The Art of the Con: The Most Notorious Fakes, Frauds, and Forgeries in the Art World (15 page)

With that, Radcliffe agreed to sign a bill of sale on Bakwin’s behalf that read, “For value received, the undersigned transfers and assigns to Erie International Trading Company Panama (the company) all of the undersigned’s right, title and interest to the paintings described on schedule A.” Schedule A was merely a one-page document on an Art Loss Register letterhead listing the seven paintings stolen from Bakwin’s Stockbridge home in 1978, with a line scratched through the Cézanne and initialed by Vischer. A sealed envelope containing the identity of the anonymous individual behind both the Erie International Trading Company and the negotiations themselves was presented and, as agreed, given to the multinational law firm Herbert Smith for safekeeping.

Radcliffe instructed Strauss to transport the Cézanne to London immediately, and after insuring the piece for transit for nearly $20 million, the team left that evening on a London-bound flight with the painting still wrapped in the trash bag and on the aircraft floor at Strauss’s feet.
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Soon thereafter, Michael Bakwin was reunited with his prized
Bouilloire et Fruits,
the painting that he had not only urged his parents to buy, but had described as the most beautiful thing in the world.
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The reunion, however, was bittersweet. Faced with an enormous bill from the ALR, whose fee was based on the value of the
painting, and concerned about his ability to safeguard a painting of such historic and monetary value, Bakwin came to the sad realization that he would have to sell his beloved Cézanne at auction. He instructed Sotheby’s to sell the painting as soon as convenient. The famed auction house was able to include it in its December 1999 sale, where it brought Bakwin more than $28 million. In an affidavit, Bakwin stated that he then paid the ALR approximately $2.6 million.
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The recovery of the Cézanne in 1999 was a major victory for Radcliffe. Indeed, it was the biggest and most important recovery of a stolen painting that the ALR had ever accomplished. But Radcliffe and Bakwin did not intend to rest on the laurels of the Cézanne return and went back to work to regain ownership of the six paintings signed over to whomever was behind Panama’s Erie International Trading Company. In fact, on the very night of the Cézanne recovery, with the painting safely en route to London, Radcliffe joined Vischer for a drink and posited to him that the agreement he had signed earlier that same day might not stand up in court. He told Vischer, “They should never try to sell the pictures, they should come back to us, and . . . we should negotiate now to get those pictures returned” before law enforcement began putting pressure on Vischer and his principals at Erie International.
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Within months, with Swiss authorities allegedly stirring over his involvement in the case, Vischer withdrew from further negotiations.

