‘Aman Siddique looked at the picture first and said it was definitely correct, no doubt about it, look at all these artist marks,’ Deutscher told me. ‘How naïve was I?’ he laughed. ‘I’d heard rumours here and there, but I still rated him as an excellent conservator. He’s the best in the country.’
After Siddique was charged with art fraud in August 2014, Deutscher stopped using him. Australian Galleries director Stuart Purves, however, continued to give him work. He was still using him when I visited his Collingwood galleries in December 2015. His trademark red ute was parked outside, unmistakable with a leopard painted on the bonnet and a vanity plate proclaiming ‘Arts 2’. Purves was also known for his shiny red cowboy boots, and a penchant for cameos and bolo ties in preference to the traditional sort. His parents, Anne and Tam, were pioneers in the marketing of Australian contemporary art, establishing Australian Galleries in 1956. Brett Whiteley was one of their star artists. Stuart joined the business in 1966 after the death of his father, and had been sole director since 1999 after his mother died.
He recalled the day he was asked to Deutscher and Hackett’s Prahran showroom to inspect Orange Lavender Bay.
‘When I walked in, the Whiteley was right up the other end of the building and I could see straight away. I thought I hope it’s not about that because that for me is certainly not painted by Brett Whiteley.’
He was furious at Siddique’s suspected involvement. He didn’t want to lose his favourite restorer.
Sydney conservator David Stein had originally recommended Siddique, and Purves found him ‘terrific’. He was skilled and fast and Purves, who also had a gallery in Sydney, began to give all his Melbourne work to Siddique.
‘David actually did himself out of work,’ Purves said.
He too was familiar with Siddique’s own paintings, which he described as ‘quite classical’.
‘He could paint anything,’ he said.
However, he noted, as others had, that Siddique was constantly complaining about not having enough money or getting enough work.
Siddique considered Robyn Sloggett a rival, and felt that she was siphoning off business with the commercial arm of the Centre for Cultural Materials Conservation. There was some truth in this—I had spoken to one artist’s widow who despite praising Siddique’s ‘brilliant’ skills, started using Sloggett’s centre when it came on the scene. ‘If Robyn had not been around, I would certainly have kept in touch with Aman,’ she told me.
Even though Purves kept using Siddique, he did have his doubts. A Fred Williams painting Siddique had ‘marvellously’ cleaned came back with a tiny section cut out of the back of the canvas. Purves couldn’t remember whether the canvas had the small cut in it before it had been sent for cleaning, but whoever had cut the canvas now had a record of the material Williams used. When Siddique’s name started coming up in relation to the alleged Whiteley fakes, Purves confronted him.
‘They were telling me I was going to need a kitty of at least $200 000. That was to engage a barrister, and that’s just a cheap barrister,’ Gant told me when we next met at Jimmy Watson’s.
‘Where do you get that? Especially if you’ve come out of bankruptcy and they’re all expecting that your family’s going to put their hand in their pocket. Well, they’re not,’ he said.
‘I was going to try and raise it myself. I didn’t want my family to. They’ve been through enough. And you know, the Crown have brought it on. I haven’t brought it on. So as far as I’m concerned, if I can’t fund it they have an obligation to give me some representation.’
Five weeks before the trial, on 1 March 2016, we were sitting at the same table, in the same cosy nook; it was starting to feel like the queasy confessional boxes of my Catholic childhood. With the academic year just begun, Jimmy’s was frisky with students savouring the last of the heat, summer creeping into the first day of autumn. Gant had his sailboat shirt on again, teamed with beige shorts, a combination suited to the hot, humid night. He arrived straight from a small gig at the University of Melbourne, showing a group of Chinese students around the campus. They succumbed to his charms, asked him to pose for selfies at tour’s end, unaware of his petty fame. He earnt fifty dollars in cash for his efforts, presented to him in a beautifully folded and decorated envelope.
‘Tight-arse fucking Chinese,’ he laughed, showing me the envelope, and his spiky sense of humour.
So he wasn’t really making enough money to fund a legal case?
