March 7, 2022 • 38 mins
The Knoedler Gallery and its alleged co-conspirators stand trial.
Hosted by Alec Baldwin. Art Fraud is brought to you by iHeart Radio and Cavalry Audio. Our executive producers are Matt DelPiano, Keegan Rosenberger, Andy Terner, Alec Baldwin and Michael Shnayerson. We’re produced by Branden Morgan and Zach McNees. Zach also edited and mixed this episode. Music by Blue Dot Sessions. Lindsay Hoffman is our managing producer. Our writer is Michael Shnayerson.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Galling mystifying. I think I would get me to a nunnery.
I mean I would go and do penance, you know,
go work for some nonprofit in the art world for
the rest of my career and try to atone for
(00:22):
whatever had happened. In the grim aftermath of the closing
of the Nler Gallery, ten lawsuits were filed by cheated customers,
most notably Domenico and Eleanor desle There saga began with
a shriek in a Miami hotel room after reading the
(00:45):
story of the fake Lagrange Pollock in The New York Times.
Most former customers of the now shuttered gallery just wanted
to recoup their losses. Investigators concluded that no fewer than
sixty fake paintings had been created at the direction of
(01:08):
Fara Rosales. At trial, an accounting expert would testify that
Freedman and dealer Julian Weissman had sold their clients seventy
million dollars in fakes, yielding a net income of thirty
three point seven million dollars for Knodler and generating more
than ten million dollars in commissions for Anne. This was
(01:30):
in addition to her salary estimated to be four hundred
thousand dollars annually. Michael Hammer took his own four hundred
thousand dollars salary plus of both galleries, a near limitless fund,
spewing cash to eight thirty one his private holding company.
As for Rosales, no taxes had been paid from her
(01:53):
sales to Knodler, so profit estimates varied. The New York
Times would later declare that Rosa Alice had taken in
about twenty six million dollars from her sale of paintings
to the two dealers. That was all money that would
have to be disgorged, along with some twelve point five
million dollars due to the i R s. Surprisingly, one
(02:17):
of the first to settle was Pierre Lagrange himself in
October two thou twelve. Shouting from the rooftops had earned
Lagrange some admiration, but also his share of ridicule among
collectors for buying a painting without doing due diligence. He
had vowed to get his seventeen million dollars back, but Artsy,
(02:39):
the online art magazine, published a rumor It's settled for
six point four million dollars, being first in line for
a refund, had its advantages. There was likely more money
in the galleries till to be had. The Desoles, by contrast,
felt bound by a sense of mission. Their lawsuit was
aimed at making the true public in a civil trial.
(03:02):
Having a judge and jury declare FIRA's forgery ring to
be nothing less than a racketeering conspiracy was the real
prize for them. Assistant District Attorney Jason Hernandez was taking
a very different approach. He was trying to make a
criminal case of the notetor's dealings. Surprisingly, it was far
(03:25):
from a slam dunk. What we were doing previously is
sort of your art fraud one on one playbook. You've
got to prove that the paintings are fake, and you've
got to prove that someone who sold them knew that
they were fake. But it was very clear that this
was going to be especially difficult following our usual kind
of playbook in this case, because well, there were an
(03:48):
unusually large number of prominent people who seemingly We're going
to stand by the paintings and say that they were real.
That is uncommon, and I could see right away, well,
you know, how do you get over that? Because if
the person selling them is showing them to all of
these esteemed people, and they're saying, yep, looks right to me,
(04:11):
looks good to me. That's not a criminal case anymore.
You're not going to be able to prove fraud that
someone intended to deceive, because they'll say, well, you know,
this museum director said it was good, and I mean
you know, and Freeman bought one of the paintings. It
was well thought out. The truth is all of the
(04:32):
experts declined to authenticate the paintings in any official capacity.
They've seen them in passing on the notors walls at
cocktail parties, but none of the experts had any interest
and testifying. You gotta remember it's it's a criminal case,
so you have to prove your case to twelve people
beyond a reasonable doubt. We weren't really getting anywhere with
(04:53):
the conventional investigative methods, and the provenance was very difficult
to di proved. Glafira was alas we know very virtually
nothing about. She told nod Lern and Freedom that she
was a brokera representing a family that she wouldn't disclose
and I can't get hurt to disclose it, so I
can't issue her a grand jury subpoena and say tell
(05:15):
me the name. She would just assert her fit in
them and right and refuse to tell me. My thought was,
I can kind of through the back door figure out
whether or not Glafira was Alas represents a family that
owns these paintings, because if she's lying about that, that
is going to be a crime that I can charge, Okay,
because that's in a very important part of the provenance.
(05:36):
Imagine if she's lying about this actually being a European
family that bought these and stored them over all these decades, well,
that is something I can charge her with. So she
says she's a brokera she says the paintings are not hers.
I could see that all the money would go from
the Nobler Gallery once they would purchase them to a
couple bank accounts, I think two or three in Spain.
(05:57):
So my thought was, I'm gonna ask Spain that we
have a treaty with Spain to for their bank records.
And then if she is a broker, I'm going to
see or whatever percentage go to the family in Europe
and it's going to go to a bank account in
some other country probably and then I lost that country
(06:18):
to give me the bank records, and you might prevail there.
You might actually get foreign banks to cooperate and give
you records that would prove that she had been engaged
in financial shenanigans. That's right, let's see where the money flows.
So I took that kind of old approach. Okay, you know,
follow the money to the sexier world of art fraud,
where you follow the pigments and those sorts of things.
(06:41):
And what it showed was that she was lying about
who owned the paintings. She owned them, someone else owned them,
but she's keeping all the money. So that gave me
a fraud charge against her. Okay, you are falsely representing
to the Nobler Gallery that these paintings belonged to you know,
then fill in the long story what she told all
(07:02):
that that yarn she spun about who it belonged to.
I now have leverage against CFIA. I have a criminal charge.
It's a lot of money, you know, many millions of
dollars of paintings, so it's a significant fraud. And then
on top of that, she is not reporting any of
this money as income, so there is a tax charge there.
Nor is she reporting the fact that she has formed
(07:23):
bank accounts in excess of ten thousand dollars, which is
another federal crime. So now the deck is stacked way
high against the FIA Rosol. She's kind of got nowhere
to run. I have very simple, provable, direct, strong criminal
charges against her, and now I can kind of use
that as pressure um to get her to talk unless
(07:48):
she's willing to spend, you know, a lot of time
in prison. One night, early in the summer of two thout,
some eighteen years after his first faithful meeting with Anne
at a Soho art gallery, law enforcement agents came crashing
through the front doors of Carlos Andrs. Multimillion dollar home.
(08:13):
It's very traumatic. They came actually to wake me up.
It was very early in the morning, at six in
the morning around the time. And then there was the squad.
I was sleeping, My daughter was upstairs sleeping. She was
supposed to go to Spain the next day or that
(08:34):
day day evening. And they knocked at the door and
they told me that they were the police and opened
the door. And I saw them, you know, with their weapons,
and and I said, can I put something on it?
