August 6, 2002 By JOHNNY MASON, Courant Staff Writer
William Hosley held up a puzzle-sized piece of a porcelain vase to show the depth of destruction caused by a motorist who drove his vehicle through a wall at the Butler-McCook Homestead museum. Impact from the vehicle shattered the century-old Chinese vase, sending pieces flying into four rooms, including one upstairs at the oldest surviving residence in Hartford, said Hosley, executive director of the Antiquarian & Landmarks Society, which operates the museum. Many of the family heirlooms were destroyed when 21-year-old Wildfredo Sanchez's sports utility vehicle blew through a Main Street intersection, wooden fence and outside wall before landing squarely Sunday inside the parlor of Daniel and Sarah Butler's 1782 home. While construction workers nailed sheets of plywood over the opening and stacked fragmented pieces of the front-yard fencing, Hosley estimated damages at $350,000. He said that the sturdy post-and-beam structure was durable enough to absorb the crash without devastating damage, but not so many historic items in the parlor. He added that about 75 percent of the Colonial-era artifacts that were damaged could be restored or conserved, he said.
On Sunday, Sanchez was charged with operating a motor vehicle while under suspension, misuse of license plates and driving an uninsured and unregistered vehicle. Sgt. Maura Hammick, a Hartford police spokeswoman, said further charges are pending. Sanchez, who was listed in stable condition at Hartford Hospital, was still in pain from the crash during a visit to his hospital room Monday. His face and left arm were covered in scratches and, with his fiancée, Marilyn Ayala, by his side, Sanchez apologized, saying the accident occurred when his brakes "gave out" shortly after 6 a.m. Sunday. He said he had been returning home from a family picnic and had just dropped off his sister at her Dutch Point apartment. He had not been drinking alcohol, said Ayala, who owns the 2000 KIA Sportage Sanchez was driving. She was not in the vehicle at the time of the crash. "It all happened so fast," he said. Also on Monday, Hosley asked Mayor Eddie A. Perez for support by inviting him to tour the damage. He asked Perez to consider participating in a fund-raiser that could rally residents and other supporters to help rebuild the museum that had just reopened in June following a $1.3 million, four-year renovation. Peeking into the parlor from a hallway, Hosley warned Perez and councilman Robert L. Painter not to venture too far inside because of safety concerns. Shattered glass and nails protruded from pieces of splintered wood.
Hosley said he was waiting for insurance representatives to inspect the damage before allowing employees to sift through the items. He hoped the damaged items were covered by insurance, but was unsure how many might be, Hosley said. Inside the parlor, the original wide floor boards seemed to have survived the weight of the SUV, which tore huge holes in the plaster walls, smashed nearly every piece of furniture and cracked a marble fireplace in half. Three of the most valuable items that had been destroyed were a 165-year-old sofa, a painting of Talcott Mountain by Hartford artist William Wheeler and a Japanese art and armor display. The Japanese artifacts were smashed when an 1890s Victorian upright piano crashed through a wall from the parlor to another room. "It's sad," said Hartford preservationist Greg Secord, who accompanied Perez on the tour. During the half-hour tour, Hosley repeatedly reminded Perez and Painter about the importance of maintaining Hartford's history, saying it was a key to the city's economic development and should be included in any talks about Adriean's Landing. A new Main Street History Center, attached to the house, was not damaged by the crash. In the end, Perez agreed to support any type of fund-raiser. Perez said, if needed, he would consider asking the council for funds although Hosley did not specially ask for public money. The Greater Hartford Arts Council made an emergency grant of $1,000 to the museum Monday to help clean up and rebuild the landmark. Ken Kahn, its executive director, challenged other groups and individuals to make donations to the Main Street museum as well. The Connecticut Health and Educational Facilities Authority matched the arts council's grant Monday with a $1,000 grant of its own. http://www.ctnow.com/
Treasures from the deep
Philip Delves Broughton reports on the extraordinary story of the prolific art thief whose mother threw his booty into a canal..
