It was apparent from the start of his federal trial last month on criminal fraud charges that Donald Austin was pretty tightly wound.
During a recess on the first day, Austin, the owner of the now-defunct Austin Galleries Inc., remarked to one of the prosecutors that he was trying to calculate the square footage of the courtroom by totting up the number of ceiling panels. “I count when I get nervous,” he said.
When Austin took the stand in his own defense later in the 7 1/2-day trial, he broke down in tears soon after his attorney began questioning him. U.S. District Judge Marvin Aspen sent the jury out of the room and left the courtroom himself, but Austin continued to sob for minutes afterward.
Austin, 59, had reason to be on edge. On Oct. 25, a jury needed only 90 minutes to deliberate before finding Austin guilty on all counts of selling fake art prints in his chain of galleries in the Chicago area and elsewhere.
Perhaps the jury needed so little time because Austin’s prints weren’t just fakes, but bad fakes. So bad that it was hard to believe that Austin, who had been in the art business for 25 years, didn’t know he was trafficking in bogus prints purportedly by Salvador Dali, Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall and Joan Miro.
How could Austin have missed obvious signs of fakery?
“I looked, but I didn’t see,” he explained from the witness stand.
But government prosecutors left a stronger impression with the jury: that Austin saw, but he didn’t care.
Austin, who grew up in the Elgin area and has lived for many years in East Dundee, was just a barber with a fondness for what he called “pretty pictures” when he attended one of those start-your-own-business expos in the late 1960s. He opened up an art gallery in the Rogers Park neighborhood around 1967. He later would open and close a total of 30 galleries in the Chicago area, Michigan and California.
He was a wealthy man. His chain was doing about $34 million a year in the 1980s, most of it in sales of prints and other works of art priced between a few hundred and a few thousand dollars.
In federal court in Chicago last month, Austin, a lanky, white-haired man who seemed to be wearing the same gray double-breasted suit every day (though with black trousers in one appearance), was represented by federal defenders because he couldn’t afford to hire a lawyer.
Austin was convicted on five counts of mail fraud, two counts of wire fraud and one count of interstate transportation of stolen property. He is to be sentenced Feb. 10.
His was the third conviction in Chicago and at least the eighth nationwide for federal prosecutors and investigators involved in Operation Bogart, for bogus art, according to James Tendick. Tendick, a U.S. postal inspector in Chicago who was the lead investigator in the Chicago cases, said the probe has uncovered an international network of forgers and dealers in fake prints and has led to additional convictions in state courts and overseas.
Begun around 1984, the investigation focused initially on works purported to be original, limited-edition prints by Salvador Dali. So many Dali prints had come on the market that most reputable galleries were afraid to sell them.
But after the Federal Trade Commission raided the Palatine-based headquarters of Austin Galleries Inc. in 1988 and discovered questionable works ascribed not only to Dali but also to Picasso, Chagall and Miro, the investigation expanded to include prints purportedly by those artists.
Material seized in the Palatine raid led postal inspectors to major figures in the phony-art ring, several of whom were netted in undercover sting operations and who then implicated others. Investigators believe that at the center of this ring was Leon Amiel, a New Jersey publisher once authorized to produce prints by Miro, Chagall and Dali, but who allegedly later became a prolific forger of their work.
Amiel died in 1988. His two daughters and a granddaughter carried on the business and moved it to Long Island. In 1991, U.S. postal inspectors raided the company and discovered more than 78,000 allegedly phony prints by Chagall, Miro, Picasso and Dali. The Amiel women recently went on trial in federal court in New York charged with criminal fraud and conspiracy for selling counterfeit prints in this country, Europe and Japan.
Authorities believe the international scheme resulted in more than $500 million in fraudulent art sales. Austin was said to have sold at least $3.8 million in bogus prints between 1984 and 1990, paying as little as $60 for some prints and turning around and peddling them for several hundred dollars or more.
“One day we’ll all be sitting in jail because of Leon Amiel.”
Austin allegedly joked to that effect as he was fixing up the sloppy artist’s signatures on some “Chagall” prints that had come from Amiel by way of Northbrook art wholesaler Michael Zabrin.
Zabrin, who pleaded guilty in Chicago to trafficking in phony prints and agreed to cooperate with the Operation Bogart investigation, related the incident while testifying for the government in Austin’s trial. Austin denied that the incident ever occurred.
But Robert Galitz, a corporate officer for Austin Galleries from 1981 to 1986, testified that on at least one occasion he saw Austin pencil in the designation for artist’s proof on some prints. (Such proofs are the small number of prints an artist holds back from the public and keeps for himself. They aren’t numbered, as are the prints sold in the limited edition, and thus are harder to keep track of and authenticate, as forgers well know.)
New York art wholesaler Phillip Coffaro, who also pleaded guilty in Chicago to selling bogus prints and agreed to cooperate with the government, testified that by the early 1980s the quality of Amiel’s fakes was “horrendous” and got progressively worse.
