Word: underworld
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James Ellroy is the real deal. The real, raw deal. The international best selling author of L.A. Confidential, among others, pulls no punches when it comes to the sex, drugs and violence of the American underworld, particularly in his native Los Angeles...
...largest city in the world 11 years from now; what happens there is just a more dramatic instance of what happens in Jakarta and Bangkok and La Paz. And the only people maintaining standards and facilities in this Jacobean society are, almost inevitably, members of the criminal underworld, who run things more efficiently than do their government counterparts. Even judges turn to mobsters for help. "Our motto," a criminal overlord tells Mehta, "is insaaniyat, humanity." When an ordinary, law-abiding citizen comes to Bombay from elsewhere, Mehta shows, he soon learns that just to buy a movie ticket...
...beneath them. According to one Brazilian friend, 400,000 people arrive at the city's bus station every year, seeking a new life, only to find that all the jobs and houses?and lives?have been taken up by others like themselves. They can survive only by joining the underworld, and a child is seen as irresponsible if he goes to school when he could be supporting his parents by running drugs. If the population of Bombay continues to double every 10 years, it will eclipse that of Italy by the year 2015, says Mehta. We may dream to ourselves...
...museum officials and gallery owners, who know how vulnerable their treasures are. Nothing could be worse than the thought of a canvas as important as The Scream, Edvard Munch's indelible image of a man howling against the backdrop of a blood-red sky, disappearing into a criminal underworld that doesn't care much about the niceties of art conservation. Art theft is a vast problem around the world. As many as 10,000 precious items of all kinds disappear each year. And for smaller museums in particular, it may not be a problem they can afford to solve...
Thieves sometimes try using artworks as collateral for other underworld deals. The masterminds of the 1986 robbery of Russborough House near Dublin, who snatched 18 canvases, tried in vain to trade them for Irish Republican Army members held in British jails. Others demand a ransom from the museum that owns the pictures. Ten years ago, thieves in Frankfurt, Germany, made off with two major canvases by J.M.W. Turner that were on loan from the Tate Gallery in London. The paintings, worth more than $80 million, were recovered in 2002 after the Tate paid more than $5 million to people having...