On a Friday in June 2022, a swarm of federal agents piled out of government vans and into the Orlando Museum of Art, a 98-year-old institution abutted by several lakes in the central Florida city. The feds moved past staffers and crowds there to see “Heroes & Monsters,” an exhibition filled with what were billed as never-before-seen works by Jean-Michel Basquiat. When the show had opened several months earlier that February, thousands came through in its first few days. Attendance was up 500% during the exhibition.
But questions about the authenticity of the works had dogged the show and now the feds had arrived, warrant in hand, seemingly confirming the doubters. The day before the raid, a US magistrate judge had signed an application to secure a search warrant filed by the FBI’s Art Crime Team, which indicated the works on the wall could actually be contraband—“fruits of crime, or other items illegally possessed,” as their application put it. The agents proceeded to strip the walls while visitors there to peruse and spend money at the gift shop stocked with Basquiat-themed merch, looked on. By that evening it was national news.
All the while, Aaron De Groft, the director of the museum, was in Italy on vacation with his wife. He was fired four days later. “They simply cut off my email,” he told me this spring in his first extensive interview since his dismissal. Still, it wasn’t a complete shock. The FBI had been investigating the so-called Basquiats for almost a decade, and the Bureau issued a subpoena to the museum in July 2021. In February 2022, the month the show opened, The Orlando Weekly reported that the FBI had seized computers in the weeks leading up to the exhibition’s debut, and The New York Times ran a story that delved into the paintings’ mysterious provenance. The affidavit said that the FBI might possess enough evidence to charge individuals with conspiracy and wire fraud—evidence that showed the works’ owners may have been attempting to sell forged art, which would be a felony. The timing of the June raid was apt. The show was set to close in less than a week, and the paintings were to travel to Italy, outside the art unit’s jurisdiction.
For almost a year after the raid nothing seemed to happen and, as I began reporting this story, the case was something like an Art World Unsolved Mystery. Were the paintings indeed faked? And, if so, how had they wound up making such a splash? The investigation appeared to be stalled, or even abandoned. The paintings remain seized; De Groft remained out of work. The Orlando Museum of Art turned over its walls to the late artist Purvis Young, followed by the exhibition “From the Andes to the West Indies: Spanish Colonial Paintings from the Thoma Collection.”
Then, in April, a break: US attorney Martin Estrada filed notice of a plea deal between the Central District of California and North Hollywood auctioneer Michael Barzman, a key character in the raid-on-Basquiat extended universe. According to filings made public with the plea, when the FBI interviewed Barzman nine days before agents obtained the warrant for their raid last June, he explained he’d sold artworks “in the manner of” Basquiat to three of the same people, according to the affidavit, who went on to lend them to the show in Orlando. (The affidavit refers to people by their initials but their identities have been confirmed by various reports.) The catalog for the show also mentions Barzman, referring to him as the “small-time Los Angeles auctioneer” who said he found the paintings in a storage unit that he purchased in Los Angeles. The affidavit also says that Barzman signed a sworn statement that he had sold works to the clients who later loaned them to the Orlando Museum of Art, creating a clear, if remarkable, narrative for the work.
In October, with Barzman’s partial confession still under wraps and the mystery still lingering publicly, the feds met with him once again, bringing along a work they had seized. Agents explained to their interrogatee that affixed to that same oilstick-and-acrylic-paint-on-cardboard artwork, hidden behind thick impasto purportedly by Basquiat, was a shipping sticker with none other than Mike Barzman’s name and address. Barzman “claimed that he had never seen the work and said that he had no idea how a shipping label bearing his information got on the back of it,” reads the plea arrangement.
Eight days later, Barzman met with the federal agents again, and finally blurted out what some had suspected the entire time: he had made all of the “Basquiats” himself, along with a friend (identified in the plea as J.F.), creating some of the pieces in as little as five minutes, and sold them over eBay, splitting the profits. Though he sold forged work knowingly, the government declined to charge Barzman with wire fraud and instead levied the lesser offense of making false statements to a government agency, which carries a maximum sentence of five years.
For those who had been closely watching the case, the news brought a sense of finality to the proceedings. Months after the raid—the most scandalous episode in recent US art museum memory—someone admitted guilt. The museum issued a statement offering its support for the plea agreement, appearing to leave no room for debate about the fact that a year ago fake Basquiats were on its walls.