Whenever Stéphane Breitwieser stole a work of art, he would make sure he took its display card as well. When he was back in the safety of his bedroom in his mother's house he would memorise the card and then destroy it. The bedroom had a skylight but no windows for the neighbours to peer into. 'It's a house for hiding things,' says the Breitwiesers' neighbour, Robert Hartman, a retired salesman. 'Look at the way the trees cover the windows. And the front door never opened. They would go in and out through the garage and never once in five years did they say hello... I don't think they had any friends in the village.' The garden of the small white house - 14c Rue Habsheim - is overgrown now, with trees and bushes pushing against the walls. A few inches of lacy curtain appear below the plastic shutters, which are pulled down nearly all the way. It is on a road at the bottom of the village of Eschentzwiller, a pretty Alsace dormitory town which becomes smarter the higher up the hill you go. The village is just south of Mulhouse, a few miles from the Swiss border. Mr Hartman says that the mother's boyfriend still comes round to keep an eye on the place, but no one has been living there since mid-May. He is standing on his toes now, looking over his neat hedge. 'Look, even if I stand like this, I can't see anything.' Up until last November, if he had been able to peer in, he would have seen that the walls of the two small first-floor rooms, Stéphane's sitting-room and bedroom, were lined with paintings and drawings, and that every flat surface groaned with bibelots: religious statues, porcelain plates, silver figurines, ivory carvings. He did not know it until he read about it in the newspapers, but Mr Hartman had been living next door to one of the most acquisitive thieves the art world has ever known. Stéphane Breitwieser, 31, a restaurant waiter, is now in custody in Switzerland, where he was finally caught last November after stealing a hunting horn from the Richard Wagner Museum in Lucerne. He is suspected of stealing 239 works of art in 174 thefts in Switzerland, France, Germany, Belgium, Holland, Denmark and Austria. Among the paintings he stole were François Boucher's Sleeping Shepherd, Pieter Brueghel's Cheating Benefits its Master and David Teniers' The Monkey's Ball. For his thefts, he would always be dressed smartly in a suit and overcoat, and he kept what he stole for himself - a second- rate Thomas Crown. His mother and girlfriend are being held in Strasbourg. Anne Catherine Kleinklauss, 31, a nurse from Mulhouse, is alleged to have accompanied Breitwieser on his trips around Europe and acted as his lookout. Mireille Breitwieser told police that when she learnt that her son had been arrested, she went up to his room, took all his stolen artworks and tried to destroy them. She chopped up the paintings, mostly works on wood and copper, and threw them in the rubbish. She forced the drawings down the waste disposal unit in her sink. The objects, she tossed into the Rhine-Rhône canal 60 miles from her house. She is expected to face the rarely used charge of 'destruction of works of art'.
Alexandre von der Mühll, a heavy-set Swiss police sergeant, last spoke to Stéphane Breitwieser in mid-June. 'He has this portable television in his cell,' says von der Mühll, 'and he told me that whenever programmes about art come on, he turns it off, but then after a few minutes turns it back on again. He can't resist.' We are talking in Lausanne's police headquarters, a modern cluster of low- rise buildings between a motorway and a grassy hill covered in wildflowers. Beside the car park is a free-standing mobile, 30ft tall, painted in primary colours - a classic piece of government art. As I arrive, a troop of cadets come bursting out of breakfast in blue T-shirts and trousers, high on mountain air and muesli. It is a while since von der Mühll came bursting out of anything but his waistband. Though only 35, he has the manner and appearance of a man 20 years older. He is mostly bald, has a thin grey moustache and a paunch which sags over his corduroys, and he smokes a pipe from breakfast till bedtime. He also oozes trust, which is half the reason Breitwieser, who had resisted all previous interrogators, poured his heart out to him. The other half is that von der Mühll is also a devoted connoisseur, with his own modest collection of mostly 19th- century French paintings. For the past 10 years, he has specialised in art thefts in Switzerland - a dream job, he calls it. He had known of Breitwieser for years before he met him, though not by name. All he had was a blurred photograph taken by a security camera of a man suspected of stealing silverware from museums in von der Mühll's home canton, Vaud, around Lausanne. 'I've done a lot of these kinds of investigation, and I had an idea of what kind of person this was,' he says. 'Then a 17th-century Flemish tapestry went missing, and I started asking all the dealers around Switzerland and France, but none of them had seen it. I had already been talking to the silver dealers in Basle, where they have a big antiques fair, and none of them had heard about the silver objects that had been stolen. I got the feeling that the thief was stealing for himself.' It was not until the beginning of February that von der Mühll and Breitwieser finally met, in an interrogation room in Lausanne. Breitwieser had been transferred there from Lucerne where police, who at the time suspected him of only a handful of thefts, were having no luck in their questioning of him.
