by Leigh Keno
The authenticity of the Slocum label was clear on a number of fronts. The paper had the rough, starchy feel of eighteenth-century stock and also displayed some slight foxing (an industry term used to describe the discoloration of paper caused by moisture or mold). The edges of the roughly four-inch-by-two-inch rectangle were mildly tattered, having suffered the natural abrasions of use through the years. And on the drawer bottom, beneath the areas where the paper had crumbled away, there remained the unoxidized shadow of the label, left by centuries of coverage. When Sarah Slocum's chest of drawers sold at Christie's in June 1998, that label, along with the inarguably pristine shape of the piece, helped propel the final price to $4,732,500 (I was actually the underbidder on the chest, meaning that I cast the last bid before the winner). Obviously, the same would never be said for the label on the Tacoma bureau.
Offhand, I was unable to think of a direct source for the faked label displayed in the open drawer. I later learned that had I simply stepped over to Michael Moses's book lying open on the table nearby, I would have discovered its exact origin: an authentic Townsend label displayed on a tidy Federal table made by Townsend in the 1790s that had been reproduced to size in the text. The faked label was a photocopy of the illustration in Moses. The forger was apparently so careless in his copying technique that not only were the same acid stains visible in the paper but so, too, was the background wood grain of the table from which the label had originally been reproduced. The distinctive grain appeared as a darkened printed border on three of the fake label's four sides.
The underside of the fake desk shows no signs of natural oxidation or wear.
Throughout the course of my silent study, Alan and Cheryl Gorsuch had been watching my face with obvious concern, anxiously awaiting my feedback. Now I had a verdict and I wasn't about to mince words. “You've been had,” I said. “Someone is using you. There is nothing old about this bureau.”
Alan's face went white. Perhaps I had been too harsh. He took a deep breath, glanced over at his wife, and said quite seriously, “Honey, call the caterer; cancel the caviar.”
I truly felt sorry for him. It seemed like such a funny response to my words, but then Alan explained that he had planned a sizable postsale party with caviar and champagne and had even lined up some extra security for the event.
The exquisite dovetails found on the drawers of the Whitehorne desk.
The fake desk complete with reproduction brasses.
I waited a moment for the color to return to Alan's face and then asked him where he was storing the alleged John Townsend dining table and the portrait of Dr. Thomas Moffatt.
“Right out here,” he said, leading me back to the entrance foyer to the office—an area that I had initially walked through to see the bureau. On my first pass, I hadn't even noticed the nice-enough mid-eighteenth-century portrait of a man holding a letter that was leaning against the wall. Nor had I registered the late George III English mahogany dining table standing next to it—probably because it couldn't have been worth more than a thousand dollars. Often described in period terminology as a “falling leaf” table, the straight-legged table featured a stationary rectangular center board flanked by two hinged sides. To verify my on-the-spot-analysis further, I decided to flip the table over to see what the underside looked like. To begin with, the rails appeared to be made of oak (recognizable from its prominent dark medullar rays), a common secondary wood on English furniture, rather than maple or chestnut, which is often found on Newport furniture. Next, the oxidized wood color of the center section didn't even come close to matching the color of the leaves. Clearly, the three boards had not aged at the same rate, which meant they were probably not all original to the base of the table. Furthermore, there were some additional nail holes visible along the edges of the center board, indicating that it had a previous attachment history—quite possibly to another table frame.
The English drop-leaf table masquerading as a Newport gem.
Yet another problem with the piece was the issue of the table's single cross-brace, which hung like a narrow bridge between the center of the two longest side rails. For one thing, it had been painted over with a dark rust paint that forever disguised its true origin. But more important, whoever had masterminded this scheme to pass an English table off as a Newport piece obviously knew a little bit—but not enough—about the methods of John Townsend. Typically, Townsend used a series of cross-braces on his tables (usually laid out with three bars placed flush against the top, interspersed by two hanging from the bottom rails) to strengthen the form. Although he occasionally varied this scheme, he never used just a single bar. The proverbial icing on the cake was the sight of another photocopied John Townsend label glued to the underside of the table's central board. The print may have been a bit lighter and perhaps it had soaked in the staining agent a little bit longer, but there was no getting around the fact that the tag was identical to the one on the block-and-shell bureau—right down to the distinct way the copy machine had read the irregularities in the paper.
