Suspects Are No Master Art Thieves, Police Say : Crime: An expert calls into question authenticity of painting believed to be a Picasso that was found in Valley.

Peter MacKenzie could do wonders with a hammer and Alan R. McArthur could make sense of the circuitry in a fuse box, but when it came to art, it seems that neither could bring the same expertise to determining a Baldini from a Modigliani.

It was that naivete that, more than anything else, landed them in jail this week as suspects in a $9-million art theft from a Northridge storage locker, authorities said.

MacKenzie, 43, a Chatsworth carpenter who worked part-time at the self-storage facility from which 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, Alan R. McArthur, 37, a Granada Hills electrician, was charged with receiving stolen property and was being held under the same bail.

Authorities said the pair had possession of nine artworks by modern masters, including Picasso, Degas, Chagall, Baldini and Modigliani.

The paintings had been reported missing Feb. 5, 1992, when their 85-year-old owner, Eve Weisager, visited her locker at the Public Storage facility at 9341 Shirley Ave. and found them missing.

She told police that she had placed them there because she thought that they were secure and that the cost of placing the uninsured paintings in traditional art storage vaults was too expensive.

Although investigators remained tight-lipped about the suspects Wednesday, they did acknowledge that the pair are not suspected of being master art thieves.

Their arrest seemed inevitable.

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

An indication of MacKenzie’s naivete could be a conversation he had with his 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 that 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 noted that MacKenzie and McArthur did not follow any pattern indicating that they had 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 police 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 Los Angeles police officers and FBI agents raided their homes.

Eight paintings were found secreted in a wall in a house that MacKenzie rented for $400 a month.

The ninth painting was found in McArthur’s house.

The paintings were undamaged. An investigator said that although eight were found in their ornate gold frames, an examination determined that at some point they had been removed from the frames and later replaced.

“That would indicate that maybe someone was trying to show them,” the investigator said. “This might have been to make it easier to move them.”

It was unclear how much the suspects were seeking for them, and Martin said he could not make an estimate.

“There are so many variables that would change the dollar amount that it is impossible to say,” he said.

Recovery of the masterpieces and the wide publicity that accompanied their display Tuesday by the FBI raised questions in the minds of some art experts as to the authenticity of at least one of the paintings, the piece titled “The Party” by Pablo Picasso, valued at $5 million.

They said that if the artwork was painted by the master, it is almost completely unknown in the art world.

John Richardson, an art historian widely recognized as one of the world’s foremost authorities on Picasso, said he had doubts about the authenticity of the painting after a facsimile photograph was transmitted to him in New York.

Richardson, whose first volume of an exhaustive Picasso biography was met with great acclaim, said he had never seen the work before, but added that he could not make a full determination without further study.

“It’s very unlikely to be right, but it just could be something,” Richardson said. “There are paintings of his from 1901 that look a little like this. He had just arrived in Paris and he dashed off quite a lot of paintings.”

FBI Agent Jim Botting said an art expert appraised all the artworks at $9 million Wednesday and found nothing that would raise a question of authenticity. He declined to reveal the expert’s name.

“This person had no reason to believe they were anything other than what was reported,” Botting said. “There is no doubt in our minds that it is a Picasso. They all come with a pedigree like a dog. When the victim reported the theft, she was able to provide the documentation.”