You're listening to a stage talk titled Detecting Stolen Art. This week we're joined by art detective Arthur Brans. He, alongside law enforcement, uncovered more than 200 stolen artworks over his career, from a stolen Picasso to statues owned by Hitler, that disappeared after the war. He was able to find them. And, he says, anyone
would be able to do what he does. In this stage talk he explains how open sources are crucial to his work, and he shares valuable resources for those who are curious about the world of art crime themselves. This talk was hosted by me, Merel Zut, on Thursday the 31st of July 2025, in the Bellingcat Discord server. Hello everyone, welcome back to our stage talks. Today we're speaking to an art detective which I think might
be one of the coolest job titles there is. Artur Brandt has recovered over 200 stolen artworks throughout his career. These include famous paintings once thought lost from Dalí's to Picasso's. He uses an array of different techniques to uncover where these pieces may have ended up. from going undercover on the black market to more traditional open source methods. Arthur also works alongside law enforcement in their pursuit of the thieves
providing expertise and guidance. Despite years of experience he still maintains that this role is something anyone could be doing and therefore Arthur will talk us through his methods using a real case he worked on and he'll explain how open sources played an important role in solving the mysteries. If you have any questions while he speaks please put them in the chat. And if you don't want me to share your username, make sure to share this as well in your questions
so I leave your name out. And due to the complexity and volume of Arthur's work in the Q &A section, Arthur will only be answering questions on specific cases that he has already mentioned in the talk. We don't unfortunately have time to dig into all his work. If you want to learn about other cases not mentioned, you can read Arthur's book on Hitler's Horses, which we'll put a link for in the chat, or you can follow him on social media. Of course, we will have time to dive into
how and why Artur does what he does. And with that in mind, please, Arthur, if you want to go ahead and share your story and your work, you can go ahead now. Okay. Well, everybody, thank you for joining. My name is Arthur Brand, called Art Detective. It's not really a title. You cannot go to university to become an art detective. It's just... the title that they gave me. I'm working very close with police forces all over the world to track down stolen art or
fake art. And the topic that I chose for today is a recent case that I cracked together with the police. It was this year and I chose this one because it has a lot of juicy details, but also we cracked it through the use of open sources, which means that you could do the same. So let's start with this case. You see now for the people who are watching now, you see now a small painting on screen and it started with this. This is a
news article. You see a small painting. It says After 40 years, this painting is first to be seen again for the public. It was a Dutch museum who was publishing or was exhibiting this particular work. And it was made by Pieter Bruegel, a very important, famous Dutch painter. And to describe the painting for the people who are listening and not watching, you see a peasant woman in
a summer landscape. She's wearing two things, a bucket of water in one hand, And a pair of tongs with drawing pieces of charcoal in the other hand. And that's an old Dutch proverb which says, don't trust anybody with water in one hand and fire in the other hand. So this painting, a very important painting from Pieter Bruegel, as said in the newspaper, was first shown after 40 years. There was this man, John Brosius, he
works for a Dutch magazine called Find. And he wanted to write an article about this particular painting. So he started searching for more information with the title, but he couldn't find anything on the internet, which is not that strange because many of the paintings from the 16th, 17th, 18th century do not have a name. They were just painted. So the names were put on later. So he couldn't find anything on the internet, but he didn't give up. So he did a reverse image search with
this picture from this newspaper. But as you can see, the painting is shot from the side. You cannot see it very well. So that didn't work either. So most people would have given up at this moment, but John Brosey has walked that extra mile. So he edited the picture and you can see that here. He turned it up and then he put it again through Google images. That's a good lesson. You never should give up, you know.
