At first glance it looks like a photograph: Pablo Picasso, middle-aged, leaning on a wood-panelled wall. In one hand he holds a cigarette, the other is stuffed in the pocket of his suit. It’s an old picture. There’s a grain to the film, scratches on the lens. But appearances are deceptive. As any art dealer will tell you, to appreciate art you first need to learn how to see.

Look again. Look carefully. See that it’s actually a painting of a photograph, oil on canvas, exquisitely detailed. The portrait, “Untitled” (2012), is typical of the Italian conceptual artist Rudolf Stingel, who often takes as his subject the act of painting itself. (If a painter paints a photograph, whose art, really, are you looking at?) Though not a household name, Stingel is regarded in the rarefied world of the contemporary art market as one of the most significant painters working today. His abstract works, layered on metal, Styrofoam or carpet, rarely sell for less than seven figures. In 2017, Christie’s auction house sold another of Stingel’s paintings for $10.6 million.

So when Daniel Tümpel and Loretta Würtenberger decided to sell the Picasso portrait in the spring of 2019, it seemed likely they would get a good price. The couple are experienced art traders. Tümpel is a former investment banker, Würtenberger, a former patent lawyer and judge. In 2007, they set up Fine Art Partners (FAP), a Berlin-based company that provides loans to artists, advises artists’ estates and invests in artworks for profit. FAP had paid $7.1m for the Stingel in 2016, on the recommendation of the gallerist Inigo Philbrick. A suave American with strawberry-blond curls, Philbrick was an art world prodigy. At just 32, he had opened galleries in London’s Mayfair and Miami’s Design District and built a roster of high-profile clients. Philbrick regularly advised FAP on its art investments. FAP would put up most of the money, while Philbrick would identify undervalued paintings, buy them discreetly and sell them in short order to another buyer. Then they’d split the profits. (In the art world this practice, frowned upon yet widely practised, is known as “flipping”.) Stingel was one of Philbrick’s specialties.

Philbrick told them that with Stingel’s reputation riding high and an upcoming retrospective at Switzerland’s Fondation Beyeler museum, the Picasso portrait could now be worth up to $14m. Christie’s had accepted the painting for its upcoming evening sale, with a guarantee of $9m – meaning at the very least a tidy profit. (Guarantees are essentially a bet on an artwork’s value. If a lot sells for less than the guarantee, the auction house will instead buy it for the guaranteed sum. If it sells for more, the auction house takes an extra cut – typically 50 per cent of anything above the guarantee – as payment for assuming the risk.)

Philbrick sounded confident. “[Christie’s], and increasingly I, feel there is an opportunity in May to set a new world auction record for the artist with the painting,” he wrote to Tümpel in an email.

On 15 May 2019, the art world cognoscenti assembled in the white, high-ceilinged auction room at Christie’s in New York. The mega-gallerists Larry Gagosian and Arne Glimcher sat a few rows from the mega-dealers Helly Nahmad and Jose Mugrabi. Christie’s staff manned phones on both sides of the room, taking bids from anonymous clients. The evening started strongly. Early on, a glistening stainless-steel rabbit by Jeff Koons sold for $91m, setting a new record for a living artist. But the Stingel – lot 33b – was listed late in the proceedings and bidding proved tepid. When the hammer fell, it sold for just $6,517,500, to New York gallerist Stellan Holm – less than the guarantee and not even half what they’d hoped for.

© Mike Diver,DIVERAGUILAR

The next day, Philbrick messaged Tümpel and Würtenberger. “Strange sale. Super-strong sale for blue-chip post-war things, but not great for a lot of others,” he wrote. “They were talking to me about a hammer price in excess of $10m, but one party flaked.” The sale proved that accepting the $9m guarantee had been the smart choice. “We were right to take it,” Philbrick wrote. But a few days later, when Christie’s updated its webpage listing the Stingel as sold for $6.5m, Tümpel emailed Philbrick, confused. Not to worry, Philbrick said, explaining that Christie’s would have “internal reasons” for displaying such a low price. He also sent, via WhatsApp, a copy of the signed guarantee agreement for $9m.

But as spring fell into summer, the money for the Stingel didn’t arrive. Philbrick made excuses. He had the money, he said, he just needed to first settle his accounts with someone else. Tümpel and Würtenberger had little reason to doubt his word. Philbrick had been buying and selling paintings for FAP since 2015 and had always been straightforward. But recently, he had become more erratic and distant. He still hadn’t settled the balance on two other paintings he’d sold for them the previous year, blaming the buyer – a rich but tempestuous Russian collector. Philbrick changed the subject. He had another painting in mind for FAP – desperate sellers, quick profit. Did they want in?

