While she was busy selling what turned out to be millions of dollars in forgeries from Glafira Rosales, Ann Freedman was interviewed by New York Magazine about another major figure in the Manhattan art gallery world, Larry Salander. In what might or might not have been a case of projection, she said, “Larry always has some mystery. Success for him was to find the undiscovered painting, to prove this was a masterwork against all odds.”1 If Freedman’s evaluation may have offered a glimpse into her own psyche, it was accurate nonetheless when it came to Salander. Salander was at the time working feverishly on two major shows that he saw not only as a financial necessity, but also as a grand moment for the art market the world over. One exhibition, to be titled Masterpieces of Art: Five Centuries of Painting and Sculpture, would feature the works of true classical giants such as Rubens, Correggio, Botticelli, El Greco, Titian, and Michelangelo.
Masterpieces of Art represented Salander’s deep interest in what he saw as truly valuable art—that of the classical masters. Speaking to the critic James Panero, Salander made a blunt comparison between the prices fetched by the work of contemporary artists versus that of the Old Masters: “Our society now values a Warhol for three times as much money as a great Rembrandt. That tells me we’re fucked. It’s as if people would rather fuck than make love.”2
Salander’s other show, Caravaggio, which he curated with the art historian and dealer Clovis Whitfield, would not only further Salander’s goal of emphasizing the value of the Old Masters: it was also a natural headline grabber. The show would be centered on a classical painting called Apollo the Luteplayer, which had last been sold in January 2001 at a Sotheby’s auction of important Old Master paintings and arts of the Renaissance in New York. At the time, the auction house listed an estimate for the painting at a range of $100,000 to $150,000—a relatively low figure for the work based on the fact that experts consulted by Sotheby’s deemed the painting to be from the circle of Michelangelo Merisi, called Caravaggio. The work was likely simply a copy based on existing Caravaggio works featuring a lute player hanging at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia.
When he saw the Sotheby’s auction catalog—which stated that the work might have been created by Carlo Magnone—Whitfield was taken with the image of Apollo. Working on behalf of an anonymous American client, Whitfield went about examining the painting further. He was no novice: in addition to running a London art gallery, Whitfield was educated at both Cambridge and the Courtauld Institute of Art. He would go on to write Caravaggio’s Eye, a detailed study of the artist’s revolutionary approach to painting. Of Apollo he said, “We had an idea that it was something more interesting. When I went to New York to look at the painting and put a lens close to it, I thought it was electrifying.”3 So taken was he that Whitfield advised the American to buy it, and he did so for $110,000. It turned out to be quite a bargain. When Whitfield had it analyzed closely by paintings conservators, they found evidence that the painting was not a copy at all. For instance, X-ray analysis revealed that the artist had made corrections to the picture that indicated he had changed course in the midst of painting it, including changes to the profile of the lute player’s hands. That’s not something an artist would do had he simply been copying an already-completed painting onto another canvas. Further analysis showed that the canvas bore preparatory incisions that were indicative of Caravaggio’s technique.4
Despite the findings, Sotheby’s remained unmoved. “Were we to take the painting in for sale today, we would definitely not catalogue it as by Caravaggio,” a spokesman said.5 But both Salander and Whitfield were undeterred by Sotheby’s stubborn refusal to budge. After all, no one expected Sotheby’s to suddenly tell the world that they had mistakenly undervalued a piece of art by tens of millions of dollars. And furthermore, the pair had to be buoyed by the approval they received from Sir Denis Mahon, one of the world’s most respected experts in Italian art of the Baroque period, about the painting. With a newly attributed Caravaggio headlining his exhibition, Salander knew he had something the art world could not ignore. Here was a true Old Master who met all the criteria for top billing and a sky-high asking price: previous high prices, a very low number of available paintings, and an important place in art history. And added to this was the emerging information about his fascinating life. Put simply, Caravaggio was a rock star.
