A broken frame, and DNA traces, led to arrest in van Gogh theft

Vincent van Gogh’s “The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring.” Dutch prosecutors said that DNA evidence tied a man to the thefts of a van Gogh and a Frans Hals painting; he denies the charges. Via Groninger Museum via The New York Times. by Graham Bowley

NEW YORK, NY.- Nils M. was no rookie art thief. But prosecutors say he left behind DNA evidence on a broken picture frame at one museum and on a heavy-duty strap at another that helped Dutch investigators identify him as the man who stole paintings by van Gogh and Frans Hals in two daring heists.

A match in their database led them to the 59-year-old defendant who had previously served a five-year prison sentence for stealing a 17th-century gilded silver monstrance, or church vessel, from a museum in Gouda in 2012.

During that theft, Nils M. — who is being identified without his full surname because of Dutch privacy laws — used explosives to blow open the museum door.

In the more recent thefts, prosecutors are seeking a prison sentence of eight years for what they described as “exceptional crimes” that were committed with an as yet unidentified partner. The paintings — the van Gogh had an insured value of 2.5 million euros (about $2.9 million), and the Hals was valued at between 10 and 15 million euros (between $11.7 million and $17.6 million) — have not been recovered.

A three-judge panel is expected to rule on the case Friday.

“Breaking into a museum and taking paintings by artists who are world famous, pieces that belong to our cultural heritage, that are irreplaceable,” was “totally unacceptable,” the prosecutor in the case, Gabriëlle Hoppenbrouwers, said in court this month, according to a copy of the indictment.

In the court hearing, in Lelystad, the defendant denied the charges. “He said that he didn’t steal those paintings and he had nothing to do with it,” said his lawyer, Renske van Zanden.

But public prosecutors for the Central Netherlands region said that the DNA evidence from the picture frame and the strap, which was likely used in the getaway, points to him.

The van Gogh painting, “The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring,” from 1884, was part of a temporary exhibition at the Singer Laren Museum, on loan from the Groninger Museum in Groningen.

Security camera footage of the robbery last year showed a man using a sledgehammer to smash two glass doors to break into the museum. He left with the painting under his arm.

Prosecutors said the painting’s frame was left behind in pieces in the parking lot. Some of those pieces bore traces of the suspect’s DNA, they said.

The Hals painting, “Two Laughing Boys with a Mug of Beer,” from the 17th century, was stolen five months later, in August 2020, from a tiny museum, Museum Hofje van Mevrouw van Aerden, in Leerdam. That robbery drew special notice because it was the third time that the painting had been stolen from the same small museum. (It was previously stolen in 2011 and 1988, but recovered both times.)

The back door had been broken open and police found an orange tension strap tied to a flagpole in the garden outside the museum that prosecutors believe was likely used to lower the Hals or the thief down a nearby 10-foot wall to a waiting scooter. A security camera showed two people driving away on the scooter. The passenger was carrying something square that looked like a small painting.

Also discovered two weeks before the robbery in Leerdam was an extendible ladder, submerged in a stretch of water near the base of the museum’s garden wall that prosecutors suspect could have been hidden there by the burglars to scale the wall. A passerby, however, noticed the ladder and moved it, possibly thwarting part of their plan, investigators said.

Prosecutors emphasized the strength of the DNA evidence at each of the scenes. But they said there were other compelling reasons to suggest the two thefts were carried out by the same man. Both thefts occurred sometime shortly after 3 a.m., involved heavy force to break into the museums, and involved an accomplice who helped the thief get away on a scooter, they said. Investigators have not identified an accomplice.

The museum in Leerdam is part of an almshouse for unmarried women that also showcases the collection of its 18th-century founder. It is largely run by volunteers who maintain the Hofje and its garden. Prosecutors said a trampled zucchini plant had helped investigators work out where the thief had climbed over the wall into the garden.

The defendant, Nils M., was arrested in April at his home in Baarn, a small town close to Laren. A firearm and ammunition were found in a search of his home, as were more than 10,000 ecstasy pills, prosecutors said.

