October 2, 2000

Three alleged mob associates arrested in art fraud scam

September 30, 2000
NEW YORK (AP) -- Three mob associates were arrested on charges of trying to peddle "cheesy" fake artworks that they claimed were created by Picasso, Chagall and Rubens, federal prosecutors said.
Prosecutors said the defendants planned to sell the fakes through an upscale Manhattan gallery for $32 million. Federal agents, using wiretaps and an informant, disrupted the alleged scheme and no paintings were sold. Defendants Dominick "Little Dom" Curra, 56, Kevin McMahon, 35, and Robert Walsh, 35, are associates of reputed Gambino organized crime soldier Charles Carneglia, prosecutors said.
Curra and Walsh were arrested at their homes Friday morning. McMahon was arrested in jail where he is being held on federal extortion charges, Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew Weissmann said.
The defendants were charged with wire fraud, which is punishable by up to five years in prison. Walsh and Curra pleaded innocent when they were arraigned in federal court.
Walsh remained in custody Friday; Curra was released on $750,000 bond. Weissmann said the phony art package included two pieces purportedly by Picasso, one by Marc Chagall, one by Fernando Botero and one by Peter Paul Rubens. He said the fakes "looked really cheesy."
Weissmann said the fake Rubens was in fact an authentic 12-inch-by-12-inch canvas from "the school of Rubens," meaning it was painted by a Rubens-era (1577-1640) artist in Rubens' style.
The Rubens-style canvas, worth about $2,000, was stolen from a private residence in Maryland about 30 years ago, the federal complaint said. The defendants and the informant, who has pleaded guilty in another case and is cooperating with prosecutors, planned to ask $30 million for the "Rubens" and $500,000 for each of the other four fakes.
Weissmann said he did not know where the defendants got those paintings. The complaint said Walsh told the informant in a March 31 telephone conversation that the Rubens was real, had been insured by Lloyd's of London, and had been owned by a "real gangster."
http://www.cnn.com/2000/US/09/30/mob.fakeart.ap/index.html

From: Jim Holley jim.holley@wadsworthatheneum.org
Subject:

Cultural Property Rules of Decorum

A good day to the Network,
Our Protection Services Team is in the midst of putting together a formal policy for rules of decorum we would like all visitors and particularly school groups follow when they visit. Although we have general guidelines, I am reaching out to the Network to see if and what other folks are doing in this area of patron services. Please feel free to forward any thoughts or suggestions related to this topic to me.
Thank you,
James Holley
jim.holley@wadsworthatheneum.org

From: newsletter@theartnewspaper.com
Subject:

BANGKOK'S LAST POCKET OF TRADITIONAL CULTURE UNDER THREAT

The Art Newspaper.com
http://www.theartnewspaper.com

This week's top stories: (abbreviated, T.C.)

BANGKOK'S LAST POCKET OF TRADITIONAL CULTURE UNDER THREAT
BANGKOK. The canal-side building housing the Jim Thompson House Museum is virtually the only island of traditional culture left in Bangkok. Now, just months after the museum opened an impressive new wing, the Thai government is proceeding with plans to build an expressway right over it.
http://www.allemandi.com/TAN/news/article.asp?idart=3293

BARNES FOUNDATION MAY SELL 'MINOR' ITEMS
MERION, PA. Is the Barnes Foundation revisiting one of the most deplorable moments of its past to fund its future? Reports from Philadelphia suggest that the embattled foundation, which now admits having squandered much of its endowment on lawsuits, is now contemplating an $85 million capital campaign, which could be fuelled by the sale of "minor" objects that had belonged to Albert C. Barnes, the art collector who decreed that no paintings from his collection could be sold or loaned.
http://www.allemandi.com/TAN/news/article.asp?idart=3230

From: Dan Chure danchure@easilink.com
Subject:

Icarosaurus auction dispute

FOSSIL'S CO-DISCOVERER FILES SUIT OVER RIGHT TO AUCTION PROCEEDS

Bergen Record Corp
Saturday, September 30, 2000
By PETER J. SAMPSON
Staff Writer
With the one-of-a-kind fossil of a prehistoric gliding reptile now safely back in a New York museum, a new battle is brewing over the $150,000 it fetched at auction last month.
Michael Brandrowski, 55, of Cliffside Park, one of a trio of teenage fossil hunters who unearthed the previously unknown creature 40 years ago, is suing his old digging pal, Alfred Siefker, 56, of North Bergen, in a dispute over the proceeds of the sale.
Brandrowski, now a construction supervisor, contends that as the actual discoverer of the 200 million-year-old fossil, he was the lawful owner and the money should go to him.
An attorney for Siefker, after whom the creature was named, said Friday that Brandrowski's claim is about 30 years too late.
The suit, filed last week in state Superior Court in Hackensack, marks the latest chapter in the saga of Icarosaurus siefkeri, a winged lizard whose discovery in 1960 in the former Granton Quarry in North Bergen led scientists to revise the evolutionary time line.
The only known specimen of its kind, the gliding reptile --- with a 10-inch wingspan and 7-inch-long body -- proved that vertebrates took to the air millions of years earlier than previously thought. In the months prior to the auction, the fossil had become the focus of intense debate over whether such rare artifacts should be sold for profit on the open market, where they can end up in the hands of private collectors and be lost to the public and the scientific community. Soon after its discovery, the fossil was taken to the American Museum of Natural History in New York where it was studied and described. The suit charges that Siefker "wrongfully took possession" of the artifact from the museum in 1989, and after failing to find a buyer privately, put it on the auction block Aug. 27.
A retired California businessman paid $167,500, including commissions, for the fossil and on Tuesday brought it "home" to the museum, where it will go on display next week. Meanwhile proceeds from the auction are still in the hands of the California auction house Butterfield & Butterfield, which handled the sale.
Also named in the lawsuit is Ridgefield attorney Ronald S. Genovese, who under an Aug. 18 agreement between Siefker and Brandrowski is to act as escrow agent holding the sale proceeds until a court decides how to distribute them.
"I'm confident that justice will prevail and that the monies from the auction will be turned over to Mr. Siefker for his medical treatment in short order," Genovese said Friday. Siefker suffered a debilitating stroke in 1990, and remains disabled.
His attorney, Robert Avery, also of Ridgefield, said the deadline for Brandrowski to stake an ownership claim expired three decades ago. "We're convinced that the allegations will be dismissed rather quickly," he said.
As teenagers, Siefker, Brandrowski, and Joseph Geiler, a Colgate Palmolive purchasing agent who now lives in Cambridge, Ohio, regularly scoured the quarry for fossils.
"[Siefker] was the one who introduced them to the study of rocks and fossils and to paleontology in general . . . and, indeed, had the contacts with the museum," Avery said.
Avery would not discuss how the fossil was found, but said Siefker has documentation proving that Brandrowski surrendered his rights and was compensated.
Siefker was not available for comment but has said he gained sole ownership of the relic by trading Brandrowski a telescope, $30, and some fossils for it.
Geiler, 55, backs up Brandrowski's claim of finding the fossil and says he helped to extract it from the quarry. In a sworn statement dated Aug. 4, Geiler granted any share of the auction proceeds to which he may be entitled to Brandrowski, "for himself or to share with Alfred Siiefker." Brandrowski and Geiler only learned this summer that Siefker had removed the fossil from the museum a decade ago, after filing a $60 million suit.
Siefker, who has been disabled for years, grappled with the dilemma of auctioning the fossil but in the end had no other way to pay for the medical care he needs, Avery said.
"If it were not for his illness, he would not have had to sell the fossil," Avery said.