Today, Caravaggio is considered an innovator, described by British artist and photographer David Hockney as having “invented a black world that had not existed before, certainly not in Florence or Rome.” “Caravaggio,” Hockney adds, “invented Hollywood lighting.”6 Perhaps this was because the Milanese artist’s life was filled with a great amount of drama and turmoil, which included a duel over a woman, a purported murder, and imprisonments. Despite such turbulence, he did not want for commissions, and though his first works sold for very little, he eventually captured the eye of collectors, leading his fellow artist Giuseppe Baglione to complain that Caravaggio “was paid more for his individual figures than others for history paintings.”7
Today, his paintings are worth astronomical figures. In 2006, almost a year to the day before Salander’s planned exhibition, it was announced that the restoration of a Caravaggio that had been found in the attic of an Italian church was complete. The painting’s value was estimated at more than $110 million. A similar value was attached to his painting The Taking of Christ.8
So Salander, emboldened by these estimates and eager to make a splash with his important shows, attached an ambitious price tag to Caravaggio’s Apollo the Lute Player: $100 million—one thousand times its previous sale price. Salander’s gambit was that the art buyers would—and should—return to putting their big bucks on what he saw as the true greats: the Old Master paintings made by Caravaggio, Rembrandt, El Greco, Tintoretto, and others. In his view, contemporary art—the conceptual and sometimes downright bizarre—had been commanding top dollar for too long, and Salander saw his exhibition as the pivotal moment where it just might turn course, or rather, get back on course. He told the New York Sun that his exhibition would mark the first time a Caravaggio was sold in public and, therefore, “I’m not sure what we’re going to get for it, but $100 million is cheap. It’s the most important painting ever sold.” Apparently believing that the significance of the exhibition to his own career and the art world could not be overstated, he added, “There’s not a lot left to do after a show like this. It’s going to be a hard act to follow.”9
The man who would reestablish the classical masters as the marquee-grabbers of the art world was born in 1949 and grew up in a respectable but modest middle-class neighborhood on Long Island. His father, the owner of a small gallery himself, died when Salander was a young man, and the tough, tenacious art lover took on the responsibility of providing for his mother and sisters. Though he didn’t finish college, he became a self-taught expert in the world of art, impressing others with his voracious appetite for all things related to his field. In 1976, well before his thirtieth birthday, Salander and a partner opened the Salander-O’Reilly Gallery in Manhattan and built it into one of America’s best known and regarded art galleries. And he himself became a major figure in the world of art, known for an unmistakable passion for his work. His friend and former employee Ron Gerston recalled that Salander “didn’t sleep at night. He ate, drank, and breathed art. When he wasn’t in the gallery selling art, he was in his office reading about art and writing about art.”10
Salander was somewhat of an anomaly in the art world, as he was successful as both an art dealer and acclaimed as an artist. As a painter, his works were so well regarded that one of them, Crucifixion, painted in 1992, is in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Eight feet tall, the painting is executed in the same American Modernist style upon which he first established himself as a dealer. His paintings were the subject of nine solo and ten group exhibitions. According to Gerston, “He was a painter and that’s what he cared about.”11
His background as an artist may have been the driving force behind his passion for the art he sold, but it was his forceful, dynamic personality that suited him well for wheeling and dealing with the powerful figures who created high-value art and those who could afford it. Salander made no attempt to conceal his background and upbringing as a regular guy, and his gift of gab made him an attractive figure to other powerful men. According to art critic and writer Judd Tully, the stocky, balding, somewhat unrefined yet charming Salander was not what one envisions when they picture a high-profile art dealer in Manhattan. “He was very gruff-speaking and contrary to almost any profile you might think of in terms of what an art dealer might look like, sound like, dress like, and act like.” Yet his status near the top of the New York art world spoke for itself. “When he was in the nice digs, the Wall Street people were able to look past his eccentricity and trust this guy’s success and want to listen to him. The other people didn’t mind the eccentricities; he was an artist like they were.”12 His friend Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of the New Republic, said Salander is “a very unusual combination of street vitality and aesthetic refinement.”13
It wasn’t just Wall Street types who gravitated to Salander. He called many celebrities friends, including Robert DeNiro, Liam Neeson, and Bruce Springsteen. And when tennis legend John McEnroe was considering turning his SoHo residential loft into a gallery space, he turned to Salander for guidance. Salander brought him into his Upper East Side gallery in a nonpaying role to study the inner workings of the business. “You can’t learn guitar without learning the basic chords, and you can’t learn the art business without knowing the nuts and bolts,” McEnroe later wrote in his autobiography You Cannot Be Serious.14 The two became so close that McEnroe would eventually become the godfather to Salander’s child.
