Lifestyle
Meet the Dutch art detective who tracks down stolen masterpieces
For 20 years, Dutch art detective Arthur Brand has acted as an intermediary between the police and people who know where stolen artwork might be hiding.
Rebecca Rosman for NPR
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Rebecca Rosman for NPR
AMSTERDAM – In his modest IKEA-furnished apartment, Arthur Brand paces to distract himself.
“I’m nervous,” he says, with the honesty of a man who has learned that bravado is useless in his line of work. He lights a cigarette, leans out the window, and scans the street below.
“The waiting is the hardest part.”
Brand, 56, has made a career out of waiting: for a phone call, a knock at the door, and, every once in a blue moon, a Picasso or a Van Gogh left discreetly on his doorstep.
“Those are the moments you realize it’s worth it,” he says.
Until, of course, everything resets, and the waiting game begins again.
In another life, Brand says, he’ll take his mother’s advice and “find a normal job.” But in this one, he’s helped recover stolen art for two decades — often the cases police can’t solve alone.
Some call him the “Indiana Jones of the art world.” Brand insists he’s closer to a certain Pink Panther character.
“Do you know Peter Sellers, Inspector Clouseau? Well, I’m like that,” he says. “I always follow the wrong lead.”
Maybe it’s true. Maybe it’s just modesty. Or maybe it’s Brand’s ability to follow every wrong lead — and keep going — that keeps him in the game.
He says he has recovered more than 150 stolen paintings and artifacts. His cases regularly make international headlines.
There’s the stolen Van Gogh that showed up on his doorstep in 2023, stuffed into a blood-soaked pillow in a blue IKEA bag. The Salvador Dali painting he recovered in 2016. The Picasso he tracked down for a Saudi sheikh in 2019.
Brand’s path into this work wasn’t planned.
“You know, you cannot go to university and say, I want to become an art detective,” Brand says. “This is a job created more or less out of lack of other opportunities.”
He traces his entry point to Michel van Rijn, a notorious Dutch figure in the art underworld who introduced Brand says to a shadowy ecosystem of smugglers, thieves and forgers — and law enforcement.
After making a cold call to van Rijn’s office, Brand says he became his apprentice in London — which regularly involved sitting quietly in a corner while older men swapped stories. “Everybody thought — who is this idiot?” he says.
Van Rijn, Brand later discovered, was straddling two sides. In 2009, he walked away after learning his boss was working with police while still keeping “one leg” in the criminal world.
The experience left him with a simple rule for survival: In a world where people expect betrayal, being honest — and keeping your word — is its own form of power. It’s a lesson that underpins just about everything Brand does now.
A bridge between informants and the police
Brand says his work lives between two worlds that don’t trust each other: police and the people who might know where the stolen art is hiding.
“The police don’t trust the informants. The informants don’t trust the police. So I want to form a bridge between them to see what can be done. And in most cases, it’s possible.”
The bridge only holds if Brand is seen as independent. “I’m not hired by an insurance company,” he says. “The police, of course, don’t pay me. So I do this work [at] my own costs.”
He supports himself by consulting for art galleries and helping Jewish families trace art looted during World War II. But the majority of his energy goes to the work he does on his own dime — acting as a go-between when someone wants to quietly unload a masterpiece they can’t keep.
Stolen masterpieces, he says, are hard to enjoy and even harder to sell. “Who buys stolen art? You cannot show it to your friends. You cannot leave it to your children.”
Dutch police say Brand’s motive matters.
Richard Bronswijk, who heads the Dutch police art crime unit, says he’s seen private detectives create problems when money is the driver. “I’ve worked before with private detectives who are doing this for the money,” Bronswijk says. “And then it’s always dangerous.”
Brand, he points out, has always been driven by something else: the thrill of the chase.
“Everybody’s in it for the money, and I’m not,” Brand says. “They cannot buy me.”
The art thief and the art detective: An unlikely pair
Still, sometimes Brand’s trust isn’t enough on its own. When an informant is deciding whether to return stolen art, Brand says fear can take over … of the police, of retaliation, of being tricked.
That’s when he calls in his ace — Octave Durham.
In 2002, Durham, already a seasoned bank robber, stole two Van Gogh paintings from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.
“You have born soccer players, born teachers, born policemen,” Durham says. “I’m a born burglar,” adding he doesn’t steal anymore but “still can.”
Today, he works with Brand to recover stolen art.
Brand has legitimacy. “But I have contacts on the streets,” Durham says.
“What takes [Brand] sometimes five, six years to figure something out, I could go up to somebody right away.”
Durham says he trusts Brand because Brand’s focus is consistent. “He shows how he works, and it’s all about recovering the art,” Durham says — “and not to send somebody to jail … or go for the reward.”
