![]() ![]() Outside of agencies like Interpol, the practice of art crime investigation tends to reveal the national priorities, and even the national character, of the highly specialized local agencies tasked with enforcement. MUSEUM FAÇADE & BUZZER: LUC & RENAUD SCHROBILTGEN/RENÉ MAGRITTE MUSEUM, JETTE-BRUSSELS. The René Magritte Museum in Jette, where the artist resided for nearly 25 years, was open only by appointment. “More so, it’s accurate to say that there are transnational organized crime groups that are treating these objects just as they would any other illicit chattel.” “There are master thieves and master forgers, but they are in small supply,” said Jake Archer, a special agent with the FBI’s art crime team. Modern art crime, like the arms trade, still thrives in the shadow of global conflict, which gives rise to criminal networks that make from the detritus of war immensely profitable commodities. In the wake of the Napoleonic Wars and again after the First World War, a patchwork of treaties gradually tried to regulate the looting, destruction, and trafficking of art and antiquities. Napoleon’s repository for looted treasures was the Louvre, in Paris, where many of the works he acquired remain. There they can sell to finance their own criminal activities: drugs, arms, prostitution.”Ĭ ontinental Europe’s first art theft unit was established by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1796 and was focused not on stopping plunder but carrying it out on a scale unseen since the Romans took precious artifacts as spoils of war from Athens, Sicily, and Jerusalem. “It’s very easy to do an important art theft here in Belgium and then the same night, or 15 hours later, they are in Croatia or in Albania. When he joined Section Art in August 2005, Verhaegen’s years of particular experience proved surprisingly useful: Serbian gangs are heavily involved in trafficking stolen art and antiquities, Verhaegen told me, along with organized crime networks that can be traced to Romania, Bulgaria, Moldova, and elsewhere in the Balkans and Eastern Europe. Next he worked as part of a special intervention unit that investigated organized crime and managed underworld informants he specialized in Eastern Europe. His law enforcement career began with a five-year stint on the local police force in Brussels, where he patrolled the central district of Belgium’s capital city. It was a childhood dream that he pursued only after earning degrees in agronomy and biochemistry, then working for a few years in the private sector. Verhaegen was 51 at the time of the Magritte heist and had been a cop for two decades. ![]() In the first hour, sometimes it’s in another country.” “But when it’s art theft, what we need is a very good description, a photo a maximum of information, very quickly, because we know that a lot of stolen objects go abroad. ![]() “They know very well what they must do when there is a theft,” Verhaegen said of Belgium’s local police. But the thieves had avoided larger, more secure metropolitan museums in favor of one exceptionally valuable painting from the artist’s former home, open only by appointment, leaving slim chance they would arrive to find it packed with more visitors than they could manage. Magritte, whose surrealist paintings influenced the work of Ed Ruscha, Andy Warhol, and Jasper Johns, is a national treasure in Belgium, where a number of museums display his work. They had also been clever about selecting their target. Brazen as it was, the robbery seemed to be the work of professionals-a daring, high-value heist carried out with speed and precision by men who knew how to handle weapons, how to deal effectively with hostages, and how quickly to expect a police response. Interpol described one suspect as short, of Asian descent, and an English speaker, while the other was described as a bit taller, of European or North African descent, and a French speaker. It was uncommon in those days for small museums to bother installing surveillance cameras, so police had to rely on sketches of the two suspects, who appeared to be in their 20s. ![]()
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