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Lost and found

Unimpeded by a security system, or perhaps even by locked doors, the thieves entered the house.

Of the handful of people crowded into the Geneva law office, Julian Radcliffe was the only one who had not yet begun to panic. They had been waiting three hours that October afternoon for a man with a stolen painting, a painting he had pledged to return. To everyone but Radcliffe, the man's failure to appear on time could mean only one thing - that the deal had collapsed.

But Radcliffe maintained his proper British composure. Having worked for a company that sought the release of kidnapped hostages before moving on to the search for stolen artwork, he was accustomed to tense moments and last-minute hitches. For months last year, he had been negotiating with Swiss lawyer Bernard Vischer, the man they were waiting for, and Radcliffe was convinced that he had done a good job.

Before the afternoon ended, Radcliffe's faith was rewarded. Vischer was shown into the office, where he offered no apology or explanation for his delay. And he had no painting with him, only a briefcase from which he took a sheaf of documents, each written in French and English. For the next hour, Vischer and Radcliffe read through the pages, scrutinizing them closely before signing their names. Then Vischer reached for his cellphone and made a call. Minutes later, a car arrived in the gravel courtyard of the building, out of sight of those assembled in the law office, and Vischer went to meet it.

He came back with a bulky package wrapped in black plastic. Trying to stay calm, Radcliffe asked Vischer to join him in a side office to chat, while the two art specialists Radcliffe had brought with him took possession of the package and went about their work.

One of them was Michel J. Strauss, Sotheby's top expert in Impressionist art. And although he had spent his life appraising priceless paintings, he knew as he removed the canvas from the plastic and white towel wrapped around it that he might be part of something historic. For more than 20 minutes, Strauss and an assistant inspected the painting for authenticity and possible damage. "I had to take my time to make sure of what I was seeing," says Strauss, "but I knew from looking at the first two brush strokes that it was the Cezanne, and it was in excellent condition."

On hearing that judgment, Radcliffe reached out and shook Vischer's hand. Eight months of painstaking negotiations, which had involved lawyers, bankers, insurance brokers, art dealers, police, and prosecutors in several countries, from the United States to Russia, were complete. Radcliffe and the London-based Art Loss Register, of which he is chairman, had pulled off the biggest recovery of a stolen masterpiece in modern history.

The painting, Bouilloire et fruits (Pitcher and Fruits), is a still life done in the early 1890s by Paul Cezanne, the post-Impressionist whom Picasso called "my one and only master." A young Ernest Hemingway, seeking to portray mood without sentimentality, had studied Cezanne's brushwork. And more than two decades after it disappeared, this irreplaceable painting had surfaced in the Geneva law office. Six weeks later, last December 7, an anonymous American paid nearly $30 million for Pitcher and Fruits at a Sotheby's auction in London - and Radcliffe had gotten it back apparently without paying a cent.

Despite the mission's success, however, there were still unanswered questions that might dampen the celebration. Remarkably, neither Radcliffe nor anyone in law enforcement knew the identity of Vischer's client - the party responsible for returning the painting - or the motivation for doing so. Nor did they know anything about the painting's whereabouts for the previous 21 years - since the Memorial Day weekend in 1978 when it had last been seen on the dining room wall of a small but elegant home in Western Massachusetts.

Michael Bakwin fit easily into the Berkshires' better life. A member of a cultured, well-to-do family, he moved to Stockbridge in 1959 and opened a restaurant and inn that served visitors drawn to the region's pastoral beauty and classical music centers like Tanglewood. His mother was immensely wealthy, an heir to two Midwestern meatpacking empires, and she and Bakwin's father were both renowned pediatricians. They began assembling a world-class collection of Impressionist art in the 1920s and '30s, when they were living in Europe.

As the elder Bakwins aged, they had begun to distribute their artwork among their four children, and Michael Bakwin's Stockbridge home - which he shared with his wife, Doris, and her two children from a previous marriage - was filled with paintings and sculpture. But there was by no means museum-quality security. Perhaps because of the rural setting, Bakwin didn't feel the need to lock his door; he occasionally allowed friends and workmen to stay in the house even when the family was away. And not all the guests were of Bakwin's upstanding character - one, in fact, allegedly stole and sold a car and snowmobiles that Bakwin owned. Another, who was acquainted with Pittsfield's criminal element, had a key to the Bakwins' house.

If Bakwin believed he was a world away from crime, he was wrong. Just 12 miles north of Stockbridge, the city of Pittsfield was experiencing such an increase in criminal activity, particularly drugs and gambling, that in the late 1970s the county established its own district attorney's office, instead of sharing a prosecutor with nearby Springfield.