The Van Gogh in the IKEA bag
In 2020, another Van Gogh — The Spring Garden — was stolen from the Singer Laren Museum. Police caught the thief a year later, but the painting was still missing.
Then Brand says he got a tip from an informant.
A gang, he said, was holding the Van Gogh as leverage until the attention made it too risky to keep.
“Everybody wanted to get rid of it,” Brand says.
Brand says the informant told him he could return it — but only if could be guaranteed confidentiality. And he needed proof he could trust Brand.
So Brand turned to Durham. Durham sent the informant a message on Brand’s behalf. “I don’t know who you are,” Durham texted. “The only thing I can say is that I guarantee you won’t get into trouble if you talk to [Brand].”
It worked.
One afternoon, Brand says he opened his door and found a blue IKEA bag on his doorstep. Inside, he says, was a pillow soaked in blood. Wrapped within it was the missing Van Gogh.
“It was one of the most beautiful moments of my life,” Brand says.
He says moments like the Van Gogh discovery explain why he keeps doing his work — and why, despite the danger, he keeps answering the phone.
He compares it to living inside a thriller. That’s when he has a confession to make.
“It all started with Dan Brown, this whole idiot story,” he says.
Earlier this year, it all came full circle when he met the author at a book signing in Amsterdam.
Brand shows off a framed note Brown gave him at the signing. “To Arthur, the real world Robert Langdon, with gratitude for all you do.”
The first time Pop’s Social, a catering company in South Orange, N.J., that specializes in dirty soda, served an alcoholic drink at an event, something strange happened.
At the event in December, its nonalcoholic offering, a spiced pear-cider seltzer with vanilla and peach syrups, cream, lemon and cold foam, was a hit. The Prosecco-spiked version? Not so much.
“People were more interested in the mocktail than the cocktail,” Ali Greenberg, an owner of the business, said in an interview.
Dirty soda — a customizable blend of soda, flavored syrup, creamer and sometimes fruit, served over pebble ice — has been crossing into the mainstream for years, especially after the cast of “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” the hit reality show that premiered in 2024, frequented Swig, the Utah chain that started it all.
But its reach has gone far beyond the Mormon corridor, and its rise in popularity has dovetailed with an overall decline in U.S. alcohol consumption. “There’s not a lot of Mormon people in our neighborhood,” said Greenberg. “But there are a lot of people who are sober-curious or not drinking.”
The reality show, which follows a group of Mormon influencers in Utah, helped popularize dirty soda beyond the Mountain States and inspired a wave of TikTok videos on the subject. Swig rapidly expanded — growing from 33 locations in Utah and Arizona in 2021 to now more than 150 locations in 16 states — along with other Utah chains, and spawned copycats nationwide.
Dirty soda has joined other Mormon cultural exports, like tradwife influencers, a “Real Housewives” franchise in Salt Lake City and Taylor Frankie Paul, the Bachelorette who wasn’t, that have captivated America.
With the recent rollouts of dirty soda at McDonald’s, Chick-fil-A and Dunkin’ — behold the Dunkin’ Dirty Soda: Pepsi, coffee milk and cold foam — and the appearance on grocery shelves of Dirty Mountain Dew and a coconut-lime Coffee Mate creamer for homemade dirty sodas, we may have reached peak dirty.
The idea for dirty soda came out of a desire for members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which has millions of followers in Utah and surrounding states, to have more options for social drinking, as the church prohibits the consumption of alcohol, hot coffee and hot caffeinated tea.
When Swig introduced dirty soda in 2010, it filled a need, providing a pick-me-up for car-pooling moms and an after-school treat for their kids. It was quickly adopted by many in the community.
“In other cultures, parents go, they pick up their coffee in the morning, and for me and for a lot of my other friends’ parents, it was, ‘Let’s go pick up our dirty soda,’” Whitney Leavitt, a breakout star of “Mormon Wives,” said in an interview.
Leavitt was surprised when her dirty soda order became a recurring question from reporters in recent years. “They were so excited to hear all of the different syrups and creamers that we add to our drinks to make whatever your go-to dirty soda is,” Leavitt said. (Hers is sparkling water with sugar-free pineapple, sugar-free peach and sugar-free vanilla syrups, raspberry purée, a squeeze of lime, and fresh mint if she’s “feeling really fancy.”)
In April, Leavitt became the chief creative and brand officer at Cool Sips, a beverage chain based in New York that sells dirty sodas.
