by Andy Behrman
Going Cold Turkey
A bunch of Jonathan’s actor friends tell him about an excellent therapist they all go to on the East Side. So after Jonathan has seen Dr. Solnick a few times and recommends him, I decide to give him a try. I cancel my appointments with Dr. Golub and tell him that I no longer can continue treatment with him for financial reasons. I’m also not feeling like I’m making much progress. Although I feel he has properly diagnosed me, I’m not responding well to the medication. Lithium is not effective for all manic-depressives, and Prozac is usually not used to treat manic-depressives; it can induce mania. I tell my sister that I have found a doctor I can afford on my own and make an appointment to see Dr. Solnick, who is opposed to treating his patients with medication. I am curious about this because I feel open to a new approach to my psychological problems. When I tell Dr. Solnick, a middle-aged psychiatrist with a hint of a British accent, about my pharmacological regimen, he immediately dismisses it as “overmedication” without really listening to my diagnosis of manic depression. He advises me to go off the lithium, Prozac, and Anafranil cold turkey.
Within a few days I notice that my thoughts are becoming increasingly unhinged. It’s as if chunks of my brain have been scooped out, like the part that edits my thoughts before they become speech. I talk nonstop to friends and family about the case, babbling about anything that comes to mind. It’s sort of like that nervous energy you feel right before you have to give a speech, or what actors must feel before they go on stage. Only I feel it all the time. “Andy, relax,” my father says rather gruffly one morning when it’s clear he’s exasperated by my chatter.
I’m beginning to wonder if Dr. Solnick has done the right thing. But those times when I’m able to focus on winning my case, I feel a powerful euphoria wash over me, filling me with a sense of confidence that I hope will last through this trial.
July 22, 1993. Brooklyn.
Stuart learns that the Federal Prosecutor’s Office in Brooklyn is preparing to indict me, on one count of conspiracy to defraud and four counts of wire fraud. The day has come to surrender. I meet Stuart at his office and we take a cab to the courthouse in Brooklyn. It seems like such a formal event. I’m wearing my Yamamoto suit, but I wish I had been allowed to dress more casually. I have to appear before the judge to enter a plea. When we arrive I’m taken into custody and handcuffed by a police officer—a formality, I’m told—while I wait to be processed. I’m unusually calm. But this isn’t good. I’ve lost control. It’s getting hot in this room, and I’m sweating and I want to get this over with. After about half an hour they remove the handcuffs and fingerprint me, and I’m really feeling like I’ve committed the crime of the century. Guilty. Then on to be photographed. Head on. Sideways. Holding the ID board in front of the Yamamoto suit. Right from the movies. Then Stuart and I walk into the courtroom and go before a judge, a stern man who states the name and number of the case, United States of America v. Andrew Behrman, Case 93-0515—a whole fucking country against me—and asks how I plead. Per Stuart’s advice I plead not guilty on all counts. The voice barely comes out of me. He sets the trial date. Throughout the arraignment my mood is one of high energy—though nervous, I actually enjoy the experience because after two years I’m finally dealing directly with the system and I think we’re going to win this case. We head down the long courthouse steps into a group of local photographers and reporters who photograph me and ask Stuart lots of questions. Stuart comments to the press that “we all will be able to sleep easier now knowing that the government is going to defend Mr. Kostabi.” The next day the New York Post captions a photo of me “Easel Weasel” and prints an article filled with errors about the story, such as “The forger is believed to be cooperating with authorities.” The forger, Annike, is not cooperating with authorities and is not indicted by the government. Because I trust her, I am confident that Annike is not talking to the D.A. I feel relieved that the wait is over, and at the same time I’m on top of the world. I love the frenzy of the attention. My big secret is finally out—I’ve been indicted. It all appeals to my manic state of mind.