I briefly explained my observations to Alan and Cheryl and then moved on to the portrait of Dr. Moffatt—or whoever he was. There was nothing about the painting that screamed American to me. It had the stylized, genteel, anonymous look of a classic eighteenth-century English portrait. The clean stretchers and taut canvas told me that the painting had recently been both restretched and relined, which effectively eliminated any evidence of its past. The sitter's attribution appeared to have been from a twentieth-century pencil inscription dashed along one of the new-looking yellow-pine stretchers. I saw no need to waste any more time with the piece. I leaned the portrait back against the wall, turned to Alan and his wife, and asked, “Where did these pieces come from?”
The mysterious “Dr. Moffat.”
And that's when Alan launched into a strange story, which, as chance would have it, was far from over. Less than two weeks previously, Alan explained, Cheryl had awakened him from a nap by dropping a sizable handwritten prospectus next to him on the bed. An older white-haired man who had just left the gallery had given her the papers after explaining that he had some eighteenth-century American furniture and a painting that he wanted to sell that were worth in the vicinity of $12 million. The man (whom Alan didn't name, in deference to his request for anonymity) said that he was submitting the furniture on behalf of a family trust called the Carthaginian Financial Corporation, of which he was the treasurer. The trust, which was based in Reno, Nevada, had insurance that would cover the property until it changed hands, and he even said he would pay for an advertisement promoting the sale in Antiques and the Arts Weekly. Rounding out the proposal was a detailed marketing plan for the sale, which he stipulated had to occur before the end of the month—the owner was ill and in need of cash.
Having shaken off his sleep in a matter of seconds, Alan listened to his wife with feelings bordering upon cautious enthusiasm and absolute disbelief. “The whole thing sounded fantastical,” he said to me. “Twelve million dollars' worth of furniture just landing on our laps? Why us? And yet, I guess I just wanted to believe the deal was true. I mean, aren't we all just optimists at heart?”
Alan then reiterated a point that Cheryl had made to me when we first met—that Early American furniture was not their strength. He said he figured that even if he couldn't verify the authenticity of the pieces beyond a shadow of a doubt—in the photos, they looked fine to him—he felt confident that potential buyers would do their homework. Furthermore, the seller claimed a forty-year background in the field and he used that stated familiarity to impose numerous restrictions on the sale, including the denial of supplementary photographs, the insistence on the one-day preview inspection, and the ban on phone or absentee bidding. In hindsight, of course, it seemed clear that those limitations were set in an attempt to contain word of the fraud from spreading.
In short, by the time Alan was through reviewing the man's proposal, he thought it sounded unusual, although completely nont
hreatening to his business. There didn't seem anything in it that could be harmful to Sanford & Son. He had decided to go through with the sale.
“Well, what are you going to do now?” I asked Alan, whose distress at the scheme seemed just too earnest to doubt.
“I don't know,” he said slowly. “Cheryl and I need to discuss this. Obviously, we have to get in touch with the consignor. This may all be news to him, as well.”
Although that seemed doubtful to me, I could tell that Alan needed a little time to sort things out. He seemed to be nursing some lingering hope that all that I had told him about the furniture wasn't true.
In the end, however, my trip out to Tacoma wasn't a complete waste. Before I left, I asked the Gorsuches for a tour of their place. They took me through canyons of furnishings, all of which seemed to date back to the period of Tacoma's founding in the 1880s. But down in the basement, we came across a wonderful circa 1830 painted Vermont blanket chest with two drawers and a lift top. The piece featured a vividly painted all-over faux wood grain and had come, Alan said, from a family that had moved to the area back in the early twentieth century from New England. I ended up buying the piece for under three thousand dollars and shipping it to New York, where I eventually sold it to a private collector for a price that covered my airfare out west.