‘Be careful. These people play nice, but when it comes to the dollar, things get dark quick’

Eventually, in September, Tümpel contacted Christie’s, enquiring about the missing payment. He attached the guarantee as proof. A few days later, Tümpel and Würtenberger received an email from Christie’s’ lawyers. “We believe that is a falsified document,” the email read. “First, we have no record of that version of the agreement in our files. Second, Inigo Philbrick Limited was not the consignor of the lot.” The guarantee was a forgery. Worse, Christie’s hadn’t even sold the painting on FAP’s behalf. According to their records, it belonged to somebody else.

Realising they were in the midst of a con, Tümpel and Würtenberger quietly instructed lawyers, careful not to alert Philbrick to what they’d learned. There was more than the Stingel at stake. Philbrick had eight other artworks owned by FAP in his possession – including works by Wade Guyton, Christopher Wool, Donald Judd and Yayoi Kusama – in total worth more than $14m.

On 9 September, Tümpel wrote to Philbrick, demanding that he hand over the remaining artworks. Philbrick refused. He was “on the cusp of selling” three of the works, he said. “I’m very happy to give you the security you desire,” he wrote, “but not where it interferes with sales strategies that are in place and bearing fruit.” He sounded almost scolding. “I’m hugely disappointed that our relationship, after so many successful deals, has deteriorated in this way.” Shortly after, he stopped responding. When FAP sent someone to Philbrick’s Miami gallery to find him, the gallery was shut. There was still food in the fridge, but the walls were bare.

Only then, like an artwork revealing itself, did the full extent of the con become clear. Over the course of several weeks, more victims came forward, claiming they, not FAP, were the rightful owners of the Picasso portrait. It wasn’t just that painting, either. In multiple instances, victims alleged, Philbrick had sold artworks to more than one person or sold fractions of paintings – 50 per cent here, ten per cent there – that together amounted to more than 100 per cent. He had allegedly taken out nearly $20m in loans on paintings he didn’t actually own – and, in some cases, even absconded with both the paintings and the client’s money. Lawyers painted a picture of an elaborate transatlantic Ponzi scheme, drawing in galleries, auction houses and some of Britain’s richest men. In early November, a London judge placed a worldwide freeze on Philbrick’s assets – but it was too late. By then he was already gone.

What is the value of a painting? Your answer might consider beauty, perhaps. You might add rarity, a work’s historical context, the artist’s place in the canon. But ask an art dealer and the honest ones will tell you it’s simple: the value of a painting is the maximum that someone will pay for it. The moment you enter an art gallery, the dealer begins appraising you, forming an estimated value based on aesthetics (watch, shoes, handbag), provenance (family fortune?) and other subtle market signals. High-end art galleries never display prices, because the art’s value itself is in one sense immaterial; the dealer’s job is to work out what it’s worth to you.

Over the last decade, fine art dealers in London and New York have rarely been short of new customers to appraise. Globally, the art market grew to total $67.4 billion in 2018. With globalisation providing a steady supply of new million- and billionaires, but sluggish interest rates providing few places for them to profitably invest their money, art has become yet another financial instrument – one ripe for speculation. Flipping, once fringe, has become big business, with investors buying shares in paintings like they would stocks or real estate. For the speculative investor, the art itself is hardly important – some might never see the painting in person, trading instead on jpegs and the trust in their dealers.

Speculating on art is a risky business; only a handful of artists in a generation will go on to be the kind of household names traded in evening sales. But invest well and the returns can be astonishing. According to Bloomberg, the value of Christopher Wool’s “Apocalypse Now” – a 1988 stencil that spells “sell the house sell the car sell the kids” – grew 350,000 per cent between 1988 and 2014, when Christie’s ultimately sold it for $26.5m.

Philbrick was a natural salesman. He had an intellectual charm and an aggressive competitive streak

The flood of money into the art market has fundamentally shifted the role of art dealers. “Once upon a time, dealers looked to museums and to connoisseurship to validate the quality of the work,” says art historian Dr David Anfam. “Museums have to a large extent been replaced by dealers. It’s now dealers who validate and set tastes, influence markets for the art.”

Art dealers come in two forms: primary dealers, dominated by the mega-galleries Gagosian, David Zwirner, Pace and Hauser & Wirth, who work directly with living artists, not only putting on exhibitions, but acting as publicist, publisher and private bank. In industry parlance, primary galleries don’t sell new artworks, they “place” them, usually with museums or prestigious collectors, whose cachet will further burnish the artist’s reputation. The rest of the art trade is the secondary market, the buying and selling of existing works. The secondary market’s great advantage is in its secrecy. While auction sales occasionally make headlines, the majority of the trade takes place between dealers and collectors, behind closed doors. Art remains largely unregulated; unlike property, there is no central registry of ownership for paintings. While auction houses will provide paperwork for a sale, private deals can be done on little more than a handshake and an invoice listing the artist and a description of the work. Dealers and auction houses are known to withhold the true identities of their clients and, in any case, many of the largest transactions take place between shell companies, the true ownership obscured.

