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For centuries, art crime was relatively harmless, at least from the perspective of the global economy and international crime. Forgers fooled the occasional buyer, tomb raiders dug up what archaeologists didn't have time to reach, and the occasional nonviolent thief would steal for reasons more often ideological than fiscal. Even vandalism was dismissed as part and parcel of the ravages of war.

But since the Second World War, art crime has evolved into the third-highest–grossing annual criminal trade worldwide, behind only the drug and arms trades. Most art crime is now perpetrated either by or on behalf of organized crime syndicates, who have brought violence into art theft and turned what was once a crime of passion (think of Vincenzo Peruggia's stealing the Mona Lisa in order to repatriate it to Italy, or Kempton Bunton's stealing Goyas Portrait of the Duke of Wellington as a protest against taxes on television sets) into a cold business. Art crime now funds, and is funded by, organized crime’s other enterprises, from the drug and arms trades to terrorism. It is no longer merely the art that is at stake, and it is no longer a crime to be admired for its elegance.

Today, the largest victim of art crime is the art trade. This multi-billion-dollar legitimate industry is victimized to the tune of a conservatively estimated $6 billion per year, most of which goes into the pockets of organized crime. Here is a brief analysis of how the four main categories of art crime influence the art market. These encompass a myriad of sub-categories but are unified in being premeditated criminal activities — undertaken for financial and/or ideological reasons — that profit from, or reduce the value of, art and therefore affect the art market.

Vandalism
Whether the willful damage to art and architecture is ideological or simply spiteful, damaged art decreases in value, and destroying an artwork can turn a potential fortune into a pile of dust. However, for certain famous works, the cachet of having endured vandalism (or theft) actually increases value. It certainly adds to popular interest, as witnessed by the tour guides in Florence and London who love to recount the survival tales of Michelangelos David and Pieta or Velázquezs Rokeby Venus. The destruction of art can also raise the value of related works that survive — imagine a fire that consumes every Vermeer but one.

Forgery/Deception
This category encompasses a range of confidence tricks that involve the premeditated misattribution of art for profit. This includes a number of different methods, all of which take advantage of a degree of enthusiasm and wishful thinking on the part of the art trade. Everyone benefits if an artwork that comes on the market is legitimate: The owner makes money, the dealer receives a high commission, the buyer gets a new trophy, and academics get a new object to study. Because of this, there is a subconscious desire on the part of the members of the art trade for potentially questionable objects to be legitimate. This is where clever criminals can take advantage. The most common types of deception crimes are:

1. Wholesale Forgery: A new artwork is passed off as a piece that is either older than it really is or is by a more valuable artist than the one who actually created it.

2. Alteration Forgery: A legitimate work is altered in some way — a signature is added, for instance — that raises its value. Such alterations are difficult to detect, as scientific tests are designed to determine age, not attribution.

3. Provenance Forgery: The documented history of an artwork, as opposed to the work itself, is altered or falsified. Provenance is much easier to forge than the work itself. This technique is most often used to provide looted antiquities with a false history, suggesting that they were excavated before art exportation laws were put in place.

4. Willful Misattribution: The value of an artwork is intentionally overestimated. This is a question of connoisseurship, and the most frequent perpetrators are the very experts that the art trade relies on to determine the values of artworks, which ultimately, it must be remembered, are not intrinsic. A work’s value depends on a combination of its perceived authenticity and perceived rarity, and millions hang upon the words of experts as to a work’s authorship. One need only recall Bernard Berensons questionable, and profitable, attributions: Especially if an expert is paid on commission, there is the temptation to attribute a higher value. This is the easiest type of forgery to get away with, as an expert can always claim to have “made a mistake.”

Crimes of deceit and forgery affect the art market in a generally beneficial way. The members of the art trade — gallerists, auction houses, dealers, middlemen, and sellers — all benefit, earning money even if the item they are handling is not what they claim it to be. Only the buyer who overpays for a fake or misrepresented work suffers. But the buyer only loses out if the work is proven to be false. If the buyer and the world at large remain blissfully ignorant, then the perceived value of the work remains consistent — which is why it is in the best interest of all involved to believe that the art in question is exactly what they hope it to be.

Art Theft
Art theft affects the art trade less than other categories of art crime, to a large extent because stolen art is rarely offered on the market. In this Internet age, police and dealers worldwide can be notified of stolen goods in minutes, making it difficult for criminals to “shop” stolen art. Rather, criminals profit from art theft in a variety of ways that tend not to involve resale. For famous works, there is basically no market, black or otherwise. Famous art is either offered for ransom (such as the Munch paintings stolen in 2004) or traded on a closed black-market system among organized criminals for an equivalent value of another illicit good, such as drugs or arms. Within this system, a work’s value is generally marked at seven to ten percent of its legitimate auction value — the amount that criminals could sell it for, were they willing to run the risk of seeking a buyer. Experts have discovered this black-market price because it is the value at which undercover police posing as criminal buyers were offered stolen art.

Less recognizable artworks and antiquities are often altered in some way, provided false provenance, and then sold on an open market in which the actual owner is never revealed, or on a gray market (this would include objects that “fell off a truck” or that are stored in the basement of a legitimate dealer’s shop). In such cases, the art trade can actually benefit from criminal activity. With more objects to sell, the trade will make more money, provided the illicit origins of the artworks can be disguised.

The final and most alarming method of profit from stolen works is the sale of raw materials. Since 2005, there has been a rash of thefts of bronze and copper artworks and objects, following the astronomical rise in the price of these raw materials. Masterpieces such as Henry Moores Reclining Nude, a two-ton object stolen from the Henry Moore Foundation in December 2005, was almost certainly chopped into pieces and sold for scrap, earning perhaps as little as £3,000 ($5,800). The work carried a £2 million insurance policy.

Antiquities Looting
Perhaps comprising as much as 75 percent of all art crime, antiquities looting is the most difficult crime to catch. Objects taken directly out of the earth or the sea will not appear on stolen art registries, because the objects never existed, at least not to the knowledge of contemporary society, before their illicit excavation. Looted antiquities can often be sold on an open market for full value, even without a false provenance suggesting they were legitimately excavated and exported. Since the legitimate antiquities trade is laced with questionable characters and objects with incomplete provenances, the nature of this market provides shadows in which criminals can hide. Although buying a looted artifact might seem relatively harmless, trade in illicit antiquities has been identified as a major funding source for terrorist groups. As with art theft, the art trade can actually benefit from antiquities looting. New, exciting antiquities on the market benefit the trade — even if money from the transactions is going into the pockets of criminals.

Art crime is a subtle and fascinating world, one in which even the best-intentioned dealer or collector could be supporting organized crime through their purchases. Buyer beware.