It's a steal!

In the profitability ratings, it ranks right up there. Art theft, and its subsequent sale, is becoming a major headache for governments. And the looting crisis in Iraq is not making anything easier, says Linda Hales


On Italy's Most Wanted list of stolen art, Caravaggio's 'Nativity With SS. Francis and Lawrence' still ranks at the top.

The Renaissance masterpiece hung in the Oratorio di San Lorenzo in Palermo, Sicily, from the time of its completion in 1609 until the day of its theft on October 19, 1969. As one of the artist's last works, the painting is worth tens of millions of dollars. But additional symbolic value comes from the timing of the heist: the Caravaggio painting was stolen just months after Italy set up the world's first SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) team to crack down on art theft.

These days, the looting crisis in Iraq has brought the freewheeling world of art smuggling into the spotlight. But long before that, the clandestine art market had established itself as a multi-billion-dollar international business. By some estimates it ranks in profitability right after the illegal market for arms and drugs. In Italy, as in Iraq, layers of civilisation have graced the landscape with a seemingly unending supply of saleable treasures.

Italy mobilised on May 3, 1969, launching the Carabinieri Unit for the Protection of Cultural Heritage. Thirty-four years later, the squad has established a global reputation and a respected record for finding masterpieces. But the Caravaggio continues to elude its grasp.

"We have certain information,'' says Gen. Ugo Zottin, commander of the elite squad. "We try to do the best.''

Zottin journeyed to Washington this summer to talk about looting and pillage at archaeological sites in Italy, as well as the worldwide effort to stop the trafficking in Iraqi artefacts. He expressed satisfaction that a Carabinieri data bank, compiled after the first Gulf War, had proved a crucial asset. As for what's fuelling the black market for art, he boiled it down to "two words: rich countries''.

The Carabinieri have been outfoxing criminal elements from a four-storey baroque building in Rome, with windows overlooking a historic piazza. Zottin and his team track stolen goods with a computer program known affectionately as 'Leonardo'. All manner of objects qualify under the mandate of preserving "cultural heritage''. There are Etruscan antiquities, Venetian paintings, Roman sculptures, 19th-century furniture, clocks, books, liturgical artifacts and old musical instruments.

"When you speak about 'art objects,' you are applying market value,'' Zottin says. "All that has been created by the genius of Man has cultural value.''

The Carabinieri recently published an accounting, with impressive statistics and images. In three decades, the squad has recovered 455,771 artefacts looted from digs and 185,295 works of art stolen mostly from churches and private homes. In addition, investigators have unmasked 217,532 forgeries and brought charges against more than 12,737 people.

Three priceless paintings – two Piero della Francescas and a Raphael – were stolen from the Palazzo Pubblico in Urbino in 1975 and found a year later in Switzerland. A marble statue of a youth stolen from Rome's Capitoline Museum in 1978 was located four years later in Boston. It took eight years to find a 14th-century Venetian Trinity taken from Palermo's Palazzo Pubblico. It turned up in London in 1979. Two van Goghs and a Cezanne stolen from the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome in 1998 were still in the capital when police recovered them less than two months later.

"Some art objects are so well-known there is no market,'' Zottin says.

But lesser works and undocumented treasures keep the black market for Italian art and artefacts flourishing from Bari, in southern Italy, to Britain. That's where British culture minister Kim Howells caused an outcry in May by acknowledging London's whispered status as a nexus of illegal activity while promoting a bill to stiffen penalties for knowingly dealing in contraband cultural objects.

The Carabinieri track leads through a shadowy world of grave robbers, entrepreneurial middlemen and unscrupulous or unwitting dealers, auction houses and private collectors, who may turn a blind eye to sketchy provenance. Occasionally, the trail can lead to a museum. (Zottin says no Washington institutions were on his list).

They warn of an "increase in underworld activities'' progressing from simple theft to extortion, armed robbery, defacement and destruction for political gain, and money laundering. The opening of borders across Europe has encouraged smuggling from countries that prohibit export of artifacts to those that do not impose penalties for passing on stolen goods.

As for the thieves, Zottin says: "There are organisations that target the churches. Others steal from isolated houses in the country. The tomb robbers – tombaroli – feed the illicit market of archaeological objects. This is the starting ring of the chain that ends with the art merchants.''

He doesn't assume that thieves steal only to sell: "Criminal minds can also be lovers of art.''

Interpol, the International Criminal Police Organisation, also tracks art crime. For the year 2000 in Italy, Interpol counted 27,795 thefts of artwork, including paintings, sculpture, books, vases, liturgical items and coins. (By comparison, 3,257 works of art were listed as stolen in Russia the same year.) While major works like the Caravaggio make headlines, lesser frescoes, mosaics, sculptures and ancient everyday objects are regularly excavated from tombs, pried from floors, slipped out of churches and burgled from private properties.

Interpol has noticed that more than half of all stolen art is recovered in the country of theft. The Carabinieri have developed international clout. In the 1980s, working with Hungarian and Greek counterparts, the Italian sleuths retrieved seven masterpieces stolen from Budapest's National Museum of Fine Arts. Two Raphaels, two Tintorettos, two Tiepolos and a Giorgione self-portrait were found in an abandoned convent on the coast of Greece.

Last December, in a high-profile recovery effort, Italian police found a cache including a Giovanni Bellini painting stolen 30 years ago, 20 masterworks from the Vatican and a 600-year-old choir sheet from a Siena monastery in Italy. News accounts indicated that two paintings, including Bellini's 'Madonna and Child', were found with a Russian art dealer in Switzerland, and 11 paintings were found with a Belgian art dealer, who was charged with receiving stolen goods and illegal exportation.

Zottin most wanted to talk about the classic police work that closed a case in March after a pursuit of six years. Too new to be included in the Carabinieri's history book, it involved the rescue of several rare and fragile pieces of a statue of Apollo stolen from a tomb near Rome in the 1990s. The Carabinieri had an idea who the grave robber could be. Eventually, the man admitted his initial role. "The robber was very angry with the buyer, who still owed him money,'' Zottin says. "He cooperated and revealed to whom he had sold it.'' Apollo's path was traced through Germany, Switzerland and Cyprus and on to London, where police wou