Try everything to get what you want to do. And when he put this image to Google search, he got a hit. And he watched the painting and he thought, well, this probably is the same painting. It's a woman carrying embers and it looks quite similar. So he started reading through Google Translate. And the story that he read was quite explosive. The story said that this painting, woman carrying embers, was in the possession of a museum in
Gdansk in Poland in World War II in 1944. You know, in World War II, there was a lot of stolen art, et cetera. We all know these stories. So he got interested. He thought, how can it be that a painting that was in 1944 in a museum in Poland can now be on exhibition in a Dutch museum? The Dutch museum got it from a Dutch family. It was in the possession of a Dutch family who had lent it out to this museum. So he thought,
how can that be? But when he read more about the article, he found out that there were more disturbing things. In 1974, on April 24, a cleaning lady was working in this museum in Poland, in the room where this painting of Bruegel was hanging on the wall. And in a moment of inattention, she knocks the Bruegel from the wall. The glass panel protecting this painting shatters into countless pieces on the floor. And you can imagine
the cleaning lady was shaking. She thought, oh my God, we are talking about 1974, Poland was communist country. So she thought, oh my God, this is so bad news. So she called the curator. The curator stepped in and she and the curator both feared for their job. In communist Poland, you could go to prison for destroying cultural heritage. The curator leans forward to the floor. With trembling hands, he picks up the painting. And to his great surprise, the painting feels
like thin paper. And then he looks better and he sees that instead of a painting, he has reproduction in his hands, cut from a magazine. And then, of course, the penny drops. The painting had been stolen weeks or months before and had been replaced by a copy from a magazine, of course, to mask a theft. So the cleaning lady, of course, was relieved. She thought, my God, I just uncovered a theft, but at least I didn't destroy the painting.
But the story gets darker. Of course, the police starts investigating in 1974, the Polish police, this theft, and then somebody calls in, and that's Romwald Werner. Here you see a picture of Romwald Werner. Romwald Werner was working for the state in the port of Gdansk. And after the theft, he read about it in the newspaper, he called the police and he said, I'm working in a port here, but there are some people in this port smuggling
stolen art abroad. You must understand that in communist Poland 74, you know who dared to steal a painting and who had the connections to smuggle them abroad. So, Ronald Werner thought that maybe the Secret Service was involved. So, he called the police and the police ordered him in for questioning. Ten minutes before he would enter the police station, some people nearby, employees from a cemetery, heard somebody screaming. They
went outside and they saw somebody waving. screaming he was full of flames somebody had put petrol over him and he was standing there he fell down and he died and that person was Romuald Werner. So it appears according to this article that some people didn't want him to go to the police to tell about this theft. The Secret Service then closed the case Which is strange, of course, you know, it gave more suspicion to the idea that the secret service was involved in the theft
of the Bruegel. So Brozius, the Dutch guy who was reading this article to Google translate, you know, he was shocked. He thought, oh my God, this painting was in the war. It was in Poland until 1974. Then it was stolen. Somebody got murdered. So he was quite shocked. But the article said one more thing, that Bruegel painted six similar paintings of a woman carrying embers.
So Brozis was not sure that the painting that was now shown in the Netherlands was the same painting that was being talked about in the article. So he thought, well, let's contact the Dutch Museum, who is now exhibiting this painting. So he wrote them an email, but he got no response. And he thought, well, sure they have read this email and they probably figured out that these two are not the same. Probably the one in the Netherlands is one of the other five similar
paintings. But little did he know that nobody read his email because the person who shoot was on sick leave. So normally here the story ends. Nobody would have discovered this. But here is a lesson make yourself known. In the last 15 years, I have done a lot of interviews. I have my own series on Dutch television. People think I'm an expert. So I always give the message that
you can contact me if you have questions. Luckily for me, Brocers, after half a year, he remembered this case and he thought, well, I know this artifact. Let's give him a call. You never know. So Brooches called me and told me the story and I was intrigued of course, you know, World War II, Bruchel, that's not a, you know, it's quite a big name, a murder,
probably involvement of the secret service. So I started to read about this story and I of course also thought that the museum had read this email and that most likely the Bruchel in the Netherlands was not identical, was not the same one that had been stolen in Poland, but one of the five others. Roses could not find the five others, so I started looking for the five others. There are a lot of websites where you can find art. One of them is the RKD, which is a huge archive
with hundreds of thousands of paintings. So it took me three days, but finally I got the other five identical ones. This is one of them. As you can see, this is also a woman carrying ambus. It's almost identical to the one that was stolen in Poland, but you can see it's not a summer landscape, but a winter landscape. I found all the other five and I was now sure, comparing them all together, that the one in Poland, stolen in Poland in 1974, was indeed the same one that
was now in the Netherlands. What did I do? I called the police because, you know, this painting was stolen in 1974 in Poland. I also found that it was, this is this picture. You can see it. This is the list of Poland's most wanted pieces of art. And on the bottom left, you can see woman carrying embers of Bruegel. So, it was a very important painting for Poland, national heritage. So, I called the police and the police checked my findings and they went to the Dutch Museum
to secure the painting. Well, you would think that the story ends here. It was stolen, it was secured by the Dutch police, but in my field, in tracking stolen art, there was always a new twist. Because the first question was, Could Poland claim the painting? If the Dutch owners could prove that they had bought the painting 30, 40, 50 years ago in good faith, according to Dutch law, there would be a problem because there is something called statute of limitations.
