On the trail of stolen goods
Katrina Burroughs reports on the latest initiatives to help track down works of art
One chilly day in January, police seized 34 stolen ceramics before they could be auctioned in an antiques sale at John Nicholson Fine Art Auctioneers in Surrey. The recovered pieces, including Derby can- dlestick figures of a shepherd and shep- herdess, a Coalport teapot and a Derby figure of a sailor, were part of a Mr Smith's £20,000 private collection, which had been stolen from his home near Sheffield in October 1995.
Mr Smith had registered his loss with a stolen art and antiques tracking company which had picked up the possible match while screening John Nicholson's cata- logue. The company, Trace, sent Jim Hill, an ex-Thames Valley art and antiques squad police officer, to confirm the match and look into the recent history of the pieces. Mr Smith was able to identify posi- tively his property, the police withdrew it from sale and the last four 'owners' were interviewed. The owner, his insurers and the auctioneer — relieved not to have sold stolen goods — were all delighted. Despite this success story, the theft of art, antiques and collectibles in Britain is a massive problem that has overtaken car theft in financial terms. Insurers reckon annual losses amount to £450 million, whereas car crime, despite the public per- ception of the problem as an epidemic, accounts for £350 million a year. The bulk of this figure is not made up by the theft of famous paintings which occasionally make the headlines but by the daily stealing of portable antiques from private homes. Criminals who would once have settled for a television and video recorder will now go to work armed with specialist knowledge (Antiques Roadshow is required viewing in prison), targeting the Georgian silver, the Victorian watercolours and even the stamp album.
Mark Dalrymple, chairman of the Coun- cil for the Prevention of Art Theft, a group of insurers, former and serving police offi- cers, and members of the antiques trade, says, 'One of the greatest incentives for a criminal to steal the family silver as opposed to a television is the ease with which he can pass it on — and this is com- Pounded by the habit of the trade to deal in cash so there is no paper trail.' Moreover, police art and antique squads have been closed down in Hampshire, Sus- Sex and the Thames Valley — and Suffolk is the next likely victim. Most of the spe- cialist departments that remain — in Essex, Cumbria, West Yorkshire, the Metropoli- tan Police and the Royal Ulster Constabu- lary — are stretched beyond their dwindling budgets. All are frustrated by the lack of a national official stolen art and antiques database, which makes 'cross-bor- der' crime difficult to solve. When, for example, a haul of suspected stolen items is seized from a known handler at the Newark Antiques Fair, a local Notting- hamshire officer will have no way of know- ing that the Sussex constabulary have logged the goods as stolen from an antiques shop in Brighton — because there are no central records for him to consult.
The police are the first to recognise the limitations of the service they can offer vic- tims of theft. Malcolm Kenwood, a former detective constable at Sussex art and antiques squad in Brighton Ca centre of vil- lainy'), explains, 'The police rely on com- mercial companies to tip them off and do the groundwork before property can be seized and arrests can be made.'
What, in effect, has happened is the unofficial privatisation of tracking and retrieving stolen art and antiques: police use private companies to identify the true owners of seized stolen goods while the vic- tims who are insured or who are prepared to pay turn to the private sector for help.
For a victim of theft, the first step towards retrieving their property is to make sure information about stolen objects travels to the right people faster than the objects themselves and then to ensure details are stored on one of the stolen art databases, where they will be regularly checked.
Trade associations such as the Philatelic Trade Society and the British Numismatic Trade Association advertise losses to their members, and the Antiques Trade Gazette has been including photographs and descriptions of stolen goods since its first issue in 1971. Libraries have in the past been the softest of targets for villains after all, taking books out is the whole point — and last year a security officer from the National Library of Scotland was prosecuted for stealing books from the col- lection. Now librarians and private collec- tors can add descriptions of stolen books to the Antiquarian Booksellers Association `pink sheets', which are circulated to a net- work of 300 dealers.
There are at present two commercial stolen art databases in Britain. The Art Loss Register, which operates primarily at the top end of the fine art market, has a database of 100,000 items, including 352 Picassos (the world's most stolen artist) and 119 Renoirs. ALR's Caroline Wake- ford estimates that after ten years on the database the likelihood of an item being found is one in three. Trace has a similar size database of art and antiques, with new losses circulated to the trade in a monthly magazine, and has recovered £45 million worth of stolen objects over the last ten years, about a dozen recoveries every week.
This month has seen a new commitment by the police to tackling these crimes. The Council for the Prevention of Art Theft has produced 'due diligence' guidelines, encouraging members to record details of every customer and transaction. And there is now a 'due diligence' police-officer in each of the 47 forces, to whom the public can now report illicit trading in antiques.
Will the new system make any difference to the work of, for example, Jim Hill? Will he no longer need to chase up and down the country identifying police recoveries and viewing suspected stolen items in auc- tion houses and dealers' stock? He told me, `Any commitment to the problem is wel- come, but each force plans to work as an individual unit, so there is still a need for a central database and a tracking system with no force boundaries. I won't be out of a job just yet.'
Katrina Burroughs is business development manager for the Thesaurus Group and writes for its Trace magazine.
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