And they say, opened it, opened it. Or else. Of
(08:57):
course I opened the door, I saw the I'm drawn
in all over my house when they were with the
way pons pointing everywhere. Uh, and then they took me
and I wanted to give a hat to my daughter,
(09:19):
so they didn't let me. Oh, so it was horrible.
We'll be back in a minute. Brian Scarlatto's fear as
attorney and family friend took the call while out of
town on a work trip. I recalled because I was
(09:41):
in Las Vegas for work, and my wife called to
say that Glad had been arrested and that there was
a story in the newspaper, which you know, I looked
up on the internet, and um, you know, at this
point had been a friend of ours for a while,
so I felt like I should look into it since
you know, it is kind of my area of the law.
Glafi had just been arrested and so um, we had
(10:02):
to go into jail to speak to her. But what
we found out is is that she had really been
arrested for tax evasion, sort of like al capolm and
the government couldn't get them, you know, for organized crime.
They just followed the money, and in Glafira's case, the
government was able to follow the money. By now, after
living in Sand's Point for years, had you come to
suspect Laphia and Carlos might be art thieves. I did
(10:25):
not suspect anything. They did seem to be very successful.
But it was extremely shocking, and you know, and it's
shocking whenever you hear about anybody being arrested, but certainly
a very nice woman in her you know, later fifties
like Fra Brian visited Glafira in prison soon after her arrest.
It was a sobering moment for the family attorney who
(10:46):
had come to know Carlos and Fia. Well, you go
in and it's very difficult to get in, and Gafa
had just been arrested, and in fact, she didn't have
enough money for shoes because they take your shoes away
and you need a commissary account then to buy shoes,
and so she was wearing paper slippers and it was
very very distraught, you know, just didn't know what was
going to go on Carlo's head, you know, fled and
(11:08):
so her daughter, her young daughter is on the outside
with no parents, I mean solely was maybe twenty years old,
maybe nineteen years old at this time. It's hard to
overstate just how lucky Glafira was to have such a
family friend who was an experienced attorney at this moment
in her life. After she was arrested, I offered to help,
(11:30):
largely on a pro bono basis, because all of her
assets had been seized at that point. Basically, what we
were able to do is explained to Glafira how this
was going to play out, that the government had, you know,
a strong case on the tax evasion charges and that
carried very significant penalties. Once behind bars, the first order
(11:51):
of business was for a judge to determine whether Glafira
Rosalee was a flight risk. We put together I thought
a very persuasive ca ace thatfa you know, had dual citizenship,
a boyfriend, with a home into the Dominican Republic, ties
I believe to Spain, foreign bank accounts, a lot of liquidity,
a lot of assets, you know, at the time, and
(12:13):
I'll say it was by no means certain that she
would be detained because on the other side of the coin,
I mean, she's never had a criminal case before. She was,
you know, maybe fifty something, your old woman with a
daughter here in the United States, and so the defense
made an argument, a strong argument that hey, you know,
she's not going to go anywhere. Why would she go anywhere?
(12:34):
She's got all these ties. But thankfully for us, the
judge detained her. And although I can't say for certain,
I would think that being detained would weigh on someone
and make them more likely to want to cooperate and
tell us what really happened. The judge said, no, I'm
going to keep you detained because I think you've you
you are a flight risk, and so you know, if
(12:55):
that was that, she she went back into the m
c C or the m d C, one of the
two facilities that are used. Well, yeah, you don't want
to be there, trust me. She was not in the
most difficult spot where like the terrorists and Burne made
off go. But no, you don't. You know, you don't
want to spend any time there. If you can, if
(13:16):
you can help it. A few months in prison was
all Glafa needed. The con was over and there was
no one worth protecting. At the cost of sacrificing her freedom,
Gafara decided to cooperate, and she provided information about Carlos
and about Patience, and after it was clear that Glifer
(13:40):
was telling the truth. The government agreed to release her
un bail. Rosales spilled the entire story to investigators. In
September two thirteen, she pled guilty to nine counts, including
one count of money laundering, one count of wire fraud,
and three counts of falsifying income tax returns. She had
(14:02):
pocketed twenty six million dollars and paid no Texas. Despite
her testimony, Fia was facing as much as nine years
in prison. But this was only the bail hearing. The
sentencing would come much later, you know, as we later learned,
because of her cooperation, really only because of her cooperation,
(14:24):
we've got the two burgan Tinos brothers and Psian you know, involved,
and that really broke down the door, okay, to a
wealth of information that only came from her. But as
you know most people know, Py Sian as soon as
he heard that we were on his tail, took off
(14:44):
to China, a country that does not extradite its own nationals.
I'm personally much more upset with the Spanish court's decision
to non extradite the Bergantino brothers. Amazingly, from a criminal standpoint,
things were looking good for and freedman. If we thought
(15:06):
that we could prove beyond a reasonable doubt to twelve
people that other people knew the aspects of the scheme,
the critical aspects of the scheme, then we would have
brought a case. But you know, you've got to have proof.
You've got to have proof that's admissible in court that
you know someone who was selling the paintings, whether it's
Fa as the consigner or and you also have to
(15:28):
prove that she knows that they are fake. So, you know,
here you're dealing with a situation where a freedman's first
point of contact, Lafia, is lying to her about the provenance.
And again the provenance has elements of it that have
elements of truth. You know, Sorry, it was a real person.
Herbert was a real person. It is actually the case
that a lot of art is found, you know, from
(15:50):
time to time. What we did in this case was
we took it as far as we thought the evidence
that we had would take it. FA had done her
part and broken the case wide open for investigators. The
bergen Tino's brothers fled the United States for Spain, a
(16:13):
country beyond the reach of US extradition. The artist patient
Quan hurriedly returned home to China, another country out of
reach from u S authorities. That left only Michael Hammer
and Ann Friedman. Neither would be prosecuted on criminal charges
or simply wasn't enough proof, but both were still subject
(16:35):
to civil suits, where a jury only needed to conclude
that a defendant was more than fifty likely to have
committed a crime. Monetary settlements from civil suits could inflict
their own kind of severe punishment. The fear of such
verdicts had led the Knoedler to settle with Pierre Legrange.
(16:56):
As for the Souls, their showdown with Ann Eatment and
the Knodler was about to begin. Some three dozen journalists,
including our own Michael Schneyerson, who were bent over their
notepads that day in the classically high ceiling, oak paneled courtroom.
The trial began on a Monday in January two thou sixteen.
(17:20):
The list of names who weren't present in court that
day was almost as interesting as who was. Lafara Rosalee
wasn't there. Having served three months in jail before admitting
her guilt, she was now agonizing over what further sentence
she would have to serve and wondering how she would
come up with eighty million dollars in compensation for her victims.
