Caveat Emptor (26 page)

Two days later, I returned to the hotel after lunch and approached the front counter to check for messages. I stood at the counter waiting for the clerk, who was talking with two serious-looking men in dark overcoats, one of whom was holding a briefcase. I heard the clerk say, “Yes, sir, I rang his room but there's no answer.”

“Room 214?” one of the overcoats asked.

“Yes, 214,” the clerk replied. A shock wave ran through me when I realized that that was
my
room number.

The clerk then turned to me and asked how he could help me. My first impulse was to admit that number 214 was my room and to find out what they wanted, but it was as if an invisible hand covered my mouth. Instead, I just asked directions to Rockefeller Center. I lingered for a few seconds, pretending to read a brochure by the counter. Then I heard Overcoat No. 1 say, “Okay, we'll come back later” to Overcoat No. 2. I followed at a distance and watched them leave the lobby and disappear down the street. “Who were those guys?” I asked myself. “Who sent them, and why?” They must be detectives, I concluded, but they just didn't look like cops.

In a state of alarm, I raced up to our room and started grabbing clothes, stuffing them in our bags. But now I faced another dilemma. It was 1:00 p.m. and I had agreed to meet José, who was out shopping, at five. There was no way to contact him and no way I could risk waiting around until five. I was trying to figure out a plan when I was startled to hear the door lock being opened. In a third example of amazing luck in the past couple of days, it was José. He'd come back to drop off some shopping bags from Bloomingdale's.

“We gotta get out of here!” I told him and explained what had just happened. “I don't know who they were, but they didn't look good.” In the next couple of minutes, we were packed and ready to leave. “Look,” I told José, “you take the bags and grab a cab downtown to the Gramercy Park Hotel. Take any room you can get. If they don't have any, then just wait there for me.”

José left the hotel without a problem, and I approached the counter. Now came the tricky part. Fortunately, there were several clerks on duty and I went to one at the opposite end of the counter from the one who had dealt with the overcoats. I told him that I wished to check out. When he asked if I chose to leave the charge on the credit card, I pulled out my roll of C-notes, said, “No, I'll pay in cash,” and took the open charge slip from him. After he counted out the hundred-dollar bills and gave me my receipt, I still had another problem to take care of. Lying in the folder from which he had taken the charge slip was the card I had filled out upon my arrival. It had my name and Florida address on it.

“Could I have the card too, please?” I casually asked, hoping he'd just slide it over, but no such luck.

“Sorry, sir, we have to keep those,” he said matter-of-factly. Then, with the wad of bills still in my hand, I discreetly peeled off two Ben Franklins and slid them toward him, whispering that I couldn't afford to have my wife find out I'd been there. To my great relief, he slid the card my way.

Twenty minutes later, I walked into the lobby of the Gramercy Park Hotel and was informed that José had checked into a suite on the tenth floor.

It took hours for my nerves to settle down. We walked around the Village and sat down in a café. We could only speculate who those guys were, and what they would do when they returned to the hotel and discovered that we'd checked out right under their noses.

I strongly suspected that the two overcoats were connected with Revere Gallery. It had to have been my foolish slip of the tongue in giving away my location to the gallery owner that sent them to the Blackstone. But why? And how could he have found out the picture was a fake in just two days?

Perhaps, I reasoned, Jimmy Ricau, who was always informed of the latest gossip among the Madison Avenue dealers, could shed some light on the subject. It had been some time since I'd last spoken to him. He'd had an operation for cancer and had become even more reclusive, but when I called him and related the events at the Blackstone and mentioned the name of the Revere Gallery, he knew at once what had happened.

“Revere Gallery!” Jimmy yelled. “That place is a Mafia front! It's backed by one of the godfathers. The young guy you met is their front man. The dealers say he doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground and has been running around the city buying up American pictures and paying crazy prices. He's supposed to be making them money with the gallery, but it's really a front to launder drug money.”

