Dudley Cain was a successful businessman who had made his money in pharmacies and real estate. He was also a great lover of music, having played drums in a swing band as a young man. For about ten years the Cains dealt with Gant, buying the works of important Australian artists including Lloyd Rees, John Passmore, Tony Tuckson, Ian Fairweather and Danila Vassilieff. They bought a couple of Whiteleys too.
‘Never had any trouble with the Whiteleys,’ Barbara said.
Never had any trouble with Gant either, until the time the dealer phoned one night and asked Dudley if he could borrow the couple’s John Perceval painting Night Watch, from 1957, as television impresario Reg Grundy was in town and keen to buy a Perceval.
‘Dud never ever liked paintings to go out of the house—if people wanted to see paintings they came to the house,’ Barbara said.
But Gant somehow convinced him, telling him that he only needed it for a night as Reg was only in town for a night. He would collect the painting from the Cains, take it to Grundy’s hotel room, and have it back to them by midday Saturday.
Noon Saturday came and went. Concerned about his painting, Dudley called Gant, but Gant didn’t answer. Dudley kept calling and the phone kept ringing out.
‘And then Sunday came, and nothing happened. And then my husband realised that there was something wrong,’ Barbara said.
She recalled the moment Dudley finally got on to Gant: ‘I remember him sitting at the dining room table and his face went white.’ The man who Dudley had treated like an ‘absolute son’ had sold the Perceval painting to Grundy—but the money was ‘gone’.
Gant was charged with two counts of obtaining property by deception and was tried in the Melbourne County Court in 1993. The typewritten court documents I tracked down stated that the first count was for dishonestly obtaining $160 000 from Reg Grundy on 24 December 1990, by falsely representing that he, Gant, had the authority to sell Night Watch. The second count was for dishonestly obtaining Night Watch on 14 February 1991, ‘with the intention of permanently depriving Dudley Cain and Barbara Cain of the said painting’. So Gant had already sold the painting to Grundy before he’d even asked the Cains if he could show it to him? Not even Barbara had been aware of this, or she had forgotten—I had brought the court documents to show her.
Dudley Cain died before the trial began. He had been ill with cancer and Barbara is convinced that Gant’s betrayal accelerated his death.
‘The shock was so great I really think it contributed to his death,’ Barbara told me.
‘And do you know afterwards, on the day of the court case, we were sitting outside the court before we were all called in and Peter came up to me. I was having coffee and he sat down and he said, “That was the worst thing I ever did to Dudley, I’m so sorry.” And I said, “Get lost.” He had the cheek to come up to me.’
It was Gant’s first criminal trial, and one of the witnesses who spoke in his defence was Aman Siddique. Gant presented invoices showing that Dudley had been buying paintings from him for years and that he was Dudley’s agent. Siddique verified Gant’s story.
‘Siddique got up and said, “Yes, oh, as long as I’ve known Peter Gant they’ve been so close and he’s always been his agent,”’ Barbara said.
Gant was found not guilty. The defence claimed it was a civil matter and not theft, as Gant had been selling paintings on commission for Dudley.
It wasn’t so easy for Barbara.
‘It was such a traumatic time for me because they put me in the witness box and Dudley had only died nine months before and I was never intended to be in the witness box. They tore me to shreds, like they did to Wendy, and said, “What would you know about art?” They tore me to shreds. I was so distressed about the whole thing.’
I asked Barbara whether she pursued the case in the civil courts.
‘Don’t be ridiculous—he went bankrupt.’
There was another thing I wanted to do. I wanted to see the documents that The Age’s media lawyers, MinterEllison, had amassed in preparation for the civil case when Gant sued the paper in 2010. What else hadn’t the jury been told? What else was there to know? I spent the morning of 22 June 2016 in a sleek, light-filled office at MinterEllison’s, sifting through four boxes of legal documents. The files recorded a procession of people who had been caught with suspect artwork leading back to Gant. There was one man in particular that I wanted to speak to: Arthur Thompson. He too had an interesting story to tell: about Gant, and his friend Jeremy James, whose evidence had been so influential at the trial.
