Con artist, p.18
Con/Artist, page 18
twenty-one
MY TRIAL
(1989 to 1991)
When I first told people about my arrest, nobody cared; once it was on TV, everybody went nuts. My friends in the art world faded into the shadows, but the rest were titillated and wanted to get as close to the action as they could. Some bragged that they knew me, while others lied that they had known about my art all along. When I told them that now they couldn’t say I was a drug dealer anymore, one asshole said, “You know you did that too.”
George and I spent a week preparing for my first appearance before a judge. It wasn’t a big deal, mostly procedural. We just had to show up and tell them how we intended to plead. I drove two hours to the courtroom and spent three minutes in front of the judge—just long enough for her to yell at me for sitting in the wrong spot. We pled not guilty to the charges, they set an initial date for the preliminary hearing, and that was it.
When I stepped out of the courtroom, a horde of journalists and reporters and cameramen was waiting for me. They shoved microphones in my face and pointed cameras at me, bombarding me with questions. Was I guilty? How many forgeries had I done? Where was my studio? They kept jostling each other to get as close to me as possible. I had to back up, telling them that I had nothing to say and that I would let George do the talking.
George stood in the hallway and made some clichéd statements about how he was going to vigorously defend his client and how he was going to show that I was innocent of all charges. In all, he talked for about ten minutes, mostly about how I was a unique and talented artist and what a wonderful human being I was. It’s the least he could do considering how much I was paying him. For sure, criminal defense attorneys are expensive and justice does not come cheap.
We spent the next year going back and forth to the courthouse for motions, hearings, and arcane procedural bullshit. I’d go to Porter’s office a couple of times a week. We’d talk on the phone almost daily. Mostly we’d show up before the judge to request delays and continuances and postponements, wasting my time and racking up more and more billable hours while the sword of justice hung over my head.
Marguerite’s boyfriend, Larry, had warned me that George overcharged enormously and viciously pursued his clients for payment. Still, when I got the bill, it shocked me. In all, it cost me about $130,000 for George to see me through the preliminary hearing. All it got me was the go-ahead to prosecute me and a trial date over a year away. When I got the bill from the law firm, I fired George. How the fuck was I going to keep coming up with that kind of money? For a trial, it would have cost me another half a million dollars.
Pretty soon, it was a fire sale at the Tetro residence. I sold my condo to a well-known divorce attorney. When I was showing him around, I gave him a dollar and “hired” him on retainer so that I could establish attorney-client privilege. Then, with confidentiality in place, I showed him my secret room and how it could be accessed by using the phone. He loved it so much, he bought the place on the spot.
My Rolls I sold to the friend of Joey Marcena. He was a cheapskate who took full advantage of the position I was in and ended up stealing the car. I think I gave it to him for $35,000—half of what it was worth. I even threw in the Alpine stereo and phone system, though he bitched and moaned endlessly because he needed to replace a $25 part that was broken.
To eat, I painted two expensive Chagall gouaches on Japon paper for the dealer Truman Hefflinger, who wanted to sell them for me. It was a terrible idea, but I needed the money badly. Not that I ever saw any, though, because he ended up stiffing me. After all, I couldn’t call the cops.
Soon, I needed to find a new lawyer. I met Robert Shapiro, the attorney who famously represented O. J. Simpson, and Marlon Brando’s son Christian. I would see Shapiro at Nikki Blair’s having dinner with all the other hotshots. He would come over to my table and schmooze me, grandly buying me drinks and stopping to chat and introduce me around.
When I went to see him at his office in Century City, it was a different story. Suddenly, he acted like he was doing me a big favor and that I should be grateful. Though we had set an appointment, Shapiro made me wait for an hour and a half, sitting in the waiting room with my thumb up my ass while people streamed in and out of his office. I left without even seeing him. Later he called me to ask what had happened and why I didn’t show up. When I complained about having to wait, he bristled, “Marlon Brando waited for me.” I got rid of him immediately. I found out he was planning to plead me out anyway, but I wanted my day in court.
