Inigo Philbrick, art dealer who went to prison for fraud, is free
In 2022, Philbrick was sentenced to seven years in prison after pleading guilty to an $86m fraud
Inigo PhilbrickPhoto by Stuart C. Wilson/Getty Images for Galerie Patrick Sequin
Inigo Philbrick, the disgraced art dealer who pleaded guilty to carrying out an $86m fraud and was sentenced to seven years in prison, has been released. His sentence of seven years (including two years already served) was handed down in May 2022, meaning that he will have served a little less than four years of his seven-year sentence.
Philbrick’s lawyer, Jeffrey Lichtman, confirmed his client’s release: “Yes, Inigo is out of prison and home with his family.” His release was previously reported by the Daily Mail, which cited a Federal Bureau of Prisons source stating that he had been released in February. According to Vanity Fair, he was released in January to home confinement and two years of supervised release. Contacted via Instagram, Philbrick declined to comment on his release or future plans.
Philbrick’s fiancée, former Made in Chelsea star Victoria Baker-Harber, celebrated his return in an Instagram post on Wednesday featuring a photo of the couple and their daughter Gaia-Grace from the aforementioned Vanity Fair article. In the accompanying caption, Baker-Harber wrote: “A long stretch, but here we are!”
Philbrick opened his own gallery in 2013 after serving as the head of secondary market sales at White Cube. He was known among collectors and speculators for having a keen eye and was known to bid on blue-chip contemporary art auctions. In 2017, his gallery reported a $130m turnover. However, in 2019 Philbrick’s reputation began to sour, and his business suffered when the market for some of his preferred artists (such as Christopher Wool and Rudolf Stingel) began to cool. To keep up appearances and maintain his lifestyle, the art dealer misrepresented the ownership of certain works for his benefit, sold shares of works to multiple investors for totals that exceeded 100%, used some of those works to secure loans for himself and forged consignment documents.
In late 2019, after collectors and speculators started to suspect Philbrick of doing dirty business, civil lawsuits for fraud began to pile up. In October of that year, he defaulted on a $14m loan and just before the multiple lawsuits against him became public, he fled the US for the Pacific island of Vanuatu. He was arrested in June 2020 after Vanuatu authorities expelled him at the request of the US embassy in Papua New Guinea. He was indicted by a New York grand jury one month later. In November 2021 he pleaded guilty to federal wire fraud charges, telling a Manhattan judge that he had done it “for the money”. Though he faced a sentence of up to 20 years in prison, he was sentenced the following March to seven years.
Fraud: the case of Inigo Philbrick
Last September, Philbrick’s business partner Robert Newland was sentenced to one year and eight months in prison by a New York district court judge after pleading guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
Philbrick’s fraud, disappearance and subsequent arrest in a remote tropical locale were the talk of the art industry in 2020 and 2021. To many, his case illustrated in sensational terms the the risks of a market where seven- and eight-figure transactions can be conducted with little to no paper trail, and sellers’ and buyers’ identities can easily be kept secret from authorities and each other.
The Digest |
Inigo Philbrick, an art dealer who pleaded guilty to a $86 million fraud, has been freed from prison after serving nearly four years of his seven-year sentence. [The Art Newspaper and Vanity Fair] |
The Confessions of Inigo Philbrick, Art Fraudster Extraordinaire
EPISODE 1: THE PITCH
Inigo Philbrick awakens at dawn to see what the morning’s email will bring.
Philbrick, 36, was once one of the most accomplished and admired young art dealers of his generation. Yet when we begin our correspondence in April 2023, he is prisoner 05863093 in Allenwood, a low-security federal prison in rural Pennsylvania, serving a seven-year sentence for what the FBI believes is the largest art-based fraud scheme in US history.
“There are no doors, and the noise is like a spring break bar at peak capacity—banter and arguments and all clamoring against the most unforgiving acoustics—linoleum and cement,” he says via CorrLinks, the national prison email system, around which his days now revolve. “There’s constantly a screaming argument about how much money Jay-Z has or if a certain BMW is faster than a Mercedes.”
Everyone professes innocence in prison, the saying goes, but Philbrick has already pleaded guilty—to one count of wire fraud. Now a force perhaps as fierce and formidable as the federal government is seeking his public confessionals: movie, TV, and documentary producers in a dogfight over the rights for Philbrick’s story. At 6 a.m., he lines up before a row of desktop computers, which inmates compete to use at five cents a minute. Occasionally kneeling for lack of a chair, he reads the pitches as they come.
