Robert Volpe; World-Renowned 'Art Cop'

Robert Volpe, 63, a painter, sculptor, gallery owner and New York Police Department detective who became internationally known as the "art cop" for tracking purloined art on the black market, died Nov. 28 at his home on Staten Island, N.Y., after a heart attack.

For years, Mr. Volpe was a singular figure in police work as the only detective in the country assigned full-time to investigate stolen or forged artwork as well as dealer fraud and vandalism in museums.

With his dungarees, long hair and thick, handlebar moustache, he looked less like a cop than an art school bohemian, and he endured peer ridicule. Police colleagues once placed a nude centerfold in his locker with a note asking, "But is it art?"

A former art school student and narcotics investigator, Mr. Volpe was asked in 1972 to gauge the usefulness of an art squad. Until then, art thefts were lumped into burglary or larceny caseloads.

"Instead of coming back with a report, I started coming back with arrests and recoveries," he told the New York Times.

He scoured auction houses, raided homes of collectors suspected of going bad and sometimes went undercover to negotiate with thieves about returning art.

Once, he portrayed a gay Rhode Island art dealer named Damien Renar. When he arranged to meet the thieves, he was dressed in a white linen suit, and he relished the dramatic showdown, he said, when he could pull his police revolver from its holster and shout, "Freeze, you [expletive]!"

"Grade B movie stuff," he told the Times. "You find you have to behave that way. You don't come off with authority, you're done."

When he retired in 1985, he estimated that he had recovered tens of millions of dollars worth of Byzantine ivories, Oriental rugs, Greek marble heads, Tiffany glass, Matisses, Raphaels and other treasures. For a period, he noted a particularly high trade in faux antique French furniture.

"If all the old French furniture was real," he told the Christian Science Monitor, "there would never have been a French Revolution. Everybody in the country would have been too busy making furniture."

As a detective and later as a private art-security consultant, he shared information regularly with Interpol and other police agencies in London, Paris and Rome. He added that thieves were just as likely to help in order "to knock out the competition."

Mr. Volpe was born a banker's son Dec. 13, 1942, in Brooklyn. As a teenager, he painted the tugboats he saw from his Bay Ridge neighborhood. When a local art dealer exhibited the works, Mr. Volpe was shocked to see them sell for $250.