That opacity has made the art market particularly attractive to plutocrats, oligarchs and others who might want to hide their wealth away from prying eyes. “Art is portable and it’s difficult to tell how much something is actually worth,” says Georgina Adam, editor-at-large of the Art Newspaper and author of Dark Side Of The Boom. “That’s actually very useful. If you ship it through frontiers, you can put a price on it [that’s] very difficult to verify.” The rise of flipping artworks has meant that, often, an investor can purchase a painting, or a share in a painting, without ever actually seeing it in person. Priceless artworks can sit boxed in freeports in Geneva or Singapore, going untaxed and unnoticed for years. (The most expensive painting ever sold, Leonardo Da Vinci’s “Salvator Mundi”, reportedly bought by a Saudi prince for $450m in 2017, hasn’t been seen since.)

© Kishor Shahi

In such a secretive marketplace, dealers are prized as much for their knowledge as their discretion. You need to know not just which artist is going up in value, but where the paintings are, who wants to buy and which collectors might be ready to sell. (Dealers talk of the three Ds that drive sales: death, debt and divorce.) Connections are everything; outsiders are shunned.

In that sense, Inigo Philbrick was the perfect fit. He grew up in Connecticut, steeped in the art world. His mother, Jane, is an artist. His father, Harry, is a well-known former museum director and CEO of the arts organisation Philadelphia Contemporary. Philbrick’s parents divorced acrimoniously when he was in his late teens. Inigo didn’t take it well. (Harry Philbrick, in a statement, said, “While Inigo and I have been estranged for nearly a decade now, I love him and want the best for him,” and that he hopes the situation “is resolved soon”.)

After graduating from high school, Philbrick enrolled to study fine art at Goldsmiths, whose alumni include Damien Hirst, Lucian Freud, Bridget Riley and the director Steve McQueen. In 2010, Philbrick landed an internship at White Cube, the prestigious London gallery owned by Jay Jopling, the most prominent gallerist in Britain. A thickly bespectacled, privately educated son of a former Conservative MP, Jopling’s clients include Hirst, Tracey Emin and Antony Gormley. Few have done more in shaping the last two decades of British art.

Philbrick proved to be a natural salesman. “He was young. He was smart. He had a brashness immediately,” says one former colleague. He had an intellectual charm and an aggressive competitive streak. If an artist was selling well, Philbrick would learn everything about them – the best paintings, who owned them, any upcoming shows. Rumours spread quickly, as they do in the art world, of Jopling’s new protégé. Less than two years after joining White Cube as an intern, Philbrick was suddenly sitting in the aisle at Christie’s evening sales, bidding for multimillion-dollar artworks on Jopling’s behalf. In 2012, when Jopling launched Modern Collections, a premium new secondary market gallery on Mayfair’s Mount Street, Philbrick was named a codirector of the business.

“His meteoric rise was incredible,” Rob Sheffield, who runs the art agency Sheffield & Wang, told me.

The market for young contemporary artists was booming and as sales grew so did Philbrick’s ambition. Little more than a year after Modern Collections’ opening, Philbrick decided to launch his own gallery, with Jopling’s financial backing. Philbrick even kept the same Mount Street space and gallery staff. Though the sign outside said Inigo Philbrick, the connection was clear. “The word on the street was that Jay was the silent partner,” says a local dealer. The revamped space opened that autumn, with a widely acclaimed exhibition of the American artists Joe Bradley and Sterling Ruby.

Tümpel and Würtenberger paid for 35 per cent of the Stingel upfront – but on paper gained 100 per cent of ownership

(In a statement, Jopling said he was “shocked” and “enormously disappointed” by the allegations made against Philbrick and had applied for a legal injunction against him “to protect my interests”. He refused several interview requests for this story, citing confidentiality restrictions imposed by the High Court in London.)

Philbrick had sold shares of paintings at Modern Collections, but at his own gallery he began to participate in increasingly elaborate financial deals. To advise on the transactions, he turned to Rob Newland, a director at White Cube who had worked in the finance department. (According to Companies House records, Newland left White Cube in 2015. There is no suggestion of wrongdoing on his part.) For a time, Philbrick seemed to have a gift for playing the market. Like gallerists, secondary dealers are storytellers; an important part of the trade is to build the profile of their artists among collectors and in the press. One technique is to acquire pieces by artists ahead of high-profile museum shows, then use the resulting press coverage and attention to turn a quick profit. (One dealer referred to this practice as “pump and dump”, a reference to a form of securities fraud.) The new gallery began to specialise in certain artists – Stingel, Wool, Guyton, Mike Kelley – who were seeing their prices and reputations soar. Fellow dealers jealously recalled his ability to source difficult-to-find paintings or works that had only recently come on the primary market. “He talked about major US collectors as if they were close personal friends,” says a rival Mayfair dealer.