From 2010 to 2019, Philbrick cut a swath through the highest echelons of international art. Dozens of extremely wealthy collectors bought—or thought they bought—percentages in multimillion-dollar pieces from Philbrick. Many discovered that he’d sold the same shares to others and in some cases didn’t have a full ownership stake to sell in the first place.
Philbrick is at his inbox seeking a path to a postprison future in an outside world that either wants him for the $86 million he owes in restitution or for entertainment onscreen. “There’s so little in this system that allows a man to feel successful or improve himself,” he says. “Cut away family, cut away friends, cut away work. What’s left of a person?”
$2.50 $1/mo for 1 year + a free tote.
For Philbrick, what’s left is his story.
“The art world is unregulated,” Philbrick tells me, “but I am continually amazed by the promises and declarations producers will make, the breathless tone that ‘Today is my last chance to speak’ before they made their final edits.”
In London, where Philbrick launched his career, his fiancée, Victoria Baker-Harber, has been equally inundated. “At least a hundred people writing me from the moment he was arrested,” says Baker-Harber, who is well-known in the UK from her high-heel turn on the reality show Made in Chelsea.
She and Philbrick helped produce a treatment, but they’ve never told their side of the story.
Until now. Sitting—or kneeling—before the prison computer keyboard, Philbrick spent eight months chronicling his life and alleged crimes to me.
“I was also struck by how few of the people I’ve interacted with since entering the Bureau of Prisons have even a conception of what an art dealer does,” Philbrick wrote.
The Inigo Philbrick story began with a week-old baby in a carriage in an East London gallery. At the helm was Jane Philbrick, a Barnard-educated playwright and artist. Her husband, Harry Philbrick, was a painter and curator. They named their newborn after the famed 1600s British architect Inigo Jones.
They moved to New York when Inigo was four. A few years later, Harry was named director of the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut. The job took Inigo and his family to the leafy Fairfield County town of Redding, the summer home of Société Anonyme, an arts organization launched in 1920 by the artists Katherine Dreier, Marcel Duchamp, and Man Ray to promote and exhibit modern art.
“Early on I spent a lot of time in artists’ studios,” says Philbrick. “I became fluent in that world and enjoyed seeing what artists were working on. I wanted to be a lawyer, but I was soon fascinated by the commerce of the gallery world.”
In adolescence, a foul wind blew his perfect world apart. “A scorching divorce,” as Philbrick puts it. His father eventually landed at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and Philbrick went from carefree, art-obsessed 18-year-old to helping support his mother and younger sister. Just before Philbrick headed off to Thailand for his “gap year,” his mother attended a cocktail party in the London home of the sun king of the city’s thriving art market, Jay Jopling. In the 1990s, Jopling, through his landmark gallery, White Cube, fostered a generation of talent that came to be known as the Young British Artists, or YBAs, including Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, and Sam Taylor-Wood.
At the party, a White Cube employee happened to hear Jane discussing an internship for her son with an American fashion designer.
“Why don’t you send him to us instead?” the White Cube employee asked.
Back home in Connecticut she presented the two offers to her son.
“Well, the gallery, obviously,” Philbrick said without hesitation.
He arrived at White Cube for a three-month apprenticeship—and never really left. He enrolled at Goldsmiths, University of London, the premier school for young art hotshots. The gallery paid half of his tuition the first year. After graduating in 2009, he rented a house in Bloomsbury next to the British Museum. He was still an intern, sitting on White Cube’s acquisitions committee, which seeks out artists worthy of the gallery’s representation. At one of the committee’s meetings, Jopling presented a work by the video artist Marco Brambilla. Entitled Civilization, it’s a swirling, pixilated, gargoyles-on-fire-filled video mural. Jopling felt it worthy of White Cube, but Philbrick says he found it, well, hilarious, and began “riotously laughing.”
“Inigo, that’s enough,” Jopling said.
The next day, an email arrived, summoning Philbrick to the executive office. Philbrick gathered his papers, thinking he was done for, finished, exiled to nowheresville. Instead, Jopling offered him a proper job and a title, assistant collections manager, along with a percentage of sales.
“Initially, working for Jay full-time barely paid a living wage,” he writes. “I was earning something like 28,000 pounds a year, then 50, then 100….
“I was 23.”
EPISODE 2: THE YOUNG WOLF
Philbrick set flight: his college clothes replaced with $7,000 Kiton suits, his pub ales with $5,000 flagons of Petrus Bordeaux and Romanée-Conti Burgundy. Soon he had a gallery to run, the Jopling-backed Modern Collections. “Too Much Too Young?” asked a 2011 Art Newspaper headline, referring to the gallery’s array of young artists in a “secondary (or resale) market [that] has historically relied upon dead or aging artists for its supply.”
