Stolen Chagall is going home
A stolen Marc Chagall painting is heading back to its rightful owners — nearly 30 years after it was swiped from an elderly couple’s Upper East Side apartment by a building worker, the FBI announced Thursday.
The 1911 oil on canvas, “Othello and Desdemona,” was recovered last year and will be returned to the now-deceased couple’s estate.
Its decades-long odyssey involved the Bulgarian mob, a falling-out between the thief and his fence, and multiple aborted attempts to flip the work to a Washington, DC, gallery, according to the bureau and court documents.
Upper East Side collectors Ernest and Rose Heller came home from a 1988 vacation to find their apartment cleaned out of an estimated $600,000 in jewelry, silverware, carpets and art.
“It was an inside job,” said Special Agent Marc Hess, of the FBI’s Art Crime Team. “A person who had regular access to the building was stealing from apartments while the tenants were away.”
Sometime in the late ’80s or early ’90s, the thief — whom FBI investigators were able to identify as a worker in the Hellers’ building — turned the Chagall over to a prospective fence with ties to Bulgarian organized crime in Virginia, court papers show. But any potential black-market sale fell apart when the fence found out the burglar had been trying to deal with the mobsters directly to cut out the middleman and increase profits, investigators learned.
The fence intermittently tried to flip the Chagall to a DC gallery but was repeatedly rebuffed when the owner refused to take it without documentation, the FBI found. On the ad- vice of the gallery owner during the most recent attempt to sell the work, in January 2017, the fence broke down and contacted the FBI to turn over the Chagall. The FBI is now prepared to return the painting to the Hellers’ estate, whose administrators have said they will auction it off.
Investigators have not released the names of the thief or fence because the statute of limitations has run out. Efforts are ongoing to track down other works stolen from the Hellers’ apartment.