‘No, I’m not, definitely not,’ he said, still laughing, revealing small, spaced-out teeth.
Well, what did he do with all the money he made as a dealer? ‘I don’t know, that’s what my wife keeps asking.’ What happened?
‘I’ve got no fucking idea. I really don’t know. I think money and I just don’t mix. I just spend it.’
On what?
‘Wine, women and song. Who knows.’
Women? I wondered what his wife would say about that?
‘She’s not talking to me at the moment so it doesn’t matter,’ he said, laughter abating.
Because of the court case?
‘The court case. I think she’s pretty much run her race. She was really pissed off when you rang her.’
I offered my apologies.
‘Well, you can buy me a drink,’ he said.
Small price to pay.
Gant remained unperturbed about his upcoming trial; he was keen to take to the witness box.
‘Bloody oath. The crew I had were certainly going to put me there,’ he said, referring to his former legal team, ‘and I assume Stary will, but maybe he’ll have different ideas. I’d put me there, because if you’ve got a jury they’re going to expect to hear from one of us, surely. I know if I was on a jury I’d want to hear from the accused.’
Siddique, however, would not be taking the stand.
‘They’re worried that he won’t be able to cope with it. He carries a lot more burdens in the sense of his ethnicity and even his manner, maybe. I would like him to go into the stand, but they all tell me he won’t.’
During the committal hearing, Siddique wore a constant scowl. He caught my eye once; I gave him a thin smile. He glared back. I didn’t bother smiling again.
‘My problem is that I can’t help but smile,’ Gant said.
My impression was that most of the time he look bored.
‘Most of the time I am bored.’
I asked Gant about Robert Le Tet, and the story that he supposedly bought Big Blue Lavender Bay directly from Brett Whiteley through his studio assistant Christian Quintas in 1988.
‘Answer me this, why isn’t he a witness for the Crown?’ Gant said.
I assumed he would be.
‘Well, he’s not.’
Why not?
‘Well, that’s my question, why isn’t he? He’s absolutely pivotal to their case, and he’s not a witness. Now that says a lot to me.’
Le Tet, I reminded him, had denied owning Big Blue Lavender Bay, and denied signing any letter purporting to claim ownership.
‘But he’s not denying anything because he’s not in court,’ Gant said.
The defence could call him as a witness, I noted.
‘We could, but I wouldn’t.’
Why not?
‘I know him too well.’
What did that mean?
‘If there was any advantage of him being called I’d know about it. He’s not being called by the Crown. I don’t need to call him, all I need to do is make sure that my team raise it as a big issue, well, where the fuck is he, he should be your number one, well, where is he? They’re the ones presenting the case, not us. We don’t need to call him … I know why they haven’t called him, because he’d be a hostile witness.’
I couldn’t see why Le Tet would be, as Gant put it, a ‘hostile witness’. Either he owned Big Blue Lavender Bay since 1988, which would bolster the defence’s argument that the painting was genuine, or he didn’t and then there was a case to answer.
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‘There’s only a case to answer if there’s been a wrongdoing; there hasn’t been a wrongdoing,’ Gant said.
But if there was no wrongdoing, then Le Tet could easily stand up in court and say, I’ve owned this painting since 1988, and it’s genuine. It would be a small thing to do, to get a friend out of a bind.
‘He might have all sorts of other reasons for not wanting to say that,’ Gant said.
So he was claiming Le Tet owned the painting?
‘I’m not saying anything any more, because it doesn’t matter. And our relationship was too intertwined anyway. For thirty-odd years our relationship was so intertwined that it was hard to know. Often he would finance things that I would buy and depending on the circumstances he’d say, well, he owned them—or do I own them? Do I own it and I owe him the money or does he own it and I’m trying to sell it for him, and it’s a very fluid state of affairs.’
Gant gave me an example of this fluid state of affairs, the purchase of an artwork by Italian artist Lucio Fontana, bought at Christie’s in Sydney several years ago for $700 000. ‘Who do you think paid for that?’ he asked.
So he was Le Tet’s agent? I asked.
