Last August, the OMA sued De Groft and the owners of a series of paintings included in the scandal-ridden 2022 show “Heroes & Monsters: Jean-Michel Basquiat.” The museum alleged that De Groft and others used the show and the museum’s reputation to legitimize a group of 25 paintings they claimed were by Basquiat so that they could be sold after. However, the show was shuttered in June 2022 after several reports doubting their status as bonafide Basquiats, which culminated in the FBI seizing the paintings. A subsequent FBI investigation provided evidence that the works were not by Basquiat, with Los Angeles-based auctioneer Michael Barzman admitting in a plea deal to helping paint and sell the works himself.

The case figures to be a complicated one. Akerman LLP, the law firm representing the museum, said in the case-management report that it expects to depose 50 “art scholars and museum directors” for the case. Further, a representative for the firm told the Sentinel that the lawsuit could cost the museum $500,000. That’s in addition to the more than $100,000 OMA has already paid Akerman since June 2022, according to the Sentinel, when the FBI raided the museum and seized the allegedly phony paintings.

Further delay in the suit could be caused by a series of countersuits against the OMA. DeGroft filed a countersuit against the OMA in November claiming wrongful termination, breach of contract, and defamation. In the countersuit, DeGroft claimed he is being made a scapegoat as part of the OMA’s media strategy for dealing with the scandal. He alleged that Cynthia Brumback, the OMA’s former board chair who resigned in the wake of the Basquiat scandal, and an outside legal team, had approved of the exhibition, even after it was clear the FBI, which subpoenaed the OMA for records regarding the paintings a year before they were seized, was investigating claims of forgery.

Additional countersuits for defamation are expected from defendants in the case, including the group of artworks’ owners called the Basquiat Venice Collection Group/ who claim “that the value of the Basquiat works of art has been tremendously devalued by OMA’s statements to various outlets, including but not limited to the filing of this lawsuit,” according to the court documents. 

De Groft and the owners of the supposed Basquiats have denied wrongdoing and maintain that the pieces are real.

There have been reports that mediation and a settlement could resolve the dispute between museum and DeGroft, though, according to court documents, “certain parties” have entered into negotiations and “appear to be far from settlement,” however they have agreed to a neutral mediator.

“As alleged, Inigo Philbrick was a serial swindler who misled art collectors, investors, and lenders out of more than $20 million,” U.S. Attorney Geoffrey S. Berman said in a statement. “You can’t sell more than 100 percent ownership in a single piece of art, which Philbrick allegedly did, among other scams. When his schemes began to unravel, Philbrick allegedly fled the country. Now he is in U.S. custody and facing justice.”

The scandal surrounding Philbrick first came to light in October 2019, after the German firm Fine Art Partners filed suit against him in a Florida court, alleging that the dealer was withholding millions of dollars’ worth of art by Donald Judd, Yayoi Kusama, Christopher Wool, and Wade Guyton. At the center of the suit was a Kusama “Infinity Mirror Room” installation that FAP claimed Philbrick had “refused” to return.

The filing of that lawsuit unfurled a series of related legal claims. In November, Guzzini Properties Ltd., a company that collects art, filed suit against Philbrick in New York. The company alleged that it had financed Philbrick’s purchase of a Rudolf Stingel painting and that Philbrick later sold it without their knowledge, and Guzzini claimed it should have ownership over the canvas. Meanwhile, that same month, a British court froze Philbrick’s assets.

Philbrick had previously operated a gallery with spaces in London and New York. The 33-year-old dealer had been considered an up-and-comer in the market sphere, and was mentored by notable gallerists, including Jay Jopling, the founder of London-based White Cube gallery, where Philbrick formerly worked.

In a 2019 ARTnews profile of Philbrick, Judd Grossman, a lawyer for several parties named in lawsuits related to the dealer, called Philbrick’s business “a con,” adding, “There were actual transactions taking place, and there were real assets being acquired and sold, but it was all being done against a web of lies.”

Amid the legal drama, Philbrick disappeared, causing many in the art world to speculate about his whereabouts. According to the FBI press release, flight records suggest that Philbrick left the United States ahead of the reports on the lawsuits in October and November and had been in Vanuatu since late October. He was then taken to Guam and is being transported to New York.

“Hats off to the FBI NY Joint Major Theft Task Force/Art Crime Team who worked diligently to track down Mr. Philbrick and bring him back to the U.S., where, if convicted, he might have to trade in his jet-set life for a drab federal prison cell,” FBI assistant director William F. Sweeney Jr. said in a statement.

Robert Wittman often risked his life as the FBI's chief art hunter and undercover art agent.

