The Art of the Con: The Most Notorious Fakes, Frauds, and Forgeries in the Art World (16 page)

The centerpiece of the case, as Mitchell saw it, was established when Mardirosian made his damning statements in his radio interview. WBUR readily handed over the recording to the prosecution without a subpoena, a key development in the case. “Subpoenaing a media outlet requires the approval of the United States Attorney General, which is rarely granted,” Mitchell said, “but WBUR rightly provided it to us.” Why a seasoned defense attorney would make such admissions on air is difficult to understand, but Mitchell has a theory. “At some level and at some point, he had deluded himself
with the belief that what he had done was just fine, that he broke no law, and that the entire transaction was lawful. He would have been better off throwing himself on the mercy of the court” than going to trial, the prosecutor believes.
36

In the government’s closing argument, DiSantis delivered a riveting narrative that had the jury on the edge of their seats. At 4:45 p.m. on August 18, 2008, the trial ended with the court in recess for the jury. At 5 p.m. that same day, the jury returned its unanimous verdict: guilty. DiSantis described his feeling when the verdict was read as “satisfying.” He added, “Having a hand in righting a wrong that had persisted for over a generation was a very rewarding experience.”
37

Four months later, Mardirosian was back before the court for sentencing. Judge Mark Wolf sentenced the 74-year-old—who was by now claiming to be suffering from the beginning stages of dementia—to seven years in federal prison for his crime, a substantial penalty that surprised even Michael Bakwin. “He’s my age,” he told journalist Gretchen Voss. “He shouldn’t be in jail. I feel awful. An old guy my age in jail? He should have to pay some other way.”
38

But pay he would. In 2011, a Massachusetts state court ordered Mardirosian to pay Bakwin $3.1 million in damages for the whole sordid affair. It was a final justice for Bakwin, who was finally able to recoup the costs of recovering his possessions. But a question remains in the case: Could Bakwin have circumvented all of the intrigue by going straight to the FBI with a plea for help when the paintings had first surfaced back in 1999? An FBI sting operation, after all, would have cost him nothing at all, and that might have been the best route from the very start for Bakwin. As Kelly said, “I cannot speak for Mr. Bakwin and why he chose to go through [Mardirosian’s] extortionate deal for the Cézanne; however, I’m confident that if the FBI had been allowed to work the investigation to its logical conclusion when it was
first brought to our attention [when the Cézanne resurfaced], quite likely, all of the pieces would have been recovered and Mr. Mardirosian would have been identified much earlier as the subject behind the illegal deal.”
39
Indeed, the case might have ended much sooner—and at a far lesser cost.

Seven

The Double Dealer

In the heart of Roslyn Heights, New York, between a psychic reading center and a sports rehabilitation complex sits a newly constructed pale-brick building belonging to the Chabad of Roslyn. The cube-like structure features a prominent Modernist rendering of a menorah extending above the building’s roofline. The impressive menorah is functional, lit each year to celebrate Chanukah. It’s also billed by the Chabad of Roslyn to be one of the tallest menorahs in the world (without exceeding the 30-foot height limit set forth by Jewish law). The Roslyn Chabad movement is the beneficiary of the Ely Sakhai Torah Center at that location, where the faithful may visit for a variety of services, ranging from lectures to Jewish services to adult education. The Torah Center is named for its benefactor, a Jewish émigré from Iran committed to his faith and heritage who was eager to make a mark among his people in his adopted homeland.

Ely Sakhai
1
moved to the United States in 1962 at the age of ten and would go on to donate millions of dollars to Jewish charities. Prone to loud attire and flashy jewelry, the pot-bellied antiques dealer with a thin mustache and dark, receding hair became well known
for his philanthropy in Long Island, where he made his home.
2
And in addition to his generosity in providing money to support his fellow Jews, in 2009 Sakhai helped to right a wrong committed by the Nazis during World War II.

In 1940, Adolf Hitler’s forces invaded the previously neutral nation of Belgium. It took the Germans less than three weeks to force the Belgians to surrender, leading to more than four years of Nazi occupation. Finally, in 1944, Canadian and Allied forces liberated Belgium, but not before Nazis had looted art from many families, including one Belgian family that was forced to flee its Ohain apartment in order to seek refuge in the countryside. After the liberation they returned home to find that five oil paintings had been taken by the Nazis, the same fate as so much art throughout Europe. They were left with no other recourse but to file a claim for their missing paintings with the Belgian office for looted art, and the works were listed in the
Répertoire d’oeuvres d’art dont la Belgique a été spoliée durant la guerre 1939–1945,
a listing of Belgian war losses.
3
Among the paintings that were taken was a portrait of their young daughter with her pet rabbit, which they had commissioned to be painted by the famed Belgian artist Anto Carte.

