THEN IT WAS TIME for Kerr and Redniss to question witnesses for the Foundation. In contrast to Gravante, their questions focused on how the Foundation worked and how the Board went about authenticating Warhol’s art. The questioning process was not easy, because BSF, the defence lawyers, had prepared those who appeared on behalf of the Foundation, allowing them to give their answers using what appeared to be formulaic wording that threw the gossamer veil of deniability over what was said. Reading transcripts of their testimony is a tedious and, for the most part, unenlightening experience. Time and again in their depositions, the phrases ‘I do not recall’ and ‘to the best of my recollection’ wrap their answers in skeins of evasion and circumlocution. From long experience, both as a lawyer and a politician, Wachs was skilful at parrying questions and avoiding giving clear answers.
At times, evasion is almost indistinguishable from perjury. When Brian Kerr deposed Joel Wachs, for example, he first established that Wachs had served on the Foundation’s board of trustees since December 1995, becoming president in 2001. Kerr asked Wachs a simple question about the chairman of the that board, Michael Straus: ‘What was his background?’ When Wachs seemed perplexed by the question, Kerr elaborated:
When Kerr insisted Wachs answer the question, Wachs replied:
Wachs knew what Michael Straus did for a living. The information was on the Foundation’s website. Straus is an antitrust lawyer who was then a partner in the Alabama law firm of Straus and Boies. It was the name of Straus’s law partner that Wachs did not want to utter in court. David Boies III was the son of the lawyer who was charging the Foundation, of which Michael Straus was chairman, about $450,000 a month to represent them in the case. I expect Wachs would not admit he knew this because, if he did, Kerr could bring up an issue the Foundation preferred not to discuss: a flagrant but undeclared case of conflict of interest.
Wachs, under oath, was true to form. Whenever an opportunity arose, he said or implied that those who challenged the Board’s decisions did so with criminal intent. He knew, as everyone on the Authentication Board knew, that Simon had submitted the ‘Dollar Bill’ piece to the Board more than once. Each time, he had begged the Board to explain to him the reasons for denying its authenticity. On each occasion, the Board had told him to do more research, and then to submit it again. That’s not what Wachs said. In his telling, Simon ‘may have’ forged the ‘Dollar Bill’ piece.1 Kerr questioned Wachs about the Board’s authentication of the Malmö-type Brillo Boxes, now known to have been manufactured after the artist’s death. He asked Wachs whether, in that instance, Wachs would characterise the decision made by the Authentication Board as a ‘mistake’. Wachs replied that although their opinion was wrong, their decision to verify the authenticity of 105 fakes was not a mistake.
For the Foundation to refer pictures to the Board for authentication, the correct procedure was to fill in and sign a submission form. Fremont did not have the authority to submit pictures to the Authentication Board, and he did not say who did. In the case of forty-four fake pictures, which will be discussed in the next chapter, the signature on the form was that of K. C. Maurer, chief financial officer and treasurer at the Andy Warhol Foundation.
The name was new to me. Maurer came to the Foundation in 1998, from NASA. At the time of her deposition in 2010, she was paid $365,131 per year, plus pension and benefits, not only to oversee the Foundation’s finances, along with an outside firm of accountants, but also to appraise works by Warhol. During the hearings, Maurer always sat next to Wachs, never once leaving his side. For her first appearance in court, Maurer chose to carry a handbag conspicuously imprinted with Andy Warhol’s Gun depicting a handgun used so often in muggings and robberies during Warhol’s lifetime that it was known in the street as a ‘Saturday-night special’.
Kerr started by asking what qualified her to pronounce on the value of Warhol’s work. Her reply was in keeping with the previous experience the Foundation required of so many of its employees: she had no qualifications whatsoever, except that she read Christie’s sales catalogues. But Maurer did have experience as a high-powered executive, which meant she knew how a Foundation with assets – worth an estimated billion dollars, in 2010 – functioned. She understood the importance of following procedure. Just from reading her CV, my instinct told me she was not the kind of employee who would make a unilateral decision on a matter of such importance.
Kerr did not waste any time. He asked Maurer whether she was the person who submitted the forty-four fakes to the Board on behalf of the Foundation. Under oath, Maurer flatly denied it. Kerr then showed her documents listing numerous works in the Foundation’s inventory which were submitted to the Authentication Board in the autumn of 2002. They included the forty-four fakes.2 Every single one had been submitted under Maurer’s name and every single one bore her signature.
Without missing a beat, Maurer calmly stated that she ‘did not recall’ having signed those submission forms. Notice her choice of words. To say that you do not ‘recall’ signing something is not the same as stating that you did not sign it. Incredulous, Kerr asked her the same question again. She repeated her denial. This time, she added that perhaps someone else had submitted the pictures on her behalf, presumably by forging her signature on the form. Kerr asked which staff members at the Foundation had the authority to submit works to the Authentication Board. Her reply was unambiguous. Only two people had such authority: she was one, Joel Wachs the other.3 Fremont had said the same thing, adding that he could only sell a picture with Wachs’s approval. ‘The fact is I can’t sign off on a deal; the last person to sign off on a deal – a negotiation – is Joel Wachs, the president of the Foundation.’4
Was it Wachs? His testimony came next, and now Kerr asked him the same question he had put to Fremont and Maurer. Had he ever submitted work confiscated from Rupert Jasen Smith to the Board? Wachs appeared to be indignant at the very idea. He claimed that the Foundation only rarely submitted works of art to the Board for authentication. In her deposition, Maurer had mentioned a Warhol painting of a candy box as one of the pictures sent from the Foundation to the Board for authentication. Now, Wachs claimed that he had been shocked to hear that. So, Kerr changed tack. When a painting owned by the Foundation was submitted to the Authentication Board, ‘is that something you need to approve?’
Wachs brushed the question aside without answering it. ‘I’d like to be informed of that, at least. I don’t have to be the actual physical person to do it, but I’d like to know of it. I just don’t recall – I didn’t recall the one instance [the Candy Box] that she mentioned…’ Then, for the fourth time, Wachs stated categorically that, apart from the Candy Box – the submission of which had come as a total surprise to him – he could recall no other instances when the Foundation had submitted any works to the Board for authentication. Kerr looked at him in disbelief.