(17:46):
The Bergen, Tino's brothers were still in Spain, Quan was
in China, even Michael Hammer was absent in court. Hammer
had not appeared once from behind the Knodler doors since
the gallery closed, nor granted any interviews. But after eighteen
years or so of the forgery ring, Michael Hammer looked
(18:07):
more and more like a key player, no less so
than Ann Friedman, As much was told in a lawsuit
filed by one of the victims, casino owner Frank for
Tita the Third, who in two thousand eight bought a
fake Rothco for seven point two million dollars. Hammer, the
complaint detailed, knew that Knodler bought the paintings from Rosale's
(18:29):
for shockingly low prices and quickly resold them for enormous
markups for Tita alleged quote. In all, Knoedler resold the
Rosealves paintings for a total of sixty three point eight
million dollars, realizing gross profits of approximately forty eight point
seven million dollars. Hammer, acting on behalf of Notler and
(18:50):
his foundation eight thirty one, saw two of the tens
of millions of dollars in profit be distributed largely to
himself and Ann Friedman through a Friedman and Hammer had
a meeting in the early days of the scandal, and
(19:12):
a handwritten memo survived their talk to surface later in
Fatita's complaint. It was unclear whether the notes were taken
by Freedman or Hammer, but the sentiments were in technicolor
Discreet sources are my stock and trade. When one of
the comments, don't kill the goose that's laying the golden egg,
(19:33):
went another, and I am not going to change my
way of doing business. If you were not comfortable, step away.
And Friedman was in the courtroom the day the desolas
child began. She sat quietly beside her lawyers, wreathed in
(19:54):
her soft white curls, dressed in black, beige and gray,
saying nothing. As the witnesses began to come forward, she
too would be forced to testify if the trial went
as planned. Luke Nichoas and Freedman's lawyer, had a novel defense.
As it turned out. He argued that thess were responsible
(20:14):
for checking their paintings authenticity themselves. They were, after all,
sophisticated art buyers. By that logic, Nikos suggested the jury
shouldn't blame Noldler for selling the their fake art. The
customers were the ones to blame for buying it. As
for Anne, she was a salesperson, not an expert. They declared.
(20:38):
She was just doing her job, selling paintings and earning
profits for the gallery. Here's Luke Nichos with Anne. I
certainly wanted to believe, but and I looked at the
evidence and where the evidence show and what the evidence
showed to me separate and apart from what Anne was
telling me was emails from a guy like David ann
(20:59):
Fam are the most significant experts and at abstract expressionism.
What did David an Fem say about these works? He
wrote an email in May of two thousand eight to
Jack Flamm from the Dadalist Foundation, and that email said,
I can't think of any reason to deem this newman
from the Resolves collection. This newman inauthentic. He went on
(21:21):
to say in the same email, I've seen the Krasners,
I've seen the Pollux, the roth Codes, the clients and Stills,
and I believe in these works. Now he acknowledged that
the story was murky acknowledged that the ownership was unknown.
But the reality is I saw an email like that
from David and fam and I thought, if David and
fem saying that, who am I the lawyer without this expertise?
(21:44):
Let me dig further. I think it's important to understand
what I concluded about whether they were authentic or not.
Wasn't the point. My point is I had no expertise
in whether they were authentic or not. The core question always, always,
always was what did Ann Friedman believe and what did
she have reason to believe based in the facts. Early
(22:10):
in the trial, attorneys for the plaintiffs presented a fascinating
exhibit to the court, the Doles eight point three million
dollar fake Rothcoe. The thing I remember about it being
physically in the courtroom the most is that the defendants
immediately wanted a sidebar with the judge because they felt
that the painting smelled new. This is the dissillis attorneys again.
(22:35):
I think the issue was, like all artwork that's transported responsibly,
it was in a wooden crate, so the wood was
just secured with screws, and the crate got unscrewed, and
it creates that kind of wood smell in the air,
which made the painting smell like fresh wood, and so
(22:55):
they felt it was prejudicial that the painting would smell
so obvious we like fresh And the judge had to
go over the and smell the painting to assess, and
he was, like he said on the record, he was like,
I can't believe I'm going over to smell the painting.
Trudge over. He smelled it, and I think they did
(23:16):
move it. Yeah, yeah, but they left it out, but
I thought. I remember it was very dramatic. We carried
the painting over someplace and you know, there was like
a hush in the room. Were like a gas because
people in the art world are so used to such
delicate handling and white glove handling of works like this,
(23:37):
and you know it was a fake, so that we
just picked it up with our bare hands. We were
not professional. There was the other moment, the funny moment
with the painting, when Pulkari said on the stand, like,
I think it's supposed to be the other way, you know,
like its upside down. Even Stephen Poli was one of
the two quote unquote experts who Knowler had hired and
paid to look at some of these works, and when
(24:00):
he testified about the Rothcoe, he testified that it did
it couldn't usually tell with Rothco's which weighs up. A
day or two into the trial, the Doles took the
stand to tell the story of their fake Rothco. Eleanor
was emotional, Domenico fierce. Both were heartfelt, taking breaks to
(24:24):
chat up the press, but they would find themselves subject
to the occasional bit of snarkiness for bringing rich people's
problems into the courtroom. With the Doles done on cross examination,
the trial turned to Ann Friedman's list of eleven experts
whose names she had used to authenticate her paintings. None
(24:46):
of the eleven had wished to be on that list.
What emerged was what we showed that trial with the
witness testimony, that there were no experts who authenticated the paintings.
For another, it just didn't happen. You know. The story
that the defendants were selling that they believe the works
(25:06):
were real and the experts authenticated, that was just absolutely rebutted,
totally debunked. With respect to David Ampham, he never was
shown a Rothco despite being the world's leading expert in
Rothko I don't think it's a coincidence that he was
never shown any the rathcos not one. Not only had
(25:29):
I not seen the Disoli painting, I'd never even been
in the same moon with it. What I got was
a package with a transparencive a painting, a note for
man dated July and pretty so this was two thousand
and five. I picked it up, looks at the transparencies
(25:51):
were about twenty seconds, and put it in the file,
filed it away and did not look at it again
until then. That's the time of the drial. It sounds
as if Anne was doing her best to circulate your
name and your approval of this painting. Is that true? Yes,
it's true. I didn't know of the time. I have
(26:13):
to say that from the perspective of the present, I
felt I was being manipulated, and I don't take commory
to that. And when I saw the letter, which had
a list of people who had seen the dissol A painting,
starting with Christopher off Go, followed by myself, I was
absolutely shocked. I couldn't believe that my name has been
(26:37):
put in a letter without my knowing it, without my approval,
and effectively so any buyer, it could be constituted as
a kind of authentication by Foxing. As the trial entered
its second week on February sixteen, as of excitement permeated
(27:01):
the courtroom. After all this warm up, An Friedman was
due to testify at last. Oddly, however, the judge's chair
remained empty as the ten am hour came and went.
At last, the judge reappeared and announced in open court
that a settlement had been reached from the dess Grins.