“Mormon Wives” inspired Kaitlyn Sturm, a 26-year-old mother of three from Jackson, Miss., to post recipes for dirty sodas on her TikTok. The one she makes the most contains Coke or Dr Pepper, homemade cherry syrup, a glug of coconut creamer and a packet of True Lime crystallized lime powder, which she combines in a pasta-sauce jar filled with pebble ice. “It kind of has become like a ritual, where I make one for my husband as well, and we have it most evenings,” Sturm said in an interview.
The trend has also hit fast-food menus. The new “crafted soda” menu at McDonald’s is riddled with dirty soda DNA. The Dirty Dr Pepper, with vanilla flavoring and a cold-foam topper, is the chain’s version of what has shaped up to be the universal dirty soda flavor. Since 2024, Sonic, beloved for its porous, soda-absorbing pebble ice, has offered “dirty” drinks — your choice of soda plus coconut syrup, sweet cream and lime.
These drinks might feel new, but there are antecedents in the Italian sodas of the ’90s (fizzy water and a pump of Torani syrup); the Shirley Temple (ginger ale or lemon-lime soda with grenadine and maraschino cherries); and the egg cream, a tonic of seltzer, chocolate syrup and milk. And what is a dirty Dr Pepper with cold foam if not a descendant of the root beer float? “It’s just a soda fountain from 125 years ago,” Kara Nielsen, a food and beverage trend forecaster, said in an interview.
Though Leavitt moved to New York City with her family in December, her dirty soda ritual has remained consistent, with one key difference. “In Utah, we don’t get to walk to dirty soda shops,” Leavitt said. “We have to drive there.”
Annuals include flowers like marigolds and nasturtiums. They grow fast but won’t come back the next spring (though they will drop seeds and possibly propagate). Perennials like lavender and sage will return year after year, but they may take longer to grow. Wildflower and pollinator packets often contain both annual and perennial seeds but are frowned upon by some serious gardeners, because the selection can be haphazard and ill-suited to the area.
It’s a good idea to exercise a little situational awareness. How much rain can you expect? How much sunlight? Dig the earth and feel it between your fingers — is it sandy? Loamy? These are things to keep in mind as you prepare for your journey into horticultural chaos.
“You want to prepare your soil, your site, at least a little bit,” said Deryn Davidson, a sustainable landscape expert at Colorado State University Extension in Longmont, Colo. “Try to get rid of weeds. Make sure the soil is ready to receive seeds.”
Davidson, who has written about chaos gardening, strongly advised covering the seeds with a layer of soil, lest they become bird food. As for watering, that depends on where you live, she added. On the whole, though, the formula is straightforward: “Soil, sun and water is what these seeds need,” Davidson said.
Not everyone is a fan of the trend, or at least the way it has been portrayed on social media. “Nature is not chaos — nature is pattern,” said Robin Wall Kimmerer, a botanist and the author of “Braiding Sweetgrass,” which recommends imbuing modern life with Indigenous wisdom.
“It seems unrealistic,” Kimmerer said of the chaos gardening videos she has watched. The feeling of effortlessness they convey — a common social media effect, almost always the result of deft editing — seems to elide the work that goes into a garden, whether chaotic or not, she suggested.
“I want my garden to be natural and biodiverse,” she said. “That’s a good impulse. I don’t think this technique is going to get you there, but that’s an important impulse.”
Boitnott, the maker of the viral video, offered a simple reason for why chaos gardening has become popular: “It just makes you happy.”
Admission: I suffer from eyestrain. Even right this very second. As a reporter working on a computer more than eight hours most days, my eyes often feel fatigued and itchy by evening.
I’m not alone: More than half of the U.S. population lives with computer vision syndrome, also known as digital eyestrain, and nearly 16.4 million Americans suffer from dry eye syndrome. So I was especially excited to stumble on New Vogue Spa, in the City of Industry, which offers a relaxing, if intriguing, treatment called “Eyeball Care” — something I’d never heard of before at a day spa.
New Vogue Spa is an Asian-style spa with Korean and Chinese influences. The spa’s offerings include massages and body scrubs — I was curious about the “Red Wine Body Scrub” — but I couldn’t help exploring eyeball care, which was much needed after my 50-minute drive from Silver Lake. (The City of Industry is about 30 minutes from downtown L.A. without heavy traffic.)
So it came to be that I found myself lying on a massage table, wearing what looked like protruding diving goggles, with clouds of cool, aromatic steam oozing from both sides of it and engulfing my face. A spindly plastic tube extended from my forehead to the “Eye Spa” machine. Serene spa music, a blend of classical piano and loudly chirping birds, trilled in the background as the machine sloshed and gurgled. It felt like lying, creekside, in a spa robe wrapped in a blanket of chamomile and rosemary-scented fog.
