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September 20, 1999

Lowbrow art smugglers target a `hot' South Florida market

(See list of recovered art 1982 - 1999 at the end of this message)

Published Sunday, September 19, 1999, in the Miami Herald

Lowbrow art smugglers target a `hot' South Florida market

By FRED TASKER
Herald Staff Writer

The list of hot goods reads like a Christie's art catalog:


All were recovered in Miami and Fort Lauderdale from art thieves. All were found by FBI and Customs agents in briefcases, wooden crates under fresh fish, the seat-bottoms of cheap furniture, car trunks, fancy hotel rooms.
Has South Florida, all these years, had a more highbrow class of criminals than anyone realized?
Well, yes and no.
``Miami is such a crossroads that a lot of things come through here --from high-tech supercomputers to munitions to missile deals,'' says Michael Sheehan, U.S. Customs spokesman.
It's no coordinated plot, he says. In fact, he doesn't know of any connection among the art theft recoveries in South Florida in the past 20 years.

Except money.

``There's a lot of money in South Florida, some of it dirty,'' Sheehan says. ``A lot of people involved in art crimes are looking to sell the stolen property to anyone, at a good price. It's easy to sell a painting here; they know the people will keep it quiet because their money is dirty just like the art is hot.''
Just who are South Florida's art thieves, and who are their customers?
They come in all types, investigators agree: dishonest businessmen, drug dealers, small-time grifters.
In 1982, two Rubens paintings were recovered from a self-employed construction consultant from Lighthouse Point and an unemployed Margate man living on disability. In 1989, a Goya was found with a retired Argentine policeman living in Miami Beach. In 1991, a cache of Irish antiquities was taken back from an Irishman who had moved to Miami.
``They're very diverse,'' Sheehan says. ``Neither the sellers nor the buyers are necessarily art experts in any way. The common thread? Miami. They feel they can get their stuff in and out of here.'' Art theft is not quite the glamorous caper it's often made out to be, says Anna Kisluk, director of the Art Loss Register, a Manhattan firm that keeps a database of stolen art to help galleries and insurance companies recover it.
``People think art thieves are debonair, suave, knowledgeable,'' Kisluk says. ``Generally they're just common burglars.'' Buyers, too, tend to be rather ordinary, she says.
``It's not usually stolen on commission for collectors,'' she says. ``The image people have of a mad, crazy collector sitting in a vault admiring his stolen art [the plot of the James Bond film Dr. No] is more fiction than fact.''
But a very different view comes from Carol Damian, chairman of the art department at Florida International University. As an expert on pre-Columbian art, she is often called by U.S. Customs agents to evaluate suspicious art objects arriving at Miami International Airport.
``It does go on,'' she says of commissioned thefts. ``It's not just a Bond story. I have visited private collections, especially in South America, where I have intentionally not disclosed that I'm a scholar who would know what I'm seeing.
``I've seen things that have shocked me. There is a certain kind of person who wants to be surrounded by fabulous things, and doesn't want to share.''
In one case, Damian says, she saw seized art objects that still bore a museum's identification numbers, as if a collector had asked for each by name.

Insurance firms wary

Companies that insure art works and other expensive things are onto Miami, says a spokesman for the Chubb Group of Insurance Companies, which specializes in luxury coverage.
``We recognize that Miami, because it's a port like other large ports, has a higher frequency of smuggling and theft,'' she says. FBI and Customs agents are tight-lipped about how they catch art smugglers. In the current case of the Greek art objects -- 271 artifacts, including statues of gods, urns, wine jugs and a marble head of Dionysius -- the FBI will say only that it received a tip and worked with Greek investigators.
``The police in Greece have leads,'' says Achilles Paparsenos, spokesman for the Greek Embassy in Washington. ``They're preparing a case for the judicial system. Apparently they do know who did it. ``We're excited that they've been recovered. It was one of the major crimes against our cultural heritage.''

Sources of information

Often, arrests result from tips, or even computer studies, Damian says. Two years ago, a shipment of Guatemalan artifacts headed for a shop in Manhattan was seized in Miami when someone in Guatemala called U.S. Customs, she says. ``Probably, the person in Guatemala didn't get paid and was mad,'' she says.
In an earlier case in which ancient feathered Peruvian garments were mailed individually in padded envelopes through Miami to Arizona, Customs computers at the Miami mail facility spotted the pattern, Damian says.
Undercover work is also involved. In 1982, a group of South Florida businessmen hatched a bizarre plot to steal paintings by Edgar Degas, Claude Monet and James Whistler from a Connecticut art museum, hold them for ransom, and deliver their shredded remains to The New York Times if it wasn't paid. FBI agents nabbed them by infiltrating their gang, posing as museum tour guides and art appraisers. The boom in art thefts seems to have begun in the 1980s, alongside a boom in legitimate sales. In 1982, for example, Japanese businessman Ryoei Saito paid $82.5 million for a Van Gogh and $78.1 milliion for a Renoir at a single auction.
``The art market was really booming then, with those huge auction prices being paid,'' Kisluk says. ``And it's very strong right now.''

A growing problem

When Kisluk's firm took over the registry of stolen art in 1991, it listed 25,000 stolen artworks; today it has 100,000. Kisluk's registry had listings for the Greek art objects recovered last week in Miami. So anyone trying to sell them openly probably would have been exposed quickly, she says.
In fact, almost everything really famous is eventually recovered, she says. Exceptions: Titian's Rest on the Flight to Egypt, stolen in England, and Gainsborough and Rubens paintings stolen in 1986 from an Irish mansion.
``Chances are the thieves are sitting on them,'' Kisluk says. ``They can't sell them on the open market.''
e-mail: ftasker@herald.com
Herald researcher Gay Nemeti contributed to this report.

addition:

AUDACIOUS ART SMUGGLERS



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