A Corrupt Culture

...Several of the employees fingered in the book resigned following publication...

...This is precisely what happened to the oncethriving market in poached ivory and for...

...Entrapment, he argues, occurs when an investigator leads someone "to do something wrong that he or she would not otherwise do...

...All except diehard apologists will enjoy the polite venom with which Watson demolishes the company's pretensions to being a patrician organization dedicated to scholarship and the contemplation of the sublime...

...He shadowed tomb robbers in southern Italy, traced the precise route of sacred Hindu sculpture taken from a destitute Indian village that ended up in a London warehouse, and, financed by the BBC, went so far as to purchase a minor Old Master painting...

...Many major Western museums are crammed with loot from three centuries of legalized colonial plundering...

...But it is impossible to maintain such insouciance after reading Watson's account of those destitute Indian villagers praying to a pile of rubble—all that remains of a shrine once decorated by the statues of 20 sacred goddesses...

...Despite the odd Dickensian nugget (a Sotheby's antiquities expert named Oliver Forge, an Indian dealer called Essajee Sham) Sotheby's is more convincing but less entertaining than fiction...

...The strength of this book, indeed, is that its findings are based not on anecdote and speculation but on painstaking documentary evidence...

...As a small boy growing up in Damascus I used to frequent antique shops in the Old City, where Syrian dealers routinely coated ordinary glass vials with sheep dung, buried them in the backyard for a few weeks, then passed off the result as Roman glass...

...In an effort to bolster his Nuremberg defense that he was merely following orders, he had amassed a huge stash of documents...

...These he turned over to Watson in hopes that the publicity would help his case...

...Hodges was on trial for stealing antiquities and maintaining secret bank accounts from which he paid commissions to smugglers...

...If Sotheby's and other auction houses simply refused to deal in such items, much of the trade would dry up, as Watson points out...

...The author and a BBC team next carried out a sting operation: One of the team members posed as a naive Australian who hadjust inherited a collection of paintings...

...At Sotheby's in Milan he surreptitiously recorded an executive of the firm explaining precisely how to flout Italian laws against the export of national treasures...

...The statistics themselves are sobering...

...Acting partly on what the author uncovered, Italian and Indian police made some arrests, although no one has so far been formally charged with any crime...

...Roughly 90 per cent of these pieces are of unknown provenance, meaning they were almost certainly stolen, smuggled or both...

...In fact, the company's willingness to sell art of murky origin acts like a magnet for smugglers...

...Watson's work was the subject of a BBC special and was featured here on 60 Minutes, where Morley Safer gravely pronounced that its revelations "shook the art world to its foundations...

...Much of the dialogue is drawn from court transcripts and secretly recorded conversations, giving it the stilted quality—if also the unvarnished allure— of real speech...

...Before reading this book, I confess, I did not look upon art smuggling as a terribly serious matter...

...It was only after being approached by James Hodges, a former Sotheby's employee, that Watson decided to center his investigation on the company...

...The auction house has also complained that it was unfairly singled out...

...It is not entrapment if the police, or journalists, merely tap into an illicit practice that is already ongoing, in order to demonstrate the specific nature of the wrong and that it is still occurring...

...But as Watson notes, he would have been flirting much more directly with entrapment had he gone off on fishing expeditions against Christie's and Bonham's, prompted only by the suspicion that if Sotheby's was up to no good then they must be, too...

...Ransacked, its treasures were smuggled to London by a corrupt Indian diplomat...

...The trail took him from Europe to Asia and the United States...

...But there are compensations...

...Using company documents obtained from a disgruntled ex-employee, Watson demonstrated that its personnel were involved in smuggling works out of Italy and India to London andNew York, where they would fetch higher prices...

...The entrapment charge is dismissed by Watson...

...Sometimesahigh-profiletheftmakes the front pages, as in 1990 when two men dressed as police officers broke into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and made off with several Rembrandts along with works by Vermeer, Manet and Degas...

...Art crime, however, is far more pervasive than the occasional well-publicized dramas or those crooked dealers' ploys would suggest...

...Sotheby's has countered that auction houses are not responsible for policing the international art market, and that rejecting all unprovenanced works would simply drive the traffic underground...

...One goes to London, after all, to see the Parthenon frieze...

...The blind arrogance of the auction house's senior management was their downfall, of course...

...The reason he is not up to his armpits in litigation today is that he has been able to substantiate all of his allegations...

...The truth is that those exposed by Watson were immersed in a deeply corrupt corporate culture, where possession of an art object was seen as 10 tenths of the law...

...Thus began a complex 10-year probe by Watson, who eventually enlisted the backing and cooperation of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC...

...The result of this spectacular gumshoe journalism was a media firestorm in both the United States and Britain after the book was published there last year...

...Over single malt whiskey and sugared almonds in a "small but exquisite" palazzo by the Arno, Watson's dinner companion convinced him to write a different sort of book: an investigation into art smuggling, with the author playing detective and attempting to track a pilfered painting...

...In the end these records are even more incriminating than the author's undercover investigations, because they vitiate claims that the illegality was confined to a few isolated individuals...

...I would have fit right in at Sotheby's, where one now former director remarked at the height of the uproar: "It's a national sport in Italy to take things in and out of the border...

...Hodges still spent nine months in jail, but the trove paid off for the author...

...Reviewed by Richard McGill Murphy Contributor, "New Republic," New York "Times Magazine " In 1979 Peter Watson dined in Florence with an aristocratic Italian policeman who specialized in recovering stolen art...

...Instead the company announced, rather weakly, that it was launching an internal investigation...

...He discovered organized networks dealing in contraband art, often abetted by Sotheby's, the world's oldest and most respected auction house...

...According to a Cambridge University study, 30 to 40 per cent of the world's available antiquities pass through the sale rooms in New York and London...

...Watson, though, takes us well beyond the numbers...

...Most people are vaguely aware of a thriving global market in faked, stolen and smuggled art and antiquities...

...British and American newspapers seized on the story as well...

...In document after document company directors openly refer to circumventing foreign and international laws...

...This emphatically was not a victimless crime...

...The British journalist and author was planning to write a book chronicling the world's most spectacular art heists...

...Although his book is admirable for its investigatory rigor and moral clarity, Watson's prose has the stodgy texture of the British school puddings he no doubt was weaned on...

...Not that the modern black market is dominated by unscrupulous Westerners...

...But Sotheby's made little effort to contest the substance of Watson's allegations...

...Sotheby's reacted with predictable fury, accusing Watson of entrapment and arguing that even if one or two of its employees had facilitated smuggling, they were merely rotten apples in an otherwise sound barrel...

...It's regrettable, not shocking...