Art thefts challenge Canadian police

The disappearance this month of 12 gold artifacts handcrafted by the influential native artist Bill Reid is exposing the underbelly of the Canadian art industry recently buoyed by record-setting sales. As Canadians increasingly gain confidence in artworks and cultural artifacts as promising and secure investments, a new wave of criminal activity in the art world is also taking root.

It is a problem Canadian police are being forced to address while scrambling to locate the Reid items, which disappeared overnight last week from a closely guarded exhibit at Vancouver's Museum of Anthropology. . .

The RCMP investigating the Reid thefts, for example, have no specialized section dedicated to the investigation of art theft. . . .

For the past several decades, most art thefts in Canada have been investigated simply as stolen property. Such an approach has deprived authorities of the opportunity to establish investigative protocols and a database of stolen artworks.

Detective Sergeant Alain Lacoursiere, with the Surete du Quebec, is one of only two investigators in Canada whose attention is devoted exclusively to looking for stolen art.

From the National Post. More on the Reid theft here, including this:

Initially, museum officials were unwilling to disclose the value of the stolen works, but then publicized the message that intact they were worth about $2-million, while the gold would be worth little more than $15,000 at market prices.

Getting that information out, says Toronto lawyer and art-theft expert Bonnie Czegledi, "probably" had an impact on the fate of the works.

One obviously doesn't want to help potential blackmailers maximize their returns, but at the same time, top priority in a case like this is to prevent destruction of the objects. If only this were done more widely in cases of stolen metal artifacts!

More on art theft in Canada here. As usual, the weakest link is usually human error.

Posted by David on June 4, 2008 1:17 PM