Salander’s opulent lifestyle matched that of the company he kept. Wieseltier described him as “a street kid who reads Ruskin. I don’t know anybody else who so naturally recognizes the brutality of the world but lives in such a fine way.”15 He had two homes: one a 60-acre estate in Millbrook, New York, that included not just tennis courts but also a baseball field for his kids to play on; and a three-story brownstone on the Upper East Side of Manhattan that he purchased for nearly $5 million. His propensity for flying only on private jets was such that it left even DeNiro incredulous. When the pair went to Portugal, DeNiro recalled, “I saw I had a plane and Larry had a plane. It just didn’t add up to me.”16 And when his second wife, Julie, turned 40, Salander rented the Frick Collection museum for a $60,000 birthday bash. He also lavished her with a half-million dollars worth of jewels.17
As his business grew and became more successful, Salander decided to make another major acquisition. He expanded Salander-O’Reilly Galleries to incorporate a new location on East 71st Street in Manhattan, a 45-foot-wide neo-Italian Renaissance mansion that was nothing less than spectacular. Tully described it as “One of these beautiful nineteenth-century buildings with a big staircase, beautiful rooms, beautifully appointed. You walked in and you thought, ‘Oh my god, this place is a palace.’”18 The location featured three stories of exhibition space, a greenhouse roof, and skylight-illuminated upper levels. New York Magazine raved that it was “well worth a visit in itself with its arched front entrance, velvet-walled rooms, and inlaid wood floors.”19 Such space doesn’t come cheap, especially in Manhattan. Rent for the new gallery space exceeded $150,000 per month.
Despite the sumptuous new gallery space, all was not as it seemed in the world of Larry Salander and Salander-O’Reilly. With six children, an ex-wife, two multimillion-dollar residences, and a lavish lifestyle—not to mention two Manhattan gallery locations—to support, pressure to earn large amounts of money was intense for the art dealer. Furthermore, Salander had now embarked on his quest to bring a rebirth to Renaissance art. This meant acquiring Old Master paintings, which required that he find additional large investments. An acquaintance told the New York Post that Salander “had delusions of becoming the major American dealer in Renaissance art. He would sign any piece of paper, he was buying everything in sight. He just went crazy.”20 While some saw craziness, however, Salander saw a quest for the soul. He wrote an unpublished manuscript titled Soul Wars and told James Panero, “When I’m talking about the soul to people, they look at me like I’m nuts. But there has been a longtime manipulation of people who want to make money to dumb down the American society and rob us of the curiosity of our souls.”21
While Salander may have seen himself on a mission of salvation, his chosen route to rescue the soul was a curious one. Burdened by intense financial pressures to support his personal and professional lives, he embarked on a number of schemes to stay afloat—which would put all he built at risk.
One such scheme involved the art of the well-known American artist Stuart Davis, the Philadelphia-born early American Modernist whose paintings ranged from political pieces to street scenes and cafes. Davis was something of a prodigy, leaving high school to study at the Robert Henri School of Art in New York. At just 19 years of age, five of his works were exhibited at the 1913 Armory Show. His most famous work was perhaps his abstract Egg Beater series (1927), one piece of which sold for $254,000 at Christie’s in 2008.22 While Davis also taught at Yale and at New York’s New School for Social Research, he remained a lifelong artist.23 When he died in 1964, Davis left hundreds of works in his estate, the entirety of which he entrusted to his only child, Earl.
Earl, who devoted much of his life to his father’s art, was a friend of Salander’s, and the gallery owner convinced him that he could promote and sell the collection for him.24 According to Earl, he agreed to entrust his friend with his father’s works, but he didn’t want all of the works to be sold, as they held a great sentimental value to him. Instead, Earl wanted to keep some of his late father’s works in his own private collection, and therefore directed Salander to notify him prior to putting any of them up for sale. He insisted on having a say not only in which pieces could be sold, but also at which price they should be offered. He and Salander entered into an agreement in which the gallery would take a 20 percent commission on the sales of paintings up to $1 million. For sales over $1 million, the commission would be 10 percent. A similar agreement existed for Stuart Davis’s works on paper, with Salander earning a commission of 30 percent of sales up $20,000 and 20 percent of sales in excess of that figure.