But this was the new world, and Jopling and his protégé were at its forefront. According to Philbrick, he was “already giving advice that Jay was following on things to buy, things to offer clients, top clients who needed a bonbon.”
“He’d given me a little fund to manage (500,000 GBP, as I remember, 20 percent upside to me) and we were traveling for auctions together, seeing the sales, having lunch,” Philbrick writes.
“He was clever, ambitious, he had an eye and an incredible sense for business,” Jopling told Le Monde after Philbrick’s arrest, for an article in which the French paper dubbed him “the young wolf.” To ensure the best works came to him, the young wolf learned how to stand out.
“The kind of things he was doing on a weekly basis would keep me up nights on end,” says a friend. “He would take a private jet in the way that I would take a bus. We would have dinners quite frequently, the two of us, which would end up costing what I took home in a month.”
Raising his paddles in every major auction, Philbrick became a constant presence at all of the stops in the “circus,” as art collectors call it: the Sotheby’s, Christie’s, and Phillips auctions; Art Basel Miami and Switzerland; Frieze London; the New York art fairs; and beyond. He became the darling of what one observer calls “the new collecting class,” to whom he offered something as coveted as the art itself: the VIP treatment. “You don’t want to buy a ticket,” the observer says. “That’s déclassé…. He was offering access to a lifestyle.”
The word that comes up most often in the Philbrick saga is charm. He was, one client tells me, “polished, very convincing, profound in his in-depth knowledge of these artists on the secondary market.”
Integral to the lifestyle was the partying. He’d been using drugs and drinking daily since high school, habits intensified by the art world. Philbrick had also been regularly snorting cocaine and taking MDMA and ketamine, all in relation to the job.
That is, after all, “how art deals are done,” his attorneys would claim.
“I always drank too much,” he concedes in one of our exchanges, “but would always stagger away with a couple of deals done…. I spent money on clothes, but there’s no unshod art dealer, and private planes were a great setting for closing deals.”
Philbrick’s ascent paralleled a historic moment that Artnet writer Eileen Kinsella has called “the financialization of the art market.” Today, art is no longer merely displayed for admiration and pleasure but often tucked away in storage facilities from New York to Hong Kong. Enterprising dealers sell shares to individuals and corporate entities, many of them offshore, only to flip them again when the prices rise. There is no authority overseeing which collector owns which works, nor any real way to know how much a middleman such as Philbrick has paid for a work he then divides into tranches. The New York Times labeled this new collecting class “specullectors.”
“Where I’m the rogue I have no problem with wearing the scarlet letter,” Philbrick wrote in his first email to me in April 2023.
It is an admission of guilt but also, like much of what follows, a promise that there is more to his story—a tale made possible by its setting: the global art market, with sales of $67.8 billion in 2022 alone. Philbrick became a wizard of its especially opaque “secondary market,” where pre-owned works are sold and resold, and dealers take a commission of between 5 and 20 percent on each flip.
Work there rises and falls according to an artist’s heat, which Philbrick was proficient at stoking: bidding up pieces at auction, courting prestige-conferring museums, and, of course, talking up potential buyers and sellers. He specialized in selling Yayoi Kusama pumpkins, Christopher Wool canvases, Wade Guyton abstracts, and, most infamously, a photorealist mash-up, Untitled/Picasso (2012) by Rudolf Stingel, the Italian artist whose fortunes Philbrick so excelled in predicting that he “called himself ‘Stingeldamus,’” after Nostradamus, the artist Kenny Schachter once wrote.
Along the way, he became an art-market avatar, personifying its wealth-generating potential and its unchecked excesses. As long as an artist’s prices kept rising, Philbrick and his clients prospered. “He was very well-versed; you trusted him,” says one, who may have been among the first to invest in percentage shares of paintings with Philbrick. “I think he saw how easy it was to get people to trust him enough to go into partnership and buy a portion of a work. Maybe that was the early stages leading into the fraud.”
Philbrick maintains that he was a novice in financial maneuvers, which he left to a young consultant he met at White Cube who would become something of a protégé.
“I would never have had an offshore company nor an art-backed loan had I not met Robert Newland,” Philbrick says.
“Total nonsense,” Newland’s attorney Roger Burlingame says of this claim. The only other person charged in connection with Philbrick’s case, Newland was sentenced to 20 months in prison in September 2023 after pleading guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
AWales-born London School of Economics graduate and young father of two, Newland worked at McKinsey and Christie’s before becoming commercial director of White Cube in 2012. There, his attorney would later write in a sentencing memo, he discovered that the gallery world exists “seemingly untouched by even the most basic principles Rob had learned in business school.”
