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Part Four
Unveiling
71
East Hampton
The call came through on the emergency line of the East Hampton Town Police Department at 9:55 p.m. Sergeant Bruce Logan, a twenty-year veteran of the department and lifelong resident of the East End, braced himself for the worst. It was Mike Knox calling from the airport.
“Helicopter or plane?” asked Logan.
“Actually, it was two Range Rovers.”
“Fender bender in the parking lot?”
“Fatality on the tarmac.”
“You’re shitting me, Mike.”
“I wish.”
The department’s headquarters were located on the southern edge of the airfield, on Wainscott Road, and the first officers arrived at the scene just three minutes after the initial call. They found the victim, a white male in his mid-fifties, lying on the tarmac in a bay of his own blood, his legs nearly severed, surrounded by several hundred carefully packaged five-hundred-gram gold ingots. The driver of the vehicle that had struck the man was an attractive, fit-looking woman in her thirties. She wore leggings, a Lululemon hoodie, and neon-greenNikes. She had no wallet and seemed unable to recall her name. Mike Knox supplied it for her. The woman was Lindsay Somerset. The dead guy with the nearly severed legs was her husband, a rich investor of some sort who owned a weekend palace in North Haven.
Death was formally declared, an arrest was made, a statement was issued. The news broke at midnight on WINS radio, and by nine the following morning it was all anyone was talking about. The real estate mogul Sterling Dunbar was in the shower when he learned that Lindsay Somerset had run down her scoundrel of a husband; the retailer Simon Levinson, still in his bed. Ellis Gray of JPMorgan Chase, having endured a sleepless night after reading theVanity Fairstory, was in his office overlooking Park Avenue. Two hours later he informed senior management that the firm was now on the hook for $436 million in loans issued to Masterpiece Art Ventures—loans that, in all likelihood, had been collateralized with forged paintings. Senior management accepted Gray’s resignation, effective immediately.
By midday the FBI had assumed control of the investigation. Agents searched Phillip’s homes, sealed his warehouse, and raided his offices on East Fifty-Third Street. The firm’s three female art experts were taken to Federal Plaza and questioned at length. All denied any knowledge of financial or art-related impropriety. Kenny Vaughan, Phillip’s wingman from his days at Lehman Brothers, was nowhere to be found. Agents seized his computers and printed files and issued a warrant for his arrest.
Phillip’s crimes were global in scope, and so was the fallout. Two prominent European dealers—Gilles Raymond of Brussels and Konrad Hassler of Berlin—were arrested and their inventories seized. Dealers in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Dubai were likewise taken into custody. Under questioning, all admitted that they were part of a far-flung distribution network that had been flooding the art market with high-quality forgeries for years. The French Ministry of Culture grudgingly acknowledged that four of those forgeries had found their way into the permanent collection of the Louvre. The museum’s president abruptly resigned, as did the director of the esteemed National Center for Research and Restoration, which had declared all four works to be authentic.
But who was this master forger who had managed to deceive the world’s most sophisticated art laboratory? And how many examples of his handiwork were now circulating through the bloodstream of the art world? Evelyn Buchanan, in a follow-up to her original exposé, reported that Phillip’s warehouse likely contained more than two hundred forged paintings. Hundreds more, she wrote, had already been foisted upon unsuspecting buyers. When a partial list of those works appeared anonymously on a much-read industry message board, panic swept the art world. Collectors, dealers, curators, and auctioneers—having relied for generations on the pronouncements of connoisseurs—turned to the scientists to help them sort through the wreckage. Aiden Gallagher of Equus Analytics was so inundated with requests for evaluations that he stopped answering his phone and responding to emails. “Mr. Gallagher,” wrote an art reporter from theNew York Times, “is the scandal’s only winner.”
The losers, of course, were Phillip’s well-heeled investors, the ones who had seen hundreds of millions of dollars in paper wealth wiped away in a matter of hours. Their lawsuits, countersuits, and public lamentations earned them little sympathy, especially from art world purists who found the very concept of a fund like Phillip’s abhorrent. Great paintings, they declared, were not securities or derivatives to be traded among the superrich. They were objects of beauty and cultural significance that belonged in museums. Not surprisingly, those who made their living buying and selling paintings found such sentiments laughable. Without the rich, they pointed out, there would be no art. And no museums, either.
A federal judge appointed a trustee to sift through Phillip’s assetsand dole out the proceeds to those he had defrauded. Three hundred and forty-seven investors sought restitution. The largest claim was $254 million by the industrialist Max van Egan. The smallest was $4.8 million by Sarah Bancroft, a former curator from the Museum of Modern Art who now managed an Old Master gallery in London.
