The case against Gant and Siddique, Ribbands said, was just ‘the old game of Chinese whispers’, a story blown out of all proportion. Gant and Siddique were the victims of people’s spiralling rumours: my articles, the police, Sloggett and Kowalski. All of us conspiring against them.
He said this with typical charm. Ribbands’s carefree air made him extremely likeable, even when he was being critical. ‘You can catch more flies with honey’ was his approach to life and the law. It seemed to work for him. I was here to talk about Jaap Boon—the Dutch expert who the defence had considered flying to Australia for the trial. They didn’t in the end, but Boon’s assessment of Sloggett’s reports on the orange and blue paintings informed the defence’s case, and prompted the prosecution to accept that the solubility tests to determine the age of the paint were, in Ribbands’s words, ‘bullshit science’.
‘We saved ourselves a truckload of money in not bringing Boon out here,’ Ribbands said. ‘It would have assisted in skewering Sloggett on the stand … but we didn’t need to go to that time or expense, even though Aman would have loved to have seen her skewered.’
Sloggett hardly emerged unscathed, I said. Siddique must have been pleased about the judge’s critique.
‘Aman would have thought that was worthwhile,’ Ribbands agreed. ‘I am sure he didn’t want to go through that path to get to it, but he felt vindicated.’
Ribbands could not give me a copy of Boon’s report but he read aloud what he felt were the most pertinent lines: ‘The outcome of the research on the paints is not what the researchers expected to find. The researchers do not find any compounds that suggest a young age of the paint films. The data point to a much older age of the paintings since markers of a young age of the paints are absent.’
Sloggett and Kowalski had preconceived ideas—they had not examined the orange and blue paintings with open minds, and Boon had picked up on this, Ribbands said.
‘Confirmation bias,’ he called it. He told me we were all guilty of it—of holding an opinion and then looking for evidence that supported that opinion. I could relate to that, but I also knew that sometimes my hunches were right.
‘I see it with Sloggett and Kowalski,’ he said. ‘“Oh, these paintings are fake, let’s work backwards and prove it.”’
But could Boon age the paint?
‘He couldn’t age it. But you can see it’s not young.’
Was Ribbands hopeful that Gant and Siddique would be acquitted?
‘I have said from day one that we are going to win. I am on Remy’s 1988 train. We are going to pull into the station, and the judge has seen this,’ he said.
‘No properly instructed jury can convict on the evidence in this case,’ Ribbands said, repeating the judge’s words. ‘So he has already given us a free kick on appeal.’
Certain of winning, Ribbands was paradoxically anticipating an appeal. But what about the stylistic analysis? The lack of ‘points of identification’ between the paintings in court and Whiteley’s known work? Ribbands paused for a moment, searching for the right words, unusual for a man who never seemed lost for them. ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. It’s very subjective,’ he said.
I was curious about the relationship between barrister and client. Did he ever ask his clients to tell him the truth? Ribbands smiled coyly, licked his lips.
‘It’s not a quest for the truth,’ he said. ‘It’s a contest. It’s a fight and we have to win the fight within the rules that are set down for us.’
It seemed to me the most truthful thing I had heard him say.
That night I watched F for Fake, in which Orson Welles depicts Elmyr de Hory as a jester, playing a ‘gigantic joke’ on the art world and its pretensions, and wondered whether I needed to get a sense of humour. Weren’t we all faking it? In the postmodern world the very notion of authenticity was challenged. ‘Fantastic!’ de Hory exclaimed as he read about his exploits in the news, under the headline: ‘Exposed—A Man Holds the Art World to Ransom’. De Hory’s biographer Clifford Irving, a man also prone to confabulation, proclaimed that his subject—‘the great faker of the twentieth century’—‘becomes a modern folk hero for the rest of us’.
Elmyr justified his fraudulence, declaring that he had exposed the corruption at the heart of the art world: ‘You explode the myth of the infallibility of the art dealers and the museum directors and you expose their crookedness, their evilness, their viciousness.’ His excuses had a familiar ring.
The jury had been out since Monday afternoon. It was now Thursday.
