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Charley Hill is a retired detective for the Metropolitan police’s art and antiques squad. He helped to recover Edvard Munch’s The Scream after it was stolen from the Oslo National Gallery, and assorted other old masters, including a Vermeer, a Goya and a Titian – functioning as a one man A(rt)-Team. If you have a missing painting problem, if no one else can find it and if you can find him …
Last year he got a tipoff from one of the many contacts he has made in the shadows over the years about the location of 13 art works – including three Rembrandts, five Degas, a Manet and a Vermeer – that were stolen 30 years ago from the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum in Boston. They were, says his informant, a career criminal called Martin Foley, taken out of the US and have resided ever since behind the wall of a safe house somewhere in Dublin. The Billion Dollar Art Hunt (BBC Four), written and presented by the arts journalist John Wilson, follows Hill as he chases down the latest lead in a case that the FBI (and private hires, and hobbyists, and fellow retirees, and bloggers and assorted recidivists) have never ceased pursuing. The reward for their safe return now stands at $10m (£7.6m).
To me and, I imagine, my fellow philistines there is something innately soothing about stories of art thefts and their investigations. The stakes are so fabulously high – though it is worth pointing out that the programme’s headline amount is double what everyone from the FBI to Hill himself seems to agree is the $500m valuation of the stolen goods. Perhaps this is a highbrow commentary on the essentially arbitrary nature of trying to assign monetary value to art. Or perhaps it is sensationalism, informed by a view of the audience as idiots unable to focus their eyes in the direction of any documentary that doesn’t refer to mere millions in its title if it can possibly help it. Who can say?
Anyway. The stakes, whether they be half a billion or a billion dollars, are fabulously high. And yet at the same time, so low. Obviously it would be great to see justice done and the pictures restored to public glory. But – and here’s the thing – nobody is going to die, nobody is going to suffer in any real or meaningful way if they aren’t. Life will go on. With everyone’s emotional bandwidth currently being eaten up by dreadful affairs beyond their control, this is the kind of viewing experience we can all get behind.
(For the avoidance of doubt, the larger question of what the money raised from heists such as this is used to fund is a grim one – but equally, one that this documentary was not asking and so falls beyond the remit here.)
While Hill tries to coax more details from the elusive and volatile Foley, Wilson visits the museum in Boston, hears from those immersed in the three-decade search for the paintings, and lays out the two theories that have preoccupied most of the official investigations. One is that the paintings were stolen by the Boston mafia and never left the US. The other, stemming from information volunteered to the Newcastle police when they were interviewing someone about a murder case, is that there was Irish involvement and that the pictures could be retrieved from a hiding place in Dublin.
The crisscrossing tracks and clues, and the delicacy of Hill’s and other experienced parties’ negotiations and hunches, make for a fine, compelling story. It is badly interrupted, however, by the distracting presence of a bizarrely whiny Wilson, who starts complaining about Foley’s elusiveness and criticising Hill for not bringing the hardened criminal to heel and enabling Wilson to meet him. “This is getting ridiculous,” he whinges at one point. “A man who is sure he can help return a billion dollars’ worth of art can’t even arrange a meeting with his own criminal source!” The story is not unfolding at his pace or in the way he would like, and the foot-stomping becomes embarrassing (the arrogance and entitlement you betray when complaining about any expert is never pretty), unprofessional (him meeting Foley is not part of the story) and ultimately quite obtrusive.
Plotwise, the hunt ends on an unavoidably weak note. But formally it does too, thanks to Wilson’s frustrations and hurt feelings. One at least could have been avoided.
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