(27:27):
Their gambit had paid off. As for Ann Friedman's lawyers,
they looked relieved. Whatever they had agreed to pay, it
was probably less than the million dollar RICO payment that
Theses were demanding. The trial, however, would continue because Michael
Hammer and his eight thirty one foundation were not yet
(27:50):
off the hook. Hammer's chief financial officer testified that Hammer,
her boss, had awarded himself some twenty luxury cars, including
a four hundred two dollar Rose Royce and a five
dollar Mercedes. That was all in addition to a four
hundred thousand dollars salary he paid himself from his Knodler
(28:13):
piggy bank. Anne was scheduled to testify that Wednesday against
her former boss about how much the two of them
had profited from selling forty plus fake paintings that had
come through the Knodler. Once again, the judge and counselor
has disappeared behind closed doors and emerged appearing satisfied a
(28:33):
private settlement had been reached between the Desoles and A
thirty one. The trial was finally over some weeks later,
and agreed to speak to the press. From the start,
Friedman said she had regarded the David Herbert collection as
a quote puzzle to be solved. She had tried to
(28:57):
extract more information from GlyP Era every time Rosalee arrived
with another painting. Only with Rosalee's confession had an realized
how thoroughly and classically duped she'd been. Or so she said,
when you ask a calm artist a question, they say, aha,
I see what you mean. Let me check it out,
(29:18):
and miraculously they have the answers and be called. She
called herself a perfect mark and added I have never
deliberately done something wrong, which is to say knowingly. But
then she added a jarring remark, I am terribly sorry
for anybody hurt or damaged, but let me be clear,
(29:41):
this is about works of art. I didn't slay anybody's
first born. We have to have some perspective on suffering, or,
as a sympathetic historian apparently told her, we all need
to get over it. More art fraud in a minute.
(30:05):
The Disilers lawyers felt pleased they've gotten their clients the
outcome they wanted, but the settlement allowed Freedman to crow
and declared she would have gladly had the trial go on,
and was sure that jury would have found her innocent,
if only on a technicality. The Disols lawyers roll their
eyes at that things got resolved before the journey got
(30:25):
to reach its verdict. But you know, we did speak
to the jurors afterwards. They were completely convinced that she
knew exactly what she was doing. Despite the fact that
a jury never actually ruled on the case in court,
the Doss and their lawyers saw the outcome as an
overwhelming victory. I think that you're looking maybe you're suggesting
(30:49):
that you need a verdict through your story. I don't
think so. I think you need to tell the story
and put it out there to show what happened. And
they did a d of that, and it's not a
coincidence that the five cases that were pending you know
at the time we settled, also all settled and no
one went to trial. You know, I'd say, you know,
(31:11):
no other and Freedman and Freedman didn't step up to
defend themselves and go to trial on any of those
five cases that followed. The rulings made it crystal clear that,
you know, collectors have the right to reasonably rely on
reputable galleries, and that it's the reputable galleries obligation to
come forward with what they know and what they don't
(31:32):
know about works that they're selling. As attorney Luke Nicas felt,
the settlement only confirmed the case that he had argued.
Not only was she not prosecuted, but when the superseding
indictment came out, in which Glafira Resolis had told her
story to the federal government, it was clear from that
(31:52):
indictment that Anne was not implicated at all in the
underlying crime. He had every reason to throw in under
the bus. Her boyfriend had every reason to throw in
under the bus. The painter did. Everyone did, and at
least from that superseding indictment, it was clear they didn't.
(32:13):
And when you look at all of the information, not
just pieces of it, and you put it together and
you ask did Anne believe these works were fake at
the time, I just don't think you can get there.
You can say she made mistakes, but the prosecutor needs
to prove beyond that, and I don't think they could.
(32:35):
It had now been three years since was arrested, three birthdays,
three Christmas, is out on bail, nervously awaiting her sentence
on nine federal charges. During that time, Rosalee had broken
no laws and had helped prosecutors to the extent that
she could to track down the Bergantino's brothers. They remained
(32:57):
at large due to Spain's changing extradition rules. In weighing
her sentence, Judge Faiala had listened to Lafas story of
physical and emotional abuse at the hands of Carlos and
found it credible. As Jason Hernandez suggested, the judge had
seen a culprit left holding the bag while the rest
(33:20):
of the ring went free. Enough was enough. In January
two thousand seventeen, the judge sentenced her to time already
served eighty two days. Lafra was a free woman. She
was also broke, but their lives are very difficult because
(33:41):
everything that they had could be traceable to, you know,
their art business, which was fraudulent or infected with frauds.
So everything was seized. Their home was seized, all of
their money was seized, all of the art was seized,
and so far in her late fifties, had to build
herself back up. So she now works part time as
(34:01):
a hostess in a restaurant in her sixties and as
a waitress from time to time, and solely is involved
in the art business and is building her own business
and knows how to do it right, and is supporting
her mother. And so you have the story of a
daughter supporting her mother and their father is still very
(34:22):
much very antagonistic. Carlos is very antagonistic, but he's he's
off in Spain. The government, as you probably tried to
extradate him and was unsuccessful in doing so. The fall
of the Knodler Gallery would have rippling effects throughout the
art world. Gretchen Deep and Corn described the seismic shift
(34:46):
and trust between client and gallery. I think it's terrible
for the art market. For example, right after the first
revelations in the New York Times story, the dealer. Our
current dealer began getting phone calls about, oh dear, it
is the work that I bought? Is it real? And
(35:07):
it wasn't only our dealer, it was others. And then
all of the dealers are under suspicion now because it's
never been a field that has seemed entirely squeaky clean anyway,
because things happen, you know, people get better. One person
(35:28):
gets a good deal, the next person doesn't, and they're
they're mad, and so, I mean, nobody trusts anybody in
this kind of world anyway in some way. But this
made it a hundred times worse. David and fam didn't
hold back in his blistering opinion of the Knoedler scandal.
(35:49):
In hindsight, I think the whole Knodler story will go
down as one of the worst scandals of its kind,
indeed probably the most shameful for law go in the
Annals of Martin. What could prove even more interesting is
a verdict of history upon whoever the gods as being
(36:10):
of the episode who of the Soldid saga from first
to Lost, Having followed the fall of the Knodler Gallery
from the first revelations of forgery through the trial and
the half dozen settlements, I'd come to realize that this
(36:31):
case was far from a once in a lifetime phenomenon.
As we've heard from countless artists, dealers, and collectors, the
art market has been and remains a target rich environment
for con artists willing to risk prison time for a
big score. There's the fascinating case of Intego Philbrick, a
(36:53):
young and charming London based dealer who oversold fractional shares
of works by hot new artists in a made off
like Ponzi scheme. There's also the case of aging artist
Robert Indiana, creator of the iconic love Works, whose Coterie
of Assistance on an island off the coast of Maine,
(37:14):
would be accused of squeezing windfall profits from him, going
so far as to employ an automatic signature signing machine. Finally,
there was my own brush with art fraud, in which
a painting I purchased from an artist I adored through
his longtime dealer Mary Boone, would end up pitting us
against each other in a bitter legal battle I never
(37:37):
could have anticipated. We'll talk about all of those cases
in our final episode of Art Fraud. Ny Arn't Fraud
(38:13):
is brought to you by I Heart Radio and Cavalry Audio.
