Caveat Emptor

CAVEAT EMPTOR

The Secret Life of an American Art forger

KEN PERENYI

PEGASUS BOOKS

NEW YORK LONDON

In memory of

José

London 1993

T
wenty minutes passed as I waited in the oak-paneled consultation room. Well into my second day of a vicious bout with the flu, I was burning with fever and getting nervous. I just wanted to get this over with, get back to my hotel room, and sleep.

The day before, I'd visited the posh bank at Harrods and handed the head teller a withdrawal slip for the equivalent of ninety thousand US dollars in cash. They requested a day for the transaction.

When the door finally opened, I lifted my weary head to see three sour-looking bank officials stride in. One solemnly placed a package the size of a New York City telephone directory on the table and asked dryly, “Do you want to count it?”

The plastic package bearing the emblem of Barclays Bank looked hermetically sealed. Inside, I could see stacks of twenty-pound banknotes bound with neat paper bands. “No thanks,” I replied, as a pen and paper were slid in front of me to sign. The three sourpusses looked on in silent alarm as I unceremoniously jammed the package into the canvas safari shoulder bag I'd brought for the occasion. As I rose to leave, an attractive woman poked her head around the door and gently said, “Be careful with that now!”

Desperate to get back into a warm bed, I left Harrods and headed down into the Knightsbridge tube station with part of the package sticking out of my bag. An announcement came over the PA system alerting passengers to pickpockets. I did my best to pull the flap of the bag over my precious cargo, but the strap and buckle wouldn't reach. I clutched it to me and ran.

Back in my hotel room, I took two aspirin and fell into bed. My throat was so sore, it was agony to swallow. A chill had set into my bones and I wished I was back home in Florida soaking in the sun. As I lay in bed, my eyes were fixed upon the package on the dresser: money wired into my account at Harrods a few days before from Christie's auction house, the proceeds from a painting of a pair of hummingbirds that I had left with them some time ago. I fell asleep thinking about my career, how lucky I was, and how it all had started years ago.

CHAPTER ONE

The Castle

J
ust across the George Washington Bridge from Manhattan lies Bergen County, New Jersey, composed of towns such as Fort Lee, Englewood, Palisades Park, and Edgewater, to name a few. Today Fort Lee, whose splendid location stretches along the Palisades Cliffs, is a mass of high-rises, a spillover from Manhattan, but the Hudson River and the Palisades Cliffs are still as beautiful as I remember them when I was a kid. In the 1950s there wasn't a high-rise to be seen. The towns were more like villages, old-fashioned and unchanged for decades.

I grew up in Palisades Park, a town next door to Fort Lee, in a typical middle-class neighborhood. Dad worked as a machinist and tool-and-die maker at the American Can Company in Jersey City. His fellow workers said he was a genius and could do the impossible. When everybody else was stumped with a mechanical problem and the situation was considered hopeless, that's when they called on Dad.

I attended an ancient schoolhouse that resembled a Gothic fortress. It had wainscoted classrooms, green slate boards, and old wooden desks with inkwells. The initials carved on their surfaces by generations of bad boys dated back to the turn of the century. I hated every single day of school and was chronically in trouble for daydreaming and drawing pictures. I managed to pass from grade to grade by devising ingenious methods of cheating on tests with like-minded classmates.

Life in a town like Palisades Park in the 1950s was like living in the country today. As provincial as it was, though, one could cross the bridge to Manhattan and land on another planet, one of taxicabs, skyscrapers, and millions of people moving at a hundred miles per hour. I grew up aware that New York City was the center of the entire world, a place where you could get anything or be anything you chose to be—a place where everybody who was “somebody” lived.

During the holidays, my Sicilian relatives would visit from Jersey City for an Italian feast. After my grandmother entertained my cousins and me with stories of growing up in Palermo, she'd give us pieces of
torrone
. Each piece of the Italian nougat came packaged in a small, exquisitely decorated box. On the back of each box was a picture of a painting by one of the Italian masters. Each picture was set in a printed gold-leaf frame that highlighted the painting like a miniature masterpiece in a museum. I lined up my empty boxes on my bedroom bureau and was mesmerized by the beauty of these pictures.

No holiday was complete without a hike to Fort Lee, where we spent the day exploring the cliffs. This included a visit to something quite remarkable that would one day change my life and set the stage for my future career. At the very edge of town, perched on a cliff overlooking the river, was an old estate set in its own parklands that cascaded down the side of the cliffs and ended at River Road below. In a clearing near the cliffs' edge stood a mysterious-looking house in solitary relief against the sky.

The structure resembled a medieval tower. It stood a full three stories high and had a sinister aspect. As kids, we played on the grounds that descended the side of the cliff. They were filled with strange ruins overgrown with ivy and shrubs. Crumbling walls, lookout towers, and a series of open caves or grottoes were carved into the face of the stone cliff.

Appropriately enough, the locals called the place “the Castle.” Every imaginable story circulated about it. One held that a Nazi spy had lived there, photographed battleships on the river during World War II, and was caught and shot.

Time passed. I graduated from the ninth grade barely able to recite the alphabet. It was a foregone conclusion I'd never make it through high school, so I decided to enter a trade school to learn to be a printer. During this period of my midteens, I finally saw the inside of the mysterious house.

