Churchill portrait stolen from Chateau Laurier may have already been sold

As police and Chateau Laurier officials try to pinpoint exactly when a valuable portrait of Sir Winston Churchill was stolen from the hotel and replaced with a copy, art experts say the thief may have already sold it.

Someone stole the photograph by famed photographer Yousuf Karsh sometime in a two-week period starting last Christmas and replaced it with a copy.

Hotel staff noticed on Friday and Karsh’s estate confirmed the version that had been hanging at the hotel for months was a fake, including a forgery of Karsh’s signature.

“An eight-month delay is not particularly helpful,” Christopher Marinello, the founder and CEO of Art Recovery International, told Newstalk 580 CFRA on Wednesday. “I do believe that it’s possible that this was already sold.”

Karsh took the photograph, known as “The Roaring Lion,” in December 1941 while Churchill was visiting Parliament Hill to deliver a speech amid the encroaching threat of Nazism.

Karsh lived at the Chateau Laurier and had a studio there for nearly 20 years, and a collection of 15 of his portraits are displayed in the lounge and in the Karsh Suite, all anchored to the walls.

The hotel's general manager, Genevieve Dumas, says it would have required special tools to remove the frame.

“These pictures are securely anchored with a mechanism, and they’re bolted with a security lock in the wall,” she told Newstalk 580 CFRA. “So there are four of those security locks, which back then in 1998 when they were installed, it was probably the most sophisticated tool.”

Marinello said if the photo hasn’t been sold, perhaps the person who took it could be thinking twice about trying to unload it.

“They may say well the publicity’s out, we might get arrested. Maybe we’ll volunteer to return this thing if we can do it quietly,” he said.

“But if we have an evil thief who’s looking to cash in, we may not see it for a while. It could be handed between criminals, it could be exchanged for weapons, it could be exchanged for drugs until someone is foolish enough to try to sell it.”

Marinello also said it’s not unusual for these thefts to go unnoticed for months. He cited one case in New York of a man who replaced several pieces of artwork that were in a family trust with copies, and no one noticed for 10 years.

You really can’t blame the hotel all that much. They are not a museum, they are not an art gallery. They are in the business of putting people up for the night, not exhibiting artwork,” he said. “The fact that it wasn’t really noticed is not that unusual.”

Dumas, the general manager, looked at it many times in the past few months without noticing.

“I’m walking by this picture every day, and no way I could tell you from one day to another that it’s been replaced,” she said. “It was almost identical.”

The new version is slightly smaller and hangs differently relative to the wood on the wall, which is what led hotel staff to notice the switch on Friday.

The hotel is still asking anyone who might have photographs of the Churchill during the two-week period it was taken—from Dec. 25, 2021 to Jan. 6, 2022—to send them along.

The matter is complicated by the fact that COVID-19 restrictions were in effect at the time—the hotel was not crowded and masks were mandatory indoors.

Former FBI agent says theft was likely an ‘inside job’

A former art crime investigator with the FBI says the theft was likely an “inside job.”

Robert Wittman, a former Federal Bureau of Investigation special agent who helped create the agency's Art Crime Team, told CTV's Your Morning on Wednesday that FBI research into stolen artwork and collectibles has found about 89 per cent of thefts are done by insiders, such as collectors or employees.

"So usually when a situation like this occurs, it's not a shoplifting, it's not just a burglary; it's someone from the inside who had access, who knew what they were looking for, knew what the security measures were that were protecting the piece and that (they) were able to defeat those measures because they had inside information," Wittman said.

Wittman said he expects the investigation to include a forensic analysis of any fingerprints, a review of surveillance footage at the hotel and nearby locations, looking at who had access to the photo and what security measures were in place to secure it on the wall, as well as potentially tracing the frame back to its place of purchase.

In his experience, Wittman said the recovery rate for high-value artwork is as high as 95 per cent.

"Ultimately, unless it's destroyed, it's still in the marketplace," he said. "At some point, it comes back to market, it's advertised and then we recover it."

With files from CTVNews.ca’s Michael Lee and The Canadian Press