Arthur Thompson no longer collected art. His introduction to the art world, via Jeremy James, did not end well. It put him off the prospect of ever buying art again. Thompson, who worked in the tender notification industry, met James through his late business partner William K Oliphant, who had bought art from James. Oliphant piqued Thompson’s interest in doing the same.
And so, from December 1999 to May 2000, James visited Thompson’s home in Melbourne’s east, bringing artworks for him to look at and consider buying. James brought several Sidney Nolan works to Thompson, telling him that they were being sold as a result of a divorce settlement in Toorak, and that it wasn’t unusual for prominent families to sell paintings in this way, so as to maintain privacy about their divorce.
James also brought over two charcoal sketches purportedly by Robert Dickerson, telling Thompson that the sketches could only be sold as a pair, as this was the artist’s intention when they were drawn. Peter Gant had valued and authenticated the works. Thompson ended up buying six artworks from James—four Nolans and two Dickersons—spending a total of $103 000. He happily hung them on his office wall. It was only after the untimely death of William Oliphant that Thompson discovered that the works hanging in his office were not what they seemed. When Oliphant’s estate was wound up, the artworks he had bought from James were found to be fake. Thompson decided he had better have his own artworks examined. He brought them to Robyn Sloggett at the University of Melbourne. She did not have good news.
Thompson launched legal proceedings against James and Gant. In late 2003, he sued them in the County Court of Victoria, seeking $200 000. The case was settled at mediation—Thompson’s money was refunded. James and Gant denied any wrongdoing and denied the artworks were fake.
‘If my business partner had not died the paintings would still be hanging on my walls and I would still think they were real,’ Thompson told me.
PARTV
The Aftermath
THE JURY GOT IT wrong. So Trevor Wraight declared at the plea hearing two months after the verdict.
‘And while we respect the jury and its function, they got it wrong,’ he repeated. ‘And they got it wrong to the point … where these innocent men should not be in jail while it’s worked out.’
Siddique and Gant had been out on bail since the jury returned its verdict on 12 May 2016. It was now 29 July 2016, the second day of the plea hearing, and Wraight was trying to safeguard their freedom, arguing that they should remain out of custody until an appeal was lodged and heard. He was pushing for a stay of sentence. It was an extraordinary move, in a trial that had been achingly marked by them. Stays of sentence were rarely given and were limited to exceptional circumstances such as mercy cases where an accused’s child or partner was about to die. But Wraight was arguing that this case was exceptional and that the sentence should be stayed ‘in the interests of justice’.
The boldness of this latest move was in some ways predictable—it had been fortified by the judge’s own words during the trial. Hadn’t the judge himself stated that a conviction would be ‘unsafe’? The defence continued to ride on the force of that statement.
‘These men should not unjustifiably go to jail when there is a powerful argument against the jury’s verdict,’ Wraight told Justice Croucher, holding his spectacles in his right hand, jaw clenched.
Yet again the Crown’s case was being filleted, yet again Susan Borg had to defend the strength of the prosecution
’s evidence. The Crown did not accept that the verdict was ‘unsafe’, she stated emphatically.
‘Come on, you must have been surprised when the jury found these people guilty?’ the judge replied incredulously.
‘Not because of the evidence I wasn’t. Can we have lunch now please?’ Borg joked, exasperated by the continuing onslaught. She was not alone. One of the art dealers who had been following the case and had come in for the plea hearing left the public gallery on the first day. He later told me he could no longer bear to listen to the defence’s machinations.
I had imagined a plea hearing would take a matter of hours. It took two days, and at the end of those two days the pained, exhausted look I had seen during the trial’s final days had returned to Borg’s face. And yet a suppressed anger seemed to be fuelling her in this last stage of the case. The jury, she submitted, had returned a guilty verdict in the absence of ‘even the slightest bit of evidence’ that what Siddique had produced at Easey Street were copies of the paintings in court. The defence’s alternative hypothesis was ‘fanciful’, she said, sounding more confident than she had at times during the trial. I wondered whether the experience had emboldened her as a prosecutor.