‘No, I’m not his agent,’ he said, arms crossed. ‘If there’s a picture I want to buy because I know I can make money on it, let’s buy it. Who actually owns it doesn’t matter because it got sold. I sold it. The whole thing was just a project. We sold it in Milan six months later for like $1 million.’
Gant’s relationship with Le Tet had cooled considerably since Gant was arrested and charged with four counts of obtaining and one of attempting to obtain a financial advantage by deception. Le Tet couldn’t have been pleased to find his name so prominently associated with the provenance of Big Blue Lavender Bay.
‘I think he’s really pissed off that I’ve put him in all this light … He was in many respects like a big brother,’ Gant said. Le Tet was ‘an amazing man’, ‘generous’, ‘incredibly loving’ and ‘tough as all hell’. Gant assured me that if I put one foot out of place Le Tet would sue me ‘for sure’.
‘And he won’t stop,’ he said. ‘One of the things I love most about him, his single-mindedness.’
I asked Gant what he would do if it all went bad, if he and Siddique were found guilty. Did he ever think about that?
‘Yeah, I have a really good wig, and somebody to ferry me across to Greece,’ he laughed, alluding to bail-skipping drug trafficker Tony Mokbel, who was captured in Greece and immortalised in a mugshot wearing a wonky toupee.
I asked Gant about another famous runaway: his first cousin, Christopher Skase. He stopped laughing.
‘Now who told you that?’ he asked, warily.
Lots of people. His mother’s sister, Audrey, was Christopher’s mother.
Gant conceded.
‘Yeah, he was one of my closest friends. Yeah, I loved him. His mum’s still alive,’ he said.
Skase was Gant’s ‘favourite cousin’, one of those guys ‘who always made you feel important’. Charismatic. Young Peter would go on holidays with Skase and his parents, Charles and Audrey. One year, when he was about twelve, and Skase about twenty, the entrepreneur-to-be set Gant on a mission. He asked his young cousin to pick the most beautiful of all the girls he knew.
‘So we spent the whole summer holidays with him ferrying me around in this blue Morris Minor, introducing me to females between the ages of eighteen and twenty and I had to score and the winner got a date with Chris,’ Gant said, laughing long and hard at the memory. ‘That was great. Chris was a lovely, lovely man.’
That’s not how many people remember him, I suggested.
Most of the people who knew him, really knew him, liked him, Gant said.
‘Port Douglas wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for Chris, wouldn’t even be there,’ Gant said, referring to the luxury resort, the Sheraton Mirage, that Skase opened in Port Douglas in 1988, transforming the sleepy seaside town in Far North Queensland into a holiday magnet for supermodels, rock stars and Hollywood actors.
‘He wasn’t obsessed with making money by ripping things apart and shredding them and selling them up. He was obsessed with building things,’ Gant said.
He didn’t mention the $177 million Skase owed creditors when he booked a one-way ticket to the Spanish island of Majorca after his business empire collapsed. Skase remained in exile in Spain for a decade—refusing to return to Australia and face sixty criminal charges related to the collapse of the Quintex group and alleged misappropriation of more than $10 million from shareholders. The Commonwealth criminal charges were withdrawn when Skase died in Majorca on 5 August 2001.
Gant told me that his father, Austin, turned Skase on to the stock market. Skase would visit Kyneton for tips. Perhaps Austin wasn’t the best teacher—his own investments in the stock market didn’t thrive.
‘No, he was terrible, he lost it all,’ Gant laughed.
Our conversation shifted from the stock market to the art market. I mentioned Robert Hughes’s famed quote about the art market being the biggest unregulated market in the world, bar that for drugs. Gant wholeheartedly agreed.
‘Oh yeah, art’s a fantastic vehicle for shifting money, it always has been. And probably always will be. And a lot of bad money has come into the art world in recent years, in particular when art became expensive. Art’s a great commodity for hiding money. It doesn’t come with a certificate of title, and therefore it can’t be regulated. It can’t be documented, it can’t be taxed.’