'We began by just talking about collecting,' says von der Mühll. Each long session would begin with a cup of coffee and the police sergeant lighting his pipe. 'He is very well spoken and knows a lot about art. After about 10 days, we got to know each other and I asked about the stolen objects. Suddenly and spontaneously, he mentioned a Flemish still life of a bunch of flowers. He had spoken about the silverware a little, but never about paintings. 'We talked again and again and he confessed to stealing 50 or 60 paintings. Eventually he was telling me everything about the pictures, the silverware, the ivory, the illuminated books. He's a real collector. He always took the descriptive sign from whatever he stole, memorised it, destroyed it and then did more research. He knew by heart the dimensions and condition of everything he stole and knew their prices. Though whenever I suggested a price for an item, he would always suggest a lower one. He was trying to minimise the scale of his theft and show that the financial values were not important to him.' Early estimates valued Breitwieser's collection over-excitedly at around £1 billion, but now experts believe it came to less than £100 million. Breitwieser could not share his enthusiasm for art with anyone. His mother and girlfriend knew next to nothing about it. 'He said to me, "You're the only person I've ever been able to talk about my collection with",' says von der Mühll. 'He never had many friends, and he couldn't even show it to them. He would rotate his paintings on the walls of his bedroom. There wasn't enough room for all of them at once. All his objects would be arranged around the room. He was desperate to talk about his collection with a fellow connoisseur.'
Von der Mühll suggests that Breitwieser's passion for art is no different from other people's passions for cars or food or music. But he loved art so much it turned him into a thief. 'He started out by buying a few objects,' says von der Mühll, 'but when he realised he could not afford what he wanted, he began to steal. This was the only financial aspect to his thefts. Often, he told me, he was very frightened, but his desire to own these things overcame his fear. He never sold what he stole.' According to French police and neighbours of the Breitwiesers, mother and son were a miserable pair. Their relationship was foul. Roland Le Goff, their former neighbour in the nearby village of Ensisheim, frequently complained to the police about their screaming matches and received menacing telephone calls from the Breitwiesers in return. He was relieved when they moved to Eschentzwiller in 1996. Ten years ago, Mireille was shattered when her husband left her for another woman. Soon afterwards, Stéphane was arrested for shoplifting and in 1995 he began to steal art on a regular basis. By this time, he was telling people he was the grandson of a modestly successful local painter, Robert Breitwieser. In fact, he is only distantly related to him. However, Bruno Breitwieser, 46, an art expert from Poitiers and the real grandson of Robert Breitwieser, told a French newspaper that he had met Stéphane and Anne Kleinklauss several times, at their insistence, and found them a charming couple. 'We are all stunned,' he said. 'Who would have thought it? Stéphane is not particularly charismatic or funny. He is shy, introverted, small and fragile.' He said Kleinklauss was 'very nice, enthusiastic in her work, jolly and smiling'. Stéphane Breitwieser had gained a tourism qualification and spent a year at the University of Strasbourg studying history of art. But he made his living waiting in good restaurants in Switzerland. His mother also worked in Switzerland, in an office job, driving over the border each day like so many from Alsace. Almost every weekend, Breitwieser and his girlfriend would set off for small museums all over Europe and return with an item or two. Typically, he would scout out the museum first, then go in when there was no one around, grab what he wanted and smuggle it out under his raincoat or in a rucksack. He would never cut paintings and drawings out of their frames, as the French police claimed, but carefully undid the frames and removed the entire works. Often, the couple would hit two or three museums in a weekend.