As to how this novice dealer had discovered the “Buttersworth” to be a fake, Jimmy guessed the answer to that as well. Jimmy had recently been down to Sonny's studio, where he spotted a Buttersworth that he knew to be one of mine lying on a worktable.

“Nice little Buttersworth,” Jimmy remarked, baiting Sonny.

“Yeah,” replied Sonny. “But the dealers uptown say there's fake Buttersworths all over the place, and this is supposed to be one of them.”

Then Jimmy paused and said, “And you're gonna love this. Sonny had examined the picture and said, ‘It's impossible for that painting to be a fake.'”

Jimmy speculated that the guy from Revere wasn't in the loop and that after he bought the “Buttersworth,” he probably showed it around to one of the dealers on Madison Avenue, who tipped him off. Hence the two overcoats.

After receiving this valuable intelligence, I knew it was time to stop all sales and just lie low until everything blew over. But it was too late. The critical mass had already hit meltdown. As more and more of my paintings suddenly started turning up in New York, suspicion soon turned into rumors of fake Buttersworths, Petos, Heades, Kings, Walkers, and Jacobsens being “all over the place.”

Indeed, it seemed that every time I looked at an auction-house catalog, I found another one of my “Buttersworths,” complete with “provenance.”

Tony was the first to be rounded up by his old buddies from the FBI. And then the picker who'd sold literally dozens of my paintings. And the word was that after Mr. F realized that his luck was a little too good to be true, the feds were looking for a “young lady posing as an heiress who passed off a fake Martin Johnson Heade.”

We shut down the studio and dismantled it. Photos, research material, books, and even, to my eternal regret, a collection of letters from Jimmy Ricau were all destroyed. There seemed to be nothing to do except to keep Roy Cohn's telephone number handy and wait for the inevitable.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The British School

A
lthough it was rumored that the FBI's New York offices had enough of my paintings to open a gallery of their own, nothing was traced back to me. Apparently the paintings had passed through too many hands. The closest they got was to Tony and the picker, but that was bad enough. Tony was on the hook for a “Peto” he'd sold to a Wall Street stockbroker. According to Tony, who kept in touch with me by pay phone, “She tried to sell the painting uptown and found out it was a ‘bazooka.'” He explained, “She had a fuckin' cow and called the cops!” And as for the picker, he was sunk when he tried to float yet another “Buttersworth” at an antique show in New York City. Word spread about the painting, and he was paid a visit.

Fortunately, neither of them was easily intimidated. Both claimed the paintings had been found at flea markets. The feds filled out their reports and let them know, “There's an investigation going on” and “We will be getting back to you.”

Months passed, and nothing happened. José and I kept the doors locked and quietly ran the restoration studio and antique operation. But every time there was a knock at the door or the phone rang, I thought it was either the feds or the “overcoats.”

Only after a year passed without incident did I begin to relax. Life for us had undergone a change. For one thing, we had no more easy money to burn, no more trips to Miami, no more nights on the town in New York. For the first time, I realized how dangerous my occupation was, and I swore off forgery for good. Thanks to the money we had invested in real estate and stocks, we were in good shape. After we were convinced the heat was off, I thought it would be therapeutic for me to shut down the business for a while and do some traveling. We left for London.

A friend had given me a tip on a discreet little hotel tucked away in a quiet street behind Kensington Place, not far from Notting Hill Gate. The Vicarage Gate Hotel was run by an English family and was very traditional. It maintained an “early morning call” in which loud bells rang throughout the old town house, rousing the guests out of bed for the hearty breakfast served in the dining room.

We spent our time shopping along Regent Street, visiting antique markets, and hanging out at cafés. After a few weeks, we decided to get away to someplace quiet where I could relax and make a plan for the future. We rented a car, took the M4 west, and headed for the city of Bath.

