The ninjas arrived at six. Peggy Howell, the stylish blonde 62-year-old owner of Gallery HB, a bright courtyard shop at the Hyatt Regency Huntington Beach hotel, was alone. A surf song played from the ceiling speakers. Yellow glass cichlids sparkled in the light.

But the three “martial-arts experts” towering over Howell, as she would later tell it, weren’t interested in buying a “Greetings from Surf City” lithograph or a psychedelic Peter Max. One of them shoved her into a chair in her tiny back office, while another blocked the front door, she claims. “Are there any video cameras in this gallery?” she says he asked.

“Yes,” Howell said, fearfully.

“Well, make sure that they’re turned off,” he snapped. And if she didn’t do exactly what they wanted, he growled, “your life will not be the same as you know it.”

Two hours later, the gang exited the gallery, with Howell in tow and, she later estimated, more than $1 million worth of work by Howell’s favorite and most valuable artist: Todd White, a scruffy 42-year-old Texan famed for his lounge-lizard paintings, and for his work as the lead character designer for SpongeBob SquarePants.

But, as Howell told police the following day in her statement, the mastermind behind one of Orange County’s biggest art heists was no ordinary thief. It was the artist himself: Todd White. It was all part of an elaborate plot to frame Howell, steal back works she had rightfully bought, and take over her lucrative gallery, she insisted. White had hired “goons” she said, from his martial-arts club to do his dirty work: imprisoning and assaulting her in her own gallery.

“Despite White’s string of professional successes,” Howell later claimed, “his true nature was revealed on the night of August 2, 2011, when he orchestrated a malicious and brutal assault and robbery against the very woman who helped him launch his career in studio art.”

Boys in San Antonio only had three options, White says: “You either played football, baseball, or you were gay.”

White played a little baseball, but preferred sketching Iron Maiden logos in class—a hobby that got him into trouble with his teachers and his father. “He’d pop a beer, sit on the couch, make me pull his boots off,” White recalls. “He was just an angry guy.” White toughened himself up by learning Jiu-Jitsu, a Brazilian form of defense that draws from wrestling and karate.

As soon as he could, White moved to Hollywood to work as an animator on shows such as Tiny Toons and the pioneering gross-out series Ren & Stimpy. In 1999, he joined the new series SpongeBob SquarePants as a lead character designer. Created by a marine biologist, the show followed the surreal misadventures of a sea sponge living in a pineapple house, and played to White’s frenetic imagination and creative energy. Colleagues recall White parading around the office in his bolero hat, and playfully challenging spindly cartoonists to Jiu-Jitsu matches on the parking-lot roof.

When SpongeBob went on hiatus, White channeled that spirit into his own fledgling art career—vying for respect in the insular L.A. gallery circles. He traveled the city peddling paintings of his own imagined universe: martini-soaked scenes of natty cads and sultry vixens. He sold works from the back of his pickup truck outside art fairs (until the police escorted him away) and hustled them in to hang in influential bars, like Nic’s Martini Lounge, the agent hub in Beverly Hills.

White’s swagger paid off, and he was soon making enough to leave animation for good. “The difference with Todd and other comparable artists is that he’s a genuine charismatic character, not unlike Warhol,” says Kevin O’Donnell, owner of the Lee Hayden Gallery in Cleveland, one of the many retailers around the country that began selling his prints. White’s paintings, once described as “Rat Pack meets Picasso,” turned the 32-year-old into a multi-million-dollar brand of his own—eventually commissioned by the Grammys to do their official poster in 2007, chosen by Coca-Cola as the first-ever artist to illustrate its bottles, and prized by celebrity collectors including Sylvester Stallone, who paid $280,000 for an original print.