“The Museum is eager for the DOJ to continue its investigation and hold those who committed crimes responsible. When this investigation is closed, and charges are brought, the Museum looks forward to sharing our story regarding the works in question,” a statement from the board chair read.
Barzman has stayed silent since the plea agreement went public and will face sentencing this summer. But Vanity Fair has spoken with sources who were intimately familiar with Barzman around the time he was buying up foreclosed-upon storage units hoping to find forgotten treasure, and we’ve sifted through the various legal documents that contain Barzman’s statements to federal agents. It all amounts to a story of how these paintings once offered as “in the manner of” Jean-Michel Basquiat got in the hands of a group of ambitious owners who managed to get them onto the walls of the Orlando Museum of Art, thanks to a director trying to bring blockbuster audiences to the primary art museum in Florida’s theme park capital. It’s a narrative that makes the 168-page, lavishly produced museum catalog an elaborate fantasy on the level of a season of Game of Thrones.
Michael Barzman also broke his silence to Vanity Fair for the first time since his name shot around the world last month when he admitted to faking the paintings. Barzman’s attorney Joel Koury sent this statement on behalf of his client:
“Over a decade ago, desperate and deep in medical debt from being treated for bone cancer, I made the wrong and terrible decision to forge these works,” reads the statement. “Since then I have tried to do everything I could to rectify my mistake—I am ashamed and sorry for my part in this and hope I can finally move on.”
But the former museum director and the owners of the works aren’t buying it. Over the course of interviews in the days following the plea deal, as well as several lengthy text message conversations, De Groft, a PhD in art history, maintained to me that the paintings he put in the show were authentic and that the plea deal is a conspiracy.
“You know why he was not charged with forgery? Because 25 are right and by Basquiat and provenance on those is right. He did not forge them,” De Groft told me in a text message the day after the plea agreement was announced.
Two days later, he elaborated on his thoughts during a long phone call.
“I think this is a totally sweet-deal cover-up,” said De Groft. “This whole Barzman thing is a huge cover-up. He’s a guy that admits to forging paintings and selling them. And he’s not indicted for forgery or fraud, but he’s indicted by lying to the FBI? Because they said, Well, you can do 15 to 25 or you can do five and we’ll knock it down to 18…. I think they told him, Cop to the whole thing or we’re going to chop you up.” Through his lawyer, Barzman stands by his statement that he forged the works.
The idea that an artwork in a museum could be a forgery—that something potentially worth tens or even hundreds of millions could actually be worthless—is an endless source of fascination, not just for art-world insiders, but for the general public watching from the outside. People have been knocking off art for almost as long as they have been making it. Legend holds that Michelangelo got his start passing off his own work as antiquity. The most famous recent example of an is-it-real-or-fake brouhaha was the Leonardo da Vinci that sold at Christie’s for more than $450 million in 2017, making it the most expensive artwork of all time. Experts authenticated it, but then the Prado Museum categorized the work as “attributed” to Leonardo rather than “by” Leonardo, suggesting the painting was made by the master’s studio. After it was sold, the painting was slated to be displayed but was subsequently pulled without explanation.
But there’s a certain zeitgeist-nailing specificity to a mysteriously dubious Basquiat, who died of a drug overdose in 1988 at age 27—the same Basquiat who Jeffrey Wright played in the 1996 biopic by Julian Schnabel, the same Basquiat whose work appears in Tiffany ads with Jay-Z and Beyoncé, the same Basquiat whose painting was sold to Yusaku Maezawa, an intergalactic-traveling Japanese billionaire, for more than $110 million. Hypebeasts drool over Brooklyn Nets jerseys that have script inspired by the Park Slope–born Basquiat, and his collaborative work with Andy Warhol inspired a recent Broadway play and an exhibition at the Fondation Louis Vuitton. Last week at Christie’s, a Basquiat sold for $67 million, well above the already impressive estimate of $45 million, when a bidding war erupted in the room. The scandal at the Orlando Museum of Art exploded during the latest of Basquiat’s ongoing pop-culture renaissances, a period during which the artist’s notoriety has saturated the culture so fully that it just might attract a family otherwise in town to visit the Magic Kingdom.
