Crime and art appear to be becoming ever-closer bedfellows in our contemporary world. You only have to look at sky-rocketing values to understand why. Prices soar as markets expand, as investors from Russia and India and the Far East all compete.

These are the sort of audacious heists that get lots of attention because, involving world-famous names, they acquire a patina of glamour. But there are thousands of robberies that go all but unreported.

The art world is a rarefied place. Discretion is prized. Dealers prefer not to discuss client lists. Collectors can be very secretive. On top of that, art works are usually whisked out of the country a few days after being stolen. Often they will not emerge again for years. When they do they may well be in the hands of a bona fide person. Investigators will have to pick their way backwards through an often impenetrable succession of contacts. Besides, criminals are quick to benefit from different jurisdictions. Each country has a different statute of limitations for theft. In the Netherlands the thief becomes the owner after 21 years. In Italy the art work is yours if you buy it at public auction.

Art theft is frequently connected with the crimes with which it competes for police attention. It is used as a surety for loans or as currency to be exchanged for a fraction of its legitimate value for drugs, guns or other contraband. Criminals in Dublin, for instance, pulling off a spectacular heist in a country estate, corralled Rubens, Vermeer and Goya into providing venture capital for a drug-dealing ring. In Buenos Aires at the time of the Falklands conflict, Cézanne helped a brutal dictatorship to pull off an illicit arms deal.

What’s the answer? “If everybody in the art trade searched or insisted that the seller had searched the Art Loss Register, it would become impossible to sell unique items of stolen art,” says Julian Radcliffe, the chairman of the register. “That is what happens with stolen vehicles database. That’s why 70 per cent of stolen vehicles are recovered. Only 1 per cent of stolen art works are found.”

Until this sort of checking becomes an international legal standard, some of our loveliest and most beautiful creations will continue to serve our ugliest schemes.

Excerpted form an article by Rachel Campbell-Johnston

This Japanese bronze sculpture, standing 5 ¾ inches high, was lifted from the Winter Antiques Show. http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/27586/artful-dodgers/.

At the Winter Antiques Show at New York’s Park Avenue Armory in January, Japanese-art dealer Joan Mirviss, alone in her booth while her assistant took a break, had her back to a 19th-century bronze sculpture of two frolicking dogs she had just sold for $8,450. When she turned around, the piece had disappeared. Mirviss dashed to the nearby entrance to alert security, but the thief had escaped. Two months later, at the TEFAF fair in Maastricht, robbers made off with a €1.2 million ($1.9 million) vintage diamond necklace from London jeweler Hancocks.

Art theft may bring to mind midnight break-ins at museums or country manors, but fairs have become enticing targets as well. The Art Loss Register (ALR) keeps no precise count of how many heists occur at these events, but a representative says they probably account for around 5 percent of the annual total. Although that figure is nominal compared with the percentage that occurs in private homes (42 percent in 2007), a partial list of art-fair robberies provided by the ALR reveals that even the major shows are vulnerable.

In November 2006, a Max Ernst painting and an A. R. Penck sculpture were stolen from Art Cologne, and last October an $80,000 sculpture by Simon Starling was swiped from New York dealer Casey Kaplan’s booth during the Frieze Fair, in London. Frieze representative Camilla Nichols declines to offer details but says the “security measures we put in place are in full force as soon as, and as long as, artworks are at the fair, outside the tents, inside the tents and at each exit.”

Fairs also continue to expect dealers to look after their own goods. “Each exhibitor is primarily responsible for the security of his own objects during transportation and presentation of the objects during the fair,” says TEFAF spokesperson Titia Vellenga. Organizers, however, will sometimes help dealers with extra security. A few years ago at the Stockholm International Antiques Fair, five paintings were taken from the booth of Stockholm-based Verner Amell, one of them a landscape by Jan Brueghel the Elder worth €2.6 million ($3.4 million). The burglar hid inside a cabinet before closing and emerged during the night to make off with the booty in a backpack, eluding security guards who gave chase. The following year, the fair offered additional guards to Amell.

