In World of Art Theft, Unsolved Mysteries Abound : Crime: It is tough for thieves to turn a profit on ill-gotten Gainsboroughs or Picassos. Many missing works just disappear.

By DAVID COLKER

Aug. 15, 1993 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Planning on stealing some art?

Aim low.

“The thieves who take the big name stuff get themselves in trouble,” said Constance Lowenthal, executive director of the International Foundation for Art Research in New York. “It’s too hard to sell it without arousing suspicions.”

That sage advice may have come too late for two San Fernando Valley men arrested Tuesday and charged with stealing nine paintings worth an estimated $9 million. The art--including works by Picasso, Degas and Chagall--had been reported stolen last year from a storage locker in Northridge. Investigators said they picked up the two men--an electrician and a carpenter--after getting a tip that buyers were being sought for the art.

A third man, the owner of the Pancake Heaven restaurant in San Fernando, was arrested later in the week and charged with trying to sell the artwork.

All the art was recovered undamaged.

It was a happy ending for the 85-year-old woman who had inherited the paintings from her socialite sister and then placed them in the storage locker without getting them insured. But happy endings to art investigations are rare.

“There is an awful lot of art out there that just disappears,” said the Los Angeles Police Department’s resident art investigator, John Martin.

Of the thousands of works reported stolen every year in the United States, only about 10% are recovered.

“It’s one of the most difficult kinds of crime to solve,” said Lowenthal at the International Foundation for Art Research, a nonprofit organization that is the largest repository in the world for information on stolen art.

The group has more than 40,000 unrecovered pieces in its database.

Prominent on the list are three Rembrandts, five Degas, a Manet and a Vermeer, all taken from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990 in one of the biggest art heists of all time. Los Angeles has never had an art theft near that magnitude, but there have been major burglaries in the past few years.

In June, a Thomas Gainsborough portrait was taken from a home in Los Angeles by a thief (or thieves) who broke a rear door window to get inside. Last year, in what might be the most monetarily valuable art heist in local history, a Monet and a Picasso were taken from a Brentwood home.

The owner lists their combined worth as $12.5 million.

The owner might, like the Reseda woman, see his valuable paintings again. But people working in the art theft field will tell him that in the meantime, he might as well just get on with his life.

“The art world is complicated and sometimes these things take years to surface,” Lowenthal said. “But some of it, a lot of it, just disappears. And no one knows where it goes.”

There has long been speculation that a “Dr. No” character exists, a person who commissions master thieves to fetch masterpieces for his own private enjoyment. Works of art have been held for ransom, monetary and political. And in recent years evidence has surfaced that art is being used as commerce in drug transactions.

But establishing patterns is not easy. “There are almost as many reasons to steal art as there are art robberies,” said Joe Chapman, a former FBI agent specializing in art theft cases who is one of the foremost designers of security systems for museums.

In the Valley case, police portray the two suspects as blue-collar thieves who likely were not totally aware of the value of what they had stolen and were unsure how to fence it.

But even if they had been denizens of the art world, it probably would not have done them much good.

“A thief hears that some painting is worth $50 million and he thinks: ‘If it’s worth that much, I could at least get a million for it,’ ” Martin said. “But you can’t just go up to someone on the street and ask if they want to buy a Vermeer.

“The sad thing is, if a thief gets stuck with a painting that won’t move, they might just destroy it.”

There also have been cases where thieves have probably come upon famous art accidentally.

“There was a group of thieves in New York that were specialists in breaking through skylights, but they were not art experts,” Lowenthal said. “They happened to rob a townhouse where there were old master paintings.

“Until they read in the paper the next day that the paintings were worth $6 million to $10 million, they probably didn’t know what they had. They sold them for $40,000.”

The “Dr. No” theory has been long discounted because no such person has ever been discovered. But Chapman said there is evidence that organized crime figures have commissioned the theft of artworks they thought would be good investments. There also is speculation that drug kingpins are in possession of hot art, he said.

“There is just such a tremendous amount of cash floating around the world and you can’t just deposit in a bank,” Chapman said.

It can also be used to pay for drugs.

“We got a call from customs officials in Miami to ask us if we knew anything about a small painting of a semi-clothed, female figure carrying an oil lamp,” said Lowenthal. “We were able to confirm that what they were describing to us was a painting by Peter Paul Rubens that had been stolen five years earlier from a museum in northern Spain.”

There have been some cases where art experts are the thieves. In 1989, a La Cienega Boulevard dealer told his clients, who had left more than 1,000 items with him for future auction, that he was going on vacation.

The vacation turned out to be far longer than his clients imagined. Police say that the dealer, Richard Eszterhazy, went to Germany and remained there. With him went two cargo containers of his gallery’s holdings, ranging from works by Chagall, Matisse and Klee, to an antique harpsichord.

Martin said the pieces have been located in Germany and Los Angeles police are trying to get them returned. Eszterhazy has eluded capture.

The vast majority of art crimes target pieces by artists far below the level known to the general public, experts say.

“There are a group of people who patrol Madison Avenue, during the daytimes, visiting the galleries. . . . They are there to steal on order from other art dealers,” Chapman said. Sometimes even highly ethical art dealers and experts can be tricked into purchasing hot pieces. “A couple of years ago there was a 19th-Century American silver punch bowl stolen in Palm Springs,” Lowenthal said. “By the time we knew about it and published its picture, it had already been sold at Sotheby’s for $75,000.

“It turned out the consigner was someone knowledgeable in the field. He had bought the punch bowl from someone for $28,000 and knew it was worth much more. But the price he paid was high enough that he thought it was legitimate, just low. That’s when these things make it out into the art market, when the price is high enough not to be suspicious. Someone like that waits all his life for his knowledge in a field to pay off in a buy like that. But that’s when the thieves can get them.”