Answering the charges in court earlier this month, Nils M., who works as a mechanic, said that he sometimes used the kind of strap found in Leerdam when he carried out repairs, which could explain the presence of his DNA on the strap. But he did not know how the strap got to Leerdam, his lawyer, van Zanden, said.

“He said that he often uses straps, for instance when he picks up car parts,” she elaborated in an email. “He also said that the straps were sometimes left behind.”

Van Zanden maintained that the DNA evidence from Laren was inconclusive, partly because there were matches to other people on the picture frame. She said that her client is taller than the man shown on the Laren footage, and said that the way the thief handled the hammer on the video suggested he was left-handed, while her client is right-handed.

The theft of the artworks by the two major Dutch artists within the period of a few months spawned numerous theories about why they had been stolen. In court, Hoppenbrouwers said prosecutors believed that the defendant had sold or given the paintings away, and they were now in the criminal underworld.

In the indictment, she suggested some reasons famous artworks remain popular among thieves even though they cannot be easily sold or displayed publicly. Such masterworks can have currency in the underworld, investigators believe, because they can be used to demand ransoms from the insurance companies that insure them and, in some cases, can be used in negotiations to obtain reduced prison sentences.

The works might also be used as collateral in drug deals, she said.

Arthur Brand, a private art detective who has followed both cases, said that he believes there is demand in the Dutch underworld for artworks. People accused of drug crimes think that a stolen artwork could potentially be surrendered to the authorities in exchange for a lesser sentence, he said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times. https://artdaily.cc/news/139578/A-broken-frame--and-DNA-traces--led-to-arrest-in-van-Gogh-theft#.YVsmcprMLIU

Looted objects from Afghanistan are returned

A bronze mask of Silenus, circa 2nd Century. On Monday, April 19, 2021, 33 of antiquities, valued at $1.8 million, were handed over to the Afghan ambassador, Roya Rahmani, by the Manhattan district attorney’s office and the Department of Homeland Security, at a ceremony in New York. Via Manhattan District Attorney’s Office via The New York Times. by Tom Mashberg

NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- For half a century, through war, anarchy and upheaval, Afghanistan has been stripped of tens of thousands of Buddhist and Hindu antiquities, some dating back more than 1,800 years.

Many of those items entered the Western market in the 1990s and early 2000s, St John Simpson, a curator at the British Museum, told The New York Times last month. “And all of those,” he said, “were almost certainly illegally exported or stolen.”

On Monday, 33 of those antiquities, valued at $1.8 million, were handed over to the Afghan ambassador, Roya Rahmani, by the Manhattan district attorney’s office and the Department of Homeland Security, at a ceremony in New York.

The artifacts were part of a hoard of 2,500 objects valued at $143 million seized in a dozen raids between 2012 and 2014 from Subhash Kapoor, a disgraced Manhattan art dealer currently jailed in India on smuggling and theft charges.

Upon receiving the items, many of them delicate heads made from stucco, clay and a soft stone known as schist, a grateful Rahmani nonetheless warned that “the environment that allows for the plundering of Afghanistan’s treasured antiquities is the same environment that allows for the perpetuation of conflict.”

“Traffickers are not just robbing Afghanistan of its history,” she added. “They are perpetuating a situation where peace does not manifest and the region does not stabilize. Looting Afghanistan’s past is looting Afghanistan’s future.”

Much of the destruction and plunder of Afghan relics and religious icons took place under the Taliban, who destroyed the famed sixth-century Buddhas of Bamiyan, a pair of enormous carvings, in 2001. In the face of near-universal condemnation, officials dynamited the works, which stood in tall niches hewed from a sheer sandstone cliff.

The objects repatriated Monday will be housed in the National Museum in Kabul. Afghan officials have said they were confident they could now safeguard their museums and cultural institutions against plunder and smuggling.

According to UNESCO, “the Afghan authorities have taken important steps” to prevent the theft, smuggling and desecration of cultural objects. Those steps include a separate new police force tasked with protecting cultural sites, up-to-date museum security systems, and educational campaigns aimed at convincing anyone who finds lost or forgotten relics to turn them over to the government.