Among those attracting the attention of Pittsfield police was David T. Colvin, then 32. While he made his living as a carpenter and laborer, by 1978 he had already been arrested for illicit gun sales and investigated for drug dealing and illegal gambling. Even a close friend testified at a later trial that he considered Colvin a dangerous character, recalling the time that the 300-pound Colvin had turned on him for no apparent reason and nearly choked him to death.

Colvin also knew something of Bakwin's world. In February 1978, Colvin was deeply in debt to several bookies in and around Pittsfield and was losing money regularly in poker games. That month he approached an acquaintance and asked him if he might be interested in buying some paintings that could be stolen. There was a house in the Berkshires owned by a relative of a woman whose family controlled Swift & Co., the Chicago meatpacking company, and inside were a Cezanne and a Toulouse-Lautrec waiting to be stolen, Colvin told the acquaintance. Colvin also told him that he knew where a certain original Norman Rockwell painting could be stolen. Days later, the Rockwell was stolen from a home in New Jersey.

The acquaintance, it turned out, was an undercover agent for the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. But he was more interested in what Colvin had to say about his ability to secure stolen weapons than his designs on fine art. That was unfortunate. Less than four months later, thieves made their way down Bakwin's long, unpaved driveway, which looked, with pachysandra and wildflowers lining both sides, like a tableau for an Impressionist painting. Unimpeded by any security system, or perhaps even by locked doors, the thieves entered Bakwin's house and, within minutes, pulled off one of the biggest house robberies in Massachusetts history.

It was an incredibly easy heist. The Bakwins were away for Memorial Day weekend, leaving the house unoccupied except for a housekeeper who would stop by to feed the family's dog and cat. There was no sign of forced entry, and Bakwin's wife, Doris, told investigators it was no secret that the couple kept a spare key beneath the frog statue on the front steps.

Although there were millions of dollars' worth of paintings and artwork throughout the house, the thieves concentrated their efforts in one room. Lining the walls of the formal dining room were seven paintings from the elder Bakwins' collection, given to their son and his wife over the years, that together were worth well over $1 million at the time. Among them were the Cezanne, purchased by Bakwin's mother in 1963 for $500,000, and six lesser pieces by Soutine, Vlaminck, Jansem, and Utrillo.

No one is certain which day the theft took place. Michael and Doris Bakwin returned Monday, but they did not notice that the paintings were missing until late Tuesday.

Investigators, including FBI agents and State Police officers who were summoned to the scene, believed that the thieves had stolen the paintings in hopes of gaining insurance reward money for the return of the artwork. What the thieves didn't know was that most of the paintings, including the Cezanne, were not insured, as Bakwin felt the premiums were prohibitively high.

The insurance reward theory gained credibility within days. Over a week's time in early June, an unidentified man phoned the Bakwin residence four times, making vague remarks about the theft and what it might take to get the paintings back. The caller said that he did not know who had stolen the paintings but he knew who had them now. To prove he knew what he was talking about, the caller told Doris Bakwin that the Cezanne had a small label that read "Paris" on the wooden backing of the canvas. She was convinced, knowing that her mother-in-law had attached such a label to record where she had bought the painting.

Finally, the caller got to his demand. If the Bakwins wanted to negotiate for the paintings, they should place an ad on the front page of The Berkshire Eagle offering $25,000 for information about stolen "valuables." The ad appeared as directed on June 13, instructing anyone with relevant information to call John T. Bernardo, a Pittsfield lawyer. But it generated no worthwhile responses, and after a few days, Bernardo told the Bakwins to "put your money back in your bank account. No one is coming forward."

Perhaps not to Bernardo. But according to an FBI report on the theft, the investigators that same week received information from a confidential source then in prison that pointed again to Colvin's involvement in the crime. According to the informant, Bruce "Bo" Coppola, a longtime friend and associate of Colvin's from Pittsfield, also knew something about the theft. Once stolen, the artwork was to be passed on to two drug dealers on Cape Cod, and the dealers, in turn, were going to fence it through a larger drug trafficker in Miami who had connections in South America, the FBI report stated.

While the informant's leads may have made sense in theory, the investigators were unable to use them to build a prosecutable case. Six weeks after the theft, a federal grand jury in Boston began calling witnesses to testify about the crime. Colvin, according to sources, refused to answer questions about the theft, invoking the Fifth Amendment as protection against self-incrimination. Coppola said he had been in California at the time of the theft and knew nothing about it.

Coppola still lives in California, and when he was contacted recently about the crime, he refused comment through a family member - except to say that he knew enough "to make a movie" about the exploits of Colvin and others back in Pittsfield but would only talk if paid.

