He added, “I have the suitcase here now and I’m supposed to give it to
you.”
They agreed to meet in a restaurant in Chinatown. Li Sheung was waiting
for Brown when he arrived at the restaurant. Customs agents had placed
themselves at strategic points outside the restaurant, and one was
seated at a table in the rear of the room when the two men sat down
together.
Li Sheung kept referring to the fact that Brown would not give him
the suitcase in Los Angeles. He said he could not understand why the
delivery had not been made.
Brown said, “That time you came to my house, I thought there was
something hidden in the suitcase but I didn’t know what it was. Now I
know, and I want some money for my trouble.”
Li Sheung agreed to go with Brown to the bus station to pick up the
heroin and to pay him $100. They left the restaurant and got into a cab.
Customs agents, keeping contact with each other by radio, trailed the
cab from the restaurant to the bus station, where other agents waited,
lounging about the place as though they were travellers. They were
watching as Brown went to a baggage locker, took out the bag, and
handed it to Li Sheung. The Chinese then counted out $100 and handed it
to the seaman. At this point Samaduroff and the other agents moved in
and arrested Li Sheung. He was convicted and sentenced to five years in
prison.
And Mr. Chu--the amiable, friendly little man in Hong Kong? The British
were lenient with him because he was, after all, only the dupe, and he
had cooperated in rounding up the smuggling gang. By now, he may have
returned to his old job of being helpful to touring Americans.
The Customs files are fat with such cases, in which smuggling rings
and individual smugglers have used innocent victims to help them bring
jewels, heroin, watch parts, and other small but valuable items into
the United States.
One of the innocents in such a plot was dark-eyed, attractive
Countess Kyra Kapnist, who arrived in the United States aboard the SS
_Champlain_ on September 2, 1937, to join the exclusive fashion house
of Marcel Rochas, Inc., of New York City as a model and saleswoman.
Before she left Paris, an official of the firm had informed her that
two trunks and a hat box would be added to her baggage when it was
delivered to the liner. It was nothing she was to worry about. She
would be met on the pier in New York by Mr. Guy Fonte-Joyeuse, vice
president of the firm and manager of its New York branch. He would take
care of her customs declaration and the baggage inspection. All the
countess had to do was to be her charming self and not worry her pretty
head about such small details.
And so the countess arrived in New York. On the pier, she was met by
Fonte-Joyeuse, a distinguished-looking man accompanied by a fashionably
dressed woman. Everything seemed to go as she had been told it would in
Paris. Fonte-Joyeuse was extremely solicitous about his new employee.
“Give me your customs declaration,” he said, “and I’ll take care of
everything.”
He hurried away to find an inspector to examine her baggage. Within
a matter of minutes an inspector appeared and peeked into one piece
of the countess’ luggage. Then he stamped all the baggage for
clearance and the countess was whisked from the pier with her friends.
Fonte-Joyeuse seemed unduly elated over her arrival.
Fonte-Joyeuse would not have been so happy had he known that a member
of his own firm was an informer for the U.S. Customs Service--and that
a letter was even then on its way to the Service advising them that
Countess Kapnist’s luggage included two trunks and a hat box containing
seventy original gowns and hats valued at approximately $40,000.
Agents opened an investigation and found that Countess Kapnist’s
declaration made no mention of dutiable imports. They questioned
the inspector who had handled the examination and found that--for a
price--he had agreed to feign an examination of trunks and luggage
brought into the country by the models and employees designated by
Fonte-Joyeuse.
When agents confronted the countess, she willingly told them the whole
story. She told them of the instructions given her in Paris, of being
met by Fonte-Joyeuse on the pier in New York, and of her surprise when
an inspector took the trouble to look at only one small suitcase among
all the luggage which she carried with her.
Agents found in the house of Marcel Rochas 104 gowns of French origin,
valued at about $60,000, which had been smuggled into the United States
by models and others employed by the firm.
Fonte-Joyeuse was indicted on two charges of smuggling and conspiracy.
He was sentenced to one year and a day in prison and fined $1,000. He
served six months of his sentence and then was released on parole and
deported to France. The Parisian fashions seized from the house of
Marcel Rochas were sold at auction. They brought about $9,000 into the
U.S. Treasury--of which $2,250 was paid to the Paris informer.