In early 2005, Earl Davis requested that Salander prepare for him a full inventory of his father’s works. Several weeks passed before Salander provided his friend with a response, stating that he had personally verified the location of all of the Davis works and that all was in order. Months later, Earl received the inventory he requested. Nevertheless, Earl instructed Salander to stop selling any of his father’s works and to collect any pieces that were off-site so that they could be returned to him. Despite Earl’s concerns over the collection, Salander convinced him to sell one painting, Punchcard Flutter, for $2,250,000 and 12 other works for $650,000 in two separate sales. Earl recalls Salander telling him the buyers would be paying “cash on the table.”25
It was to be a profitable sale for the works. But it would also prove too good to be true. First, Salander told Earl that Punchcard Flutter was sold for $2,125,000—$125,000 less than agreed upon. Then he told Earl that although the paintings had been released to the buyers, no payment had been received. In the end, Earl never received payment for the works. Eventually, he learned that 96 of his father’s works had been sold without Salander informing him, and that other pieces may have been “lost.”
It was a devastating blow for Earl Davis, who considered Salander a friend and confidant whom he truly loved. But Salander’s corrupt dealing with his friend was hardly his only indiscretion. Instead, it was just one anecdote in a massive Ponzi scheme involving paintings that would leave the jaws of art power brokers agape, not only for its scope but for Salander’s willingness to victimize those who considered him a close, trusted friend.
Like Earl Davis, John and Neelon Crawford were the children of a famous artist, the painter and photographer Ralston Crawford. Crawford’s work was so respected by Salander that his gallery hosted an exhibition of his paintings in 2001 called Ralston Crawford: A Retrospective. The show’s catalog described Crawford as a “major American artist,” and the show exhibited his range, including not just his Abstract pictures, but some of his Precisionist works as well, including Overseas Highway (1939), which was based on the road leading from Key West, Florida, to the mainland. In 2007, Crawford’s sons also asked for an inventory of their father’s works, which had been entrusted to Salander. Unhappy with a lack of response from the art dealer, the men took more immediate action than had Earl Davis. John Crawford, himself an artist, jumped into his old Dodge pickup truck and drove it into the city. He walked into Salander-O’Reilly Gallery and took all of his father’s paintings he could find, packed them into the truck, and left. Meanwhile, his brother Neelon was also being ignored by Salander. Made aware that some of his father’s works were about to be sold, Neelon called the New York Police Department. He was directed to Detective Mark Fishstein, who, as part of his work on the Major Case Squad, serves as the NYPD’s top art cop. Fishstein is one of only a handful of city police officers in the United States with expertise in art theft, forgery, and fraud, and he made a short phone call to Salander in which he minced no words. Salander, apparently aware of Fishstein’s skill as an investigator, sent off the paintings to Neelon Crawford by the end of the week.26
Salander didn’t limit his fraud to just pilfering from artists’ estates that had been entrusted to him by selling works without notifying or properly compensating his clients. He also preyed on collectors who had come to consider him more than just a kindred spirit; for some, he was like part of the family.
In 2004, Dr. Alexander Pearlman passed away at the age of 91. A lifelong lover of art, he would visit galleries in Manhattan weekly with his daughters and take in the work of a wide array of artists. After frequent trips to Salander’s galleries, Pearlman, a physician from Queens, formed such a close bond with Salander that the two would regularly embrace upon meeting. The sometimes gruff Salander attended Pearlman’s funeral and cried over the loss of his friend.
Throughout their lives, the doctor’s daughters were protective of the art collection their father had assembled. It had become so valuable that his daughter Dr. Ellyn Shander remembers being instructed to tell her friends that the paintings were the work of her father in order to keep secret the fact that the artworks—including paintings by Modigliani, Manet, Cézanne, and Picasso—were worth about $2 million. As Pearlman approached the end of his life, he and his daughters discussed the future of his collection. His plan was clear and sensible: the paintings would be entrusted to his close friend Larry Salander for safekeeping.
