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Oct. 4--LONDON -- Your Degas has disappeared. Your Van Gogh has vanished. Your Pollock has taken a powder.
Who are you going to call?
Apart from the police, you might try Julian Radcliffe.
Radcliffe is the founder and chairman of the Art Loss Register, the world's largest private database of stolen art and a central clearinghouse of information about the shadowy underworld where purloined masterpieces may linger for decades, waiting to be sold or ransomed back to their owners.
The 15-year-old register contains records of more than 175,000 stolen objects, from paintings and sculptures to jewelry and rare antiques. Since its founding in 1991, the company has been involved in the recovery of more than $138million in purloined art, according to Radcliffe. At any given time, the staff of about 30 employees is juggling roughly 150 active cases, with the result that the register is involved in about three recoveries of stolen artwork in a typical week.
"We just found a pair of cannon on eBay--French 18th Century," said Radcliffe, whose paper-strewn office bears witness to the volume of cases the register handles. "EBay is just stuffed full of stolen goods."
High-profile cases
Several high-profile cases have put the rarefied world of art thievery in the spotlight recently. Oslo's Munch Museum has displayed two paintings by Norwegian master Edvard Munch, including his iconic "The Scream," that were recovered in August. Masked gunmen stole the paintings from the museum in broad daylight two years ago.
And in one of the most spectacular art heists in Russia's history, a curator at St. Petersburg's famed State Hermitage Museum was implicated in July in the theft of 221 artworks valued at $5 million.
Earlier this year, the Art Loss Register played a key role in a 28-year-old case involving seven paintings valued at more than $30 million that were stolen from the Massachusetts home of collector Michael Bakwin. As a result of seven years of complicated, high-wire negotiations with a lawyer who claimed to have been given the paintings by a client, Radcliffe has secured the return of five of the paintings, including a Cezanne in 1999 and four other paintings in January.
That demonstrates that the Art Loss Register is more than a passive repository of information. Radcliffe, whose background is in the insurance business, frequently flies around the globe to meet with lawyers or other middlemen with knowledge about the location of stolen works.
"We are leading the campaign against art theft," said the well-tailored Radcliffe. "I think we're having an effect. I don't want to overstate that, but I think that's the case."
As for eBay, the Internet auction site deals with such a huge volume of goods that it cannot check to determine whether something is stolen property before it is listed, according to spokeswoman Catherine England. But if someone reports seeing a stolen item on the site to the police, eBay cooperates with law-enforcement agencies by turning over the would-be seller's personal information.
Nazi-looted art
The register and a year-old competitor called Swift-Find also have made a specialty of tracking artwork that was seized from Jewish owners during the Nazi era.
Last year, Chicago collector Marilynn Alsdorf agreed to pay $6.5 million to settle a claim that a Picasso painting she bought in 1975 had been looted from a Paris home by Nazi officials. The painting, called "The Woman in White," showed up on the register's database when Alsdorf put it up for sale.
The company charges owners of stolen pieces about $50 to register their missing artwork, and collectors who are considering buying an object pay up to $100 for searches of the database to learn whether it is listed as stolen. In addition, the register gets a commission of 10 percent to 15 percent when it's involved in reuniting a piece with its rightful owner.
Bonnie Magness-Gardiner, who runs the FBI's program to catch art thieves, said the register's database complements the two big law-enforcement databases of stolen art, maintained by the FBI and Interpol.
"I find them quite a valuable resource," she said. "And when law-enforcement agencies ask me to put information in my database, I recommend that they also notify the Art Loss Register."
But the register's records are not available to everyone. To prevent thieves from using it to see if a work has been reported as stolen, the company requires anyone who wants to run a search to agree to cooperate with the company if it finds a match in its records. And its database cannot be accessed over the Internet.
"We will not do searches for people who will not say who they are," said Radcliffe, 58, who earlier started a company that specialized in anti-kidnapping protection and hostage negotiation. "If we were to put all our information on the Internet, guess who'd spend all their time looking at it? The thieves."
The register's crowded London headquarters is in a modern office building in a quiet neighborhood not far from bustling Fleet Street. In addition to London, the company has offices in New York, Germany, the Netherlands and India, where many of the searches are done.
Searches done by key words
Searches are conducted by key words such as the artist's name and descriptive words, but not a work's title, which can be easily changed or subject to misinterpretation.
A large number of matches come up for some well-known artists. Rembrandt has 252 items listed, including a painting of Christ and his disciples on a stormy Sea of Galilee that was stolen in 1990 from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.
But the artist whose work has found the most favor with thieves is Picasso, whose name generates 540 matches. That large number is due in part to the fact that he not only painted but also drew and created sculpture and ceramics. And he lived a long time.
That the database contains more than 175,000 items is an indication that art theft is a bigger, more persistent problem than the occasional high-profile robbery suggests.
The FBI has estimated that theft of all kinds of collectible objects amounts to as much as $6 billion a year worldwide. Art experts question whether it's that much, but pinning down the size of the problem is admittedly difficult.
"We could never achieve the firm kind of number that you'd like because it's an illicit activity," said the FBI's Magness-Gardiner. "And it could vary from year to year. It depends on whether a $50 million Rembrandt has been stolen."
As a measure of the effect databases might be having in controlling art theft, Radcliffe said that when the register first opened for business, about 1 in 3,000 items offered for auction at the two leading houses, Christie's and Sotheby's, turned out to be stolen. Lately that figure has dropped to about 1 in 7,000 items.
"Thieves have learned not to consign to the auction houses, and that is depressing the price, because they are having to wait longer to get a stolen item into the market," Radcliffe said. "I think we are helping to make the art market transparent in the best possible way."
soswanson@tribune.com
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Copyright (c) 2006, Chicago Tribune
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.
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