That means that certain crimes after a certain period of time, cannot be prosecuted anymore. That means that when you steal something in the Netherlands after 12 years, you cannot prosecute the thieves anymore. And as the theft had occurred in 74, the statute of limitations both in the Netherlands and Poland about theft had expired. But of course, there was the murder of Ronald Werner, most likely linked to this case, to this
theft. So there was a chance, you know, because normally murder doesn't reach the statute of limitations, but unfortunately in Poland it expires after 30 years. So you would think, well, we have a problem here because legally the owners in the Netherlands would keep his stolen painting. But I did some more research, of course, using Google Translate because I don't speak Polish.
And then I found something Interesting because Poland has a special law and that says that all crimes committed during the communist era in Poland, which ended in 1989, never expire. So this would mean that Poland could reclaim the painting. It belonged to them, although it had been expired according to normal law. because of this special Polish law, it had not been expired.
But I said in my field of work, there was always a new surprise because I was triggered by the fact that, as I told before, that the museum in Poland had bought the painting, had acquired this painting in 1944 during World War II. And we all know World War II, millions of artworks have been stolen mostly from Jews. So there could
be something tricky there. And we did some more research and to our big surprise we found out that the painting indeed before the war had been in the possession in the collection of a Dutch family. Of course it's not the same Dutch family who was now in possession. But before the war between 1932 and 1941 the painting had been in Holland. owned by a Dutch family. And here you can see a picture when this painting by Brugge was in their collection in 1941. We did some
more research, open sources. All this open source is what we did. And we found that there was This was also a big surprise that indeed this family had claimed that their entire collection had been not stolen, but they had sold it to the Germans in 1941, but they said it was under pressure. You know, if the Germans, the Nazis came to you and said, we want this painting, we offer you this amount of money, you hardly could say no, you know, because if you would say no, you would
be in big problems. After the war, the family went to the Dutch state and said our whole collection, including a Bruegel was sold best to the Germans, but it had not been done voluntarily. And this, of course, would mean that the painting, although it was stolen in 1974 in Poland, it had stolen before in 1941 by the Germans. So in that case, the painting should not go back to Poland. but
to the family in the Netherlands. So we did some more research also on open sources and we found the website of the Dutch Restitution Commission. In the Netherlands, we have a restitution commission. It's a state institution. And they had looks 10, 15 years ago into the case of this Dutch family who had lost or what sold their entire collection, including the Brugel. to the Nazis and the Dutch state denied the claim. They said look you sold it to the Nazis but we have found
no proof that it was not voluntarily. Which means that this Dutch family could not reclaim anything of the collection in the future. So case closed you would say because The Dutch family could not reclaim the painting, which means it should go back to Poland. But another problem came up. As said, the Dutch state had said that the Dutch family had sold it voluntarily to the Nazis. brought it to Reichsmarschall Goering. You see his picture. He is standing next to Hitler watching
art. Goering was a real art lover. And Goering then transported this painting in 1944 to the Museum in Rysdansk in Poland, what we have read before. At that time, that museum was owned by the Nazis. So the Dutch state had concluded that the Nazis had bought this painting legally. And this could mean, I know it sounds strange, but that the Nazis were the legal owners because they had paid for it. Of course, the Nazis do
not exist anymore. But if you do a little bit more research, also through open sources, you will find that the current German government is the legal successor of the Third Reich. And that means two things. They had to pay compensations to the victims of the Nazis, mostly Jews, of course. But on the other hand, everything that was legally owned by the Nazis should go back to the current German state. I know it sounds
crazy, but that's just the way it is. But I'm sure that in this case, you know, I cannot think that the German state will claim this painting, you know, it would be a scandal, of course. So my guess is that this painting, which is still in the Netherlands, will eventually go back to Poland. to dance to the museum there. And I said it's considered there as cultural heritage. It's one of the most important paintings from that museum. So it's still open what will be decided.
