LOS ANGELES (AP) – A West Hollywood antique dealer has been charged with selling a phony Picasso for $2 million.
Federal prosecutors said Friday that 69-year-old Tatiana Khan was charged with wire fraud and other crimes. She’s free pending arraignment but could face 45 years in prison if convicted.
A call to her lawyer wasn’t immediately returned.
Prosecutors contend Khan paid an artist $1,000 in 2006 to duplicate a Pablo Picasso pastel called The Woman in the Blue Hat and sold the forgery for $2 million.
The FBI stepped in last year after the buyer had the work examined and learned it was a fake.
On Friday, FBI agents seized a genuine Willem de Kooning painting from Khan. Authorities claim she bought it for $720,000 using proceeds from the Picasso sale.
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SALT LAKE CITY (AP) – Federal prosecutors have called off an auction of a Utah fraud suspect’s car collection.
A defense lawyer says the government forgot to share appraisals for nearly 200 collectible cars and motorcycles seized from Jeffrey Lane Mowen.
Mowen is in Davis County jail charged with running a Ponzi scheme.
The auctions – set to start today at a North Salt Lake warehouse – have been indefinitely postponed.
Defense attorney Stephen McCaughey (McCoy) says Mowen wants to study the government appraisals to make sure his vehicles are sold for at least two-thirds of their value. Those appraisals weren’t made available until late Tuesday.
Mowen has the right to order his own appraisals if he doesn’t think the government is pricing his vehicles correctly.
The money will go to Mowen’s investors.
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CHICAGO (AP) – A suburban Chicago man pleaded guilty Tuesday to swindling at least 250 people out of more than $1 million through the sale of counterfeit prints advertised as the work of Pablo Picasso and other major contemporary artists.
Michael Zabrin of Northbrook, Ill., admitted sometimes paying between $1,000 and $1,500 for counterfeit limited edition fine art prints produced in Spain and Italy and reselling them on eBay for many times that amount.
In his signed plea agreement with prosecutors, 57-year-old Zabrin said he would send away to his Italian source for fake Picassos, saying: “I need some P’s.” When he needed bogus works by Roy Lichtenstein, he would say: “I need some L’s.”
In the summer of 2004, Zabrin purchased eight counterfeit works purportedly by Marc Chagall for $20,000 “which he resold at no less than three times his cost,” according to the plea agreement which was presented to Judge Robert M. Dow Jr.
Zabrin agreed in the document that he caused foreseeable losses of more than $1 million but less than $2.5 million with works turned out by “the Spanish guy” and another supplier in Italy. He also admitted trading fake art works with other dealers.
Zabrin was among seven people charged in March 2008 on charges of trading in fake works by Picasso, Lichtenstein, Chagall, Joan Miro and Salvador Dali. He was the first to be convicted. Charges against the six others are pending.
Zabrin pleaded guilty to one count of mail fraud.
The charge carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison and a fine of $250,000. But prosecutors calculated that under federal sentencing guidelines Zabrin could be facing a prison term in the 10- to 13-year range.
Dow set March 23 for sentencing.
According to the plea agreement, Zabrin had been previously convicted of telephone harassment, mail fraud and retail theft.
Zabrin admitted conducting 280 sales of fraudulent art on eBay through his companies, Fineartmasters and ZFineartmasters. When some customers realized they had bought fakes, they returned them. Zabrin acknowledged that he then waited a few months and resold them to someone else.
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TAMPA, Fla. (AP) – It’s not exactly the Alamo, but Davy Crockett is at the center of a battle between two states.
Officials in Tennessee want a Hillsborough County, Fla., judge to enforce a Tennessee order that 90-year-old Margaret V. Smith turn over Crockett’s original marriage license application, which the Tampa woman says she inherited.
Lura Hinchey, archive director for Jefferson County, Tenn., said the county has repeatedly asked Smith for the license application of Crockett and Margaret Elder. Officials learned years ago that Smith had the document when she wrote the county clerk asking how to preserve it.
“I asked for it when she came to the courthouse” in about 1999, Hinchey said.
“She just said she had sent a copy and wondered why it wasn’t in the museum,” Hinchey said. “I told her the original belonged to our county because it was one of our permanent records. She said it belonged to her and she was going to keep it. … She had already been asked by the county historian, and I believe the county clerk asked her for it.”
Smith’s son said his mother inherited the document from her father, who died in the 1950s.
“The state had never asked for it back until apparently my mother went on the TV program AntiquesRoadshow,” said Vance Smith, who is a lawyer. “They knew she had it because she had loaned them a copy of it. They found out it had some significant money value. … She said it was hers and she wasn’t giving it up.”
Smith said he hadn’t seen the legal action, which was filed last week in Hillsborough County.
When Margaret Smith took the document to AntiquesRoadshow in 2005, the appraiser valued the 1805 license application at $25,000 to $50,000, and commended her for how well it was preserved.
Crockett and Elder never married, although the legendary frontiersman from Tennessee later married someone else. Crockett died in 1836 while defending the Alamo against Mexican forces.
Smith told the appraiser her uncle rescued the document when someone was cleaning out the courthouse in Dandridge, Tenn.