I ended up hiring Jay Tanenbaum, a well-known and expensive troubleshooter who always seemed to find a way to spring his clients. Covington & Crowe had wiped me out, but Jay agreed to represent me anyway. I was getting ready to sell the Testa Rossa I had built, and I anticipated that I’d get over $200,000 for it. To sell the car, I hired a PR firm to orchestrate a gala event at the Sofitel hotel in Beverly Hills. We turned it into a glamorous affair complete with champagne and velvet ropes for the gleaming, polished, gemlike car. I had a full-page ad in Cavallino, the foremost Ferrari owners’ magazine, and in the duPont Registry, a kind of classified listing that specialized in luxury automobiles, real estate, and yachts.
The event was a spectacle, and all the local media showed up to see the notorious art forger unveil his crown jewel while the DA’s office did everything they could to put him behind bars. In the end, the billionaire Ron Burkle, one of Forbes’s “Wealthiest People on the Planet,” bought the car for $210,000, which was a real bargain. I had spent over $350,000 on it, and today the car is probably worth half a million dollars. I could have cried when they took it away. After all the money and time and effort I put into it, I never even got to drive the thing.
After I sold the condo, I went to live in an apartment in Upland that my good friend Richard Lewis generously lent me. I stayed there throughout the next year, driving my Honda hatchback back and forth to court. I had already sold the Lamborghini to a guy in Switzerland, and because mine had come directly from the Geneva Motor Show, the guy didn’t even have to register it or get new plates. I just handed him the keys.
For over a year, I worked with Jay, driving to his office in Sherman Oaks and talking on the phone almost daily. I went to court so many times that everybody kept mistaking me for a lawyer; when I’d go through security, the guards would say, “Good morning, counselor.” One day, I stepped into an elevator with Charles Keating, the central figure in the savings-and-loan scandal. His lawyers wanted to kick me out because they thought I was an attorney too. I was insulted and told them, “I’m not an attorney. I’m an alleged criminal,” as if that was better.
We hired experts, in particular, a guy out of Florida who made legitimate copies of famous paintings. We wanted him to talk about how making reproductions was a time-honored tradition that had been around since before the Renaissance. It wasn’t cheap. I remember he wrote Jay a letter saying that he always flew first class and stayed in the best hotels, required a hefty daily fee, an honorarium, and a weeklong minimum just to get his ass on a plane to Los Angeles. He probably made more off of me than he ever made painting Rembrandts.
Jay gave me no illusions about my chances. The wire Sawicki had worn, along with his testimony, was pretty damning and things did not look promising. At one of the first meetings, Jay suggested that I give the prosecution the names of other dealers I had worked with in exchange for a lighter sentence. I couldn’t do it. It is engrained in the DNA of every Italian kid in Fulton that you do not rat on your friends, and I told him I would not drop a dime on anyone. He said, “Be smart, Tony, just give them some names.” We went back and forth until I finally lost patience and said, “OK, how about Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., and Dean Martin?” I thought it was funny, but Jay was dismayed. He gave up and we never had the conversation again for the rest of the time we worked together.
After I got arrested, I stopped taking care of myself and I started going downhill. I quit working out. I was stressed out. I ate poorly. I had all kinds of shit on my mind. I had been on a health kick right before I got busted, but court and lawyers and trials took the wind out of my sails. During this period, I appeared on a PBS program about art forgers called The Fine Art of Faking It because Jay thought it would show me in a sympathetic light. I also did a show for the BBC. If you look back at the tapes now, you can see that I look bloated, unhealthy, and stressed out.
After the initial bust and the rush of press, things started to grind along. I’d have a flurry of courtroom activity and then I’d have months with nothing to do, waiting for the court docket to roll along and for my trial to inch closer, day by boring day. After my fifteen minutes of fame, even my friends lost interest in the story.