After visiting a friend in Fort Lee one day, I was passing through the grounds of the Castle when I was startled to come face-to-face with an eccentric-looking man. He wore a baggy tweed jacket and an old derby perched atop bushy, graying hair. He cheerfully called out a greeting and engaged me in conversation.

“Do you live in the Castle?” I asked him.

“No, I live in the city,” he said, “but I stay here when I'm working for the artist who does.” He then introduced himself as Don Rubow, “artist's assistant and technician,” and surprised me with an irresistible invitation to see inside the house. Don led the way to the entrance at the side and up a stairwell to the second floor. We then entered a large, airy room with high ceilings and walls framed in antique paneling. Well-worn pieces of vintage furniture graced the room. My eye was drawn to an alcove with a big picture window that offered a spectacular view of the Hudson River and Manhattan.

The trappings of an artist's studio caught my attention. Paints, palettes, and coffee cans filled with brushes were arranged on worktables that stood next to a drafting table splattered with paint. Half-finished sketches and drawings were tacked haphazardly on the walls. A pair of French doors that opened onto a balcony served as a source of light. Across the room, an entire wall was taken up by a magnificently carved antique breakfront that housed a sound system. Another wall was covered with built-in bookshelves filled with volumes. I was enthralled with my surroundings but wondered what anyone could want with so many books.

My host disappeared into the kitchen and returned with two glasses of soda. Don Rubow was forty-two, a soft-spoken beatnik-artist-philosopher who lived in Greenwich Village. He explained that the house was inhabited by people from the city who had come here to establish a design studio. He mentioned that they were in the city on business, and he rambled on about art and the equipment used in their work, but I wasn't paying much attention. Instead, I was looking around and thinking how cool it must be to live in this place.

When it came time to leave, I thanked Don, and he invited me to drop by again. I didn't need any coaxing. A week later, I approached the Castle through a path in the woods, intending to visit, but just then a car pulled up and parked near the house. I was stunned when the car door opened and a well-tanned, exceptionally handsome man got out stark naked. He proceeded to pull a large towel from the car, drape it around his body, and stride toward the house like Caesar. I remained unobserved and thought it best to come by another time.

I was very bored with my life. The school I went to, Bergen Tech, aka Bourbon Tech, turned out to be nothing more than a repository for every flunky and JD in the county. The place was a madhouse with kids straight out of reformatories and was the perfect incubator for the criminal mind. The standard curriculum for incoming students was:

A) Gambling

B) Smoking

C) Drinking

The good part about the school was that hardly anyone failed—and those who did were held in the highest esteem by the entire student body. The bad part was that you might as well have wiped your ass with the diploma they gave you. Few businesses were foolhardy enough to hire graduates from that school. After two years of technical education, I still had no inkling of how a printing press operated, except to press the button that said on. There was some semblance of a classroom schedule, but before long kids started throwing things at each other and the place exploded into mass hysteria. Desks went flying right out of windows, and teachers had nervous breakdowns.

In 1966, the only thing on my mind was buying broken-down vintage cars, fixing them up with my buddies, and picking up girls. I turned seventeen and got my first jalopy, a backfiring, clutch-slipping Rover, right in time for the Revolution. The hippie phenomenon had been gathering strength and I couldn't wait to “Turn on, tune in, and drop out.” British rock groups swept the nation, and events dubbed “be-ins” materialized in Central Park's Sheep Meadow. Thousands of hippies and flower children turned out to make music, smoke pot, and express themselves through their new philosophical movement, embracing peace, love, and freedom.

That fall, I was driving down Main Street in Fort Lee, ready to turn down the steep hill to River Road, which ran below the Castle. As I did so, I noticed two interesting-looking men walking along the sidewalk in the same direction. One was Don Rubow, wearing his derby. I pulled up to the curb, rolled down the window, and called out Don's name. He came over and looked in the car. I hadn't seen him for a while, and, after asking how I'd been, he inquired if I was driving past the Castle.

Before I could answer, both men jumped in, and I renewed my acquaintance with Don as I drove down the street. I didn't have time to notice Don's friend, who was in the backseat, but once inside the car, Don introduced him as Tony Masaccio, who lived on the top floor of the Castle. When I looked in the mirror and focused in on him, I was taken aback. He was in his midtwenties and amazingly handsome. I thought he was a movie star and knew I'd seen him before. Then it hit me that he was the one I'd seen from the path outside the Castle earlier that year, the one who had jumped out of the car naked and gone into the house.

We drove down the hill from Fort Lee and turned into the narrow hidden drive that led to the Castle. When we pulled up to the house, Tony surprised me with an invitation to come in. I followed him to the charmingly dilapidated suite of rooms where he lived on the third floor. I passed a bedroom, noticed women's lingerie flung about and pieces of modern art hung on the walls. Tony went out of his way to make me feel comfortable and offered me a seat on the living-room sofa. He was curious to learn how I'd come to know Don. I told him the story of my uneventful life, how I'd played on the Castle grounds as a kid, that I was currently attending a trade school, and that I would soon be free of it forever. When I asked him what he did, he casually mentioned that he was a partner in a “Madison Avenue advertising agency.” As we talked, Tony walked around doing odds and ends. We eventually wound up in the kitchen, where, under the intense gaze of Mussolini pictured on an old World War II poster on the wall above the table, he proceeded to chop up some peppers and sausage for dinner.