Carte was a leading Belgian artist who rose to prominence after the First World War. The son of a carpenter, Carte was drawn to decorating at a young age and started evening painting classes before he even reached his teenage years at the Academy of Bergen. He then attended the Royal Academy of Brussels after winning a scholarship and studied under Jean Delville and Constant Montald. While studying theater decoration in Paris, he encountered the work of the great French and Italian painters at the Louvre; he then moved to Italy to paint frescoes. The influence of Italian painters extended to the work of his contemporary, the great Amadeo Modigliani, whose portraiture greatly influenced Carte’s work.
4
Carte would come to
be considered among the best of what was called the Belgian “new primitive school,” and today his paintings can fetch prices up to the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Carte’s rendering of the young daughter, titled
Jeune Fille a la Robe Bleue
(
Young Girl in the Blue Dress
) and painted in 1932, depicts the blond, pig-tailed girl holding a small group of flowers and seated on a bench aside her small pet rabbit, the Belgian countryside in the distance. Sadly, the painting was seemingly lost to the world and, perhaps more importantly, to the family—yet another victim of Nazi derangement. Decades passed without as much as a whisper about the location of the precious family heirloom.

In 1990,
Jeune Fille
was sold at Christie’s auction in London to an American buyer. Unfortunately, it changed hands without the buyer or the auction house being made aware that the painting had emerged from the dark world of Nazi looted art. Years later, Julian Radcliffe’s London-based Art Loss Register entered the painting into its database of lost and stolen works from the database of Belgian war losses. Then, in November 2008, there was a break: Christopher A. Marinello, then of the ALR and now the director of Art Recovery International, traced the location of the Carte painting to the Long Island gallery owned by Ely Sakhai and his son Andre. Marinello is among the world’s leading experts in the recovery of lost and stolen art. An attorney by trade with decades of experience as both a litigator and recovery specialist, he had already negotiated the return of hundreds of millions of dollars worth of art by the time he took on the challenge of helping to recover Carte’s
Jeune Fille.
Among these were many important pieces looted by the Nazis, including an El Greco, a Picasso hanging in a Washington, D.C. museum, a Monet being sold by one billionaire to another, and a major work by the British Impressionist Alfred Sisley.

In order to get
Jeune Fille
back into the hands of its rightful owners, Marinello reached out to the Department of Homeland Security’s
Immigration and Customs Enforcement team at their New York Office of Investigations. ICE was created as part of the reorganization of law enforcement and security agencies after 9/11 and the subsequent creation of DHS. The agency then formed a dedicated unit of special agents under the umbrella of the Cultural Property, Art, and Antiquities program to coordinate investigations related to looted cultural heritage or stolen artwork. Agents assigned to this unit undergo special training to better understand the unique needs inherent to a criminal investigation involving art and cultural property. ICE even brings in the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum Conservation Institute to provide on-site training in the handling, storage, and authentication of art, antiquities, and artifacts. This training program was developed thanks to the work of Senior Special Agent Bonnie Goldblatt, an investigator who had begun her career as a customs agent in 1983 and had spent years working art theft cases for the agency. Goldblatt had experience working investigations relating to the recovery and return of art stolen from museums and individuals during World War II. Based on this experience, she would become ICE’s regional subject matter expert in the field of art and antiquities investigations, working closely with the State Department’s Office of Holocaust Issues.

Goldblatt’s work involving Nazi looted art began in 1995 when she attended a conference in New York at which the ownership rights of art stolen during World War II was debated. Soon, she would develop many of the participants into sources of her own for work in repatriation. Her first such recovery took place in 2003 and involved the
Sefer Yetzira,
a rare fourteenth-century kabbalistic manuscript that had been looted by the Nazis from Vienna’s Jewish library. When the manuscript was found listed in the auction catalog of Kestenbaum and Company, Goldblatt jumped into action, and ultimately the auction house voluntarily turned the item over to the authorities.
5
So when it came to working to recover the Carte painting, Goldblatt and Marinello were an ideal pair for the mission.

Though Marinello had traced
Jeune Fille
to Sakhai’s Long Island gallery, there was a slight problem: the Belgian war losses registry that listed the painting did not, unfortunately, include a photo of Carte’s creation. So he contacted the Belgians directly, and though they couldn’t provide a photo of the painting, they did provide the art recovery specialist with a photo of the young blond girl who was depicted in the painting, seated with her rabbit. The similarity between the photo and the painting was undeniable. He provided the documentation to Goldblatt, who contacted Sakhai and informed him that the painting he had in his possession had been confiscated by the Nazis 65 years earlier and reported as an official war loss by its rightful owners. Sakhai forfeited the painting to its rightful owner—the very same girl whose portrait Carte had painted. Still frightened by the whole experience many decades later, however, the now elderly woman in the painting could not bring herself to come to the ceremony marking its return at the handover ceremony at the Jewish Museum of Belgium on December 1, 2009. Goldblatt told the
Jerusalem Post,
“The Holocaust left her with such a scar that she was scared if she came out with the painting it would be stolen again.”
6

