Artist and art detective Robert Volpe died last week at the age of 63.While not a household name, Volpe acted as the New York Police Department’s one-man art-theft squad, and in so doing, made the NYPD the only American police department with a separate art-theft bureau. The New York Times obituary notes that Volpe was “selling paintings for $1,500 when he was not on the job for the police, browsing galleries, attending auctions, lecturing at the Smithsonian, traveling to Paris or Rome, or tracking down fiendishly clever criminals.”
Volpe was also part of the narcotics squad that investigated the heroin operation known as “The French Connection.” Not surprisingly, experience in a fairly well-known squad such as that led to theatrical chases of his own. He was quoted as saying that he employed “grade-B movie stuff. You find you have to behave that way. You don’t come right off with authority, you’re done.”
Volpe also achieved some notoriety as the father of former cop Justin Volpe, who was convicted of brutalizing Haitian immigrant Abner Louima outside a Brooklyn nightclub back in 1997.
Read Volpe’s obituary here.
(Hat tip to The Art Law Blog.)
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