Art & Crime by Stefan Koldehoff & Witsch Colgne

Author:Stefan Koldehoff & Witsch, Colgne [Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Colgne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: true thriller; thriller; german; in translation; non fiction; Theft; Art theft; museum; art market; art crimes; tax fraud; forgery; art world; true crime; art books; Art; art; crime; true story; biographies; conspiracy; true stories; true crime books; artists; crime books; fbi; art book; prison; criminal psychology; political books; politics; law and order; artwork; true crime gifts; true story books; fbi books; criminology books; true crime book; prison books; true murder books; historical true crime; biography; essays; architecture
ISBN: 9781644211205
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2022-06-09T18:00:00+00:00

4

WHEN DICTATORS COLLECT

The art market, the international kleptocracy, and ethics

Somebody must have given Vilma Hernandez B. some money. A lot of money, in fact. A whole lot of money. Over and over again. B., born in 1939, earned a tiny salary as a secretary for the Philippine diplomatic mission to the United Nations in New York. She could not possibly have afforded the luxury real estate and expensive works of art she purchased. For example, the $350,000 she paid for an apartment on the twenty-ninth floor of the Olympic Tower on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan in 1976. Or the $880,000 that she paid a year later for three more apartments in the same luxury building on the forty-third floor. The seller was listed as a firm registered in Hong Kong by the name of Thetaventure, whose New York branch was the same as Vilma B.’s apartment in shabby subsidized housing on West Seventieth Street. Although her home address was on West Seventieth Street, she was often seen going in and out of the elegant Fahnestock Mansion at 15 East Sixty-Sixth Street, between Fifth and Madison Avenues, and also another building at a different address on East Seventieth Street in the elite Upper East Side of Manhattan. And she regularly paid the property taxes, starting in 1981, for The Lindemere, a 3.5-hectare estate with fourteen bedrooms and seventeen bathrooms in Center Moriches on Long Island. The single largest bill in Vilma B.’s name is dated July 20, 1978. It was on that day at the New York branch of the Italian jeweler Bulgari in the Hotel Pierre that the secretary acquired earrings, bracelets, and necklaces with emeralds, rubies, and diamonds valued at $1.4million—a lot of money for a woman whose salary was just $3,000 a month.

A second look at the receipt from this luxury jeweler solves the mystery of this small-time employee and her mountains of money. For it tells the story of the family of a dictator who stole at least $10 billion from his country’s coffers and invested that money in, among other things, works of art, hundreds of which he stashed away in secret hiding places just before his downfall. Today successor governments continue to search in vain for many of them.

The Bulgari receipt wasn’t found in New York but rather in Manila on February 25, 1986, in the Malacañang Palace, the abandoned residence of President Ferdinand Marcos, the long-standing dictator of the Philippines. It was on that night that, with the help of the American army, the strongman fled from the palace into exile in Hawaii, where he died three years later. In the two decades before fleeing, he systematically looted his country. Ten months before Marcos’s ouster by the Philippine people, an editor of the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel, Tiziano Terzani, wrote about the reason for the economic decline of the country. Marcos had established an economy based on unbridled favoritism, which hurt the populace but profited a select group—principally members of the Marcos family: “Under martial law, Marcos ruled by decree and by decree Marcos gave what he wanted to whom he wanted.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.