He had an acquaintance who ran a framing shop in Mulhouse. At first, he would send him his stolen paintings to re-frame. The friend had no idea where they came from and sometimes even displayed his handiwork in his shop window. When Breitwieser came by one day and saw his stolen works were on display for all of Mulhouse to see, he went spare, stopped sending the pictures to his friend, and simply gave him the dimensions of the frames he needed. During this time, he was caught once by police while trying to steal a painting from a shop in Lucerne in 1997. He spent a few weeks in jail, but once released, got back to business almost immediately. Breitwieser's run finally ended on November 20 last year, on the lawn outside the Richard Wagner Museum, a squat white mansion set on a hill in Lucerne. Two days earlier, on a Sunday afternoon, he had been one of only three visitors to the museum. He followed his usual pattern and swiped an old Swiss hunting horn. On the Tuesday, he came back. Dressed as usual in a dark suit and overcoat and looking shiftily at the museum, he was spotted by a retired journalist wandering around the grounds. The journalist went inside and told Esther Jaeger, the museum director, about the shady-looking man outside. She took one look at him, recognised him as one of the three visitors on the day of the horn's theft and called the police, who came and took him into custody. Almost immediately, the Swiss asked the French for permission to go to Breitwieser's house to look for the horn, estimated to be worth £40,000. But it took almost three weeks, according to von der Mühll, for the request to work its way through France's bureaucracy (the French deny that they were sluggish). Whatever the case, by the time the Swiss and French police reached his house there was nothing to be found. His mother told them that she had thrown the horn into the Rhine; divers eventually found its leather strap, but never the horn itself. At this stage the police knew nothing of the rest of Breitwieser's haul or what his mother had done with it. The horn turned up on November 29, when a pair of elderly ramblers walking along the Rhine-Rhône canal near Gerstheim, about 60 miles from Breitwieser's home, noticed something gleaming in the water, which was clear and only about six feet deep at the time. They notified the lock-keeper who called the police. Over the next week divers recovered 109 objects, mostly statues, silverware and enamelled plates, which they stored in a police cell. No one knew where they came from and no one linked them with Stéphane Breitwieser. It was only when a lawyer visiting from Strasbourg saw the treasure that news of it filtered up to senior prosecutors.
One of the objects recovered was a commemorative medal stolen from a museum in Lucerne, which piqued the interest of the Swiss. By the end of January, every canton in Switzerland was alerted to the French police's find, and slowly the museums and country houses came forward to identify works as theirs. In mid-February, Breitwieser was transferred from Lausanne to Lucerne, so he could be interrogated by von der Mühll, and the full story began to emerge. During his last formal interrogation, von der Mühll asked Breitwieser if his mother and girlfriend might have destroyed the paintings. Breitwieser laughed and said, 'They would not do that. Even they know how much they are worth.' But it appears that he did not know his mother and his girlfriend as well as he thought he did. On May 12, von der Mühll and other Swiss officers travelled to France to question them both. Once presented with Breitwieser's testimony they both started to talk. Kleinklauss said that after her boyfriend was arrested, she raced back to his house to warn his mother. Mireille broke down, went up to his room and gathered up all his objects to throw them into the canal. She told police that she was terrified of being implicated in her son's crime, losing her Swiss work permit and never finding another job again. Having been betrayed by her husband, she felt she was now being betrayed by her son. On her way to the canal, she said, she stopped at a small chapel in the forest of Hilsenheim and left a statue of the Virgin and Child, and several other religious artefacts which she could not bring herself to throw into the canal. After she returned home, she took the paintings that were left, around 60 of them, and destroyed them one by one, frightened that at any point the police might walk in. Divers were dispatched again to the canal to see if there was anything more to recover, and while they dredged it in their waders, Pascale Schultz, a puffed-up prosecutor from Strasbourg, stood in the blistering sunshine and offered his portrait of Breitwieser: 'He is young, hyper-passionate about art, a connoisseur, no less. He stole objects of value and beauty. I am amazed at the disconcerting ease and different ways by which he stole from dozens of museums. He stole things displayed behind glass, in locked cases, from picture frames, evading all kinds of security. And then he was allowed to walk out with these things hidden in his raincoat or in a rucksack. Amazing.'
