than not, they want to be able to show the works to friends, fellow collectors, art institutions and the public without the taint of criminality. When they do occasionally make a sale, it’s often not worth it: A Rembrandt self-portrait, lifted from the Swedish National Museum in 2000, had an appraised value of close to $40-million at the time of its theft. However, it took five years to sell and went for $250,000 – to an undercover FBI agent.
Trial over Picasso’s ‘gift’ to handyman and the murky world of art crime
Picasso: most prolific and most stolen artist. Anthony Devlin/PA Archive The case of Pablo Picasso’s former electrician Pierre Le Guennec and his wife, Danielle, came to a close on February 12. The pair are accused of handling stolen goods – 271 of Picasso’s works. The French prosecutor seeks a symbolic five-year suspended sentence for the couple. The judge’s verdict and sentence (if found guilty) will be delivered on March 20. Pierre Le Guennec was Picasso’s handyman at his house in Mougin in the south of France. He claims Picasso’s second wife, Jacqueline, gave him a box of the 271 works (among the pieces were lithographs, drawings, sketches) as a gift. For 40 years, the works of art apparently remained in their garage and the couple didn’t look through them properly until 2009. They only came to light in 2010 when Pierre Le Guennec asked the Picasso Administration to authenticate them. The charge of handling stolen goods (rather than theft) meant that no proof about who actually committed the alleged theft was introduced. But the lawyer for the Picasso Administration, who brought the case to court, added an extra twist to the trial by accusing the couple of being involved in international artwork laundering and alleging that the art was passed to them on account of their past with Picasso. Pablo Picasso and scene painters in 1917.
Art crime scene
This case shines another bright light on the fascinating, often violent world of art crime which internationally is often misrepresented by the media and not treated seriously enough by law enforcement agencies. In addition, there are many shades of grey that colour the interface between licit and illicit activities in the art world. The unregulated art world itself can be strongly accused of not doing enough to prevent art crime. The artist Banksy summed up the challenge when speaking to the Sunday Times in February 2010:
I’ve come into contact with a lot more villains since I moved from vandalism into selling paintings. The art world is full of shady people peddling bright colours.
Driven by the belief that work would keep him alive, Picasso was a famously prolific artist. Owing to his huge output and his art’s value in heritage, artistic and economic terms, it is not a surprise that, according to the Art Loss Register, he is the artist with the most stolen work. To illustrate the scale, before this current case, more than 1,000 of his pieces were known to have been stolen. There is a long and well-documented history of insider art thefts – the most famous of which is probably the theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre by an employee in 1911. Another significant crime, highlighted in a security report in 1954, occurred at London’s V&A Museum, where an attendant called John Nevin stole an incredible 2,544 items over 20 years. The accused.Patrice Lapoirie/EPA
Suspicions
The Le Guennec couple’s story is fascinating and confusing for a number of reasons. Despite the work being done by one of the most influential and famous artists in history, the couple claim never to have looked at the art properly and decided to keep it closed up in their garage for 40 years. They apparently also had different stories. In contrast to Pierre’s claim that they were a gift in a box, Danielle has allegedly stated that Pierre was given the works in a bin bag after Picasso had been cleaning up his studio. According to the artist’s biographer, John Richardson, Picasso never gave away work from his early periods, nor did he give anything away without signing the piece. Apparently, only one of the couple’s items is signed. Although the Picasso Administration lawyer’s claim of international artwork laundering may seem far-fetched in this case, the art world’s lack of regulation coupled with the lack of law enforcement involvement in many countries makes an array of art crimes attractive for criminal gangs – so the claim should not be simply dismissed. The couple could have been viewed as easy targets by criminals. The verdict in March could have ramifications much further afield than the south of France. As Degas once said: “Art is not what you see, but what you make others see”. Art theft is often viewed by potential criminals as having a low risk of punishment, something not helped by different media frequently misrepresenting the crime as entertainment. So the prosecutor’s call for only a “symbolic” sentence could continue to make others, whether they be potential criminals, the media or the public, see art theft as entertainment rather than as a serious crime worthy of more attention. The criminologist Simon Mackenzie has highlighted how the effects of criminal law are negligible for art crimes, especially concerning the problem of illicit antiquities. This case, whatever the outcome, could reinforce his argument.
