The Rescue Artist by Edward Dolnick

Author:Edward Dolnick [Dolnick, Edward]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-06-204184-5
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2005-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

Cops and their allies, like Dalrymple, prefer the bumblers to the pros. They love to swap tales of hapless amateurs, especially if they are meeting colleagues from far-off jurisdictions. Sitting over drinks in crowded bars, the cops play can-you-top-this. They tell true stories like the one about the Los Angeles thief who, in 1998, stole a $10,000 abstract metal sculpture and ended up selling it to a scrap dealer for $9.10.

The police tell the stories for laughs, but the laughter is bittersweet because the underlying message is so dismaying. Art theft is such an easy game and the penalties for getting caught are so low, the stories make plain, that the most hopeless sap can play. Take Anthony Daisley, who, one fine December day in 1991, staggered into the Birmingham [England] Museum and Art Gallery almost too drunk to walk. He pulled Henry Wallis’s Death of Chatterton off the wall, stuck the six-inch-by-ten-inch painting under his arm, and reeled out the door with a £75,000 prize. (The museum had recently spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on electronic security, but the alarms were designed mainly to foil thefts at night, when the building was empty.) Another museum visitor saw the theft and called a guard, but it was too late.

Daisley pulled himself aboard a passing bus and showed his fellow passengers the painting. He had just stolen it, he explained, and now it could be theirs for a mere £200. The thief asked where the bus was headed. “Selly Oak,” he was told. That was no place for him, Daisley cried out, because his ex-wife lived there. He stumbled off the bus, taking his painting with him. Five days later, police following up a tip found the stolen painting hidden in a house in Birmingham. A judge let Daisley off with a warning to stay out of trouble for twelve months, and the head of the Birmingham Museum issued him a public invitation to come back and visit the art he so clearly admired.

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