Bloomberg follows up the Salander saga with this little vignette:
In December 2006, New York art dealer Lawrence Salander wrote to Earl Davis, a client of more than 20 years, saying he would no longer tolerate Davis’s “innuendos and bullying.”
Davis had repeatedly requested an accounting of 96 missing paintings by his father, American modernist Stuart Davis, which Davis consigned to Salander-O’Reilly Galleries LLC to sell. They represented most of Davis’s inheritance.
Davis suggested lawyers resolve the mess, prompting Salander to threaten in an e-mail to “use everything I can” to protect his gallery. “It will not be pretty but believe me Earl I don’t think you understand what you would be in for,” he wrote.
The story also addresses the discrepancy between the claims of a $500 million loss put forward by victims in bankruptcy court and the $88 million the indictment sites. The short answer is that the number of claims is so great, the DAs simply stuck to what they could prove in losses:
In U.S. Bankruptcy Court, hundreds of claims remain against the gallery, seeking the return of about $300 million, according to data on the court’s Web site.
“There could be many more victims,” said Morgenthau’s Chief of Investigations, Patrick Dugan. “But there comes a point of time when you have to identify your best cases and move forward.”
Of course, this all raises a bigger question of how so many could have done business with Salander for so long without getting paid.
Indicted Salander Waits in Jail, a ‘Broken Person’ (Bloomberg)
