Online property ad reveals looted Nazi war art, triggers police raid Police in Argentina reportedly raided a home in a coastal town on Monday after someone spotted a real estate ad that included images of art the Nazis looted in the Second World War. According to a report in Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad, a painting titled “Portrait of a Lady” by 17th Century Italian painter Giuseppe …
You mean the villa, which may already have been sold, and you want to seize it from the new owner for a picture the previous owner had in there?
That is nice! Lets collect a few parking tickets and other car-related violations, then sell it, and the new owner will have to take responsibilities for those felonies.
Actually, sounds like a Trump nearly all politicians plan...
Way back in the late 1990s one of my colleagues acted as our de-facto security boffin at the time. I distinctly remembering him pointing out that online real estate photos (which were just becoming fashionable roundabout then) were, as he put it, "a burglar's wet dream".
These days the more clued-up real estate website operators have taken to blurring artwork or other valuable objects in interiour photos, but still. Think before you publish, or you might end up getting rid of more than the apartment you were trying to sell.
Without wishing to sound paranoid you have to be very careful after in-person viewings too, check for bolts drawn back on doors, windows pushed closed but with the handle left in the open position etc. All of which could be innocent oversights or the act of a thief hoping to make a nocturnal return.
Heh
The number of my students who don't think to change locks when moving into a new rental is fucking astounding.
Asking them if they trust every previous tenant (and their dodgy boyfriend/girlfriend) not to have a copy of their keys does prompt a rethink.
FWIW: Changing a euro cylinder lock is an easy 3 minute DIY job. When you move out, you simply pop the old one back on and take your lock to your new rental.
... and the family is known to the authorities in Argentina (and the family has previous form of claiming that they don't know what enquirers are talking about), freeze and seize assets until those two paintings "missing" are turned into the authorities. The daughters *knew* about the provenance of the paintings ('sold' to the Nazis), so it's no surprise the painting in the pictures online has disappeared. It would do their reputation some good to turn those paintings over and come to an arrangement with the descendants of Jacques Goudstikker.
So the family has been under suspicion of possessing this ill-gotten art for a good 80 years or so. And it took Dutch journalists monitoring Argentina property listings to spot it and inform the local police.
Seriously? In those eight decades, no one every visited the property and questioned the artwork? Then, when the police are contacted from an International agency, the art magically vanishes just in time for a 'surprise' raid.
I wonder how much of those "substantial assets" were wisely invested and still buy influence today?
I suspect Agentina may have known those "German refugees" who showed up after the war may not have been as innocent as they claimed to be. And that certain elements of the Argentine government were willing to whistle while looking the other way as said "refugees" resettled themselves, leaving piles of currency in their wake.
I'm sure the police were "shocked!" to find out about this.
I imagine just like in the US or UK, the police need to have probable cause for a search. And "probable cause" isn't "we are pretty sure her father had this painting when he left Germany in 1946".
What I don't understand is why they tried to contact her first. That's the suspicious thing here. They clearly had probable cause for a search based on the photo, they should have showed up unannounced, not given her a heads up so she had time to escape. You have to wonder if some palms weren't greased in the past to insure such a heads up.
Strange but true story: the Dutch forger and scammer who sold a fake Vermeer to Goring.
www.futurelearn.com/info/courses/art-crime/0/steps/11882
> Initially, the trial seemed set against van Meegeren. It was a cut and dried case: he sold a Vermeer to the Nazis without being forced to. But then came the twist. Van Meegeren confessed to selling Göring a painting, yes, but that painting was not a national treasure. Far from it, it was fake that he produced. According to van Meegeren, he didn’t conspire to aid the Nazis at all, but rather tricked them into taking a worthless fake.
> The painting which van Meegeren sold to the Nazis was “Woman Taken in Adultery“, a forgery of a “new” Vermeer. Van Meegeren testified that he traded his forgery for approximately 127 works of Dutch art, which would have otherwise stayed with the Nazis in Germany. He would later argue in his trial that he was not a traitor, but a patriot who used his talent for the good of the country. This proclamation drew national and international attention, and caused van Meegeren to have the fame, even if only for a short time, that he had craved as an artist.
IIRC, first heard of it in an episode of the Cautionary Tales podcast, having to do with turning experts' own cognitive biases against them - he'd leveraged the authority of a Vermeer expert to pass his - shitty - fakes off.
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Why is this so hard? Just track every phone that arrived and departed from that home since that picture was taken. Technically it could have been removed from the back of one van and loaded into the back of another van at a stop light, but, what are the chances it was moved to a different residence or storage facility owned by that family?