He said Amiel once sent him a Miro image that was “signed” by another artist, Alexander Calder. Coffaro said he once saw Amiel use a light box to trace Chagall’s signature on prints. Most of the prints Amiel sold him were “signed” but not numbered. A number would signify they were part of a limited edition produced under the supervision of the true artist.
Amiel also was using paper that showed no signs of age and could be identified as 1980s vintage, though the forgeries were of authentic works produced in the 1950s and 1960s. And Amiel had become so careless about stacking copies fresh from the press that there would be ink stains on the front and the back of the paper.
Coffaro said that Austin once returned prints to him that were improperly signed but that Austin continued to buy prints from him. Zabrin said Austin never questioned how Amiel could have unlimited numbers of “limited edition” prints, only whether he could order more if needed.
The cocky Zabrin, with his long hair and mustache and green linen suit, and the indifferent Coffaro, with his sparse hair pulled back in a ponytail, admitted that they never directly told Austin they were dealing fakes, but they implied that Austin couldn’t have believed otherwise.
Both testified that Amiel became uneasy about Austin, who was using ads in local and national publications to sell the fakes in such large quantities and at such low prices (one sale offered three Dalis for $999, though prices could run to more than $10,000 on some individual prints) as to invite suspicion by authorities.
Austin’s attorneys, Luis Galvan and Deane Brown, repeatedly reminded the jury that Austin was an ex-barber who had no formal education in art. They said Austin believed he was selling authentic prints, but was bamboozled, in Brown’s words, “by conniving distributors selling the works of talented forgers.”
They contended that there was confusion in the art world in the 1980s about the large volume of limited-edition prints on the market. There was a belief that some artists had authorized multiple limited editions, reprinted for different geographic markets. And Dali was rumored to have cut deals in which he signed hundreds of thousands of blank sheets of paper and gave carte-blanche to others to reproduce his images on them.
But the defense was unable to substantiate those rumors. The government prosecutors, Gillum Ferguson and Stephen Heinze, called two Dali experts, Albert Field of New York and Bernard Ewell of Colorado, who both believed Dali pre-signed a relatively small number of blank sheets before 1980 and none afterward. Dali was ill and in seclusion from 1980 until his death in 1989.
The experts also noted that Dali didn’t like printmaking and made only about 39 images using that process during his career. Most of the prints in circulation are reproductions of his many paintings on canvas. Ewell noted that such prints may have been authorized and signed by Dali, but that that doesn’t make them anything more than autographed posters-not original, limited-edition prints, as they were represented to Austin’s customers.
During his cross-examination of Austin, Ferguson showed the defendant several prints sold by his galleries and pointed out to him seemingly obvious differences in color and image size between them and authentic prints.
“I could look at this until the cows come home and I wouldn’t see the difference,” Austin said at one point.
Ferguson showed Austin a large “Miro” print titled “La Captive” that Austin had bought for about $1,500 and sold, framed, for about $12,000. The print had stains on the back where someone-certainly not Miro-had used a felt-tip pen to touch up the image. Austin didn’t seem to think the blemish was a telltale sign of forgery.
But employees who worked at Austin’s galleries in the Chicago area, California and Michigan testified that they were skeptical about the authenticity of prints they sold. Most of them had no formal training in art, but had the common sense to question how the galleries could have a seemingly unlimited supply of images supposedly produced by the artists 20 or 30 years before and in editions usually limited to between 50 and 200 prints.
Jacqueline Renier, a former saleswoman at one of Austin’s Michigan Avenue galleries, said that even when a customer requested his “lucky number” in a Dali limited edition, the order would be filled. Fred Laidlaw, who managed two of Austin’s San Francisco galleries, said that in 1987 he shipped prints he believed to be fakes to Palatine, but that Austin upbraided him and shipped the prints back to San Francisco. Laidlaw resigned a month later.
But the only Austin employee who volunteered his opinions to authorities was David Armentrout. After working only six months in the shipping and receiving department in Palatine, Armentrout went to the FBI in mid-1987 with stories about Dali prints arriving in Palatine with duplicated edition numbers or no edition numbers at all. He also saw Dali, Chagall, Miro and Picasso prints arrive without certificates attesting to their authenticity.
The FBI passed the information on to the FTC, which had been receiving complaints about Austin from other quarters, according to Tendick. The FTC raided Austin’s galleries and the Palatine headquarters in May 1988 and seized large supplies of what experts later deemed to be fake prints.
On April 12, 1990, Austin signed a consent decree to settle a complaint filed against him by the FTC, but he violated terms of that decree only 11 days later, when, strapped for cash, he sold nine Chagalls for $50,000 to an old friend in Michigan. He told his pal that the prints had a retail value of $140,000.
Ewell, a self-styled art detective, was asked on the stand what might be the market value of the Dali prints sold by Austin.
“There was no market value at all for them because they were fakes,” Ewell said. “You might want to buy one as a gag for a party and tear it up before your guests.”
Don’t invite any of Austin’s customers to the party.
