NEW YORK—After a Memorial Day weekend getaway in 1978, the restaurateur Michael Bakwin returned to his Stockbridge, Mass., home to a shock. His quiet suburban house had been robbed of seven paintings, including Pitcher and Fruits, a still-life by Paul Cezanne worth over $29 million, which had been a gift from his mother.

The alleged thief, David Colvin, had whisked the loot to the nearby town of Falmouth, stashing the goods in the attic of his friend and attorney, Robert Mardirosian, for safekeeping. A year later, debt sharks murdered Colvin, but the Cezanne, along with works by Chaim Soutine, Maurice Utrillo, Maurice de Vlaminck, and Jean Jansen, remained in Mardirosian’s possession. The paintings, whose whereabouts were unknown for over 20 years, represent the largest theft from a private residence in Massachusetts history.

The Art Loss Register is a nonprofit agency that specializes in the recovery of lost or stolen works and the prevention of art theft. Since 1991, when it has spawned from the New York-based International Foundation for Art Research, it has recovered more than $140 million worth of paintings and other artifacts. With 200 to 300 recovery cases hot on the table at any given time, the agency works with law enforcement to track down thieves. It also has to deal with legal battles after art is recovered.

The ALR found the missing Cezanne in 1999, when Mardirosian, who is retired and sculpts in his free time, attempted to sell the painting in London under the cover of the Erie International Trading Company, a Panamanian shell company he set up. An agreement was reached that restored ownership of Pitcher and Fruits to Bakwin, but kept Mardirosian’s identity secret. Bakwin then auctioned the painting through Sotheby’s for $29.3 million, almost 60 times the price his mother had paid for it in 1963.

In 2004, Mardirosian attempted to auction at Sotheby’s four more of the stolen works. The ALR alerted Bakwin, who took Erie to court. As a result of the trial, the four recovered works are being returned to their rightful owner and Mardirosian was forced to reveal that he was behind Erie International.

Investigators now believe that the remaining two paintings are in the possession of a Swiss friend of Mardirosian. Earlier this year, Mardirosian was arrested and indicted on charges of attempting to resell stolen property.

Working the Database

With branches in London, Bath, New York, Cologne and, most recently, Delhi and Amsterdam, the ALR’s 30-odd-member team has assembled an extensive, confidential database that currently lists 180,000 items as stolen or missing. The agency works closely with collectors, galleries, and leading institutions, including Christie’s, Sotheby’s, the Metropolitan Museum, MoMA, the Getty, and the Art Institute of Chicago, to prevent them from accidentally acquiring any of the listed works. At Christie’s New York, for instance, the local ALR branch reviews every upcoming sale catalog against its database, alerting the auction house of potential matches.

The ALR also checks 200,000 to 300,000 search requests a year for galleries, auction houses, dealers, collectors, and law enforcement agencies. For approximately $75 (plus an annual fee), customers can request a search of the database over the phone, on artloss.com, or through third parties. The agency has also launched a “positive” database on which owners can register their art as a preventative measure, in case it is subsequently stolen.

For Landau Fine Art, a small Montreal gallery specializing in 19th- and 20th-century art, search clearance is relatively quick. It usually takes no more than 24 hours to verify each of the 50 to 60 pieces the gallery registers every year. “No reputable dealer would handle stolen art knowingly, nor would most private clients want to buy stolen pieces,” says Suzette L’Abbe, Landau’s director. “We are taking the time more often to register our pieces as a preemptive measure.”

Recovering lost art, on the other hand, is a much slower process, and success rates are not quite encouraging. “The more valuable it is, the more likely it is to be recovered,” said David Shillingford, director of the ALR’s four-person New York branch, though he estimated that the return rate for “very valuable items” is only 30 percent.

Moreover, a work may take years to resurface, if it ever does. Pitcher and Fruits was missing for 21 years before the ALR spotted it in 1999, and Picasso’s Woman in White Reading a Book, looted by the Nazis in 1940, took 65 years to resurface.

Expanding the Net

Though the nonprofit ALR is funded by a group of shareholders that includes Christie’s, Sotheby’s, insurance companies, and trade associations, it also makes big commissions when it reunites a lost piece with its owner, charging 15 to 20 percent of the art’s estimated value. (The ALR could not disclose their commission information for the Bakwin case.)

Now, the ALR is using those commissions to branch out in Europe and Asia, starting with Paris.

France’s big role in the art market means it is also a big player in art’s black market, as was shown in 1911 when the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre and went missing until the thief was caught trying to sell it in Florence two years later. More recently, from 1995 to 2001, French waiter Stephane Breitwieser stole 239 pieces of art from museums and exhibitions all over Europe. When he was caught in 2001 attempting to steal an antique bugle from a Swiss museum, his mother destroyed much of the art and dumped artifacts into a canal near their home in Mulhouse, France. These works were only partially recovered.

Several years ago, the ALR tried to establish a Paris branch, though the French government apparently wasn’t keen on letting the private, Anglo-Saxon enterprise manage a business traditionally overseen by the French state, according to Julian Radcliffe, the ALR chairman. France tried to solve the problem by having its vehicular theft department, called Gie Argos, also investigate art loss, which inevitably failed.

“They are now trying to rely on technology alone for matching, which we know will not work,” Radcliffe said. “Any independent effort by one country is bound to fail when this is such an international problem, and half of all our recoveries are found in a country other than where it was stolen.”

With newfound inspiration, the ALR is pushing again to open a Paris branch. “We have good support from a number of the French auction houses and dealers,” Radcliffe observed, “and hope to find ways of giving them our service locally rather than through London.”

However, he added, the ALR also still needs to overcome obstacles in Switzerland, where art can hide in secret vaults for years, and in Japan, where laws favor current art holders over original theft victims, making it difficult to reclaim art that has already been resold.

To jump these hurdles, the agency needs to build strong ties with the governments of both countries, as well as their police and media. “We do work across all these countries,” said Radcliffe, “but to develop them properly requires a local presence to build relationships.”