Not that he was in favour of increased regulation.
‘We should get back to a situation where art is just art … and it’s not a commodity,’ he said.
I was astonished to hear this. Gant traded in art; he had bought and sold with the intention of turning a profit. He had treated art as commodity.
‘Oh yeah, I’m a complete fucking hypocrite, I agree,’ he said with such candour that I couldn’t help but laugh.
He returned to one of his favourite themes—how did you value art, and who was to say what was good and what was bad? Market value wasn’t necessarily a reflection of quality. Certain artists were pushed, demand was created for their work, prices were ramped—it was artifice. These Whiteleys at the centre of the art fraud case, for example, they were just ‘potboilers’, he said. They were not great Whiteleys. But they were genuine, he insisted.
‘The paintings are fine and I’ve always been confident. If we go down, we go down. If it doesn’t go my way it means the jury have made a terrible mistake.’
He was just happy the trial had been delayed until after Easter and he could get to the WOMADelaide music festival as planned. Nor was he worried about the media coverage the trial would attract. He was inured to it, he said, because he went through it all with ‘Christopher’.
‘We all travelled that road with him, we saw what he went through. We felt part of it. You saw what damage the media could do, and you saw how quick people were to forget certain things and remember others.
‘I just think that just prepared me for it, maybe. Put it this way, I have a lot more emotional stability than probably Aman does.’
We’d been talking for almost two hours, and it was time to give it a break. Yet again I had come to the end of my tolerance for alcohol.
He kissed my cheek goodbye and left me a little something to ponder: ‘What’s best for your book? Innocent or guilty?’
PARTIV
The Contest
THEY NEVER THOUGHT IT would come to this. During the committal hearing, the word in the art world was that Peter Gant and Aman Siddique were boasting that they would get off ‘on a technicality’. They had hoped to cauterise the case, hiring one of Australia’s best criminal lawyers. But Robert Richter had not spared them. On Monday 4 April 2016, almost a year to the day after Magistrate Suzanne Cameron’s judgement, and almost nine years after the sale of the first suspect Whiteley painting, Big Blue Lavender Bay, Peter Stanley Gant and Mohamed Aman Siddique stood trial.
; The faces milling in the passageway outside the courtroom, waiting for proceedings to start, were now familiar to me. Brett Lichtenstein, in an anxiously chirpy mood, was down from Sydney, one of seven new witnesses called by the prosecution. On the bench behind him sat a lone, grey-haired, weary-looking man in a navy jacket, beige trousers and clunky black leather shoes. This was the formidable Robert Le Tet. He looked like an older Marlon Brando. So Gant had been wrong about Le Tet not being called as a witness for the prosecution. Wearing his favourite black leather jacket, Gant sheepishly sidled over to greet him. Le Tet barely looked up.
The trial would take place in the Supreme Court of Victoria’s impressive courtroom three, a narrow but magnificent room with soaring ceilings, intricate moulded plasterwork and sombre wood-panelling. A swarm of wigged and gowned lawyers, hemmed in by large ring binder folders, occupied three wooden tables, trolley suitcases parked alongside. With two defence teams and the Crown prosecutors, space was at a premium. Only two lawyers from the committal had made it to the trial: Shane Kenna, the Crown’s instructing solicitor, and John Ribbands, who had worked alongside Richter. Ribbands was now junior counsel to the wry, bearded Remy van de Wiel, QC, an old hand who had replaced Richter as Siddique’s defence barrister. Everyone else was new to the case.
Tom Gyorffy’s replacement was Crown Prosecutor Susan Borg, a forthright blonde with a big laugh. She had just finished the manslaughter trial involving 11-month-old Charlotte Keen. The man accused had been acquitted. Art fraud, for all its complexity, was a welcome change of pace, she told me briefly before the trial: ‘No-one got stabbed, no-one got killed, no-one’s killed a baby. It’s just greed. It’s nice not to have to deal with the brokenness of parents who have lost their child.’ She felt there was a reasonable chance of conviction with Gant and Siddique.
Whiteley on Trial Page 17