Hot Art by Joshua Knelman

world within the city.
    â€œEven in those early days, without any experience at this kind of work, I knew immediately this work was different,” said Hrycyk. “I’d been working gangs and ghetto crimes. Suddenly I’m walking into museums and galleries asking questions. I was dealing with the rich and the powerful, the most influential people of the city.”
    Some of the wealthiest collectors in L.A. were incredibly irresponsible when it came to buying, selling, and storing their art. In many of the early cases, Hrycyk discovered, no records of transactions had been held on to. For a detective, a paper trail is vital; it’s a path to follow. In this new scene, often nothing remained to signify that any transaction had even occurred. “Just one person saying they had paid for a work, or another saying they had sold a painting,” he said. “It didn’t make any sense.”
    Another big difference from traditional property-crimes work was that even when there were suspects they often had no prior criminal convictions. “I found that a very high percentage of the cases I investigated involved people who had never been in trouble with the law before,” he said.
    The detectives theorized that stolen art was also unlike other property-crime cases when it came to time frames. If a stolen tv wasn’t found immediately, it might as well not exist. Paintings were different. A few years could go by, even a decade or two, and a painting could suddenly reappear at an auction house or a gallery. Information, then, became critical to solving these cases. Martin and Hrycyk wrote their reports by hand and filed them in blue binders. They started organizing those blue binders by year, and soon they had a few shelves’ worth. The blue binders were their database and their archive— whoever worked those cases in the future would need to rely on the information in those binders. Without those records, it would be as if the cases had never happened.
    â€œThe art world as a whole is very secretive,” Hrycyk said. “Deals are done on a handshake, on a sense of trust, and on the basis of a relationship. I’ve run into many situations where people will enter into million-dollar financial deals based upon their personal relationship and evaluation of another person, just by eyeballing them.”
    Confidence, Hrycyk figured out, was a big part of the problem. In the art world, confidence often replaced good business practices and safeguards. The sums of money trading hands without records were large, and so were the egos.
    â€œPride and reputation ruled the scene,” he said. “A lot of people in this city take pride in their judgment of character. Over the years I have seen that kind of pride in judgment be the undoing of many people.” He explained, “A stranger with a business card can walk into a gallery and say, ‘I think I have a client who would be interested in buying this painting.’ The gallery owner might take a chance on this stranger only because he possesses a business card. That stranger may be a con man.” The con man may ask to borrow a small piece of art, to see how it fits with the collector’s taste. He may do this several times, always returning the art to the gallery or dealer. By going through these motions, the con man creates a relationship, becomes a friend.
    â€œThen he might borrow a much more valuable painting, and simply disappear,” continued Hrycyk, who has investigated dozens of cases where a borrowed painting simply vanished. In those cases, when a detective asks for records or proof of purchase, the gallery owner often winces and shrugs. This leaves the detective powerless: “If a crime has been committed I can make an arrest, but the prosecutor must have evidence. If there is no paper trail, a prosecution might be impossible.”
    The art world, it turned out, was totally unregulated. It relied on a