‘They are analysing it for themselves. The longer they take the more likely a conviction,’ Gyorffy texted.
Yesterday the jurors had been given the day off—two of them had funerals to attend. Bill Luke, an illustrator who had been following the case since the committal, joked that Wendy Whiteley had pronounced both paintings dead, and now we had not one but two funerals. Gallows humour? We’d been stuck in court for too long.
I had colonised bay thirty-one in the Supreme Court Library; plugged in my laptop, spread out my reading material. From my quiet nook I read the judge’s 225-page charge. The more I read, the more a conviction seemed unlikely.
You understand that the accused do not have to prove that the originals exist, nor do they have to produce copies to persuade you of any argument like that. To think in that way would be to reverse the onus of proof.
How could I argue with this principle of law? Kathie Sutherland, the art historian preparing the catalogue raisonné for Brett Whiteley, took the opposite approach when appraising the authenticity of an artwork—it was ‘guilty’ until proven innocent. But here we were talking about the lives of two men.
Lunch came and went. Another day dragged on. At 2.10 p.m., I stood up to stretch, looking out to the courtyard. What I saw stunned me: the jurors were out there, and they were chatting and laughing! I could not keep my eyes off them; I spied on them from my library eyrie. One of the men stretched out his arms and then swung them from side to side as though he’d finished a long run or a big project and was relieved that it had come to an end. A verdict was imminent, I was sure of it, and the accused would be found not guilty. Why else this lightness of spirit? I was certain we would soon hear from the jury, and that it would have good news for the accused. At 2.20 p.m., the jurors strolled back inside and I sat anxiously at my laptop.
Another hour passed, and nothing. At 3.50 p.m., I began to think I had been wrong. Just before 4 p.m., Ribbands sent me an email, citing the lines in the transcript where Justice Croucher had stated that a reasonable jury could not find the accused guilty in this case, that a conviction would be ‘unsafe’. Minutes after Ribbands’s email, my mobile phone started chiming with texts and emails: from the judge’s associate, from the barristers, from the court reporter, from the court publicist: ‘Verdict in Gant Siddique case. Court reconvening ASAP’. Had Ribbands been trying to tell me something? Was it sheer coincidence that he emailed what he did when he did? Did he know the verdict, and was it not guilty?
My heart was pounding. There would be a verdict today. I gathered up my laptop, my bags, books, pens, highlighters, notebooks, all the paraphernalia that I seemed to haul around with me, and rushed to courtroom three. A crowd was rustling in the foyer; Gant was speaking amicably to Stefanec. How civil of them. If my heart was pounding, how must Siddique and Gant be feeling? Gant looked his usual smooth self, but the colour of his skin betrayed him—ashen, with patches of red. The courtroom was busier than it had been in weeks—the barristers bustled around their long wooden tables, and the media seats were full. Over the past few days I had been the sole writer still following the trial, and now the television reporters, the wire reporters, the newspaper reporters, had all returned, all here, waiting for the verdict.
Gant calmly walked into the dock, sat down and stretched his arms out along the back of the chair. Siddique’s son hugged his father before he walked into the dock. Gant’s family filled the seats next to the media�
�wife, son, three daughters and his faithful friend. I glanced at Deborah; I read the contempt in her eyes. I looked away.
Two knocks signalled the judge’s arrival. The court rose and the judge took his place up high. Silence fell over the room. The tension was nauseating. ‘I feel ill,’ I whispered to the court publicist. ‘Just as well it’s not a murder trial,’ she whispered back. I had no right to feel anxious. It wasn’t me sitting in the dock.
Not one of the jurors looked at the accused as they entered the room and took their seats. Not one.
‘I understand you have reached a verdict,’ the judge said.
Verdict. In Latin it means the truth spoken.
‘Yes,’ the forewoman replied.
‘All right, just wait and my associate will take that from you now.’