Although he wasn’t known for attending art world events, Philbrick became close friends with dealer and writer Kenny Schachter, whose column for Artnet is notorious for its salacious revelations of industry gossip. (Schachter also produces art; one of his regular motifs is an elephant fellating itself. There is no suggestion of wrongdoing on his part.) Philbrick was one of Schachter’s regular sources. They would sit together at auctions, holidayed together and regularly did deals together.

“He was very good at what he did,” Schachter told me. “He’s one of the only people in the world that could tell you the difference between a $2m Christopher Wool erasure painting and a $2.2m Christopher Wool erasure painting. He had a deep breadth of knowledge, because he’d grown up with it.”

Still, not everyone liked the way Philbrick did business and found him cold or evasive. “He was arrogant and played games,” says the LA-based dealer Stefan Simchowitz, who once sold Philbrick a painting for $20,000. “I told friends of mine before [any accusations] came to light that I wanted nothing to do with him and that I never wanted to be in any transaction chain that he was in.”

Others expressed distaste at Philbrick’s penchant for flipping. In many cases, Philbrick’s clients would never actually possess the artwork in question – it stayed in storage or at his gallery, where it could be more quickly sold. “I always thought he was a hedge fund manager running a hedge fund, but the assets just happened to be art,” says Sheffield, adding, “It was like looking into the eyes of a shark.”

Around the turn of 2016, Philbrick approached Aleksandar Pesko, a British-Serbian financier, with an offer to invest in a painting: Stingel’s portrait of Picasso. Pesko, who manages investments on behalf of his father’s art investment company, Satfinance, knew Philbrick well. They moved in the same social circles in Mayfair and by then had done several deals together, which had always worked out. They were more than business partners; they were friends.

‘They become seduced by the lifestyle of the people they work with. They think, “Why shouldn’t I have the Rolls?”’

The Picasso, which had belonged to the foundation of a Russian oligarch, had recently become available through a New York dealer. By then, Philbrick was, in his own words, “centrally placed in the Stingel market” and planning a major exhibition of the artist at his Mayfair gallery. Philbrick suggested that Pesko should buy a 50 per cent share for $3.35m. Pesko agreed and wired Philbrick the money. (The following month, Philbrick sold the other 50 per cent to Tümpel and Würtenberger.)

That summer, Pesko invited Philbrick and his then-girlfriend Francisca Mancini, an Italian art dealer, on a family holiday to Italy. Mancini was heavily pregnant with Philbrick’s child. (Their daughter was born a few weeks later.) As their families relaxed under the Mediterranean sun, Philbrick enticed Pesko with another major acquisition: “Humidity”, a 1982 painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat. The seller, Philbrick said, was an American collector who “needed cash”, so the painting was available at a steep discount.

Pesko demurred, but Philbrick continued to push the Basquiat deal. It would, Philbrick said, be a virtually guaranteed profit – he had already spoken to Christie’s, who were ready to provide a $35m guarantee on the painting at that November’s evening sale. Eventually, Pesko agreed. The deal would be a 50-50 split. To help Philbrick finance his share, Pesko agreed to loan him $3m. To protect Pesko’s interests, it was agreed Satfinance would retain title (and therefore legal ownership) of the painting until Philbrick could find a buyer.

A few days later, Philbrick emailed Pesko a bill of sale showing that he had bought the Basquiat for $18.4m. The seller was listed as “SKH Management Corp”, a New York company with a nondescript address on Lexington Avenue. Strangely, the signatory hadn’t printed their name – a result, Philbrick said, of the deal being concluded in a hurry. (He later provided a replacement.) That September, Philbrick took Pesko to see their new masterpiece at Uovo, an upmarket art storage facility in Long Island. It seemed like a perfect deal.

But, as with the Stingel, the Christie’s sale failed to materialise. Philbrick attributed the change of heart to management changes at Christie’s and assured Pesko that with Basquiat’s prices soaring there would be other buyers. (Christie’s refused to comment on individual clients. However, a source familiar with the discussion told me the auction house never actually made an offer to guarantee “Humidity” at auction.)

As 2016 turned into 2017, Philbrick looked like the young star of the London art world. His Mayfair gallery – which by then had moved to a tastefully appointed upstairs space on Davies Street, with polished parquet floors and crisp, bright white walls designed for an optimal viewing experience – was thriving, turning over almost £100m a year.

The reality, however, was more complicated. In truth, the market for young artists had begun to slow and Brexit had tanked the value of the pound, making life difficult for London’s art dealers. To combat the slowdown, Philbrick started to move into handling more big-ticket items, acquiring not only the Basquiat, but works by the likes of Mark Bradford and David Hockney, whose best paintings can sell for more than $10m. But he had a cash flow problem. Selling fractions of a painting often required Philbrick to put up large sums, too. Clients, eager for returns on their investment, but often allergic to real risk, usually refused to spend large sums upfront, yet insisted on keeping the full legal title to the painting. When FAP purchased the Stingel Picasso, for example, it paid only 35 per cent of the purchase price upfront, for 50 per cent of the painting – but on paper, legally, gained 100 per cent of ownership.

