00:00Paintings by the French Impressionist Renoir have been stolen from a museum in France.
00:06Thieves entered the building through a hole, cut in a fence to snatch the art worth millions of dollars.
00:12However, two of the paintings were dropped in the museum's garden during a rather hasty escape.
00:18This is the latest in a string of high-profile European art thefts in the last 12 months.
00:24Chris Marinello is the CEO and founder of Art Recovery International, an investigative firm working to try to recover stolen
00:32art.
00:33Chris, welcome. Good to see you. How significant is this theft?
00:38Well, this is, as you said, one in a chain, a series of thefts throughout Europe that shows that right
00:45now, Europe's museums are under siege.
00:50I mean, it's your business to try and get this stuff back.
00:54I mean, how likely is it that these stolen Renoirs will be retrieved?
01:01I've recovered eight Renoirs in my career over 40 years, but the thefts took place over 30 years ago.
01:08So that just gives you an idea of how difficult it is that if we don't recover these in the
01:13first few months after the theft,
01:15they could go underground and we may not see them again for decades.
01:19That just shows you the magnitude of these types of thefts.
01:24This is a rather stupid question, but I'll ask you anyway.
01:28Who's stealing them? I mean, are they being stolen to order?
01:31Are these just people having a go or is this highly organized crime?
01:36Somewhere in between.
01:37They are organized gangs operating mostly out of Eastern Europe, coming to European museums to take advantage of what they
01:45consider soft targets.
01:48These groups are not, as Hollywood would lead you to believe, super intelligent criminals.
01:55They're dropping things.
01:56We saw that with the Louvre.
01:58They're leaving paintings on the side of the road in haste of trying to escape.
02:03They are conducting the four-minute heist, which is just a minute faster than the police are able to get
02:11there.
02:12And that's what's going on in Europe right now.
02:14And what do we think happens after these are stolen?
02:17I mean, you can't hang these paintings in your home, can you?
02:21That's right.
02:21The criminals don't think about that.
02:23They're looking to monetize the theft to not have them on their person anymore or they could be arrested.
02:30So they want to get rid of them as quickly as possible.
02:32They will find that difficult to do, especially given the press coverage that we've seen on this theft.
02:38What will happen after that?
02:40They'll try on the black market.
02:41They will travel at a fraction of their true value.
02:44They'll trade them for drugs.
02:46They'll trade them for weapons.
02:47They may even try to get them through Eastern Europe over to Russia, where some Russians will buy them at
02:53a severe discount to kind of put a thumb in the eye of some Westerners.
02:58And we have seen that before, where stolen art will be acquired by Russian collectors at a severe discount.
03:07But you can't hang them on your wall, can you?
03:10Because someone will find out.
03:13I mean, it's just impossible to show it anywhere else, is it?
03:16Exactly. That's why we don't believe there's this Dr. No type collector that's ordering these thefts, because criminals do show
03:24off what they have.
03:25They will be ratted out by other criminals.
03:28They can't display them.
03:29They can't.
03:29They're not going to sit in a room and sit there and enjoy them by themselves.
03:33These are going to they're trying to monetize this theft as quickly as possible.
03:38Now, it seems like only yesterday we were talking about someone flogging off stuff, Nick from the British Museum on
03:45eBay.
03:45And it seems like less than a year, I think, since another high profile art fair from the Louvre in
03:50Paris.
03:51I mean, what is our problem in our museums and our art galleries that we can't keep these people away
03:57or keep our art more securely locked up?
04:00It's the fact that there's two wars going on, that there's immigration issues, that law enforcement is underfunded, it's understaffed,
04:08it's underpaid, and there's not enough money to protect our cultural heritage.
04:12And we need to start doing things differently.
04:15Criminals are going on to AI and chat GPT and looking up, where is my local small museum?
04:22What is inside this small museum?
04:24Is there gold?
04:26Are there jewels?
04:27Are there Renoirs?
04:27Are there Picassos?
04:29And they're hitting them, and they're hitting them hard.
04:31And this is a cultural loss that some museums will never survive.
04:37Briefly, it's a fine line, isn't it, between locking these things down and giving the public access to see them
04:44in their full beauty.
04:47That's right.
04:48Nobody wants to feel like they're being searched and have to enter like a bank vault to see beautiful art.
04:54But unfortunately, if we don't start doing that, there's not going to be enough art for us to see.
05:00Chris, good to see you.
05:01Thank you for that.
05:02Chris Marinello, the CEO and founder of Art Recovery International.
