Robert Volpe, New York City's "art cop," dies at age 63

WASHINGTON — Robert Volpe, a painter, sculptor, gallery owner and New York police detective who became internationally known as the "art cop" for tracking purloined art on the black market, died Tuesday at his home on Staten Island, N.Y., after a heart attack. He was 63.

For years, Mr. Volpe was a singular figure in police work as the only detective in the country assigned full time to investigate stolen or forged artwork as well as dealer fraud and vandalism in museums.

With his dungarees, long hair and thick, handlebar moustache, he looked less like a cop than an art-school bohemian, and he endured peer ridicule. Police colleagues once placed a nude centerfold in his locker with a note asking, "But is it art?"

A former art-school student and narcotics investigator, Mr. Volpe was asked in 1972 to gauge the usefulness of an art squad. Until then, art thefts were lumped into burglary or larceny caseloads.

"Instead of coming back with a report, I started coming back with arrests and recoveries," he told The New York Times.

He scoured auction houses, raided homes of collectors suspected of going bad and sometimes went undercover to negotiate with thieves about returning art.

He once portrayed a gay Rhode Island art dealer named Damien Renar. When he arranged to meet the thieves, he was dressed in a white linen suit, and he relished the dramatic showdown, he said, when he could pull his police revolver from its holster and shout, "Freeze, you [expletive]!"

"Grade B movie stuff," he told The New York Times. "You find you have to behave that way. You don't come off with authority, you're done."

When he retired in 1985, he estimated that he had recovered tens of millions of dollars worth of Byzantine ivories, Oriental rugs, Greek marble heads, Tiffany glass, Matisses, Raphaels and other treasures. For a period, he noted a particularly high trade in faux antique French furniture.

"If all the old French furniture was real," he told The Christian Science Monitor, "there would never have been a French Revolution. Everybody in the country would have been too busy making furniture."

Mr. Volpe was born a banker's son Dec. 13, 1942, in Brooklyn. As a teenager, he painted the tugboats he saw from his Bay Ridge neighborhood. When a local art dealer exhibited the works, Mr. Volpe was shocked to see them sell for $250.

He graduated from the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan and attended the Parsons School of Design and the Art Students League, both in New York.

After Army service, he joined the police department in 1964 to support his art. He was put to work investigating organized crime and drug dealing.

With his superiors noting the increase in art thefts, he was chosen for his new assignment. He was the subject of Laurie Adams' 1974 book "Art Cop" and, as his fame grew, he occasionally was summoned abroad.

He said the Hungarian government once requested his help in finding two stolen Raphaels and five other paintings taken from the country's fine-arts museum. He concluded that only a rich collector would risk stealing $40 million worth of government property behind the Iron Curtain, and contacts in London told him that a Greek olive-oil merchant was the probable culprit. Police arrested the culprits and recovered the art.

Overall, he said, the recovery rate for stolen fine art was at best 10 percent. He lamented to Time magazine that judges rarely gave harsh sentences to art thieves.

"An art thief is entertaining, romantic," he said. "I've seen cases where the thief has pleaded guilty and gotten no sentence at all."

In 1997, Mr. Volpe re-entered the news when he came to the defense of his son, Justin, a New York police officer who pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting Haitian immigrant Abner Louima in a Brooklyn police precinct station house. Louima had been taken into custody after police responded to a fight outside a club.

Mr. Volpe's son received a 30-year prison sentence, and a Staten Island newspaper reported that Mr. Volpe traveled every month to visit his son at a federal prison in Rochester, Minn.

Survivors include his wife, Grace Volpe; two other sons; two brothers; and a sister.