MIAMI BEACH, FL - DECEMBER 04: Art dealer Jay Jopling attends White Cube & Soho Beach House Party with Bombay Sapphire during Art Basel Miami 2018 on December 4, 2018 in Miami Beach, Florida. (Photo by Andrew Toth/Getty Images for Soho House ) © Andrew Toth

One solution Philbrick found for earning money quickly was by acting as a third-party guarantor for auction houses, particularly Phillips, with whom he maintained a close relationship. (One Mayfair dealer claimed Philbrick was widely known to be “Phillips’ biggest customer”.) In third-party guarantees, the external party puts up the money, rather than the auction house. If the sale goes above the guarantee price, the guarantor (Philbrick) would receive both a flat fee and a share of the profits. But if the item failed to sell, he’d have to pay above market rate for the painting. Acting as a guarantor is essentially betting that someone else is willing to pay more than you – a risky gamble.

Some people noticed Philbrick’s behaviour becoming more reckless. At auctions, Philbrick would regularly underbid (that is, placing the losing bid) on works by artists such as Stingel, Guyton and Wool. Most of the time, dealers underbid at auction because they’re genuinely interested in a painting. But some will also underbid intentionally, to make a public statement of their interest or maintain prices for other paintings they own by the same artist. “He was not just participating in these markets. He seemed to want people to know,” says Marion Maneker, president and editorial director of Art Media. “If you want to push something, you don’t have to sit in a room and bid; you can do it over the telephone just as well and no one ever knows it’s you.”

Rumours also began to swirl around Philbrick’s private life. Shortly after their baby was born, Philbrick and Mancini separated. Not long after, Philbrick began dating Victoria Baker Harber, a fashion designer better known for her role in TV’s Made In Chelsea. Philbrick would fly by private jet and often be seen ordering ludicrously priced wine at five-star hotels and dining out lavishly at Mayfair’s high-end restaurants.

The Christie’s guarantee was a forgery. Worse, according to their records, the painting belonged to somebody else

“He got a new girlfriend and the market shifted. He drank a lot and went to a lot of raves,” says Schachter. “His behaviour got sloppier.”

To raise money, Philbrick started to take out loans. Art loans – which use paintings as collateral – are not a new phenomenon; the major auction houses have long offered financing plans to select clients. To acquire a particularly expensive new painting, a cash-poor dealer might take out a loan against their existing inventory and settle the debt with the profits. When the art market was booming, new start-ups and existing banks expanded into art loans, hoping to capitalise. But given the difficulty of proving provenance and the art world’s penchant for secrecy, doing the appropriate diligence seems to have proved challenging. (More recently, several art lenders have ceased trading.)

In early 2017, Philbrick took out a $10m loan with Athena Art Finance, a boutique art-lending company based in New York. The loan was made out to 18 Boxwood Lane, a shell company Philbrick operated in Jersey. As collateral, Philbrick – via Boxwood – pledged five works by Judd, Bradford and Stingel. As works were bought and sold, Philbrick would swap in other works, first transferring the title of the paintings to Boxwood. It’s not clear exactly when he started transferring paintings he didn’t own, but by the spring of 2019, he had pledged both the Stingel and the Basquiat to Athena.

A few months later, in search of more money, Philbrick turned to Lisa Reuben, a former Sotheby’s executive and well-known art collector. Reuben runs Guzzini Properties, an art finance company based in the British Virgin Islands and owned by Lisa’s father and uncle, the British property billionaires Simon and David Reuben. According to the Sunday Times, the Reubens are the joint second-richest men in Britain. Guzzini agreed to pay Philbrick $6m for three paintings – including the Stingel portrait of Picasso. (It would later turn out that Guzzini, not FAP, had consigned the Stingel to Christie’s.) The Guzzini deal was unorthodox. Though the company had paid $6m for the paintings, by its own admission the paintings were worth $25m. And under the terms of the deal, Philbrick had the right to buy them back within 12 months for what Guzzini had paid for them, plus a fee. It was, at least in function, another loan – but one that gave Guzzini title and possession to the paintings. Or, at least, so they thought. (Guzzini insists it owns the works and declined to comment for this article.)

Philbrick was almost $20m in debt. But if he was worried, he didn’t show it. In December 2018, he opened a second gallery, a $30,000-a-month space in Miami’s exclusive design district. Philbrick marked the occasion with a glamorous launch party that was the talk of the local art scene and lined the walls with millions in works by the likes of Riley, Guyton and Avery Singer. The deception seemed to be holding. Then came the spring, the Stingel sale and everything fell apart.