18
THE STORMY WORLD OF ART
The Korean War was still raging in April, 1951, when Sgt. Elverne
Giltner left the American Army’s Tenth Corps Headquarters for a stroll
about the war-battered streets of Seoul. Four times in less than
one year fighting had washed through the city as the United Nations
forces battled the North Korean and Chinese Communist troops across
the mountains and through the valleys of this unhappy land. Sergeant
Giltner was only one of thousands of American soldiers in Seoul at this
time.
Like most Americans overseas, the sergeant was a collector of
souvenirs. Whenever he had the chance to get away from headquarters,
he enjoyed poking about in the little shops in Seoul, searching for
interesting knickknacks to send back to his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Hugh
V. Giltner, in Pueblo, Colorado.
Not far from the parliament building--a gaunt structure bearing the
scars of war--Sergeant Giltner halted to examine the wares of a street
peddler. “I have nice rug you will like,” the peddler said. He pulled
back the edge of a bundle, revealing part of a leopard skin. “This rug
was made from leopard skins. It is very valuable,” the peddler said.
“How big is the rug?” the sergeant asked.
The peddler replied, “Very big.” He indicated by stepping off several
paces that the rug was probably 18 feet long by 8 feet wide. “In your
country,” the peddler said, “this rug would be worth several hundred
dollars.”
The peddler unrolled the bundle to give the sergeant a better look at
this bargain he was offering. Giltner saw that it was, indeed, a large
rug of leopard skins. It appeared to him as though it were not in the
best of condition, but he liked the idea of surprising his folks in
Pueblo with a genuine leopard-skin rug. “How much do you want?”
The peddler said he would sell the rug for 150,000 won, the equivalent
at that time of about $25 in U.S. money. Then the peddler tugged at
Giltner’s sleeve and whispered, “This rug is from the old queen’s
palace. She was the last queen of Korea. It is worth $2,000 in United
States.”
Sergeant Giltner was impressed. He agreed to pay 150,000 won. He picked
up his new souvenir and lugged it back to the barracks, where he tossed
it into a corner. He would send it home later by mail, as he had such
gifts as a black lacquer chest, a lamp fashioned from a beer can, and
other souvenirs of his stay in Korea.
But Giltner’s plans for shipping the rug were postponed. A lieutenant
took a fancy to the rug and, pulling rank, persuaded the reluctant
sergeant to part with his souvenir for the purchase price. That same
evening, the lieutenant lost the rug in a poker game to Lieutenant No.
2, who sold it to Lieutenant No. 3 for $50. Lieutenant No. 3 was going
to send the rug to his parents, but then he decided it was too much
trouble. He sold it to Sergeant Giltner for $25.
The sergeant stuffed the rug into a carton and mailed it home. He wrote
a note to his mother: “... I figure you won’t have much use for this
rug even after it gets there. But you can always sell it.... The rug
like I said before is made of leopard skin--the real thing, and is
mounted on red felt or something.... Just where you would put it beats
me....”
The rug was a sensation in Pueblo. Neighbors dropped by to see it.
It was so large that it could not be used in any of the rooms in the
Giltner home. For the best viewing, Mrs. Giltner had the rug hauled
out into the back yard and strung over a clothes line. The exact
measurements of the rug were 18 feet 11 inches by 8 feet. It was
embroidered at the four corners and had a red felt backing.
Mrs. Giltner told neighbors, “It’s too pretty to walk on and too big
for my living room. I don’t know what in the world we’ll do with it.”
The Giltners sent the rug to a local firm for cleaning and storage.
They valued the rug at $25,000 and had it insured for $16,000. The
Pueblo _Star-Journal_ carried a picture of the rug with a pretty girl
seated on it. The accompanying story said: “Owners of the rug are
contacting museums and big-game hunters, with a view to selling it,
since they feel it is too valuable for their use, and their home will
not accommodate it.”