Our executive producers are Matt del Piano, Keegan Rosenberger, Andy Turner, myself,
and Michael Snayerson. We're produced by Brandon Morgan and Zach McNeice.
Zach also edited and mixed this episode. Lindsay Hoffman is
our managing producer. Our writer is Michael Schneyerson.
Galling mystifying. I think I would get me to a nunnery.
I mean I would go and do penance, you know,
go work for some nonprofit in the art world for
the rest of my career and try to atone for
(00:22):
whatever had happened. In the grim aftermath of the closing
of the Nler Gallery, ten lawsuits were filed by cheated customers,
most notably Domenico and Eleanor desle There saga began with
a shriek in a Miami hotel room after reading the
(00:45):
story of the fake Lagrange Pollock in The New York Times.
Most former customers of the now shuttered gallery just wanted
to recoup their losses. Investigators concluded that no fewer than
sixty fake paintings had been created at the direction of
(01:08):
Fara Rosales. At trial, an accounting expert would testify that
Freedman and dealer Julian Weissman had sold their clients seventy
million dollars in fakes, yielding a net income of thirty
three point seven million dollars for Knodler and generating more
than ten million dollars in commissions for Anne. This was
(01:30):
in addition to her salary estimated to be four hundred
thousand dollars annually. Michael Hammer took his own four hundred
thousand dollars salary plus of both galleries, a near limitless fund,
spewing cash to eight thirty one his private holding company.
As for Rosales, no taxes had been paid from her
(01:53):
sales to Knodler, so profit estimates varied. The New York
Times would later declare that Rosa Alice had taken in
about twenty six million dollars from her sale of paintings
to the two dealers. That was all money that would
have to be disgorged, along with some twelve point five
million dollars due to the i R s. Surprisingly, one
(02:17):
of the first to settle was Pierre Lagrange himself in
October two thou twelve. Shouting from the rooftops had earned
Lagrange some admiration, but also his share of ridicule among
collectors for buying a painting without doing due diligence. He
had vowed to get his seventeen million dollars back, but Artsy,
(02:39):
the online art magazine, published a rumor It's settled for
six point four million dollars, being first in line for
a refund, had its advantages. There was likely more money
in the galleries till to be had. The Desoles, by contrast,
felt bound by a sense of mission. Their lawsuit was
aimed at making the true public in a civil trial.
(03:02):
Having a judge and jury declare FIRA's forgery ring to
be nothing less than a racketeering conspiracy was the real
prize for them. Assistant District Attorney Jason Hernandez was taking
a very different approach. He was trying to make a
criminal case of the notetor's dealings. Surprisingly, it was far
(03:25):
from a slam dunk. What we were doing previously is
sort of your art fraud one on one playbook. You've
got to prove that the paintings are fake, and you've
got to prove that someone who sold them knew that
they were fake. But it was very clear that this
was going to be especially difficult following our usual kind
of playbook in this case, because well, there were an
(03:48):
unusually large number of prominent people who seemingly We're going
to stand by the paintings and say that they were real.
That is uncommon, and I could see right away, well,
you know, how do you get over that? Because if
the person selling them is showing them to all of
these esteemed people, and they're saying, yep, looks right to me,
(04:11):
looks good to me. That's not a criminal case anymore.
You're not going to be able to prove fraud that
someone intended to deceive, because they'll say, well, you know,
this museum director said it was good, and I mean
you know, and Freeman bought one of the paintings. It
was well thought out. The truth is all of the
(04:32):
experts declined to authenticate the paintings in any official capacity.
They've seen them in passing on the notors walls at
cocktail parties, but none of the experts had any interest
and testifying. You gotta remember it's it's a criminal case,
so you have to prove your case to twelve people
beyond a reasonable doubt. We weren't really getting anywhere with
(04:53):
the conventional investigative methods, and the provenance was very difficult
to di proved. Glafira was alas we know very virtually
nothing about. She told nod Lern and Freedom that she
was a brokera representing a family that she wouldn't disclose
and I can't get hurt to disclose it, so I
can't issue her a grand jury subpoena and say tell
(05:15):
me the name. She would just assert her fit in
them and right and refuse to tell me. My thought was,
I can kind of through the back door figure out
whether or not Glafira was Alas represents a family that
owns these paintings, because if she's lying about that, that
is going to be a crime that I can charge, Okay,
because that's in a very important part of the provenance.
(05:36):
Imagine if she's lying about this actually being a European
family that bought these and stored them over all these decades, well,
that is something I can charge her with. So she
says she's a brokera she says the paintings are not hers.
I could see that all the money would go from
the Nobler Gallery once they would purchase them to a
couple bank accounts, I think two or three in Spain.
(05:57):
So my thought was, I'm gonna ask Spain that we
have a treaty with Spain to for their bank records.
And then if she is a broker, I'm going to
see or whatever percentage go to the family in Europe
and it's going to go to a bank account in
some other country probably and then I lost that country
(06:18):
to give me the bank records, and you might prevail there.
You might actually get foreign banks to cooperate and give
you records that would prove that she had been engaged
in financial shenanigans. That's right, let's see where the money flows.
So I took that kind of old approach. Okay, you know,
follow the money to the sexier world of art fraud,
where you follow the pigments and those sorts of things.
(06:41):
And what it showed was that she was lying about
who owned the paintings. She owned them, someone else owned them,
but she's keeping all the money. So that gave me
a fraud charge against her. Okay, you are falsely representing
to the Nobler Gallery that these paintings belonged to you know,
then fill in the long story what she told all
(07:02):
that that yarn she spun about who it belonged to.
I now have leverage against CFIA. I have a criminal charge.
It's a lot of money, you know, many millions of
dollars of paintings, so it's a significant fraud. And then
on top of that, she is not reporting any of
this money as income, so there is a tax charge there.
Nor is she reporting the fact that she has formed
(07:23):
bank accounts in excess of ten thousand dollars, which is
another federal crime. So now the deck is stacked way
high against the FIA Rosol. She's kind of got nowhere
to run. I have very simple, provable, direct, strong criminal
charges against her, and now I can kind of use
that as pressure um to get her to talk unless
(07:48):
she's willing to spend, you know, a lot of time
in prison. One night, early in the summer of two thout,
some eighteen years after his first faithful meeting with Anne
at a Soho art gallery, law enforcement agents came crashing
through the front doors of Carlos Andrs. Multimillion dollar home.
(08:13):
It's very traumatic. They came actually to wake me up.
It was very early in the morning, at six in
the morning around the time. And then there was the squad.
I was sleeping, My daughter was upstairs sleeping. She was
supposed to go to Spain the next day or that
(08:34):
day day evening. And they knocked at the door and
they told me that they were the police and opened
the door. And I saw them, you know, with their weapons,
and and I said, can I put something on it?
And they say, opened it, opened it. Or else. Of
(08:57):
course I opened the door, I saw the I'm drawn
in all over my house when they were with the
way pons pointing everywhere. Uh, and then they took me
and I wanted to give a hat to my daughter,
(09:19):
so they didn't let me. Oh, so it was horrible.
