That left one more insider, Robert “Buddy” Verson. After their initial investigations, the FBI assumed that he was the key. Their inquiry centered on whether he was a dupe, a perpetrator, or both.
They couldn’t help noticing an eerie similarity between Verson’s experience with the fake Renoir and that of a New York–area resident who had been duped by a fake art scam. He had approached the FBI three years earlier, and some parts of the file on that matter are included in the Elayne Galleries file.
A word about FBI files here, because they are crucial sources for the telling of this story. FBI files resemble good literature in two respects. Number one, what is left out is just as important as what is included. The reader has to fill in the blanks. This can be a powerful tool for a good writer of literature, but the FBI carries it to ludicrous extremes. An entire file page may contain only a few words. The rest consists of black stripes, indicating where lines, phrases, and complete paragraphs (you know when a paragraph is gone because the stripe at the bottom is shorter than the ones that precede it) have been “redacted.”
That term—redacted—is the FBI’s, and it was apparently chosen over the more appropriate deleted for a reason. Redact is a verb meaning “to put into suitable literary form, to revise, to edit.” But police reports, court documents, and official records in general are not normally revised and edited. Stories are. In fact, when records and reports are revised and edited, they become stories, and therein lies another resemblance between FBI files and good literature: when the FBI responds to a Freedom of Information Act request, they have a story to tell, but it’s not necessarily the one you want to hear.
The highly redacted documents concerning the dupe from New York City (name redacted, “A” for the purposes of this summary) reveal that in 1975, he and two partners, “D” and “E,” purchased a painting titled “St. Peter,” purportedly by the famed seventeenth-century Dutch painter Rembrandt van Rijn. A had been tipped about the availability of the painting by “B aka C,” who provided a written appraisal from Rikki’s Art Studios, Inc., Miami, valuing the painting at $375,000.
After A and his partners purchased their Rembrandt (price redacted), they stored it in a warehouse in New York City along with two other valuable paintings, one said to be by the Italian artist Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, the other by the Spaniard Diego Velazquez. Both paintings were said to date from the turn of the seventeenth century. According to the file, they had been acquired through someone identified as “B/C” as well.
B/C told A that four paintings—the Velazquez, the Caravaggio, and two Rembrandts titled “St. Peter” and “St. Paul,” respectively—had been purchased in Havana in 1953 for $250,000 cash. Initially, he said, the plan had been to carry the paintings, plus $10.5 million in stolen bearer bonds, to Europe for subsequent sale. But that fell through.
A went to the FBI in August 1975, when he became aware that one of his partners—further identified in the file as an officer of the Anthony Abraham Auto Agency in Miami—had removed the Rembrandt and one of the other paintings (it doesn’t say which) from the New York warehouse without A’s permission.
A gave photos of the missing paintings to the FBI. They were shown to the curator of European art at the Metropolitan Museum, who said both were low-quality fakes. At that point the FBI decided not to open an investigation, but the file does indicate that B/C remained a person of interest. It contains an entry noting that in March 1976, B/C made an appointment with the Sotheby Parke-Bernet Gallery in New York, where he attempted to sell a painting he claimed was by the twentieth-century Austrian Expressionist Oskar Kokoschka. It was immediately spotted as a fake.
The summary of the New York matter appears to be included in the Elayne Galleries file for three reasons: (1) B/C is identified elsewhere in the files as Rolando A, the Cuban who sold Verson the fake Renoir; (2) Rikki’s Art Studios, Inc., provided appraisals of both the fake Rembrandt purchased by A and his partners and Verson’s fake Renoir; and (3) fake paintings were sold, then stolen, in both cases.
It is easy to deduce what avenues of inquiry the FBI might have pursued, based on the similarities between the two matters. How does Rolando A, a bold con man who is not averse to attempting to peddle a second-rate fake to a prestigious gallery, find more likely victims? Does an attractive, dark-haired young woman named Sonia lure them into the scheme? Is Rikki’s Art Studios in on the scam? Is it a coincidence that fakes were stolen after they were sold in both cases, and if not, what could explain that?
Buddy Verson was the link between the two situations, and the FBI gathered information about him at a furious pace for a while, hoping to solve the Minnesota theft plus what they viewed as a New York case worthy of their renewed consideration. They hoped to bring federal charges against the Miami men and anyone who aided in their scheme. The crime would be transporting people, goods, and information via interstate commerce in furtherance of theft and fraud.
Verson, a graduate of St. Paul Central High School in 1955, didn’t leave much of an impression on his classmates. The one thing that several of them recall so many years later is that his fair skin and blue eyes belied his Russian-Jewish heritage. According to the yearbook, he played tennis on the Central team and belonged to the Radio Club. He was about five feet ten inches and a little on the pudgy side in high school, more so later in life.
“We never got to know each other very well,” says his cousin and classmate Ronald Verson, a Chicago lawyer.
“You know, I remember him but I don’t remember anything about him, if that makes any sense. He was a nice guy, I guess I remember that much,” says his classmate Howard Abel of Newport Beach, California.
“Blue eyes, right, but I don’t recall anything else about him,” says another classmate, Butch Salita of St. Paul.
According to other sources, while he was in high school Buddy Verson met a girl from North Dakota at Herzl Camp, a Jewish summer camp in Webster, Wisconsin. They married soon after he graduated. He worked in her family’s business in Bismarck after the marriage, but eventually the couple relocated to the Twin Cities area. Verson invested in a wholesale business called Budget Liquors, and in 1972 became partners with a Minneapolitan, the late Robert Bell, in a bar called the “1 & 44” in Shakopee, Minnesota.
