An art dealer disappeared with $50M. 17 years later a documentary crew found him

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/day6/an-art-dealer-disappeared-with-50m-17-years-later-a-documentary-crew-found-him-1.5297422

by jacquesm • 7 years ago

161 56 7 years ago

cbc.ca

findyoucef4• 7 years ago

how can i watch this?

kristofferR• 7 years ago

It's available the places BBC content is available, except iPlayer.

It's so damn dumb to force people to seek pirate sources by not providing legal options.

findyoucef4• 7 years ago

well can I stream it online or not?

samstave• 7 years ago

Which is where?

quickthrower2• 7 years ago

VPN

eeh• 7 years ago

BBC have a steaming subscription available to Canada/US: https://www.britbox.com/

fnord77• 7 years ago

what countries out outside the reach of interpol / US extradition for this type of crime? Guessing he's still in South America someplace.

mushufasa• 7 years ago

farther. us has extradition with all south america, and is widely believed to have a large cia presence as well. (lots of historical evidence for that). https://www.voanews.com/archive/explainer-extradition-and-us interpol has 194 member countries. https://www.interpol.int/en/Who-we-are/Member-countries google says there are currently 195 countries.

somehow, though, I don't believe they're in North Korea? Nor that the documentary filmmaker could get there...

sailfast3• 7 years ago

Pretty sure Venezuela is not an extradition country?

Also wasn’t Assange holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy?

Cuba probably would hold on to someone, as well.

sailfast3• 7 years ago

Yeah - my money would be in Venezuela or Cuba.

rmason• 7 years ago

Venezuela makes the most sense since he could simply walk over the border from Brazil. Guyana might be another possibility as well which would have the added advantage of English being the national language. John McAfee famously lived in Guyana.

sirtoffski• 7 years ago

After watching the doc - I wouldn’t want to spoil it, so I’d just say these guesses were not correct. I was thinking Cuba or Venezuela too at first though.

unstrafed• 7 years ago

Taiwan and North Korea are the only two countries I've found that seem to have no extradition and no (formal) interface to law enforcement abroad through Interpol.

Palau, Tuvalu and Micronesia in the Pacific are not members of Interpol, but they do have extradition treaties with the US, and then there are a host of countries in Interpol that have no US extradition.

dmolony• 7 years ago

The documentary says he is in France.

findyoucef4• 7 years ago

He's in France and france doesn't extradide french citizens. They will extradite other nationalities though.

eddhead• 7 years ago

Isn't all of the global art marketplace, a swindle to begin with? It's a money laundering industry in its entirely with almost barely any money actually reaching the original artist. It could have easily been him selling something he drew up in 2 days, make up a bullshit backstory, sell it for 50 million and he'd actually not have to disappear

saagarjha• 7 years ago

It's a money laundering industry in its entirely with almost barely any money actually reaching the original artist.

Considering the original artist is often deceased, I think it would be rather difficult for them to get the money.

jml7c5• 7 years ago

I think the theory is that Bob secretly gives an accomplice a bunch of dirty cash. That accomplice then buys art from Bob, but they get to keep some portion of the money for their trouble. There needn't be an artist involved.

Though it seems the accomplice would come under scrutiny unless they have some plausible explanation as to how they got the money to pay for the thing. I don't know if "the art market is fueled by money laundering" theory is actually supported by evidence, but it's a fun idea.

milofeynman• 7 years ago

Right now another common use of high end art is to avoid taxes by purchasing expensive art and storing it in a Freeport[0].

[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/02/09/584555705/epis...

redis_mlc• 7 years ago

Isn't all of the global art marketplace, a swindle to begin with?

According to press reports, most artworks for sale are forged.

(The corollary is that old collections are even more valuable.)

t_akosuke• 7 years ago

As an artist who wants to deliver some value for the hard work I put into it... I'm appalled shit still works like this

vkou2• 7 years ago

The artist delivers some value for the hard work he put into the painting, but not tens of millions of dollars of value.

The accountant, who implements the tax fraud delivers a lot more value to his 'customer'.

friendlybus3• 7 years ago

I repeatedly see a cynicism around art on HN and other tech blogs, does no-one here see the inherent value in art or culture?

Jackson Pollock's art pieces get a lot of flack for basically having no publicly presented interpretive structure, the artist came up with a technique for doing 'plastic depth' that was a novel innovation. Irvine Kershner who directed Empire Strikes Back and met Pollock made fun of him at the time for his work appearing to be off the rails, and later came to appreciate it.