After the funeral, Salander saw to it that each and every painting was properly inventoried, crated, and shipped to his establishment. Shander’s mind was at ease; that is, until she heard word in 2007 of problems at Salander-O’Reilly Galleries. She made the trip into the city to see Salander in person, and instead of being greeted by the caring friend she had come to know, she was met with a refusal to see her. She was escorted from the gallery by a security guard. She would later learn that much of the precious collection had been sold, and the works that had not became embroiled in legal proceedings.27
Not even his celebrity friends were safe from Salander’s scams. Robert DeNiro had entrusted Salander with his late father’s paintings, with an agreement on a 50–50 split on any sales. Salander had hosted exhibitions of Robert DeNiro Sr.’s works and the painter had chosen Salander as his dealer. The younger DeNiro would recall that Salander gave him “the impression he liked my father’s art, he was enthusiastic.”28 While he may have liked it, Salander and his associate Leigh Morse sold $77,000 of it to San Francisco’s Hackett-Freedman Gallery in 2007 without sharing the proceeds with DeNiro as agreed. Morse, a dealer in Salander’s employ, was found to have wired money from the sale into her own personal bank account. Ultimately, DeNiro was able to retrieve the paintings at some expense after complex legal wrangling in U.S. Bankruptcy Court.29 Morse was convicted of scheming to defraud in April 2011.30
When it came to John McEnroe, Salander had an entirely different scam at work. This one involved selling one piece of art to multiple buyers. In 2004, the dealer convinced his good friend McEnroe to invest $2 million to buy half the interest in two paintings, Pirates I and Pirates II, by the Armenian American Abstract Expressionist artist Arshile Gorky. Salander told McEnroe that he would then flip the paintings and split the proceeds with the tennis great. But Salander only followed through on part of that plan. First, he sold the same half-interest in the paintings that he sold to McEnroe to another investor, a banker named Morton Bender. And then Salander boldly took the fraud a step further, selling Pirates II to yet another buyer and pocketing the $2.5 million proceeds. Manhattan district attorney Robert Morgenthau put it well when he summed up the scheme: “Why sell it once when you can sell it three times?”31 Ironically, Salander had once been quoted as saying that “art is the human attempt to make one plus one equal more than two.”32 Clearly, he had taken his own philosophy too literally.
While it appears that Salander’s frauds were motivated at least in part by the debts he accumulated while trying to become the father of Renaissance art in the gallery world, he also fleeced the group that was formed to finance his purchases of that dream collection. Renaissance Art Investors was one of the biggest investors in Salander-O’Reilly Galleries and paid out $42 million for about 328 works of art from the Renaissance. RAI then consigned the works back to Salander to be marketed and sold. Yet RAI soon learned that Salander had misrepresented nearly all aspects of the investment, including the cost and source of the artwork. Salander told the investors he was buying the works from private dealers and estates primarily in Europe, when in fact many of the works were obtained from public auction houses in Europe and the United States. He also failed to report or turn over millions in proceeds from the RAI artworks. And finally, in order to cover his fraud, Salander provided RAI with forged and falsified documents ranging from invoices to inventories.33
News of Salander’s scams spread quickly as more of his clients became aware that their artistic assets might be in jeopardy. Nevertheless, he remained defiant. When Maurice Katz learned that Salander had sold one of his paintings for $125,000 and didn’t pay Katz as agreed, Katz contacted the Maine Antique Digest, a major industry journal read by a large number of important collectors. He also spread the word that he had been cheated by the art dealer. Salander contacted Katz directly by e-mail and was apoplectic. “[You] have referred to me as a ‘crook’ among other things in conversation with a senior officer at my bank. This person and others will testify to your slanderous remarks and your balance due in your Maurer of $15,000 will seem like a pittance to the damages that that will have been caused to my business and for which I will ask for damages as well as the amount of loss actually incurred as a result of your out of bounds, unfounded and outrageous remarks . . . You have made it more difficult to put food in the stomachs of my children and I am extremely angry about it.” Ever portraying himself as the common man, he added, “If you were enough of a person it would be much more rewarding for me and less expensive for you if we settled this matter the way men did in the old days (although it would be much more painful).”34
When he became aware of the scheme perpetrated by Salander, RAI’s head, Donald Schupak, was a force to be reckoned with—and he was not one to be bullied. In 2007, with Salander’s dream Caravaggio exhibition on the horizon and a steady stream of stories about trouble at Salander-O’Reilly Galleries in the media, Schupak kicked into action. Working to stop the exhibition from happening, he and his attorney filed a motion in the New York State Supreme Court to limit Salander’s control. He even sent a private security firm to videotape all activity at the gallery and to search people as they left.35
With lawsuits mounting, negative press attention snowballing, and doubts about Salander’s actions and judgment at their high point, Clovis Whitfield, the man who had Caravaggio’s Apollo the Lute Player—the cornerstone of Salander’s plans—was pushed to the brink. In a scene out of a Hollywood movie, Whitfield went to Salander-O’Reilly Gallery on the afternoon of the Caravaggio exhibition and informed Salander that he was pulling his prized painting from the gallery. Salander’s exhibition—and his dreams—were dashed.
