Michel van Rijn

Michel van Rijn was one of the three middlemen who sold the Kanakaria church's mosaics to an Indianapolis dealer in 1988, and nine years later he was the buyer who brought frescoes stolen from northern Cyprus back out of Munich for the Church of Cyprus. He was born in 1950 and died in Italy on 25 July 2024, aged 73^7,8. Dan Hofstadter, who interviewed him, writes that he was the son of an Amsterdam gallery owner and dentist, and that Robert Fitzgerald, an American dealer, had known him since boyhood⁵.

A reputation before 1988

When the Kanakaria case reached court, his name was already attached to a conviction. In 1985 a French court had convicted him in absentia of forging Marc Chagall's signature on lithographs, and the Indiana court took judicial notice of that conviction and of his reputation^1,2. Sullivan adds that he and Fitzgerald were being sued in Britain over a modello said to have been used by Michelangelo for the David, and Hoover that an art gallery had sued him for failure to pay^1,2. A Scotland Yard detective, quoted without a name by Hofstadter, said that he had had a hand in many of the world's art-smuggling jobs and would be happy to claim all of them⁵. No court made such a finding.

The Kanakaria mosaics

On 1 July 1988 Fitzgerald introduced Peg Goldberg to van Rijn in Amsterdam, where van Rijn showed her photographs of four mosaics. Hofstadter reports that he told her they came from a church destroyed in 1974 and belonged to a Turkish archaeologist in Munich; the archaeologist was Aydın Dikmen, whom Sullivan says van Rijn presented to her as the former official archaeologist of Turkish Cyprus^1,5. Van Rijn also told her of his French conviction, which he resented⁵. The California attorney Ronald Faulk acted as counsel to both Fitzgerald and van Rijn^2,5.

The price was about $1.08 million. Kaiser reports that Dikmen received $350,000 and that Fitzgerald and van Rijn received $282,500 each³. Hofstadter reports that the two men took shares of the resale proceeds in place of a finder's fee, 22.5 per cent each and 5 per cent for Faulk. At the trial Fitzgerald testified that $350,000 went to Dikmen under a secret agreement among the three middlemen, $80,000 to Faulk, about $70,000 to a London attorney and $580,000 to himself and van Rijn together⁵. The Geneva hand-over of 5 July was made by Goldberg and Fitzgerald while van Rijn remained in Amsterdam⁵. Later in 1988 he telephoned Goldberg to say that Dikmen also held a fragment showing the Hand of Mary and the Feet of Christ, and a roundel of Saint Andrew. A second agreement for those pieces was signed on 10 February 1989, and the pieces were never reunited with the first four mosaics. The Indianapolis physician Stewart Bick paid $780,000 for half of van Rijn's and half of Fitzgerald's resale interests together⁵.

Van Rijn was not a party to Autocephalous Greek-Orthodox Church of Cyprus v. Goldberg, but the court named him among the dealers who brought Goldberg to the mosaics^3,5. At the trial in May 1989 Goldberg testified that he had given her Dikmen's credentials and dated the mosaics to the late fifth century. Judge Noland's order of 3 August 1989 awarded the mosaics to the Church of Cyprus and listed, as an alternative ground under Swiss law, that the middlemen were suspect⁵.

His own account, and others'

In The Hague in 1991 and 1992 van Rijn gave Hofstadter long interviews. He said that Goldberg knew exactly what the mosaics were and that he had given her the Dumbarton Oaks monograph; Goldberg has said she did not see it until weeks after the purchase⁵. Others made claims about him: Savo Kujundžić, an associate of Dikmen, alleged to Hofstadter that van Rijn had arranged for a friend to impersonate Dikmen at Geneva airport, and Fitzgerald repeated the allegation. Van Rijn denied it heatedly⁵. In 1993 he published a memoir, Hot Art, Cold Cash⁷.

Buying back from Dikmen

In February 1997 van Rijn approached Tasoula Hadjitofi, the honorary consul of Cyprus in The Hague and the Church of Cyprus's representative for stolen art, and offered to help buy back three mosaics and 44 frescoes. On 5 September 1997 he delivered the Kanakaria mosaic of Saint Thaddeus to the consulate. The next day he went to Munich and bought 25 frescoes from Dikmen through intermediaries with $75,000 of his own money; he took them to The Hague by chartered jet, where they were identified as coming from the church of Christ Antiphonitis. On 7 September he returned to Munich and arranged to buy seven larger frescoes for $49,000¹⁰.

In October 1997, with 32 frescoes and one mosaic recovered, Hadjitofi decided to move against Dikmen. According to Mark Rose, van Rijn and his intermediaries were granted immunity in the Netherlands, Cyprus and Germany, and police raided two of Dikmen's Munich apartments during a handover of money on 10 October and took him into custody¹⁰. Rose wrote in April 1998 that van Rijn, who had received death threats, was under the protection of Scotland Yard¹⁰. His website, which published material on the antiquities trade, was shut down in 2006⁸.