11/16/04

LC041116

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

This cop patrols a beat found only in Los Angeles. He's on the
trail of stolen art and artifacts.

Donald Hrycyk>> We have looked for dinosaur eggs, dinosaur
fossils, animation art. I mean, we're looking for a comic book
right now that is worth over $190,000.

Val>> And then, a legal way to put a masterpiece on your wall
and it won't cost you a fortune.

All that and more straight ahead on tonight's Life and Times.

Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of
the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality
of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of
medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Val>> You're about to meet one LAPD detective who single-
handedly recovers more loot dollar for dollar than any other
police division. How does he do it? Well, it helps if you're
on the trail of art, fine art, where one piece can be worth
hundreds of thousands of dollars. Stephanie O'Neill Noe takes
us inside the LAPD where one cop has made an art of finding
stolen art.

Stephanie O'Neill Noe>> In the celluloid world of art thievery,
the security is replete with high-tech gadgetry. The criminals
are handsome and agile and the art itself is from world-renowned
collections inside upscale museums. But the real world of
stolen artwork paints a different portrait. Typical victims?
Everyday Los Angeles residents like UCLA Professor of Pathology,
Richard Gatti. Ten years ago during earthquake reconstruction
at his Sherman Oaks home, Gatti discovered that a valuable
painting purchased by his father decades ago was stolen from his
closet where he'd stashed it for safekeeping.

Richard Gatti>> It was horrible, real horrible. You feel
violated. You feel like, you know, there are not many things in
my life that I really need to have, but this was one apparently
I had become very attached to.

Stephanie O'Neill Noe>> To ease the loss, Gatti sent a photo of
the 1850 work by Italian painter, Ettore Forte, to a Spanish
artist who recreated the painting for him on ceramic tiles.

Richard Gatti>> After everything had kind of calmed down, I had
adjusted to the fact that I was never going to see it again. It
was hanging above the mantel there. I just decided to fill that
bare spot with a copy and we decided to, instead of using the
gold frame, to use the white frame just to be different from the
original, just different enough that I'd know it wasn't the
original.

Stephanie O'Neill Noe>> Still, Gatti never gave up searching
for the painting.

Richard Gatti>> This one is one that I keep in my wallet and
I've had it in my wallet for the past ten years. I travel a lot
as a scientist and, whenever I have a moment, I will go into a
gallery and look around and then ask them if they've seen this
painting.

Stephanie O'Neill Noe>> Across town at the Los Angeles Police
Department, another set of eyes remained on the lookout for
Gatti's painting and hundreds of other pieces of art and culture
stolen from throughout Los Angeles.

Donald Hrycyk>> "Commercial Crimes Division, Detective Hrycyk.
Yeah, I needed to talk to you about the art that was taken from
your home."

Stephanie O'Neill Noe>> Detective Donald Hrycyk has one of the
more unusual police assignments in the country. He's the
nation's only fulltime art cop.

Donald Hrycyk>> This is an interesting case that I'm working on
right now. This is a painting that was stolen over ten years
ago, so here you see it the way it was when it was stolen, but
when it came back --

Stephanie O'Neill Noe>> -- there are people there.

Donald Hrycyk>> Suddenly we have five people that were not
there before. What we learned is that the people were there
originally by the artist and then, after it was stolen, somebody
took an interest in the painting and went to the trouble of
doing a professional restoration of the painting. So now it's
in much better shape than when it was stolen.

Stephanie O'Neill Noe>> So, in this case, the person who lost
the painting gets a painting that's improved and back to its
original shape back to them.

Donald Hrycyk>> Absolutely.

Stephanie O'Neill Noe>> At no extra cost.

Donald Hrycyk>> No extra cost, no (laughter).

Stephanie O'Neill Noe>> The art theft detail, now staffed only
by Hrycyk, has recovered more dollars worth of stolen loot than
any division of the LAPD. Dozens of paintings and collectibles
remain unclaimed and can be seen on the LAPD's website.

Donald Hrycyk>> This portion here is the art theft portion of
the LAPD website and on here it gives an introduction into our
unit. It gives here the fact that, just in the last ten years,
we've recovered over $52 million dollars worth of art.