Reviewing the books, Newland saw that “a young art trader named Inigo Philbrick, had been generating 10 times the profits of...the entire 150-person operation.” To keep the star from bolting, a proposal was made to place him in “golden handcuffs.” He was granted 50-50 ownership of a company called Philbrick Ltd. According to the memo written by Newland’s attorney, the “lion’s share of the financing” for the new company was provided by a third party. (The name of the third party was redacted from Newland’s filing. Philbrick says he was in a partnership with Jay Jopling. Jopling declined to comment for this story.)
“Philbrick would do the trading, and the profits would be split,” according to the memo. But both sides seemed to chafe at the arrangement. Soon, Philbrick started looking for financing elsewhere, with Newland’s help. The pair could dominate the art world, Newland thought, if he could just bring Philbrick’s blazing talent under “appropriate management.”
Under Philbrick’s tutelage, Newland was transformed: educated on dress codes and watches, wines and menus. “I was desperate to impress him,” Newland wrote in his own letter to the court. The business consultant was also participating in some of Philbrick’s trades, investing his life savings of $100,000 on one sale and quickly doubling his money. After four years of dreaming of world domination, Newland left White Cube to join Philbrick’s operation. He soon realized that the finances were in chaos.
And so Newland became, in his attorney’s words, “the day-to-day back office for Philbrick’s fraud,” counseling on how to keep it all from collapsing.
EPISODE 3: THE LOVE STORY
In August 2016, Philbrick was on a yacht chartered by the London-based investor Aleksander “Sasha” Pesko. Both a client and a friend, Pesko invited Philbrick and his live-in girlfriend, the Argentinian artist and designer Francisca Mancini, to join a weeklong Mediterranean cruise.
Enter, onto this sun-splashed yacht anchored just off Corsica, Victoria Baker-Harber, 28, a whirlwind with a supermodel’s stature and a Regents Business School education. Five feet eight inches tall, her ombré blond hair billowing to her waist, Baker-Harber was best known as the quick-witted villain on the British reality TV series Made in Chelsea. In 2013, with the cast gathered around the holiday dinner table, she responded to an insult with an instantly memed rejoinder: “Don’t fucking open your fucking fat fucking mouth, you fucking fat turkey.”
On board the yacht, Champagne flute in hand, Baker-Harber took one glance at the skinny Philbrick and thought, This is going to be a fucking boring trip.
“He wasn’t my type,” she tells me over lunch at a fashionable London trattoria.
Philbrick had never watched Made in Chelsea. And although he was traveling with his girlfriend, he was nonetheless thunderstruck. “She staggered me; vivacious; exciting,” he says.
Baker-Harber tells me that in the months after they met on the yacht, she deliberately steered clear of Philbrick. He was living with Mancini, and they would soon have a daughter together. “Forbidden fruit,” she called him, ignoring his incessant texts until one night, while having dinner at the London restaurant China Tang and convinced that Philbrick was unencumbered, she relented.
“Feel free to stop by,” she responded.
“I’ll be there in five minutes,” Philbrick replied.
At the time, Philbrick’s businesses were hauling in revenues of approximately $100 million annually. Later that night, showing her his gallery, he leaned over and kissed her. Baker-Harber was entranced. “He could hold an entire room in awe just by discussing the context of an artist’s work or what it represented,” she says.
“From that point forward, we were together nonstop.”
Fast-forward to May 2019: They’d been a couple for nearly two years with no talk of permanence. Philbrick had never told her about his business problems, which were multiplying. And while she never understood “the intricacies of art world finance,” she says, “I merely saw buying and selling and ‘flipping’ as something tantamount to commodity or stock trading.” On a walk through Hyde Park, he gave her a glimpse behind the curtain: “I laid out my relationship with Jay Jopling and his financing of my business, as well as the fact that I may have done illegal things in trying to resolve my untenable situation with jointly owned artworks between multiple parties. She probably didn’t believe me…. The whole world knew me as this wunderkind art dealer…. How could it be otherwise?”
Of course, at this point, Philbrick believed that he could salvage his sinking business—a faith he clings to even writing from prison years later. If prices had risen, he says, everyone would have been paid. It had worked before. “The aim was always to pay everyone out, and with a profit—something I managed many times despite the over 100% percentages sold,” he says.
“By no means am I blameless, but the people I was partnered with were all seeking an edge,” he says.