M Schultz then produced photographs of some of the objects recovered from the canal: two silver goblets made in Belgium in 1619; a small silver model of a sailing ship, an 18th-century table ornament, stolen from Augsburg in Germany. In his folder, he had more than 100 photographs of items from the Breitwieser collection, some chipped and stained from a week in the canal. All the items are now with conservators at the Unterlinden Museum at Colmar, north of Mulhouse. What astonished many in the art world was how few of the stolen items had been reported lost. 'The notion that works signed by masters such as Boucher, Watteau or Cranach could have disappeared from public collections is quite incredible,' said Evelyne Schmitt, an adviser to the ministry of culture's department of regional museums. She said that her department had been told about none of the more significant thefts. One reason may have been that the museums feared higher insurance premiums when they could not even afford proper alarm systems, according to von der Mühll. Given the choice between having to shut down or stay open with lax security, they chose to stay open. There are still some glaring questions about the Breitwieser case, especially regarding the fate of the paintings. Alexandra Smith of the Art Loss Register in London, which tracks stolen art, says, 'Perhaps I'm cynical, but I'm still not ruling out the possibility that the mother sold them.' These suspicions have been fed by inconsistencies in the mother's confession, as related by French police. She says she left the Virgin and Child in the forest chapel around the same time that she dumped the rest of her son's booty in the canal. The cleaning lady at the chapel, however, says the statue did not appear there until one morning at the end of January, when she found it sitting in the hallway. The congregation of the chapel then did not tell police about it for another four months, saying they did not know it was stolen. If Mireille Breitwieser was still disposing of art works in January, perhaps this explains why her son stayed quiet for so long, finally unburdening himself when he was confident his mother had got rid of the collection. Von der Mühll is not convinced. He believes Breitwieser was a collector, not a wheeler- dealer. But even assuming the paintings were destroyed, there are still around 60 other items missing.
Rolf Koch, the spokesman for Lucerne police, says it could be months before all of the museums across Europe file their complaints against Breitwieser. The French are trying to bring him back to France for trial, but the Swiss - who lost 66 works to France's 68 - are determined to try him themselves. Whatever happens, it will be months before the waiter, his mother and the girlfriend are brought to trial and it is discovered whether the paintings - those sleeping shepherds, dancing monkeys and silent bowls of fruit - are either gone for good or making another art thief very happy. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
'Euro billions' art thief mother freed
COLMAR, France, Aug 2 (AFP) - The mother of a French art enthusiast accused of stealing some 200 works, destroying some and dumping others in a canal was released from police custody on Friday, court sources said. Mireille Breitwieser, who was detained and placed under investigation in May for possession of stolen goods, allegedly tried to dispose of some of the works after her 31-year-old son Stephane was arrested in Switzerland last November. Investigators believe the son stole some 200 works worth an estimated EUR 2 billion (USD 1.97 billion) from museums across Europe over a period of several years beginning in 1995. Among the collection of works looted from galleries and sale rooms were paintings by 16th- and 17th- century masters, as well as glassware, china and antique musical instruments. Authorities have so far recovered only about one-tenth of the stolen objects, worth about EUR 10 million. Breitwieser remained undetected for so long because, instead of trying to sell the art, he stored it at his mother's apartment in the eastern French city of Mulhouse, which he turned into a kind of private museum, police said.
He was eventually caught red-handed trying to steal a bugle from a museum in Lucerne and later confessed to Swiss investigators, claiming to have stolen the works "for his own pleasure". Breitwieser's mother has been accused of slashing some of the works in a fit of rage - including paintings by Peter Bruegel and Antoine Watteau - and throwing them out with the household rubbish. She then allegedly tossed others into a canal in eastern France, where police found remains of several paintings and other objects. Among the destroyed masterpieces were "Madeleine of France, Queen of Scotland" by 16th-century artist Corneille de La Haye, and "Sleeping Shepherd" by Francois Boucher. http://www.expatica.com/
Firm Fights for Right to Sell Titanic Artifacts
Tue Aug 6, 9:25 AM ET
By Paul Simao
- UNESCO estimates that more than 3 million undiscovered shipwrecks litter the world's ocean floors -