Frustrated by the lack of progress in the official investigation, Bakwin hired a private investigator, Charles G. Moore of CGM Detective Group in Plymouth, who had been successful in helping authorities recover other artwork, including a Rembrandt, a Winslow Homer, and several Ming vases stolen in separate heists. Moore tracked down the Miami drug trafficker who had allegedly wound up with the paintings. However, the trafficker refused to answer questions and warned Moore that he would get hurt if he did not back off.

And authorities say any hope they had of solving the theft died on February 13, 1979, when Colvin was shot to death. Arthur W. Samson Jr. and Brian C. Matchett, both from the Boston area, had driven to Pittsfield in hopes of collecting on a $1,500 poker debt that Colvin owed Samson. In a predawn confrontation at his home, Colvin scuffled with the two. According to testimony at their trial, Matchett, fearing for his life, drew his .38 caliber revolver and shot Colvin.

The lack of investigative progress after Colvin's death frustrated Bakwin as well as authorities. He moved his family out of state after the theft, and waited for a call reporting a break in the case. But no one called - at least no one with substantive information - and Bakwin got accustomed to the idea that his beloved Cezanne painting, as well as the millions of dollars it now represented, was forever gone.

Sell your Dodge Dart for $800 in the United States or in practically any other country in the world, and the government is going to make sure that you have good title to it - in other words, that you're not selling a stolen car. Sell a piece of art, even a masterpiece, and your buyer better beware, because there is no government oversight of such transactions.

In fact, until a decade ago, there was no sure way of knowing if a painting being sold in New York had once been stolen in Tokyo and the ownership documents forged. That changed during the past decade, with the establishment of computerized databases that could be quickly checked to determine the background of a painting.

With the financial support of the insurance industry, the Art Loss Register was founded in 1990 and set up such a database with the images and descriptions of thousands of paintings and other art pieces that had been stolen over the years and remained missing. The paintings taken from Michael Bakwin's Stockbridge house in 1978 were among those listed.

Although there are still no laws requiring such inquiries, more and more auction houses, galleries, insurance companies, and collectors in the multibillion-dollar art business now check with the Art Loss Register or law enforcement agencies that maintain similar databases before completing their transactions.

As a result, federal law enforcement officials as well as those involved in such crimes in the past agree that fewer masterpieces are targeted for theft now than a quarter of a century ago. "It is just too hard to fence anything with a value of over a million dollars," says Myles Connor Jr., whose name has been mentioned in connection with several highly publicized art thefts, including a Rembrandt stolen from Boston's Museum of Fine Arts in 1978.

Connor stresses, however, that there is still a ready underground interested in buying stolen paintings by lesser-known artists or minor pieces by the masters: "Sure, there will always be someone who cannot live without having a particular painting on his wall and will go about trying to steal it. But as for stealing something in hopes of turning around and selling it for near its value, those days are over."

Yet thieves in England quickly punctured any false sense of security that lovers of masterpieces might have about art safety in the new millennium. Last January 1, they broke into a museum at Oxford University and made off with the only Cezanne in its collection, Auvers-Sur-Oise, which was valued at $4.8 million. The crime remains unsolved.

Stolen paintings have always been a valued commodity among big-time drug traffickers, particularly in Europe. "It's an obvious way for laundering money" for drug dealers, says Lynne Chaffinch, manager of the FBI's art theft program. "They have all this ready cash. ... Any stolen artwork is going to draw their interest."

Under 1994 legislation, the FBI has prime jurisdiction in pursuing the theft of artwork from a public place, and the case that has consumed much of the bureau's investigative time involves the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. In the predawn hours of March 18, 1990, two men posing as Boston police officers persuaded security guards to open the side door of the museum, and within two hours they had made off with 13 pieces of art, including a Rembrandt and a Vermeer, with a total value of more than $250 million. It was the largest art theft in modern history and, despite a $5 million reward offered by the museum, remains unsolved. FBI officials say that suggests that the artwork remains in the possession of people who either participated in the theft or were involved in the fencing of the paintings.

Unless such individuals were willing to return the paintings without a reward, it is unlikely that the FBI would be willing to deal with them. There are a few absolutes that the FBI and Interpol, the international law enforcement agency, follow in negotiating the return of stolen artwork, and foremost among them is that no one who was involved in a theft or who acquired the paintings knowing they were stolen can benefit financially from their return.

"To allow someone to get a reward or insurance money for stealing a painting will only encourage more thefts," says John Trahan, head of the FBI's major crimes unit in Boston, who was in charge of the investigation into the Cezanne theft. That prohibition underpinned the negotiations for recovery of the Cezanne last year, though some might question whether it was strictly adhered to in the deal that was struck.

At first, the phone call to the Art Loss Register's London office on January 18, 1999, seemed just like the countless others seeking the background of a particular painting. An insurance agent at Lloyd's of London was asking about Cezanne's Pitcher and Fruits, saying someone had inquired about the cost to insure the shipment of the painting from Russia to England. But a check of the register's database showed the painting had been stolen from a Massachusetts home in 1978, and Julian Radcliffe, the firm's chairman, quickly got on the phone.