One of Phillip’s investors, however, filed no claim at all: Magdalena Navarro, thirty-nine years old, a citizen of Spain who resided in the upscale Salamanca district of Madrid. According to documents seized from the offices of Masterpiece Art Ventures—and to sworn statements given to the FBI by the three cooperating employees of the firm—Navarro was a European-based freelance runner who purchased and sold paintings on Phillip Somerset’s behalf. Her last recorded account balance was $56.2 million, a great deal of money to leave lying on the table.
As it turned out, the FBI knew more about Magdalena Navarro than it had revealed in public, which was nothing at all. It knew, for example, that the European art dealers Gilles Raymond and Konrad Hassler had identified her as the link between their galleries and Masterpiece Art Ventures. The Bureau also knew that Navarro had been in New York at the time of the hedge fund’s spectacular collapse, having arrived on a Delta Air Lines flight from Rome and departed—less than twelve hours after Phillip Somerset’s death—on a flight to London. Interestingly enough, she had been seated next to Gabriel Allon, the legendary former director-general of the Israeli secret intelligence service, on both legs of her journey. The art dealer Sarah Bancroft, who also happened to be a former clandestine CIA officer, had accompanied Allon and Navarro on the flight to Heathrow.
Investigators also established that all three had stayed in separate rooms on the twentieth floor of the Pierre Hotel during their brief visit to New York. And that Magdalena Navarro was likely the source of the exposé inVanity Fair. And that Navarro departed the Pierre Hotel shortly before the article’s publication—without luggage ora handbag—and traveled to East Hampton Airport aboard Phillip Somerset’s Sikorsky helicopter. And that she subsequently left East Hampton Airport, in the chaotic minutes following Somerset’s grisly death, aboard a Bell 407 chartered by Allon and Bancroft. The pilot delivered them to JFK, where they spent the night in the airport Hilton. And by eight the following morning, they were gone.
All of which suggested to the FBI that a friendly chat with Allon was in order. Finding him proved less difficult than they imagined. The FBI’s legal attaché in Rome simply rang the offices of the Tiepolo Restoration Company in Venice, and Allon’s wife arranged a meeting. It took place in Harry’s Bar—which was where, unbeknownst to the legal attaché, Allon’s involvement in the affair began. While sipping a Bellini, he told the FBI officer about a private inquiry he had undertaken at the behest of an old friend whom he refused to identify. This private inquiry, he said in conclusion, led him to Magdalena Navarro and, ultimately, Phillip Somerset’s $1.2 billion forgery-based Ponzi scheme.
“Where is she now?” asked the FBI man, whose name was Josh Campbell.
“Somewhere in the Pyrenees. Even I don’t know where.”
“Doing what?”
“Painting, I assume.”
“Is she any good?”
“If Phillip hadn’t got his hooks into her, she would have been a major artist.”
“We’d like to question her.”
“I’m sure you would. But as a personal favor to me, I’d like you to let her get on with her life.”
“The Bureau isn’t in the business of granting personal favors, Allon.”
“In that case, you leave me no choice but to call the president directly.”
“You wouldn’t dare.”
“Watch me.”
And so Special Agent Josh Campbell returned to Rome empty-handed, but with a fascinating tale to tell. He wrote it up in a lengthy memorandum and fired it simultaneously to Washington and New York. Those who knew of Allon’s past exploits were dubious as to the document’s accuracy—and justifiably so. The report made no mention, for example, of a forged portrait by Anthony van Dyck. Or a recently deceased Frenchwoman named Valerie Bérrangar. Or a Parisian antiques dealer and art thief named Maurice Durand. Or the Swiss violinist Anna Rolfe. Or the notorious Corsican crime figure Don Anton Orsati. Or the lecherous but lovable London art dealer Oliver Dimbleby, whose fictitious rediscovery and record-setting sales of three Venetian School masterworks had recently set the art world ablaze.
By the end of July, all three canvases were hanging in the apartment of the forger who had created them, along with two versions of Modigliani’sReclining Nude, a Cézanne, a Monet, and a stunning version of Van Gogh’sSelf-Portrait with Bandaged Ear. On the easel in his studio was a painting with an L-shaped tear, 15 by 23 centimeters, in the lower left corner. After repairing the damage and retouching the losses, the forger shipped the work to a small gallery near the Plaza Virgen de los Reyes in Seville. Then, early the next morning, he disappeared.
