Kevin says
Back in the day i spent some time with these folks, a organization that i belonged too. Used to hold its meetings at this gallery. I remember it being next to the iraq or iran embassy, what a beautiful gallery. What nice people.
what what
I am totally shocked
These are really good friends of a really good friend of mine. I cant tell you on this thing
but privately i can dish some dirt.........................lol
no forget it i aint stupid.............lol
Art Dealer Is Charged With Stealing
$88 Million
Chip East/Bloomberg News
Lawrence B. Salander, right, and his wife, Julie, tried to restrain their son Jonah as he confronted a photographer in 2007.
By JAMES BARRON
Published: March 26, 2009
A noted Upper East Side art dealer has been indicted on charges he stole $88 million from investors and collectors who consigned artwork to him and said they were cheated out of the sale proceeds or never saw the pieces again, according to a person briefed on the case.
The dealer, Lawrence B. Salander, and his business, the Salander-O’Reilly Galleries, were charged by a grand jury with 100 counts including grand larceny, falsifying business records, scheming to defraud, forgery and perjury, according to the person, who declined to be identified because the charges had not been formally announced. A news conference was scheduled for 11:30 a.m. Thursday at the Manhattan District Attorney’s office.
Mr. Salander was arrested at his home in upstate Millbrook, N.Y., on Thursday morning.
Mr. Salander’s gallery displayed paintings as different as English landscapes by John Constable and modernistic scenes by Robert De Niro Sr., the actor’s father. The gallery boasted that The Robb Report, the glossy lifestyle guide for the rich, had cited it as the best gallery in the world in 2003.
But the gallery shut down amid a barrage of lawsuits accusing Mr. Salander of falling behind on obligations like payments he had promised customers who invested in paintings with him. Investors like the tennis star John McEnroe said he had put up $162,500 for Salander-O’Reilly to buy art and then resell it at a profit. He sued, saying that Salander-O’Reilly had promised to pay him $325,000.
Another investor, Roy Lennox, a hedge fund manager, said he had given Mr. Salander far more money—$3.575 million—and had been promised a $3.725 payback. But Mr. Lennox said in court papers that Mr. Salander had paid him only $958,332.
One lawsuit described the gallery as ”nothing more than a Ponzi scheme,” and at least one artist’s family went to the police. In October 2007 John Crawford, a son of the abstract painter and printmaker Ralston Crawford, said that he went to the authorities because at least a dozen paintings and photographs consigned to the gallery were missing. He estimated that they were worth $1.2 million to $1.5 million.
Mr. Salander filed for bankruptcy after closing the gallery and moved to Dutchess County after listing his town house on East 82nd Street with real estate brokers.
Mr. Salander had built his reputation with a gallery on East 79th Street with a solid reputation. But in 2005, he opened a second gallery, in a lavish town house on East 71st Street, steps from the renowned Frick Collection.
Rival dealers marveled that Mr. Salander seemed to be switching specialties. He planned to use the town house gallery to show and sell old masters after years of specializing in 20th-century American art. He told his landlord on East 79th Street he needed more space to display European works and attract “all the new money” that was pouring into the art market.
Mr. Salander was putting up big money himself. He was renting the newly renovated town house for $1.848 million a year, or $154,000 a month. He was also responsible for property taxes of almost $20,000 a month. But he did not put down a cash deposit to secure the lease. He gave the owner a Manet that he said was worth more than $10 million.
The East 79th Street gallery closed within a year of when the town house opened. And the town house lasted only about two years. Days after it shut down, the locks on the wide front doors were changed by order of a State Supreme Court justice as customers fretted that the gallery’s assets—paintings and sculptures—could be removed.
Mr. Salander had been in the art and antiques business for nearly 40 years. In 2001 he told The Art Newspaper, a London monthly, that his father, his grandfather and two uncles had been antiques dealers. He also said that he “had to go to work” after his father died in 1969. He started at Astor Galleries in Greenwich Village, then opened a shop of his own in Wilton, Conn., where he advertised 19th- and 20th-century paintings and furniture.
By the mid-1970s, he was back in Manhattan. He and another dealer, William O’Reilly, opened the East 79th Street gallery together in 1989. He and Mr. O’Reilly parted ways in the mid-1990s, although the gallery’s name was never shortened.
People who dealt with Mr. Salander said he was passionate about the art he showed and sold. Mr. Salander was “not a dealer that one would describe as reserved and methodical,” Maxwell L. Anderson, a former director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, said in 2007.
William K. Rashbaum contributed reporting.
No comments:
Post a Comment