During the ceremony, the Afghan ambassador praised the office of the district attorney, Cy Vance Jr., for arranging the return. Vance’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit, overseen by the Assistant District Attorney Matthew Bogdanos, said that over the past decade, it has recovered several thousand stolen antiquities collectively valued at more than $175 million, from more than a dozen nations.

Since August, the unit has overseen the return of 338 objects to seven nations, among them Nepal, Sri Lanka, Egypt and Pakistan, with more to be sent back once the countries involved resolve travel and transport issues related to the pandemic.

Crimes involving looted and stolen religious relics, Vance said, “not only tear at the societal fabric of nations but also deprive millions of believers worldwide of the earliest sacred symbols of their faith.”

© 2021 The New York Times Company
https://artdaily.cc/news/134953/Looted-objects-from-Afghanistan-are-returned#.YIbSHehKjIU

We don't know how much art has gone missing from museums

Object's from the Louvre's collection stored at a warehouse in Lens, France, Feb. 9, 2021. Museums are doing a better job of accounting for missing inventory than years ago, when they would sometimes not report thefts out of embarrassment and fear of exposing security weaknesses. Dmitry Kostyukov/The New York Times. by Jenny Gross

NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- Should museums tell the public about missing art?

Two pieces of gold and silver-encrusted Italian Renaissance armor, which had been stolen from the Louvre in 1983 and found this year in a family’s private collection in France, were discovered the way that stolen art often is: An expert cross-checked the items against an online database of lost and stolen art.

But museums have at times withheld information about thefts, fearing that revealing security weaknesses could make other institutions less likely to loan them art or that it could encourage other thefts, according to current and former museum officials. Art security experts say the failure to report thefts, particularly involving items stolen from storage, has prevented museums from recovering items.

Philippe Malgouyres, the curator of heritage art at the Louvre, said that when he started working in museums decades ago, he heard stories of thefts and disappearances that had not been reported.

“Our purpose is to preserve objects for the future and for the public,” Malgouyres said. “When we fail to do that somehow, when something is stolen, it’s a very painful experience, which led some museums in the past, especially, not even to go to the police sometimes, because they were feeling so embarrassed about it.”

He said that while the armor that was recently recovered was not as well known as many other pieces in the Louvre’s collection, he had thought it would eventually be found because it had been cataloged in a database of art thefts in France.

Now, public museums and galleries act in a more transparent way, said Sandy Nairne, the former director of the National Portrait Gallery in London and the former director of programs at the Tate Gallery.

“In the past, there was a kind of instant reaction of institutions that wanted to protect their sense of integrity that made them very cautious about talking about it,” said Nairne, who led a team at the Tate that recovered two J.M.W. Turner paintings in 2002, eight years after they had been stolen while on loan to a museum in Germany.

On Sunday, the newspaper El País reported that the National Library of Spain had discovered in 2014 that one of its holdings, a 17th-century book by Galileo, had been replaced by a copy but did not report it to police until four years later, when researchers had requested the work.

Although it is obvious when artwork that is on display is stolen, museums can sometimes take years to realize that pieces in storage have been taken, said Tim Carpenter, a special agent with the FBI’s art crime team.

“It might be 10 or 15 years before they do an inventory and say, ‘Hey, where is this piece?’” he said. “You can imagine how difficult it is trying to play catch-up on a 15-year-old crime. It makes things infinitely more difficult for us.”

A comprehensive inventory of a museum like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has hundreds of thousands of objects, is time-consuming and expensive, but poor record-keeping can hamper an investigation of theft.

In one case that Carpenter worked on, a major museum discovered the disappearance of artifacts 15 to 20 years after the theft. Authorities knew where the artifacts were but could not recover them because the museum was unable to establish that the items had belonged to it; the museum’s most accurate inventory was from the 1920s, he said.

The advantages of reporting thefts are clear: Members of the public can help identify stolen art, and it’s more difficult for thieves to sell. In 2011, after a drawing attributed to Rembrandt was stolen from an exhibition at a hotel in Los Angeles, authorities released an image of the piece. Days later, it was left at a church.

However, there are also instances when keeping thefts out of the public eye is advantageous for investigative purposes, said Lynda Albertson, the chief executive of the Association for Research Into Crimes Against Art, an organization that researches art crime.