All of this activity caught the watchful eye of district attorney Robert Morgenthau’s office, and on March 26, 2009, he announced the arrest of Larry Salander and a 100-count indictment for stealing $88 million from a bank, art owners, and investors—many of whom were friends and longtime associates—from 1994 through 2007. In all, the district attorney’s office stated that Salander had defrauded 26 victims, stealing from them essentially in two ways: first, he sold artwork he didn’t own and kept the proceeds; and second, he lured clients to invest in fraudulent opportunities. It was discovered that in one case he had sold half interest in one painting to seven people. And through the court battles and prosecution that would ensue, the enormous debts that Salander had accumulated become public. They included a $15 million mortgage on his Manhattan brownstone after racking up nearly $500,000 in costs for a series of unpaid home renovations; a $1.2 million personal loan; $1.7 million in back rent due on his original gallery (which he was forced to close not long after opening the palatial gallery on East 71st Street); and nearly $55 million due for paintings and investments, including the Stuart Davis and RAI paintings.36
From a criminal prosecution perspective, the D.A.’s office had a mountain of evidence against Salander, and he, like so many scammers, knew he faced an opponent he could not beat. In 2010, with new district attorney Cyrus Vance in office, Salander pleaded guilty to stealing over $120 million from investors and art owners. Photos of Salander were splashed across newspapers and the internet, depicting a ruffled, beaten man. In his long statement to the court, Salander stated, “I’ve lost my life, my business and my reputation.” He sobbed as he apologized to his victims and his family and added, “I’m utterly and completely disgraced.”37 The court, however, was in no mood for his contrition. Judge Michael Obus hit Salander with the maximum sentence allowable under his plea deal: 18 years in jail, with the opportunity for parole after six served. But that wasn’t all Salander faced: he is also responsible for $114.9 million in restitution, and was embroiled in dozens of civil lawsuits as well as complex bankruptcy proceedings. Summing up the Salander affair, Manhattan assistant district attorney Kenn Kern said, “Lawrence Salander is a pathologically self-absorbed con man who betrays friends, investors, heirs and living artists.” He added that Salander was engaged in “a Ponzi scheme that would make Bernie Madoff proud.”38
Incredibly, RAI head Donald Schupak had also been personally impacted by Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. Schupak’s then 94-year-old mother and blind sister were left penniless by Madoff’s audacious fraud.39
Rather than rescuing souls, Salander left widespread devastation in his wake. Making matters even messier, a bankruptcy ruling out of federal court in New York related to the case caused yet more consternation for an owner when it was decided that a painting owned by a private interest but in possession of Salander-O’Reilly could be sold by the bankrupt gallery to pay creditors. But the hurt extended far beyond just finances. Decades-long friends were shocked, even crushed, by Salander’s betrayal, in what many have called New York’s biggest-ever art fraud. Onlookers were left astounded that one man could turn on those who considered him not just a friend but a trusted member of their extended family. And he left many wondering how they could have been so wrong about a person. Perhaps the answer is in the words of Dr. Ellyn Shander: “He is a sly, manipulative sociopath, a con man with no soul.”40