But if you want to follow this story more, you can follow my socials. But of course, you can also read press articles about it. There has been press articles in many languages about this story. I told this story to show you that these stories have A lot of juicy details, you know. Well, murder is not really juicy, but you know what I mean. World War II, the Nazis, a Dutch family, a mass theft, the cleaning lady who accidentally kicks off this painting from the wall. Everything
is in it. And if you give it time and you have the skills and you are determined to follow up on such stories, you know, you could do what we did in this story. So this was my case for today and now I go back to Merel for the questions. Thank you Arthur. It's a fascinating story and I think there are some questions coming in from the chat right now. The first question is very straightforward. Is the painting still on the
display now and I'm curious also where? Yes, the painting is still in the museum in the Netherlands. It has been secured by the Dutch police. And well, as you have heard from my story, it's a very complicated legal issue. The Dutch family who sold the collection As they said under Dures, not voluntarily, they might appeal the Dutch decision from 10, 15 years ago that their collection was not seized by the Germans. So that can happen.
The Dutch family, who's the current owner of the painting, could say, look, it might not have reached the statute of limitations in Poland because of that special Polish law, but according to Dutch law, we are the owners. So there are still a lot, maybe even Germany will reclaim the painting. So there is still a lot to do. I drove the police and I who did this together. I heard from the prosecutor that we drive her nuts because, you know, it's such a complicated
story. So at the moment it's still in the Dutch Museum. But my guess is that eventually it will go back to Poland. And I think it belongs there. Cyber 4 and 6Pi. asked in the chat how important was it that you essentially lived in the same areas as the artwork or that you know about Dutch law perhaps? Well not at all. I'm a little bit older than I think most of the people in the public. I'm still from from an era that there
was no internet. But in these days, you know, you can find anything everywhere around the world. And with Google Translate or other means for translating other languages, you can find anything everywhere in the world. I found pieces in South America. I found pieces in South Korea. So in this case, you know, this John Brosius this guy who started his investigation, he just was interested by this painting, you know, a very important painting that turned up after 40 years. He didn't
suspect anything. When I would have read this article, I would because, you know, most paintings are not hidden for 40 years. Of course, in some cases, yes, because a family owes a painting and they sell it after 40, 50 years. But normally it's known where important paintings are. So if you read something about a painting in a small newspaper that a painting resurfaced after 40 years, well, it might trigger you to get interested, you know, and then you start searching for it.
And I think that of 50 % of all the cases that I cracked, I used open sources. And people always think that I have some special talent. I don't. is just using your, you should be determined. Of course, you should build up a network of people. Well, we are here at Bellingcat, that's already a network, but you know, everyone could have found this painting. I think that's exactly the type of mindset that a lot of people in this
server and at Bellingcat are following. And that's also why I see some people asking in the chat, and maybe you could talk first a bit about How do you start with an investigation? Because you said, you explained you tried to get your name out there, people come to you with clues and information. Is that how you usually start or do you also sometimes just stumble upon something on the internet and start digging into there?
Well, both. I of course know the wet flags, you know, sometimes I read something about something and I think, well, this sounds tricky. But in most cases, not in most cases, but in some cases I'm being called even by students, art history, you know, from the United States who tell me, look, I have an uncle who called me because he thinks I'm an expert, I'm studying art and he has a problem with a certain painting which might have a shady history. And then he contacts me.
If people, if you are out there on the internet, you know, it's like Bellingcat. They are doing the same. If people know that you exist, people from your surroundings might come to you with questions. So that could be the first link. But if you start, there are entire websites like lostart .de, which has thousands of black and white pictures of paintings stolen during World
War Two. And they are still missing. And I know of some people who are like me, you know, we don't have any other hobby than searching stolen art. And they go from picture to picture and do reverse image search. And once in a while, they come up with a story of a painting, a painting that might have been stolen by the Nazis in Poland, and turns up somewhere in the Netherlands or in Japan. So there is so much there out there, so many venues where you can start, you can read
about it. And I think, you know, who doesn't love art, who doesn't love history, the stories, and who doesn't love crime stories? So this comes all together here, you know. I have other paintings now, we are working on that, paintings that had been in the hands of Adolf Hitler, for example. So, you know, these stories are so great. It's about the beauty of art and the bad things of
crime. And I think, you know, if you're determined, if you can make this your hobby, if you have a few hours to... to kill in the weekend, you know, it's such a fascinating world. And there is still so much to find out, you know, I said www .lostart .de, you can find hundreds of thousands of paintings which have been lost, but I think
half of them are still out there. And with reverse image search, Maybe someone in the public is going to do that tonight, and maybe in two or three days, he or she finds a painting stolen from a museum, let's say in France, and he or she finds them now in the collection of an American museum. We have done that. And the feeling when you have this hit, it's the best feeling you can get. You spoke a bit about some red flags and telltale signs that you look for when you
think, hey, this is a fishy story. AlpIntel asks in the chat, what would be telltale signs and tools to preliminarily, sorry, that word I struggle with, detect forgeries. So they mentioned UV lights, radio code, GEMMAs, spectrometers. Can you tell anything about these? Feltail signs. Yeah. Yeah. Forgeries are very spectacular. Some people say, I say that too, that 30%, three zero of all the art which you can find on the internet or at auction houses or at museums is fake or
misattributed. 30%. Of course, if you go to an auction house with a good name like Sotheby's or Christie's, It's not 30%, it's less, but in other auction houses, it's more than 30%. So 30 % of all the art on the market is fake. And there are a lot of ways to find out. You have, of course, technical ways. You can go to a laboratorium and to check certain technical stuff. I'm not an expert in that. but that doesn't hold me back.
