Displaying items by tag: art fraud

Tax evasion, trout poaching, and now mail fraud: Luke Brugnara cannot get a break lately.

Following his May conviction for failing to pay for $11 million in art, Brugnara is awaiting sentencing and looking to appeal, while the dealers he allegedly conned are still waiting to recover their artwork from court custody.

A 67-year-old assessor named Wolf G., and a 60-year-old art dealer named Hans K., have been accused of art fraud and the falsification of documents, in a court case that has been brought against a German ring who stand accused of knowingly attempting to put a forged Alberto Giacometti sculpture on the market, Süddeutsche Zeitung has reported.

Wolf. G's ex-wife Ulrike G., a 63-year-old solicitor and her 92-year-old mother have been accused of being accomplices. Wolf.

Private equity titan Leon Black and his wife Debra, a Broadway producer, melanoma survivor and leading force behind the Melanoma Research Alliance, are buying 19 E. 70th St., the former Knoedler & Company art gallery, which shuttered following a major art fraud scandal in 2009 that is still under investigation.

London developer Christian Candy bought the 30-foot-wide, 17,000-square-foot, 104-year-old Italian Renaissance-style townhouse for $35 million in 2013.

An East Hampton man stands accused this week of selling over 60 forged paintings, which he claimed to be by Jackson Pollock, to private collectors and on eBay, netting him nearly $1.9 million.

A special agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, in seeking a warrant for the arrest of John D. Re, 54, said he had engaged in the scheme since March 2005 and at least until this past January. According to the complaint by the agent, Meredith Savona of the bureau’s art theft and art fraud division, Mr. Re falsely told collectors he had come across a trove of Pollock paintings in 1999, when he was hired to clean out the basement of an East Hampton woman, Barbara Schulte, three years after the death of her husband, George Schulte, a woodworker and antiques restorer.

A convicted tax evader and trout poacher from San Francisco has been charged with mail fraud for allegedly falsely claiming that he had $11 million to buy artwork.

Luke Brugnara, 50, was named in a complaint unsealed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in San Francisco. Federal prosecutors accused him of taking delivery of the art and then refusing to pay for the pieces or return them.