The associate read out the first charge. Gant? Guilty. Siddique? Guilty. The second charge. Gant? Guilty. Siddique? Guilty. The third charge. Gant? Guilty. Siddique? Guilty. The word ‘guilty’ was slashing down like a guillotine, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty. Gant’s daughter Chrissy was sobbing. Her father was expressionless. Siddique had his head down. Gant’s wife was stone-faced; Siddique’s son stoic. Siddique raised his head and crossed his arms. He looked as though he were in shock. Twelve ordinary people had spoken their truth. The judge seemed stunned. Not once but twice his directions had been ignored. In a quiet, solemn voice he thanked them for their work and reiterated his great faith in the jury system. And then he discharged them. They slowly filed out of their seats and disappeared through the jury room door, job done.
No sooner had the jury left than the jousting between Borg and Croucher resumed. The prosecution opposed bail. The judge ruled in favour of the defence. Bail was extended. Gant and Siddique went home that night. Not so the paintings. The next morning they were taken back into police custody.
Out on Lonsdale Street the television reporters played catch-up. Gant emerged first, his lawyers forming a defensive ring around him. The television reporters thrust microphones towards him, the camera crews scrambled in front of him. I was too far away to hear the reporters’ questions, but I heard the word ‘verdict’. The truth spoken. Gant ignored their questions and kept walking. Siddique emerged a few minutes later, girdled by his lawyers. He too had microphones pushed towards him. He too said nothing. I watched as the two clusters of black gowns walked towards William Street, amid the flash of lights and scurry of camera operators. That night, Gant and Siddique made the television news. Stories online labelled them ‘fraudsters’. The papers could now reveal the evidence that had been ruled inadmissible, the words the jury never heard. They could write about Gant’s previous court appearances and the ‘door man’ Richard Simon’s prohibited quote. I hoped the jurors would read the stories.
They ignored everything the judge said. I had not expected such tenacity in the face of not one but two attempts at directing the jury to acquit. That evening I pondered the verdict, still stunned. What was driving the jury’s resolve? The presumption of innocence was a fundamental principle of our legal system—one that I believed in—and yet I kept returning to the fact that the two accused said nothing, offered nothing, never explained where the so-called copies had ended up. Had the jury done the same? Not a scrap of evidence was offered for the defence’s alternative hypothesis that the paintings in court were authentic and that the paintings photographed in Siddique’s storeroom were their facsimile. I knew that the law told me I was not to reason this way, that the accused had to prove nothing, but surely if you were innocent you would do anything to clear your name. Why, to borrow a line from Susan Borg, was Superman never in the same room as Clark Kent?
After five uncomfortable weeks in courtroom three, I understood that in the eyes of the law such ‘common sense’ questioning was wrong—even though the judge himself once asked that very question of the defence. Where were the copies? But he had asked this in the absence of the jury. When he directed the jury at the end of the case, he returned to the holy tenet of the law: the burden of proof lay entirely with the prosecution. The question in the end seemed to be, not were these men guilty, but could they lawfully be found guilty? The judge seemed to think not. His definition of ‘reasonable doubt’ differed to that of the jury. And yet at the start of the case he had told the jury that the words ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ meant ‘exactly what they say’. In my mind, there was nothing exact about them.
Hadn’t he also told the jurors to use their ‘common sense’ in assessing the credibility of witnesses? The jury had applied its common sense and found certain witnesses lacking. Their evidence, in the eyes of the jury, did not ‘harpoon’ the prosecution’s case. And that was where the judge and the jury parted ways. They boarded different trains.
In the days following the verdict, I phoned some of those closest to the trial for their responses. Jud Wimhurst wrestled with contradictory emotions. He felt for Siddique’s wife and children, but was appalled by Siddique’s betrayal of an artist not here to defend himself.
‘I am torn,’ he told me. ‘But I would have felt disappointed if they were found not guilty. It was a really stupid thing that they did and I am confused as to why two intelligent men would do it. I suppose because they could get away with it. I really thought that Aman and Peter loved art more than this.’
Guy Morel was equally ambivalent.
‘I don’t want these guys to go to jail. Jails are for crooks and murderers,’ he said. But what Gant and Siddique did was ‘sacrilegious’ and ‘unethical’.
Wendy Whiteley was typically snappy: ‘You saw what I said in the newspaper.’
