The Art of the Con: The Most Notorious Fakes, Frauds, and Forgeries in the Art World (23 page)

The Temchins were neither art novices nor the typical suckers born every minute. Myron specifically questioned the telephone representative for Fine Art Treasures Gallery and asked if the pieces were original lithographs bearing original signatures. Informed that they were indeed completely original, Myron provided his credit card information and completed the sale. This was no greedy attempt to make a killing on a couple of art pieces. Instead, the Temchins saw the purchases as a gift to their family. “I think we were excited to think that we could have a lithograph from Picasso and then it would be something we could pass down through the family,” Myron said.
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In about a week, the first of their treasures arrived in a carton at the Temchin home via FedEx. Upon opening the box and examining her new Picasso,
Trois Femmes,
Mary instantly identified a problem. To her it was clear that this was not a lithograph, but instead was much more similar to a color photocopy and did not bear an original signature by Picasso. She called her husband and told him that the piece
was not what it was purported to be. The certificate of authenticity was inauthentic as well; it was a “cheap black and white Xerox copy on colored paper.”
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Not even the signature on that appeared to be real.

The next day, the second Picasso purchase,
The Bullfight,
arrived in the same manner. Again, it appeared to the couple to be a photocopy without an original signature. The pair, concerned that they might have been conned, researched the authentication service and found that though there was a famous David Smith who collected art, he had no connection at all to art authentication for Fine Art Treasures Gallery. They then went to the auctioneer’s website at www.finearttreasures.net and found that it advertised “fine art, original paintings, museum quality prints.” At that moment, the Temchins realized that they “had been swindled.”
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What they had were museum-quality prints, not original signed lithographs. After some research, they found that what they had was most likely “some kind of copy of one side of a print in a book.”

The Temchins were not about to be anyone’s fools. They researched the auction show and made attempts to contact Eubanks, even driving to one of her addresses only to find that it was a mailbox store. It was perhaps a good thing that Myron couldn’t manage to find a way to confront her. Eubanks was earning a reputation for being an extremely feisty and difficult person with whom to deal. According to a federal investigator, some employees found her intimidating and others claimed to be afraid of her. LAPD art cop Don Hrycyk stated that “in one case she grabbed one person and threw them out of the business, and in another instance the man turned around and she kicked him in the rear. All of this sort of fit into what we were hearing, that she was very aggressive.”
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Temchin decided to turn his investigation over to the professionals. He contacted Special Agent Christopher Calarco of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Calarco was ideally suited to take on
the Eubanks scam. He had been with the FBI’s Art Crime Team since its inception in 2004 and served as the team’s coordinator for the Western region. Though he also supervised a violent crime and gang squad in the Los Angeles Division of the FBI, he was not just a door-crashing tough cop—he had also previously served as a prosecutor at the state and federal levels.
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His interest had been piqued by the Fine Art Treasures Gallery case in late 2004 when he received several calls about the program. Despite his experience and training in art crime, this was the first time he had heard of a television program selling art. He also learned that the show potentially reached 25 million households through DirecTV and Dish Network. “When I started getting an idea of the potential scope of the fraud, and how many victims and how much loss there could be, the case took on a sense of urgency,” Calarco recalled.
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He obtained permission from the cooperative Temchin to have the purported Picassos examined to establish whether or not they were authentic. They were not. This, however, was not enough to make an arrest. Investigators still had to prove that Eubanks was knowingly trafficking in illicit art and had to learn with whom she might be working.