We'll be back in a minute. Brian Scarlatto's fear as
attorney and family friend took the call while out of
town on a work trip. I recalled because I was
(09:41):
in Las Vegas for work, and my wife called to
say that Glad had been arrested and that there was
a story in the newspaper, which you know, I looked
up on the internet, and um, you know, at this
point had been a friend of ours for a while,
so I felt like I should look into it since
you know, it is kind of my area of the law.
Glafi had just been arrested and so um, we had
(10:02):
to go into jail to speak to her. But what
we found out is is that she had really been
arrested for tax evasion, sort of like al capolm and
the government couldn't get them, you know, for organized crime.
They just followed the money, and in Glafira's case, the
government was able to follow the money. By now, after
living in Sand's Point for years, had you come to
suspect Laphia and Carlos might be art thieves. I did
(10:25):
not suspect anything. They did seem to be very successful.
But it was extremely shocking, and you know, and it's
shocking whenever you hear about anybody being arrested, but certainly
a very nice woman in her you know, later fifties
like Fra Brian visited Glafira in prison soon after her arrest.
It was a sobering moment for the family attorney who
(10:46):
had come to know Carlos and Fia. Well, you go
in and it's very difficult to get in, and Gafa
had just been arrested, and in fact, she didn't have
enough money for shoes because they take your shoes away
and you need a commissary account then to buy shoes,
and so she was wearing paper slippers and it was
very very distraught, you know, just didn't know what was
going to go on Carlo's head, you know, fled and
(11:08):
so her daughter, her young daughter is on the outside
with no parents, I mean solely was maybe twenty years old,
maybe nineteen years old at this time. It's hard to
overstate just how lucky Glafira was to have such a
family friend who was an experienced attorney at this moment
in her life. After she was arrested, I offered to help,
(11:30):
largely on a pro bono basis, because all of her
assets had been seized at that point. Basically, what we
were able to do is explained to Glafira how this
was going to play out, that the government had, you know,
a strong case on the tax evasion charges and that
carried very significant penalties. Once behind bars, the first order
(11:51):
of business was for a judge to determine whether Glafira
Rosalee was a flight risk. We put together I thought
a very persuasive ca ace thatfa you know, had dual citizenship,
a boyfriend, with a home into the Dominican Republic, ties
I believe to Spain, foreign bank accounts, a lot of liquidity,
a lot of assets, you know, at the time, and
(12:13):
I'll say it was by no means certain that she
would be detained because on the other side of the coin,
I mean, she's never had a criminal case before. She was,
you know, maybe fifty something, your old woman with a
daughter here in the United States, and so the defense
made an argument, a strong argument that hey, you know,
she's not going to go anywhere. Why would she go anywhere?
(12:34):
She's got all these ties. But thankfully for us, the
judge detained her. And although I can't say for certain,
I would think that being detained would weigh on someone
and make them more likely to want to cooperate and
tell us what really happened. The judge said, no, I'm
going to keep you detained because I think you've you
you are a flight risk, and so you know, if
(12:55):
that was that, she she went back into the m
c C or the m d C, one of the
two facilities that are used. Well, yeah, you don't want
to be there, trust me. She was not in the
most difficult spot where like the terrorists and Burne made
off go. But no, you don't. You know, you don't
want to spend any time there. If you can, if
(13:16):
you can help it. A few months in prison was
all Glafa needed. The con was over and there was
no one worth protecting. At the cost of sacrificing her freedom,
Gafara decided to cooperate, and she provided information about Carlos
and about Patience, and after it was clear that Glifer
(13:40):
was telling the truth. The government agreed to release her
un bail. Rosales spilled the entire story to investigators. In
September two thirteen, she pled guilty to nine counts, including
one count of money laundering, one count of wire fraud,
and three counts of falsifying income tax returns. She had
(14:02):
pocketed twenty six million dollars and paid no Texas. Despite
her testimony, Fia was facing as much as nine years
in prison. But this was only the bail hearing. The
sentencing would come much later, you know, as we later learned,
because of her cooperation, really only because of her cooperation,
(14:24):
we've got the two burgan Tinos brothers and Psian you know, involved,
and that really broke down the door, okay, to a
wealth of information that only came from her. But as
you know most people know, Py Sian as soon as
he heard that we were on his tail, took off
(14:44):
to China, a country that does not extradite its own nationals.
I'm personally much more upset with the Spanish court's decision
to non extradite the Bergantino brothers. Amazingly, from a criminal standpoint,
things were looking good for and freedman. If we thought
(15:06):
that we could prove beyond a reasonable doubt to twelve
people that other people knew the aspects of the scheme,
the critical aspects of the scheme, then we would have
brought a case. But you know, you've got to have proof.
You've got to have proof that's admissible in court that
you know someone who was selling the paintings, whether it's
Fa as the consigner or and you also have to
(15:28):
prove that she knows that they are fake. So, you know,
here you're dealing with a situation where a freedman's first
point of contact, Lafia, is lying to her about the provenance.
And again the provenance has elements of it that have
elements of truth. You know, Sorry, it was a real person.
Herbert was a real person. It is actually the case
that a lot of art is found, you know, from
(15:50):
time to time. What we did in this case was
we took it as far as we thought the evidence
that we had would take it. FA had done her
part and broken the case wide open for investigators. The
bergen Tino's brothers fled the United States for Spain, a
(16:13):
country beyond the reach of US extradition. The artist patient
Quan hurriedly returned home to China, another country out of
reach from u S authorities. That left only Michael Hammer
and Ann Friedman. Neither would be prosecuted on criminal charges
or simply wasn't enough proof, but both were still subject
(16:35):
to civil suits, where a jury only needed to conclude
that a defendant was more than fifty likely to have
committed a crime. Monetary settlements from civil suits could inflict
their own kind of severe punishment. The fear of such
verdicts had led the Knoedler to settle with Pierre Legrange.
(16:56):
As for the Souls, their showdown with Ann Eatment and
the Knodler was about to begin. Some three dozen journalists,
including our own Michael Schneyerson, who were bent over their
notepads that day in the classically high ceiling, oak paneled courtroom.
The trial began on a Monday in January two thou sixteen.
(17:20):
The list of names who weren't present in court that
day was almost as interesting as who was. Lafara Rosalee
wasn't there. Having served three months in jail before admitting
her guilt, she was now agonizing over what further sentence
she would have to serve and wondering how she would
come up with eighty million dollars in compensation for her victims.