‘And I know, and I keep reiterating it’s not for the defence to prove innocence, but if you’re going to put a reasonable hypothesis, then it has to be reasonable,’ she said. ‘If I say to the jury “pigs can fly” and everyone says “no they can’t” and then there’s a sighting of a pig flying, the unreasonable hypothesis starts to become reasonable, and the more pigs that are seen flying, the more reasonable the hypothesis becomes.’ Her choice of metaphor revealed her own incredulity at the way the trial had unfolded.
‘I don’t think it’s fair, though, to equate the evidence of Ms Milburn and Mr James to flying pigs,’ the judge countered.
The previous day Borg had to contend with Wraight describing the alleged crimes of Gant and Siddique as being no different to someone selling a fake Rolex watch. It was ‘a simple deception’, Wraight had said, and just because the case had attracted ‘notoriety’, ‘received all sorts of publicity’ and involved Brett Whiteley did not mean that the accused should be punished more severely. The offending was limited to a small section of the community, he said—not many people could afford $2.5 million paintings—and the impact on the market had been negligible. Steven Nasteski had just bought a ‘brand new Whiteley’ and a new house to put it in, Wraight told the judge.
‘You mean that he was not once bitten, twice shy, he was the opposite,’ the judge remarked upon hearing of Nasteski’s purchase, overlooking the fact that the car dealer’s prize new painting did not have the uncertain provenance of Orange Lavender Bay—Whiteley had been working on the multi-panel beach scene in his studio before his death, leaving behind an unfinished work. The work’s provenance was solid—nothing to be shy about.
Justice Croucher let it be known that he liked both of the paintings that he had looked at ‘for weeks on end’ in court, but he couldn’t understand how one could be worth $1.1 million and the other $2.5 million. He also questioned how serious the police had been about prosecuting the crime—it took until 2014 for Gant and Siddique to be charged, seven years after the investigation began. Did the delay suggest that the police didn’t consider it a particularly grave crime, and should that in turn influence his own assessment of it, the judge wondered aloud. So now the police’s apparent lack of interest—or lack of experience in prosecuting such a case—could be used to justify a lighter sentence? The fault lines kept emerging in this case. Borg pointed out that this was only the second criminal trial for art fraud in Australia, and that this type of fraud was difficult to detect and uncover and ‘even more difficult, as we have seen, to prosecute’. But that didn’t mean that it was somehow of a less serious nature than other frauds: this particular crime ‘involved conduct that was premeditated, sophisticated and took place over several years’. It was not the same as hocking a fake Rolex.
While Wraight urged a stay of sentence, Remy van de Wiel impressed upon the judge his client’s perilous mental state. Siddique was suffering depression and having suicidal thoughts—the prospect of jail could push him over the edge.
‘I don’t want to say it all out in open court but Your Honour’s read the paragraphs in the psychological reports and psychiatric reports as to Mr Siddique indicating that he would want to kill himself if he goes into prison, but hasn’t had a clear plan of it,’ van de Wiel told the judge.
I later read in one of Siddique’s psychiatric reports that while his commitment to his family was keeping him from harming himself, he had ‘specifically researched suicide methods online’. Another report stated that he had ‘no worked-out plan’ but had ‘mentioned vague thoughts about “eating lots of buttery foods”’ with no care for the consequences to his health.
While Justice Croucher demanded rigor in the application of the law, he was not a hard man. He had once wept while sentencing a man to nine and a half years’ jail for killing his partner’s son. And now he solemnly announced that he was ‘troubled’ by Siddique’s mental state—and that if he formed the view that a stay of sentence was proper in the interests of justice for Siddique, it would be cruel not to treat Gant the same way.
