Caveat Emptor (23 page)

In the late seventies, Miami was
the
place to be. The city was awash in money. Ostentatious displays of wealth were everywhere, much of it drug related. Clubs, chic restaurants, and high-end boutiques were popping up overnight, and Coconut Grove was one of the hottest spots.

I even ran into Roy and Dave one day on the street. We'd meet occasionally and have lunch at the Coco Plum, a café they owned in the Grove. George Campbell's business was booming too. It wasn't unusual for his high-society patrons to stop in on a Saturday afternoon and drop fifty or sixty grand for paintings and antiques. It didn't take long for old George to figure out that the amazing finds I made for his buddy Dr. G were in fact paintings I'd created myself, but he wasn't interested in the details: all he wanted was paintings to put in his shop, and I was happy to oblige. Between the two of them, the money kept pouring in.

With Dr. G's estate serving as my base of operations, I discovered that the Miami area was one of the best places to find early-European furniture, in particular sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italian and Spanish pieces that had once decorated the rooms of the old Mediterranean-style mansions that were built there in the 1920s.

Profits from my paintings went straight into an inventory of rare furniture for our antique shop. I kept in touch with dealers I knew in New York City who dealt in these items. Some, like Piero Corsini, were Italian. They would buy pieces from us and then ship them to places like Florence or Milan, where, due to the pitifully weak US dollar, they sold at tremendous markups.

One afternoon, I got my hands on a few auction catalogs from Sotheby's featuring sales of early furniture in their London salesrooms. “Check out these prices,” I told José at the studio. José was astonished when he flipped through the catalog and saw many pieces just like ones we had in our inventory, estimated at prices several times more than we were asking.

“Wow!” he said. “Maybe we could get some of our stuff over there.”

“Exactly what I'm thinking,” I said.

At that time, we were loaded with inventory. Seventeenth-century tables, cassones, and credenzas were stacked in piles. We both agreed it was time to call Sotheby's.

CHAPTER TEN

Sotheby's Chump

A
uction houses are notoriously devious institutions and should never be trusted. However, most auction houses do not rig bids as some believe. They leave that to the dealers, who form buying combines, called “pools” or “rings.” There are many variations on these schemes, but basically several dealers who have agreed not to bid against each other conspire before the sale and decide upon who bids on what. They also agree that if the bidding dealer is successful, he pays a percentage of the hammer price into a pot, which is divided among the other members of the ring. Thus they buy off the competition among themselves and divert money that would otherwise go to the seller into the pockets of their fellow dealers.

Such schemes are highly illegal, but they flourish openly. The ring is a fact of life in the auction-house business, and the savvy seller hopes there are enough private bidders present at the sale to bid against the ring. Herein lies the problem.

Some sales assure a good crowd and vigorous competition. These are usually on weekends. Sales scheduled on weekday mornings often attract nothing but dealers who form a ring or, if you're lucky, two rings, and a few private bidders. If your items are thrown into one of these sales, get ready to bend over and drop your drawers.

Dealers manage to book
their
goods into the best sales before anyone else by wining and dining auction-house employees at ‘21' and the Four Seasons. Midweek sales are automatically reserved for suckers whose goods are sacrificed to the dealers' “knockout.” However, to outwit the experienced seller, they often employ a bait-and-switch routine.

Having shipped a planeload of furniture, estimated at seventy-five thousand dollars by Sotheby's, to their London salesrooms, and having been assured by the head of the furniture department, Mr. Hinchcliff, that our goods were to be included in a “very important” early European furniture sale, I was not even afforded the courtesy of a letter or phone call concerning a change in schedule. By the time I received my complimentary copy of the catalog, my goods had already been dumped in a Monday morning sale, which netted a mere fifteen thousand pounds. All the yelling and cursing in the world only earned me a cool Cambridge-accented “I beg your pardon, sir” from an unperturbed Hinchcliff. The moral of the story was clear. Always, especially when dealing with auction houses,
Get it in writing
.

I called New York and complained, but the most Sotheby's New York branch was willing to do was to issue me a check in dollars at a favorable exchange rate, if I sent them my check written on Barclays Bank, which had been issued in pounds—a very small consolation considering the hosing I'd taken. I sent them the check and received one in exchange for thirty-two thousand dollars.

A month had passed when a letter from Sotheby's, postmarked London, arrived at our studio. Inside was the Barclays check originally issued to us for the fifteen thousand pounds.

“What's this?” José asked.

Because of some incomparably splendid accounting snafu, the Sotheby's check in pounds sterling that we had sent to New York to be reissued in dollars had been returned to London, where, incredibly, it was simply rerouted back to us.

“It can't possibly be good,” I told José. “They must have put a stop on it.”

“Well,” he replied as he lifted the telephone receiver, “why don't I just check it out with Barclays in London?” Amazingly, the check was good, but our local bank said it would take at least two weeks to clear.

Twenty-four hours later, jet-lagged and blurry-eyed, I walked into the Bond Street branch of Barclays Bank, cashed the check without a hitch, and wired the funds back home.

To offset expenses, and remembering how, years ago, I had sold my first pictures in London, I had brought along a “Buttersworth,” just in case. It didn't take fifteen minutes before I was walking out of Omell Gallery on Duke Street with a thousand-pound check and making another visit to Barclays.

Two sublime months with an extra thirty-two grand in the bank had sailed by when a phone call disrupted an afternoon lunch in the courtyard. José answered from the studio and called out “Sotheby's London” and stretched out the receiver to me.

“Hinchcliff here,” began the snob. “I'm afraid there's been a bit of a mistake, Mr. Perenyi.…” I let him ramble on about the mix-up before delivering a perfunctory “Go fuck yourself, sir” in my most polished English.

