Masterpiece Thieves Were No Masters at Theft, Police Say : Crime: Among their errors was failing to move the $9 million in stolen paintings out of the city, an investigator says. ‘They were not part of the art world,’ he adds.

Peter MacKenzie could do wonders with a hammer and Alan R. McArthur could make sense of fuse box circuitry, but it seems that neither knew the difference between a Baldini and a Modigliani--much less how to fence them.

It was this naivete, authorities said, that more than anything else landed them in jail this week as suspects in the theft of $9 million in master artworks from a Northridge storage facility.

MacKenzie, 43, a Chatsworth carpenter who worked part time at the warehouse where the paintings were stolen, was charged Wednesday with commercial burglary, grand theft and receiving stolen property. He was being held in lieu of $5-million bail and is expected to be arraigned today.

His friend, McArthur, 37, a Granada Hills electrician, was charged with receiving stolen property and was held under the same bail.

Authorities said the suspects had possession of nine paintings by modern masters, including Pablo Picasso, Edgar Degas, Marc Chagall, Jean Baldini and Amedeo Modigliani.

The works were reported missing Feb. 5, 1992, when their owner, Eve Weisager, 85, visited her Public Storage closet and found them gone. She told police she had placed them there because she thought they were secure, and the costs of placing the uninsured paintings in traditional art storage vaults was too expensive.

Though investigators remained tight-lipped about the suspects Wednesday, they did acknowledge that they are not master art thieves.

“This was different from the norm,” said Detective Bill Martin, a Los Angeles Police Department art theft expert. “They were not part of the art world.”

An indication of MacKenzie’s naivete came in an alleged conversation he had with landlord Sharon Friedman, who said MacKenzie told her last year that he needed art books so he could attempt to determine the value of paintings he said he had found.

“I doubt he even knew the value of what he had,” Friedman said. “He didn’t know what he was doing.”

Herman Miro, another tenant on the property during the three years MacKenzie lived there, said he believes his neighbor simply got into something over his head.

“You get to know a guy after three years,” Miro said. “He doesn’t strike me as the type of person who would steal, who plans a big art heist. This guy sometimes had trouble coming up with the rent. That doesn’t sound like somebody sitting on a treasure.”

Investigators also said that MacKenzie and McArthur did not show any sophistication in selling stolen paintings.

“Usually when paintings are stolen a thief does one of two things,” Martin said. “Either he has to move them out of the area and sell them, and they can be sold if they move away from the publicity. Or he holds them and waits for things to cool down, for people to kind of forget about it, which we feel they did in this case.”

It was the wrong move.

“With paintings of this magnitude, it’s a given you have to move them,” Martin said. “They didn’t do that, and that’s one of the reasons they got caught.”

According to a source familiar with the investigation, the suspects attempted to sell at least one of the paintings to a person who was also unconnected to the art world. That person contacted the FBI and the net was soon drawn around MacKenzie and McArthur.

Both men were arrested early Tuesday when squads of LAPD officers and FBI agents raided their homes. Eight paintings were found hidden in a wall in a house MacKenzie rented for $400 a month. The ninth painting was found in McArthur’s house.

The paintings were not damaged. Eight were found in their ornate frames, but investigators said they had been removed and returned to the frames so that they could be shown more easily.

“This might have been to make it easier to move them,” the investigator said.

It was unclear how much the suspects were seeking for the stolen merchandise. “There are so many variables that would change the dollar amount that it is impossible to say,” Martin said.