©DONNA WITTMAN

Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World’s Stolen Treasures
By Robert K. Wittman with John Shiffman
Crown, 230 pages, $25

You’re an undercover agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. To ingratiate yourself with and win the trust of two thugs, Sunny and Laurenz, you carry six forged paintings in Laurenz’s platinum Rolls Royce with bulletproof glass to the undercover FBI yacht, Stagehand. You cruise Miami harbor until late afternoon as stewards serve rare roast beef and magnums of Champagne while bikini-clad female undercover agents dance and eat strawberries. Meanwhile the captain is flipping on hidden surveillance cameras.

You sell the paintings to an agent posing as a Colombian drug dealer. He pays you $1.2 million with a bank wire transfer, a small pack of diamonds, and Krugerrands from the FBI vault. When you leave the boat, you toss a few gold coins to Laurenz and the diamonds to Sunny, who says, “Dinner’s on me.”

A scene from a James Bond movie starring Daniel Craig and Scarlett Johansson? No. It’s one of the fascinating stories in Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World’s Stolen Treasures, a memoir by Robert K. Wittman with John Shiffman. Wittman created the FBI’s art-crime team and is now a private art-recovery specialist. His book has the excitement of an espionage novel. It’s suspenseful, thought provoking, and funny.

Wittman, who was with the FBI for 20 years, often risked his life as the agency’s chief art hunter and only undercover art agent. Posing as a collector, philanthropist, professor, or broker (on the yacht he was a shady art dealer), he recovered more than $225 million worth of stolen art and antiquities, including works by Rembrandt, Bruegel, Rodin, and Norman Rockwell, as well as Geronimo’s headdress and an original copy of the Bill of Rights that had been lost for many years.

To help solve the theft of 18 paintings worth $50 million stolen from the home of a Spanish billionaire, he writes:

“I’d be entering another hotel room across town.
To meet a desperate, possibly homicidal gangster eager to close a $10 million deal.
Unarmed.
Dangling a million euros cash as bait.
Working with an FBI partner in his first undercover case.
Negotiating in French, a language I didn’t understand.
Swell.”

The bait worked.

Art crime is on the rise, “easily outpacing efforts to police it,” Wittman writes. “The $6 billion a year figure is probably low because it includes statistics supplied by only a third of the 192 member countries of the United Nations. Art and antiquities theft ranks fourth in transnational crime, after drugs, money laundering, and illegal arms shipments.”

Hot art and antiquities “attract money launderers, crooked gallery owners and art brokers, drug dealers, shipping companies, unscrupulous collectors, and the occasional terrorist.”

Most stolen or looted art is quickly smuggled across borders to reach new markets, according to Wittman. Half of the art and antiquities recovered by law-enforcement agencies is recaptured outside the country in which the theft took place.

Not much is being done about policing art crime, he writes. The French national art-crime squad has 30 officers. Scotland Yard has 12 and has deputized art professors and archeologists, partnering them with detectives. Italy has the largest number of art and antiquities sleuths: 300.

In the United States, the Los Angeles Police Department is the only department with a full-time art-crime investigator. The FBI’s art-crime team, which Wittman created in 2005, still exists, he writes, but it is “managed by a trained archaeologist, not an FBI agent,” and turnover is rampant.

He is critical of the FBI’s “unusual pecking order and protocols,” as well as “turf wars and intra-agency rivalries on both sides of the Atlantic.” He quotes an FBI colleague as saying that “the major federal law-enforcement agencies—especially the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Internal Revenue Service, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, and Immigration Customs Enforcement—almost always wrestled for control of joint investigations; the public would be surprised to learn how often different law-enforcement agencies hid things from one another, or tried to squeeze each other out.”

Sunny and Laurenz had ties to a criminal gang in Corsica and offered to sell Wittman some of the paintings stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990. Wittman claims his efforts were sabotaged by a superior, who tried to have him thrown off the case, which is still unsolved.

Wittman even has tips for people interested in becoming undercover sleuths. Describing a dangerous operation, he writes, “As I crossed into the middle of the lot, reaching a spot where the bad guys had no place to hide, I gave the go-sign—I brushed my backside with my left hand. (The go-sign should always be something you rarely do, so you don’t give it by mistake). Agents in raid jackets jumped out, guns drawn, shouting, ‘FBI! Let me see your hands! Down on your knees! FBI!'”

Milton Esterow is editor and publisher of ARTnews.

The Italian Mafia had a role in the theft of Caravaggio's Nativity with Saints Francis and Lawrence, 1609, from a Sicilian church, according to two informers.

COURTESY CARABINIERI SPECIAL UNIT FOR THE PROTECTION OF CULTURAL HERITAGE

The night of October 18, 1969, was dark and stormy. A tempest raged, with a wild wind and beating rain. It was a night, Colonel Robert Conforti, who was then chief of Italy’s art theft squad, told a reporter, “that presaged tragedy.”

That night a famous painting by Caravaggio, Nativity with Saints Francis and Lawrence, a large canvas 105 by 77 inches in size, was ripped from its frame in the Oratory of San Lorenzo in Palermo, Sicily, and disappeared. No one has seen it publicly since.