(17:46):
The Bergen, Tino's brothers were still in Spain, Quan was
in China, even Michael Hammer was absent in court. Hammer
had not appeared once from behind the Knodler doors since
the gallery closed, nor granted any interviews. But after eighteen
years or so of the forgery ring, Michael Hammer looked
(18:07):
more and more like a key player, no less so
than Ann Friedman, As much was told in a lawsuit
filed by one of the victims, casino owner Frank for
Tita the Third, who in two thousand eight bought a
fake Rothco for seven point two million dollars. Hammer, the
complaint detailed, knew that Knodler bought the paintings from Rosale's
(18:29):
for shockingly low prices and quickly resold them for enormous
markups for Tita alleged quote. In all, Knoedler resold the
Rosealves paintings for a total of sixty three point eight
million dollars, realizing gross profits of approximately forty eight point
seven million dollars. Hammer, acting on behalf of Notler and
(18:50):
his foundation eight thirty one, saw two of the tens
of millions of dollars in profit be distributed largely to
himself and Ann Friedman through a Friedman and Hammer had
a meeting in the early days of the scandal, and
(19:12):
a handwritten memo survived their talk to surface later in
Fatita's complaint. It was unclear whether the notes were taken
by Freedman or Hammer, but the sentiments were in technicolor
Discreet sources are my stock and trade. When one of
the comments, don't kill the goose that's laying the golden egg,
(19:33):
went another, and I am not going to change my
way of doing business. If you were not comfortable, step away.
And Friedman was in the courtroom the day the desolas
child began. She sat quietly beside her lawyers, wreathed in
(19:54):
her soft white curls, dressed in black, beige and gray,
saying nothing. As the witnesses began to come forward, she
too would be forced to testify if the trial went
as planned. Luke Nichoas and Freedman's lawyer, had a novel defense.
As it turned out. He argued that thess were responsible
(20:14):
for checking their paintings authenticity themselves. They were, after all,
sophisticated art buyers. By that logic, Nikos suggested the jury
shouldn't blame Noldler for selling the their fake art. The
customers were the ones to blame for buying it. As
for Anne, she was a salesperson, not an expert. They declared.
(20:38):
She was just doing her job, selling paintings and earning
profits for the gallery. Here's Luke Nichos with Anne. I
certainly wanted to believe, but and I looked at the
evidence and where the evidence show and what the evidence
showed to me separate and apart from what Anne was
telling me was emails from a guy like David ann
(20:59):
Fam are the most significant experts and at abstract expressionism.
What did David an Fem say about these works? He
wrote an email in May of two thousand eight to
Jack Flamm from the Dadalist Foundation, and that email said,
I can't think of any reason to deem this newman
from the Resolves collection. This newman inauthentic. He went on
(21:21):
to say in the same email, I've seen the Krasners,
I've seen the Pollux, the roth Codes, the clients and Stills,
and I believe in these works. Now he acknowledged that
the story was murky acknowledged that the ownership was unknown.
But the reality is I saw an email like that
from David and fam and I thought, if David and
fem saying that, who am I the lawyer without this expertise?
(21:44):
Let me dig further. I think it's important to understand
what I concluded about whether they were authentic or not.
Wasn't the point. My point is I had no expertise
in whether they were authentic or not. The core question always, always,
always was what did Ann Friedman believe and what did
she have reason to believe based in the facts. Early
(22:10):
in the trial, attorneys for the plaintiffs presented a fascinating
exhibit to the court, the Doles eight point three million
dollar fake Rothcoe. The thing I remember about it being
physically in the courtroom the most is that the defendants
immediately wanted a sidebar with the judge because they felt
that the painting smelled new. This is the dissillis attorneys again.
(22:35):
I think the issue was, like all artwork that's transported responsibly,
it was in a wooden crate, so the wood was
just secured with screws, and the crate got unscrewed, and
it creates that kind of wood smell in the air,
which made the painting smell like fresh wood, and so
(22:55):
they felt it was prejudicial that the painting would smell
so obvious we like fresh And the judge had to
go over the and smell the painting to assess, and
he was, like he said on the record, he was like,
I can't believe I'm going over to smell the painting.
Trudge over. He smelled it, and I think they did
(23:16):
move it. Yeah, yeah, but they left it out, but
I thought. I remember it was very dramatic. We carried
the painting over someplace and you know, there was like
a hush in the room. Were like a gas because
people in the art world are so used to such
delicate handling and white glove handling of works like this,
(23:37):
and you know it was a fake, so that we
just picked it up with our bare hands. We were
not professional. There was the other moment, the funny moment
with the painting, when Pulkari said on the stand, like,
I think it's supposed to be the other way, you know,
like its upside down. Even Stephen Poli was one of
the two quote unquote experts who Knowler had hired and
paid to look at some of these works, and when
(24:00):
he testified about the Rothcoe, he testified that it did
it couldn't usually tell with Rothco's which weighs up. A
day or two into the trial, the Doles took the
stand to tell the story of their fake Rothco. Eleanor
was emotional, Domenico fierce. Both were heartfelt, taking breaks to
(24:24):
chat up the press, but they would find themselves subject
to the occasional bit of snarkiness for bringing rich people's
problems into the courtroom. With the Doles done on cross examination,
the trial turned to Ann Friedman's list of eleven experts
whose names she had used to authenticate her paintings. None
(24:46):
of the eleven had wished to be on that list.
What emerged was what we showed that trial with the
witness testimony, that there were no experts who authenticated the paintings.
For another, it just didn't happen. You know. The story
that the defendants were selling that they believe the works
(25:06):
were real and the experts authenticated, that was just absolutely rebutted,
totally debunked. With respect to David Ampham, he never was
shown a Rothco despite being the world's leading expert in
Rothko I don't think it's a coincidence that he was
never shown any the rathcos not one. Not only had
(25:29):
I not seen the Disoli painting, I'd never even been
in the same moon with it. What I got was
a package with a transparencive a painting, a note for
man dated July and pretty so this was two thousand
and five. I picked it up, looks at the transparencies
(25:51):
were about twenty seconds, and put it in the file,
filed it away and did not look at it again
until then. That's the time of the drial. It sounds
as if Anne was doing her best to circulate your
name and your approval of this painting. Is that true? Yes,
it's true. I didn't know of the time. I have
(26:13):
to say that from the perspective of the present, I
felt I was being manipulated, and I don't take commory
to that. And when I saw the letter, which had
a list of people who had seen the dissol A painting,
starting with Christopher off Go, followed by myself, I was
absolutely shocked. I couldn't believe that my name has been
(26:37):
put in a letter without my knowing it, without my approval,
and effectively so any buyer, it could be constituted as
a kind of authentication by Foxing. As the trial entered
its second week on February sixteen, as of excitement permeated
(27:01):
the courtroom. After all this warm up, An Friedman was
due to testify at last. Oddly, however, the judge's chair
remained empty as the ten am hour came and went.
At last, the judge reappeared and announced in open court
that a settlement had been reached from the dess Grins.