Denver’s Collector of Customs Harry A. Zinn saw the news story in the
Pueblo paper. He thought it odd that an American sergeant should be
sending back a $25,000 rug to the United States. He forwarded a copy
of the clipping to the Supervising Customs Agent in Chicago, saying,
“Enclosed is a newspaper clipping, the subject of which you may
consider warrants some investigation.” The Customs agency certainly was
interested in investigating the importation of a rug of such value.
At the same time, the Korean Consul General in New York, David
Namkoong, was displaying interest in the report of the rug shipped from
Seoul. Namkoong realized that the rug was one of the national treasures
which had been stolen from the palace in Seoul at the outbreak of the
Korean War. The rug had hung in the Chang Duk palace, the home of Queen
Min. The palace had been made into a national museum where the Koreans
displayed historical treasures of the ancient kingdom. Many of these
treasures had been among the loot taken by Communists and civilians
during the first invasion of Seoul. Mr. Namkoong told a reporter for
_The New York Times_, “The rug is worth about $100,000, if such a
priceless national treasure can have a price tag.”
The Korean government and the United States government took the view
that young Giltner was an innocent purchaser of the rug and that he
had knowingly violated no law in sending the rug home. A Customs agent
hurried to Pueblo from Chicago to impound the rug. It was placed in
storage for safekeeping in Denver pending its return to Korea. The
Korean government reimbursed the Giltners for all the expenses involved
in the shipment, cleaning, storage, and insuring of the rug. And thus
the case of the souvenir-hunting sergeant and the leopard-skin rug
ended on a note of international good will.
The case of the leopard-skin rug presented no difficulty for Customs
in establishing the historic and artistic authenticity of the rug.
But classification in the field of fine art is not always so simple.
Customs has become embroiled in some hilarious and notable cases of
this sort.
Early in this century, Congress decided in the interest of promoting
culture to permit, free of duty, the importation of paintings,
sculptures, and other art objects which could be classified as “fine
arts.” It was when Congress began defining fine arts in legal language
that the trouble began. For example, a sculpture was defined as
something which is representative of an animate object in nature that
is in its true proportion of length, breadth, and thickness. When this
definition was written, members of Congress did not take into account
the abstractionists and the modernists, who hardly view their subjects
in their “true proportion of length, breadth, and thickness.”
With the passage of this law, Congress automatically converted every
Customs appraiser in the United States into an active critic and judge
of the arts. This was so because--whether the appraisers liked it or
not--they had to decide whether an import was a work of fine art and
thus free of duty. No shilly-shallying about it. It was or it was not
subject to duty. Juries of eminent art critics might enjoy the luxury
of disagreement; the Customs appraiser had to say yes or no.
This was the situation in 1927 when the distinguished sculptor
Constantin Brancusi sent from Europe a highly polished bronze figure
called “Bird in Flight.” The bronze was about 4 feet 6 inches high and
stood on a cylindrical base about 6 inches in diameter and 6 inches in
height.
In his effort to describe the sculpture, Justice Waite of the Customs
Appeals Court would write: “The importation ... terminates at the top
in a point which might be caused by the cutting of the piece diagonally
across and upward until it terminates in an edge. It increases in size
as it descends with a slight curve to the middle, from which point it
decreases and terminates about ten inches from the pedestal, where it
is cylindrical, and from that point it increases in size on a conical
shaped base which rests upon a pedestal....
“The piece is characterized ... as a bird. Without the exercise of
rather a vivid imagination, it bears no resemblance to a bird except,
perchance, with such imagination it may be likened to the shape of the
body of a bird. It has neither head nor feet nor feathers portrayed
in the piece.... It is extremely smooth on its exterior which is a
polished and burnished surface....”
When a Customs examiner first saw this objet d’art, he decided that it
could not, from his viewpoint, be called even a reasonable facsimile
of a bird. As he studied it further, he was unable to detect the “true
proportions” which were necessary to meet the requirements of the law
laid down by Congress for duty-free statuary.
His ruling that the famed “Bird in Flight” was not a work of fine
art touched off a storm in the art world, with much derisive comment
aimed at Customs. Edward Steichen, the importer of the Brancusi work,
appealed the examiner’s ruling, and when the case came to trial in
1928, he was flanked by an imposing list of witnesses ready to testify
that Brancusi had indeed produced a work of fine art in “Bird in
Flight.”
