Co-Owner of Missing $1.3 Mil Painting Has Criminal Past
NEW YORK (CBS/AP) It seems like a plot straight from Hollywood: an art thief asks a man to transport a valuable painting for sale. What happens? The painting goes missing.
On July 28, James Carl Haggerty was hired by one of the co-owners of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot's $1.3 million "Portrait of a Girl," Thomas Doyle, to take the painting to a Manhattan hotel for a potential buyer to examine, according to a lawsuit filed by the painting's other co-owner Kristyn Trudgeon.
According to the lawsuit, the potential buyer, London gallery owner Offer Waterman, "had no further interest in pursuing this painting" after seeing it, his lawyer said in a statement Wednesday.
Security footage shows that Waterman left the hotel, and then Haggerty lingered in the hotel bar for more than an hour and left with the painting, but cameras at Haggerty's Manhattan apartment building captured no glimpse of the portrait when he got home nearly two hours later, Trudgeon's lawsuit reads.
Haggerty called Doyle the next morning and claimed he had no idea where the painting was and that he had gotten extremely drunk the previous night and couldn't remember a thing.
Trudgeon sued Haggerty earlier this week but just as quickly she withdrew the suit when she discovered that her co-owner, Doyle, has a less than squeaky clean past.
Seems Doyle pleaded guilty in 2007 to stealing a $600,000 Edgar Degas sculpture from a wealthy collector by pretending to be related to a renowned art dealer who wanted to have the sculpture authenticated, according to Manhattan prosecutors. Then-District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, called him "a very talented con man."
Indeed, when those charges were filed, Doyle was in federal custody for violating his supervised release for a $200,000 jewelry swindle in Tennessee, authorities said.
Doyle was paroled on the Manhattan case in December, records show.
Trudgeon is "exploring potential legal remedies," according to her attorney Max Di Fabio. Di Fabio declined to say how Trudgeon and Doyle knew each other and acquired the AWOL portrait and whether it was insured.
Meanwhile, the Corot painting's fate remains a mystery. Police said no complaint about its disappearance had been filed. Prosecutors declined to comment.