At the pub, Drewe was greeted by several of his mates. When he’d first arrived a few years earlier, he stood out as something of a loner, but he had since become a familiar face, a little odd perhaps, but an interesting fellow nonetheless, with a background in nuclear physics and an uncle or cousin or some sort of relative who had invented the hovercraft.
Terry Carroll, a Catch regular who lectured in computer technology and digital systems at the University of Westminster, remembered Drewe striding into the bar for the first time. “Instantly you knew someone was in, that the lights were on,” he said. Drewe was six feet tall, intense, and clearly intelligent. He was accompanied by a friend of Carroll’s, Peter Harris, a veteran of the armed forces with wild red hair and an improbable stew of wartime tales. Harris introduced him to Carroll and suggested that the two probably had a lot in common.
Carroll had studied physics and gone on to work in the field of artificial intelligence. Drewe said he had studied abroad, at Kiel University in Germany, and then in Paris, where he had taken to the streets during the May ’68 demonstrations. Subsequently, he had worked at the city-sized atomic energy research complex in Harwell, near Oxford, where he’d made substantial and lasting contacts with the police and with MI5. Those contacts were useful in his current line of work, which included consulting for the Defence Ministry.
Carroll said that he too had worked at Harwell, back when he was a young physicist analyzing various materials with the use of neutron beams. Harwell was so enormous that most employees knew only a small fraction of the layout, but Drewe recalled the place as vividly as if he’d been there the day before.
Whenever Drewe spotted Carroll at the pub after that first night, he greeted him warmly and bought him a beer. Usually he dominated the conversation. He liked to talk about defense technology, and said he was developing a handgun that could fire a thousand rounds a minute. On a good night, he sounded like Ian Fleming on Dexedrine. He told Carroll that once, after a meeting at the Defence Ministry had gone late into the night, he was accidentally locked in the parking garage. Fortunately, he had recently been demonstrating the effects of a powerful explosive called pentrite, and he had a small supply on hand. With it, he had blown the garage door off its hinges.
Carroll found the story amusing and a little strange, but he didn’t ask for details. He knew quite a bit about pentrite from his own army training, and it was obvious that Drewe was well versed in detonators, boosters, and initiators. The man was an all-rounder, he thought.
Drewe never forgot a name or a face, and seemed able to retain every last stray piece of data. He could recite Newton’s laws of motion, Maxwell’s equations, and the principles of quantum mechanics. Carroll envied his ability to remember it all. Drewe explained that he compartmentalized information so he could call it up for use whenever he needed it. It was effortless, he said, like pulling documents out of a filing cabinet. He could remember every room he’d been in, every nuance of every story he’d been told, every twist and turn. No bit of information was trivial to him. He was a data sponge, a Hoover of books, journals, and news.
“John was able, almost at will, to drop in important parts of the history of physics from memory,” Carroll recalled, “and in doing so to convey the impression of a much greater understanding of the subject area in which he purported to be expert.”
Drewe created an entire informational universe from other people’s lives, storing potentially useful morsels and retaining details of the quirks and professional habits of each of his acquaintances. He would look them straight in the eye with his flat, unwavering stare, listen intently, and come away with flakes of character and personality, pieces so small his marks hardly knew anything was gone.
“He was like a shark that doesn’t bite but rubs up against you and takes away little bits of your skin,” said one such acquaintance.
Drewe often boasted to Terry Carroll that he had a pilot’s license, that he loved flying helicopters, and that he was an accomplished hang glider. Carroll thought it would be nice to surprise his friend with a private visit to the Concorde, and on a clear day the two men drove out to Heathrow in Drewe’s Bentley. On the giant airliner, at the pilot’s invitation, Drewe took the controls in his hands. He looked as excited as a four-year-old with a lollipop, and asked a variety of technical questions. (Interestingly, Goudsmid would later tell police that Drewe had a mortal fear of flying.) On the way home he expounded on various theories of unmanned flight and drone weaponry, and Carroll noted again that he had a sophisticated understanding of physics. Years later Carroll realized that Drewe had simply memorized basic concepts from physics textbooks.
