Free Hot Art by Joshua Knelman Page B

money—half a million dollars in some instances—but, also unlike the other property-crime boxes, no detective was paying attention to them. It was as if major bank robberies were tearing up the city and no one could be bothered to investigate.
    There were a few good reasons for detectives to be hands off when it came to art. Many of the case files had no suspects. In the politics of a police department, that meant little incentive to spend time hunting around. No closed case, no glory. LAPD detectives with a desire to climb the ranks want a high clearance rate for the crimes they investigate. Stolen art cases remained the X-files in Burglary Special—too strange to touch.
    Martin got hooked, though, and began staying late to read through the case files. The more he read, the more he started to see the cases in a new way. Property crimes meant stolen goods: televisions, jewels, cars, watches, and so on. A lot of the material goods that went missing in the city were duplicates— there were other material objects that looked just like them. Sure, they had serial numbers, but those could be changed or destroyed.
    What Martin was seeing in these files were paintings, drawings, and sculptures: unique pieces of property. His theory was that these artworks should be easier to identify than a stereo made in Japan by the millions and sold all over the world, identifiable only by a serial number. These artworks had histories to them, and instead of serial numbers, they had personal signatures. The detective decided to follow his hunch and work a few of the cases. From them, Martin developed a set of principles to guide his investigations, principles that were often counterintuitive to standard property-crimes protocol.
    For example, up to that point in Burglary Special most cases got hot once they had a witness and a suspect. A suspect could be hunted down, and even if the stolen items had passed away from him, he could divulge their whereabouts. Because art theft cases usually had no witness and no suspect, Martin reversed the process. He started with the community and followed the trail to the person who might have had a motivation to sell the artwork. It was more Sherlock Holmes than Lethal Weapon . “Traditional methods for finding property do not lend themselves to finding stolen art,” Hrycyk told me. “There are no schools for learning this stuff, so you learn from cases.”
    In Los Angeles in the mid-1980s, art theft was a hidden crime, blending many different worlds. It cut across socioeconomic lines and could move in a heartbeat from blue-collar to white-collar criminals. A thug who knew nothing about art except that it was valuable could steal a painting; that same afternoon, the painting could wind up in the possession of an auction house; within the week or the month, it could be sold to one of the Los Angeles art elite.
    In 1986, when Donald Hrycyk started to work cases with Bill Martin, the two detectives picked up a phone book and extracted long lists of art galleries, auction houses, museums, and private art dealers. Their goal: to visit all of them. That’s a tall order in a city where every time detectives take out a car they have to deal with long distances and traffic. It was also a risk, because it could be a huge time-waster.
    Each time the detectives visited a new gallery, they asked for suggestions, for other contacts in the art world they should talk to. This also advertised the LAPD Art Theft Detail’s existence. It was the oldest form of marketing a new product— going door to door and knocking.
    Hrycyk also hunted for any reading material that might help. The only thing close to a manual was a book by Laurie Adams called Art Cop . “That book was about a New York detective called Robert Volpe,” Hrycyk said. “It wasn’t designed as a playbook for other detectives to use. It was written as a fast read, as entertainment.” Hrycyk bought a copy and