What I find pretty amazing about this theft and the theft from the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum in Boston is that the pieces stolen can't be resold on the open market. Whomever is paying for these thefts, can only sell to discreet private buyers (who then can't display them openly without risking being caught). The economics of it are fascinating. A collector is paying someone to steal artwork, which then becomes an illiquid asset with significant legal liability. And the main benefit of these artworks is being able to display it to your guests, which now adds more legal liability when someone recognizes it. Who's behind these? Mob bosses? International millionaires? The 1% in the US?
Watched a documentary about stolen van Gogh. Turned out the person planned to use it in negotions with authorities if he got caught (for other crimes, he was involved in drugs).
In some countries you can negotiate a shorter sentence if you agree to cooperate. ”Give me shorter sentence, I’ll bring back the national treasure - put me to jail for life and you’ll never see it”.
On a national basis, the top 1% in the US don't have enough money to finance bespoke art heists (nor can they generally afford black market museum pieces). So it's probably not them :)...maybe the top 0.1% or 0.01% could.
Whenever I think about this particular topic, I come to the conclusion that there must be much more nuance to it. I assume the pieces are eventually sold outside of the United States, maybe to oligarchs or royalty in other countries. Or maybe they end up becoming more like "gray market" pieces that can be semi-safely purchased under the guise of spontaneously "re-surfacing" after a number of years.
From what I've heard, the easiest way of turning a stolen painting into cash is by, in effect, selling it back to its legitimate owner. You do this by using a trusted agent who collects a "reward" for helping to recover the painting, but in a manner that does not reveal who stole it in the first place. It's not easy and it can go wrong, of course, but it's presumably easier than finding a real-life James-Bond-villain to buy it from you.
Generally this type of stuff is used as collateral for illegal transactions. Everyone knows it really isn't going to be sold, or even can be. It's a sign of good faith and legitimacy in the underworld.
They are generally not ending up in some rich guys mansion.
When you have functionally infinite money, rare objects become more important indicators of status. And when you and all of your friends are involved in illegal activities, your mutually assured destruction makes any questions of legality moot.
The whole point of currency is that it doesn't have to have value at all. You use it for goods and services. Money doesn't have value, it's just a piece of paper, bitcoin is just bunch of bytes in a linux server. This is also why people used use gold as currency; it's not that gold is a very practically valuable metal (say, unlike iron) but it was the currency mostly because it wasn't too common, but also not rare enough to make it impractical to use for goods and services.