But that very cultural dominance has made Basquiat a favorite of the forgers—and why one might be pressed to prove that a suspicious Basquiat in his or her possession is the real deal. In 2018, years before the Orlando debacle, the market was so lousy with suspected fakes that art authenticator Richard Polsky felt the need to pen an op-ed for Artnet News that served as a guide for spotting them. Some telltale signs: gold crowns, obvious signatures, painted-on found objects, and a miraculous backstory of why the work has been missing for decades.
Even after Barzman’s plea, nearly every person who played a role in bringing this body of work to the Orlando Museum of Art still maintains the works—and their, it should be said, miraculous backstory—are real. Speaking in the weeks after the deal, many of those with a stake in the game still truly believed they were not just legit Basquiats, but great, weird, and interesting ones too. They were willing to further risk their reputations, insisting that these are works made by Basquiat, works that were found in a Los Angeles storage locker.
The evidence uncovered by the FBI was already daunting, and then the US attorney shed light on the shipping address sticker, the confession, and Barzman’s assertion that he was asked to sign a sworn statement. According to the plea agreement, Barzman claims at least one of the owners dangled as much as $15,000 over him if he just signed a document saying the work came from the storage unit, although in an earlier interview, he said he was offered $5,000.
The owners deny such an offer was ever made, taking Barzman’s assertion in stride, as they have every bombshell in the cast thus far. They remain convinced they’ll be vindicated. “They now say I’m a victim—great, I’m a victim,” Pierce O’Donnell, the celebrity attorney who says he owns six of the works that were in the Orlando show, told me, audibly exasperated, the day after Barzman’s plea deal was announced.
O’Donnell, and other stakeholders I spoke to after the plea, shared a common refrain: at least some of these paintings are real Basquiats.
“Michael Barzman is a proven liar, he lied time and time again,” O’Donnell went on. “Maybe he said, to lower his sentence, that he faked them all? This is just a wrinkle. This is not the final chapter…I just want my six paintings back.” (The sources close to Barzman say the two men never spoke.)
And now the believers have to prove the works’ authenticity before the investigation goes any further, and before we get to the end of most concluded forgery cases: destruction of the contraband.
“It would be a terrible, catastrophic tragedy if they say, Well, this guy said they’re all forged, we’re going to destroy them all,” De Groft said.
Before thinking about the potential end of these works, it’s useful to go back to their origins—or at least the origins of the show that raised them from a curiosity of the storage-locker-wars set to national prominence. De Groft’s lofty ambitions for the museum were a key catalyst in the tale of the so-called Basquiats. These days, it’s not enough for a museum to simply organize and exhibit a solid group of works by institutional-level artists. The competition for eyeballs and wallets may be a bit starker in Orlando, where Disney reigns, but it’s true in every city to some extent. In the last decade or so, museums have had to compete with trendy, art-as-spectacle extravaganzas like the Van Gogh “Immersive Experience,” which reproduces ear-cutting Vincent’s works on grand display in geodesic domes. They have to compete with Instagram catnip like The Museum of Ice Cream and its lowest-common-denominator ilk. And then museums also have to compete with a thousand non-art attention-suckers that make it increasingly hard to get bodies into the galleries without a white-hot name. Jean-Michel Basquiat is one such rarified name, and it was apparently enough to convince De Groft to take a leap of faith.
Since the raid, he’s largely kept his head down about the entire matter. In the months after his dismissal, the Orlando Museum of Art witnessed a hemorrhaging of staff, including trustees and their chief curator. De Groft’s replacement as interim director was Luder Whitlock, the director of a local charitable organization. Less than two months later, he resigned. The museum removed five trustees through a formerly ignored bylaw that stipulates a term-limit they’d exceeded. Then the board chair Cynthia Brumback stepped down after concerns were raised about how she’d handled the scandal. (Brumback initially replied to a request for comment indicating she would read over questions, and then never responded.) In January, the American Alliance of Museums put the OMA on probation, making it hard, if not impossible, for the museum to borrow or loan out art to other member institutions. That doesn’t happen very often—right now the Orlando Museum of Art is the only one of more than 1,100 accredited institutions listed as under probation on AAM’s website. On April 17, after months without a director, the OMA announced that it had hired Cathryn Mattson, an executive with no museum experience, as its interim CEO.
De Groft is still unemployed—he lost what he says was a $200,000 annual salary—and says that he’s having trouble finding another job. “I got turned down for a job at the National Gallery that I was deemed to be the best qualified for because of…” De Groft told me, trailing off as he got to the obvious. (Both OMA and the National Gallery declined to comment on De Groft for this article.) So he wanted to tell his story. We spoke for the first time in early March.