It was now nearly three o'clock in the afternoon and I had yet to have lunch. More important, though, I wanted to return to my hotel so that I could call up some of my colleagues on the East Coast to save them the hassle of the trip to Tacoma. Because of the three-hour time difference, I needed to move quickly.
The first call I placed was to Albert Sack.
He greeted my pronouncement that the desk was a fake with a rather extended silence. Finally, he cleared his throat and said, “Leigh, you are either doing me a huge favor or really pulling a good one on me.” He said that he had already asked a local Seattle furniture restorer to survey the piece for him and that the report had not been good. “I was still going to fly out,” he confessed, “because the potential of the lot was too great to ignore. Thanks for saving me the airfare.”
After talking to Albert, I spoke with a small group of dealers, including the Pennsylvania-based Clarence Prickett and sons, the conservator Alan Miller, Wayne Pratt, and, finally, Guy Bush down in Washington, D.C. When Guy heard the news, he said, “Go anywhere you want for dinner. It's on me.”
By now, I was ravenous, but I still had one more call to make before I was through. The day before I left for Tacoma, I had received a phone call at my office from a Tacoma-based heart surgeon, who had expressed an interest in the pieces at Sanford & Son. Would I be able to look at them for him? he asked. At the time, I had wavered on his request because the man was a stranger to me and I had no idea if he had the finances to handle such a purchase, if the furniture turned out to be authentic.
Now, at least, I was off the hook, because I only had bad news to report.
“That's a shame,” said the surgeon, “Alan and Cheryl are good friends of mine, I'm sure they must be let down.” He paused for a moment, then added, “You know, I was actually there at the gallery when the fellow came in—a thin white-haired fellow with a beard. I think his name was Flynn. Cheryl didn't know what to make of him.”
Flynn, Flynn, I thought. There was something about the name and the doctor's description of the man that sounded familiar. “Not Don Flynn?” I asked in a flash, remembering a man I had met about ten years earlier on a call to a San Francisco town house while I was still at Christie's.
“Yes,” said the doctor, “that was it, Don Flynn.”
Well now, things were beginning to crystallize. The Don Flynn I had met (a gaunt white-haired man) had done well in real estate and had evidently poured some of that success into a sizable collection of American furniture. But the collection was poorly conceived and really ran the gamut in terms of condition. Some of the pieces were genuine untouched treasures, but other objects had undergone significant restoration. I was in the house to evaluate the collection, but whenever I pointed out that an object had a problem, Flynn would cut me off and usher me to another piece. After awhile, I became so frustrated by his utter unwillingness to listen to my analysis that I left. Considering the nature of that past encounter, I wouldn't have been at all surprised if the man in San Francisco and the man who had consigned the furniture in Tacoma might be one and the same.
Don Flynn at the auction.
By Wednesday evening, I was back in New York, but in the days (and indeed weeks) that followed, word of the fraud in Tacoma spread. Journalists such as Laura Beach of Antiques and the Arts Weekly and David Hewett of Maine Antique Digest began to track the story, and slowly, more details began to emerge about the elusive Mr. Flynn. For example, in 1992, a few years after my visit to his home, Flynn had put some of his collection up for sale at Butterfield & Butterfield, the San Francisco auction house. Included in that sale was an object described as a “Chippendale Mahogany Shell-Carved Block-Front Kneehole Dressing Table in the Newport, Rhode Island Manner.” Estimated between ten and fifteen thousand dollars, the piece—which was unlabeled—never attracted a buyer. Had Flynn simply attached a fake label and then thrown the dining table, the portrait, and the Moffatt provenance (which was easily proven a hoax) into the mix in an effort to sell an object he hadn't previously been able to move? There was also an incident back in the mid-1980s, when Flynn had filed a lawsuit against Christie's, claiming that the auction house had improperly sent some of his property to Christie's East, its lower-end division. I was still at Christie's at the time and had actually been deposed for the case, which was quickly thrown out of court.