Five minutes after I'd slammed down the phone, it rang again. A frantic Hinchcliff implored me to “consider that people's jobs are in jeopardy over this!”

“Look,” I said, stopping him in his tracks, “let
me
make this perfectly clear. First of all, you're never gonna see five cents of that money and, secondly, I'll show you the same consideration you showed me when you switched me into that fuckin' Monday morning sale. As for anyone losing their job, good, let them go out and earn an
honest
living for once!”

When Tony first started making money with my paintings, he treated me like gold. He insisted I stay at his apartment and spend every night out on the town with him. He was the consummate insider. You wanna see gangsters, he knew where to go. You wanna see movie stars, he knew the spot. You wanna meet Bobby De Niro, no problem. These days, he strolled the Upper East Side in a hand-tailored sports jacket (lifted off a hook in some café), a pair of expensive sunglasses, and Gucci loafers. The very embodiment of an Italian aristocrat, Tony oozed Continental charm. Gallery owners and maître d's would throw themselves at his feet when he walked in.

As time went by, though, and as Tony sold more and more of my pictures, I began to notice the Masaccio metamorphosis, whereby Tony transformed from a broke but good-natured friend into an insufferable tyrant when his fortunes changed. The pathology progressed in direct proportion to his accumulation of money. The catalyst in this particular episode of the metamorphosis was a wad of hundred-dollar bills totaling over fifty thousand dollars that he kept in a tin can hidden behind his refrigerator. As the roll got bigger and the transformation took its inevitable course, I went from the talent and brains behind the operation to a mere employee while he assumed, as he saw it, his rightful role as mastermind!

After lunch at La Goulue one cold winter afternoon, we decided to stroll up Madison Avenue and visit the galleries. Tony wanted to see a collection of gouaches and paintings by Alexander Calder at Perls Galleries. After we reviewed the collection, as we were leaving, Tony was carrying on about what a genius Calder was.

“Oh, come on, Tony,” I said, just to shut him up. “I could paint those things blindfolded.”

“Well, then, why the fuck don't you? Do I have to think of everything around here?”

“You mean you could sell those things?” I made the mistake of asking him.

“Sell them?!” Tony yelled right out on Madison Avenue. “What the fuck is wrong with you?! I could sell them all over the country!” Ten minutes later, we were at Rizzoli's buying up every book we could find on Calder and, right after that, we were at a table at Gino's studying the books over a bottle of wine.

“The compositions,” I explained to Tony, “are easy enough. Just a bunch of squiggles, spots, and circles on paper. The trick is to get exactly the right kind of paper with the watermark Calder uses.”

That mystery was solved by a visit to one of Tony's friends, who had several Calder gouaches hanging in his SoHo loft. Tony had sold him artworks (stolen) in the past, for bargain prices. Beholden to Tony, he put the gouaches at our disposal. After extracting two of them from their frames and holding them up to the light, I had all the information I needed. The next day, I ran around the neighborhood visiting every art-supply shop, but with no luck in locating the rare paper. Finally, someone sent me to Central Art Supply on Third Avenue, and they had it, watermark and all, for fifteen bucks a sheet.

Next, I loaded up on paints, brushes, and palettes.

Meanwhile, Tony was transforming his apartment into a factory, with easels, drafting tables, flood lamps, a clothesline, and hair dryers. I spent the next two days studying all the examples of Calder's gouaches I'd cut out of the books we bought. Then I sat down and composed my own “Calders” on large sketchpads laid out on the drafting tables. After working up thirty or forty ideas on the cheap paper, we selected around twenty that Tony considered to be on the “right wavelength.” Using the sketches as a guide, I was ready to transfer the ideas onto the real paper.

Just then, the weather was turning nasty and the city was bracing for a winter blizzard. I had to make one more trip to get a few more supplies on Third Avenue, but the storm had already begun with a fury. So violent was the freezing wind and snow that by the time I was heading back, I could only see a few feet in front of me. Clutching my supplies, I could barely breathe the icy-cold air. I lunged into a doorway to catch my breath before pushing on.

For two days, I worked at an exhausting pace. When I ran out of sketches, we worked up some more. Tony was ecstatic as he hung gouache after gouache, each bearing the scrawled signature of Calder, on the clothesline stretched across the apartment. I could see the dollar signs in his eyes as he gleefully blow-dried each one. Despite the weather, Tony braved the storm and returned with an endless stream of my favorite things—pastry from Veniero's, stuffed artichokes from Balducci's, bread, cheese, salami, and, of course, the best wine—anything to keep me happy and working. But no matter what he brought me, nothing could make up for the freezing cold of his apartment. Even with logs blazing in the fireplace, the antiquated heating system couldn't keep the place warm.

Finally I couldn't take the cold and exhaustion anymore and retreated uptown to a warm bedroom at the Alray. I soaked in a tub of hot water for an hour before getting into bed and felt I was in heaven. Tony, deeply concerned, called to make sure I hadn't headed for the airport instead.

“Yeah, I'm okay,” I told him.

“Okay. Well, I got a little something I'm gonna send up to you tonight,” he said, and abruptly hung up. A couple of hours later, the front desk called to say that there was a delivery for me. Assuming that Tony had actually found a way to deliver a box of pastry, I told the desk clerk to send it up.

When I opened the door, I was confronted by a beautiful dark-haired girl with olive skin and dreamy brown eyes. She was dressed in an army fatigue jacket, camouflage pants, and combat boots. My first thought was “I'm going to be assassinated!” But when I caught sight of the bottle of Courvoisier in her hand and she announced with a smile that she was Orly, a friend of Tony's, I asked her in.