Art-knapping (ctd.)

September 8 2015

Picture: Philip Ide via Mail

Regular readers will know that I worry about paying ransoms for stolen art - doesn't it just encourage more thefts?

The Mail recently reported that a number of pictures were returned to Esmond Bulmer (above), a former MP, from whose home they were stolen in a rather brutal raid in 2009. The return came about after the involvement of Dick Ellis, a former police officer who is now one of the world's best known and most effective art investigators. On this occasion, a reward for £50,000 was advertised in The Antiques Trade Gazette, and after a while;

Mr Ellis received a phone call [...] to say that ‘he had been contacted and told that someone he knew, knew somebody else, who knew somebody else who had information’. What followed was a period of tense negotiation. Mr Ellis said: ‘It is not an easy process. But you can be assured that the money went to those whose information led to the recovery, not the raiders themselves.’

Now, I'm very pleased the pictures - inlcuding a Watts and a Clausen - have been safely returned. But can we really be sure that someone, somewhere along the line, hasn't profited from the original criminal act? Would the original thieves have simply given up the pictures, gratis, to the person who then claimed the £50k? If, for example, the case was one in which somebody had simply found the pictures, then wouldn't they go to the police and claim the reward? That seems not to have happened here. And the suspicion in cases like this is that such art thefts inevitably manage to extract a payout, in the form of a ransom. All you the villains have to do is wait a few years, put in place a middleman or two, and then begin negotiating. 

In this case, the thieves have yet to be caught, and some £1m of jewels are still missing.

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