“Until the very last moment, I’d been squaring off debts, paying out profits, and closing accounts,” Philbrick says.
I wanted to believe him. From prison, thousands of miles away, he had done to me what he had done to his investors: seduced me, sold me, convinced me of his at least partial innocence.
Then I spoke with the FBI.
EPISODE 4: THE LAW
The FBI Art Crime Team are the high sheriffs of the art market. The Philbrick case, with at least two dozen alleged victims across the world, was an insanely complicated puzzle that took months to understand, much less solve, according to special agents Christopher McKeogh and Jessica Dittmer. Foremost among the injured parties was the art investment firm Fine Art Partners. From their base in Berlin, the principals in the firm traveled to London, where Philbrick proved his prowess with a dazzling first sale: a work by the visual artist Danh Vo in 2014, which he resold at a respectable profit before they’d even sent “our share of the purchase price,” a FAP principal would write in his victim-impact statement. After Philbrick’s downfall, the principal would say he learned the resale never happened: Philbrick had paid their “alleged profit share” out of other funds.
“We took the bait,” he wrote. Between 2014 and 2019, FAP invested $17.8 million with Philbrick. In February 2016, prosecutors say, they agreed to purchase Rudolf Stingel’s Untitled/Picasso through Philbrick for $7.1 million. Three heat-generating years later, Philbrick told FAP that he had consigned the Stingel on their behalf to Christie’s, which had “guaranteed” a price of $9 million, meaning if the auction price was less, Christie’s would buy it for the agreed amount.
Meanwhile, in June 2017, Philbrick had done a separate deal involving the same Stingel and two other paintings with Simon and David Reuben, two of the richest people in the UK. Represented by Simon’s daughter, art consultant Lisa Reuben, their company, Guzzini Properties, paid $6 million for the paintings.
In all, prosecutors say, Philbrick sold interests in the Stingel to three different parties, who gave him more than $15 million in total. (Philbrick says he received less than $10 million total.)
When the Stingel sold in May 2019 for a disappointing $5.5 million, its listed consigner was Guzzini. That was news to Fine Art Partners, who began investigating. They eventually discovered that Philbrick was not in possession of the work, and that the Christie’s contract Philbrick had sent them was forged.
Pesko, on whose yacht Philbrick and Baker-Harber met, turned out to be another victim. In August 2016, according to a witness statement filed by Pesko, Philbrick propositioned him with Basquiat’s stellar 1982 painting Humidity—featuring a red-nosed figure who resembles Andy Warhol with his arms outstretched to the heavens. If they moved fast, Pesko said Philbrick promised, they could scoop it up at a 30 percent discount. Philbrick said Christie’s would guarantee it for $35 million, which enticed Pesko’s father’s company Satfinance to invest $12.2 million for 50 percent of the painting. Philbrick retained the other 50 percent, along with a $3 million loan from Satfinance secured by the painting. Philbrick produced a sales slip that showed he would be paying $18.4 million for the work from an entity called SKH Management Corp, according to Pesko, and later took him to see it in a Long Island storage facility.
There was just one problem: SKH never owned the Basquiat, which had already been purchased by Philbrick from Phillips auction house for only $12.5 million. Two months later, according to prosecutors, Philbrick sold another 12.5 percent of Humidity to Delahunty Fine Art, telling the gallerist Damian Delahunty he had purchased the painting from SKH for $22 million, omitting that he had sold an interest in the painting, and transferred its title, to Satfinance.
The Christie’s auction “did not materialise,” Pesko would state, so the alleged guarantee never arrived. Not to worry, Philbrick told Pesko: He had several interested buyers, including the fashion designer Tory Burch and a Saudi royal, according to Pesko’s statement. (A representative for Burch says she knows nothing about this.) Philbrick had also pledged the oversold and overleveraged Basquiat to a collateral pool for a $10 million loan from Athena Art Finance, a New York–based lender that secures loans with “blue chip” art.
“Athena, Satfinance, and Delahunty are currently locked in litigation over ownership of the Basquiat,” according to the US government’s sentencing memo in Philbrick’s case.
Some of the two dozen victims the FBI identifies as being caught up in the scheme must have been left feeling as if they were trapped inside a Cubist painting, their prize purchases carved up and resold in myriad ways. “In some instances Philbrick purported to sell works owned by others without their knowledge or consent,” says someone familiar with the case. “In other cases, he purported to pledge as collateral on loans to his own business works owned by others without their permission, as he did with works by Basquiat, Stingel, Donald Judd, and Christopher Wool.”
