Listen to Charles Hill’s True Spies podcast: The Man From the Getty

Scotland Yard art sleuth Charles Hill has used lies, disguise - and a lifetime’s knowledge about the art market’s underworld - to recover some of the most valuable paintings on Earth including Johannes Vermeer’s magnificent Lady Writing a Letter With Her Maid which was stolen from a stately Irish home.

The Scream (1893) - the original in the series of four by Edvard Munch - is in a category of its own. It is one of the most recognizable paintings in the world. A later version in the series sold for a record $120m at Sotheby’s auction house in New York in 2012 but the original was stolen in a brazen robbery from the National Gallery in Oslo.

The 1994 art heist took less than a minute. The thieves even left a note. It was a taunt Hill - a master of spycraft - couldn’t resist. “You've got to have as much control over your emotions as possible at the time when you're doing the work. And also you've got to tell as few lies as possible. And the few lies you do tell have to be whoppers,” Charles Hill told the True Spies podcast.

The London detective was in his element. Munch’s painting was stolen on the first day of Norway’s Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, so local police already had their hands full dealing with security. They needed to call in the big guns.

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Scotland Yard to the rescue

Oslo’s chief of police, Leif Lier, turned to Scotland Yard. London’s Metropolitan Police force and Charles Hill. Charles had climbed the ranks to detective chief inspector and worked alongside investigators who would eventually become the UK’s National Crime Agency - an elite, FBI-style team.

The job suited Hill’s talents. He was the son of an American airman and a British ballerina with a soft mid-Atlantic accent and a love of art. Hill was no pushover either. Charles cut his teeth in the 173rd Airborne in the central highlands of Vietnam before he traded in his military career for one tracking international art thieves. He had an enviable track record.

‍“I recovered a Vermeer, a magnificent portrait by Goya called Doña Antonia Zárate, and other pictures, others from that particular theft from Russborough, which is a great Palladian mansion in the Dublin Mountains, Wicklow. We got all of those back in Antwerp,” Hill said.

He sees recovering stolen art as a vocation: “Why do people want to shoot themselves in the foot stealing some masterpieces that they are highly, highly unlikely to ever be able to sell? And it intrigues me, the mentality that goes into this.”

‘Thanks for the poor security’ 

One lazy Sunday morning in 1994, Hill heard the news on television: The Scream (1893) had been taken just before dawn. CCTV captured a stolen car as it crept up to the National Gallery. Two men dashed across the snow carrying a household ladder to scale the gallery wall to the second floor. They smashed the window and hustled down with The Scream. It was an audacious heist. The thieves even left a postcard with a cartoon image of three men laughing uproariously on the front, and a mocking message scrawled on the back: Thanks for the poor security.

Charles Hill was determined to have the last laugh. He thought long and hard about the one common denominator among thieves: greed. What if he transformed himself into a fast-talking California art buyer, an irresistible bit of bait to attract the art thieves? Luckily, the Yard had connections in New York and Hill was soon working with the FBI and the Getty Museum in California. The Art Squad pulled together Charles’s legend, a full-on cover to mask his work with British intelligence, and Charles soon became his alter-ego: ‘The Man from the Getty’.

Charles knew he’d likely to bump into forgers and con artists along the way but he’d studied the art world. The original version of The Scream was completed on a large piece of cardboard and it had a ‘tell’. Munch dribbled a bit of candle wax on his 1893 artwork, leaving white splotches.

All Charles needed now was back-up. Luckily Sid Walker, the finest Scotland Yard undercover officer of his generation, was available for a trip to Norway. It was time to put the Art Squad’s scheme into effect. Within a month, word spread among art thieves that The Man From the Getty had serious cash to splash. Charles was about to enter the criminal underworld.