The Art of the Con: The Most Notorious Fakes, Frauds, and Forgeries in the Art World

by Anthony M. Amore

  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.”32 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.33

  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.34 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.”35

  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.

  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 ou
r 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 Sakhai1 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 wom
an 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.