Mirviss suspects that her sculpture was concealed under a coat and suggested to Winter Antiques officials (who didn’t return calls for comment) and to Anna Haughton, who runs four fairs at the Park Avenue Armory, that all visitors be required to check their outerwear. Haughton says that can be a touchy issue. “You could get a man coming from his office who wants to spend half an hour at the fair,” she says. “With a long coat-check line, he might just leave. If you want people to buy, they must feel comfortable.”

Haughton adds that after the theft at Mirviss’s booth, she spoke at length with her security team about how far one can go without violating visitors’ civil rights. Her fairs allow guards to search purses and other totes—but not pockets—at the exits. The Armory Show in Manhattan had a mandatory bag inspection a couple of years ago, says director Katelijne de Backer, but dealers complained, and now bags are checked sporadically.

Mirviss speculates that some stealing at fairs is more impulse shoplifting than the planned theft of valuable art objects. Last year, for example, a reveler at the Winter Antiques Fair’s Young Collectors’ Night snapped a butterfly—valueless in itself—off a 19th-century cast-iron statue of Cupid on offer in the booth of New York dealer Barbara Israel.

There was one time, Mirviss recalls with amusement, that she wouldn’t have minded having a few pieces filched. At a show in the Midwestern U.S. some 20 years ago, a prominent woman in the community—and a known kleptomaniac—had to be trailed by an assistant who discreetly wrote checks for the objects her boss swiped. “Unfortunately for me,” says Mirviss, “she didn’t like Japanese art.”

Article originally appeared in the June 2008 issue of Art+Auction.

The following was excerpted from a New Haven, CT newspaper on March 23, ’08 after several thefts of art from local institutions. The theft was caught on camera, but the thief was long gone by the time it was discovered. This is precisely why works should be alarmed, either exclusively or with a camera as back up.

A thief allegedly slipped this painting under his jacket to feed his heroin habit — not knowing that the public library’s cameras were rolling, and his string of remarkable art heists was about to end. Police said the thief, an unidentified 53-year-old man from Farren Avenue, ripped off 39 paintings from New Haven venues, including $40,000 in art from Yale’s Slifka Center and the New Haven Free Public Library.
The paintings were recovered during a weekend bust on a Hill area home, where a second man, age 47, had been allegedly accepting the art in exchange for bags of heroin. Police expect to arrest the thief later this week.

The break in the case came from a surveillance camera at the New Haven Free Public Library, Branfuhr said. He and Assistant Chief Peter Reichard gave the following account of how they stopped a serial thief in his tracks.

New Haven police first learned of the case on March 5, when two paintings went missing from the downtown public library on Elm Street. Two days later, the thief apparently hit again: Two more paintings disappeared. Detectives reviewed the surveillance footage, which showed a man concealing something under his jacket, standing right near the spot where one of the paintings, called “Beware Of Dog” (in photo at the top of this story), had hung. Also stolen that day was this etching (pictured) by Tony Falcone of New Haven City Hall. The paintings at the library were not secured, police said. They were just hanging there.

Police constructed a description of the suspect based on the videotape. Then, just three days later, the same man came back to the library, police said. Staff called police, who took the man to police headquarters for questioning.

In a taped conversation, the alleged thief recounted how a heroin addiction drove him to steal the art, according to police. The suspect admitted to stealing five paintings from the public library, as well as three from the Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale. Those three paintings were done by Unabomber victim and Yale professor David Gelenter as well as his son, Daniel, a Yale music major.

As reported in The Art Newspaper, Richard Northcott, Exec Director of the art division of Heath Lambert, a London re-insurer, says that re-insurance companies — firms that protect specialist fine art insurers — are becoming increasingly wary of insuring too much art in any one place. This could have a particularly sobering affect on art fairs, especially large ones with an aggregation of expensive pieces.
“For a long time nobody in the insurance world was monitoring the cumulative value of art shown at fairs,” explains Northcott. “But in the last two or three years the industry has become a lot more sophisticated and a lot more aware of the issue.”

The cap on insurance liability for art kept in one place, known in the industry as “maximum aggregated value”, has also led to rising insurance prices. Better security would seem to be the answer! Or is that just me?