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 piece, entitled Othello and Desdemona, was recovered last year and is slated to be returned to the now-deceased couple’s estate after a decades-long odyssey involving 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.
The painting by the famed Belarusian modernist — which shows Shakespeare’s titular Othello holding a sword in the foreground as his bride, Desdemona, reclines behind him — was part of an extensive collection amassed by Upper East Side collectors Ernest and Rose Heller that also included works by Picasso and Renoir.
That trove took a sizable hit in the summer of 1988, when the Hellers, then in their 80s, came home from their annual two-month vacation in Aspen, Colorado, to find their apartment cleaned out of an estimated $600,000 in jewelry, silverware, carpets and art — including a Renoir and the Chagall, according to a report by UPI at the time.
“It was a lifetime of collecting,” said Ernest Heller, who had owned the painting since the 1920s.
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 that the burglar was trying to deal with the mobsters directly to cut out the middleman and increase his profits, investigators learned.
The documents do not identify the thief or the would-be fence by name, because the statute of limitations on the 1988 burglary has expired and neither is being charged with a crime.
The jilted fence held on to the painting.
In the intervening years, the crook was convicted of interstate transportation of stolen property, and mail fraud for heists carried out in other buildings he tended, the FBI found.
“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.”
The fence intermittently tried to flip the Chagall to a Washington, DC, gallery but was repeatedly rebuffed when the owner refused to take it without documentation of the painting’s chain of custody, the FBI found.
When he wasn’t trying to consign it, the man kept the Chagall — valued between $50,000 and $65,000 by an auction house in 1974 — in the attic of his Maryland home, inside a crude box fashioned from a door jamb and plywood, and labeled “Misc. High School artwork.”
On the advice of the DC gallery owner during his most recent attempt to flip the work in January 2017, the man broke down and contacted the FBI to turn over the Chagall.
The FBI is now prepared to return the painting to the Hellers’ estate, which has said that it will auction off the work.
A portion of the proceeds will reimburse the insurance company that paid off a claim on the 1988 theft, while the balance will go to a variety of nonprofits, including a New Hampshire-based arts colony.
Investigators are still trying to track down the other works stolen from the Hellers’ apartment.
“As the FBI returns this painting to the estate of its proper owners, we do so with the purpose of preserving history,” said Nancy McNamara, assistant director in charge of the Washington Field Office.
“This piece of artwork is of significance not just for its monetary value, but for its place in the world of art and culture.”