The witnesses who came to the defense of Brancusi were Sculptor
Jacob Epstein, Forbes Watson, editor of the _Arts_ magazine, Frank
Crowninshield, editor of _Vanity Fair_ magazine, and William Henry Fox,
director of the Brooklyn Museum of Art.
After hearing all the evidence, the court conceded that “under the
earlier (court) decisions, this importation would have been rejected
as a work of art, or, to be more accurate, as a work within the
classification of high art.” However, it noted that opinions of what
constituted high art had undergone changes under the influence of
modern schools of art.
Finally the court said of the statue: “It is beautiful and symmetrical
in outline, and while some difficulty might be encountered in
associating it with a bird, it is nevertheless pleasing to look at and
highly ornamental, and as we hold under the evidence that it is the
original production of a professional sculptor and is in fact a piece
of sculpture and a work of art according to the authorities above
referred to, we sustain the protest and find that it is entitled to
free entry....”
The storm kicked up over the Brancusi bird created little more uproar
than the arrival in New York in May, 1955, of an abstract painting by
the European artist Dr. Alberto Burri. It was a most unusual work of
art, as it consisted of several pieces of burlap sewn together and
affixed to a board, stencilled with letters, and decorated with birds
painted in oils. The artist said the effect of the whole was to convey
a spiritual sense of the order in life. He valued his work at $450.
However the Customs examiner, failing to perceive the artist’s message,
ruled that the importation was not a work of art. He held that it was
a manufactured object whose chief value was in the vegetable fiber, or
burlap sacking. Under this ruling, the import was dutiable at 20 per
cent of the value placed upon it by the artist.
The examiner’s ruling posed an unusual problem. Art experts agreed
that Dr. Burri’s work was not a painting--but a collage. And Congress
had failed to mention collages in the categories of art held to be
duty free, an oversight thought by some to reflect no credit on the
Congressional artistic sense.
Alfred H. Barr, Jr., director of museum collections of the Museum of
Modern Art, and Leo Castelli, owner of a New York art gallery, were
among those who came to Dr. Burri’s defense in court. They agreed his
collage was an original work of free fine art and they described Dr.
Burri as one of the first half-dozen artists to emerge in postwar Italy
with a world-wide reputation. His works had been exhibited in the New
York Museum of Modern Art, the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, the
Allbright Gallery in Buffalo and other well-known museums.
The court reluctantly held, however, that since Congress had failed to
include collages in the free fine arts, an import duty of 20 per cent
would have to be paid--a ruling which later led to Congress amending
the law to permit collages to be imported free of duty.
These cases and others moved leaders in the world of art to petition
Congress to change the tariff laws governing the entry of works of
art, and to remove the absurdly restrictive language which had caused
so much embarrassment not only to the artists and to museums, but also
to Customs and the government itself. As a result of these petitions,
Senators Jacob Javits of New York and Paul Douglas of Illinois
introduced in 1959 a bill to amend the tariff laws to permit free duty
for all fine art and to eliminate the old definitions which had bemused
Customs examiners. The bill was passed by Congress.
Actually, the slings and arrows hurled at the Bureau in the disputes
over abstract art obscured the fact that over the years the Bureau had
developed a good many experts whose opinions were valued highly by
museums and leaders in the world of art. The Bureau also has some of
the country’s leading experts on appraisals of a wide range of imports.
It even boasts that it has a man who can look at a hog’s bristle and
tell whether the hog was raised on the China slope of the Himalayas
or the Indian side of the mountain, a bit of esoteric knowledge which
is not as useless as it might seem. Little is heard of the fact that
almost daily these men protect American dealers, collectors, and the
buying public from forgeries, fraud, and unfair trade practices.
Thirty years ago the country was being flooded with fake antique
silverware from England. In many cases an old hallmark--authentic in
itself and perhaps 200 years old--would appear on a beautiful teapot.
To all outward appearances the teapot was an authentic antique 200
years old. But what had happened was that an expert silversmith had
lifted the hallmark from an inexpensive spoon and then soldered it into
the teapot so smoothly that only an expert could detect the fakery.