And what of the fate of the objects in Tacoma? Well not long after I flew home, Alan Gorsuch called his client and told him point-blank that the authenticity of his furniture had been questioned by some top-level East Coast dealers. Don Flynn was apparently unbothered by his words, however, and said that he wanted to go through with the sale. He told the auctioneer that he would accept a minimum of fifty thousand dollars for the entire lot. Flynn also told Gorsuch that he planned to be in the room on the day of the sale but that he wanted his presence to remain under wraps. With that bit of knowledge in his pocket, Gorsuch set a trap. First, he attached disclaimer notes to the pieces, which he decided to offer as three separate lots rather than as one. Then he warned a handful of local television stations and newspapers that a newsworthy event was to take place at Sanford & Son's Saturday sale.
Obviously I did not bother to attend the sale, but according to David Hewett's detailed report of the sale in Maine Antique Digest, there were fewer than twenty people in the room that Saturday, including six members of the media and four auction house employees. About ten minutes before the scheduled 11:00 A.M. start, Don Flynn sauntered into the gallery, registered for an auction paddle, and took a seat near the rear. A few minutes later, Alan Gorsuch opened the sale by summarizing the recent sales history of authentic furniture of the Goddard-Townsend school. When he was through, he gestured to the pieces on the podium beside him and then went on to describe them in far less glowing terms. After that, he opened up the bidding on the portrait of “Dr. Moffatt,” which ending up selling to—of all people—Don Flynn presumably bidding against the reserve) for one thousand dollars. Next on the block was the drop-leaf dining table, now correctly described as an English piece with a fake label. It sold to a local collector for three hundred dollars.
At this point, Gorsuch halted the sale and officially withdrew the kneehole desk. Then, before rolling television cameras and the smattering of print journalists, he addressed his wily consignor, who was seated in the back of the room.
“Don Flynn,” he announced, “as this is the most arrogant counterfeit endeavor in the history of American antiques…the entire nation of antiques dealers and collectors would like to see a fitting finale to this piece of furniture.” With that, Gorsuch placed a can of gasoline and a box of matches on top of the desk and instructed two o
f his workers to take the piece outside. Using a hand truck, the two men rolled the desk out of the gallery and onto the sidewalk as the paltry audience—including Don Flynn—filed out onto the curb behind it. There, Gorsuch resumed his speech.
“Don Flynn, I call on you to give everyone involved, directly or indirectly, the closure needed. To avoid prosecution and guarantee that it will never again resurface to deceive furniture innocents, put this article to sleep forever.”
Flynn refused the auctioneer's invitation to burn the fake desk, but, oddly enough, he lingered on the street as the crowd dispersed, comfortably lobbing half answers to the numerous questions thrown his way by the reporters who remained. Perhaps the most telling of his responses was his answer to the fact that the desk was a forgery. Hadn't he been concerned about perpetrating a fraud?
Burn this?
Flynn's answer: “No. It's ‘Buyer beware' at auctions.”
13
…Gone!
—Leigh and Leslie Keno, journal entry, August 6th 1969
THROUGHOUT OUR LIVES, Leigh and I have taken great pleasure in our shared passion for American furniture and decorative arts. Our love of objects is so much a part of our makeup—our very souls—that I truly cannot remember a time when we were not hunting for and learning about things. However deeply I reach back into the past—to our teens, preteens, or early childhood—I come up with memories of interesting and beautiful objects that captured our imagination and sparked our curiosity. Because Leigh and I are brothers, and twins at that, our intellectual connection is bound far more tightly than if we were merely colleagues. Our shared life experience has increased our synchronicity. We have never strayed far from each other—intellectually or geographically—because we have known from an early age the course our lives would take. The trick has been carving out separate yet equal spaces in the world of antiques so that we can grow as individuals but remain bonded as brothers and best friends.
