Stolen LS Lowry paintings traded as 'currency' and 'collateral' by criminal gangs

Pictures stolen nearly a decade ago are believed to be in the hands of drug bosses

Matilda Battersby

Thursday 07 May 2015 14:01 BST

L.S. Lowry, Industrial Scene with Figures, 1949, has not been recovered

Stolen paintings by Salford artist LS Lowry are being used as “currency” by criminal gangs, a gallery owner has claimed.

Works of art seized in a smash and grab raid nearly ten years ago at a Cheshire gallery are probably being passed between drug bosses as a form of “collateral”, he says.

Three Lowry works, one of which would today be valued at around £400,000, were among a cache of 13 paintings stolen from the Clark Art gallery in Hale in 2006.

The haul, worth around £500,000 at the time of the theft but now estimated at more than £1 million, has never been recovered.

Gallery owner Bill Clark was told by a loss adjuster who came to investigate the theft that the paintings – in particular the highly sought-after Lowrys – were probably being used as “currency” and “collateral” in down payments for drugs.

Stolen LS. Lowry, Two women and Children,1950

“The loss adjuster said stolen Lowry paintings are used as collateral within the criminal underground,” Clark told The Independent.

“They are traded against drugs and used as currency. Eventually the monetary value is realised and they sell them someone for cash.”

He is offering a £25,000 reward to anyone with information that will lead to their recovery.

“After this amount of time the thinking is that they will appear,” Clark said.

“At the time we did a Crime Watch programme which got surprisingly little back. It was suggested to us that they might have been stolen to order by someone very high up in the criminal underworld. Someone people don’t want to mess with.”

20th century's biggest art heists

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1/1020th century's biggest art heists

20th century's biggest art heists

20th century's biggest art heists

Leonard Da Vinci's iconic Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre by employee Vincenzo Peruggia on 21 August 1911. The thief hid overnight in the Parisian art gallery before emerging to lift the famous muse off the wall, strip the painting of its frame and shove it up his smock. Peruggia's crime has been described as the greatest art theft of the 20th Century, but he and the painting were discovered in Italy two years later.

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20th century's biggest art heists

20th century's biggest art heists

Works by renowned Norwegian artist Edvard Munch have been stolen three times in separate heists. In 1994 his most famous work The Scream was lifted from the National Gallery in Oslo, but was recovered later that year. In August 2004 another version of The Scream was stolen along with Munch's Madonna from the Munch Museum, also in Oslo, by a gang of gunmen. The paintings were recovered two years later and three men convicted, but the gunmen remain at large. Another three Munch paintings including the recognisable Blue Dress were stolen from a hotel in Norway but recovered the next day in March 2005.

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20th century's biggest art heists

20th century's biggest art heists

Russborough House, a large estate belonging to Sir Alfred Beit, has been robbed four times since 1974 and works worth millions are yet to be recovered. Robbers and members of the IRA bound and gagged the Beit family in 1974 in order to steel nineteen paintings worth an estimated £8 million, all of which were subsequently recovered when the criminals were apprehended. Twelve years later another gang of thieves stole paintings thought to be worth £30 million in total. Sixteen were recovered but two remain missing. Gainsborough's Madame Baccelli, which had been stolen in the previous raid, was stolen again in 2001, along with a Bellotto. The two paintings were recovered and returned to the Beits, but just days later the house was robbed for a fourth time and another five paintings were taken. The latest hoard were returned just months later. Let's hope they've installed burglar alarm since then...

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20th century's biggest art heists

20th century's biggest art heists

Armed thieves broke into the National Museum of Fine Art in Stockholm, Sweden in 2005, robbing it of one Rembrandt and two Renoirs. The robbers fled by boat and it took five years for all three paintings to be recovered.

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20th century's biggest art heists

20th century's biggest art heists

Canada's Montreal Museum of Fine Arts was cleaned out by thieves in September 1972 when 18 paintings, jewellery and sculptures worth a staggering (for the time) $2 million were stolen. The works, which included a rare Rembrandt landscape and paintings by Delacroix and Gainsborough, have never been recovered.

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20th century's biggest art heists

20th century's biggest art heists

Panels from the Ghent Altarpiece, painted by masterly brothers Jan and Hubert Van Eyck, were stolen in 1934. The left panel has never been recovered as the presumed thief, who had sent a demand for a ransom, died before it could be issued, taking the secret of the painting's whereabouts with him to the grave.

20th century's biggest art heists

20th century's biggest art heists

Three armed men used a crowbar to break into the Pinacoteca do Estado Museum in São Paulo in June 2008, making off with five extremely valuable paintings including Pablo Picasso's The Painter and the Model and Minotaur, Drinker and Women.

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20th century's biggest art heists

20th century's biggest art heists

Monet's Poppy Field at Vetheuil was among a host of impressionist paintings pinched from the Emile Bührle Foundation in Zurich in February 2008 by thieves in ski masks. The total hoard, which also included Edgar Degas' Ludovic Lepic and his Daughter, Van Gogh's Blossoming Chestnut Branches and Cezanne's Boy in the Red Vest, had a combined value of $163 million at the time of theft. The Monet and Van Gogh were recovered from a nearby parked car shortly after.

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20th century's biggest art heists

20th century's biggest art heists

Rembrandt's Jacob de Gheyn III has been stolen four times, earning it the nickname of the "takeaway Rembrandt". It was initially stolen from the Dulwich Picture Gallery in 1981 by four men who made off with it in a taxi. The painting was returned to the gallery soon after, only to be nicked again two years later when a burglar broke in via a skylight. The painting went missing for three years before it was discovered in a luggage rack of a train station in Münster, Germany. The painting has been nabbed twice more from the Dulwich Picture House since then, but no thief has ever been apprehended. Each time the picture has just turned up: once under a bench in graveyard and another time in the basket of an abandoned bicycle. Mysterious!

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20th century's biggest art heists

20th century's biggest art heists

On 18 March 1990 thieves disguised as policemen handcuffed security guards and stole 13 paintings worth a collective $500 million from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, USA. It has been described as the biggest art heist in the world and remains as yet unsolved. Vermeer's The Concert, three Rembrandts and a series of drawings by Edgar Degas were among the valuable artworks seized.

The theft took place just one week after the gallery opened at around 2am in September 2006.

Other works stolen were all by artists from the North of England which Clark suggests points to the thieves being local.

Stolen Lowry: Industrial Scene with Figure, 1949

He believes the paintings were stolen to order – something supported by witnesses who saw men browsing through a catalogue outside the gallery in the early hours on the night they were stolen.

Thieves are believed to have used a manhole cover stolen from a street a mile away to bash the windows of the gallery in before grabbing the paintings and escaping.

Bill Clark of Clark Art gallery

Police investigated at the time but Clark said he has heard nothing since. He remains “optimistic” that the paintings have not been destroyed and will eventually be recovered.

“It does sound a bit sensational but it is true that stolen paintings are used as collateral in exchange for drugs, weapons and sometimes as what we call ‘get out of jail free cards’ to bargain with the police,” said Christopher A. Marinello of Art Recovery International.

“We have been doing recovery work for a long time and have seen almost everything. Thieves sometimes contact us to ask about rewards. Since the creation of the ART Claim Database they have realised the world they operate in has got a lot smaller which sometimes frustrates their attempts to sell paintings quickly so they end up using them for bargaining purposes within the criminal underworld.”

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