I was once called by a person who said, Arthur, can you help me find out if a certain piece of art that I own is a fake? And I said, sure. And she said, it was a woman, she said, but how can you know? I didn't even tell you which piece of art it is. How can you be an expert in everything, you know, because you have paintings, you have statues, you have everything. And she said, So you know a lot of experts. And I said, yeah, yeah, I do know, but that's not the way I work.
And she said, but how do you work? I said, well, what I always do is when somebody offers me a painting, I do some research and try to find out who has faked these paintings in the past. I'm now doing this work for 15 or 20 years. So in my red book, I have like a hundred forges with a telephone number, and I just give them a call. You know, that's how I start. So I call.
If there was a Giacometti popping up on the market, there was a very famous Giacometti forger who was sentenced in Germany to four years in jail. I have his email address. So I sent him a picture and I say, Robert, his name is Robert Dreesen, a very famous forger. Is this piece real? I cannot ask him, did you fake it or did you force it because then he would incriminate himself. But if I ask him, is this piece real? And he sends back, no. I know that the piece is fake and that
he made it. So there are a lot of ways to find out if a piece is fake. Read about forges, see what the techniques are. You can always go to a laboratory and ask them to test it, but there are so many red flags that can pop up. Many fakes that are now on the market, they always have the story that it was, when you turn the painting,
You see always a fake stamp of the Nazis. They have to come up the forges with an explanation that this new fake, which they say that it's a very old master, that it has not been on the market, has not been seen for 40, 50 years. That's of course normal because it was fake yesterday, but they have to make up a story that it was hidden somewhere. In these days, you see a lot of these paintings with a fake German Nazi stamp
on the back. So if you Google a little bit, you see, oh my God, there are more of these pieces on the market. Other pieces that show up have strange provenances. A provenance is the history of ownership of a painting. If a painting has been faked, of course, it's just a week on the market. So it was not in the hands 40 years ago of someone. a big collector. So what they always say is it was in the possession of General Franco or Mussolini or Ceausescu. So they always come
up with these stories. So, and if you read books about forgeries and there are many on it, one of them is from Noah Charney from Arca. You also should follow Arca. They are very good in this. You will see the tricks and you will see the red flags. And I think that detecting forgeries is even more interesting than trying to find
stolen art. Thank you. I have another question in the chat from Chris, who asks, of the 25 objects you helped to return to the National Archives of the Netherlands, which one had the most impact on you and why? Three weeks ago, I recovered together with the Dutch police. I always work with the police. Every step I do, I do with the police. That's an important lesson because if you go hunting for criminals or for stolen art, you are civilian, you know, and you have to follow
the law. So it's always good to have very good relations with your local police force. You inform them what you're going to do, et cetera. But in this case, with the stuff stolen from the Dutch National Archives, It was in somebody's cellar and this person was more or less dying. So family members were searching the cellar and they discovered an old box with old paper works
and they thought, well, it might be stolen. And what you see in most cases is that people do not want to get involved, especially when they are innocent. So then they destroy these pieces of art. I always give the message out, before you destroy stolen art, give me or somebody else at ARCA or whatever, give us a call, let's discuss it. Maybe there's a way out for you to bring
it back. And in this case that happened and it turned out that in this box, there were some pieces that were declared world heritage by UNESCO, the VOC, the Dutch East India companies. the first multinational in the world. And in this box was, for example, the first meeting of the Dutch East India Company. A famous logo, the first company logo in the world was designed in the book that I found in that box. There was
a ship lock of Michiel de Ruyter. Michiel de Ruyter is one of the most famous admirals in history. He was a hero in the Netherlands. He saved the Netherlands many times, but he's also still considered one of the... biggest admirals in history. And then I opened this box and I see the first journal of this man describing his travels to South America and that he had to fight the Spanish in Spain with his ship.