Stephanie O'Neill Noe>> In an LAPD evidence room next to
packages of drugs and carts stuffed with automatic weapons and
rifles, Hrycyk stores some of the artwork. At any given time,
he's working on thirty-five to forty cases.

Donald Hrycyk>> This is a nineteenth century and this painting
used to hang in a mansion in Bel Aire. For a while, the wife
saw this hanging on the wall and thought that it looked a little
bit different, but she couldn't figure out why. So months went
by and probably after three or four months of not being able to
determine what was wrong, she actually came up to it and put her
hand on it. At that point, she realized that the original
painting was gone and it had been replaced now with a photograph
of the actual painting that was there. This is one of those
cases where "the butler did it".

Stephanie O'Neill Noe>> Hrycyk began his career as a street cop
investigating murders and violent crimes.

Donald Hrycyk>> I actually wanted to get away from the grimness
of having to deal with street crimes, violent crimes, and
actually art sounded like something that would be challenging.

Stephanie O'Neill Noe>> Do you have to make a judgment call, in
some cases, about what is art?

Donald Hrycyk>> All the time, all the time. And it's difficult
because there may be something that a person really wants us to
recover, really wants us to work on, and yet it doesn't fall
within the criteria.

Stephanie O'Neill Noe>> Still, Hrycyk's net is a broad one.

Donald Hrycyk>> I mean, we have looked for dinosaur eggs,
dinosaur fossils, rare comic books. I mean, we're looking for a
comic book right now that is worth over $190,000.

Stephanie O'Neill Noe>> Are art thieves the sophisticated
criminals of popular fiction like "The Thomas Crown Affair"?

Donald Hrycyk>> Some of them are. We don't have too many wall-
crawling ninjas that are involved in these cases. But on the
other hand, I had a case involving a man that climbed into an
art gallery, took a metal sculpture that was over seven feet
tall, dragged it over a barbed wire fence, dragged it into the
back of a pickup truck and then took it to a metal recycling
yard and sold it for scrap metal for $9.10.

Stephanie O'Neill Noe>> Fortunately, Hrycyk says, many of his
cases have successful endings like his recovery this year of the
L.A. Philharmonic's rare Stradivarius cello worth $3.5 million
dollars. And whatever happened to that painting that Richard
Gatti loved so much?

Donald Hrycyk>> Mr. Gatti's artwork was missing for ten years
and suddenly it showed up. In fact, here's the catalog here at
Sotheby's in New York. In the catalog, here we see Mr. Gatti's
artwork.

Stephanie O'Neill Noe>> Gatti says he's eagerly awaiting the
reunion with his family's long-lost painting, but it won't come
cheaply. Before getting it back, he'll have to cough up $25,000
in insurance company reimbursements. But the good news is that
the painting is now worth more than double that.

Richard Gatti>> I was going to buy a car this year, but I think
I'm going to have to wait a year to buy the car. That's a lot
of money to come up with certainly.

Stephanie O'Neill Noe>> Meanwhile, the image of the Forte
stamped "Recovered" will remain on the LAPD art theft detail
website to remind Angelenos that Hollywood endings still happen
in Los Angeles. For Life and Times, I'm Stephanie O'Neill Noe.

Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and
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Val>> You don't have to adopt a criminal lifestyle to enjoy
fine art. There is a perfectly legal option. It's at LACMA,
the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where you can not only
look at beautiful art, you can actually rent it for as little as
$25.00 a month. Vicki Curry takes us inside LACMA's rental
gallery.

Vicki Curry>> It's a world-class museum with major works and
high-profile exhibitions, but there's a little-known part of
LACMA that may surprise you. Some of the works on these walls
are for sale or for rent.

Gail Rachelefsky>> And I think that's a service that I don't
know anywhere else where that exists. One of the great values
of renting art is, if you're just not quite so confident and
you're not really sure what your taste is, you have an option.
You can rent. You can build your taste in art.

Vicki Curry>> That's thanks to the LACMA Art Rental and Sales
Gallery which offers over four hundred pieces by local working
artists. Anyone can purchase them and museum members can rent
them.