The recovery of
Jeune Fille
was far more important for its historic significance than for a big-dollar value. The return of the painting, estimated at a relatively low $15,000, marked an important closing of a sad chapter in one innocent woman’s life. But it would hardly be the last intersection between Nazi looted art and the careers of Marinello and Goldblatt. Rather, the two would continue to work steadfastly to repatriate art stolen during World War II. Marinello, through Art Recovery International, continues to work to recover looted art and is deeply involved with the huge cache of so-called “degenerate art,” including a Matisse, found in the home of the reclusive Cornelius
Gerlitt in Munich. (For more on this “degenerate art,” see Chapter 1.) As for Goldblatt, Marinello called her “unlike any civil servant I have ever encountered. . . . She is extremely dedicated and passionate about her work.” And her passion was evident when she said, “Every time I return a Holocaust painting I just get teary-eyed. . . . I’d like to get it all back.”
7

Clearly, art affected the tough, seasoned federal agent in a way perhaps money laundering or drug interdiction might not, inspiring intense commitment and even heroic efforts. Surely, too, the willingness of the art dealer Sakhai to turn over the painting should be ranked as, at the least, magnanimous, if not heroic. After all, he was a victim in a sense too. He had purchased a fine work of art in good faith, believing that its provenance was solid and title clear; yet he parted with his expensive possession voluntarily so that it could be returned to a woman whose life was so adversely affected by the Nazis, just like so many of Sakhai’s Jewish brethren during the Second World War.

But there was another side to Ely Sakhai, a separate portrait of a dealer who proved not so altruistic. Despite the injustice suffered by the Belgian family at the hands of the most evil anti-Semites in history, Sakhai wasn’t going to walk away from his Anto Carte empty-handed, happy simply to have righted a historic wrong. Instead, Sakhai wanted something in return, ranting about how he, too, was Jewish and suffered as well. Plus, he wanted his purchase price for the painting.
8

That Sakhai would be less than generous in his art dealings is of no surprise, as this restitution affair came on the heels of an elaborate and clever confidence game he created, taking forgery to a whole new level and scamming art collectors living far from his home in Old Westbury, New York.

Sakhai entered the art market first by working at his brother’s antiques shop in Manhattan. Eventually, he would branch out on his own, opening a shop in which he sold furniture, antiques, and art. But the art Sakhai peddled was not in the league of the storied art galleries of New York, where prices could easily escalate into the tens of millions. Instead, he dabbled in relatively inexpensive items. He did, however, occasionally have an authentic Tiffany lamp for sale. Such lamps can be a rarity in antiques stores: many copies have flooded the market over the past few decades; some copies can be excellent, with the same level of exacting detail forgers put into paintings. Indeed, Tiffany lamps are considered true works of art and can fetch anywhere from a few thousand to over a million dollars. Sakhai made an intriguing observation about the authentic Tiffany lamp he had for sale in his shop—it was identical to a fake he had on a nearby shelf. He considered the two lamps and found them similar in every respect except for the presence of an authenticating label affixed to the base of the true Tiffany. Then he had a thought: if he could duplicate that label and adhere it to the base of much cheaper Tiffany copies, he could sell them as originals at a steep profit. And that he did, making hundreds of thousands of dollars off his crooked scheme.
9

It would have been bad enough had he stopped there. But Ely Sakhai had grander plans. Flush with the earnings he made selling lamps, Sakhai decided to morph from a moderately successful antiques shop owner to a successful art dealer, opening a gallery he named Exclusive Art Ltd. He also began dating and eventually married an affluent Japanese woman with whom he made trips to Japan and learned the practices of art collectors there. Soon he had another brainstorm.

Sakhai had begun attending art auctions at Sotheby’s and Christie’s around 1990 looking to buy Impressionist and Post-Impressionist
works. Some took note of his unusual style of dress, but few noticed him for his purchases. That’s because he focused his efforts on lesser-known, midrange value paintings by renowned artists. Among those popular nineteenth- and twentieth-century figures whose works he bought were Marc Chagall, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and the man who had so influenced Anto Carte, Amadeo Modigliani.

For an artist whose life was cut so tragically short—he died at only 36 years of age of tubercular meningitis—and therefore produced a somewhat limited body of work, Modigliani’s work has been the subject of a great deal of fraud. The famous and prolific forgers Elmyr de Hory and, later, John Myatt, made numerous counterfeit paintings attributed to him, and the problem of tracking Modiglianis is complicated by the fact that he was destitute and often resorted to trading his paintings for food. Furthermore, his mistress, Jeanne Hebuterne, committed suicide just days after his death. Thus, little information about his works remains. Perhaps most startling was the 2012 arrest of Christian Gregori Parisot, the man who headed the Archives Legales Amadeo Modigliani and was once considered one of the world’s most reliable authenticators of the artist’s works. Parisot was nabbed by Italian police after a raid of an exhibition resulted in authorities finding 22 fakes. They would go on to seize 59 fakes from Parisot and his suspected accomplice, art dealer Matteo Vignapiano. In all, it is thought that Parisot had put more than 100 bogus Modiglianis on the art market. Incredibly, Parisot was arrested a few years earlier for fakes he offered for sale as drawings made by Modigliani’s mistress, Hebuterne.
10
For that crime, Parisot was convicted and sentenced to two years in jail as well as ordered to pay a fine.
11