So that's the fun thing of this, whether you recover a painting, whether you recover a statue or a box with 17th century ship logs. the first meeting of the Dutch East India Company. You know, it's like stepping into Treasure Island. And I think, thinking about it now, I think that's the most interesting thing in this field of work. Every painting you start researching, like this painting by Bruegel, we started to look for this Bruegel. Was it stolen or not? You learn so much.
You learn something about communist Poland. You learn about secret services who killed. for stealing art. You find things about the Nazis. How did they work? And in the end, you learn more about Bruegel. So every story is like a book on itself. Yeah, that's fascinating. I had the same experience when recently we were working on the, we made some art crime challenges on our website together
with Linda from ARCA. And it's so fascinating how much comes together in this work with the crime story of it, but also the historic art and art history information that you learn along the way. So it's very interesting. If you start searching for stolen art on lost art or whatever, and if you feel insecure, you can always ask
Linda from ARCA or myself or other experts. You just send them an email and you say, look, I'm new in this field, but Could it be that I just discovered that this painting stolen by Goering is now in that museum? They look quite similar. You know, there are people out there like Linda and myself and some others. You can always approach them. Don't feel ashamed, you know, give it a
shot. Could you maybe share some of your favorite open source research tools that people in this server could use to get started in this themselves? Yes, well, first of all, you have there is the Interpol. app of Stolen Art. You can download it when you see a painting you can. just make a picture and this app then shows immediately whether this painting or statue shows up in the Paul Stolen database of art. That's one. I said we have the lostart .de which I use a lot, which
is fascinating. So you have these kind of websites where there are hundreds of thousands of pieces of art that had been stolen mostly by the Nazis and that are still not recovered. So it's an endless sea of stolen art, you know, and not that many people are searching for it. You know, you have Linda, you have myself, you have some police forces, but that's about it. So there are maybe 200 people in the world looking for 200 ,000 or more. pieces of stolen art. So you
can use the app of Interpol. You can follow stories that I put out on my social media. ARCA has a lot of... They do summer courses. They have a blog. You know, it all starts with being fascinated by these stories. And if you follow people like us, you will come across certain websites which can bring you further. I started 20 years ago and... I could hardly distinguish a Van Gogh from a Rembrandt, you know? Well, this is a bit
exaggerated, but look where I am now. And that's, I think, because if you feel passionate about something and you can end up where I am, you know, give it a shot and feel passionate. And who is not passionate about art, these stories which I just told about this Polish, this Bruegel, you know? who doesn't like these stories, you know, and it's out there for everyone. George in the chat is asking, you've been doing this work for over 15 years now. How did you see art
crime evolve since then? Have you noticed any emerging trends in the field of art crime? Yes, of course, we have now internet, we have a lot of places where people can easily sell now stolen art. You have the dark web, but In many countries in the world, we have a problem that the soil is full of treasures which still have not been unearthed from the Romans, the Greeks, et cetera. And of course, an archaeologist should dig them
up. But in many countries, you have people with metal detectors roaring around and finding these pieces, maybe gold, silver, and they sell them
on the black market. in the old days it was difficult you had to find an art dealer but these days you can you can put them out on ebay or wherever you know so that's that's a big problem the police is very focused on that so that has changed and what you also see is that in the last 10 -15 years in many pieces of the world where these people are walking around with metal detectors these grave robbers the credit of our civilization was in the Middle East. So there is where you
can find the most. Unfortunately, in many of these countries, there is not a stable government anymore. And we have seen that certain terrorist groups took over this world of illicit antiquities. So we have seen cases in which people linked to groups like Al -Qaeda or ISIS have been caught selling art, stolen art on the Western market. So that has changed. And what also has changed
