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Showing posts with label Carabinieri Art Squad. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Carabinieri Art Squad. Show all posts

March 25, 2012

Sunday, March 25, 2012 - ,,,, No comments

Would you have recognized these paintings as stolen if they had been in the home of a friend?

The Carabinieri TPC listed the images of the paintings recovered earlier this month from a home in Rome's Parioli district because these are the paintings which were stolen from another house in the same neighborhood more than 40 years ago.  A Carabinieri officer recognized the images in an auction sales catalogue in a routine check against the TPC's stolen art database of more than 3 million artworks.  Thirty-seven paintings were recovered.




































March 24, 2012

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Carabinieri's TPC (Division for the Protection of Cultural Heritage) Recovery of 37 Paintings Stolen from a private residence in Rome in 1971

Press conference photo from Comando Carabinieri Tutela
Patrimonio Culturale in Rome on March 8, 2012 
by Catherine Sezgin, ARCA Blog Editor

On March 9th Tom Kingston for The Guardian reported "Stolen paintings recovered in Rome 40 years after art heist" which you can read here.  Nick Squires reported from Rome for the Daily Telegraph here.  Noah Charney wrote about the discovery in his column, The Secret History of Art.

Where were the paintings found in Rome? "Italian police find stolen paintings hanging in a house in the same district of Rome from where 42 works disappeared."

The Parioli district is an elegant residential area which also includes the Villa Giulia and the Galleria Borghese.  Thieves had not shipped the paintings out of the country.  Eleven of the paintings were likely on display in a private home for two decades.  How many guests spent the night or ate dinner in this home of stolen paintings, never recognizing the paintings as stolen or maybe not knowing or remembering that another residence had been burglarized in 1971 in the same area? Interpol's Stolen Art Database had a record of these paintings but access to this information is limited.  Public access to Interpol's Stolen Art Database was not made available until 2009.  The public has limited access to the inventory of millions of paintings reported stolen to the Carabinieri.

How did the police find the stolen paintings? The owner, a widow, put four of the paintings up for sale.  In a routine check between for sale items and the stolen art database, Comando Carabinieri Tutela Patrimonio Culturale (TPC, translated to the Carabinieri Cultural Heritage Protection Operations Department) identified the four paintings as stolen in 1971.

Here's the link to the press release by the carabinieri on the recovery of 37 of 42 paintings dated from the 13th to the 19th century which were stolen from a private residence in Rome.  The TPC's investigation started in the first week of February in coordination with the Public Prosecutor of Rome. The woman tried to sell four of the paintings at auction was arrested for possession of stolen property.

Tomorrow's post will feature the images of the most recovered paintings as provided by the Carabinieri TPC. Would you recognize these artworks as stolen if you saw them hanging on the wall of a friend's house?

March 21, 2012

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FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin, March 2012: Noah Charney, Paul Denton, and John Kieberg on Art Theft

"Protecting Cultural Heritage from Art Theft" is an article by Noah Charney, Paul Denton and John Kleberg recently released in the March 2012 issue of the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin.
When someone thinks of art crime, a Hollywood image is conjured, one of black-clad cat burglars and thieves in top hats and white gloves. But, the truth behind art crime, one misunderstood by the general public and professionals alike, is far more sinister and intriguing. Art crime has its share of cinematic thefts and larger-than-life characters, but it also is the realm of international organized crime syndicates, the involvement of which results in art crime funding all manner of other serious offenses, including those pertaining to the drug trade and terrorism. Art crime has shifted from a relatively innocuous, ideological crime into a major international plague. 
Over the last 50 years, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has ranked art crime behind only drugs and arms in terms of highest-grossing criminal trades.1 There are hundreds of thousands of art crimes reported per year, but, despite this fact, the general public only hears about the handful of big-name museum heists that make international headlines. In Italy alone there are 20,000 to 30,000 thefts reported annually, and many more go unreported.2 In fact, even though reported art crime ranks third in the list of criminal trades, many more such incidents go unreported worldwide, rather than coming to the attention of authorities, making its true scale much broader and more difficult to estimate.
You may read the remainder of the article online here which includes a discussion of art police squads around the world (Scotland Yard Art and Antiquities Unit, Italy's Carabinieri Division for the Protection of Cultural Heritage, and the Dutch Art Crime Team).

March 4, 2012

Sunday, March 04, 2012 - ,,,,, No comments

The Journal of Art Crime, Fall 2011: General B(a) CC Giovanni Pastore on "Archaeology and the Problem of Unauthorized Excavation in Italy"

In the Fall 2011 issue of The Journal of Art Crime, General B(a) CC Giovanni Pastore writes of "Archaeology and the Problem of Unauthorized Excavation in Italy":

The public follows, with growing and increasingly alarmed attention, news on the destruction of historic sites because of speculation, pollution and even war. In contrast, little consideration is given to the rather serious state of danger in which the world’s archaeological heritage remains as a result of being the target of increasingly frequent episodes of looting at illegal excavations. 
In recent decades these depredations, due to the smuggling of archaeological material on the international arts market, have taken on such a scale that not even the specialists in this sector can assess the value of the losses with confidence. 
What is certain, however, is that the archaeological heritage of many regions of the world is constantly the subject of illegal activities involving not only the physical destruction of looted artifacts, but also the resulting loss of the rich heritage of historical information contained in those archaeological sites, destroyed by the violent action of the excavations themselves. 
The regions most severely affected by this phenomenon are in Central and South America, Italy, the Middle East, China and Turkey, while countries such as Germany, Switzerland and Austria increasingly report on looting at archaeological sites.

General B(a) CC Giovanni Pastore served as Vice- Commandant of the Carabinieri Division for the Protection of Cultural Heritage from 1995 until his retirement in 2011. During that time he was widely considered the world’s finest art policeman, Colonel Pastore commanded the twelve Carabinieri art police divisions within Italy. Pastore was trained at the elite military academy in Modena. He studied art history, law, and security, and excelled in horsemanship. Over his long career, he has been decorated with numerous medals both in Italy, including the equivalent of a knighthood, and by grateful nations abroad, in appreciation for his professional service. He is one of the founding trustees of ARCA.

You may read the complete article by subscribing to The Journal of Art Crime.

June 16, 2010

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