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On June 17, Interpol held a conference in Lyon, France, to increase co-operation among its 186 member nations in the fight to retrieve stolen cultural property. Since the fall of the Iron Curtain, the rise of the Internet and the globalization of the world economy, trade in stolen art and antiquities has been rising steeply.
Interpol is the international police agency through which countries share information on international crime. Of the missing art objects now on Interpol's list, 516 were taken from Canadian collections.
The number of art thefts in Canada has been growing, the most notable being the robbery in 2004 of five ivory statuettes from the Art Gallery of Ontario snatched in broad daylight. They are worth almost $1.5-million and were eventually returned to the owner. The gallery's insurer offered a reward of $150,000. After the police said that "persons of interest" had been spotted on a video, a criminal defence lawyer representing unidentified persons arranged for the return of the statuettes. These events have attracted speculation that the insurance company might have paid over the reward as a ransom, as this is one way in which thieves make their money.
Worldwide, the illegal art and antiquities trade ranks third in value, after illegal arms and drug smuggling, and in many ways they are connected. For example, Mohamed Atta, the terrorist hijacker, by his own account had sold stolen antiquities to finance the Sept. 11 attacks. The average gain by thieves on a piece of stolen art is 10 per cent of its value; in the advanced industrial democracies, art theft seems to have become a form of proxy kidnapping.
One of the Bill Reid artifacts stolen from the UBC museum of Anthropology in May. (Jeff Vinnick, for The Globe and Mail)
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That explains why some paintings have been stolen and recovered more than once. Rembrandt's Jacob de Gheyn III has been stolen four times. It is the world's most stolen painting. Sometimes, one group of criminals gives stolen art as collateral to another group, to get credit for another illegal deal, a kind of crooked banking and credit system for robbers.
In the 1990s, a number of world-class paintings were stolen from the Gardner Museum in Boston. The heist took place on St. Patrick's Day (Boston has one of the largest communities of Irish Americans), and a fair amount of research suggests that rogue members of the IRA did the job. It is thought the paintings are now overseas, perhaps in Ireland or Britain.
"Criminals go where the money is," says FBI Special Agent Robert Widman, senior investigator on the agency's rapid deployment Art Crime Team (ACT). Each year the trade in illegal antiquities is thought to be in the range of $8-billion. A growing percentage of this "business" is perpetrated by organized criminal gangs who also deal in drugs and arms. These gangs work most effectively in countries that are plagued by corruption and terrorism and whose border officials can be bribed. This includes most of the "archaeological countries" in the Near East, Asia and Latin America. At the same time, the trade has triggered a growing business in copies, fakes and forgeries. One curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York believes that his museum contains a number of smuggled fakes that the Met's authorities are ashamed to acknowledge.
It is not only low-lifers who despoil countries and institutions of their cultural heritage. More than a hundred years ago, Hiram Bingham, a member of Yale University's aptly named secret society, the Skull and Bones, went on a swashbuckling Indiana Jones-like adventure into the highlands of Peru. There he rediscovered the Incan site of Machu Picchu and brought back a hoard of 5,000 objects to the university museum.
After 18 months, the museum agreed to return the artifacts to Peru, but it has taken Peru more than a century to mount a legal case to persuade Yale to hand them back. That will happen some time next year. After Bingham left archaeology for a seat in the U.S. Senate, not surprisingly, he eventually joined the select group of American politicians whom Congress has censured for misconduct.
FASCIST PRECEDENTS
The Italian government is at the forefront in investigating the illegal antiquities trade, in the spirit of the new archaeological responsibility. They do not pay ransoms. They convincingly argue that they are dealing with well-organized international crime syndicates that drive the trade in illegal art and antiquities.
To show their good faith they have returned an obelisk looted from Ethiopia during the fascist period in the 1930s. Based on first-rate detective work and a more than 10-year, concerted legal inquiry with full government support, they sued employees and associates of the Getty Trust and the J. Paul Getty Museum for allegedly importing illegally excavated antiquities into the United States. They have also pressured the Met in New York to return antiquities that were clearly smuggled out of Italy. In some instances, the Met has complied.
