Outgunned in the Search for Stolen Art

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June 2014, and a three-day conference is taking place in the basement room of New York University’s School of Law. The 200 or so attendees that have hurried their way across sunny Washington Square include FBI agents, lawyers, auction house heads, art dealers and collectors who buy and sell multi-million-dollar items.

Waiting, sharp-suited, is Brooklyn-born conference organiser Chris Marinello, arguably the world’s most experienced art hunter (£350 million worth recovered so far) and founder-director of London-based Art Recovery International. The conference is titled “Fakes, Forgeries, and Looted and Stolen Art” and these industry bigwigs are here to discuss the vastly underestimated and booming business of art crime. As we take our seats, a lawyer comments that “three days is extremely ambitious to fit all that in.”

He’s not kidding.

If it seems hard to imagine that art crime is, according to the U.S. Department of Justice and Unesco, the third highest-grossing criminal trade over the past 40 years (just behind drugs and weapons), then consider that the art trade is the largest lawful unregulated business on the planet, leaving hardly any paper trail for detectives to follow. Buying a sculpture or painting is just like acquiring a bicycle from Gumtree or Craigslist. We wouldn’t buy a house without a deed, yet people do this with art worth millions of dollars all the time.

There are also no transaction records. There is no legal requirement to publicly list art sales. The only chain of title that exists in art is “provenance,” a potted history full of blanks, anomalies and guesswork. In the U.S., there’s one art crime officer for every 21 million people (that’s sixteen in total) and New Scotland Yard in the UK has just two-and-a-half officers (one is part time).

Among the speakers at the conference are Bob Goldman and Bonnie Magness-Gardiner, the Mulder and Scully of the FBI, in that they run a tiny, underfunded department (Art Theft) that no one else seems to believe in. Blonde, mustachioed Bob, who left the FBI to become a lawyer for white-collar crimes, is still passionate about recovering stolen art. He’s the first to admit “it’s a dismal effort.”

Thanks to lack of regulation, accurate figures for the art market as a whole are impossible to ascertain, but Christie’s and Sotheby’s together turn over about $11-12 billion a year and a 2008 survey by ARTnews, the world’s most widely circulated art magazine, estimated that annual private art sales amounted to $30 billion.

The amount of criminal income generated by art crime each year is thought to be $6-8 billion, according to the FBI. In the UK, the value of art and antiques stolen each year is around £300 million, second only to drug dealing and more costly than the theft of stolen vehicles. These figures are woefully inaccurate simply because we can’t possibly know about every single illegal trade that takes place, with some stolen, looted or forged pieces being sold multiple times. Worldwide, some 50,000-100,000 works of art are stolen each year. Not surprisingly only about 10 percent of stolen art is recovered, and successful prosecution occurs even less frequently.

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