Super rich person really wants that particular painting to hang in a private room where they can enjoy it.
And they go through a couple connections for plausible deniability -- buying it from some kind of "dealer" they can "assume" is "legit", and the "dealer" then connects with actual criminals to steal it.
If ever caught (unlikely), the thieves and "dealer" take the fall, not the rich person. Also the rich person may be halfway around the world in a country where there's literally zero chance of being caught/extradited.
But the thieves and dealer are going to make a helluva lot of money, obviously, for the risk they're taking.
I don't think plausible deniability works on one-of-a-kind artwork. Even if you assume your dealer is legit, any cursory research will tell you it was stolen. It would be like buying the secret formula for Coca-Cola and claiming you didn't know it was stolen because it went through multiple middlemen.
These aren't paintings that are on display to the public after they're stolen. They're kept in houses and families for generations, and by then, time has laundered their provenance. If you read art news, it's not uncommon for museums to have paintings donated to them by the grandchildren of the person who bought the painting, only to learn half a century later that the painting was stolen.
And if someone doesn't like their stolen painting after a while, there are plenty of dealers who will hook you up with a similarly amoral buyer. The fee is higher, to go with the risk.
There's an entire class of rich people who sometimes go by the label "globalist" who believe they are above national laws, and nations, themselves. They see themselves as "citizens of the world" and sometimes even think they shouldn't need passports to travel because their egos tell them they're so fabulous, and have the money to back it up.
I read a magazine or newspaper article about it last year. Many of them attend that big meeting of super-rich people and the politicians they've bought in Davos each year.
But I'm not sure it's entirely outlandish. The buyer just spins a story to the judge: "the dealer said he could acquire a van Gogh from someone's private collection, I loved its appearance, so I paid them to do that." The buyer could insist the dealer said the painting was unnamed, that they would have had no way of ever knowing it was the same one stolen from a museum, etc. (That they certainly never bothered to take a photo and upload it to Google Image Search because why would they?)
To complicate things even further, you can even say you assumed it was a different original version. Just Google "multiple versions of van gogh" and you'll see that the artist would make multiple versions of the same painting.
Obviously the buyer in this case does know what going on -- they initiated the whole thing. But as long as there are no records of communication and the dealer has been paid off to take the fall, they can play dumb in front of a judge if it ever came to that. With a good lawyer, they might very well get away with playing the victim.
If you have enough money to finance an art heist or buy a priceless Van Gogh from a "dealer", you probably have enough money to not go to jail over an art theft. The collector pays a replica price on paper but in reality pays much more to the dealer. If caught, you just say you thought it was a replica, the dealer says they thought it was a replica, their dealer says the same, and so on until no one ends up with any jail time.
> If you have enough money to finance an art heist or buy a priceless Van Gogh from a "dealer", you probably have enough money to not go to jail over an art theft. The collector pays a replica price on paper but in reality pays much more to the dealer. If caught, you just say you thought it was a replica, the dealer says they thought it was a replica, their dealer says the same, and so on until no one ends up with any jail time.
But that story just beggars belief. Sure it's a story, but one that makes no sense at all unless you're willing to entertain the ludicrous premise that someone would steal painting just to sell it as a cheaper replica. Furthermore, a professional art dealer could probably be expected to be able to tell the difference between a replica and a genuine painting. Otherwise, who would buy genuine paintings from him?
I think a prosecutor would be able to quickly identify an individual in the chain of custody who clearly should have known the painting was stolen, and is thus be guilty of receiving stolen property:
And you've just decided that the "replica" was so good that you paid stolen-art-on-the-black-market money for it, not "good replica painter" money for it...
The thing is your books say "good replica money" and only your crypto wallet or offshore account or shell company slush fund or pile of gold have the 'stolen-art-on-the-black-market' money removed from the balance sheet. Smart accountants are payed a lot of money to figure out exactly how to hide this from overworked and underpaid auditors.
Ash and Mickey have tried to capitalise on the theft of a rare Picasso by selling a fake to a well-known collector, Petre Sava (Peter Polycarpou), a vicious Eastern European gangster. They learn too late that Sava who owned the stolen original. Mickey is taken prisoner by Sava, leaving Ash and the others with just a few hours to return the real stolen painting, otherwise Mickey is a dead man. With their usual contacts unable to give any clues, except only the word that a Scottish crew were behind the theft, the gang visit renowned Picasso forger Dolly Hammond (Sheila Hancock) (the one who helped to create the fake). She points them in the direction of the McCrary brothers, the thieves in question, and are told that they stole the original painting for another renowned gangster, Harry Holmes (Martin Kemp). Time is ticking and Mickey is edging closer to death; if the group can't find the real painting, Ash will have to devise a plan that can get him back...
The timing of this is interesting. Are they merely taking advantage of most places having a skeleton staff during the pandemic, or is it something worse like the thieves anticipating the museum will be destroyed by starving mobs soon so they’re stealing the things they like the most before it’s too late? Also, could the museum director have allowed it to happen for a price? His reaction seems strange.
> Are they merely taking advantage of most places having a skeleton staff
This. Art thieves don't care for conservation, they are just extremely opportunistic. I expect this is just one instance we learnt of, simply because of the author's name being known to the mainstream. There is probably much more stuff getting stolen right now in Italy and Spain, which we won't know about for months or years - or even at all, unless we read specialist media.
