Gangsters' use of paintings as currency shows a profound belief in art

How many bags of cocaine for a Van Gogh? This is the sense in which the mafia reveres priceless works

The discovery of two stolen Van Gogh paintings in a house near Pompeii during an investigation into the Neapolitan crime syndicate the Camorra casts a fascinating light on gangs, art theft and Italy. Added to other occasional glimpses into the murky underworld of art, it suggests something surprising: that Italian gangsters, in their own way, revere art.

The Camorra does not have the soft-toned image that Mario Puzo’s The Godfather lent the more famous and sentimentalised Sicilian mafia. Instead, Roberto Saviano’s courageous reportage on the savage organised crime that defaces Naples, and the film and TV series Gomorrah that it inspired, portray this scar on southern Italy as a brutish, utterly unscrupulous business in drugs, protection and human lives. What would gangsters who traffic people and cocaine want with art?

Related: Italian police find stolen Van Goghs 14 years after infamous Amsterdam heist

Continue reading...