The Art of the Con: The Most Notorious Fakes, Frauds, and Forgeries in the Art World
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On September 9, 2013, Luigi Cugini filed a motion with the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida seeking an early termination of his supervised release. Apparently forgetting his long involvement in the trafficking of fraudulent art, he cited Title 18 of the U.S. Code, Section 3553, which refers to the conduct of the defendant and the “nature and circumstances of the offense and the history and characteristics of the defendant.” He argued, “Petitioner behavior since release has generally been productive and positive . . . and he has not been in any incidents/violations of the law.”24 How long Cugini will go before he tries to sell another misattributed work of art is anyone’s guess. But it’s safe to say that the FBI will be watching closely.
Six
The Captor
As young postdoctoral students in Europe, Harry and Ruth Bakwin were as devoted to their studies and to each other as their colleagues were to the quaint restaurants and pubs of their neighborhood—and it showed. The pair would go on to become accomplished and well-published pediatricians, and thanks to the time they spent together visiting galleries and museums viewing and learning about art, they amassed one of the most respected collections of paintings in the United States.
In 1929, the Drs. Bakwin traveled with their four children on their annual trip to Europe and ultimately made their way to Switzerland. The couple, still in the nascent stages of their lifelong love of collecting, visited the Galerie Thannhauser in Lucerne, where they made a significant purchase: Vincent van Gogh’s L’Arlésienne, Madame Ginoux.1 The painting is an essential work in the Dutch painter’s oeuvre, completed as Van Gogh convalesced from one of his many struggles with mental illness at the asylum in Saint-Remy, near Arles, during a period considered to be the zenith of the artist’s creativity.2 It was one of the six existing Van Gogh portraits of the cafe-owning Ginoux that was privately held, with the others hanging in some of the world’s most notable museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. L’Arlésienne, Madame Ginoux was one of the more important pieces of the more than 100 paintings and sculptures collected throughout the Bakwins’ lifetimes, in what would become one of America’s best collections of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art.
Throughout their lives, the Bakwins’ children would each develop an affinity for certain pieces of their parents’ collection, and Harry and Ruth saw to it that at the time of their respective deaths, each child would inherit a painting of their choice. For the couple’s eldest son the decision was easy. In 1987, upon his beloved mother’s passing, Edward Bakwin chose the Van Gogh from the collection that had come to include works by Picasso, Cézanne, Matisse, Gaugin, and many others. Less than 20 years later, however, Edward would make a decision that came with much more difficulty. He chose to sell the Van Gogh at an auction on May 2, 2006, through the famed auction house Christie’s in New York City. Though the painting would fetch Edward more than $40 million, it wasn’t money that motivated him, it was fear. “It was a very major decision of mine to sell it,” he said. “The risk of damage of any kind or robbery just felt a little too high. Much as I would have loved to continue holding it, it seemed to me too important to have hanging in a modest apartment in Chicago.”3
This fear was grounded in personal experience. Edward Bakwin had only to look to his own family to find good reason to worry that his painting could be targeted by thieves. In 1976, Edward’s younger brother Michael made his own selection from his parents’ collection. He, too, made what he felt was an easy choice, selecting Paul Cézanne’s Bouilloire et Fruits (Pitcher and Fruit). Michael Bakwin was not alone in his appreciation of the Cubist masterpiece. No less an expert on the medium than Pablo Picasso himself (whom the Bakwins met during their travels) called the painting one of the greatest pictures ever painted.4 Michael proudly and lovingly displayed the painting in the dining room in his home in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. There it hung, the crowning piece of his collection of paintings that made for one of the greatest displays of art in all the Berkshires, a region rich in great art and scenic majesty. That’s no small claim: the pastoral area lays claim to some of the nation’s best college museums and was the home of the great sculptor Daniel Chester French (whose most notable work was the Lincoln Memorial) and the twentieth-century American master Norman Rockwell. Rockwell, whose museum is located in Stockbridge, moved to the region in 1953 and left an indelible mark on the Berkshires, just as the Berkshires left its own on his works. His famous images bear the region’s unmistakable New England essence, and the people of Stockbridge and the surrounding area served as models for many of his works.