An artiste in the art of forgery

By JULIAN COMAN
Monday 2 October 2000
The life of a judge in the provincial French town of Orleans can be a tedious affair. Most court sessions throw up nothing more exciting than a rural dispute over farmland, or a couple of petty thefts.
Last Monday, however, there was an excited buzz in the local Palais de Justice. Instead of examining the minor misdemeanours of her fellow citizens, Judge Josiane Ardoin-Voru found herself handing out a one-year prison sentence to a man judged by French police to be "the most sophisticated and prolific master-forger in the history of European art". Orleans was agog.
The extraordinary progress of the 57-year-old Geert Jan Jansen from the School of Fine Art in Amsterdam to a small-town courtroom 50 miles from Paris, is a story of two false names, seven fake bank accounts and up to 1,500 fake works of art.
Or so police believe. Even now, six years after Mr Jansen was first rumbled, the exact number of forgeries he produced is still unknown, since he alone can distinguish between the real and the fake in his vast art collection, which is now in the hands of the French state.
Mr Jansen's duplicitous career was born of artistic frustration. In the late 1970s, he was a highly promising young artist with a fine future. Having graduated with distinction from one of the most prestigious European academies of modern art, he set about making a name for himself in Amsterdam's artistic circles.
Boldly, he placed his savings in a new outlet for contemporary art - the Raam gallery, on the Keizersgracht, the grandest of the city's canals - filling it with paintings of his own and a few by favoured modern masters such as Karel Appel, Chagall and Miro.
Then things started to go wrong. Mr Jansen's abstract paintings did not sell as well as he would have liked. Money started to get tight. Landlords became restless.
"Paying the rent was getting difficult," Mr Jansen said last week. "I looked around at the other galleries, and thought, in the end, you've got to give the people what they want. It worked very well.
"My first fake 'Appel' was sold to a small auction room for a handy amount of money. The art dealer who bought it said he recognised the painting from an exhibition he had seen 30 years ago! I found imitation easy and I was good at it."
Mr Jansen continued to produce the occasional fake when times got particularly hard. Then, still deep in debt, he met the French art dealer Adrien Venema. If Mr Jansen was by now a crooked artist, Mr Venema had long been a crooked dealer. The Frenchman proposed a lucrative partnership. "Mr Venema could see how talented my client was in producing imitative works," said Jerome Wedrychowski, the lawyer who is representing Mr Jansen in Orleans. He saw how much potential there was and he offered to help." The help that Mr Venema could provide was invaluable. In his Paris home, the dealer had meticulously collected all that was required for the forger's art. He possessed several rare typewriters, manufactured between 1920 and 1950, complete with writing paper from the same period. There was also a collection of stamps, bearing the names of the art experts usually called on to verify a Picasso, a Dali or a Magritte.
Painstakingly, Mr Venema taught his protege how to produce a flawless certificate of authenticity for almost any 20th-century work of art. Once Mr Jansen had also mastered the signatures of the great painters, the production line of forgeries was ready to be activated.
By now based in an isolated 17th-century chateau in central France, Mr Jansen worked solidly for three years. Between 1991 and 1994, he turned his home into the world's most unorthodox museum of modern art. Among the "exhibits" were paintings that were to be passed off as the work of Appel, Cocteau, Klimt, Miro, Magritte, Dali, Dufy, Chagall, Matisse and many, many more.
In small batches, the pictures were sent from the chateau to Paris. Mr Venema, until his death in 1993, sold them on to galleries throughout Europe, taking his cut along the way. An average fake went for between Ł500 and Ł15,000. Mr Jansen has confessed to selling around 30 paintings. Police, however, believe the figure is far higher.
"Abstract expressionism was the most difficult to pull off," said Mr Jansen. "You know, the paintings that everyone thinks their four-year-old son could do. But I tried my hand at everything. Oils, crayons, engravings, watercolours, etchings."
The variety and scope of his forgeries is still a considerable source of pride. "I think versatility was my strongest point," he says, "I moved from genre to genre, seeking to crack new styles. My proudest moment came when Appel carried around one of my fakes at a gallery, actually believing that he had painted it." A confidence trick on this epic scale required other deceptions if it was to succeed. All trace of the struggling artist who had opened a gallery in Amsterdam had to be erased. Mr Jansen carried two false passports - one in the name of Jan van den Bergen, the other identifying the bearer as Johan William Van Tonceren. Seven bank accounts were opened using false names, one in Germany and six in France.
After the death of Mr Venema, Mr Jansen took a safe house in Orleans, at 2 Rue des Maltotiers, from where he conducted the business side of his activities, helped by his lover, Ellen van Baren. Then one day he over-reached himself. In April 1994, experts at an art auction in Stuttgart spotted a false Chagall and a false Dufy. The police were called and the paintings traced back to "Jan van den Bergen", a Dutchman now living in France. It was the beginning of the end.
When police arrived in Orleans, they found the house in Rue des Maltotiers deserted and a forwarding address for mail. Soon they were knocking on the door of the chateau, where, said one policeman, they found "enough fake works of art to fill the Louvre". An investigation that was to last for six years was under way.
Back in Orleans, police placed a substantial selection of Mr Jansen's fakes on display, hoping to jog the memory of deceived art dealers. But in the galleries and exhibition halls of Europe, there has been an embarrassed silence. By the time of last week's verdict, only two victims had come forward. Mr Jansen takes this as a vindication of his art. "Clearly people were happy with what I sold them. I always tried to deliver top-quality art. Okay, people thought they were buying an Appel or a Matisse, but if they're happy, so what? They still believe that what they have is real." In fact, Mr Jansen does not really believe that what he did should be classified as a crime at all.
"What I did in the world of art should be compared to similar activities in the world of music," he said. "A musician is paid to reproduce the work of Bach, or Mozart, or Beethoven. His job is to produce an exact rendition of a masterpiece. That is precisely what I have been doing with Picasso and Miro and Appel." In the aftermath of his trial, Mr Jansen's future looks far brighter than it ever did in the days when he had no money with which to pay the rent. Since he has already spent six months in a French prison while awaiting trial, Mr Jansen will not be required to serve the one-year jail sentence imposed in Orleans for fraud. Instead, he and Ms van Baren, who was found guilty of complicity, are to be barred from French territory for three years.
Mr Jansen will therefore be free to exploit his new-found fame. For the scandal of his forged pictures is at last bringing him the recognition that was so elusive in the days when he exhibited under his own name. Dutch galleries that spurned earlier Jansen work are now offering him exhibitions. He has also started to make regular appearances as an art pundit on Dutch television and earns a living writing scripts for documentary-dramas. Only one cloud looms on the horizon. After finally giving her verdict last Monday, Judge Ardoin-Voru turned her attention to the fate of the 1,500 works of art that were seized from Mr Jansen's chateau. She ordered that all the fakes be destroyed, while all genuine works of art, including those by Mr Jansen himself, would be sold off, if it could be established that they were indeed genuine. Distraught at the prospect of losing the only honest works of art he has ever produced, Mr Jansen has lodged an appeal. His grounds, explained by the lawyer Mr Wedrychowski, may strike the Orleans court as a little odd, given the defendant's former career.
"These are the works and fruits of more than a quarter of a century's artistic endeavour," explained Mr Wedrychowski, who is himself the owner of a Jansen original. "The court has established that copying and forgery is wrong. By the same token, an artist has an inalienable right to the possession of what he has produced in his own name and Mr Jansen has an inalienable right to his own pictures. It's the other side of the same principle." The excitement is not over yet in Mme Ardoin-Voru's courtroom.
http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/20001002/A26246-2000Oct1.html