THUNDER BAY — Italian officials got a first-hand account of the Norval Morrisseau art fraud investigation from a Thunder Bay police inspector who helped dismantle the complicated multi-million-dollar scheme.
Insp. Jason Rybak, said there are parallels between Italian law enforcement officials’ stated concerns about the impact of illegal trafficking in art and antiquities and how it not only depletes cultures, but also fuels organized crime, and the Morrisseau case he and others spent so much time working on.
“One of our goals was the importance of Norval's work to the Indigenous community and that his legacy was restored,” he said. “That was one of our fundamental goals as a team, was to ensure that we can restore his legacy and make that corrected.”
“That was really the framework of my presentation was talking about the collaborative approach and what that meant, what the frauds meant to the identity of Norval and to the destruction of his cultural heritage to the Indigenous community.”
The Thunder Bay police inspector was in Ottawa on March 19 to make his presentation to a Canada-Italy symposium on crimes against cultural property.
The symposium was tied to Canada officially returning three artifacts to Italy that federal officials said were imported illegally into the country, and were ordered to be returned by the Federal Court of Canada, according to a government press release.
Rybak was heavily involved in the years-long investigation into multiple connected fraud rings that led to a slew of charges against nine people, and the guilty pleas and sentencings of two Thunder Bay men — David Voss and Gary Lamont.
Rybak said the outcome of the investigation was the result of so many organizations, including those outside of law enforcement, working well together.
“The key lesson is that we can work together and when we do work together, we're stronger together,” he said, adding that level of support and shared resources was especially important, given the roughly three-and-a-half-year span of the probe and the nature of the investigation.
“It was the first art crime-type of investigation we did,” he continued.
“So, leaning on the FBI to support us — and then as we went through this, some of the civilian partners that have expertise in these areas, where traditionally in policing we may not look to them, but getting to gain trust within the civilians’ side of these issues by discussing part of the investigation, which commonly for police sometimes is tricky.”
Rybak said that’s often because police are hesitant to share information about ongoing investigations outside of the team that’s working on it.
There’s been a lot of interest in the Morrisseau case across Canada, he said, but being able to present to delegates from outside the country will help it find an even wider audience.
“I think it opened up people's eyes to the magnitude of it,” Rybak said. “I don't think they really understood how big this really was.”
“That was a lot of the comments I got from a lot of the individuals was they were quite surprised by the magnitude of what this was, and I think got a true understanding when we say this is, in our opinion, the biggest art fraud in world history.”