Drewe quickly added Terry Carroll to his collection of unwitting accomplices. The soft-spoken lecturer was developing powerful intelligence-gathering software that could be applied to various disciplines. Drewe told Carroll he was sure the Home Office would be interested in the software for a newly proposed national computerized fingerprint identification system, as would the auction houses for an international database for art. Drewe said that he could broker both potential deals. Soon he was bringing an assortment of interesting characters to Carroll’s office: a group of MI6 and Scotland Yard acquisition officers; a handful of Russian and South African officials; a Chinese military attaché and his computer specialist. Carroll couldn’t help but be impressed.
Another candidate for Drewe’s crew was Peter Harris, the larger-than-life armed forces veteran who had introduced him to Carroll. Harris was well into his fifties, a hard drinker and smoker who had already lost a lung, and whose appointment with oblivion was neatly stamped on his forehead. A retired commercial artist, Harris supplemented his income by working an early morning paper route and subletting his flat, most recently to Carroll.
Harris’s friends would probably have pitied him if he hadn’t been such a great raconteur. He claimed that in the late 1960s, while fighting in Aden in the British Army’s last colonial counterinsurgency campaign, he had stood his ground after a sniper shot one of his mates dead. Wearing the Tartan kilt of the Argyle Highlanders, he had picked up his bagpipes and marched down a bullet-pocked street playing “Scotland the Brave” and daring the bastards to finish him off. Or so the story went.
It was questionable whether Harris had ever seen combat, but the Catch-22 was a perfect venue for such yarns, with its collection of armchair warriors and tin soldiers who enjoyed the camaraderie of real fighters. Britain was filled with barflies who lied about their war service. Many of the kingdom’s khaki fantasists claimed to have served in the elite Special Air Service (SAS), or as commandos during the Falklands War, or in the bomb-disposal squads in Northern Ireland. Drewe also claimed to have belonged to an elite military unit, one of several in the British Army that operated covertly against the IRA in Northern Ireland in the 1980s, relying on spies, “dirty ops” informers, and army and loyalist death squads. Terry Carroll realized much later that Drewe, who could reel off military commands, ranks, and lists of weapons, probably got most of his information from spy novels and military manuals.
Psychiatrists who treat serial war fibbers and compulsive liars use the term “pseudologia phantastica” to describe this pattern of habitual deceit. The lies often contain some element of truth: A onetime army clerk, for example, might claim to have seen hazardous duty during wartime. Fabricators most often tend to be in search of some internal psychological gain rather than a tangible or monetary reward. They want to be seen as extraordinarily brave, important, or above average, somehow superior to the ordinary citizen. The typical fantasist is not delusional.8
Peter Harris and John Drewe both fit the pattern. They were habitual exaggerators. At the Catch, they loved to talk about their shared passion for all things military, about calibration and cannons, missile velocities and the merits of the old Lee-Enfield rifle. Harris wasn’t making everything up. His service career was as an airman between 1947-1949. He knew about guns, having worked for three years as a security officer for the South Afr
ican High Commission, and he was still a registered firearms dealer, although the only guns his friends could remember were replicas imported from Spain.
For his part, Drewe never let the facts get in the way of a good story, particularly one that could help him sell more fakes. He needed real names to attach to Myatt’s paintings, and Harris was a fine addition to his roster. The self-described “oldest newspaper delivery boy in Hampstead,” whose only artwork was a framed certificate proclaiming, “I’ve visited every Young’s Pub in London,” was about to morph into a wealthy arms dealer with a large art collection. This new, improved Peter Harris would be based in Israel and would have close ties to an ammunition manufacturer in Serbia.