In 2013, when thieves stole 27 pieces from the National Etruscan Museum of Villa Giulia in Rome, the police kept quiet about the theft and, as a result, recovered most of the pieces, she said.

“Sometimes they’re very quiet, not so talkative or splashy,” Albertson said of the division of Italian police that focuses on art crime. “That discretion has been quite helpful.”

© 2021 The New York Times Company

https://artdaily.cc/news/133966/We-don-t-know-how-much-art-has-gone-missing-from-museums#.YFIzsJ1KjIU

Ancient coins returned after Italy church confession

ROME (AFP).- More than 200 ancient coins were returned Thursday to a museum in southern Italy by a priest who was told about the theft in confession. The unnamed penitent, presumed to be the thief himself, asked the priest to return the loot to the Paestum archaeological park near Naples.

He insisted the coins had to be given personally to the site's director Gabriel Zuchtriegel, the park said in a statement. "It's the latest restitution by someone who feels remorseful" for stealing things, the statement added. Of the 208 coins returned, seven were fakes but most of the others date from as early as the third century BC, running up to the end of the 4th century AD.

Paestum, originally a Greek colony that was later conquered by the Romans, boasts three of the best preserved Greek temples in the world.

It is not unheard of for people to return artefacts stolen from Italian archaeological sites, sometimes after decades. The former manager of Pompeii, the ancient Roman city, has said that sometimes people return them in the fear that they may be cursed.

© Agence France-Presse
https://artdaily.cc/news/132276/Ancient-coins-returned-after-Italy-church-confession#.YA7kZuhKjIU

ICE recovers 19th century painting stolen from Italian monastery

HSI Dallas was able to locate the painting after receiving a tip from the HSI Attaché Office in Rome.

DALLAS, TX.- U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) in Dallas, Texas, recovered a 19th century painting Wednesday that was stolen from the Abbey of Santa Maria in Sylvis in Sesto al Reghena, Italy, in May 2002. The painting called “the Assumption of the Virgin Mary” was created by Italian artist Giuseppe Pappini in August 1851.

HSI Dallas was able to locate the painting after receiving a tip from the HSI Attaché Office in Rome, Italy, in 2019. Based on that tip, HSI tracked the painting to a private art collector in the Dallas-area who had purchased the painting in 2015 from a dealer who was unaware that it was stolen. After learning of the painting’s origins, the private collector voluntarily agreed to hand it over to HSI so that it could be repatriated to Italy and returned to the monastery.

“Investigating the loss or looting of cultural heritage properties and returning them to their countries of origin is an important part of HSI's diverse mission” said Ryan L. Spradlin, special agent in charge of HSI Dallas. “Our specially trained investigators and attachés in more than 40 countries not only partner with governments, agencies and experts who share our mission to protect these items, but they train the investigators of other nations and agencies on how to find, authenticate and enforce the law to recover these items when they emerge in the marketplace.”

This is an HSI Dallas-led investigation with assistance from the HSI Attaché Office in Rome, Italy, and HSI Headquarters Cultural Property, Arts, and Antiquities (CPAA) Division in Washington, D.C.

https://artdaily.cc/news/128019/ICE-recovers-19th-century-painting-stolen-from-Italian-monastery#.X6lTS2hKjIU

No laughing matter as Dutch masterwork stolen for third time!

This photograph taken on November 3, 2011, shows District Chief of Alblasserwaard, Bart Willemsen showing the recovered painting "Two Laughing Boys" by Frans Hals which was stolen from the Leerdam Museum in May 2011. Thieves have stolen the painting "Two Laughing Boys" by Dutch golden age artist Frans Hals from a museum in the Netherlands, the third time it has been taken, police said on August 27, 2020. Ilvy Njiokiktjien / ANP / AFP.

THE HAGUE (AFP).- Thieves have stolen the painting "Two Laughing Boys" by Dutch golden age artist Frans Hals from a museum in the Netherlands, the third time it has been taken, police said Thursday.

The canvas by the 17th century master was taken during a burglary at the Hofje van Mevrouw van Aerden museum in Leerdam in the early hours of Wednesday, they said.

