Art of nicking culture vultures

THE first case Jim Kilmartin had to deal with when he joined North Yorkshire Police as a young beat bobby in the 1960s was the theft of a stolen painting. He was on patrol late one evening when he saw a man walking towards him with a painting tucked under one arm.

"I invited him to answer some questions," he recalls. "It's not everybody that walks down Thirsk market place at 11.30pm with a picture of a racehorse!"

The painting, of local racehorse Lancelot, turned out to have been stolen from the Golden Fleece, where it had been gracing the wall for two years. It was duly returned.

"I don't know whether it was valuable or not, but it was valuable to the people from whom it was taken," he laughs. "But they say you always remember your first case."

It may have been the first time, but it certainly wasn't the last, in his long career that he was to end up on the trail of art thieves. As a detective inspector in Harrogate he was involved in the investigation of a major art forgery operation, in which a dealer was thought to have been forging signatures on paintings.

The last big case he presided over as commander of York police was the dramatic 'sting' which saw the recovery of all 20 paintings stolen in the great York Art Gallery robbery of 1999.

Police have never given a detailed account of just how the paintings were recovered for fear of compromising future operations, but it appears undercover police officers posing as possible buyers had a series of meetings with armed robber Craig Townend that led to his eventual arrest - while actually carrying 18 of the stolen pictures - in Rotherham on May 17, 1999. It was a major coup for the police.

National Crime Squad officers were involved in the operation, as well as North Yorkshire Police and a firearms team from South Yorkshire, where the arrest took place.

But they were York paintings stolen from a York gallery, and it was a team of York detectives headed by Det Insp Phil Metcalfe that had been on the case from within an hour of the paintings being stolen. Quite rightly, York police and the man who commanded them received much of the credit.

Within less than two months, Jim Kilmartin had retired - but it seemed right, somehow, that a career which had begun with a stolen painting should have ended 32 years later with the recovery of £1 million worth of them.

"You could say I've had an interest in art theft for 32 years," he laughs now.

It was an 'interest' that hadn't gone un-noticed.

While the Art Gallery investigation was under way, one of the organisations Mr Kilmartin had been in touch with was Invaluable, a private firm which has the world's largest auctions database - and uses it to help in the recovery of stolen paintings and antiques.

The firm can use its database to cross-reference details of stolen valuables with objects listed for sale at auctions throughout the UK, US and Europe - so that if a stolen antique listed on its database is put up for sale, police, insurers and owners can be alerted instantly.

The London-based firm was looking to increase its network of agents to cover the North of England - and Jim, who as head of York Police had worked with the Evening Press on the 'Too Hot To Handle' campaign, was an obvious candidate.

Within months of his retirement the former top copper, now 54, had been recruited as Invaluable's northern Police Liaison agent - covering an area from Leicestershire to Scotland.

Being an antiques-finder extraordinary keeps him busy. Every night the Invaluable database on the Isle of Wight will flag up any matches it finds between valuables reported as stolen and those listed for auction.

Any stolen from the North of England or Scotland will be referred to Jim who then alerts the police force from whose area the item was reported stolen, so that steps to recover the property can be put in motion.

He also liaises with police after a theft, if they want advice about how to describe a stolen artwork and, when requested, sometimes accompanies them on raids of properties where they suspect stolen property may be kept. "I can sit there with my laptop while they are searching the premises and look through my database identifying things. We can quickly tell them whether they have got any stolen property and it gives them confidence to seize those items," he says.

There's no doubting his real passion for the antiques detective's job. Because antiques are not simply overpriced collectibles - they are often priceless family heirlooms that mean far more to the people from whom they were stolen than they could possibly mean to anyone else.

In one of a series of burglaries at Thirsk, he says, one of the objects stolen was an antique writing box. "Inside there were some letters from the early 1800s. A young man was describing how, because he had TB, he'd been given a bath chair to be pushed about in - and how he really enjoyed this.

"These letters were written by an ancestor of the family. They had been stolen along with the box, and you know in your heart of hearts that the thief has probably just thrown them out of the car window. But to the family these things are absolutely irreplaceable," says Jim.

One of the advantages the antiques detective faces in his struggle with thieves is that if an antique or old painting is to maintain its value, its appearance cannot be altered. It's not like a stolen car that can be resprayed and given a false number plate. If you repaint a Turner it's not a Turner any more.

This can make it difficult for a thief to sell. To overcome this, Jim says, art thieves will often move stolen property around - and hold on to it for up to several years until they believe the 'heat' has died down.

But even then, with a good enough database, the valuables could be identified immediately if a thief tries to sell them at auction. Jim says the problem at the moment is that there is no national database of stolen art and antiques. The Invaluable database is probably the nearest thing - but even so only about one per cent of stolen art or antiques is listed.

Jim says if the war against the art thieves is to be won what is really needed is a national database - one on which all stolen valuables reported by every police force in Britain is listed.

That's what he was arguing for before a Commons Select Committee on the theft of 'cultural property' recently. To Jim, it's plain common sense.

"The more information circulated, the more you are going to recover," he says. "It's a simple equation." Simple indeed.

Only art thieves would disagree.

Updated: 11:08 Friday, January 26, 2001