Provenance_ How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art - Laney Salisbury [111]
Volpe said he had a warrant to search the house for forged paintings and provenances, and the officers marched into the living room. His wife, Helen Sussman, insulted the detectives and made it clear she thought the idea Drewe might be involved in a serious criminal enterprise was ludicrous. Drewe asked Volpe, who was clearly in charge, if he and Sussman could go upstairs and get dressed. Volpe kept an eye on the professor as he put on a good gray suit, and then they went back down to the kitchen, where Sussman sat out the rest of the search.
“I want you to watch very carefully while we search your premises,” Volpe said with uncharacteristic gravity, well aware of Drewe’s high-end cognitive abilities to read a personal weakness or lack of resolve. “If anything is found which may be evidence, it will be seized. Anything you say may be given in evidence.”
The team went through cabinets and drawers and coat pockets, bagging and tagging the contents. Worried that Drewe might accuse them of planting evidence, they asked again that he pay particular attention as they combed the house.
Everywhere they looked there were documents and photographs, paintings and catalog mock-ups. Tucked in the top left-hand pocket of a blue suit hanging in the cloakroom was a passport in the name of John Cockett. In a kitchen drawer, inside a plastic folder, they discovered a tight little bundle of letters and negatives. Drewe said they had to do with a Giacometti painting he had handled in his capacity as an agent for fine art.
“What’s this?” asked Ellis, pulling from the same drawer a blue folder marked “Stuart” and containing material on a 1939 relief by Ben Nicholson. Drewe explained that Stuart Berkeley was one of his many associates.
Volpe and Ellis sifted through a stack of material on the dining room table, jotting a description of each document in a notebook, and popping the exhibit into an evidence bag. Soon they had accumulated hundreds of items. Volpe slipped through photographs of paintings and sculptures by Segal, Ernst, Kandinsky, and Epstein, stopping at a picture of Giacometti’s Standing Nude, 1955, which he had seen the day before when he and Searle were interviewing Armand Bartos.
“What’s this, then?” he said.
Drewe explained that several years earlier he had acted as an agent for the painting. He showed Volpe a stack of agreements drawn up between himself and his associates, who included Sheila Maskell, Clive Belman, and Daniel Stoakes. Stoakes, he said, was a well-known collector of Ben Nicholson’s work and happened to be the stepson of Tewfik Pasha, the onetime deputy of the kleptomaniacal King Farouk of Egypt, an enthusiastic collector of Fabergé eggs and aspirin bottles, and the owner of the legendary 1933 Double Eagle $20 gold coin, which was now worth more than $7 million. Raymond Dunne, also mentioned in the documents, was a trusted partner in Drewe’s own Airtech Systems, which developed and marketed remote-piloted vehicle technology for the aviation industry.
“Robot planes,” he said to the detectives’ puzzled looks.
He had a long-winded answer for every question and never seemed to falter or contradict himself. Liars of this caliber had amazing memories, Volpe reminded himself, and this was a particularly impressive performance.
As one of the officers recorded the exact time of each question and response, Drewe provided a detailed account of himself as a man with broadly varied interests, several interlocking businesses, and a dozen close associates.
At 7:40 A.M., he said he was an agent for the works of Alberto Giacometti.
At 8:05, he was an art researcher specializing in British watercolors.
At 8:15, he was a historian working on a groundbreaking study of artworks lost during World War II.
At 8:33, he was an unofficial diplomatic go-between in the process of organizing reciprocal postwar