In late September 2019, Pesko and Philbrick had lunch in London. Pesko was frustrated: for more than a year, Philbrick had failed to find a buyer for the Basquiat. Each time Pesko raised the painting, Philbrick would spin stories about potential buyers – a leading fashion designer, a mysterious Saudi royal who never materialised. In an attempt to drum up interest, Pesko agreed to let Philbrick loan the painting to the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo.

Philbrick seemed nervous. “He had two glasses of wine and was visibly shaking,” Pesko later wrote in a witness statement to the High Court. Unbeknownst to him, Tümpel and Würtenberger had discovered the Christie’s forgery and had already filed their lawsuit against Philbrick in Miami.

Pesko already knew that something was amiss. That summer, he had been talking to a New York collector called Andre Sakhai at a dinner with a mutual friend. It turned out they had a lot in common. In 2017, Pesko had signed a deal to acquire another Basquiat painting with Philbrick – again, a 50-50 split. But, over dinner, Sakhai revealed he had bought the exact same Basquiat, also supposedly in a 50-50 with Philbrick. “Philbrick had told each of us that we were his partners in the painting,” Pesko later told the courts. “In fact, we were partners with each other.” There had also been murmurs that Philbrick was off-loading paintings to free up cash.

Then, on 10 October, Pesko received an Instagram message from Kenny Schachter: “Are you still in touch with Inigo?”

Pesko immediately knew something was wrong. He called Sakhai. Sakhai was already one step ahead. A few days earlier, Philbrick and Sakhai had met in person and Philbrick had confessed the truth: he was underwater in debt and had signed over their paintings – including “Humidity” – to Athena. When Pesko finally got through to Philbrick, Philbrick cried down the line. The real seller of the Basquiat, he said, had not been an American collector but a Russian: Leonid Friedland, the Russian luxury goods magnate and joint majority shareholder of Phillips auction house. It was Friedland, too, who Philbrick had said to FAP was the “volatile Russian” client he regularly flipped paintings to and was late with payments. (According to a source familiar with Phillips, it seems likely in fact that “Leonid” was a mirage and the true client was Phillips’ private sales department, which trades on the secondary market. Phillips declined to comment.)

“This was a sophisticated fraud, involving elements of a classic Ponzi scheme, coupled with actual purchases and sales of in-demand art,” Judd Grossman, the lawyer representing Pesko and Sakhai in New York, told me. “The scheme could continue so long as the art was appreciating in value, but once the returns slowed, it all came crumbling down.”

More and more victims came forward, filing lawsuits against Philbrick and his companies in London, Miami and New York. In one case, the Belgian gallerist Louis Lannoo alleged he had paid Philbrick for a share in a Stingel and a 1988 work by Judd, but that Philbrick had neither delivered the works nor returned the money. Another Belgian company, owned by the collectors Dirk and Jeff Cavens, claimed it had purchased “Infinity Nets (RDUEL)”, a 2018 painting by Yayoi Kusama, but that Philbrick had asked them to release it for a viewing and then disappeared with it. (Sakhai alleges that “Infinity Nets” belongs to him and that Philbrick sold it to the Belgians without his permission. A court case to settle the ownership is ongoing.)

In a surreal twist, the fight over the Stingel became a competition over who had been most thoroughly duped

As for Stingel’s Picasso, a four-way legal battle erupted over who was in fact the rightful owner. Much of the argument is focused around a counterintuitive legal principle, which states that in Britain and the US a good-faith purchaser can legally buy something, even if the seller doesn’t actually own it – provided, that is, the buyer can prove they were unaware of the deception. Thus, in a surreal twist, the fight over the Stingel quickly became in effect a competition over who had been most thoroughly duped.

In January, I went looking for Philbrick. His Mayfair gallery had long since shuttered, the walls bare. A sign outside advertised for new tenants, but there were so far no takers. The Miami gallery, too, was empty. (The developers are suing Philbrick, in absentia, for more than $30,000 in missed rent -payments.) Philbrick’s phone and email were cut off and his gallery staff were also nowhere to be found. I heard rumours that he was in Thailand, South America, the South Pacific. I also went to the address of Rob Newland, Philbrick’s former White Cube colleague-turned-advisor; a neighbour said they hadn’t seen him in a while.

Shortly after Philbrick’s disappearance, Schachter – who says he lost $1.7m to Philbrick over a different Stingel painting – posted a column on Artnet claiming Philbrick was in Australia. According to Schachter’s story, an anonymous Instagram account, @steve_irwin_pets, had sent him a series of messages defending Philbrick. “If he’s smart enough to do it in the first place he’s smart enough to make good on it,” @steve_irwin_pets wrote. Eventually, however, the author slipped into the first person. “It’s no big deal, I did nothing wrong and it will all be forgotten soon.”