The newspaper and magazine articles generate a wave of interest from prospective clients—authors, doctors, musicians, even artists—who for some reason want to work with me now that I’ve been indicted. I’m flooded with requests from prospective clients and give Sandy notice that I want to go back to working on my own. I abruptly break the lease on the office/apartment. I also walk out on the $2,000 tab at Harry Cipriani (only to settle with them later when they track me down). I’m still off all the medications and am just self-medicating with alcohol. This causes me to make off-the-top-of-my-head business decisions without any real thought. I sign three new clients in a week, open a new bank account, and quickly become obsessed with building a brand-new business. I take an expensive office space on 57th Street and Fifth Avenue, which I can cover with the new retainers I am collecting. It costs about $3,000 a month for a space that is only about fourteen feet square, but it gives me a sense of security, and I turn it into my home and office, working and eating at my desk for marathon twenty-hour stretches, sleeping on the floor behind my desk on a roll of bubble wrap, and bathing and brushing my teeth in the men’s room sink. There are other people working in offices on the same floor, but I’m sure I’m the only person in the entire building who sleeps over. Still, I’m tired of asking to sleep on friends’ couches and imposing on them for their hospitality. One day I take my usual walk outside on Fifth Avenue to find some coffee, and the streets are virtually empty. I come back and start frantically typing a memo to Stuart.
TO: Stuart Abrams
FROM: Andy Behrman
RE: MY PREDICAMENT
DATE: November 1, 1993
I am obsessed with winning this case.
What can I do in the next five weeks to help you?—I’m feeling desperate!
If we need expert witnesses, let’s get them. I’ll find a way to finance this. If we need to bring up the original painting, Give Leaves a Chance, let’s do it—it can be rolled and FedExed rather inexpensively.
If I need to testify—and you feel confident that I can pull it off—I’ll do it!
If they convict me, and choose to indict Kostabi, what do I get for cooperating?
If I plead guilty to a lesser count today, and cooperate, what do I get?
Isn’t our defense pretty solid so far?
Isn’t his crime worse than the one I am accused of (worth more to the government)?
What’s the jury going to think when I don’t testify?
I spend the rest of the morning preparing press information for a client, an artist named Paul Rebhan, who paints small canvases and quietly hangs one in the Museum of Modern Art as a publicity stunt. Next to his 11-by-14-inch abstract black-and-white painting, he places a card that reads, “Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Donald Trump.” The painting hangs for two days until it’s discovered. I’m talking to a columnist at the New York Post. “Yeah, he actually put double-sided tape on his small canvas and stuck it on the wall without the guards seeing him, and it stayed up for two days,” I tell her. The Post publishes the item the following day, as does The New York Times. I get a call from an English rock band that is recording an album in New York and is interested in having me promote them. This is a new direction for me. I still have diet doctors calling me. I’m sitting back in my chair, drinking my coffee, wondering why anybody wants to work with an indicted art dealer. Annike calls to see how I’m doing. We haven’t seen each other in a while. Nobody has called her from the D.A.’s office. She’s teaching German to Americans now, and things are more stable for her financially. I tell her more about the upcoming trial. “I despise Kostabi,” she says. She always says that. At about 1:45 P.M. I leave for a massage appointment that helps me keep my head together. I love being kneaded, twisted, and stretched. I’ve become one big ache. When I return to my office, I have quite a few messages to return, but first I call my friend Deb, who invites me over to dinner. Both my
mother and father called to see how I’m doing. I look up at my door, and standing there is Jason, my escort/med-student friend, who is now a doctor. We haven’t seen each other in a long time, and he’s brought a bottle of Perrier-Jouët and two plastic glasses to celebrate my troubles and catch up. We get pretty drunk quickly. I put the answering machine on, and we reminisce about the eighties and our scandalous activities. “And look how far you’ve come,” jokes Jason. “Shit, what the fuck did you get yourself into?” he asks me. We walk out together—I’m flying—and say good-bye. I head to Deb and Paul Kogan’s apartment on the Upper West Side for dinner, a much needed injection of normalcy: a good meal, good wine, music, intelligent conversation, and friendship. I’m so tired, I sleep over on their couch.