is that there was more awareness. In the old days, nobody was that interested, you know, but in these days, you see that many countries in South America, in Africa, they say, look, these pieces once were stolen from us, we want them back. For many countries, to have these treasures back, which were once stolen from their countries, it gives them pride. It should not be that all these pieces that were illegally found by gravediggers were smuggled to the West Air and are now here
in collections or in museums. So what you see is many countries now have stepped in, China, countries in Africa, countries in South America. So these are the things that have changed. Alp Intel asks about your connection and your work together with law enforcement. How did you first link up with law enforcement officials and how does an OSINT investigator or an investigator like yourself complement law enforcement in this
field? Well, it starts... a little bit strange, you know, you start to find stolen art and then you have to call the police. And then the police says, look, who are you? And I said, well, you know, I just came from the university. It's my hobby. And then they say, well, we have a problem because in most countries, the art squad is very limited. In most countries, Stolen art is not a priority. Priorities are terrorism, drugs,
et cetera. But there is always in any country one, two, three people who are working on art. So you get to know them, you start working with them because they have not enough people to do all the things that they should do. In the beginning, you know, if you or I or anybody else starts working in this field and you find something, the police, of course, is a little bit suspicious. Who is this man or woman? But in the years, you know, after 10, after a couple of years, you
earn that trust. And in the end, I'm now working at this very moment now with five different police forces all over Europe in cases involving their countries. and I've been very closely working together with the German police in the past and still I'm working with them almost on a daily basis with the Dutch police, with the Spanish
police. So they do like it when there are people like also Linda from ARCA and myself, people who are They always think we are a little bit crazy, you know, because they at least earn money with it. We are doing this more or less like a hobby, but they know some police officers, you know, they enter this field and after five years they are being replaced. And people like Linda and myself are keeping sitting there, you
know, and keeping keep going. What you see is that many of these police forces are very happy. They have said about me in many interviews, we are glad we have Arthur Brandt here in the Netherlands who is monitoring everything with us and every steps he does, he does in consultation with us. So you have to have good relations with the police and you have to earn that trust, but sooner or later you will get that trust, if you behave
of course. Okay, I want to remind everyone in listening in that we only have 10 more minutes, so please if you have any more questions, this is the time. I was wondering, can you talk a bit about the time frame? Does it get more difficult to look into art pieces that have been missing for a long, long time? Or does that time frame not really matter and is it dependent on other circumstances? The older the better, because... You know, there have been cases that have been
closed 30, 20, 40 years ago. Nobody is searching for them anymore. So most cases I do, the statute of limitations have reached. The best cases are cases that are 10, 20, 30 years old because the police is not investigating anymore. Most people have forgotten about it. So, like this piece, you know, we talked about the Bruegel. It was stolen in 74. It was almost forgotten in Poland until four years ago. They did a big documentary
about it on Polish television. So, can you imagine how Poland felt when the news broke there that the painting stolen in 1974 just resurfaced in the Netherlands? I think the older the stories are, the better it is. Sometimes when something gets stolen 50 years ago, people are hiding it and then they die. And then a son or daughter finds it on a seller, like the Dutch East India Company stuff that I recovered, and they try
to sell it maybe on the market. And if you look for certain pieces, I think that the best Cases are the cases that are more than 10 years old. And it's also very cool, of course, to crack a case that people have been trying to crack for 50 years and nobody cracks it and then you crack it. So I think those are the coolest cases. So even two years ago, there was Madonna, the famous singer, she was posing for magazine, Vogue,
I think it was. She was posing in front of a painting and some people in France, a mayor was watching it and he recognized this painting. He thought, oh my God, this looks like the painting that was stolen during World War I in 1918 from our little town. So even if you look in magazines like Vogue, you know, you can crack a case that's over 100 years old. Alina in the chat asks if AI tools have changed the detection of forged or solenoid art, if you use those in your work.
