Provenance

by Laney Salisbury

  On the second day he rose from his seat dramatically, cleared his throat, and fired his defense team. His reasoning astonished everyone. His case, he explained, was far more sinister than they could imagine. It no longer involved a handful of bad paintings. Instead, it centered on a multibillion-dollar arms industry that sold covert weapons to nations with the British government’s approval. This conspiracy of middlemen, gun runners, and Crown spies had been funded through the sale of thousands of works of modern art. When the government realized that the true story was about to emerge at the trial, it had sent its agents to silence Drewe. That he was standing before the court was conclusive proof that they had failed. Now he alone possessed the requisite skills and inside knowledge to unravel the convoluted conspiracy. He would handle his own defense, thanks very much.

  Sitting high above the barristers in his seventeenth-century ceremonial wig and gown—symbols of the majesty of British law—Judge Geoffrey Rivlin listened carefully to Drewe’s peculiar petition. The defendant announced that he planned to call top government officials and arms dealers to the witness stand who knew of covert weapons sales to nations, including Iran, Iraq, and Sierra Leone. Documents in his possession and eyewitness accounts of the plot would shed light on the evil forces arrayed against him. All he wanted was a court-appointed legal adviser to help him navigate the finer points of the law.

  John Bevan, the prosecutor, noted that Drewe’s original defense statement had made no mention of such a conspiracy.

  Judge Rivlin strongly advised Drewe against representing himself, but the professor would not be deterred. Rivlin was well aware of his repeated success in delaying the start of the trial, and he probably suspected that Drewe was once again trying to drag the proceedings out. If he were to begin a protracted search for new counsel, who would need months to prepare his case, it would delay the trial “indefinitely, possibly permanently,” the judge concluded. Consequently, he allowed Drewe to represent himself but refused to grant him a legal assistant.

  Drewe seemed composed and confident, and appeared to enjoy his newest incarnation as a barrister. Each morning he arrived in court in a freshly pressed suit, with a silk handkerchief tucked in his top pocket and a tie that had a snakelike pattern. His con man’s sensitivity to body language, dress, and manner was especially well-honed, and enabled him to adopt the style and appearance of a successful courtroom veteran. A model of propriety, he maintained a firm but always decorous tone when addressing the judge and his adversaries at the prosecutor’s table.

  “With all due respect to my learned friend,” he would say, or “if it pleases your lordship,” or “may I respectfully draw the court’s attention to . . .” With a flourish, he would address the “ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” punctuating his presentation with sudden gestures and the occasional accusatory roar. A well-timed guffaw would communicate his special contempt for a contention advanced by the prosecution. It was a grand performance, worthy of Charles Laughton and Rumpole of the Bailey. One prosecutor told a colleague that if Drewe had been grounded in reality, he might have made an excellent barrister.

  Drewe argued that he had been made a scapegoat by officials determined to conceal a “cesspit of corruption.” Arrayed against him, he said, were the Ministry of Defence, the Crown Prosecution Service—which he accused of withholding evidence that supported his claims—Whitehall, the Art and Antiques Squad, and a cabal of auction houses. “A web of deceit has allowed art dealers to join in the horrible conspiracy,” he declared, explaining that the plot involved more than four thousand paintings—many of them that proved to be fake—sold to finance the weapons deals.

  These courtroom antics were widely considered a stratagem of last resort in the service of an indefensible defense, but the prosecutors had to make sure that Drewe would not sweep away a single member of the jury. The detectives in the gallery paid particular attention whenever he stood to question a witness or request a ruling from the judge, and they soon observed a pattern that would prove useful to the prosecution. Each time he made a statement that they knew to be a lie, he put his tongue to the roof of his mouth, producing a barely audible clucking sound. Poker players call this the “tell,” an almost involuntary manner-ism that betrays a player who is holding a particularly good hand. Drewe’s nervous tic became increasingly frequent as the trial went on.