Sleepless Nights
I’m thrilled with the media coverage and the rush it induces—it’s as good as a manic high or a cocaine high. I enjoy seeing my name in print and being the topic of conversation around town. It’s particularly exciting to me that the indictment has been given space in The New York Times. All of the New York newspapers have covered it, and the story has even appeared in USA Today and the Los Angeles Times. Some of the reports are ridiculously inaccurate: “A knowledgeable observer said the forgeries were of markedly lower quality than genuine Kostabis,” reports the New York Post. Some are humorous: “The U.S. Attorney’s office in Brooklyn, perhaps lacking an appreciation for dada, has shattered this house of mirrors by indicting Andrew Behrman, the salesman, on charges of fraud and criminal conspiracy. If convicted, he faces up to $250,000 in fines and 25 years in prison, where the Government may well envision him lovingly attending to license plates,” writes the New York Observer. Everybody seems to know that I’ve been indicted. Stuart gets to work on the case immediately. He prepares our pretrial motion for dismissal. Stuart argues that the acts I’m charged with committing don’t amount to a criminal offense under the wire-fraud statute. But the judge rejects this argument; we’re going to trial. United States of America v. Andrew Behrman. We have five months to prepare our case, and there’s a tremendous amount of material to review—government exhibits, documents, and grand-jury testimony (from more than a year ago)—in a short period. There’s research and strategizing to do. The government has had a full year to prepare for this case and has a large staff and unlimited resources with which to prosecute me. Stuart and I meet regularly to discuss my defense. I continue to be in touch with Annike, who has not been indicted; because they don’t see her as the mastermind of the scheme they’ll have difficulty proving that she actually painted the paintings, and she can just flee the country. And I am the one who has carelessly left the massive paper trail—tons of invoices, receipts, checks, and wires that are all in the hands of the government. I’m feeling confident that we’ll win the case and that no jury will find me guilty of producing or selling “counterfeit” Kostabis. There’s just no such thing as a fake Kostabi, since he doesn’t paint any of his own paintings. I don’t believe a jury will buy the fact that these paintings are his creations just because they have his signature on them. So technically there can be no forgeries. The issue here is about “authorized” versus “unauthorized” paintings—what is a genuine Kostabi? Is a Kostabi only genuine if it has the Kostabi signature, the Kostabi blessing? If we can prove not only that he doesn’t paint his paintings but also that he sometimes doesn’t even sign his own name on the paintings, I’m convinced the jury will have to find me innocent. Other times I fantasize that the jury will find me guilty, and I imagine myself eating bread and water for the next five years, banging my tin cup against the bars of my cell in some jail somewhere in the middle of the woods in North Carolina. And then I counter by asking myself, is a jury really going to side with a self-described “con artist” who makes millions of dollars paying people minimum wage to paint his ridiculous faceless paintings?
It all drives me crazy, and I fight hard to maintain some level of sanity. Because I really think I’m losing my mind. I spend hours at Stuart’s office examining hundreds of pages of government exhibits, documents, and grand-jury minutes, filling him in whenever he needs a question answered or an issue clarified. I’m intrigued by the case and fascinated that these details that we are working with trace my moves over the last years, because oddly I feel as though I’m working on somebody else’s defense. I agonize over facts, searching for loopholes that might help us win this case for “the defendant.” Sometimes I’m stunned that someone has made such blatantly foolish mistakes committing a crime—having monies wired directly into his personal bank account, signing receipts for cash, and issuing invoices separate from those of Kostabi World. Clearly I wasn’t thinking about the consequences of my actions. I set myself up for my fall. I stay up until four or five in the morning, looking for clues to help Stuart and this pathetic defendant. I seize every opportunity I can to make money. Obsessing about the case induces my mania, and I go for days without sleep, becoming less lucid and more incoherent. I start believing that this is the most important legal case of our time. Stuart realizes that I am a bit out of control and obsessed, but he never loses focus and lets me continue my own investigation.
When I can no longer handle my manic obsession about the case, I try to divert my attention to some other activity. I usually go on a strict 800-calorie-a-day diet of egg whites, tuna, and tofu and a vigorous exercise program, starving myself until I lose thirty or forty pounds in two or three months. Ultimately, I break down and gain the weight back within a month, but I get tremendous gratification from watching myself losing the weight. At my most manic period, I weighed about 175 pounds at six-feet-one, rather lanky. I returned to 195 pounds.
I go back to see Dr. Solnick. I tell him I’m feeling much worse since I last saw him, and he tells me not to worry, that this is a typical response to coming off the medication. Finally, after a month of talk therapy and downward spiraling, I leave his care. A year later I learn from a psychiatrist I meet that the infamous Dr. Solnick practiced without a medical license because of an incident in which he allegedly seduced a patient, and that he was not a proponent of medication because he was no longer able to write a prescription. I call to thank Jonathan for the recommendation, and he is rather amused by this story about his miracle shrink.
