Provenance_ How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art - Laney Salisbury [118]
John Drewe’s trial date was now fixed for September 22. His strategy was to wage a war of attrition against the Crown, to wear the prosecution down with constant requests for disclosure, including full details on the witnesses, paintings, and documents that the prosecution intended to produce in court.
Drewe had accumulated a complicated medical record and was given a bed in the prison’s hospital wing. Brixton was Britain’s oldest nick, and it had a reputation as one of the most squalid in London. It had introduced treadwheels in the nineteenth century as a form of punishment and had recently been hauled over the coals by the nation’s corrections minister. Drewe did not want to spend any more time there than he absolutely had to.
On the opening day of the trial, he was ferried to Southwark Crown Court by private ambulance, with EMS personnel and escorts. The prison authorities had failed to provide a wheelchair for him, and when he stepped out of the ambulance to climb the courthouse steps, he saw his chance. Clutching his chest, he collapsed.
In the courtroom, Searle and Volpe heard the commotion and ran outside. Drewe was sprawled on the ground. Moments later, to the detectives’ dismay, he was carried back to the ambulance and driven off. Once more he had managed to delay the trial.
When he returned to Southwark a few days later he had a front-row seat in a courtroom that resembled a combination art gallery and accounting firm, with a bank of typewriters displayed on a long table and some of Myatt’s best forgeries hanging on the walls in all their bogus glory. The Crown’s evidence was stacked away in a small courthouse room with wire racks holding piles of boxes, and containers loaded with exhibits covering the floor. The police report ran to more than three hundred pages, and the jury bundle was a whopping six hundred pages long. All told, the cops had gathered some four thousand items, interviewed more than a thousand witnesses, and recovered about eighty paintings from dealers, auction houses, and collectors around the world.
The prosecution, led by John Bevan, had secured the cooperation of Drewe’s runners, a handful of angry dealers and authenticators who were willing to take the stand, and a dozen former Drewe associates who had been ripped off or in other ways betrayed. To make the case manageable, only nine of the hundreds of works that had passed through Drewe’s hands over the years would be entered as evidence: two in the style of Sutherland, including Nahum’s panel; one in the style of de Stäel; another in the style of Bissière; plus three “Ben Nicholsons”—including Gimpel’s 1938—and two “Giacomettis,” one being Bartos’s Standing Nude, 1955.
Drewe, Myatt, and the luckless Daniel Stoakes, who had knowingly posed as an art collector, were about to stand trial.
34
THE TRIAL
I always thought it’d be better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody.
—TOM RIPLEY in Patricia Highsmith’s
The Talented Mr. Ripley
From the first day of the trial—Regina v. John Drewe, John Myatt, and Daniel Stoakes—it was clear that Drewe was a courtroom buff’s delight. Flawlessly attired, he carried himself with the haughty manner one would expect from a top-shelf patrician. He was never tentative and had an air of confidence about him that bordered on arrogance. Looking around the courtroom, an observer would have guessed that he was anyone but the plaintiff. He crackled with energy, perhaps fueled by the chocolate bonbons he regularly plucked from a box at his elbow and popped into his mouth. When the judge chastised him for one of these candied distractions, he explained that his diabetes required him to keep his blood glucose at a certain level.
On the second day he rose from his seat dramatically, cleared his throat, and fired his defense