Best Gallery In The World Goes Rogue
It doesnt happen often or at least on a scale that makes all the international newspapers, but once in a while theres a good art gallery scandal. One that happened recently stayed in the news for some time.
Lawrence Salander owned a New York City gallery which specialized in high end art work. The art gallery displayed things as diverse at Renaissance paintings to contemporary ones. People paid millions to Salander for works of art and he was in the business for some years and his art gallery had even been ranked by The Robb Report as the best gallery in the world. As it turned out Salander was found to have defrauded many of his customers. His customers were among the rich and famous and poured money into his art investment deals. For instance, John McEnroe, the tennis player, was defrauded out of $2 million by investing in shares of a famous piece of art – twice!
One customer was sold a collection of over 300 pieces of Renaissance art works only to find they werent real. Eventually all this caught up with Salander and he was arrested and arraigned before a grand jury. He was charged with 13 counts of first degree grand larceny, 10 counts of second degree grand larceny and even more smaller ones. Oddly enough, the real trial has never taken place and Salander is at work in a new gallery, but it isnt in New York City.
The trial may have slowed down because Salander managed to spend all of the money he ever defrauded out of people and none of them will ever recover anything. So somewhere out there people are owed what is estimated to be $300 million dollars.