ATLANTA (Reuters) - A U.S. company that has the rights to salvage and display artifacts from the Titanic said Monday it had asked the Supreme Court to overturn a lower court ruling that bans it from selling items recovered from the sunken ship. RMS Titanic Inc., a publicly traded company based in Atlanta, argues that a federal appeals court was wrong when it ruled in April that the company did not have proper title to the 6,000 items it has salvaged from the famous vessel. The ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Richmond, Virginia, meant that the company could be compensated for its salvage work but could not sell any artifacts from the wreck or surrounding waters. The Titanic struck an iceberg and sank off the coast of the Canadian province of Newfoundland on April 15, 1912, killing 1,523 people. Arnie Geller, president of RMS Titanic, said the company was the first to recover objects from the shipwreck. It then went through a legal process that resulted in a federal court granting it ownership rights to the Titanic's treasures in 1994, allowing the salvage operator to recover and, if it wished, sell the artifacts. He noted that the firm had spent millions on expeditions to the wreck site and on efforts to preserve and restore artifacts plucked from the depths of the North Atlantic. "Investors bought stock in the company in reliance upon the fact that a United States federal court awarded us ownership of everything we recovered," said Geller, who noted that the company's shares had fallen to about 25 cents a share from about $3 a share last year. The company has, however, been able to recoup some of the money it spent by displaying Titanic artifacts, which include a 15-tonpiece of the ship's hull, in shows and exhibitions that have attracted millions of visitors. The legal battle over the spoils of the Titanic comes amid a growing effort by the United Nations to designate and protect ancient shipwrecks and drowned civilizations as underwater cultural heritage sites. Last November in Paris, the 138 member states of the U.N. cultural organization UNESCO ratified a new convention outlawing the plundering of ancient shipwrecks and underwater archeological sites. The measure was bitterly opposed by private salvage operators. Although many countries already protect and manage historic wrecks and sites within their waters, those in international waters, such as the Titanic, are not governed by any statutes or regulations. http://news.yahoo.com/
Greece demands theft explanation
Helena Smith Tuesday August 6, 2002 The Guardian
Greece yesterday demanded an explanation from the British Museum as to how a small but valuable archaic marble head went missing from its galleries during opening hours. In a letter to Neil MacGregor, the new director of the museum, the Greek culture minister, Evangelos Venizelos, insisted Athens be further informed about the theft, the second to affect a Greek work of art being exhibited in Bloomsbury in the past 18 months. "Given the historic and cultural interest Greece has in all Greek antiquities, wherever they may be, we would like an explanation," the culture ministry announced. The 2,500-year-old sculpture was apparently snatched on Tuesday. Although diminutive, the worn, wide-eyed marble is heavy, almost six pounds. Its removal - on Mr MacGregor's first day in office - would have required skill, time and strength, officials say. Last night, as Interpol stepped up the search for the head, antiquities experts in Athens said they believed it was worth at least $40,000. The sculpture had been significantly damaged, with most of the bottom of its face chipped away, when the museum acquired it in the 19th century. "We understand that safe guarding antiquities is never easy," said a Greek government official who handles cultural affairs. "But one would have thought that when an institution like the British Museum is host so many foreign treasures it would be extra vigilant." Athens has long smarted over Britain's accusation that none of its museums is adequate to house the Elgin marbles, also on display at the British Museum. "We have to ask whether Britain is allocating enough resources to protect the artworks in its possession," the official said. "No artwork has ever been stolen from the National Archaeological Museum in Athens." The Greek media emphasised that the head was stolen from a gallery whose full time guard had been forced to resign because of cost cutting. http://www.guardian.co.uk/
HIGHLIGHTS OF TRACE MAGAZINE, ISSUE 162
As usual, the magazine includes all the latest stolen alerts, many with colour illustrations, and any rewards posted.
RECOVERIES. Trace™s latest rapid recoveries and slow-burn successes, including silverware, clocks and watches and a Queen Anne parquetry chest.
NEWS.Inside story of Operation Cuba, the international police sting that recovered Esther Koplowitz™s Goya in Madrid; Do you know this man? CCTV images of a walk in theft in Worcestershire
VIOLIN THEFT. Sarah Jane Checkland investigates the stories behind the stolen Strads
BELGIAN POLICE: David Fanning profiles the Belgian art detectives and their work
MAN VERSUS MACHINE. Which is the more effective deterrent to criminals: a human house sitter or a hi-tech security system? John Leaver reports on holiday security
PAPERPRINT. No chipping, no tagging, no marking “ a revolutionary new non-invasive method of ˜fingerprinting™ rare books and maps
MAY THE FORCE BE WITH YOU. Chief Inspector Jan Berry, the newly appointed chairman of the Police Federation of England and Wales, talks to Katrina Burroughs