Philbrick’s dealings also ensnared his former mentor, Jay Jopling. By 2017, frustrated over unsold art he and Philbrick owned together, Jopling demanded an explanation. According to Newland, Philbrick told Jopling that a “client” was delaying payment for a $4.5 million sale. Philbrick then invented one from whole cloth, an Argentine financier named Martin Herrero, with a fake email address, correspondence, and payment plan to match.
By December 2018, Philbrick was reportedly $20 million in debt and “spinning plates,” in the words of the FBI’s McKeogh.
“His accounts to me were more erratic and inconsistent,” Pesko said in his witness statement. “He was very nervous at a lunch we had together in London on 30 September 2019. He had two glasses of wine and was visibly shaking.” Another client recalls a major red flag: “You could see it in his Instagram pictures,” he says. “His eyes were hollow and dark, it wasn’t the same bright-looking vivacious Inigo.”
Around this time Pesko called the art investor Andre Sakhai. Sakhai and Philbrick were so close that Sakhai was the godfather to Philbrick’s first daughter. Pesko had meanwhile “developed a relationship” over a smaller Basquiat with Sakhai. Pesko believed he had bought the smaller Basquiat in November 2017 as a 50-50 partner with Philbrick. Sakhai told Pesko he was an even partner with Philbrick in the same work. “It became clear that Mr Philbrick had told each of us that we were his partners in the painting but that in fact we were partners with each other,” Pesko wrote in his witness statement. “We had both been lied to.”
Pesko confronted Philbrick in October 2019 in a series of messages and phone calls. “He cried on the phone to me, confessed to what he had done and started to send me various documents,” Pesko said in his statement. That same month, Fine Art Partners filed a lawsuit against Philbrick in Miami, alleging that Philbrick refused to return works of art, including Untitled/Picasso.
FAP was soon in touch with the FBI. When investigators had assembled the puzzle, they found “that this Philbrick matter is the largest art-based fraud scheme that we know of in US history,” says McKeogh.
“Philbrick is the face of the operation,” says the FBI’s Dittmer. “He was the one who was able to get clients to trust in him and to support and have him as a broker going to make those deals on their behalf. But Newland was the numbers guy and understood the money components of it.”
By 2019, Philbrick and Newland’s tenuous business relationship had dissolved. During one of their last communications, in early 2019, Philbrick says, Newland told him he’d thrown his laptop into a body of water near his home. “That was his way of telling me, ‘You’re on your own now,’” Philbrick says. (Newland’s attorney says this never happened.)
In October 2019, Philbrick’s galleries in London and Miami were shuttered, their walls empty, FedEx and UPS stickers littering their doors. “It looked like somebody had left in a hurry with no forwarding address,” says the Miami art adviser Karen Boyer of the spaces Philbrick had rented in the city’s Design District for what Philbrick would say was $30,000 a month.
Philbrick himself had disappeared.
Among the documents he left behind were spreadsheets showing the dizzying positions each investor owned in the various percentages of the oversold art, along with a handwritten note that read, according to the government’s sentencing memorandum, “How to fuck them?” Philbrick says the note was in Newland’s handwriting, but Newland’s attorney Burlingame calls this claim “false (and ridiculous),” adding, “Check the difference between his and Rob’s sentences”—20 months for Newland versus seven years for Philbrick. “Rather than stuff his pockets and blow victims’ money...Rob spent down his and his wife’s life savings for the privilege of working for Philbrick and thereby ruining his life.”
EPISODE 5: THE ESCAPE
“Are you okay?” Baker-Harber asked Philbrick in the midst of a torrential thunderstorm in Miami, where they were temporarily residing. It was October 20, 2019. Lightning crackled across the tropical skies as the couple waited for an Uber in a covered parking lot. They had just watched Joaquin Phoenix demonize Gotham City in Joker, and Philbrick seemed in “a fragile state,” says Baker-Harber.
Philbrick by then knew of at least one lawsuit against him, and his lawyer had advised him “that I no longer had a seat at the table, and this was a matter for the lawyers.”
“If I had to go somewhere for a while, would you come with me?” he asked her.
The next morning she woke to a suitcase slamming to the floor in their sunny condominium.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” said Philbrick.
She suggested visiting her grandmother in Australia. Within hours they were on a Qantas flight—“cattle class,” says Baker-Harber. During a layover at the Dallas Fort Worth airport, Philbrick withdrew his last $400 at an ATM. Landing in Sydney, they were told that brush fires ruled out a flight to her grandmother’s rural home in New South Wales. They tried her late grandfather’s birthplace in Fiji but couldn’t get a flight that day. (McKeogh says, “We have no information that Victoria was aware of the fraud scheme.”)