Calarco found that Eubanks was not alone in the business. In 2002, she brought aboard James Mobley, an experienced auctioneer who assisted her in her plot and also served as an on-air auctioneer. And there was her husband, Gerald Sullivan, who worked on the behind-the-scenes operations. But, according to one federal prosecutor, Eubanks “wore the pants in the family. She really controlled the business and she really was the one who was in charge of every aspect of it, and he, Mr. Sullivan, ran the details, ran the accounts, handled the transactions.”
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As investigators dug deeper into the operation at Fine Art Treasures Gallery, it began to emerge that although the Eubanks trio was
raking in the money, their execution of the fraud wasn’t especially tight. For one, she committed some of her crimes right in front of employees who were not in on the scam. Justin Lundberg, a shipping department employee at Fine Art Treasures, said that on several occasions as he was preparing to ship prints, he came across certificates of authenticity that were unsigned. Upon being notified of the omission, Eubanks would come to the shipping department and personally sign multiple copies of the certificates, which attested that the works were authentic and part of a limited edition. In addition, he saw Eubanks sign artists’ signatures, saying she “paid royalties that made it legal.” Another employee, William Woodard, stated that he saw Eubanks sign Picasso’s name in front of him.
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In another instance, Eubanks made a ham-handed effort at disguising her Fine Art Network by listing Thom Keith and his daughter Jennifer as officers and/or directors of her company when, in fact, the pair’s only connection to the corporation was purchasing television media time for Eubanks.
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Perhaps it was a combination of the scammers’ greed and the sheer volume of prints that Fine Art Treasures Gallery was moving, but they were sloppy in other ways in their crime too. Hrycyk recounted that seemingly minimal effort was put into the creation of the fraudulent certificates of authenticity: “In some cases the person signing [the certificate] didn’t exist. . . . In some situations we saw that there was a certificate where you could see that the certificate paper was created on a certain day that’s actually listed . . . but then the signature and the date that was attesting to the authenticity was a date that was two years prior to when the actual paper was created.” The sloppiness, Hrycyk said, “just showed how reckless a lot of their actions were.”
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Here, investigators found that in many cases, Eubanks and her cohorts were making the certificates themselves, an error that would prove costly. The certificates are key pieces of evidence
when investigating an art crime in California. Section 1742(a) of the state’s civil code requires dealers selling or consigning art to furnish a certificate of authenticity at the request of the purchaser or consignee. Falsifying the certificate, therefore, means breaking the law, pure and simple, so reputable dealers would know the importance of providing authentication. Added Hrycyk, “For somebody that’s in the business, obviously it was a joke.”
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Even the way that many of the auctions were conducted was rigged. For instance, Fine Art Treasures would claim false bids were made to fraudulently inflate retail and purchase prices for their prints, a practice known as shill bidding. They would even employ false ringing telephones to make viewers believe that a bona fide auction was taking place on television. They would broadcast that the art they had for sale was acquired from “estate liquidations all over the world.” In fact, they were knowingly selling fake and forged artwork that was purchased from crooked suppliers. And of course, they were manufacturing some of the art themselves in their print shop.
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So many complaints were levied against the dealers that the Better Business Bureau ultimately gave them an F rating. For those who were not novice art collectors, the scam was a tremendous embarrassment. Tom and Mary Ann Cogliano bought six pieces—including a Dalí—from the televised auctions, spending more than $50,000. When they later donated the Dalí to a charity fund-raiser, they learned it was a fake. “It made me look foolish,” Tom said, “especially with these folks who are my friends—and here I am with a fake piece of art.”
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And as the complaints flowed in, investigators widened the scope of the case, looking into the finances of Kristine Eubanks. They found in her bank accounts nearly $4 million, and, when they examined her tax return filings closely, also found that false documents had been filed in support of the fraud. It was time for a warrant. As the assistant U.S. attorney assigned to the case,
David Willingham, said, “When the personal investment accounts were located and there were significant assets that were directly traceable to the crimes themselves, then it was just a matter of putting that on paper and getting a judge to sign off on the warrant.”
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In September 2006, investigators led by Agent Calarco raided Fine Art Treasures and arrested Eubanks. The belligerent Eubanks was immediately put into jail upon her arrest because she was on probation: the consummate con artist had previously pleaded no contest to using the credit cards of a deceased business partner, racking up $144,000 in bills. The judge in that case stipulated that if her record did not remain spotless, she would be put directly into jail. Clearly, it did not.

