Portrait of a Police Specialist--He Excels at Finding Stolen Art

Bill Martin’s case file reads like an Erle Stanley Gardner sampler. There is the Case of the Crafty Sword Swiper, the Unmasking of the Unscrupulous Pawnbroker, Mystery at the Ebell Club.

These are not the recollections of a worn and crusty private detective or a crime novelist. They are recent cases of stolen art that Martin handled as the Los Angeles Police Department’s art-theft specialist, working in a world of exotic locales and twisting plots.

Martin, 42, is one of only two police investigators in the nation who specialize in art theft, a crime that is not only flourishing but lucrative. Nationwide, only 12% of all art thefts are solved.

However, thanks to Martin’s efforts, which include the recent installation of the first police-owned art theft computer in the nation, the recovery rate of stolen artwork in Los Angeles is almost four times higher than the national average, 45%.

Martin suggested that the department create an art theft detail eight years ago as part of its burglary-auto theft division, where he had begun working.

“I kept seeing a lot of burglaries of highly valued art and they never seemed to get solved,” he said. “I asked around to see if there was any special way of going about these investigations and got a blank. So I started collecting all the art cases and ended up creating a cross-index of artists and stolen objects.”

The department had recovered no stolen art objects the year before Martin began his work. By 1980 it was recovering items worth $1 million. Martin estimates that more than $2 million worth of art is stolen annually in Los Angeles. The computer he set up to track thefts now lists 921 art-theft cases in Southern California.

While tracking an expensive landscape painting might provide a bit more glamour than tracking a stolen auto, the detective work is basically the same.

“It’s talking to people, knowing who to go to to get information, forming contacts and following up on tips,” Martin said.

While an exact figure is elusive because of the fluctuating nature of the art market, the value of art stolen in this country reaches hundreds of millions of dollars a year, experts say.

“It’s right up there with drug trafficking, arms dealing and car theft,” said Constance Lowenthal, executive director of the International Foundation for Art Research. The New York-based group has collected art theft reports worldwide since 1976 and maintains an archive of stolen objects.

Since 1976, the foundation’s archive has recorded more than 28,000 works of art stolen from galleries, museums and private owners.

Lowenthal said the numbers of stolen objects listed yearly has risen to 1,200, up from the 500 to 1,000 annual thefts recorded in earlier years.

Because it is so much easier to take valuable art across borders than, say, large amounts of cash, such art can often go undetected for years, Martin said.

Added Lowenthal, “That 88% of stolen art that hasn’t been recovered has been sold cheaply on the fringes of the art community. And until it falls into the hands of someone who appreciates it and wants to sell it at market value, it could be a decade before it surfaces.”

Several of the recoveries that Martin has made involve objects stolen years ago.

Take the case of the sword swiper, which stemmed from the theft in Los Angeles of a priceless collection of Japanese swords made between the 14th and the 19th centuries. The case began in 1980 when 22 of the swords were stolen. When the thief attempted to sell them to an antique dealer in Culver City he was arrested and all of the swords were recovered. However, before the trial began, while the thief was free on bail, the entire collection of 154 swords was stolen.

Police wasted no time in questioning their prime suspect but could not come up with any incriminating evidence.

Last year, an anonymous tip led Martin to a dealer of Japanese swords who disclosed that he had bought two of the stolen swords from a man who had been a cellmate of the original suspect, and who subsequently had acted as a front man for the team. Both men were arrested in February and police were able to retrieve four of the swords. However, the bulk of the collection is still missing; several of the swords are believed to have been spirited to Japan via Texas. Martin said he believes more swords will eventually surface.

Lt. Doug Collisson, the officer in charge of the department’s burglary section, said Martin’s role is a valuable one.

“If we didn’t have Detective Martin these cases would fall on the division detectives who have neither the expertise nor the time to thoroughly investigate them,” he said.

Added Lowenthal: “He has a great memory for incidents, objects and individuals,” she said. “We need more police specialists, and departments need to allow them to stay with this for a long time.”

One of Martin’s favorite cases is the mysterious disappearance of California Impressionist William Wendt’s rendering of “View of Morro Bay” from the Ebell Club in the historic Wilshire Ebell Theatre in 1987.

It seems that the room in which the 1925 painting hung was booked for a show by a mother and daughter team of antique dealers. Two months later the painting was bought by an unwitting Laguna Beach art dealer. After hearing of the acquisition, a Los Angeles dealer who had long been interested in the painting contacted the Ebell Club and was told that the painting had not been sold but was missing.

Martin was notified, and in February the painting was recovered and the two antique dealers were arrested.

Martin speculates that the theft probably was not planned but that after folding up tables and turning out lights the painting was too inviting to ignore. The mother, it turned out, had been convicted of a similar offense in 1975.

Martin, who says he “didn’t know any more than anyone else about art” when he first started the detail, has taken art courses at UCLA. And he says it helps to be able to “differentiate between avant garde and Cubism and to be able to talk about different periods when talking to experts or if I’m under cover and have to present myself as someone knowledgeable in the field.”

He admits to having favorites but is reluctant to reveal them: “There are so many prejudices in the art field about this and that, that I’d just as soon remain neutral. I have to deal with everyone.

“I get to rub shoulders with an odd cast of characters--the eccentric, eclectic, the wealthy and the not-so-wealthy,” Martin said. “There’s not a place in the world I would rather be.”