“Why don’t we go to Vanuatu?” she asked Philbrick. “My mother has friends there.”
After more than a month of travel, with stops in Japan, Australia, and New Caledonia, they made a temporary home in Vanuatu, a small archipelago nation in the southwestern Pacific whose “borders quickly shut down due to COVID,” says Baker-Harber. Many would later point out that Vanuatu has no extradition treaty with the US. It became a respite for Philbrick: from the art world, from attorneys, and from a cesspool of debt. For months, the couple reveled in the village-like environment, Baker-Harber says, enjoying “the fresh fruit, the pho in the workers’ cafés,” the sun-kissed beaches. Philbrick even got a government-issued Vanuatu driver’s license “using his full name.” Six months after their arrival, Baker-Harber was pregnant.
“I was traveling on my US passport, hardly a fugitive,” insists Philbrick. The Justice Department, which considered him one in April 2020, disagrees.
Back home, burned collectors were seething. Attorney Judd Grossman, who represents several of Philbrick’s former clients, offers a representative opinion when he calls Philbrick “greedy. He did this to benefit himself, to live the lifestyle that he saw so many of his clients living. But when things didn’t go his way, rather than face the music, he ran, and he left all of them holding the bag.”
In a December 2019 Artnet column, Philbrick’s former friend, client, and hard-Burgundy-drinking buddy Kenny Schachter called Philbrick’s disappearance the art world’s equivalent of Where’s Waldo? Schachter designed a wanted poster of Philbrick (“$10,000 REWARD”) and published excerpts of Instagram messages he received from someone calling themselves @steve_irwin_pets (“the Aussie naturalist speared to death…by one of the stingrays he cared about so deeply. Get it?”). Schachter’s inference was clear: The sender was Philbrick, on the lam from the collectors he felt he had so capably served. “Nobody was stiffed, it was just a few bad deals,” wrote @steve_irwin_pets. “Things will be made good.” (Philbrick says he never sent these messages.)
The story went viral, at least in the art world. Determined to tell their story their way, Philbrick and Baker-Harber helped produce a TV docuseries treatment, which ramped up the drama of their disappearance. It’s “one of the most jaw-dropping art world stories of recent years,” the producers would later say, culminating in “a love story that spanned multiple countries, multimillion-dollar art deals, and an international manhunt ending in an exotic, South Pacific archipelago.”
On the afternoon of June 12, 2020, the long arm of the law reached from across the ocean. It was 3 p.m., and Philbrick and Baker-Harber were in the local market, searching for what they’d heard was “an amazing green tea taro cake.” Walking through a series of what he calls “tin roofed breeze block shops,” they reached their destination, where the taro cake awaited. But then: “an eerie silence.” Parting the crowd of peaceful islanders was a team, Philbrick recalls, of “burly giants in flak jackets.” Baker-Harber, five and a half months pregnant, watched her fiancé’s face turn white, “like he’d been tasered.”
Then one of the giants spoke.
“Are you Inigo Philbrick?”
“And it’s almost like watching an animal being electrocuted,” she says.
They hustled Philbrick into a red Ford, “handcuffs biting my wrists, five of us in the car, squeezed between two sweaty giants in the back, their Kevlar panels bowing out of their vests and digging into my sides.”
Where are they taking him? Baker-Harber thought, trailing behind in a car between two municipal police officers who had taken her phones.
The car carrying Philbrick sped past the local prison and then the courthouse, and there was only one place left: Port Vila International Airport.
They parked on the tarmac, and there, on what Philbrick calls “an island that looked like it could be the set of Jurassic Park,” waited a Gulfstream V.
“And I’m thinking, There’s something wrong with his visa,” recalls Baker-Harber, but she was unable to get answers. “Because these men were holding me down.”
“Get the fuck off of me!” she shouted once the plane was airborne, leaping out of the car and clawing at the fence, screaming, “Where are you taking him!?”
She collapsed on to the sidewalk, where the officers returned her phones, then drove her home. “I memorized the tail number,” she says. Soon she tracked down the plane’s flight plan: Guam. And its registered owner.
“A Russian chess player,” she says, and remembers thinking, “He’s been abducted by Russians. What the fuck has he done?”
She found a phone number, and what the chess player told her was both a relief and a terror:
“I lease my plane to the US government.”