“They were throwing away everything they thought was unimportant,” Smith said, according to a transcript on the television show’s Web site. “This document never happened – David Crockett didn’t marry this woman. … So they felt that it had no value whatsoever, and therefore it was going to be pitched out.
“And my uncle, my dad’s elder brother, saw it, and being a fan of Crockett, he grabbed it right quick,” the transcript quotes Smith as saying. “And it’s been in the family ever since.”
But Jefferson County officials question that account.
“That dog just won’t hunt,” Tennessee Judge Allen Wallace said in issuing his November ruling.
“The circumstantial evidence is a member of Mrs. Smith’s family took that document. It’s Jefferson County’s document,” Wallace said. “The title is in Jefferson County, period. She’s got to return it.”
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ST. LOUIS (AP) — A lawsuit filed on behalf of a Kansas boy who fractured his skull at the City Museum in St. Louis has been settled just before a scheduled weeklong trial.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported the settlement was reached Monday, the day the trial was to begin. Terms were confidential.
The family of Gavin Kirk of Lawrence, Kan., filed suit after the boy fell 13 feet at the outdoor gym of the eclectic museum in 2006. Gavin was 10 at the time and was hospitalized for four days. The family says MRIs showed brain damage.
Neither side commented. Previously, museum co-founder Robert Cassilly maintained the museum is no more dangerous than a playground. But the attorney for the family had said the museum should have taken better steps to protect visitors.
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PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) – A Rhode Island man whom prosecutors call a “habitual con man” heads to trial next week on charges that he duped investors by claiming access to deep-pocketed business connections.
Rocco DeSimone, a former art dealer from Johnston, was convicted in 2005 of filing a false tax return and later escaped from prison. He now is accused of inducing people to invest money in products that he said brand-name companies had offered millions of dollars to buy.
One invention was a protective covering for CDs and DVDs to prolong their life. DeSimone told potential investors that he owned the product and that Nintendo had offered millions of dollars for it, even though both claims were false, federal prosecutors said.
He also allegedly persuaded an inventor to give him an ownership stake in a product called the Drink Stik – a device that connects beverage containers to respirators and gas masks worn by military officers in contaminated areas – by falsely claiming that he was friends with the chief executive of Fidelity Investments. He also lied in telling potential investors that Raytheon Corporation had agreed to buy the Drink Stik for hundreds of millions of dollars, prosecutors said.
DeSimone is accused of taking in roughly $6 million in money, property and forgiven debt. Prosecutors plan to call as witnesses some of the people who gave him money.
Jury selection starts Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Providence and opening statements are expected Wednesday. The trial is expected to last at least three weeks.
One of DeSimone’s lawyers, Katherine Godin, said DeSimone maintains his innocence.
“We’re going to try and establish that he was genuinely trying to market the products and that this was not a fraud,” Godin said.
DeSimone was convicted in 2005 of cheating on his taxes by claiming he owned the painting “Canal at Zaandaam” by Monet for more than a year before selling it. The lie saved him roughly $420,000 in taxes.
The latest alleged scam began when DeSimone was free pending appeal of that conviction, prosecutors say.
He was sentenced to more than two years in prison, but escaped in March 2008 from a minimum security facility in New Jersey before surrendering days later.
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AUBURN, Ind. (AP) – Embattled auto auction house Kruse International is suing some of its customers to try to recoup millions of dollars as it faces legal pressure over its own debts.
Auburn-based Kruse has filed lawsuits in DeKalb County seeking more than $2 million. The auction house says it is owed $6.7 million by customers.
Kruse spokeswoman Kelley Ellert says the company plans to file five to 15 additional lawsuits over the next several weeks.
Kruse faces several lawsuits, including one by a Kansas bank alleging auctioneer Dean Kruse violated terms of a loan on which he still owes $6.5 million and another claiming Kruse defaulted on a $7.8 million debt.
The auctioneer told The Journal Gazette of Fort Wayne, Ind., in August that the recession has hurt his sales.
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Information from: The Journal Gazette, http://www.journalgazette.net
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PARIS – Police say a painting by Impressionist Edgar Degas worth euro800,000 ($1.15 million) has been stolen from an exhibit in Marseille, France.
A police official says the painting, Les Choristes, (or “The Chorus Singers”), was stolen overnight from the Cantini Museum. The official was not authorized to be publicly named because of police policy.
The French national museum authority said the painting — a small pastel painted in 1876-77 — belongs to the famed Musee d’Orsay in Paris, known for its Impressionist works.
A security guard discovered it was missing when opening the museum Thursday morning. The museum is closed Thursday while the theft is being investigated.
No other details were immediately available.
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ROME (AP) – Police say they have recovered from a Roman businessman Picasso’s “Little Guitar” toy sculpture made for the artist’s daughter Paloma.
Carabinieri police say Picasso had given the toy to his friend, Italian artist Giuseppe Vittorio Parisi. Parisi lent it to the businessman two years ago to build a glass showcase for it to be exhibited at the civic museum on Lake Maggiore.
But police say the unnamed businessman never returned the work, keeping it in a shoe box in his home in Pomezia.
Parisi died in January. His widow alerted police that the “Little Guitar” was still in the hands of the businessman.
Carabinieri Capt. Gabriele De Pascalis says the businessman is free on charges of fraud. The guitar is heading to the museum as planned.
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