Piece by piece, document by document, Drewe reinvented Harris. Years after his con had come apart, the police were never certain whether Harris had wittingly posed as an owner of Drewe’s fakes or whether he had been another of his marks. In either case, his name figured large in Drewe’s provenance documents, even after Harris died of cancer. Police suspected that as he lay on his deathbed, barely able to talk, Drewe was feeding him blank documents to sign.
7
WRECKERS OF CIVILIZATION
One night in the late fall of 1989, as Drewe sat at home with his KGB paperbacks and Mossad memoirs, he got a call from one of the auction houses. He had recently gone to the auctioneer with one of Myatt’s Le Corbusier works, a collage pieced together from bits of newspaper from the 1950s. Drewe said it had come from his family’s collection, but the auctioneer had bad news for him: The provenance was insufficient, and the piece had been turned down.
“Are you related to Jane Drew?” the auctioneer asked in passing.
A renowned British architect with close ties to the Swiss-born architect and artist Le Corbusier, Jane Drew had helped design the original premises of London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, which was founded in the late 1940s as a cutting-edge art gallery and cultural center. Drewe knew about her design work for the modernist Indian city of Chandigarh and her influence on the Modern Movement, a group of avant-garde architects and painters of the 1940s.
The professor was not one to let an opportunity slip by. He told the auctioneer that Jane Drew was indeed a distant relative. Drewe carried on the conversation long enough to learn that the legendary woman was still alive, living just a few hours away, in the northeast.
Perhaps, Drewe thought, it was time to pay her a visit.
Drewe and Myatt drove north in the blue Bristol for three hours, until they reached the tiny two-pub village of Durham. Drewe had called beforehand and introduced himself as a patron of the arts who was writing a book on the history of the ICA. Jane Drew had immediately invited him up.
As soon as they walked into the house, Myatt was in awe, for he considered the seventy-eight-year-old woman a living, breathing part of Britain’s culture. Before long they were chatting about her work with “Corbu,” her role in the Modern Movement, and her friendships with Frank Lloyd Wright and Buckminster Fuller, who had invented the geodesic dome and coined the phrase “Spaceship Earth.” At Drewe’s prompting, she reminisced about her involvement in the postwar celebration dubbed the Festival of Britain and her work as a pioneer in tropical architecture and public housing.
She spoke with affection about some of the artists she had met through the ICA, particularly Ben Nicholson, a jaunty character who wore a beret and talked in a high-pitched voice. She remembered his uncanny penchant for design and his beautifully composed vegetarian dishes, with a red radish placed slightly off center, a fistful of asparagus laid out in a curve on the edge of the plate.
Drewe was in top form, and Myatt noted his effect on the aging woman. When the professor suggested that it was high time she wrote her autobiography, she seemed flattered. Then he offered to finance the project himself. He was certain her memoirs would reach a wide audience.
Within weeks of the meeting, Jane Drew had prepared a detailed outline of her life, and when Drewe returned north to pick it up, she asked him for a favor. Would he use his contacts in London to act as her representative in the sale of a small Eduardo Paolozzi sculpture she owned? Drewe had seen the piece and knew a dealer who might be interested. He said he would be delighted to handle the sale.
After several more visits to Jane Drew’s country home, Drewe began systematically widening his circle of art world acquaintances by dropping her name and inviting members of the establishment to lunch with them. He reserved tables at Claridge’s or at L’Escargot in Soho for such eminent Londoners as the former head of the Tate Gallery, Alan Bowness—Ben Nicholson’s son-in-law—and the art critic David Sylvester, who had once had his portrait painted by Giacometti.
Through Jane Drew he also met Dorothy Morland, the former director of the ICA. Until a few years earlier, he learned, the bulk of the ICA’s archives had been stored in Morland’s garage for safekeeping. She had eventually returned them, and they were now in box files in a small room on the ground floor. The cache consisted of forty-five years’ worth of memorabilia and personal papers, stacks of letters, sketches, and programs in no particular order, with huge chronological gaps. There were letters from Picasso, the art critic Herbert Read, and the surrealist painter and poet Roland Penrose, along with dozens of catalog and texts of forgotten lectures by W. H. Auden and Buckminster Fuller. By and large the archives had been ignored for decades. Dorothy Morland felt that she had saved them from destruction. She told Drewe that Bill McAlister, the current ICA director, wanted very much to put the material in order but that the institute was always short on funds.