When her cohorts Sullivan and Mobley were arrested, they cooperated against their micromanaging taskmaster. All three understood that Calarco had developed an airtight case against them and chose to plead guilty. Eubanks was sentenced to seven years on charges including conspiracy to commit mail fraud, wire fraud, interstate transportation of stolen property, and tax evasion. At sentencing, federal district court judge Gary A. Feess called her fraud scheme “audacious in scope” and “blatantly illegal.” Her husband, Sullivan, was sentenced to four years, and Mobley to five. The government also seized Eubanks’s assets, including the $3.8 million in her bank accounts and much of the artwork that Fine Art Treasures Gallery had in its inventory.
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The troubles for Eubanks did not end there, however, and the inevitable civil suits followed, with good reason. Charlene Mitchell filed suit against not only Eubanks but Princess Cruises as well, alleging that the tourism giant had committed copyright infringement, fraud, breach of fiduciary duties, conversion, and unjust enrichment. When an attorney for Princess told the
New York Times
that Mitchell benefited from the exposure her counterfeited works received onboard their ships, her attorney retorted, “Princess is so twisted it thinks that mass distribution of unauthorized, forged copies of artists’ works on their ships helps artists.” For her part, Mitchell said she found a better place through which to distribute her work: Park West Gallery.
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John O’Brien, the artist whose dreams were dashed by the unscrupulous actions of Eubanks, had a sadder fate than did Mitchell. In 2004, he lost his battle with melanoma, leaving behind Martha and two young daughters. As a result of the way the value of his works was diluted, his wife filed a federal civil suit against a host of individuals for damages related to the unauthorized copying and sale of her late husband’s art. In her court filing, a familiar name emerged in another scam against John. According to Martha O’Brien, around the same time that they entered into the agreement with Kristine Eubanks, the couple was contacted by Michael Zabrin, the prolific dealer in illicit counterfeit prints (see chapter 9 on Zabrin’s crimes). Zabrin told the O’Briens that he was interested in selling John’s original artworks and purchasing wholesale, signed giclées. The artist made some deals with Zabrin Fine Arts, offering Zabrin wholesale rates for works the dealer would sell at retail prices. But Zabrin’s only payments to the O’Briens were by check, and the crooked dealer stopped payment on both of them. And despite the price agreements with them, the O’Briens found that on Zabrin’s website—Fine Art Masters—John’s paintings and giclées were listed for sale at far below the price agreements, and without any authorization or compensation to the artist.

When the O’Briens eventually lost the sale of a giclée to a buyer who purchased a much cheaper one from Zabrin, the couple confronted him. Zabrin acknowledged that he bought his giclée from
John’s publisher—Eubanks’s company Finer Image—knowingly accepting the difference between the “authentic” works and the 90 “cheap knock-off” works he bought and resold from Finer Image. Incredibly, not only was Zabrin unfazed by the fact that the O’Briens had found him out, he offered to sell them the forged giclées for $100 apiece. Now, with her husband deceased, Martha O’Brien continues to work tirelessly to fix the harm that the likes of Eubanks, Sullivan, Mobley, and Zabrin have done. But it is a long and likely unwinnable battle she wages.

Unfortunately for the O’Briens, they came into contact simultaneously with two legendary fraudsters, neither with a sense of ethics or an ounce of care for the impact their actions would have—not only on duped customers, but also on the artist who created their product and their future generations to come. The artist’s progeny would never realize the full earnings that his works should have gained had their integrity not been so badly damaged. Sadly, there is more of their ilk out there. As the man who successfully prosecuted the Eubanks case, David Willingham, said, “We cut the head off the snake. Just putting Kristine Eubanks in jail couldn’t really stop the type of conduct that was going on, but what it could do was drastically reduce the market for where those suppliers of fake art could sell their wares.”
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But whether that market was truly affected in the long term remains to be seen.