Taking out the market manipulation of fine art still leaves it with an intrinsic value whether it is technique or the meaning imbued in having a piece of work produced by an artist. Is that worth millions? Who knows, if I give you any old guitar, and a guitar that Elvis played on I know the second will be valued higher.

avs733• 7 years ago

My read on this has always been that most of the negative commentary around 'art' falls into one of two categories. Neither of which is utterly dismissive of the value of art and/or culture. However, I'm not sure they are made all that explicitly.

1) Criticism of the art industry and it's role in the commoditization and market making you mention around art. That isn't criticism of art or it's value...it's criticism that such value is often interfered with for, among other things, money laundering.

2) Criticism of specific pieces of art that an individual doesn't 'get' (and by golly I fall into this trap). By get, it really is about they don't see the artistic or cultural value of that piece but typically is done in reference, which implies that they do see some art as having value.

masonic• 7 years ago

I appreciated Pollock more after I saw a film of his process in action.

YeGoblynQueenne3• 7 years ago

I'm interested in art and culture.

Here's my favourite piece of art of all time, the Artemission bronze:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemision_Bronze

I guess, if you look at it from the wrong angle it looks just like a dude with his feet planted apart, like he's about to take a shit. But, look closely and you see that he's in full motion. His right leg is twisting behind his body. The heel is raised and the toes are pushing down hard to put the full strength of his body behind the throw. His left leg is pivoting on its heel. The toes are pulled back as he turns his torso. He is leaning back, slightly to add his weight to the power of his muscles. His left hand is extended in front of him, so that he can swing it around like a pendulum, and add momentum to the throw. He is throwing a weapon- and dancing at the same time.

This is a bronze statue so it was made to stand on its own two legs, without any props to keep it upright. That is the biggest shock of all. A living, breathing man would keep himself upright in the middle of this whirling move by pulling on his mucles to maintain balance. And yet, here's a lifeless chunk of bronze that has caught this man in the middle of all this pulling and twisting and pushing, and dancing- and it's standing upright, balanced an unfalling.

The artists who created this piece must have spent hours upon hours, days upon days, studying the human form. They must have sat at the palaistra (the public gym) observing the young men of Athens competing in javelin-throwing for ages. Until they learned how the human body comes together, how it moves, how it balances itself; how it _works_. Then they went off and transferred this knowledge into bronze. And now, thousands of years later, any human can look at the bronze and see what they learned.

This is what makes humans, human. To be able to look at the world and know, and learn, and then put this knowledge into a form that can reach through time and speak to other humans, and communicate this knowledge. To touch another human's heart and mind through time and space, even after you're long gone. To leave something behind that says "I lived, I learned, I created".

So, yeah, I see the value in art.

But modern art, like Jackson Pollock, that's a steaming hot pile of shit that means nothing. There is no skill in it. There is no knowledge. No study. No insight. There is no thought or emotion. There is just the cold hard glint of gold in the eye of the so-called artist and those who sell his garbage on as art to people who only understand the value of money, and have no other value in life than money.

clSTophEjUdRanu• 7 years ago

What? I love art and it's priceless to society. With that said high art selling for exorbitant prices can still be a swindle.

meowface2• 7 years ago

I saw Pollock's drip work in a gallery for the first time a few days ago, and it's the first and only art that really resonated with me. It looks like how a lot of music I enjoy sounds, if that makes sense.

It's baffling to me that someone could think his work is just random noise. (A lot of other abstract art in the same gallery, some clearly inspired by his, seemed much closer to that.)

Forgeries can be programmatically identified because authentic Pollock drip paintings contain ratios and fractal patterns often found in nature: https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/pollocks-fract.... (It's likely he wasn't trying to do anything like that intentionally; he just intuitively made what he felt would look good.)

haecceity• 7 years ago

I see the inherent value. But its market value not so much.

abstrct• 7 years ago

Gerald Cotten next maybe?

Enginerrrd• 7 years ago

I think the reason he felt safe in taking part in the documentary is because he is in a country where he is beyond the reach of U.S. law enforcement.
And yet he doesn't have money ... so there's no point in anyone coming after him because a civil suit wouldn't get them any money at all, and the FBI can't get him because he's out of their reach.

Title conflicts with the statements in the article. Though IMO, there's probably good reason to wonder if this claim is true.

justinclift• 7 years ago

There is a certain point in the film where there's a little flicker of remorse, but more than anything he feels that his actions were in some way justifiable.

One of my relatives is like that. :(

She'll lie, cheat, steal and generally screw over people. But pretend innocence to the outside world, and come up with truly bizarre reasons to justify things when asked by people who've realised what she's doing.

It's unfortunate, as it's so destructive. :(

An art dealer disappeared with $50M. 17 years later a documentary crew found him

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