For the next six years, the ALR continued to pursue the remaining six Bakwin paintings. Negotiations with Tony Westbrook, who had resumed his role as intermediary with the unnamed holder of the paintings, continued but moved glacially. Meanwhile, the anonymous holder of the paintings approached a prominent Massachusetts businessman, Paul Palandjian, seeking his help in selling the
six remaining Bakwin paintings. Palandjian was told that though the paintings were once stolen, title for them had been subsequently cleared. In January 2005, Palandjian traveled to Geneva, Switzerland, and met with an affluent Swiss banker, Henri Klein, and took delivery of the paintings. With the help of Klein, Palandjian stored the paintings in a Swiss bank vault while he approached Sotheby’s about selling the artwork. Sotheby’s informed Palandjian that they were interested in selling four of the works—the two Soutines, the Vlaminck, and the Utrillo.
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Then, in the spring of 2005, Julian Radcliffe received a call from Sotheby’s in London about four paintings they planned to include in an upcoming auction. This was hardly unusual: running checks through the ALR prior to sale was by then accepted as a key step in performing due diligence on an artwork’s provenance. But Radcliffe’s interest was piqued when he was asked if title was clear on four of the six stolen Bakwin paintings. For the second time, Michael Bakwin’s paintings were at a critical crossroads. If Radcliffe told the Sotheby’s representative that the pictures could not be legally sold, they’d likely disappear again for untold years. So he made a key decision: he told Sotheby’s the paintings were clear for sale. A month later, with the paintings’ whereabouts—London—now known, Radcliffe and Bakwin filed suit in a British court to stop the sale, arguing that the 1999 agreement to, in essence, trade ownership of six of the paintings for the return of the Cézanne was made under duress. The High Court of London agreed with Bakwin’s argument and not only awarded ownership of all of the paintings to him but ordered that the identity of the man behind Erie International Trading Company be revealed. On January 23, 2006, Bakwin was given the elaborately sealed envelope that had previously been entrusted to the law firm Herbert Smith. Within, he finally learned the name of his tormenter: Robert Mardirosian, the attorney who had found the stolen paintings in his
attic decades earlier. There was another key component to the High Court’s judgment: Mardirosian was ordered to pay Bakwin $3 million to recoup his costs.
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In response to the judgment, Mardirosian embarked on a curious public relations mission in the United States. He granted an extensive interview to the
Boston
Globe
in which he made no qualms about what amounted to his criminal behavior. And he went to the airwaves to tell his side of the story on Boston’s National Public Radio station, WBUR, in an interview with host Bob Oakes. It was the latter that proved most damaging to Mardirosian. Oakes asked Mardirosian, “You knew they [the paintings] were stolen; your client [Colvin] told you that.” Mardirosian answered, “That’s right.” Mardirosian went on to state that he had held onto the paintings so he could get a reward or finder’s fee and had moved them overseas years earlier for safekeeping.
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FBI Special Agent Geoff Kelly of the agency’s Boston Field Office received a call from Julian Radcliffe some time after the British High Court had issued the injunction halting the sale of Bakwin’s paintings. Radcliffe requested a meeting with Kelly to discuss the latest developments in the case, which the bureau had been monitoring for years. Agent Kelly is everything you’d expect from an FBI agent and more. A SWAT team operator assigned to the Violent Crimes Task Force who can sit at a piano and play Rachmaninoff, Kelly was particularly qualified to deal with the Mardirosian art-related matter. He had spent years investigating complex fraud cases with the economic crimes unit and was a member of the FBI’s exclusive Art Crime Team. Perhaps most notably, Kelly was the FBI’s lead special agent investigating the infamous 1990 heist at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum—by far the largest art theft in history. He was just the man to work in pursuit of stolen masterpieces.

Radcliffe laid out what he knew of the saga to the savvy street agent, and Kelly went to work investigating the matter. After reviewing evidence including a shipping invoice produced by Radcliffe listing the consignor of four of the paintings in question as Palandjian (who described himself as an “agent of an undisclosed owner”), and the document naming Mardirosian as the owner of Erie International, Kelly was confident he had enough to establish probable cause for the arrest of Mardirosian. Still, the agent recalls being shocked when he heard the Mardirosian radio interview in real time during his commute to work one morning: “I was listening to NPR, as is usual, and I almost drove off the road when I started to listen to Bob Oakes’ interview with Mr. Mardirosian. As I was listening, my cell phone started to go off from a number of my colleagues who were listening to NPR as well.” Kelly recalls that during the radio interview, Mardirosian helped make the FBI’s case against him. “One of the issues I anticipated with regard to a prosecution was proving intent relating to the substantive charge of possessing stolen property,” Kelly later recalled. “It was incredible that Mr. Mardirosian, a defense attorney, was speaking to a reporter on live radio acknowledging that he was aware that the artwork was stolen.”
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Armed with his findings, Kelly made the short trip from his office in Boston’s Government Center over to the John J. Moakley Courthouse for a meeting with assistant U.S. attorney Jonathan Mitchell, the federal prosecutor assigned to look into the Mardirosian matter.

Mitchell, a graduate of Harvard and Georgetown Law School who would go on to become the mayor of New Bedford, Massachusetts, had himself heard Mardirosian’s interview with Oakes on WBUR and could hardly believe his ears. “Here was a criminal defense counsel who has told innumerable clients to keep their mouths shut,” Mitchell said, “yet he went on the air and admitted knowing the paintings he held for decades were, in fact, stolen.”
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Like Kelly,
Mitchell believed that a crime had been committed and he sent the agent out to interview Mardirosian. When Kelly tried to interview him at his home in Cohasset, he was told that Mardirosian had obtained a lawyer, Jeanne Kempthorne, a one-time federal prosecutor who had served the District of Massachusetts alongside Mitchell years earlier.