There are also "backroom" sales, where these sorts of items can be sold in countries who have been embargoed. You trade this type of painting for a ridiculous amount of an embargoed country's goods or something and then you can smuggle this into Russia or China to trade for a non embargoed currency with an oligarch, since oil prices have plummeted. They, in turn, can hold on to it for a few generations, and sell it in grey markets for a good profit and some time.
I feel like this is one of those things people imagine happens, but actually never happens. If it did happen, eventually someone would get caught and we'd see evidence of said secret room and the painting would be recovered from a mansion or something. Instead, they're always recovered from warehouses or behind walls to in attics of crooks.
Yeah, after paying off the local officials to frame it that way. A rich person being accused of theft will tank their reputation, and if they spent $250M for the painting, they'll easily spend $10M to cover it up.
This is pure fantasy, who would spend $250m to acquire a stolen painting that they cannot resell? If it really is rich people buying them the purchase price is going to be a fraction of a percent of the amount you're talking about.
When your net worth is in the hundreds of billions, you can spend a couple hundred million to impress your "friends," and many billionaires do. Yeah, it's disgusting, but that's only because the modern global economy allows such disgusting levels of wealth.
The number of people with net worth in the hundreds of billion right now is... 1. The second-richest person is Bill Gates, at only $96.5 billion. By #10, we're at $50 billion. Fewer than 200 people are worth $10 billion. Granted, this only includes people with known net worths, but by the time you're hitting tens of billions, it's hard to hide that much wealth.
It really makes a huge impact on this conversation to say "billions" and "2.5M" and "200k," so thanks for pointing all of this stuff out. Leave it to HN to get buried in a pedantic technicality that has no effect on the points being made.
The "modern global economy" allows it? I suggest you look up the wealth (adjusted for inflation) of many, many historical business and political figures. Extreme wealth for a few is nothing new and if anything modern global economics and markets have done a massive leveling up of standards of living for many more people who aren't incredibly rich.
That aside, how should something like your subjective notion of "disgusting" levels of wealth guide how much of what they earned people should be able to keep?
Seems like you took my statement "the modern global economy allows it," and inferred that I meant every system other than the modern one does not allow it. Of course not. Of course there are many systems that existed in the past that also allowed for gross levels of wealth disparity, but did I ever claim otherwise?
> massive leveling up of standards of living
For who? Impoverished workers in China and India? How have American labourers benefitted from globalism and Keynesian economics? They haven't, at least not in the last 50 years.
> That aside, how should something like your subjective notion of "disgusting" levels of wealth guide how much of what they earned people should be able to keep?
I think you're just pretending you're naive, but you can feel free to look up many of the proposed solutions. UBI, wealth tax, limits on how much money can be passed through inheritance, etc. There are many solutions that have been _proposed_, but the problem is that with massive wealth comes massive power, and the individuals who possess disgusting levels of wealth will never let these solutions come to be.
> what they earned
Jeff Bezos has not earned 100 billion dollars. You could probably convince me that he's earned at least 1 billion dollars, but there is absolutely no way one man can generate that much wealth in one lifetime. He has stolen his wealth through asymmetrical agreements with powerless individuals, who chose to work for him rather than starve due to a lack of accessible jobs.
We've created a system that makes individuals dependent on large corporations for healthcare and rent, and then we wonder why poor individuals can't start businesses or change jobs freely (hint hint, it's due to food security and access to healthcare). If I point a gun at you and take your money, I haven't earned anything, have I? But if I starve you out, and tell you you can't see a doctor, then I can rob you of the value of your ideas and labor. For some reason our system allows that.
Bezos got a $300k interest-free loan from his mother to start his business. Are you telling me he earned that? No, it was given to him by birthright, and it's a luxury the vast majority of people don't have.
Bezos did not earn 100 billion dollars, he stole it.
Bezos doesn’t even have $100B, so the premise of your argument is nonsense.
Owning shares of something isn’t the same as liquid cash. And valuing 1 share at the most recent market closing price the same as a founder liquidating their whole investment is also nonsense.
FYI, all those worlds richest lists are clickbait.
> Bezos doesn’t even have $100B, so the premise of your argument is nonsense.
Oh, so that's how you're going to handwave this argument today. Got it, I wouldn't have bothered writing all of that up if I knew you were just going to stick your head in the sand.
Here's what happens when your boy Bezos gets too much power:
There need to be more checks and balances on individuals who possess this much power, or they need not be allowed to attain so much power in the first place. Your technicalities do nothing to fix this problem which affect tens of thousands of workers in this country, who are being forced to expose themselves to a deadly virus (or go hungry) so Bezos can buy another mansion and bang some more models. But I don't care that much, I suppose. If it isn't done democratically it won't be long before heads are rolling.
Super rich person really wants that particular painting to hang in a private room where they can enjoy it.
And they go through a couple connections for plausible deniability -- buying it from some kind of "dealer" they can "assume" is "legit", and the "dealer" then connects with actual criminals to steal it.
If ever caught (unlikely), the thieves and "dealer" take the fall, not the rich person. Also the rich person may be halfway around the world in a country where there's literally zero chance of being caught/extradited.
But the thieves and dealer are going to make a helluva lot of money, obviously, for the risk they're taking.