Gail Rachelefsky>> And I think that that is, for me, the most
incredible part of this gallery. We can start someone young who
maybe doesn't have great finances and they can start seeing at
the beginning good art.

Vicki Curry>> Although the gallery is open to everyone, it's
off the beaten path hidden away in the basement next to the
museum's private offices. But once you get there, it's like
discovering a buried treasure. So, Patty, in addition to the
things that are on the walls out in the gallery, there's also
some work here that people can come to look at to rent or
purchase?

Patricia Howard>> Yes. We have over a hundred artworks here in
the bins and a lot of the artists don't like to be in the bins,
but the renters love to come in here and have us show them the
work in the bins because they think they're going to find
something that nobody else has seen.

Vicki Curry>> So the artists that you represent here in the
gallery are all from the Southern California area?

Patricia Howard>> Yes, from Santa Barbara to San Diego.

Vicki Curry>> And how many do you have usually in the gallery?

Patricia Howard>> We have a little over two hundred that are
active artists --

Vicki Curry>> -- that you represent?

Patricia Howard>> Yes, and we have a variety of work too from
landscapes to abstract paintings to figurative paintings, so
there's a lot for them to choose from.

Vicki Curry>> The pieces are all priced by the artists
themselves, correct?

Patricia Howard>> That's correct, and then the rental price is
a range depending upon the price of the piece. Our top price
for purchasing is $6,000. Our rental range goes from $25.00 for
two months to $135.00 plus tax.

Vicki Curry>> Many people rent for years until the piece is
purchased. Others like to try out different art and some might
get to enjoy the work at their office since the gallery also
deals with companies.

Jill Fink>> The corporate program is by word of mouth and a lot
of designers come to us who know our work and they bring their
clients here to purchase them. We have many, many -- I think
last month one firm rented fifty-two pieces, so it's very large.

Patricia Howard>> They want work that is going to liven up
their work space, their lobbies, their conference rooms, their
various offices and hallways.

Vicki Curry>> The Rental and Sales Gallery started in the mid-
1960's, a project of the Art Museum Council, a volunteer
organization.

Jill Fink>> The Art Museum Council's mission is to raise money
for the museum. We purchase acquisitions and we fund different
exhibitions here. The Art Rental and Sales Gallery is a
tremendous source of income for us and primarily that's why we
wanted to start it. Well, over the years, we've purchased
approximately eight million dollars worth of art for the museum.

Vicki Curry>> The gallery usually makes about $800,000 a year.
Most of that money goes to the artists.

Gail Rachelefsky>> And the glory of this gallery is that we
only take twenty-five percent. The artists get seventy-five
percent. I don't know any other place that an artist has that.

Richard Bruland>> Artists are used to a fifty-fifty split in
commercial galleries. That's pretty much the standard. The
fact that they give you a much larger percentage than that fifty
percent is really welcomed.

Vicki Curry>> For the artists, being chosen for the gallery or
one of its special exhibits can be a life-changing opportunity.

Richard Bruland>> It's a very prestigious place. It's allowed
my work to be seen by people that I just never would have had
the opportunity to place it in front of before. Sometimes in
commercial galleries, the general public gets left out. Down
here, you get a little bit of everybody from people who are
collectors and highly-educated in the arts to people who aren't
and really are trying to open up those doors and find out new
things.

Hei Myung Hyun>> I need to get out and show my work to people,
so this was a great chance. There are many Korean artists in
Korean communities. I tell actually a lot of my friends to
apply here to get in. I think to get out and then meet other
community artists, this is a great place.

Vicki Curry>> It is a great place for those lucky chosen
artists, but getting in isn't easy.

Gail Rachelefsky>> We look for someone who has talent and
someone who has emerging talent, someone that we can help and
feed and expose and someone that we can be proud of in having in
the museum. So it is a very selective process. The artist
finds out about us and they then submit slides. Then from the
slides, we choose who we want to see and then we go and make
gallery visits. We then interview the artist, go to his studio,
see what he's producing, see how productive he is, see if he's
ready to be in the gallery.

Patricia Howard>> It gives the young artists a place to be. It
gives them confidence.

Jill Fink>> I think it's very important to support emerging
artists because they can get their foundation here. They can
have the exposure to the public much more than if they were in a
private gallery.