Charles kept in touch. I would see him occasionally when I went to LA for court and stayed at the Mondrian, until a new manager cut off my free stays. We’d go to the Moustache Café like the old days, and Charles would treat me because he knew I was broke. He also gave me some work to do—nothing illegal—and the small sum he paid helped me get by when I really needed it. I’d talk to Tommy once in a while, but there wasn’t anything left to talk about. He had his own problems and, like me, was wrapped up in court and trials and legal proceedings.
My finances were so dicey sometimes I barely had enough to eat. To keep afloat, I started a small business selling my remaining Tetrographs to telemarketers in Las Vegas at wholesale. They’d peddle life insurance or gold coins or vitamins, and they’d give away a free Chagall lithograph by master copyist Antonio Tetro as a premium. I’d stamp copied by me, tony tetro in big red letters on the back to cover my ass. It wasn’t exactly high art, but what can you do? You have to pay the bills.
Finally, in May of 1991, almost two years from the day I was arrested, my trial was set to start. In preparation, I moved out of the apartment that Richard Lewis had lent me and took a room at Griswold’s Hotel, the one attached to the smorgasbord restaurant in Claremont. I knew that chances were good I’d be going to jail and I wanted to have all my things cleared out and in order in case I needed to go away.
Griswold’s was the first hotel I ever lived in. It was not the Ritz, but it was convenient, with clean sheets and fresh towels every day. To be honest, it wasn’t bad and I didn’t feel too depressed about it. I’d come home from a long day at trial and I’d walk over to the smorgasbord for the prime rib and Waldorf salad. I figured I’d count my blessings.
Jay told me that all the judges were fighting to take my trial. They dealt with horrible stuff all day—child killers, rapists, murderers. They knew the trial would take a long time and that it would be a pleasant vacation from all that stuff.
The judge who was assigned to our case, John Henning, was a veteran. He had been on the bench forever, but out of the courtroom for years. Jay even told me Henning was so rusty that he could almost guarantee a mistrial. I didn’t know anything about the law, but after a couple of years in and out of courtrooms, even I could see that the judge kept fucking up and kept frustrating the lawyers.
The deputy DA, Reva Goetz, who was prosecuting me, was a nice woman. I liked her even though she was trying to put me behind bars; she was cordial and friendly and the jury seemed to like her, which worried me.
A jury trial is a highly choreographed performance. Once the trial starts, everything you do or say or show is intended to make a certain psychological or rational impression on the jury, the same way that films and plays move us to tears or laughter or empathy. The judge is only there to make sure the rules are observed and that things run smoothly, and the law is less important than the impression you make upon the hearts and minds of the human beings who are deciding your fate.
One of the first things that Jay did was to try to paint a more sympathetic picture of me than might have emerged from the press portrayals or my taped conversations with Sawicki. My daughter, Christine, came to the trial almost every day. Jay wanted to show that we had a good relationship and that I was a normal dad with more to his character than art forgery. He was concerned that the jury would think she was my girlfriend, so early on in front of them, he made her ask me, “Dad, I’m going to go to the cafeteria. Do you want anything?” It was the kind of thing that had nothing to do with legal arguments but everything to do with emotional connection and sympathy.
My mother made my brother fly out to make sure I was OK and to offer his support. For part of the trial, she came out with my aunt Jean. I had my daughter take them out of the court when the prosecutor was about to play the wiretap tape because in it I had been recorded swearing and saying crude things I didn’t want them to hear.
Our defense strategy was a simple one. I admitted to making the paintings and selling them to Sawicki. How could I deny it? But our claim was that I had never sold the art as real and I had never fooled Sawicki. He knew what he was getting, and it was he who sold the paintings as real, not me.
In court, we wanted to show the jurors that copying was a legitimate business and that there were lots of reasons why a person might want a forgery. Maybe a buyer couldn’t afford the real thing, maybe they put the real one in a vault and kept a copy on the walls for insurance purposes, maybe they just liked the look of it.
