The Art of the Con: The Most Notorious Fakes, Frauds, and Forgeries in the Art World (22 page)

Zabrin didn’t confine his criminal activities to just art scams. In 2001, Zabrin was arrested and convicted for shoplifting a handbag off a display rack at Neiman Marcus. Four years later he would also be arrested for shoplifting a crystal figurine from Saks Fifth Avenue. But it wasn’t until May 6, 2006, when postal inspectors and FBI agents executed a search warrant at Zabrin’s home, that he was again facing serious prison time. This time, agents discovered a number of counterfeit prints and records regarding the sale of other pieces via art galleries and the internet. In one instance, investigators discovered that a customer returned a piece that was found to be counterfeit and was issued a refund by Zabrin, who in turn resold the same piece as authentic. The investigators also determined that Zabrin was receiving the bad prints from Bonfiglioli, Bengis, Kennedy, and Amiel’s grandson.

Zabrin knew the routine and quickly agreed to again enter into what was perhaps his second-best role after con man—government informant. Zabrin wore a wire and made a number of recordings for the feds that helped them to bring criminal fraud charges, still apparently pending, against the other members of the ring. According to assistant U.S. attorneys Nancy DePodesta and Stephen Heinze, “[Zabrin], unlike many criminal defendants, readily admitted the scope of his criminal conduct and was forthcoming when asked questions regarding other subjects and aspects of the investigation.”
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However, all was not well with Zabrin’s performance: federal investigators discovered that Zabrin’s addiction to pulling off scams was so strong that he had perpetrated a new one even while being handled as a federal informant.

Agents running the investigation orchestrated calls from Zabrin to a particular target. In an astonishingly risky and bold scheme, Zabrin made additional calls to the target unbeknownst to his federal agent handlers. In these unauthorized calls, Zabrin negotiated two separate purchases for a total of eight Chagall lithographs that would be financed by his business partner. However, Zabrin told his partner that he had only purchased six, with the intent to sell the remaining two for his own profit behind his partner’s back.

Federal agents and prosecutors were irate, as they realized that this sort of unscrupulous behavior seriously jeopardized Zabrin’s usefulness as a cooperator and eventual witness at trial. Zabrin’s ploy proved self-destructive. This time, prosecutors made no pleas to the sentencing judge for leniency. Instead, the assistant U.S. attorneys assigned to the case were harsh in their recommendation to federal judge Robert Dow. Dismissing the defense attorney’s excuses of mental illness for his behavior, they described Zabrin as “a very cunning individual who is able to effectively lie and manipulate others for personal gain.” Zabrin, they argued, “poses a serious risk of recidivism”; they added that his crimes “constitute a thoroughly planned-out scheme to defraud hundreds of people over a period of several years.”
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Despite his cooperation and assistance, Judge Dow agreed with prosecutors and dealt with Zabrin severely, sentencing him to nine years in federal prison. Meanwhile, the grandson of the man who reigned over this enormous counterfeit lithograph scam like a mafia don also pleaded guilty in federal court for his role in feeding fraudulent fine art to unsuspecting buyers. On June 15, 2011, U.S. District
Court judge Joan Gottschall heard Leon Amiel Jr. ask for mercy, choking up as he told her “my children are my life.” Judge Gottschall, who could have sent Leon Jr. away for nine years in prison, was sympathetic to his request and sentenced him to only two. She cited his commitment to his family, his mental problems, and a family history of emotional and physical abuse in her ruling. “He (was) being raised by criminals,” she said.
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Ten

The Telescam

Forged and faked paintings are completely different things from their stolen counterparts. Stolen paintings are hidden away, banished from human contact, and stashed in attics, basements, storage units, and drug hides. But phony paintings live a different life. They hang on walls in homes, galleries, and even museums. They are like amateur boxers, jutting out their glass jaws and daring the observer to punch. However, the scam that moves the painting from knowing forger to unsuspecting buyer is ideally and most commonly pulled off in private, in a one-on-one meeting between the con artist and the buyer, who wants to believe they’ve found something special at a price that is even more special. And that’s what makes the scam pulled off by Kristine Eubanks so audacious.

Eubanks, assisted by her husband Gerald Sullivan, was the brains behind an enterprise called Fine Art Treasures Gallery, which broadcasted a televised art auction for six hours every Friday and Saturday night on Dish Network and DirecTV. As her website advertised, her “auction show offers the best in fine art, original paintings, museum quality prints, bronze statues and other great art that will accent your
home or office or make a beautiful gift.”
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Eubanks, a Chicago native, had an unusually diverse professional background for a founder of a television art auction. She followed her dreams of working in Hollywood, and eventually moved to California where she served as executive vice president and partner at Elixer Entertainment, a film production company out of Los Angeles. After a successful stint at Elixer, Eubanks embarked on a career in marketing with Iwerks Entertainment in Burbank, a firm that developed special-format movie theaters. A driven, competitive businesswoman, she also studied fine art photography, an endeavor that served as a primer on the high-value prints and lithographs. And in the early 2000s, she discovered a burgeoning new form of art print called a giclée, which would open up new possibilities for her.

