Canadian Cultural Heritage Deputy Minister Isabelle Mondou unveils Yousuf Karsh’s Roaring Lion portrait of Churchill, stolen in 2022 from Ottawa’s Fairmont Chateau Laurier and recovered in Italy, during a ceremony at the Canadian Embassy in Rome, Italy, on Sept. 19, 2024.Yara Nardi/Reuters
Canada needs investigators who are trained specifically to tackle art crime, says a former FBI agent who was instrumental in establishing the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s art-crime team.
Robert Wittman, who is now a consultant based in Philadelphia, said the U.S. national security and law enforcement agency recognized two decades ago the importance of having a trained squad that could conduct investigations into art crime, which is often a magnet for organized crime and money laundering.
The FBI’s art-crime team, which began its work in 2004, says it has recovered more than 20,000 items valued at more than US$900-million. Agents get specialized training and work in co-operation with local police departments.
Wittman said in an interview that over the years, he has met officers in Canada who are interested in art-crime investigations and some have experience with this kind of work.
“I think they could form the nucleus of a great team,” he said.
Recently, Wittman was tapped for his specialized skill set to assist efforts to track down an iconic 1941 photograph by Yousuf Karsh of then-British prime minister Winston Churchill, which was snatched from a high-end hotel in Ottawa.
The photograph, known as The Roaring Lion, was taken from the Fairmont Château Laurier between late 2021 and early 2022 and replaced with a print, which wasn’t discovered until months later. This November, the original was returned to the hotel after police discovered it in Italy. It had been sold at a London auction house to an unsuspecting buyer.
In Canada, there are no plans for the RCMP to create an art-crime division despite growing calls from individuals who study art crime and want this issue to be taken much more seriously. They point to cases, such as a massive forgery in which paintings were falsely attributed to acclaimed Anishinaabe artist Norval Morrisseau, as evidence for why such a team is needed.
Lawyer Jonathan Sommer, one of the people who worked to expose the Morrisseau fakes, said the fraud grew much bigger than it should have because Canada does not have a dedicated art-crime division.
The Morrisseau forgeries are believed to be the “biggest art fraud in the world,” the Ontario Provincial Police and the Thunder Bay Police Service said in May, 2023, after a joint 2½-year investigation that led to the arrest of eight people. The value of the fraud is estimated at around $100-million.
The painting on the left is not a real Norval Morrisseau: It is one of several forgeries seized by the Ontario Provincial Police from a multimillion-dollar forgery operation. At right, for comparison, is a genuine painting from 1975 of the artist’s wife and daughter.Ontario Provincial Police/AFP via Getty Images; McMichael Canadian Art Collection
Sommer, who co-runs a company called Morrisseau Art Consulting Inc. with researcher John Zemanovich, has said the scope of the fraud should encourage collectors to take a more pro-active approach. It would be a mistake for anyone to assume police have resolved all the Morrisseau fraud issues, he said.
Jason Rybak, an inspector with the Thunder Bay Police and a lead investigator on the Morrisseau case, said art crime is a global issue. He told The Globe and Mail earlier this year that his force does not have resources to track down suspected fakes, including in other parts of the world. Police are aware of hundreds of dubious paintings in places like Germany and China, he added.
At the outset of the investigation, Rybak reached out to the FBI’s art-crime team for guidance on how to conduct the probe.
This year, The Globe has reported extensively on how fraudulent paintings remained on display in many prominent public institutions.
In January, a piece called Salmon Life Giving Spawn, which was attributed to Morrisseau, was removed from a room at the Ontario Legislature after The Globe flagged questions about its authenticity. The same month, the National Capital Commission, a federal Crown corporation, announced it was working with police after The Globe reported a painting called Circle of Four was a suspected fake.
In late June, The Globe reported that another painting falsely attributed to Morrisseau called Astral Plain Scouts was in the possession of the Winnipeg Art Gallery-Qaumajuq. The gallery said it would keep the painting in a vault and consider next steps for the piece.
All of these paintings were deemed to be fakes in court in an agreed statement of facts for 52-year-old David Voss, who pleaded guilty in June to a central role in the forgeries. In early September, he was sentenced to five years in prison.
Wittman said art crime is insidious because there are victims who do not know they have been scrammed. When a fake piece is sold to an unsuspecting person, another crime is committed, he added.
Rybak has pointed to numerous victims in the Morrisseau art fraud, including the federal government and a former senator, Serge Joyal. The inspector said Joyal unsuspectingly purchased the painting that ended up in the NCC collection at an auction in the 1990s.