I told her I wanted to hear it directly from her. She laughed and answered: ‘I’m pleased it’s over, but I suspect it will probably drag on, and I find some of the stuff the judge said very peculiar.’
Peculiar. A clever choice of word.
‘I am very grateful to that jury … having said no, we want to hear more,’ she said.
‘Gant’s on legal aid, isn’t he?’ she continued. ‘Anyone tolerating an appeal is ridiculous. Get it over and done with. Put them out of business is the point. And then a decision needs to be made about who owns those paintings now and what to do with them—and the third one has not reappeared.’
Steven Nasteski dubbed it a ‘wonderful’ result.
‘The jury said, these people are guilty. At the end of the day, the jury is right. What sort of jail sentence will they get?’ he asked excitedly.
I told him I suspected the judge would be lenient.
‘He has to go on case law,’ Nasteski said, ever upbeat. ‘If there is $3.5 million worth of fraud, he has to! Let’s hope they get three years in jail. We need them to go to jail. We want them to go to jail because at the end of the day the precedent is set for the future.’
Meanwhile, Nasteski had bought a $10 million-plus penthouse in Bondi, big enough to accommodate a new Whiteley purchase—the 7.5-metre-long, 6-panel work Unfinished Beach Polyptych, titled posthumously, which he had bought directly from Wendy for ‘many, many millions’. He wouldn’t disclose the price, but said it ‘smashed the record’ set for Australian art in 2010 when Sidney Nolan’s First-Class Marksman sold for $5.4 million.
Andrew Pridham did not return my call. But I read his views in The Australian. He too believed the pair deserved jail.
‘It’s not a victimless crime, it’s stealing,’ he told the paper. ‘If people sit down in smoky rooms conjuring up elaborate schemes where they’re fraudulently creating paintings, ordering doors and frames, and creating fraudulent paperwork to conceal what they’ve done, I don’t see any difference from getting a sawn-off shotgun and committing robbery.’
Strong words. Too strong? Gant and Siddique had not terrorised anyone with a sawn-off shotgun. There was a difference. But Pridham’s anger was understandable. He had forfeited $2.5 million. His civil court case against Anita Archer was settled confidentially but it became clear during the trial that the lion’s share of his money
had not been returned. It was a massive loss, regardless of his financial circumstances. And a loss of face: he had been mocked on air by members of the football tribe, including his rival, Collingwood president Eddie McGuire.
Wary of the potential for lawsuits, Robyn Sloggett said only one thing on the record: ‘Susan Borg is a hero in my books.’
There was one woman who had known Peter Gant at the time of his first serious brush with the criminal law, twenty-five years ago. Her name was Barbara Cain.
As we sat drinking tea in her Toorak apartment on a rainy afternoon a fortnight after the verdict, Barbara told me how she had once been very fond of Gant. He had a ‘childlike’ quality that mothers loved.
‘He was always the little boy lost,’ she said with a wry laugh.
In her eighties, Barbara was smart, sharp and strong. She was a regular at art openings and a keen player of bridge. It was the first time I’d seen her casually dressed—she wore black jeans and a cream jumper with such panache that I hoped to look as good at her age.
Barbara and her husband, Dudley, had met Gant in the early 1980s, just after he’d left Niagara Galleries.
‘Peter seemed to know a lot about art so he and Dudley became quite close,’ she said. ‘My husband thought of him as a second son. Because in those days he wasn’t like this—not that we knew anyhow, this all came later.’
In those days, the Cains lived in Albany Road, Toorak, and Gant was such a frequent visitor he was practically part of the family.
‘I always liked him,’ Barbara said, sounding as though she were still questioning her judgement, as though what he had done to her family remained unfathomable. ‘He was always there … one of those people who were always in our house. That’s his modus operandi, he insinuates himself into families.’
Her descriptions concurred with what others had said about Gant—his ability to turn on the charm, to spellbind. Gant’s ‘fascination in life’ was ‘being able to manipulate people’, one dealer had told me—‘that’s his challenge, his sort of drug’. The Cains discovered this too late.
Whiteley on Trial Page 31