Richard Bruland>> Sometimes a gallery will insist that you keep
on working in the same way that you did the year before because
that was successful. They don't do that here. They really
allow the artists that are in this gallery to just work at their
own pace and to work in the direction that is natural for them.

Vicki Curry>> There's no pressure on them to sell, but the
unique opportunity for artists to rent their work can really pay
off.

Richard Bruland>> But for me, the rental component is extremely
important. That steady flow of income I find to be really,
really helpful especially as an artist.

Vicki Curry>> They may be struggling today, but these artists
might go on to become the greats of their time. It's happened
before.

Patricia Howard>> This is a ledger that I found in the cupboard
when I started working here. It goes back to 1966. These are
the artists who brought work to the gallery and there are
artists in here like Tony Berlant, Billy Al Bengston, Betye
Saar, Peter Alexander, who all were in the gallery at one time
or another.

Richard Bruland>> Well, first of all, it's the Los Angeles
County Museum of Art. It looks great on my resume (laughter)
and there's no question that a lot of people don't really make
the effort to go to galleries, but they do come here. All in
all, it opens doors.

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Val>> At the heart of the American dream is the promise that
each generation can do a little bit better than the previous
one, and yet as many parents and children are learning these
days, that part of the dream is anything but certain, even in
prosperous Orange County.

Andre Mouchard is a reporter for The Orange County Register. He
was the principal writer for a special in-depth report on the
shrinking middle class in Orange County. He told the story
through a father and son and it looks at major changes in the
growth of Orange County. Andre Mouchard, thank you for spending
a little time with us. You were the principal writer in a major
series -- or will be a major series -- and the headline was
pretty ominous. It said "Not Like The Old Days in Orange
County". What did that mean really?

Andre Mouchard>> Well, it's the kickoff to a series we're doing
about cultural change here in Orange County. Essentially, we've
identified three different eras for the county. Looking back at
prior to World War II, the county was very agricultural --

Val>> -- Orange County --

Andre Mouchard>> -- exactly. Then from World War II to roughly
the time that the freeways opened up, we were becoming a
suburban enclave, still fairly agricultural, still fairly
homogenous, very white. Then from the freeways until roughly
the fall of Saigon, that's another era. We become even more
suburban.

Val>> That's interesting. From the freeways to the fall of
Saigon?

Andre Mouchard>> Right, right. Because we went from -- you
know, there was white in this area, very suburban, middle class,
but homogenous area. Then starting around the fall of Saigon,
we become much more diversified. Population continues to grow,
but a lot of the population growth is coming from, you know,
around the world and from south of the border. So that was the
third era, okay, from Little Saigon until roughly now. Now
we're starting to write stories about, okay, how have we changed
over the last thirty years? We're looking at sort of big
picture changes.

Val>> Now the family that you focused on was a father and son,
Dave and Dave [Teshane]. Tell us about them.

Andre Mouchard>> Okay. They are electricians. The elder Dave
-- I say that loosely. He's only fifty-five -- got started in
his profession, or his trade rather, when he was twenty in 1970
and he joined a union. He was able to raise a family. His wife
didn't work. He worked fulltime and had two kids and they could
buy a house, travel a little bit. They had a big motor home,
that sort of thing, and they had essentially a very comfortable
middle-class life. He's continued on in the union. He's now
basically a union organizer, but he makes the same amount of
money as somebody who was in the upper level of the union. His
son also got a job as a union electrician, I think when he was
twenty-one or twenty-two, but essentially the same time period.

Val>> Didn't go to college, opted for union life like his dad.

Andre Mouchard>> Right, right, in the same place here in Orange
County. It turns out that his life, while it's certainly
comfortable, I mean, he's doing okay, he's not by any stretch of
the imagination impoverished, the kind of opportunities afforded
to him are -- you know, he's cut off. He can't buy a house
here, retirement is an iffy thing, sending kids to any sort of
college is, you know, certainly something the kids are going to
have to work on.

Val>> Does his wife have to work?