  Much of the inspiration for his new defense came from a recent and infamous case involving arms smuggling by an alleged MI6/CIA front company called Allivane. Without providing a stitch of evidence to connect his case with Allivane’s, Drewe inserted details from that case into his own. Drewe argued that he had met the arms dealer Peter Harris, who introduced him to a chairman of Allivane. Drewe had set up Norseland to market works, particularly those that Allivane wanted to sell, and there had been nothing to suggest to him that they were not genuine. He said that in the course of his work he had met with high-ranking government officials associated with Allivane, including the Conservative Party’s Michael Heseltine and former Soviet leader Yuri Andropov, both of whom he claimed would back up his story in court.

  Even the most generous of juries would have found it hard to follow his logic. At one point a juror asked him a question via a written note to Judge Rivlin. Ten minutes into Drewe’s long-winded reply, the same juror begged the judge to withdraw the question.

  On several occasions, Judge Rivlin lost his patience. One afternoon, in the course of a long interrogation by Drewe of Detective Searle, he stopped the professor short. “We are in danger of just getting lost in millions of questions. . . . Can I remind you that before lunch you said you were just about to get to the thrust of your suggestions?”

  “I was just about to do that,” said Drewe, who proceeded to launch himself on a new tangent. He was pushing the limits. Once, as he was questioning a witness, he stopped, anticipating another rebuke from the judge.

  “Your Honor, I am pushing ahead as fast as I can, but there are for the defense some quite important points that I have to . . .”

  “Mr. Drewe, I have not said anything to you,” Rivlin interrupted.

  “Just continue.”

  Whenever Drewe collided head-on with the facts, as he often did, he seemed unperturbed. He would ask a leading question intended to bolster his case and nearly always receive a reply that damaged it. “He’s hoisting himself on his own petard,” one lawyer was heard to whisper to a colleague.

  Drewe spent an entire morning asserting that Searle—whom he sometimes mistakenly referred to as Myatt—had investigated only those paintings that had not been linked to Allivane, the company that lay at the heart of his imagined conspiracy. Drewe accused Searle of being an agent for MI5, forcing the detective to scramble in order to prove that the allegations were false.

  Bevan objected. “Mr. Drewe is not an expert on Allivane. Can we draw a limit to this?”

  There was little need for the prosecution to bear down on the professor, for Drewe was his own worst enemy. He exuded contempt for the Crown’s witnesses and seemed unable to connect with the jury. In a stilted attempt at humor, he even corrected Judge Rivlin on his grammar while complimenting him on his craft.

  A string of witnesses testified that Drewe had convinced them to sell paintings for him. Dealers and experts explained how he had persuaded them to authenticate works of art. Sir Alan Bowness, who had given his blessing to several fake Nicholsons, told the jury how Drewe’s runners had approached him with pristine-looking provenances, and how he had eventually helped the police crack the case.

  Librarians from the Tate and the Victoria and Albert Museum testified about Drewe’s frequent and suspicious visits. Drewe protested, saying he couldn’t possibly have done anything untoward without being detected by the museums’ closed-circuit cameras and tight surveillance. During his years as a researcher, he said, he had visited archives in New York, France, and Germany without a single complaint.

  “If indeed I had been tampering with archives, there is certainly
a very serious problem, because the whole history of the Second World War would have been rewritten. I have been into just about everywhere.”

  Under cross-examination by Bevan, Drewe wouldn’t stop talking.

  “I have been cross-examining you for something like eleven hours, of which probably about one hour is me asking questions and the other ten is you answering,” Bevan interrupted at one point. “Your job now is to answer questions; all right?”

  “If you ask a question that needs a detailed answer, then I will give one,” Drewe said. “I am the defendant and it is my future that depends on being able to present a proper defense.”

  “This is getting us nowhere,” said the judge. “You are the defendant, but you are not in control of this trial. If Mr. Bevan asks you a simple question . . . you are under an obligation to give a simple answer.”

  With Myatt cooperating with police, and Daniel Stoakes’s lawyer advising him not to take the stand, Drewe hogged the show, and he seemed to be enjoying the performance.

  Another prosecutor mocked Drewe’s exaggerated defense and his tendency to name-drop, adopt aliases, and fold random pieces of history into one another.

