Provenance_ How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art - Laney Salisbury [123]
On arrival, Drewe was marched down a long corridor straight to the hospital wing. His manner had become increasingly lofty over the years, and during the first few weeks he spent as much time as he could in the wing with one complaint or another. Later, when he was thrown in with the rest of the population, he managed to establish himself as something of an expert in the intricacies of the law. It was said that he charged one inmate £10,000 to prepare a failed appeal. In the yard, among the thieves and dope dealers, miscreants and tai chi practitioners, he stood out like a sore thumb. The place was filled with immigrants from Russia and Colombia, from Jamaica and Latvia and Poland, from India and Vietnam. There was an Irish unit and a group of black gangsters from East London. Apparently, Drewe worked nights in the prison library and kept to himself until the word got out that he had a clear mind and a particular agility with paper. He was asked to offer his legal expertise several more times, and gladly gave it for whatever additional comfort he might receive in such dismal quarters.
One day in the summer of 2000, Drewe was brought up to the front office, given his old suit and the few belongings he had with him when he came in, and released. He strolled out, his long arms dangling and his head held high. He had served about four years of his six-year sentence, including time spent awaiting trial.
He appealed his conviction, claiming he had not received a fair trial and was denied proper counsel. The appeal was denied. Police estimate he made at least $2 million from the scam. Drewe returned to his well-rehearsed role as a citizen above suspicion. He lived comfortably in Reigate with Helen Sussman, his wife, and still claimed to be a physicist. Whenever reporters called, he stuck to his story. It was all the government’s fault, he said. He was a victim of a cover-up involving secret arms deals with rogue countries. Whoever came along and offered him air time or ink became the subject of repeated entreaties. He would chat for hours and invariably volunteer to supply documentation—forty-two boxes of it—to prove his case. He always failed to deliver, and he consistently broke appointments.
A death in the family, he would say.
A medical emergency.
A business trip to America.
He claimed to be working on all manner of extraordinary military inventions. He filed for “technical patents” having to do with improvements to propulsion methods through the use of a spinning disk and a substitute for the liquids used in hydraulic machines. He was looking into remote-powered surveillance vehicles the size of insects. He claimed to have received funding from an American source and was conferring with the head of procurement for the U.S. Defense Department. No matter that this self-described avant-garde agitator, child of the father of the atom bomb, and doctor emeritus of all things had spent years in police custody. He was determined to make his mark on America. He was heading across the pond, to Langley and beyond. He had places to be, people to meet, many men to see.
Drewe’s fifteen-year disappearance from the official record from the late 1960s to the early 1980s still puzzled his erstwhile pursuers. He had come out of the blue and conducted a sophisticated nine-year-long scam, but there was no record of his earlier activities. Even after the case was closed, some police officers wondered what he might have been up to. He had managed to elude the public record: There was no evidence of prior mischief; no link to other crimes; no medical, tax, or formal employment records.
Miki Volpe managed to track down Drewe