In these unfortunate circumstances I would at last learn more about the guarded Aman Siddique. No fewer than twenty-three references were presented to the court on his behalf—including from his wife and two of his children. His friends described a man of ‘scrupulous character’, ‘a good husband, father and friend’, ‘protective and proud of his family’, ‘committed to his art’, a charitable man. Aman had ‘always been a serious and depressed type of person’, wrote one, and become progressively so during ‘this matter’. He was one of the founding members of the United Muslim Migrants Association and had made many donations to the association, buying a fridge for the kitchen, curtains for the building and giving $8000 in cash to the fundraising appeal after the Pakistan earthquake in October 2005. Although raised as a Muslim, he did not generally observe religious practice until two years ago.
One of Siddique’s wealthiest and most powerful clients—Maria Myers, AC, philanthropist, art patron and wife of Allan Myers—came out in support of the conservator. She submitted a reference, writing of her extensive dealings with Siddique over the past twenty-three years: he had restored works of art for her, assessed potential purchases of art and bid at auctions on her behalf. She had also bought paintings from him ‘where he acted as an agent and where he was the vendor’.
‘In my view and my long experience he is an honest and skilled restorer and dealer,’ she wrote.
His friend from their student days at the Courtauld Institute, Sydney conservator Catherine Lillico-Thompson, who was originally going to give evidence for the defence on the solubility tests, wrote that Siddique followed the moral and ethical codes of practice that required conservators and restorers ‘to honour and respect the artists’ works that have been entrusted to them’. She had acted as referee for Siddique when he was invited to Australia in 1983 to work at the Regional Galleries Association of Victoria.
‘Though it is many years since I first met Aman Siddique, the first impressions he made have endured. He sometimes appears sombre but dignified, perhaps in an attempt to hide shyness. He is truthful and trustworthy.’ She could ‘confidently recommend him to be a man of a good character’.
One letter moved Justice Croucher so profoundly that he declared: ‘I’d want the world to read that.’ It was a letter from Siddique’s daughter, in which she pleaded with the judge not to sentence her father to jail. Her family had suffered immeasurably during the past two and a half years, and had been so devastated by the conviction that she could not ‘imagine it proceeding any further’. It struck me that she referred to her father throughout with a capital ‘F’—Father. Was it a mark of the esteem in which she held him? Her father was not an opportunist, he was not aggressive, she wrote.
‘He is the
epitome of a good and loving Father and husband and has done everything in his power to ensure that his family are taken care of.’ He had instilled morality and ethics into his children. In contrast to newspaper articles that ‘sprout with lies and negative comments’ about him, she described a kind, hard-working man whose generosity was exploited.
‘Guy Morel is an excellent example of this. My father felt sorry for him. He allowed Morel to use his premises at Easey Street, for 10 years with not a cent of rent paid.’
Her father had helped many others in the art industry, allowing them free storage space at Easey Street, bought art materials on their behalf and warned them against buying questionable paintings.
‘Many of these people refused to come forward to help him when he has needed it, instead more worried about protecting themselves,’ she wrote.
She recounted his story of exile, being forced to leave Uganda, arriving in England destitute and later building a new life for himself and his family in Australia.
‘Why would someone who has worked so hard to establish himself jeopardise it all?’ she asked. It was a good question. Why? She maintained her father’s innocence: ‘He is incredibly talented at restoring works of art; however is not so talented that he is able to mimic the greats.’ He had spent ‘upwards of $500 000’ to defend himself, in the process eroding the property portfolio that her parents had invested in with the intention of providing for their children. ‘Everything will be taken away and we will be destroyed.’
She feared for her family’s future, and she feared that her father, who had not become an Australian citizen, would be deported to the United Kingdom if he were sentenced to more than twelve months.
‘My family has had to sell two properties to pay for legal fees. As a result of the conviction the remainder of my parent’s properties have been seized. These will be sold off, including the family home which I grew up in, to compensate Pridham. We will be kicked out of our own home. Whereas Gant who is bankrupt, their family properties are untouched even though he actually made money and sold the paintings.’
Whiteley on Trial Page 32