“WANTED U.S. NATIONAL DEPORTED” read the headline in the Vanuatu Daily Post over a photograph of Philbrick, in beachwear, between two officers escorting him toward the giant jet. He’d been charged with wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. (“They made the independent decision to expel Mr. Philbrick from the island. He was not extradited,” McKeogh says of Vanuatu officials.)
Philbrick landed in Guam, home of the nearest FBI office, in a bathing suit and polo shirt. “I was wearing Castañer espadrilles and shoved into a cell with Billy—a guy doing intermittent detention,” Philbrick says of his tumultuous entry into the US prison system, where he spent the next three and a half years.
In November 2021, “having not seen daylight for almost two years,” according to his fiancé, Philbrick entered a federal courthouse in Manhattan. His best-dressed-list suits now traded for dingy brown prison garb, his fabulous crown of curly locks grown long and unkempt, his facial hair overgrown, his stylish silhouette shrunken from a prison diet of peanut butter sandwiches and lunch meat.
“Mr. Philbrick, let me ask you this,” asked Judge Sidney H. Stein. “Why did you do this?”
“For money, your honor,” Philbrick replied, his ever-so-proper accent muffled by his N95 COVID mask, adding, “I was trying to find business and needed money for that.”
“How do you plead, sir?”
“Guilty, your honor.”
“If only the Made in Chelsea cameras had been around to catch these extraordinary events,” reported the Daily Mail of the drama of Philbrick’s arrest and court appearance. “Instead, by the time the E4 reality TV show returned for its 23rd series last month, Victoria had slipped effortlessly back into her glamorous London life—with a daughter, Gaia-Grace, in tow.”
“Where’s Gaia’s dad?” a fellow cast member asks Baker-Harber, who is clad in a glam red furry vest, on the show.
“He’s incarcerated right now, like awaiting sentencing,” she responds. “It’s financial, white-collar stuff. But unfortunately he is being held in a place which is like maximum security…. I’ve only seen him once since all of this has happened, and he was shackled.”
He looked good in his prison uniform, Baker-Harber adds, although orange “is not really his color.”
EPISODE 6: THE COMEBACK
“You’re like the Talented Mr. Ripley,” Schachter, who claims to have lost $1.75 million to his former friend, reportedly texted Philbrick when he was at large.
“He wrote back, ‘Google how the movie ended.’”
“So Mr. Schachter did,” wrote New York Times reporter Jacob Bernstein. “It turns out Ripley strangles the person who may be about to expose him.” (Philbrick says he was not in contact with Schachter.)
Philbrick, however, seems poised for a rebirth, both on the screen—first the multipart Blue Ant Productions documentary with the working title The Real Inigo Philbrick Story—A Tale of Fortune, Fame and Fraud, expected to air on the BBC in the summer—and in real life. “I’m 36, still a young man, and a second act is going to require my having been up front and sincere, but also not a martyr,” he says.
“My name is soiled, but I own it again,” he continues, claiming that when various documents come to light, it might change the perception of his culpability.
“Of course, I did things the wrong way,” says Philbrick. “But creatively and with the best of intentions. I’ll have to tick the box for the felony. But I believe the art world is sophisticated enough to understand that I wasn’t Bernie Madoff (who never made an actual investment).”
That may be decidedly wishful thinking. One client called his losses to Philbrick “the worst nightmare of my life…. Philbrick was charming and a good communicator…while in reality he was only a sleek liar, trying to get closer to his victims.”
Philbrick was released from prison into home confinement and two years of supervised release in late January after being incarcerated for less than four years. He has a new wardrobe accessory—an electronic monitoring ankle bracelet—along with a sizable debt: $86,672,790 in restitution, on which Philbrick says he’ll begin making monthly payments following his release. Which means he’ll have to get back to work—and in the unregulated art world, there’s no legal mechanism stopping him.
Although his first priority is Baker-Harber and their three-year-old daughter, Gaia, he foresees a professional future. “I’d like to get reestablished as an art dealer,” he says. “And that’s going to require a lot of listening and discussing with friends, clients, colleagues. I’ve had some indications of interest from friends in helping me get started, but it’s too early to say more.”
This story has been updated.
Read More From Vanity Fair
Anne Hathaway on Tuning Out the Haters and Embracing Her True Self
Rose Hanbury Sends Legal Notice to Stephen Colbert After His Affair Joke
The Confessions of an Art Fraudster Extraordinaire
The Evolving Power of the Princess of Wales
The Best TV Shows of 2024, So Far
From the Archive: The Fatal Mauling of the Man Who Loved Grizzlies (2004)
Stay in the know and subscribe to Vanity Fair for just
$2.50$1 per month.
No comments:
Post a Comment