When I first tried to talk to Schachter about his relationship with Philbrick, he demurred – he was working on a screenplay, he said, and later a tell-all exposé for New York magazine. As the weeks went on, more anonymous accounts popped up, which Schachter would sometimes insinuate were Philbrick. One, @ibnabattuta1, claimed to be staying at a luxury hotel in Japan, according to messages that Schachter posted with the tag #theadventuresofInigoPhilbrick.

Then, one day, one of the anonymous accounts, @hehredeagehe, messaged me. “Don’t Believe Kenny Schachter He Is Just Mad He Got Finnesses By A Guy Younger And Smarter Than He Is,” the messages began. The mystery person, who claimed not to be Philbrick but an interested party living in Paris, seemed to have intimate awareness of the case. The person referred to Gagosian as “Larry”, showed a remarkable awareness of the art market and when I asked them about “Kris” – an as-yet unidentified art collector alluded to in one of the court cases, they seemed to panic. “We Cant Talk About That,” they wrote. “That Really Would Fuck Shit Up And I Don’t Wantt No Trouble.”

For a few days, the account alternated between trying to talk me out of writing the story and digging around for what I knew – about Philbrick, his relationship, his alleged drug use. One major element still puzzled me: why did Philbrick run?

“Philbrick Is Scared,” the mystery person wrote. “Philbrick Is Obviously Connected To Saudis they The Most Desperate To Get Big Pieces Right Away.” (Another well-connected London dealer told me, when I asked, that Philbrick had “fucked the wrong people”.)

“Be Careful,” the strange account said. “These People Place Nice But When It Comes To The $ Things Get Dark Quick.”

After Philbrick disappeared, the art world, already prone to gossip, swirled with wild rumours – that he’d upset Russian oligarchs or had mafia ties. But the rumours were dominated by Saudi Arabia. The Saudi connection centres around a work by Kusama, “All The Eternal Love I Have For The Pumpkins”. The piece is a mirrored room filled with ghostly, illuminated sculptures of the fruit, which are a recurring theme in Kusama’s work. According to Tümpel and Würtenberger, Philbrick purchased the Kusama on FAP’s behalf in 2017. At the time of Philbrick’s disappearance, the room was on loan to the Institute Of Contemporary Art (ICA) in Miami. However, in an unusual arrangement, Philbrick had agreed to host the display himself, at his Miami gallery. It proved a sensation. Visitors queued around the block to pay $5 to step inside and take photos. (Kusama has produced a series of such pieces, which she calls “Infinity Mirrored Rooms” and have become hugely popular settings for Instagram selfies.)

Shortly after Philbrick’s disappearance, Tümpel and Würtenberger flew to Miami to attend court hearings. Philbrick didn’t show up. But then his lawyers made a sudden and surprising intervention: a motion to dismiss the case. FAP, they said, did not hold title to the Kusama. In fact, the owner was MVCA, a Saudi Arabian entity, based in Riyadh. Indeed, the ICA’s website listed the room as “on loan from the Collection Of The Royal Commission For Al-Ula”. Al-Ula, in the northwest of Saudi Arabia, is the subject of a lavish regeneration effort by the Saudi government, which aims to turn the desert city into a world-class art destination. Philbrick had repeatedly told Pesko of his connections to a mysterious Saudi royal. Was this it?

It got stranger. As proof of MVCA’s ownership, Philbrick provided just two documents: an agreement approving the loan to ICA, signed by an executive at the Royal Commission For Al-Ula and a 2019 insurance policy from Cambridge Art Insurance, taken out in Philbrick’s name, naming MVCA as the beneficiary. The insurance certificate, however, is irregular – the letter header is missing and it has the exact same certificate number as an existing policy Philbrick had taken out earlier that year on behalf of FAP. (Cambridge Art Insurance declined to comment.)

The intervention provoked more questions than it answered. If the Saudi buyer really had purchased the Kusama, why not provide an invoice or bank records? (Neither MVCA, the Royal Collection For Al-Ula nor their lawyers responded to my approaches for comment.) If, as FAP’s lawyers seemed to allege, the insurance certificate was a forgery and the Saudis were not the true legal owners of the Kusama, then Philbrick’s sworn intervention would be perjury. Shortly after making the Saudi filing, Philbrick’s Miami lawyers excused themselves from the case, stating that Philbrick had “failed significantly to fulfil his obligations” as a client. By then he had already fled. When he did, the Kusama was the only work left behind.

In my messages with the mystery Instagram account, one in particular stood out. “Whoever Can Get To His Gf Ex Or Whatever Got the Key.” At first, Baker Harber ignored my requests for an interview; like many of the individuals I spoke to, she no longer wished to be associated with Philbrick or the case. But eventually we corresponded over Instagram. After the court cases blew up, Baker Harber told me, she and Philbrick did fly to Australia, where she has family. The Instagram accounts, she said, were unlikely to be Inigo – “not his style”. Instead, she alleged that the accounts were fake and created by Schachter himself or someone close to him. (Several other people in the art world also told me they suspect Schachter of sometimes creating anonymous accounts for dramatic effect.) When we finally spoke, Schachter strongly denied the allegations, calling the idea “ridiculous”. He reasserted that the anonymous accounts are Philbrick, who was taunting him from hiding. “I know exactly where [he is]. I’ve been in touch with him nonstop the entire time. He can’t let go because of the closeness of our previous relationship,” Schachter told me – though if he did know where Philbrick was, he wouldn’t disclose the location.