Bath is one of the most beautiful cities in the world. It was built in the eighteenth century by British aristocrats seeking a private paradise away from London. Influenced by the Grand Tour, they adopted a Palladian design for the architecture. Two hours later, we were pulling up in front of the Royal Crescent, a breathtakingly beautiful row of columned town houses arranged in a crescent overlooking their own park. Once the private residences of aristocrats, the town houses had been divided into flats and were now inhabited by ordinary people. A local woman told us that number 22 was one of the few town houses of the Crescent that was still intact as a private home, and that it was owned by an eccentric old lady who, she said, “might rent a room to you if you look presentable.”

All forty-three town houses that make up the Royal Crescent have white doors. The owner of number 22, Miss Wellesley Colley, a descendant of the duke of Wellington, had decided one day to paint her door yellow. The Bath Historic Society demanded she paint it white as before. Miss Colley told them to piss off, and a novel legal battle ensued. The residence was dubbed “the Scandal House” in the newspapers, and the case gained national attention. It caused a deep divide among the residents of the Crescent. Two years and tens of thousands of pounds in lawyers' fees later, Miss Colley prevailed and maintained her yellow door.

We rang the bell and were greeted by the notorious Miss Colley herself. A woman of about eighty, she was very British, very old-fashioned, and very direct. Without hesitation, she offered us the grand drawing room complete with an adjoining bedroom, marble fireplace, eighteenth-century furniture, and views of the park.

Number 22 had been in the Colley family for generations and was virtually unchanged since the eighteenth century. Much of the furniture was original to the house, and even the bathrooms had hardly been modernized. Occasionally I sat down and had tea with Miss Colley as she recounted for me her life in the grand old house. But these days, it was showing its wear, and Miss Colley was the last in her family line.

The more we stayed in Britain, the more we liked it, especially Bath. For the next two years, we only went back to Florida briefly, to check on our property and take care of any pressing business. We divided our time between London, where we stayed at the Vicarage Gate Hotel, and Bath, where we stayed at the Royal Crescent. The countryside around Bath is very beautiful, and I tried, as part of my rehabilitation, to paint scenes of the rolling hills and the River Avon. But something was missing. I was unfulfilled. I felt like a professional poker player forced to play for toothpicks.

Back in London, I began to spend time at the auction houses, just to look at the paintings and sit in at the sales. Then, one fine day, I strolled into Christie's just as an exhibition of British sporting pictures had gone on view. Although I'd seen examples of the genre before, I'd never taken much interest in paintings of horses, dogs, and fox chases. However, in my new Anglophiled state, I began to develop an appreciation of these pictures. How easy they would be to paint, I thought, after studying a few of them closely. I also noted the old antique frames that surrounded them.

I caught the attention of a department expert and asked him the estimate of a picture of a foxhound that caught my eye. Probably in the hope of cultivating a new American client, he gave me my first lesson in the school of British sporting paintings. He pointed out the highlights of the exhibition, taking me from painting to painting. He showed me a Stubbs, a Wootton, and a Herring. He explained what to look for in a superior painting and then, as a parting gesture, gave me a complimentary copy of the sale catalog to study at my leisure.

I had a couple of hours to kill before meeting José for dinner, so I strolled over to Ponti's at Covent Garden, ordered a cappuccino, and studied the catalog. I began by flipping through the pages and glancing at the illustrations of paintings with the artists' names directly beneath them. This exercise would familiarize me with the artists and what each was noted for. As I scanned the pictures, though, another issue presented itself. I noticed that the name of almost every artist was preceded by an interesting collection of phrases, such as “Attributed to,” “Signed,” “In the circle of,” “Studio of,” and others. My curiosity piqued, I searched the catalog and found an explanation of the cryptic phrases in the back pages under the heading “Explanation of Cataloging Practice.” In small print under the heading was an explanation of what each phrase meant.

“Attributed to” meant that, in Christie's opinion, the work was created in the period of the artist and might be in whole or part the work of the artist.

“Signed” meant that, in their qualified opinion, the signature on the painting was the signature of the artist.

“Bears signature” meant the signature might be that the artist.

“Manner of” meant the work was in the style of the artist, but
of a later date
(emphasis mine).