On her website for the television show, Eubanks provided a list of useful art-related terms for the novice art buyer. Posting the definitions made sense: part of the business model of Fine Art Treasures Gallery was clearly the marketing of high-end art to middle-class consumers who otherwise would not have access to the works of famous artists and who might be making their first foray into the purchase of art. Everything from “Artist Proof” to “Watercolor” was defined. The definition she supplied for
giclée,
however, was equal parts explanation and sales pitch. It read: “A giclée is a fine art print produced from state-of-the-art digital print-making and intuitive artistic treatment on archival watercolor paper or canvas that lasts for at least 75 years. Because of its archival quality, giclée fine art prints, [
sic
] are increasingly sought after by major galleries, museums, and private collections to help preserve fine art for generations to come.”
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Interestingly, the folk rock musician Graham Nash was at the forefront of the creation of giclée prints. Nash, an accomplished digital photographer, was credited with the first use of inkjet printing in a fine art application, when in 1991 he made samples of his work using
the giclée process on a high-tech—and very expensive—IRIS 3047 commercial graphics printer. In fact, Nash coined the term
digigraph
for this new form, but it didn’t stick. It was an associate of his in the field of high-quality print production, Jack Duganne, who assigned the term
giclée
to the process in order to give the product a bit more panache when an artist for whom he had made some of the prints asked him what she should call them. “I was looking for a French or Italian word, because so many art techniques have foreign names,” he said. Adopting the French word for a jet nozzle—
gicleur
—because of the way the inkjet printer sprays color onto the paper, he opted for the word
giclée,
meaning something that was sprayed.
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The rapid and continuous improvement in the quality of commercially available high-end printers, combined with the fact that they are becoming more and more affordable, has led to an increase in the production of giclée works by popular artists. Today, giclée prints can be of such great quality that they appear in museums, both as digital copies of works being stored for preservation and as original works in exhibitions. Even noteworthy artists such as Frank Stella, Robert Rauschenberg, and David Hockney have been known to create giclée works.

Kristine Eubanks saw the potential that giclée held from an entrepreneurial perspective, and she placed an advertisement in the trade publication
Art Business News,
offering high-quality printing on canvas under the company name Finer Image. Martha O’Brien, whose husband John was an up-and-coming, well-regarded California artist, happened upon the ad. John O’Brien painted works best described as Contemporary Romantic Realism, creating images influenced by the Impressionists but in a style uniquely his own. His paintings included Parisian settings, landscapes, Irish life, Art Deco, and street scenes. He had studied his craft abroad and at the Art Students League of New York, alumni of which include
Frederic Remington, Norman Rockwell, Roy Lichtenstein, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Jackson Pollock, just to name a very few.
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With giclées still relatively unknown to many artists, O’Brien was initially apprehensive. “He didn’t like the idea of his work being cheapened,” Martha, a ballet teacher, recalled. But Finer Image provided him with a sample giclée and O’Brien was floored.
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“He couldn’t believe the color jumped out so brilliantly,” Martha said. The O’Briens began ordering custom printing for John’s artwork by sending Eubanks’s company high-resolution images of the work via photographic slides, and sometimes even sent originals for Finer Image to sell to a client. Then Eubanks made them a great offer: if O’Brien entered into an exclusive printing arrangement with Finer Image, they would realize a substantial income using their mass-marketing abilities—Eubanks’s forte. O’Brien’s works would get more exposure, be sold on a greater scale, and be of very high quality, all without sacrificing control because he’d be signing every piece. He was all in.
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The O’Briens were excited over the promise that the Eubanks plan held. The giclée-making dealer told John and Martha that they could make six figures with their art, and things were looking up. The money from Eubanks arrived steadily as John continued to send paintings to her print shop. It was an important break in the life of the young artist, his wife, and their two young daughters. With visions of Thomas Kincaid–like success in their minds, the O’Briens were ready for John’s talent to take him to the next level of fame for American artists. “Okay, here’s our ticket into that circle,” Martha said. The deal with Eubanks was sure to “get his name out there big time and get full page ads at
Art Business News
and attract the collector who would pay $50,000 for one of John’s paintings.”
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Just as with all innocent victims, the O’Briens found that the Eubanks plan wasn’t all that they had hoped. John soon found that the television auction show wasn’t the only venue through which his
works were being sold as authentic signed works. A friend of O’Brien’s informed him that he had seen one of the artist’s signed works on eBay, the online auction site. The O’Briens had already decided that perhaps the site would be a good place for them to sell John’s works to make some additional income. But when they went onto eBay to post some pieces for sale, they were shocked to find that the site had already been flooded with John’s works for auction. Worse yet, many of the artworks were knockoffs—pieces he never actually signed.