I think that they will. I'm not that much into artificial intelligence yet, but I do think that it will change a lot. They are now trying to train artificial intelligence in detecting forgeries. The problem with detecting forgeries is that in many cases, it only comes down to some experts saying, this painting is fake. But then somebody else said, no, no, this is not a fake. And they are now training artificial intelligence to do
a better job. And I think in five, 10 years, artificial intelligence might be better in detecting fakes than... all the experts that we have had until now. But I still think that even then artificial intelligence will never be as good as the best forges. And if you talk about those cold cases and that the colder the case, it actually gets easier to solve. Do you ever stop looking or is it more that you pause and then might come back to it later? Yeah. It might be my character,
but I always keep on trying to find a case. I have here behind on my wall, I have like 40 cases with leads. Some leads dried up 20 years ago, but there is always a chance that people die and children go to the cellar and find stuff. people die and maybe their brother or their mother. I get calls from people who tell me, look, from an old woman who is from a couple of weeks ago. And she said, well, my son died and my son was
a criminal. And I know that he stole a certain painting and I don't want to die with this secret. I recovered Hitler's horses, Hitler's most famous statues. They were gone since 50, 75 years. And together with a good friend of mine from the German police, we managed to recover them. You know, it made headlines all over the world. I wrote a book about it. So if that's possible, if you can find Hitler's favorite statues of three meters high back after 75 years, everything
is possible. Cool. There's lots to work with for the people in the server, I think. And we have another question for from George who asks, do you have any suggestions for regulatory improvements that can be implemented on a national or international level, which could help with some of the challenges that crimes against art present? Well, it's difficult to know. I always say on Monday, art was invented. On Tuesday, the first art was stolen. And on
Wednesday, the first art was forged. It has always been there. In many cases, we are talking about a lot of money, you know. pieces of art, which are worth millions. If you manage to fake a Picasso and you can set it for 10 million, it's quite a sum of money. So what I think is what we see in most countries, as I told before, police is not really so much interested. There are other forms of crime. So the police could use the help of people like me, like Linda, but also of the
public who is now listening. They need us. They need people who help them search for these paintings. It's a very big market, the criminal art market. We're talking here about maybe six to eight billion. It's quite a big market. And we have a few hundred police officers around the globe who are working on it. It's a very big business. And what we see is that many of them never get caught. If they get caught, it's very hard for the police to prove that a certain piece was illegally excavated
in Italy, for example. So it's a field where criminals in the last decades had free game. And some of them get caught. But with today's internet, it also gets easier for people like me, but also from people who want to start today, to track down stolen art. And I said with artificial intelligence, it might be helpful, but I think our theft and art forgery, unfortunately will
never stop. I said it has always been there, and as soon as there is a lot of money involved, Even the biggest auction houses like Christie's and Sotheby's have been victim of forgeries, you know, and the best experts in the world are working there. So it's very hard to cover it all. I can imagine. And just to give people a bit of guidance as a last question, I think almost, do you see any patterns in cases that you've covered. Do you see repeatable steps that thieves
take to evade law enforcement? Or is every case unique? Every case is unique, but never forget, most people think that the art world is about beauty. Well, it isn't. It's about money. And if it's about money, people are capable of everything. Respected auction houses, respected art dealers, Some of them, not all of course, have been caught red handed because if there's so much money at stake, people do things that they shouldn't do.
So be aware always, we are talking here about a big market, big reputations, a lot of money at stake and people do very, very strange things for money. And we see that all the time in the art world. museums of big names, the biggest museums in the world, they have bought pieces of which they knew or could have known that they were not legally acquired. And that's because, you know, they wanted to have these pieces. So be aware that you are working in a field of high
egos, a lot of money and some bad people. That sounds fun. And just to get Pio's excitement, do you have any recommended reading for people that want to get into this field and learn a bit more about the world of art crime? Yes, follow ARCA. They have a blog. You can follow me on social media. There are books out there. I already mentioned Noah Charney. He's a professor who does a lot of research about art crime. He has written a lot of books about it. There are many
books out there. Well, follow me on social media and follow Arka. That's a good start, you know. There's much more. And I know Linda is listening probably, so that's a good way to start, you know. Arka and myself and some books. There are many books out there. Amazing. Linda was definitely listening and putting all kinds of helpful resources in the chat as well. And we'll make sure to list everything in our show notes as well in the version that is going to be recorded, that was recorded,
and that we'll share on a podcast platform. So you can find all these resources back. And I've also seen a lot of people talk about the ArtCrime server we have here on our Discord server. In that channel, people have been discussing this topic for quite some time. And this is also the place to discuss and help each other find find out more about this fascinating world. And this
was a great introduction, Arthur. Thank you very much for giving some insights in your work and for all the tips for the people that want to get started with this. And thanks, everyone, for listening in and for all your questions. I'll end the recording here and the recording will appear on your streaming platforms in the coming days. And in two weeks, we'll be back with a new stage talk. So make sure to tune in.
Thank you for listening to the stage talk. If you'd like to catch a stage talk live where you can ask the guest questions, join the Bellingcat Discord server by visiting www .discord .gg slash Bellingcat. The music you've heard is titled Dawn by Newer Self and is courtesy of Artlist.