(27:27):
Their gambit had paid off. As for Ann Friedman's lawyers,
they looked relieved. Whatever they had agreed to pay, it
was probably less than the million dollar RICO payment that
Theses were demanding. The trial, however, would continue because Michael
Hammer and his eight thirty one foundation were not yet
(27:50):
off the hook. Hammer's chief financial officer testified that Hammer,
her boss, had awarded himself some twenty luxury cars, including
a four hundred two dollar Rose Royce and a five
dollar Mercedes. That was all in addition to a four
hundred thousand dollars salary he paid himself from his Knodler
(28:13):
piggy bank. Anne was scheduled to testify that Wednesday against
her former boss about how much the two of them
had profited from selling forty plus fake paintings that had
come through the Knodler. Once again, the judge and counselor
has disappeared behind closed doors and emerged appearing satisfied a
(28:33):
private settlement had been reached between the Desoles and A
thirty one. The trial was finally over some weeks later,
and agreed to speak to the press. From the start,
Friedman said she had regarded the David Herbert collection as
a quote puzzle to be solved. She had tried to
(28:57):
extract more information from GlyP Era every time Rosalee arrived
with another painting. Only with Rosalee's confession had an realized
how thoroughly and classically duped she'd been. Or so she said,
when you ask a calm artist a question, they say, aha,
I see what you mean. Let me check it out,
(29:18):
and miraculously they have the answers and be called. She
called herself a perfect mark and added I have never
deliberately done something wrong, which is to say knowingly. But
then she added a jarring remark, I am terribly sorry
for anybody hurt or damaged, but let me be clear,
(29:41):
this is about works of art. I didn't slay anybody's
first born. We have to have some perspective on suffering, or,
as a sympathetic historian apparently told her, we all need
to get over it. More art fraud in a minute.
(30:05):
The Disilers lawyers felt pleased they've gotten their clients the
outcome they wanted, but the settlement allowed Freedman to crow
and declared she would have gladly had the trial go on,
and was sure that jury would have found her innocent,
if only on a technicality. The Disols lawyers roll their
eyes at that things got resolved before the journey got
(30:25):
to reach its verdict. But you know, we did speak
to the jurors afterwards. They were completely convinced that she
knew exactly what she was doing. Despite the fact that
a jury never actually ruled on the case in court,
the Doss and their lawyers saw the outcome as an
overwhelming victory. I think that you're looking maybe you're suggesting
(30:49):
that you need a verdict through your story. I don't
think so. I think you need to tell the story
and put it out there to show what happened. And
they did a d of that, and it's not a
coincidence that the five cases that were pending you know
at the time we settled, also all settled and no
one went to trial. You know, I'd say, you know,
(31:11):
no other and Freedman and Freedman didn't step up to
defend themselves and go to trial on any of those
five cases that followed. The rulings made it crystal clear that,
you know, collectors have the right to reasonably rely on
reputable galleries, and that it's the reputable galleries obligation to
come forward with what they know and what they don't
(31:32):
know about works that they're selling. As attorney Luke Nicas felt,
the settlement only confirmed the case that he had argued.
Not only was she not prosecuted, but when the superseding
indictment came out, in which Glafira Resolis had told her
story to the federal government, it was clear from that
(31:52):
indictment that Anne was not implicated at all in the
underlying crime. He had every reason to throw in under
the bus. Her boyfriend had every reason to throw in
under the bus. The painter did. Everyone did, and at
least from that superseding indictment, it was clear they didn't.
(32:13):
And when you look at all of the information, not
just pieces of it, and you put it together and
you ask did Anne believe these works were fake at
the time, I just don't think you can get there.
You can say she made mistakes, but the prosecutor needs
to prove beyond that, and I don't think they could.
(32:35):
It had now been three years since was arrested, three birthdays,
three Christmas, is out on bail, nervously awaiting her sentence
on nine federal charges. During that time, Rosalee had broken
no laws and had helped prosecutors to the extent that
she could to track down the Bergantino's brothers. They remained
(32:57):
at large due to Spain's changing extradition rules. In weighing
her sentence, Judge Faiala had listened to Lafas story of
physical and emotional abuse at the hands of Carlos and
found it credible. As Jason Hernandez suggested, the judge had
seen a culprit left holding the bag while the rest
(33:20):
of the ring went free. Enough was enough. In January
two thousand seventeen, the judge sentenced her to time already
served eighty two days. Lafra was a free woman. She
was also broke, but their lives are very difficult because
(33:41):
everything that they had could be traceable to, you know,
their art business, which was fraudulent or infected with frauds.
So everything was seized. Their home was seized, all of
their money was seized, all of the art was seized,
and so far in her late fifties, had to build
herself back up. So she now works part time as
(34:01):
a hostess in a restaurant in her sixties and as
a waitress from time to time, and solely is involved
in the art business and is building her own business
and knows how to do it right, and is supporting
her mother. And so you have the story of a
daughter supporting her mother and their father is still very
(34:22):
much very antagonistic. Carlos is very antagonistic, but he's he's
off in Spain. The government, as you probably tried to
extradate him and was unsuccessful in doing so. The fall
of the Knodler Gallery would have rippling effects throughout the
art world. Gretchen Deep and Corn described the seismic shift
(34:46):
and trust between client and gallery. I think it's terrible
for the art market. For example, right after the first
revelations in the New York Times story, the dealer. Our
current dealer began getting phone calls about, oh dear, it
is the work that I bought? Is it real? And
(35:07):
it wasn't only our dealer, it was others. And then
all of the dealers are under suspicion now because it's
never been a field that has seemed entirely squeaky clean anyway,
because things happen, you know, people get better. One person
(35:28):
gets a good deal, the next person doesn't, and they're
they're mad, and so, I mean, nobody trusts anybody in
this kind of world anyway in some way. But this
made it a hundred times worse. David and fam didn't
hold back in his blistering opinion of the Knoedler scandal.
(35:49):
In hindsight, I think the whole Knodler story will go
down as one of the worst scandals of its kind,
indeed probably the most shameful for law go in the
Annals of Martin. What could prove even more interesting is
a verdict of history upon whoever the gods as being
(36:10):
of the episode who of the Soldid saga from first
to Lost, Having followed the fall of the Knodler Gallery
from the first revelations of forgery through the trial and
the half dozen settlements, I'd come to realize that this
(36:31):
case was far from a once in a lifetime phenomenon.
As we've heard from countless artists, dealers, and collectors, the
art market has been and remains a target rich environment
for con artists willing to risk prison time for a
big score. There's the fascinating case of Intego Philbrick, a
(36:53):
young and charming London based dealer who oversold fractional shares
of works by hot new artists in a made off
like Ponzi scheme. There's also the case of aging artist
Robert Indiana, creator of the iconic love Works, whose Coterie
of Assistance on an island off the coast of Maine,
(37:14):
would be accused of squeezing windfall profits from him, going
so far as to employ an automatic signature signing machine. Finally,
there was my own brush with art fraud, in which
a painting I purchased from an artist I adored through
his longtime dealer Mary Boone, would end up pitting us
against each other in a bitter legal battle I never
(37:37):
could have anticipated. We'll talk about all of those cases
in our final episode of Art Fraud. Ny Arn't Fraud
(38:13):
is brought to you by I Heart Radio and Cavalry Audio.
Our executive producers are Matt del Piano, Keegan Rosenberger, Andy Turner, myself,
and Michael Snayerson. We're produced by Brandon Morgan and Zach McNeice.
Zach also edited and mixed this episode. Lindsay Hoffman is
our managing producer. Our writer is Michael Schneyerson.
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