This was O’Brien’s worst fear come true. Indeed, any artist would be dismayed to lose control of their works in such a fashion, for this was a twofold problem: not only were there lesser-quality prints that he would not have—and never had—signed now on the market, but they were in such number as to drive the value of his art down. And soon, even more bad news poured in: the O’Briens learned that his works were being sold on Princess Cruises.
8

Art auctions at sea aboard cruise ships are a big business. The biggest player in the game is Park West Gallery, a Michigan-based company that describes its “Park West at Sea” branch as a group of “onboard art galleries” on more than 70 luxury cruise ships around the world, including ships in the Carnival, Celebrity, Holland America, Norwegian, Regent Seven Seas, and Royal Caribbean lines.
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The business is incredibly lucrative—the
New York Times
reported that Park West Gallery was bringing in $300 million in revenue annually as of 2008.
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Though Park West was embroiled in a series of civil lawsuits filed against the firm by parties alleging the sale of fakes and forgeries—including suits involving works by, of course, Salvador Dalí—Park West’s chief executive, Albert Scaglione, has stated publicly that “in Park West’s 40-year history, we have never sold a nonauthentic work of art.”
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Indeed, neither Scaglione nor Park West has ever been the subject of criminal charges.

Princess Cruise Lines, which has never used Park West Gallery,
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has itself been mixed up with fraud allegations. Two retired women—Terrie Kifer and Joyce Sexton, both of Delaware—saw ads for an art auction aboard the Princess cruise ship they had boarded. Taken by the art available at steep discounts, the pair spent $86,000 on art. Princess noticed their purchases and invited them back for another cruise and membership in their Art Connoisseurs Program free of charge, an attractive offer for two women with dreams of opening their own art gallery. The pair was wined and dined by Princess aboard a ten-day cruise in the Mediterranean and even met some of the artists whose works might draw their interest. The sales pitch worked: Kifer and Sexton spent an additional $250,000 on art onboard the ship, purchasing works by Picasso, Chagall, Miró, and Erté. A year later, the women flew to Copenhagen to board another complimentary cruise, again with an art auction onboard. This time they met the Soviet-émigré artist Martiros Manoukian, a Surrealist painter whose painting,
Tranquil Remorse,
caught the attention of the women. Bidding against another passenger, the pair won the Manoukian for $71,640. On a later cruise, Sexton and Kifer saw
Tranquil Remorse
again available for sale. Shocked, they approached the artist and the ship’s representative, only to be told that the piece was not exactly the same as the one they purchased. Worse yet, this time
Tranquil Remorse
sold for $20,000 less than they paid. Though Princess offered to buy their painting back, the pair filed suit against the cruise line and the artist in state court in Florida.
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The parties reached a confidential settlement with Princess admitting no wrongdoing.
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Kristine Eubanks was a source for Princess Cruises, and not only were John O’Brien’s works being sold onboard their ships, but another artist, Charlene Mitchell, would find that her prints were for sale at sea without her knowledge. Eubanks’s pitch to Mitchell was
not unlike the one she made to O’Brien: you provide the paintings, I’ll copy and sell them. Mitchell, who had already achieved some modicum of success with her paintings on her own, was shocked one day when a person contacted her looking to commission a portrait of his fiancée. The caller told Mitchell that he had come to know her work from a piece he bought aboard a Princess cruise. Mitchell was taken aback: to her knowledge, none of her works were being sold in auctions on cruises. Worse yet, the pieces were fakes and, like O’Brien’s, never authorized or signed by Mitchell. It turned out that thousands of Princess passengers had bought unauthorized prints sold in bulk to the cruise line by Kristine Eubanks.
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Indeed, their works had flooded the market, with a deleterious effect on their value.

To make matters even worse, though the televised auctions were initially profitable (Mitchell says that she made up to $10,000 some weeks
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), soon neither Mitchell nor O’Brien was seeing any money from Eubanks, despite the sales on the televised auctions, eBay, and on the cruises. In 2002, the O’Briens didn’t see a penny, but Eubanks did.
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“It was such easy money [for Eubanks]. It was just like counterfeiting money,” Martha O’Brien would say of Eubanks’s giclée business. “I mean you’ve got a printer. You type in 100 and push the button
print
and you’ve got 100 images.”
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John O’Brien was furious over his loss of control and the nonpayment for his work. And when Charlene Mitchell began questioning the lack of compensation for her work, Eubanks’s personality changed from that of a pleasant marketing professional to that of an adversary.

Of course, it wasn’t just artists
who were victimized by Kristine Eubanks and Fine Art Treasures Gallery. The unauthorized works were sold to unknowing dupes who wanted badly to believe that they had come across a special deal, and Eubanks found plenty of them. By 2007 it was estimated that the operation had brought in
more than $20 million from over 10,000 victims across the country.
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The vast majority of them were unaware they had fallen victim to a scam. But one who caught on to Eubanks’s scheme was Myron Temchin.

As Temchin recalls,
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he and his wife, Mary, were flipping the channels on the television in a hotel in San Rafael, California, one evening in 2005 when they came across the Fine Art Treasures Gallery auction. When Picasso-signed lithographs came on the screen, they were intrigued. The auction show stated that the prints were originals, signed by Picasso himself, and valued at between $50,000 and $58,000. Further, each came with a certificate of authenticity from the Manchester Gallery, David Smith Authentication Service. The deals were too good to pass up, and the Temchins bid on two Picasso lithographs,
The Bullfight
and
Trois Femmes,
winning them both for a total of just over $4,000.