Within a few days, Radcliffe had learned a little of the story. An English construction engineer named Anthony Westbrook, who did business in Eastern Europe, had been approached in Russia and asked if he could assist in transporting the painting to England. Westbrook later told Radcliffe he did not know why he was asked to get involved, except that the Russian who approached him may have mistaken the occupation that Westbrook entered in a hotel register - architect - for art critic.

Westbrook and Radcliffe talked, over five months, about the possibility of recovering the Cezanne and the six other stolen paintings, but Radcliffe thinks Westbrook may know more than he was willing to tell. Westbrook never identified the party in Russia who had possession of the paintings. The FBI's Trahan also says he does not know whom Westbrook represented in those early negotiations, but he says he is convinced that the people who held the paintings had acquired them legitimately.

While both Radcliffe and Trahan refused to speculate about the identity of the holder of the paintings, others in law enforcement say they believe it is a Russian bank or other financial institution. They speculate that the bank loaned money to a Russian businessman and was holding Bakwin's stolen paintings as collateral. When the businessman failed to make good on the loan, they say, the bank sought to recover by selling the most valuable of the works, the Cezanne.

Bernard Vischer, a commercial lawyer from Zurich, may have the most answers of all the known participants about the missing paintings' murky past. Midway through 1999, Vischer took over from Westbrook the job of representing the holder of the paintings in negotiations. While he was willing to listen to questions, the ever-cordial Vischer would not provide any details except to say that his client did not secure the artwork illegally. The most he will say is that his client obtained the paintings in the early 1980s, about four or five years after they were stolen, and moved them from an unknown location to Switzerland about five years ago. "This is not a cloak-and-dagger operation," he says of his client's business. The client obtained the paintings "through a customary commercial process."

To satisfy the concerns of the FBI and Scotland Yard about his client's role in gaining the paintings, Vischer wrote out a statement detailing his client's behind-the-scenes dealings in the case and agreed to turn it over to the authorities if they asked for it. They have not sought the document so far, Vischer says.

Asked why the FBI had not sought to view the affidavit, Trahan says the agency viewed the negotiations between the Art Loss Register and Vischer's client as an attempt by "two private parties" to reach an agreement in a foreign country. "And we knew that the Art Loss Register had the same position as we did - to reward no one who was involved or benefited from the theft - and we're satisfied that happened," Trahan says.

Why would Vischer's client agree to such a deal, particularly when Radcliffe was insistent that the client would not be paid any money for the return of the Cezanne?

Vischer's answer: "From what Mr. Radcliffe presented to us, we were convinced that the Cezanne and the others had been stolen from the Bakwins. ... To see such an exquisite painting should bring joy, but there is no joy in having a palpably stolen painting on one's wall."

Moral misgivings aside, Radcliffe believes that Vischer's client decided to turn over the Cezanne because of the tough bargaining position he took during their negotiations. Radcliffe says he made it eminently clear to Vischer that if the painting were not returned, "we were prepared to bring it to the attention of as much of the media and the authorities as possible that this stolen masterpiece had been located, but Mr. Vischer's client was refusing to return it to its rightful owner."

For Radcliffe, the principal goal was the return of the Cezanne, and that took place in a crowded Geneva law office on October 25, 1999. For Vischer, the goal was to get his client adequate compensation or reward for returning a valued masterpiece.

Radcliffe rejected the idea that the holder of the Cezanne get anything beyond legal fees and perhaps a modest donation to a favored charity. Paying hundreds of thousands of dollars, as Vischer had suggested, was out of the question, Radcliffe says, unless Vischer agreed to tell him how his client had gotten the painting so Radcliffe could trace the transactions to those individuals who had bought it knowing it had been stolen. "To be fully successful at combating art theft," Radcliffe says, "we've got to go after those people involved in the fencing operation, or those who profit by not asking the obvious question."

Vischer turned down his request. Finally, in early October 1999, a compromise was reached. Bakwin would sign over the ownership of the other six stolen paintings, and in exchange Vischer would return the Cezanne.

Although the estimated value of the six is about $1 million, Radcliffe rejects the argument that he breached his pledge not to give anything significant to Vischer's client without knowing the circumstances under which the client had gained the artwork. "I have no problem saying we were coerced to sign over the ownership of those pieces of art," Radcliffe says. "As such, those papers are without legal standing. We gave them nothing in return for the Cezanne."

And Radcliffe and Bakwin say they have not given up their efforts to recover the other six paintings. "Those belonged to my parents and my family," Bakwin says. "They belong back with us."