Andre Mouchard>> No. His thing is that he's trying to not do
that. But the upshot is that we use them as an example of sort
of a broader change that's happened here in the county. Orange
County, back when the elder [Teshane] got his job, was as
middle-class as middle-class could be. So the upshot is that,
you know, he's got sort of a peace of mind. The younger
[Teshane] is working just as hard, is considered just as good at
his job, making the same kind of money that his father did, but
it doesn't go nearly as far and it certainly doesn't get you the
same kind of security.

Val>> One of the things that the younger [Teshane] has had to
sacrifice is home ownership. He had to move out to Riverside to
afford something and then, when he moved back to Orange County,
he had to settle for a condominium.

Andre Mouchard>> Yeah. Ironically, a condo owned by his dad
and, you know, he rents from him.

Val>> But the median home price is half a million dollars.

Andre Mouchard>> Yeah. They did have a home out in Riverside
and, even with the money that they made off of selling that,
getting back in to basically the neighborhood he grew up in
isn't within his reach right now. You know, things might
change. I mean, obviously there are fluctuations in the housing
market and we've been through this big spike. But the long-term
change is that this county is not necessarily a place where
people who, you know, work with their hands or have solid jobs -
-

Val>> -- and he's earning a very respectable salary.

Andre Mouchard>> Yeah, yeah, and with benefits as well. Again,
it's not about poverty. It's about sort of a day to day middle-
class being able to reach what used to be considered the basics
for middle-class life.

Val>> So if the middle-class is being squeezed out or becoming
smaller and smaller and we have everybody from Fashion Island,
you know, the upper class, to some very, very poor people in
Santa Ana, what does that portend for the future of Orange
County?

Andre Mouchard>> That's a tricky question. I mean, we talked
with a lot of folks who are economists and business people and
there's kind of a divide out there. Some people would argue
that, you know, a place like Orange County is going to be sort
of an executive enclave and that, by virtue of land prices and
this being a really nice place to live, you know, manufacturing
and that sort of thing maybe should be pushed away. You know,
let economic rules sort of work. Other people would argue that
that's not a real wise way to go and that, for now, Riverside
and Riverside County are sort of what Orange County was, say,
thirty years ago, a place where people live and then they drive
to work.

Val>> So, although this have and have-not gap may be in a way
more dramatic in Orange County, it's something that's happening
in Southern California, in California, actually in the United
States?

Andre Mouchard>> Yeah. I mean, a big point of contention out
there, how dramatic a gap this is in other parts of the country.
Certainly in places with extreme rises in home values tends to
push people out very quickly, so it's maybe an exaggerated
example of a bigger trend here. But it's certainly a trend that
economists point to and, however you define the middle-class, it
isn't growing as fast as it was.

Val>> So this is just one of the things you're going to look at
as you span the cultural changes in Orange County. What else
are you going to look at?

Andre Mouchard>> Well, we're going to look at everything from
physical changes here -- there are a number of high-rise
apartments being contemplated and actually being built.

Val>> And you never consider high-rises in Orange County.

Andre Mouchard>> No, and, you know, high-rises being something
more than twenty stories. Again, we're not turning into New
York. But it's not so much talking about the change there as
much as it is the emotional reaction to that. Some people feel
that, you know, we're not a suburb anymore as a result of that.
We're going to look at political changes here. For a couple of
generations basically, land developers have been the big power
players down here and that's not necessarily the case anymore.
We're also looking at demographic changes, you know, how that's
affected people. Going forward, we're going to look at a lot of
different things.

Val>> Well, Andre, you have your work cut out for you, that's
for sure, but you're in a great place for some really
interesting stories.

Andre Mouchard>> Thank you.

Val>> If you'd like to read the full story on Orange County's
middle-class, you can go to their website [www.ocregister.com].
Check it out. And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. For
everyone at Life and Times, thanks so much for watching. We'll
see you next time.

Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of
the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality
of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of
medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Next time on Life and Times --

A police crackdown on illegal possession of one of Los Angeles's
precious commodities: parking spaces.

>> By the time you get out here, it's already hooked up. The
thing is, if it's hooked up, it's gone. There's no okay in this
situation. You know, it's like, well, it's seven o'clock, your
car is already hooked up. I'm sorry, you just got to get it out
of impound.

Val>> That's next time on Life and Times.