  “In the course of the case, the jury has heard of the Holy Office, Cardinal Ratzinger, American Nazis in England. We have heard of the Bureau of State Security from South Africa, we have heard of contacts in high places, of helicopters in . . . Goodness gracious, Peking, Israel, Zaire.

  “The truth is that you are Mr. Drewe, you are two sorts of Mr. Cockett, you are Mr. Sussman, you are Mr. Green, Mr. Atwood, and you are Mr. Martin and Mr. Bayard the researcher and Mr. Coverdale, aren’t you?”

  Drewe did not answer.

  Perhaps the most damaging testimony came from Myatt, who told the court how he had been swept up into Drewe’s scheme.

  “My vanity was quite ghastly, and this is the consequence of it,” he said. During cross-examination, he described Drewe as his onetime “best friend.” Then he called Drewe a psychopath and a liar to his face.

  “I was very much your creature. I found you hypnotizing, charming, challenging.”

  Drewe argued that Myatt had misrepresented himself, and that he had never been an artist, least of all a starving artist. Instead, he had been acting as an operative for a violent neo-Nazi group called Combat 18.

  In his own defense, Drewe called his two children and his mother to the stand. When it was Batsheva Goudsmid’s turn to testify, their hatred for each other was palpable. Drewe accused her of doing emotional harm to the children, microwaving their pet goldfish, and throwing boiling water on the family dog. Goudsmid tossed the charge back at Drewe, saying he had thrown the caged pet through a window.

  “I wouldn’t have if you hadn’t ducked,” Drewe replied.

  When Goudsmid accused him of stealing into her house while she was away, climbing into her bed, and putting on her pink negligee, the prosecutors and detectives did their best to stifle their laughter.

  Daniel Stoakes, who had also been charged with conspiracy to defraud, cut a sad figure. With his right eye inflamed by an infection, and becoming increasingly depressed as the trial wore on, Stoakes was advised by his lawyer not to take the stand. Instead, his lawyer argued that Stoakes’s world had been shaken, and he felt betrayed. He and Drewe had been very close in the past, and they had bonded over their failed relationships with women and the bitter separations that followed. When Drewe first asked him to pose as the owner of certain artworks, he had no idea that Drewe had already been using his name in forged provenances for years. Drewe said he couldn’t be listed as the owner himself because he wanted to keep the money from any sale out of Goudsmid’s hands, and Stoakes agreed to help his old friend out. At the time he was desperate for cash and appreciated the occasional twenty pounds Drewe offered him. It had never occurred to him that the works were fakes.

  Of the dozen or so runners who had helped Drewe’s scheme bear fruit, Stoakes was the only one charged. The police had found several letters of ownership he’d written to dealers and experts.

  During the trial, the two old friends spoke just once. Drewe leaned over to him and said quietly, “I want you to know how sorry I am about this.”

  Stoakes had been warned. “Upon advice I will not speak to you,” he said, and then he turned away.

  For the next six months they sat side by side in court and never spoke to or looked at each other again.

  As the trial was coming to an end, Drewe made a single reference to his former friend. “Daniel’s been brought into a maelstrom not of his own making,” he said.

  Stoakes was moved, and for a brief moment thought it was a sign of sympathy, but he knew where he stood with Drewe. “I was like a ripe plum ready to be picked from the tree,” as he put it.

  The trial, which had been expected to last three months, had taken nearly six. In his closing argument Bevan argued that Drewe’s scam had undermined art history and Britain’s cultural patrimony. While his main motive had been money, the effort he put into it suggested “an intellectual delight in fooling people, and contempt for experts.” Drewe was an unscrupulous user of people, “a consummate and expert operator in his chosen field,” “a Walter Mitty with a brass neck and criminal backbone [and] an ego the size of the Millennium Dome.” The whole operation “was a waste of a clever, astute, hugely retentive brain,” Bevan said. “He has wasted himself on a lifestyle which has left a trail of victims in its wake.”

  Toward the end of the trial Judge Rivlin advised the “long-suffering” jury to stay focused on the evidence. “You are not on a mission to clean up the art world,” he said.

