The Rescue Artist by Edward Dolnick Page A

squad for most of the decade between 1989 and 1999. “Usually we’d already decided to go ahead and we’d had the first couple of meetings before we told anyone what we were up to. That was by and large how we got things off the ground. Then, once you’re flying, their only choice is to force a crash.”
    Ellis spelled out the sales pitch he favored. The first approach to the higher-ups was easy. “If this works—if we can get The Scream back—the Art Squad will look golden, and you’ll look golden.” Smiles all around. Then came the twist. “We’ve already committed to this. If we pull out now we’re going to look bloody ridiculous. Or not we—you , in management, are going to look bloody ridiculous.” Too late now.

    And then, unexpectedly, an English criminal came along and made everyone’s life easier. His name was Billy Harwood, and he had served seven years in prison in Norway for trafficking in heroin. The Norwegians had sent Harwood back to England to serve the remaining five years of his prison term, and the English had released him on parole.
    Now Harwood contacted the Norwegian embassy in London with an intriguing story. From contacts he’d made in prison in Norway, Harwood said, he knew who’d taken The Scream . He knew the thieves and they trusted him. These were hard and wary men. No outsider could lure them into the open; at the first hint that something was up, they would protect themselves by destroying the painting.
    But the crooks would deal with their old friend Harwood. He offered to oversee The Scream’s return to the National Gallery. In return, he wanted £5 million.
    The Norwegians quickly contacted Scotland Yard to tell them about Harwood’s proposal. The English police didn’t put any stock in Harwood’s story—they figured him (correctly, it turned out) for an opportunist looking to spin some fast talk and big promises into a bonanza—but this was good news nonetheless. With Harwood inadvertently serving as a bridge between the English police and the Norwegians, Scotland Yard finally had a legitimate entrée into the case.

    For Hill and all the other Art Squad detectives, planning stings was one of the best parts of the job. Recovering stolen art was different in crucial ways from most other police work. Finding a painting and hanging it back on the wall where it belonged was the main goal; throwing a crook in jail was secondary. (By the time the police found the trail, in any case, the original thieves might well be long gone.) The hope was to find a way to tempt a criminal who had stashed a painting in an abandoned warehouse or a locker at a train station to bring it into the open, where the police could grab it. That required, first of all, cultivating informants to pick up news and rumors. Many times a direct approach was futile: Kicking down a door and shouting “Police!” was all very well, but where was the painting?
    For the Art Squad, making up stories was as much a part of the job as making arrests. In the 1980s and early 1990s, for example, when mysterious Japanese buyers paid record-setting prices for brand-name artists—$54 million for van Gogh’s Irises , $78 million for Renoir’s Ball at the Moulin de la Galette , $82.5 million for van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr. Gachet— the Art Squad kicked around schemes for taking advantage of those headlines. Could they find a Japanese-speaking detective to play a gangster or a tycoon who wanted a masterpiece to hang above his fireplace?
    “You’re a bit like a scriptwriter,” says Dick Ellis. “It’s a challenge to come up with something that has a genuine feel to it. You bounce it around and ask, ‘Is this actually going to stand up? Are people going to believe this? Is it too outlandish?’ “
    A good plan for a sting needs to combine several elements that don’t fit together easily. The best cover stories are simple because they have to work first time out. There is no dress rehearsal—just opening night.