She suggested that Drewe give the director a call.
Bill McAlister was a busy man. Normally his secretary screened his calls thoroughly, but this one was from a gentleman who was so persistent and seemed to know so many of the institute’s longtime supporters that McAlister took it.
Dr. Drewe got straight to the point. He said he was a scientist and a businessman, and that in his capacity as chairman of Norseland Industries, which had a large collection of modern art, he was considering a substantial donation to the ICA. He spoke knowledgeably about the institute’s inner workings and his wish to help overhaul its legendary archives.
McAlister immediately agreed to meet him for lunch.
The business of donor fishing was at best frustrating for McAlister, like rowing upriver for a week and coming back with minnows. On the rare occasion when he managed to land a contributor, one or another of his department heads would be at the door, cap in hand, with plans for a new play by a Nordic iconoclast, a seminar on chastity in Pop, or a Bavarian film festival. There was never enough money to go around, certainly never enough for what McAlister hoped would be his final project: refurbishing the archives, which had never been properly cared for. Over the years former senior staffers had felt it necessary to remove archival material in the belief that it needed protection or was part of their own private papers. One had even removed a visitors’ book containing sketches and signatures by Picasso and Hockney. This valuable volume later found its way to the British Museum’s library.
McAlister was aware of other such potential improprieties—nothing that verged on the criminal, but there was simply no excuse for the lack of a system to identify and maintain the archives. Thus, he was especially pleased to find someone who shared his concern. “I felt very lonely in that regard,” he recalled.
He and Drewe met at a fashionable Soho restaurant. Drewe was punctual and impeccably dressed. McAlister was a gourmet and mushroom hunter, and they both took their time with the menu and the wine list. Right away, McAlister felt that they had much in common. Drewe was a man of the Left, a former official with the Atomic Energy Authority who had quit after Margaret Thatcher began to privatize government programs. He accused her of wreaking devastation on the arts and sciences with her denationalization campaigns.
McAlister was no Thatcherite either, and complained to Drewe that while bastions of the art establishment such as the Tate and the Victoria a
nd Albert Museum still enjoyed government beneficence, the ICA got chicken feed.
Cultural historians well understood official Britain’s arm’s-length relationship to the ICA. Ever since its founding in a small L-shaped room on Dover Street in 1947, it had been a constant irritant to the arbiters of art. When cofounder Herbert Read called for public funding, the prickly George Bernard Shaw declared that such funds “would be better spent on hygiene, since hygiene [and] not the arts was responsible for the improvement in the nation’s health over the preceding hundred years.”9 But the ICA’s early members, who included Henry Moore, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Peggy Guggenheim, and Dylan Thomas, believed that the institute stood as a beacon to those who wanted to create and debate new art forms. The ICA organized poetry readings and “conversation nights” with Le Corbusier and “Bucky” Fuller, and opened a bar where patrons could buy a snack and a drink and discourse until dawn on the new postwar aesthetics.
“It felt like a railway stop,” Dorothy Morland told an ICA historian. 10 “People passed one another without realizing that some would one day be famous and some would change the face of art beyond all recognition. But as with every station, everyone was in a hurry.”
Over the years the ICA became a relatively safe haven for avant-garde artists from all over the world. In 1959, during a “Cyclo-Matic” demonstration of the mechanical nature of art, the Swiss Dadaist Jean Tinguely set up a machine operated by cyclists that dumped fifty pounds of drawings on paper onto the street. In the sixties, during an era of sit-ins and protests and the first stirrings of conceptual art, a young Australian artist taking part in a Destruction in Art symposium stood by the roadside waving an animal corpse and spattering the pavement with blood.
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