Provenance_ How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art - Laney Salisbury [121]
“If indeed I had been tampering with archives, there is certainly a very serious problem, because the whole history of the Second World War would have been rewritten. I have been into just about everywhere.”
Under cross-examination by Bevan, Drewe wouldn’t stop talking.
“I have been cross-examining you for something like eleven hours, of which probably about one hour is me asking questions and the other ten is you answering,” Bevan interrupted at one point. “Your job now is to answer questions; all right?”
“If you ask a question that needs a detailed answer, then I will give one,” Drewe said. “I am the defendant and it is my future that depends on being able to present a proper defense.”
“This is getting us nowhere,” said the judge. “You are the defendant, but you are not in control of this trial. If Mr. Bevan asks you a simple question . . . you are under an obligation to give a simple answer.”
With Myatt cooperating with police, and Daniel Stoakes’s lawyer advising him not to take the stand, Drewe hogged the show, and he seemed to be enjoying the performance.
Another prosecutor mocked Drewe’s exaggerated defense and his tendency to name-drop, adopt aliases, and fold random pieces of history into one another.
“In the course of the case, the jury has heard of the Holy Office, Cardinal Ratzinger, American Nazis in England. We have heard of the Bureau of State Security from South Africa, we have heard of contacts in high places, of helicopters in . . . Goodness gracious, Peking, Israel, Zaire.
“The truth is that you are Mr. Drewe, you are two sorts of Mr. Cockett, you are Mr. Sussman, you are Mr. Green, Mr. Atwood, and you are Mr. Martin and Mr. Bayard the researcher and Mr. Coverdale, aren’t you?”
Drewe did not answer.
Perhaps the most damaging testimony came from Myatt, who told the court how he had been swept up into Drewe’s scheme.
“My vanity was quite ghastly, and this is the consequence of it,” he said. During cross-examination, he described Drewe as his onetime “best friend.” Then he called Drewe a psychopath and a liar to his face.
“I was very much your creature. I found you hypnotizing, charming, challenging.”
Drewe argued that Myatt had misrepresented himself, and that he had never been an artist, least of all a starving artist. Instead, he had been acting as an operative for a violent neo-Nazi group called Combat 18.
In his own defense, Drewe called his two children and his mother to the stand. When it was Batsheva Goudsmid’s turn to testify, their hatred for each other was palpable. Drewe accused her of doing emotional harm to the children, microwaving their pet goldfish, and throwing boiling water on the family dog. Goudsmid tossed the charge back at Drewe, saying he had thrown the caged pet through a window.
“I wouldn’t have if you hadn’t ducked,” Drewe replied.
When Goudsmid accused him of stealing into her house while she was away, climbing into her bed, and putting on her pink negligee, the prosecutors and detectives did their best to stifle their laughter.
Daniel Stoakes, who had also been charged with conspiracy to defraud, cut a sad figure. With his right eye inflamed by an infection, and becoming increasingly depressed as the trial wore on, Stoakes was advised by his lawyer not to take the stand. Instead, his lawyer argued that Stoakes’s world had been shaken, and he felt betrayed. He and Drewe had been very close in the past, and they had bonded over their failed relationships with women and the bitter separations that followed. When Drewe first asked him to pose as the owner of certain artworks, he had no idea that Drewe had already been using his name in forged provenances for years. Drewe said he couldn’t be listed as the owner himself because he wanted to keep the money from any sale out of Goudsmid’s hands, and Stoakes agreed to help his old friend out. At the time he was desperate for cash and appreciated the occasional twenty pounds Drewe offered