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As my esthetician, Jenny Chen, adjusted the eye mask and added essential oils to the mist, New Vogue manager Lesley Xie explained that the 60-minute, $125 Eyeball Care treatment aims to hydrate and stimulate blood circulation in the eye area, decrease puffiness and dark circles and aid eye fatigue and dry eye syndrome.
“It’s really helpful for overall eye health for people who are on computers for a long time or sleep really late or who are reading a lot,” she said.
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1. The Eyeball Care treatment included a mask filled with cool, aromatic steam to help relieve fatigued eyes. 2. Slippers in the Himalayan Salt Room.
Xie said that eyeball care treatments are common in China. When she was growing up in Guangdong in Southern China, elementary school students were given a break every afternoon to perform “eye exercises,” which involved gently massaging pressure points around their eye areas, for 5-10 minutes.
“It released eye stress because we studied from eight o’clock in the morning until almost noon time,” she said. “It was a break for our eyes to prevent nearsightedness and tired eyes.”
New Vogue Spa’s treatment was supremely relaxing from the onset — part Head Spa, part facial, part eye care. Chen began by massaging my scalp for about 10 minutes, as I tried not to fall asleep.
Next she cleaned my face, applied massage cream and gently massaged my face and eye area, manipulating the outer corners of my eye sockets as well as under my brow bones and on my temples. She was precise and firm but careful — as she pressed on the outside corner of my eye, I felt tension draining down the side of my cheek and neck.
Esthetician Jenny Chen conducts “Golden Eye therapy” on reporter Deborah Vankin.
Xie said the massage is based on traditional Chinese medicine, focusing on stimulating acupressure points around the eyes.
“Gentle massage of these areas is believed to help promote blood circulation, relax the muscles responsible for focusing and relieve visual fatigue,” she said. “While it’s not a medical treatment for vision conditions, it’s widely used as a preventative and restorative method.”
The massage was followed by “Golden Eye therapy,” during which Chen used an electronic device on my face with a metal roller ball on it. It uses “ultrasonic vibration technology,” Xie said, to help the skin absorb the applied moisturizing cream and combat eye puffiness.
The main event was the “cooling steam therapy,” which Xie said was meant to be calming and refreshing and help relieve tired eyes. Chen fitted me with what looked like an enormous diving mask that quickly filled with cool, hydrating mist — I felt droplets of water dripping from my eyes and down my cheeks. The Eye Spa machine uses a “cold mist atomization process,” Xie said, “that disperses micro-particles of moisture combined with soothing essential oils.”
At the end of my treatment, Chen gave me under-eye gel pad masks, for added hydration, while conducting one last head massage. She applied moisturizing eye cream, face cream and sunscreen before sending me off.
Dr. Kristina Voss, an ophthalmologist with Keck Medicine of USC, was enthusiastic about the Eyeball Care treatment.
“It sounds wonderful. Anything that makes you feel good, I generally support,” she said. “It sounds safe because they’re not putting pressure on the eye. Direct pressure on the eyeball [is dangerous]. And I’d be nervous if they were putting something in the eye, but they’re not. Steam, or even cool condensation from a humidifier, is effective for dry eye. Massaging pressure points probably doesn’t treat dry eye, but could potentially treat eyestrain or tension headaches that can be interpreted as eyestrain.”
Los Angeles Times features writer Deborah Vankin inspects her eyeballs after her treatment.
Temporary relief aside, however, Voss warned that the treatment is not a replacement for seeing a doctor if a condition is ongoing.
“It’s relaxing and complementary to a doctor’s dry eye treatments — like medicated drops or in-office treatments — but it’s not a simple fix or cure all,” she said. “Ongoing doctor’s care would be important.”
After my treatment, I was invited to linger in the co-ed Himalayan Salt Room and Red Clay Room or woman-only spa area, complete with a warm soaking tub, lounge area and treatment rooms for body scrubs. (I skipped the adjacent New Vogue MedSpa, where you can get botox, dermal filler or microneedling treatments.)
Guests are also treated to a cup of homemade snow fungus tea (made from tremella mushrooms) with a single jujube, or red, date, floating inside. New Vogue makes a fresh batch every morning for guests, simmering the collagen-rich drink so long it becomes somewhat gelatinous.
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1. The Himalayan Salt Room. 2. The co-ed lounge area. 3. The Red Clay Room.
“Snow fungus focuses on deep hydration and skin plumping, while red dates support circulation and a healthy glow,” Xie said, calling the concoction “a warm bowl of snow fungus and red date soup.”
I can’t speak to the medicinal benefits of snow fungus tea. But after a glass of the warm, woody-tasting drink — together with the hour-long tension-taming eye treatment — I saw the world in a whole new way while walking out the door: clearly, from a relaxed perspective and with the bigger picture in focus.
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