So to say that Cézanne’s Bouilloire et Fruits was perhaps the most valuable painting in Stockbridge truly meant something. That distinction came with good reason, for it is one of the great examples of his play with dimension and planes that so influenced the Cubist movement. At any moment, it seems, the fruit on the table in Cézanne’s painting might roll off. Yet it transfixes the viewer, just as the artist knew it would. “I will astonish Paris with an apple!” Cézanne famously foretold, and that he did. Though in his own lifetime he was denied the acceptance from the Salon in Paris—the official art exhibition of the Fine Arts Academy—that he deeply craved, his legacy is that of the leading forefather of Impressionism. The English literary master D. H. Lawrence called Cézanne “the most interesting figure in modern art, and the only really interesting figure.” For Lawrence, it was Cézanne’s constant struggle with the establishment that made him such an important figure, and he pointed to Cézanne’s portrayal of fruit—as in Michael Bakwin’s painting—as the key to his victory. “Cézanne’s apple is a great deal,” he wrote, “more than Plato’s Idea. Cézanne’s apple rolled the stone from the mouth of the tomb.”5 Of his influence on the movement that he would inspire, the great Pablo Picasso called Cézanne “the father of us all.”6 And here in tiny Stockbridge, Massachusetts, this seminal work hung along with others in Michael Bakwin’s multimillion-dollar collection, secured only by a rarely locked door.
In May 1978, Michael Bakwin, his wife Doris, and her two children packed their car and traveled to Ossining, New York, for a Memorial Day visit to his parents’ home. Though they were known to travel often and at a moment’s notice, this particular trip was a welcome getaway for rest and relaxation before the busy summer months would bring tourists to the Avalock Inn, a small resort bought and operated by Michael Bakwin after a number of years working in the world of hotel and restaurant consulting.
When the Bakwins returned home at about 5:30 p.m. Monday night, they weren’t looking for any signs of trouble. After all, Stockbridge was a place where people rarely bothered to lock their doors and where crime was something folks could read about if they chose to peruse the Boston Herald American, the tabloid in the big city to the east; but it was rarely found in the Berkshire Eagle. Michael and Doris noticed nothing unusual when they turned in for the night after the long drive home. There was no mess, nothing ransacked, nothing broken. There were no signs that anyone had forced their way into the home. The next day, the couple set about making their appointed rounds, with Doris returning home first that Tuesday afternoon. Opening a sliding door that led into the dining room, she found the walls bare. Seven of her husband’s treasured paintings were gone, and the only evidence they had ever been there was a lonely, empty frame on the floor that had held the famous Cézanne. This was long before the era of the cell phone, and Doris frantically tried to reach her husband. Unable to locate him, she phoned the local chief of police and reported the crime. Upon arrival at the scene, the officers also noted an absence of signs of forced entry. The Bakwins could not recall whether or not they had locked the house when they left. They did note, however, that the spare key they often left beneath a ceramic frog in the yard was not present.7
Michael Bakwin remembers that he “sort of went into shock” upon arriving home. Virtually incapacitated by what he saw, Do
ris took control of the scene, dealing with the Stockbridge police, who were eventually joined by the Massachusetts State Police and, later, the Federal Bureau of Investigation.8 This show of force at the crime scene was fully warranted: the haul by the thieves from the Bakwin home amounted to the largest-scale home break-in in the history of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. In addition to the Cézanne, six other works were taken: Portrait of a Young Man and Girl in a Red Robe, both by Chaim Soutine; Flowers by Maurice Vlaminck; The Red House by Maurice Utrillo; and Boy in the Red Shirt and Head of a Woman by Jean Jansem. Of the lot, only the two Soutines and the Vlaminck were insured by Bakwin, and for a meager $47,000 at that. “Unfortunately, insuring paintings is extremely expensive,” he would later say, “and I was just a little bit too cheap to do so, and didn’t think anything would happen to them.”9