The theft made the news again in 1996, at the Mafia–association trial of former Italian prime minister Giulio Andreotti. He was convicted of conspiring with the Mafia in the killing of a journalist and then cleared on appeal.

Francesco Marino Mannoia, a convicted heroin dealer who was a Mafia pentito, or informer, testified that he took part in the theft. He said there had been a private buyer who wept at the sight of the damaged painting. But the police believed Mannoia exaggerated the damage. He never revealed the painting’s location. The police said his mother, sister, and aunt were murdered by the Mafia after he turned state’s evidence.

Palermo’s artistic heritage societies asked Mannoia to help recover the painting. “It’s something he could do for the good of Sicily,” said one Palermo official. More than 1,000 people in the city signed a petition asking the underworld for information. They didn’t get any.

Mannoia now reportedly lives in the United States under a witness–protection program.

There have been all sorts of theories as to the painting’s fate: that it was destroyed, that it was sold to a collector in Eastern Europe or to an Italian collector in South Africa, that it was buried in an earthquake in Naples or remained in the hands of the Mafia. The painting has been on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s “Top Ten Art Crimes” list.

The story of the theft was resurrected yet again recently, during the trial in Florence on possible connections between a top ally of Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi and Mafia bombings in the city in 1993.

Gaspare Spatuzza, who went to jail in 1997 on multiple counts of murder and became an informer last year, told magistrates that the painting had been hidden in a barn in Palermo in the ’80s and that it had been “ruined, eaten by rats and hogs and therefore burned.”

Spatuzza said that Filippo Graviano, a Mafia boss for whom he was a hit man, told him about the painting in 1999 during a conversation in prison. Graviano and his brother Giuseppe have been serving life sentences since 1994 for, among other crimes, involvement in the murder of two anti–Mafia judges, the killing of an anti–Mafia priest, the bombing of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, and another bombing in Rome that killed ten people.

Caravaggio, who was born in 1571, was famous as an artist while he lived but was also, as Simon Schama wrote in Power of Art, “the unpredictable, sword–carrying, dagger–wielding eccentric with the hair–trigger temper.”

He supposedly beat up a waiter in an argument over a plate of artichokes, and killed a man in a street fight and fled from Rome. He was involved in brawls in Malta and Naples and was arrested several times. Nativity with Saints Francis and Lawrence was painted in 1609, a year before he died.

I asked Charley Hill, who was once a top member of Scotland Yard’s fabled Art and Antiques Squad and is now a much–sought–after private detective based in London, why the Mafia would steal the painting.

He said, “It was a trophy crime; they stole it as a trophy. They do it all the time. They often loot churches in southern Italy and Sicily.”

Hill, who is not an art historian but can discuss van Gogh as well as the use of light and shadow in Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Turner, added:

“My experience with the Mafia is that when mafiosos talk you cannot believe what they say. Those Mafia guys must be coming out with that bull about Caravaggio 40 years on because they want to test the water and see how people will react to that story about its destruction. The story probably means that the picture is in terrible shape but capable of being returned and restored.”

Why would they lie? “Probably because of their irrational logic,” he said. “It will make it easier for them to return it with some spurious cooked–up story.”

Robert Wittman, former senior investigator of the FBI’s art crime team, who is now a private art–recovery specialist, said: “The painting has not been seen in 40 years. Usually these come back into the market in a generation—20 years. That would make me believe that it’s been destroyed.”

He added: “You have to be careful when the Mafia gives you information. The mere fact that a mafioso says it was destroyed is not going to close the case. It will remain open until there’s some proof one way or another.”

Colonel Luigi Cortellesca, who is second in command of the Italian art theft squad, told Judith Harris, who writes for ARTnewsfrom Italy: “We take the news report of the destruction of the Caravaggio, which is not yet official, with the utmost caution. For the moment we go on doing our own work.”

A Palermo prosecutor has made a formal request to have Spatuzza’s comments sent to him.

No one seems to know exactly why Spatuzza testified about his former boss, Filippo Graviano. According to sources, he may be trying to get the best deal possible for himself while he is in prison.

In 2008 Graviano and his brother Giuseppe turned to academics and received degrees, Giuseppe in mathematics and Filippo in economics. An expert on the Mafia told the London Times that a favorite subject of imprisoned Mafia killers is law. “Either they want to find out where they went wrong, or they hope they will get out one day and that detailed knowledge of the law will help them to evade prison in future,” he said. One mafioso gained a law degree with a dissertation on “the experiences of prisoners serving life sentences.”

“Romanticizing the Mafia is a mistake,” Hill told me, “and believing what they have to say is an even greater mistake. Degrees? These are correspondence–course college degrees. It’s not like coming summa cum laude out of Harvard.”

Milton Esterow is editor and publisher of ARTnews. Additional reporting by Judith Harris in Rome and Amanda Lynn Granek in New York.