The painting, featuring two laughing boys with a mug of beer, was previously stolen from the same museum in 2011 and 1988, being recovered after six months and three years respectively.

Dutch police said in a statement that officers rushed to the museum in the town 40 miles (60 kilometres) south of Amsterdam after the alarm went off around 3:30 am but they failed to find the suspects. "After the manager of the museum was able to provide access to the building, it turned out that the back door had been forced and one painting had been stolen, 'Two Laughing Boys'," the statement said.

Police said they had started an "extensive investigation" involving forensic investigators and art theft experts. They were checking cameras and talking to witnesses and local residents, they added.

Frans Hals was a contemporary of fellow masters Rembrandt and Vermeer during the Dutch Golden Age, a flowering of trade, colonialism and art in the Netherlands roughly spanning the 17th century. He is best known for works including "The Laughing Cavalier", which hangs in the Wallace Collection in London, and "The Gypsy Girl", now housed in the Louvre in Paris.

Dutch art detective Arthur Brand -- dubbed the "Indiana Jones of the art world" after tracking down a series of stolen works -- tweeted that "the hunt is on" for the "very important and precious painting by Frans Hals." Brand said the "Two Laughing Boys", an officially designated piece of Dutch national heritage, had been stolen on the anniversary of Hals' death in 1666.

In March burglars stole the Vincent van Gogh painting "Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring" from another Dutch museum that was closed for coronavirus measures, on what would have been the painter's 167th birthday.

Brand said n June that he had received two recent photos of the van Gogh as "proof of life".

© Agence France-Presse

https://artdaily.cc/news/127751/No-laughing-matter-as-Dutch-masterwork-stolen-for-third-time

A refugee from Rwanda, confessed to starting the fire and been charged with arson, official sources say. Stating he was angered because his visa had not been renewed.

A volunteer who cleaned and locked Nantes cathedral on the evening of 17 July has confessed to starting the fire and been charged with arson, official sources say. The man, a refugee from Rwanda, was angered because his visa had not been renewed. Following a series of attacks on cultural and religious sites, the law was changed in 2008 so now those charged with criminal damage to historical buildings in France face a maximum of seven years in prison. 

A blaze broke out inside the gothic cathedral of Nantes on 18 July © Sebastien Salom-Gomis/AFP via Getty Images 

 Only one year after a devastating fire engulfed Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, the fire that broke out in the Gothic St Peter and St Paul Cathedral, in Nantes, western France, on Saturday morning has raised alarm bells about the security of France’s 150 cathedrals and 45,000 churches. France's new prime minister Jean Castex rushed to the scene with the home and religious affairs minister Gérald Darmanin and culture minister Roselyne Bachelot, while images of the church's interior darkened by smoke appeared on television news. 

 It took two hours for a hundred firefighters to contain the fire, which destroyed the baroque 1627 grand organ and a smaller 19th-century choir organ, as well as sculptures and a 19th-painting sent by Jean-Hippolyte Flandrin from the French Academy in Rome. An arson investigation was opened after firemen spotted three fire starting points. But today, a source close to the investigation said the fire may have started in an old electrical cabinet beneath the grand organ (a device that is no longer authorised in public places) and may have spread to the other organs via electrical circuits. 

 A Rwandan refugee, a volunteer who cleaned the church before it was locked down for the night, was interviewed but released on Sunday without charge. No trace of a break-in has been found. Critics have underscored the the lack of care and funding from the state as well as the cities in which religious buildings are located. 

Nantes cathedral was destroyed by fire in 1972 and was rebuilt over more than a decade. Another 19th-century church had its roof destroyed in the city in 2015. And, in the capital, Saint Sulpice church, which is the temporary cathedral of Paris now, was also damaged by a fire last year. “There is no country in Europe where fires are so common in churches,“ says the architecture historian Alexandre Gady, who also says that “there is no capital on the continent where churches are so damaged”. 

After Notre Dame’s fire, the catholic church asked for a comprehensive survey of the safety of these historical buildings, Gady says, "Has it been done? And if so, where is it?” 

 https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/nantes-cathedral 

VINCENT NOCE 20th July 2020 12:26 BST