When an art theft occurs, motives are frequently either missed or misconstrued. Often, investigators tell the media that the crime was surely the work of professional art thieves, especially when police learn that the pieces stolen are of extraordinarily high values. In fact, high-value paintings are rarely stolen by crooks that can be characterized as professional art thieves. The reason for this is simple: highly valuable and recognizable masterpieces—like Cézanne’s Bouilloire et Fruits—are exceptionally difficult to fence. As a result, thieves who pilfer such works eventually learn the folly of their ways and turn their nefarious inclinations toward targets that are easier to unload. Masterworks are most often stolen by shortsighted first-timers who are certain they can sell their ill-gotten gains, only to learn that there are no buyers willing to fork over hundreds of thousands of dollars—or more—for something they can never show anyone. History is bereft of the oft-imagined evil billionaire sitting in his private viewing room with a stolen piece of art meant never to be shown to another living person. Such is the fodder of Hollywood scripts, not true crime. In reality, it’s almost impossible to find a buyer for highly valuable stolen art. And for thieves that’s a hard thing to accept. After all, if you’re holding a few million in stolen art (or at least that’s what the newspapers are saying) and you are accustomed to getting ten cents on the dollar for your stolen goods, it’s got to be difficult to walk away empty-handed with dreams of riches dancing in your mind.
So despite the strong interest in the crime from investigators at the local, state, and federal levels, the prospects of capturing the thief or thieves and returning Michael Bakwin’s treasured paintings to him were anyone’s guess. To be sure, Bakwin took his own steps to try to recover his art: he hired a lawyer and together they decided to post a reward of $25,000 for the return of the paintings in local newspapers; he contacted the International Foundation for Art Research in New York to provide them with records of the theft in case the paintings surfaced in a sale; he worked to spread the word of the theft by contacting auction houses and art galleries; and, later, he hired a private investigator to help recover his items. All of his efforts were to no avail.
Sometime after the theft, there was a glimmer of hope for a recovery. The Bakwins received three phone calls from an individual who spoke of recovering the Cézanne for a fee. While it’s not uncommon for a person posting a large reward to be contacted by cranks and con men, the caller was able to provide bona fides, describing stickers from Europe on the reverse of the Cézanne that appeared to be accurate. However, there was a problem. “The trouble was that the people who stole the paintings didn’t know what they had stolen. They got a little bit nervous,” Michael Bakwin said.10 Though the caller eventually produced nothing, a mention was made of an individual identified only as “David.” This would prove important when a suspect in the crime emerged by that same first name.11
David T. Colvin was no stranger to trouble, and he was in it again—deep. He had lost $1,500 in a card game to an associate named Arthur Samson, who, after waiting a year and a half for Colvin to pay up, had run out of patience. Late in the evening of February 12, 1979, Samson, accompanied by Brian Matchett, a local legend with martial arts expertise and a license to carry a firearm, traveled to Colvin’s home in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, to collect his long-awaited winnings. The next morning, the pair met with Colvin in his home. Shortly after entering, an altercation ensued in which Matchett shot the hulking six foot four, 300-pound Colvin with the two .38 caliber hollow-point bullets that would ultimately kill him. According to the shooter, as Colvin lay bleeding he told him, “It doesn’t matter, I want to die anyways.”12
Some time after Colvin met his violent end, his attorney, Robert M. Mardirosian of Watertown, was in the attic of a property he owned across the street from his law offices. There he found a treasure worth millions: Michael Bakwin’s paintings. Mardirosian must have known what they were immediately. Shortly before his death, Colvin visited Mardirosian to discuss federal firearms charges he was facing, and during that meeting Colvin showed his lawyer the paintings he had taken. Mardirosian talked Colvin out of taking the art to Florida where he thought he could fence it, and the thief held on to the works. Rather than make the trek all the way back to Pittsfield, which was closer to Albany than it was to Boston, Colvin asked Mardirosian if he had a place he could crash for the night. Mardirosian offered him his attic next door. And it was there that Colvin left his bounty.