Stuart decides that I will take the Fifth Amendment because the prosecutor will have a field day cross-examining me. Certainly I will appear guilty. There’s no reason for the jury to hear what they will hear from witnesses coming from my mouth as well. But the thought of sitting silently at my own trial drives me crazy. They might as well handcuff me, too. And I worry that the average juror will question why I choose not to testify. Stuart is a brilliant attorney and can handle the case without using me as a witness, but still I feel powerful enough to convince anyone of anything, including my innocence. My thinking is so delusional that I really believe I can bond with each juror one-on-one, explain exactly why I am innocent, and answer any of their questions face-to-face, without lawyers, in a friendly way.
December 5, 1993. New York.
The day before the trial I go to Carappan, a downtown spa, for a massage, to relax and psych myself up for the big battle. The masseur tells me that he can’t work on me until I relax and take a few deep breaths. He asks me if I’m feeling particularly tense. I tell him I’m facing twenty-five years in jail so I am having a particularly hard time relaxing. He doesn’t seem to believe me and laughs. Honest, I tell him. Counterfeiting. There’s an odd silence. I feel his hands working on my lower back squeezing the tension up through my shoulders and neck and pushing it out through my head. Breathe. I imagine I’m on the set of a game show where the judge is the host and Kostabi and I are the two contestants. The judge goes back and forth asking us trivia questions about the case. “Mr. Kostabi, how many of your paintings were sold at Christie’s last year?” he asks. “Twelve?” Kostabi asks. “No, sorry,” says the judge. “Mr. Behrman, how many lithographs did Kostabi World publish last year?” “Six,” I answer
. “That’s right,” he says. I’m ahead. The judge asks eight more questions, and I beat Kostabi 8–2. I’m surrounded by a border of flashing lights and I’m jumping up and down and the audience is cheering for me and it’s obvious that I’m the champion. And the masseur’s hands are working on my head, relieving all the pressure, and the lights are flashing and I wake up and I’m totally relaxed. Where’d I go? I won. I’ve been acquitted.
United States of America v. Andrew Behrman
December 5, 1993. Edgewater, New Jersey.
I’m sleeping at my parents’ new house tonight. I feel revved up, like it’s the night before a big field trip to the Museum of Natural History. Except this one’s to the Federal Courthouse in Brooklyn to see a real trial with a judge in a black robe with a gavel. And I’m in this courtroom drama—I play the role of the defendant.
December 6, 1993. Brooklyn.
I decided yesterday that I will not wear a suit in court, just a navy blue blazer and a pair of gray flannel pants. I feel it makes me less slick, more innocent. The drive to the courthouse with my parents is somber. I feel like we’re on our way to a funeral. It’s a bleak day, and there don’t seem to be many subjects that are safe to talk about. My father gives me a pep talk as we get closer to Brooklyn. “You’ve got the best lawyer. He’s ready for them,” he tells me. As we get out of the car and approach the Federal Courthouse, my mother’s tiny hand squeezes my hand tightly and she tells me to be strong. Just be strong. We walk into the courthouse at ten minutes before nine and find the massive courtroom, where I can see through the windowpane of the door many of my friends, including Lauren, Jonathan, Lucy, Deb, Paul, Ken, and Pamela, and my parents’ friends, already seated. My parents both hug me before we enter the courtroom. I sit to Stuart’s right at the defense table, trying not to stare at the young prosecutor, and Mark and his brother sit across the aisle. Indrek is grinning at me, thrilled to see me in court. I’m most glad that Jonathan is here; he gives me a tremendous amount of strength, like an older brother. We wait for the judge to arrive. I try to avoid turning around and looking at my parents and friends, but knowing that they have come to support me gives me a sense of comfort. The door behind the judge’s bench opens, and Judge Eugene Nickerson, a sprightly white-haired man in his seventies, walks in. Everyone in the courtroom stands, then sits down, and I feel my blood pumping. I’m ready to win. The judge greets everybody with a friendly “Good morning.” So far so good. Maybe we should all just shake hands and go home. Jury selection begins. It’s an agonizing process in which both sides interview more than thirty potential jurors for approximately ten minutes each. I take voracious notes and mark the jurors that I like and dislike for Stuart to see. I don’t like the guy who works for the post office and owns the Picasso print. Scratch him. I like the guy who takes art classes. I like the Lithuanian woman who paints as a hobby. Suddenly I’m an expert in choosing a jury. After about five hours we finally narrow it down to twelve. We’re ready to start the trial.