After some time in Australia, Baker Harber said, she and Philbrick “went our separate ways”. Baker Harber flew to Japan, to work on another TV series. (This appears to be the source of the anonymous Instagram Inigos, which alleged Philbrick was there.) Baker Harber said she was “heartbroken” by the way things had turned out, yet seemed to have little sympathy for Philbrick’s victims. “I have nothing bad to say about [Inigo] from a character perspective. He is kind, thoughtful and unfortunately bit off more than he could chew,” she wrote. She was trying to put the episode behind her.

‘When the market becomes as frothy as it currently is, all sorts of disreputable characters suddenly appear’

At the time of writing, Philbrick’s current whereabouts remain unknown. Estimates for the total damage of his scheme range wildly, from $70m to $250m. With some court cases against him still under seal, it’s impossible to know where the true number might lie.

Philbrick’s story is not unique. In fact, as the art market has boomed over the last decade, similar activities have become routine. Last summer, the British art dealer Timothy Sammons was sentenced to a minimum of four years in prison for defrauding his clients of $30m. In 2018, the New York dealer Ezra Chowaiki was sentenced to 18 months for running a Ponzi scheme, which included selling paintings he didn’t own. But the comparison most art dealers used was to that of Michel Cohen, the French art dealer who disappeared in 2000 after defrauding collectors and auction houses out of $50m. (A BBC documentary crew eventually found Cohen last year, living in France.)

“When there’s this much excess capital flowing and the market becomes as frothy as it currently is, all sorts of disreputable characters suddenly appear,” Todd Levin, director of art advisors Levin Art Group, told me.

There have been attempts to quell the art market’s fraud problem. The EU’s new Fifth Anti-Money Laundering Directive, which came into force in January, finally compels galleries and dealers to request detailed information about both the buyer and seller involved in any transaction, in order to establish a clear chain of provenance. Still, several industry experts I spoke to doubted the legislation would make much real difference, except to perhaps push more transactions overseas.

“I think probably Philbrick did not start out to be a crook. Most of them didn’t,” says Georgina Adam. “They started out thinking they can make it and become seduced by the lifestyle of the very rich people they work with. They begin to think, ‘Well, you know, why shouldn’t I have the Rolls?’”

As this story went to press, the legal battles over the ownership of the missold artworks rumbled on slowly through the courts. Several people mentioned the possibility of a criminal investigation, though none were, as yet, forthcoming. “I have little doubt that Inigo Philbrick will be brought to justice by the UK authorities in due course,” Simon Bushell, the solicitor representing Satfinance in London, told me.

With no Philbrick and no money, the paintings were all that remained. But even they were nowhere to be seen, hidden away in storage facilities and auction houses, awaiting their fate. No longer art, but assets.

“Why isn’t there any criminal case against Inigo? Why?” Schachter said. “It could be the perfect crime, to fuck over a bunch of people in the art world that treasure their discretion. God knows how some of these people get their dough. In any other field, he’d have been in jail already.” The art world is designed to keep secrets.

It seems unlikely the public will lay eyes on any of the paintings any time soon. I never got to see the Stingel or the Basquiat in the flesh, nor appreciate Kusama’s eternal love for pumpkins; in late February, a Miami judge ordered the mirror room to be deconstructed and held in storage until its true ownership is settled. The last I saw of it was a photograph in FAP’s court filings. Back in December 2018, before everything fell apart, Tümpel and Würtenberger took their children to Philbrick’s Miami gallery and posed inside their new acquisition. The picture shows the family smiling together inside a luminous hall of mirrors, beautiful reflections stretching away into infinity. Looking at it, it was impossible to see where the art ended and the illusion began.

Postscript



Shortly after this article went to press, as the world began to shut down in the grip of the coronavirus pandemic, I received an email from Inigo Philbrick. “I had not been planning to address any of the press surrounding my situation. It is a humiliating time; best intentions spoiled and friendships in ruin,” he wrote. “Over the last few month as Kenny [Schachter] either created or was mislead by some third party into presenting an ongoing dialogue between himself and me, I’ve been alternately amused and distressed by it… However, I am now receiving threats of violence based on words and statements attributed to me that are not of my authorship. As Kenny must well suspect, the communications he has reported have nothing to do with me… The implication that I am purchasing things from his online shop is obviously laughable given the circumstances.” Philbrick has yet to respond to any of my other questions. The court cases surrounding the paintings are, like the rest of the world, on hold.

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