There’s a pattern that seems to emerge when highly valuable, highly recognizable art is stolen: hot masterpieces are either recovered very quickly because of snitches, hard-working investigators, and lucky breaks, or they turn up after a generation or so has passed, after the scariest member of the thieving gang has passed on or lost his fearsomeness and all involved have finally come to the realization that despite their best efforts, they simply cannot monetize their stolen art. Left with no options, the art is eventually returned. Here, in the hands of attorney Robert Mardirosian, Michael Bakwin’s paintings were at the crossroads of a quick recovery or being unseen for decades.
Mardirosian clearly understood the importance of what he had found. In fact, he was uniquely positioned to understand the paintings’ value both in terms of money and culture. Like Cézanne, Mardirosian’s avocation in the law could not suppress his love for art, and Impressionism in particular. In fact, in 1989 the attorney would eventually leave his law practice to become a full-time artist, using the name “Romard” to sign his works. “I understand color. I can make it sing for me . . . I’m not painting the subject, I’m painting the emotion that the subject evokes in me,” he would say of his technique. He counted among his influences Picasso, Van Gogh, Miró, and, of course, Cézanne.13
But despite his close familiarity with the sort of art he had found in his attic and exactly how it was procured, Mardirosian failed to return the paintings to their rightful owner in Stockbridge, betraying his responsibility as an attorney and officer of the court. Instead, he worked diligently to find a way to do the impossible: take well-known, high-priced, and stolen paintings and turn a profit with them. Thus, his was a unique sort of art scam: the art was legitimate, but his decades-long, illicit affair with it was anything but.
Clearly, this was an unethical and unconventional choice, but Mardirosian was no stranger to unorthodox ploys. In what was probably his most newsworthy criminal defense argument, he attempted to get a client—a gardener—cleared of a first-degree murder charge by arguing that the murderer was under the influence of the pesticides he had been mixing. It was the mixture that led the man to strangle his victim, Mardirosian argued in court. The jury saw past his claims and returned a guilty verdict.14
While that argument might have been outlandish, making a desperate argument in order to clear a client is nothing new for a defense attorney. Attempting to monetize a deceased criminal client’s stolen goods, however, is. But off went Robert Mardirosian on a trek that would span more than a quarter century and two continents.
Two decades would pass without Michael Bakwin hearing a word about his stolen treasures. With no new leads, no
signs of life, no reason for hope, the idea that he’d ever again see his paintings, especially his precious Cézanne, had faded from his daily thoughts. Then, in 1999, things took a sudden and dramatic turn. On the other side of the Atlantic, Lloyds Insurance Company, the underwriter for the storied insurer Lloyds of London, rang the offices of the Art Loss Register with an inquiry about a number of paintings that were set to be shipped to London from Russia. Intrigued by the inquiry, the staff went to work researching the paintings to determine whether or not they were stolen. This was the work Julian Radcliffe, the organization’s founder, formed the ALR to do.
Radcliffe, himself a former Lloyds employee who had worked for Britain’s security service MI5, started a firm called Control Risks in 1975 to provide guidance to governments, corporations, and families dealing with extortion attempts and negotiations related to kidnappings throughout the world. Then, in 1986, Radcliffe was asked to examine the feasibility of forming a separate company to deal with the problem of stolen art. There certainly exists a bustling market: the Federal Bureau of Investigation calls art theft “a looming criminal enterprise with estimated losses in the billions of dollars annually.”15 Radcliffe worked with the major auction houses, art dealers, and police from a number of countries and identified a need for a database of stolen art that could be used to vet art sales and auctions. To start such a database, Radcliffe turned to the International Foundation for Art Research in New York—the very same organization to whom Michael Bakwin had reported his stolen paintings in 1978. IFAR had already started a database of its own years earlier, but lacked the resources to grow the database and staff it to the point that it could serve the international market. Radcliffe cut a deal: IFAR would turn over its database to the ALR in return for a share holding of the new company. And thus a powerhouse in the fight against the illicit trade in stolen art was born. By 2008, the ALR would grow to 30 employees working with a database holding nearly 200,000 stolen works of art from around the world and conducting around 400,000 searches per year.16