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The new podcast The Professor opens with a dawn raid. In 2018, officers from the British police and the Italian Carabinieri entered the London home of William Veres, an Anglo-Hungarian art dealer whom they believed to be a leading figure in a pan-European art smuggling ring. Veres and his co-conspirators are alleged to have links to the Italian mafia and to have stolen €40mn worth of art and antiquities. Following the raid, in which police removed a marble bust and hundreds of ancient coins, Veres was charged with money laundering, forgery, wire fraud and conspiracy. If convicted, he faces a jail term of up to 20 years. He maintains his innocence.
I had imagined that The Professor — the title comes from the nickname given to Veres by his art-world contemporaries in honour of his knowledge of historical coins — would be an investigation into the veracity of those charges. The reality is rather knottier. Veres isn’t just the main character in this series but its principal collaborator as it follows him in his quest to avoid going to jail.
We learn how Veres struck a deal with Italy’s anti-mafia police: using his contacts in the art world, he would help them locate one of Italy’s lost treasures, Caravaggio’s “Nativity with St Francis and St Lawrence”. The painting, which is worth at least $20mn, was stolen from a church in Palermo in 1969, cut out of its frame under cover of night. Rumours swirl as to its whereabouts — some say it has been eaten by rats, others that it was cut up into smaller paintings by a Swiss art dealer — but more than 50 years later, Italian police are none the wiser, hence their reported deal with Veres. If he can find it, they will put in a good word with prosecutors.
It’s a hell of a story, deftly told by host Simon Willis, who hangs out at Veres’s flat and tags along with him on jaunts around Europe meeting various shadowy figures, among them art detectives, informants and retired police officers. In between, Willis attempts to explain the world of the Sicilian mafia, its links to the art market and to high-ranking politicians, including the former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. (Having heard all four episodes, I should warn you that a detailed diagram is needed to understand who’s who in the Italian underworld.)
If there are ethical questions raised by the creation of a podcast around a man accused, but not convicted, of smuggling art, Willis declines to address them, though he makes no secret of having been charmed by his subject. The hunt for the Caravaggio makes for an arresting premise, although there remains a hole in this story and that’s the character of Veres himself. Is he an art lover who has been terribly wronged or a villain going to extraordinary lengths to evade justice? Perhaps a second season is required to answer that.