Mitchell contacted his former colleague and arranged a meeting to discuss her client’s plight. Mitchell and Kelly met with the defense counsel at the Moakley Courthouse, and the feds asked Kempthorne if her client was interested in disposing of the case mounting against him. Perhaps, Mitchell posited, a deal could be reached between the government and her client against whom there appeared to be an open-and-shut case. Kempthorne, however, surprised the feds by replying that there was no case to be had against her client. Aware that Mardirosian’s home on the French Riviera made him a serious flight risk, Mitchell asked Kempthorne to have her client turn over his passport as the meeting came to a close. When about a week had passed with no word from Kempthorne about the passport, Mitchell told Kelly to arrest Mardirosian. That’s when the other shoe dropped: Kelly found that, just two days after the meeting between the feds and his lawyer, Robert Mardirosian had departed the United States for France.
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Nine months passed before Mardirosian finally agreed to come back to the United States. While his return would later be depicted as a voluntary return at the request of the federal authorities from an innocent sojourn, it’s arguable that Mardirosian came home because his passport and visa had expired and he risked running afoul of the French. On February 13, 2007, upon his arrival at Logan International Airport in Boston, Mardirosian was arrested by FBI agents waiting for him in the U.S. Customs and Border Protection inspections hall.

Less than a week before his return and arrest, FBI agents and Falmouth Police led by Special Agent Kelly went to Mardirosian’s home in Falmouth with a warrant to search the premises. Finding no one within and hoping to avoid unnecessary damage to the home, Kelly contacted Mitchell before making a forcible entry. Mitchell reached out to defense attorneys, who contacted Mardirosian’s 51-year-old son Marc. They called back Mitchell with a curious message: Marc was at Wood’s Hole (about a ten-minute drive) and wouldn’t be back for two hours, so the agents could go ahead and make a forcible entry. One would think that he’d have come straight home given the fact that federal agents with a search warrant were prepared to knock down the door to get inside, but the message from Mardirosian’s son was that it was fine for them to do just that.

Rather than bust down the door, Kelly popped out a window adjacent to the door, which allowed the team entry. Once inside, they found good reason, one could speculate, for Mardirosian’s son to wish to avoid driving home to unlock the premises. Agents discovered weapons, including two shotguns, a vial of cocaine, and three trash bags containing more than 50 pounds of marijuana—one of the biggest pot seizures in Falmouth history. Like his father, Marc Mardirosian remained at large until authorities were able to track him down.
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But he was not convicted of any wrongdoing.

The federal trial of Robert Mardirosian began on August 12, 2008. Assistant U.S. attorney Ryan DiSantis provided the direct examination of Michael Bakwin, and the man who was victimized for the better part of three decades by Mardirosian served the prosecution well by coming across as a sympathetic figure. This was no small feat. Yes, Bakwin had been robbed and kept from his prized possessions, but at the same time he also testified that he had sold the Cézanne at auction and walked away with more than $28 million.
That’s a figure that could easily alienate some jurors. DiSantis recalls that in order to show the jury that Bakwin, despite his wealth, was a person not so unlike themselves, he had him “describe his early work history at the outset of his direct examination, which included a five-year period in which he worked his way up in the hotel and restaurant business. His jobs during that time included work as a waiter, steward, and chief steward.” In addition, DiSantis spent considerable time doing extensive preparation for the trial with his subject, a fact that left Bakwin more relaxed on the witness stand. “His personality also came through,” DiSantis said, “which I believe allowed him to connect with the jurors.”
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On the cross-examination of Bakwin, Mardirosian’s defense attorney Kempthorne attempted to put the focus of the case on the victim, but it was for naught. Mitchell called Radcliffe to the stand, and, through the director of the Art Loss Register, Mitchell was able to keep the focus of the trial on Mardirosian and the intricate scam he clumsily constructed to try to squeeze money out of Bakwin. Mitchell skillfully led Radcliffe through a recounting of the underhanded behavior of Mardirosian and the subsequent epic negotiations that had begun back in 1999. The defense had worked hard to characterize Radcliffe as a greedy, unethical opportunist, and only Mitchell’s deft handling of the witness kept them from succeeding.