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Art heists: more Tony Soprano than George Clooney

2013-07-11 11:08:11 未知

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston would make a spectacular setting for an art-heist movie. From the outside it is a respectable building on the edge of a green area called the Back Bay Fens. Inside, it is a wonderland. A Renaissance courtyard overlooked by Venetian gothic windows forms its lush central space, made from bits of real Italian and Spanish buildings. One of the adjoining rooms contains John Singer Sargent's portrait of Gardner, who amassed one of the US's most fabulous collections; her finds range from Sargent's El Jaleo to Titian's Europa and the Bull.

On the night of 19 March 1990, this exquisite museum was the setting for a real heist – but no cameras were rolling. Sadly, the biggest art crime in US history was not a fictional one starring George Clooney but the real thing. Thirteen works were taken, with the most devastating losses Rembrandt's 1633 painting Storm On the Sea of Galilee and The Concert by Vermeer.

Nearly a quarter of a century on, the FBI says it knows who was responsible. The bureau "believes the thieves belonged to a criminal organisation based in New England and the mid-Atlantic states". A man called Robert Gentile has apparently testified before a grand jury.

So … it was the mafia? Tony Soprano, who lived in the mid-Atlantic state of New Jersey, used to have impressive Renaissance art reproductions in his home, but I need to rewatch the series to try and spot that Rembrandt.

The mafia is active in parts of New England, too. When I first visited the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, I was living in Providence, reputed to be a mafia stronghold. As Jack Nicholson says in Martin Scorsese's The Departed: "They just will not stop having the mafia in Providence." I remember having some great spaghetti in the city's Federal Hill area, but I don't remember any illicit Vermeers.

All the same, this is a chilling revelation. It squares up strangely with another of the biggest modern art crimes, the theft of Caravaggio's Nativity from the Oratory of San Lorenzo in Palermo, Sicily in 1969. The mafia was always prime suspect, and in 1996 a pentito – a member of Cosa Nostra turned informant – revealed to a Palermo courtroom that not only did the Sicilian crime organisation steal the Caravaggio, they knocked it about so badly it was destroyed.

In every major art crime I have covered as a journalist, including the notorious theft of The Scream in Norway, there turned out to be a gangland connection. It might be the mafia, it might be some lesser bunch of drug and gun lords, but these art heists always seem to be the work of organised criminals. Now it seems the Boston theft was, too. How many years were wasted pursuing other leads?

People fantasise about art theft, imagining gentlemen thieves perpetrating elegant, even tasteful crimes. In reality, it usually turns out to be gangsters. Instead of being diverted by elaborate hypotheses, in every case the police should start by asking their snoops in the biggest local crime outfit. The Oslo police, as I found out when I visited their headquarters in 2007, did just that – and got The Scream back.

Meanwhile, Tony Soprano is sitting in a backroom some place, smoking a cigar, gazing thoughtfully at Rembrandt's Storm On the Sea of Galilee. Yeah, life can get stormy sometimes. It ain't always pretty.

(责任编辑:张天宇)

注:本站上发表的所有内容,均为原作者的观点,不代表雅昌艺术网的立场,也不代表雅昌艺术网的价值判断。

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