There is little chance for such fraud today, even though dealers and
collectors import each year more than $2 million worth of antique
silver and old Sheffield, largely from England. Much of the credit for
this protection is due to a dapper little man named Nathan Nathanson,
who is one of the world’s leading experts on silverware. Nathanson is a
small, bouncing man with a bristling black moustache and an infectious
enthusiasm for his work. He was reared in Brooklyn and as a boy served
as a jeweler’s apprentice. He became fascinated with metals and gems.
The youth haunted museums, art galleries, antique dealers’ showrooms,
and libraries, studying everything he could find on the subject of
silver and old jewelry. He pursued his interests with study at Columbia
University and then joined the Customs Bureau, where he quickly became
recognized as an authority in his field. As a result of these years of
study, Nathanson usually can tell within five years when an antique
piece of silverware was made, the name of the artisan who made it, the
city in which it was made, and the original owner of the piece. This he
is able to do through his knowledge of the hallmarks on the silver--the
symbols which were first stamped into silver pieces by the ancient
guilds of England during the reign of King Edward I in the year 1300.
During the last 200 years, hallmarks have been an important guide to
those versed in the lore of old silver. But of equal importance is a
knowledge of the patina of old silver--that mellow coloration which
is given to silver only by time and which no one yet has been able to
duplicate. The expert must also know the distinctive designs from each
period.
Unscrupulous silversmiths have several methods of faking antique
silver. The most commonly used fraud is the transfer of a famous
hallmark from a small piece of silver to a large tray, coffee pot or
teapot, a process known as “sweating.”
One simple method to detect such a graft is to breathe on the hallmark.
The warm breath in most cases will make the graft lines show up. The
infallible method is to heat the silver--and this can only be done
safely by an expert. Under strong heat the graft lines come into view.
Another method of forgery is to take a valuable and authentically old
piece of silver, make a cast of it, and from the casting create a
duplicate. The new silver piece is “aged” with an artificial patina.
But no matter how good this job might be, the forgers always leave
after casting tiny marks and other imperfections which the expert is
able to spot by close study. Nathanson insists that even if the job
were so well done that an expert missed the telltale marks, he could
not be fooled by a phony patina.
Nathanson and his colleagues have their own quiet moments of triumph
when they pit their knowledge against that of well-known importers. In
one case a New York importer objected to paying duty on a loving cup
which obviously was much more than a century old and qualified in his
opinion for free entry. He argued that this loving cup was absolutely
authentic and that all Nathanson had to do was look at the patina of
the silver and also at the hallmarks. “Anyone can recognize those
hallmarks and see that they are legitimate,” the importer said.
But Nathanson was quite sure there was something wrong with this piece
of silver. The design was not quite right for its period. The hallmarks
were genuine. There was no evidence that they had been tampered with.
The patina, without doubt, was that of a very old piece of silver, and
the sheen could not have been imparted by any chicanery.
Finally he suggested to the importer that they take the loving cup to
the workshop of the importer, where his own silversmith could heat
it to a near-melting point without doing damage. As they watched the
silversmith carefully heat the silver, Nathanson saw that his suspicion
was justified. The heat showed up definite lines where a spout had been
removed from the “loving cup” and the hole patched over very expertly
with silver to change the shape of a teapot and convert it to a loving
cup.
Under the law, this piece of silver--even though it was far more than
a century old--could not meet the requirements for free importation
because it had been changed from its original form.
Many antique dealers are upset by the fact that they import what
appears to be a legitimate antique only to find that it does not
qualify for free entry because it has been tampered with at some time
in the past. For example, one importer brought into the country a very
old Oriental panel which had been made into a modern coffee table. He
declared the table was entitled to free entry because the panel was
an antique. Customs did not agree with the dealer’s viewpoint. While
the panel alone would have been permitted to enter free of duty, once
it became a part of a modern piece of furniture then it no longer met
the legal requirements. This meant that the importer not only had to
pay the regular rate of duty but also a penalty of 25 per cent--a
penalty which is used by the government to discourage the practice of
mislabelling imports.