When Yamagata took the stand, he had a Japanese translator. Yamagata spoke English pretty well, but in court I think they wanted to make him look more sympathetic, like a naive artist who had been taken advantage of by crooked villains. On TV, Yamagata had said he couldn’t tell the difference between his signature and mine, but in the courtroom, he talked about how I had left white borders around my paintings, which he never did, and how I had made my paintings ugly, instead of warm and whimsical like his own.
Sawicki came off as shifty and uncomfortable. You could tell the jury didn’t like him. Not that it mattered to him; he had already gotten probation, offering up the big fish in order to save his own ass. Jay wanted to show he would have said anything to avoid serving time. When he asked him if he was worried about going to prison, Sawicki answered, “It’s a place that I wouldn’t want to be.” I noticed that one of the younger, longhaired jurors chuckled to himself and smirked.
In one of the taped conversations between Sawicki and me, I had gone to pee while I was on the phone, you could hear it in the background, and Olds, a juror we liked and who was now the foreman, cracked up. These were little rays of sunlight because they showed that despite all the incriminating things they heard me say, some of the jury connected with me.
When I took the stand, I did my best to be calm and jovial, answering Reva’s questions politely and trying to show my knowledge, love, and passion for art. They conceded that I was obviously a talented artist and that I loved to paint, but they also focused on my use of the term “bone crusher” that Sawicki had repeated over and over again, trying to make me look dangerous, like a mobster and violent criminal. It hadn’t even been my choice of words. Sawicki had used the term and then tried to get me to agree to it, which I think would have made it look like I was extorting him.
What they really hammered me on was that I signed my paintings with the name of another artist. To them, that was crossing the line that indicated fraud. When they raided my condo, they had found the notebooks I had used to practice my Chagall signature. I had signed hundreds and hundreds of times, working hard to get things right. One of the signatures I had circled and scribbled the word perfect next to it. Reva used that as evidence to show that I was striving for a level of perfection that could only be used to fool buyers. She asked me why I had kept practicing. I told her I liked to do things properly and asked, “What was I supposed to write, Mickey Mouse?” The jury laughed, which helped to ease the tension, and this pointed to one of the big points we were making.
If a copyist was going to make a painting to look like the work of a particular artist, it was only natural and normal to also copy the signature, striving to make the copy an actual copy. This was a subtle but important point that the prosecution had to concede; the signature was an integral part of the artwork, an argument that even became legal precedent and was used later in other court cases dealing with art.
On the notebooks, I had scribbled all kinds of notes and reminders. On one page, I had written “Call Carlo Pedretti at UCLA.” He was the expert I had chatted with when I was researching my Caravaggio. A handwriting expert compared the natural writing in the notebook to the fake, distorted exemplar that I had filled out the day the cops had busted me. She told the jury that she had never seen a sample of handwriting that had been so systematically altered and she had contributed my case to an academic study as a perfect example of how to obscure your own handwriting.
During the raid, the cops had found the Butterfield & Butterfield receipt Vincent and I had gotten for the Dalí Nuclear Disintegration painting that we had planned to sell in Santa Monica. It had Vincent’s name on it and a value of $350,000. Since they never found the painting, the DA assumed that I had sold it. In reality, I had retrieved it from Mike’s attic and stuck it back in the secret room along with the Descharnes certificate that I had made for it.
When they found the receipt, the DA had called Vincent in for questioning. He covered for me, denying that he knew anything about it, and said that he had no idea why his name was mentioned. Without a painting, and with no way to show that it had been sold, there wasn’t much that they could do about it, though on the stand they insinuated I had sold it and they tried to get me to admit it.
Jay and I decided to call their bluff. I got the painting out of the secret room and we produced it at trial, surprising the DA and puncturing their claims in front of the jury. It was a big deal because it showed their allegations hadn’t been real at all, and this cast doubt as to how much the jury could trust the DA on other claims.