“There was a restaurant as well as a bar,” says Bell’s younger brother, Eddy. “I’m sure of that, because the family celebrated a couple of occasions there. I can kind of see Buddy when I think about it, but I never knew him.”
The file refers to Verson as “a bar owner and a wholesale liquor distributor.” However, licensing restrictions made it difficult if not impossible to be both in Minnesota. A sense of how Verson handled that problem—or more accurately, took advantage of the opportunities it presented—can be gathered from a memorandum in the file. It concerns some information the FBI received from an agent of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. The agent said that an inspection of the books at 1 & 44 revealed that “Verson had taken some $100,000 out of the business in an unauthorized fashion” and the co-owner was cooperating “regarding Verson’s possible illegal liquor activities.”
According to the memo, there were discussions under way between Verson and his partner about liquidating the business and dividing the assets after taking into account the unauthorized withdrawal, which would have left Verson with less than nothing.
There is reference to a “gal friend of Verson’s” and “two hit men who did a lot of work for Buddy,” one of whom is described as a “large white male.” Redactions render that part of the tale more enigmatic than it might be otherwise, but it appears to relate to the pending liquidation.
“There is talk that Buddy may have been into hot items from time to time,” according to the memo, and is “also into”—followed by a redaction long enough to cover a multitude of sins.
The FBI file—this memo in particular—supports hearsay about Verson which suggests that by the mid-1970s he was no longer the pleasant but unremarkable young fellow who graduated from Central High School. He had separated from his wife after a long spell of philandering, during which he became notorious for consummating affairs in a dentist’s chair in his office. He owned some real estate, including a house in which he allowed young women to live rent free in return for sex, and was rumored to be a fence specializing in high-end items.
Two people who knew about his activities at that time called him “a ball-buster” and “a dangerous man,” but another dismissed him as “a wannabe gangster,” someone who dabbled in things and consorted with people “he had no business messing around with.”
One of those people was Sonia V, the “gal friend” the memo mentions. Her predilections offer a clue about the $100,000 hole Verson dug for himself and the desperate schemes he concocted to get out of it.
Sonia made no secret of her fondness for cocaine, according to Brent Baskfield, vice president of in-flight services for Northwest Airlines while she was a stewardess, nor did she discourage gossip about her connections with gangsters. Baskfield, a sometime client of Elayne Galleries, was a bemused witness to Sonia’s flamboyant trajectory through their mutual workplace. When she was off duty, he observed, she took frequent trips to expensive places and wore stylish clothing and jewelry that was unaffordable for someone living on a flight attendant’s salary.
“She had kind of an exotic look—dark skin, dark hair,” says Baskfield. “Her last name was Spanish-sounding, hard to pronounce. She was very pleasant, but there was always a mysterious aura about her, as if she was way out on the edge and knew things nobody else knew.”
Buddy Verson was interviewed twice in connection with the theft, by the FBI and by an insurance adjuster named John Malone. There is a summary of the FBI interview in the Elayne Galleries file. The Malone interview is included in its entirety, with surprisingly few redactions.
On February 23, 1978, Verson told the FBI he had known Sonia for two years and through her was aware of paintings owned by a friend of hers, a Cuban exile and former politician. One in particular, a Renoir oil painting, “was available for immediate purchase.” He wasn’t much interested at first, because he knew nothing about oil paintings, but the fact that she had “influential friends” in Miami made him curious. She kept talking about it, and earlier that month he had decided to buy it.
He considered keeping it to display at his residence, but an insurance agent advised him that he would have to take pricey security measures if he did, so he contacted Elayne Lindberg and asked her to display it at the gallery, where he assumed it would be insured.
He told the FBI agent that on the morning of February 16, Elayne had called him to say that another painting belonging to Rolando A, this one by an artist named “Dominique,” could be purchased for $7,000, and if it was authentic it was worth up to $90,000. Rolando A wanted to sell it in the next two weeks. Verson said he took that under advisement.
That evening he attended the opening of the Rockwell show. Early the next morning he was awakened by a phone call from Elayne informing him that the gallery had been burglarized and his painting had been stolen.
In his interview, he told the FBI agent that the most he could recover from his homeowner’s policy was $4,000 and he hoped the gallery’s insurance would reimburse him in the amount he paid for the Renoir, $10,000. He said he had no intention of claiming the appraised value of $125,000.
As for the Dominique, he wouldn’t be purchasing it because he didn’t have the cash and also “because of the unusual circumstances surrounding the purchase and theft of his Renoir oil painting.”
When Verson was interviewed by the insurance adjuster, he said that he had been collecting art since 1976 and he owned signed, stone-cut prints and lithographs by Picasso, Bragg, and Calder, as well as Rockwell. He said Sonia was from Miami and her family was acquainted with the owner of the Renoir.
“I know a little history about him,” Verson told the adjustor. “He was some kind of Cuban politician in pre-Castro days, and back then they were aware Castro was coming, and there wasn’t much they could do about it, and they knew that money would be of no value to them so he converted his money into art works.…They had trouble getting the paintings out of the country. This painting [the Renoir] was gotten out through the Japanese embassy.”
He explained that the second signatory for the sale of the Renoir, the man from Santo Domingo, had some connection to the Japanese embassy there. He was “a kid,” but later in the interview Verson described him as “about fifty” and “a medical student.”
Malone didn’t follow up on those contradictions. He did ask if it struck Verson as peculiar that a painting appraised at $125,000 could be purchased for $10,000.
“You betcha!” Verson replied (exclamation point courtesy of the FBI). “That’s why I flew Elayne down to authenticate it.”
He went on to explain that the difference between fine art and Disney cartoons was lost on him. He preferred his young son’s finger paintings.