  The jury reached a verdict in just five hours: Drewe was found guilty of conspiracy to defraud, forgery, theft, and using a false instrument with intent. He was sentenced to six years in prison.

  According to one observer, Drewe muffled a parting comment that sounded as if the “professor” couldn’t believe the jury did not see him as the victim. “The whole art world is corrupt,” he said. “Why pick on me?”

  Myatt was convicted of conspiracy to defraud and sentenced to a year.

  Daniel Stoakes was acquitted. He told friends that the jury had tempered justice with mercy, that they had measured his humanity in terms of their own experience rather than by the complex arguments presented by the prosecution.

  When it was time for Judge Rivlin to sum up the case, Drewe showed little emotion. He leaned slightly forward, his head to one side, and listened quietly.

  “You have an extraordinary and alarming talent for manipulating people,” Rivlin told him. “You were able to live very well indeed, and make a donation of £20,000 to the Tate, which I have no doubt was not seen by the Tate as a bribe but it was seen by you as one.” Drewe had “spun gold” from the “expert forgeries and endless lies,” the judge continued. He had targeted the vulnerable, conning his associates and runners.

  “Some of these people have also been, to an extent, the victims of your fraud. When they finally turned away from you, you did not hesitate to threaten them.”

  Rivlin was easier on Myatt. “You were gradually sucked into the conspiracy when I accept you were vulnerable,” he said.

  With that, he congratulated the jury for their “extraordinary attention.” As a reward for their patience, he excused them from jury service for life.

  EPILOGUE

  The press covered the scam and subsequent trial with unreserved enthusiasm—“The Greatest Art Forgery of the Century!” “A Mix of Kafka and Lewis Carroll!”—and Drewe was already famous by the time he was transported from the courtroom to Pentonville in the back of a sweatbox van in February 1999. Built in North London in 1842, the city’s busiest prison held twelve hundred inmates and several thousand cockroaches. Reform advocates suggested that Pentonville would have been more at home on Hogarth’s Gin Lane than in present-day London. It boasted a rich musical, literary, and political history: the Irish revolutionary Roger Casement was hanged there in 1916; Oscar Wilde did time there, as
did Hugh Cornwell, the lead singer for the punk/new wave band the Stranglers. A decade after Drewe’s stint, the proto-punk singer Pete Doherty, who modeled himself on the elegant wastrels of the 1970s, also served a short sentence there.

  On arrival, Drewe was marched down a long corridor straight to the hospital wing. His manner had become increasingly lofty over the years, and during the first few weeks he spent as much time as he could in the wing with one complaint or another. Later, when he was thrown in with the rest of the population, he managed to establish himself as something of an expert in the intricacies of the law. It was said that he charged one inmate £10,000 to prepare a failed appeal. In the yard, among the thieves and dope dealers, miscreants and tai chi practitioners, he stood out like a sore thumb. The place was filled with immigrants from Russia and Colombia, from Jamaica and Latvia and Poland, from India and Vietnam. There was an Irish unit and a group of black gangsters from East London. Apparently, Drewe worked nights in the prison library and kept to himself until the word got out that he had a clear mind and a particular agility with paper. He was asked to offer his legal expertise several more times, and gladly gave it for whatever additional comfort he might receive in such dismal quarters.

  One day in the summer of 2000, Drewe was brought up to the front office, given his old suit and the few belongings he had with him when he came in, and released. He strolled out, his long arms dangling and his head held high. He had served about four years of his six-year sentence, including time spent awaiting trial.

  He appealed his conviction, claiming he had not received a fair trial and was denied proper counsel. The appeal was denied. Police estimate he made at least $2 million from the scam. Drewe returned to his well-rehearsed role as a citizen above suspicion. He lived comfortably in Reigate with Helen Sussman, his wife, and still claimed to be a physicist. Whenever reporters called, he stuck to his story. It was all the government’s fault, he said. He was a victim of a cover-up involving secret arms deals with rogue countries. Whoever came along and offered him air time or ink became the subject of repeated entreaties. He would chat for hours and invariably volunteer to supply documentation—forty-two boxes of it—to prove his case. He always failed to deliver, and he consistently broke appointments.