Thieves steal for their own gain, usually financial gain. If they don’t steal cash, they they need a buyer (fence).
Who would buy a stolen Mona Lisa? They can’t display it and there are no other uses for art. Do they already have a buyer when they steal it? Are there enough people rich enough to afford a stolen piece of art -AND- would be willing to risk the penalty of receiving stolen property.
Twenth-five years ago, art (value over $100m) was stolen from a local museum. OK, so the statute of limitations exempts the thief from criminal prosecution, but the art is still owned by the museum (isn’t it?).
Some very wealthy people enjoy owning a piece of art even if they can’t ever display it or admit to owning it. There are a handful of middlemen who connect these buyers with art thieves.
My understanding is that when an expensive piece of art is stolen, there’s usually already a buyer. Thieves don’t just steal a painting and then go looking for a buyer.
The Mona Lisa theft was apparently part of a larger scam. Some of the middlemen I described approached some wealthy buyers and made agreements to sell them the Mona Lisa. They then painted several good forgeries. But in order to make the forgeries seem authentic, they had to arrange to have the real Mona Lisa stolen. Once they did that, they sold the forgeries and each of their buyers thought he was buying the stolen original. Two years later, the Mona Lisa was recovered and the buyers realized they had been duped. But what could they do? Complain that the stolen painting they had bought was a forgery?
Good topic. i have always wondered what happened to the Gardner Art Museum theft (25 years ago). So far none have shown up on any art dealers sites; nor has the FBI gotten any clues.
The last thing I read was that a local minor gangster in Boston told an informant that the paintings were in an attic in Boston-according to him, both thieves are dead, so it is likely that they will not be recovered.
I would put this down as myth: It makes no sense: anyone who does it is going to want to tell someone, if only to show how smart they are. And assuming they didn’t steal it themselves (I doubt they’d want to get their hands dirty and risk arrest), any accomplices are bound to talk or blackmail them.
And the thought that there are a bunch of middlemen ready to steal on order shows a pretty weak grasp of human nature.
It may have happened at least once but it is a very unlikely scenario. Some wealthy collector may get approached through several degrees of separation to purchase art already stolen but it would take a pretty dumb art thief to steal something without a known purchaser in mind. Looking for a ransom from the owner or insurer makes much more sense, and apparently works. I recall an insurer saying they’d cooperate with an art thief to recover stolen items.
The problem (as I have heard it) with ransoming stolen art is that it requires the thieves to make contact with the legitimate owners. This greatly increases the risk to the thieves. The owners have no incentive to help the thieves succeed - from their point of view, the best outcome is for the thieves to get caught and the art to be recovered without any ransom payout.
Selling a stolen painting to an illicit buyer is less risk. The buyer has as much incentive as the thieves in concealing the deal. So the thieves are working with him on keeping the police out of it rather than against him.
But I’m hearing all of this second and third hand. My only personal experience with criminals involved the ones who weren’t successes.
I suspect that most of the people being referenced here as “wealthy” and “middle men” are, while technically correct, can probably more realistically be stated as “mob don” and “mafia goon” or “Dictator” and “mafia goon”. The parties involved are probably pretty accustomed to illicit behavior.
Plus how does your average rich person connect with these middle men? Is there a web site that you an be sure isn’t an FBI front? If it’s word of mouth that’s still a lot of people that would have to know about it.
Unless the building burns down, they probably will eventually be recovered. They are both well known, and “obviously attractive”. Anyone doing demolition, say, who came upon them would likely recognize them as worth something. If, indeed, they are in an attic, and not on the bedroom wall of some wealthy collector. With no evidence at all, i believe they were stolen at the behest of some collector and are in that person’s home.
Art (including antiquities) is also used as a medium of high-value exchange. Before bitcoin, one of crime’s biggest problems was how to move, say, $20 million to someone elsewhere to pay for drugs / weapons / etc without leaving an electronic trail. This could be done by cash, but that meant pallet-loads, or gold bullion, smaller but heavier, or using something that fits into a large envelope.
Some proportion of art at least circulates, or perhaps stays in storage as its ownership is transferred, to fund the black economy.
Another thing crims do is essentially lie about its value in an otherwise open transaction as a way of money-laundering.
Both of these approaches are well-documented with excellent investigative journalism and specialist law units globally, as that’s the context for the criminal art world.
Unscrupulous art dealers or crooked museum workers could be tipsters/go-betweens, expecting a lucrative cut.
Sounds like a big risk for the buyer, but maybe that’s part of the thrill.
There are known cases of people hoarding art in secret, such as paintings stolen from Jewish owners in Nazi-controlled Europe. Sometimes museums aren’t too careful about the provenance of their collections.
I can’t speak from experience about art stolen from museums, but I have been involved with private art thefts on occasion. The insurer will immediately activate a team whose two purposes are (1) identify the thief and attempt to recover the artwork, and (2) attempt to buy back the artwork, if the demands are reasonable. An insurance company would much rather pay a thief 10% to 25% of the value of the insured artwork than pay the full covered amount to the owner. Specialists will arrange the payoff and return, normally with no violence or tricks involved.
This is somewhat similar to those companies who specialize in recovering victims of kidnappings.
My rich uncle dies. I’m no art specialist, I might not realize that that painting in his attic is a stolen Picasso or Van Gogh or ___. Even if I hire an estate liquidator who tells me that it’s an expensive stolen piece I may elect to quietly dispose of it rather than invite scrutiny & sully his otherwise good name. Meh, I thought it was a copy, off to the dumpster it went. It’s not like I’d be able to sell it & make anything from it.
Nah, it was a really nice looking fairly accurate copy. I think I’d hang it on my wall instead, and tell everyone it was a copy in the style of… Unless Junior became an art major in college.
In the case of the Louvre, the stuff they got apparently can be cut up enough to sell it all separately. I wonder how you can secure the services of a clandestine skilled cutter yet we won’t be seeing crowns or tiaras on eBay.
Anecdotally, as I’ve no real cite, the mega-rich will supposedly order stolen or buy stolen art. And I’ve heard “The Scream” keeps getting stolen every couple of years like some Frat-house prank.