[CPProt.net] From Boston to Baghdad, missing treasures add up to a $6bn-a-year black market

[MSN CPPnet (Ton Cremers)]

FBI names its most-wanted stolen works of art 

>From Boston to Baghdad, missing treasures add up to a $6bn-a-year black
market 

Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington
Thursday November 17, 2005
The Guardian 


In August last year, two masked robbers armed with submachine guns
shouldered through the Sunday afternoon crowd at an Oslo museum and coolly
tore Edvard Munch's The Scream off the wall, making their escape in a
waiting black Audi.
The Scream is the most iconic of the images on a newly published FBI list of
top 10 art crimes, a catalogue of missing masterpieces worth $600m (£345m)
which includes works by Rembrandt, Da Vinci, Degas, Cezanne and Van Gogh, as
well as thousands of artifacts looted from the Iraqi museum in Baghdad.

The FBI issued its list in the hope of enlisting public help in solving some
of the world's most notorious art thefts, and curtailing a black market
trade worth an estimated $6bn a year.
The agency posted photos of the stolen artwork on its website, along with
descriptions of the theft, hoping it will prompt the public to come forward
with information on the stolen treasures.

Two paintings were stolen from the Munch museum in the 2004 burglary: The
Scream and another work by the Norwegian master, The Madonna. As with some
of the other thefts highlighted by the FBI, it was executed with brute force
and not the urbane sophistication of the popular image of the cat burglar.

"It is not as creative or sophisticated in the way they steal the art," said
Eric Ives, director of the FBI's major theft division. "It's actually the
way they sell the art. It is much more difficult to sell the art than to
steal it."

Three of the paintings on the FBI list have already been recovered - a
Rembrandt self-portrait and two Renoirs stolen from the Swedish national
museum in 2000. One of the missing Renoirs turned up in Los Angeles; the
Rembrandt was recovered in Copenhagen after a joint investigation by the FBI
and the Danish authorities.

But such successes are rare, and the FBI only recently established a
dedicated unit for art theft following the looting of the Baghdad museum. Mr
Ives put the recovery rate for artwork stolen in the US at 5%. The
international recovery rate is believed to be around 10%. Most of those
works, in Europe especially, where museums depend on public funding, were
uninsured because of the prohibitive costs of premiums for theft.

Other artworks from the agency's top 10 list still at large include: 10,000
figurines, seals and other artifacts looted from the Iraqi museum after the
fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, a dozen paintings from the Isabella Stewart
Gardner museum in Boston, which were worth some $300m, and Da Vinci's
Madonna of the Yarnwinder, worth $65m, which was stolen from Drumlanrig
Castle in Scotland by two thieves posing as tourists.

They join around 160,000 stolen works of art on the art loss register, a
London-based list established in 1991 to help trace missing items and make
it more difficult for the thieves to cash in on the real value of their
stolen goods.

About 150 works are recovered every year, said Katharine Dugdale, operations
manager in the New York office. "It has made it harder to sell stolen
artworks at the top tiers of the marketplace."

"Items registered on the top 10 list are very much exceptional. Presumably,
they could not be sold through any of the top tier auction houses or into a
museum collection so it will make it very hard to get proper value for these
items ever."

Lost and found

· 7,000-10,000 Iraqi artifacts, 2003

· 12 paintings stolen in 1990 from Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

· Two Renoirs and a Rembrandt stolen from Sweden's National Museum, 2000
(recovered)

· Munch's Scream, and Madonna

· Benvenuto Cellini's Saltcellar from Vienna museum, 2003

· Caravaggio's Nativity from Palermo, 1969

· Davidoff-Morini Stradivarius violin from New York apartment, 1995

· Two Van Gogh paintings from Amsterdam museum, 2002

· Cezanne's View of Auvers-sur-Oise from Oxford's Ashmolean, 1999

· Da Vinci's Madonna of the Yarnwinder, 2003

http://www.guardian.co.uk/