“I felt, obviously, damaged. I felt terrible, traumatized—I felt this has really, really hurt my wife and I, and my family, and I want my reputation back,” he said. “And they forget the 15% raise I got all the staff, and also the maternity leave that several pregnant mothers did not have until I got there. Everybody forgets all that stuff. It’s like, Oh, Aaron’s just a bad guy that ruined the museum.”
De Groft had arrived at the Orlando Museum of Art in 2021 brimming with confidence, a serious museum-built brain, and a generous spirit who could raise funds and generate headlines—Orlando magazine called him “a fervent scholar with a showman’s flair.” If successful, he would make the institution not just the most important art museum in the state, but one that could compete with Orlando’s world-famous theme parks. He took big swings. Months after starting the job, he announced that the museum would expand with a space downtown in a new skyscraper designed by Pelli Clarke Pelli and DLR Group that would also house downtown Orlando’s first five-star hotel—all reportedly offered rent-free by the developers. (The museum pulled out of the downtown project before the Basquiat show opened.)
A native of Smithfield, Virginia, De Groft holds a master’s in art history and museum studies from the University of South Carolina, and a PhD from Florida State University. He was a senior curator at the Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens in Jacksonville and then the chief curator at the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota. In 2005, he was named director of the Muscarelle Museum of Art at the College of William & Mary, his alma mater, and immediately set an ambitious exhibition agenda. In 2008, he staged a show of work on loan from the Uffizi Gallery that was dubbed the biggest show in Muscarelle’s history, and followed that with a Michelangelo drawing show in 2013, and then in 2015, a Leonardo drawing show that broke attendance records, seeing more than 60,000 people walk through the doors of the college museum.
Throughout his career, De Groft has displayed a penchant for finding unheralded works for cheap and having them reauthenticated as the real deal. That talent has raised eyebrows, especially after the raid. In the mid-2000s, he took up the cause of a Tennessee lawyer named Thomas Dossett who had insisted for decades that a painting in his collection was really, truly one of Titian’s rare paintings of a duke. After Dossett enlisted De Groft’s help, the then museum director discovered a date he said had been misread on a letter, leading him to believe that the work was genuine. Madeleine Viljoen, former director of the La Salle University Art Museum in Philadelphia and a Renaissance art scholar, said the work could be real, though she wouldn’t be able to authenticate it without seeing it herself.
In 2013, the Muscarelle’s chief curator at the time, John Spike, saw a work for sale at an auction house in Vienna he thought might actually be an unattributed early work by Paul Cézanne, Spike recounted in a 2017 interview. Spike and De Groft made what De Groft has described as a covert trip to Vienna to snap up the work, and later a chemistry professor provided what she deemed was further proof it was indeed a Cézanne. In 2016, the museum acquired what it said it believed was a Peter Paul Rubens study for a work that hangs in the Museo del Prado in Madrid. It was included in a show of other paintings that had recently been acquired by Muscarelle, “The Art and Science of Connoisseurship,” which opened at the museum in 2017.
In Orlando, De Groft said he was trying to do more than mega-museum numbers—he was coming for Disney, coming for SeaWorld. One idea was to create buzzworthy exhibitions to compete with the museums that get offered big-ticket exhibitions, the institutions on the blockbuster show circuit. Orlando is the most visited city in the US. De Groft drew on his history of unveiling recently reattributed masterworks to the public, but this time aimed for something more contemporary. About five years before De Groft started at the museum, O’Donnell began making headlines because of a painting he owned—one he vociferously argued was a real Jackson Pollock waiting to be authenticated that could be worth more than $100 million. The work piqued De Groft’s interest.
“Dear Mr. O’Donnell,” De Groft wrote in a cold email in March 2021, later memorialized in the Basquiat show’s catalog. “Would you be willing to speak about the Pollock? We would love to celebrate it and showcase it here in Orlando where we lead the country in tourism with an excess of 73 million tourists.”
When the Pollock show was delayed over issues De Groft said O’Donnell was having with the co-owner of the painting, the collector mentioned he owned an interest in six never-before-seen works by Jean-Michel Basquiat, and access to 19 more from the same original collection. He gave De Groft the password for a website where he could view the works. Impressed, De Groft flew to New York to see the paintings. De Groft agreed to a show, setting the debut for February 2022.
But as the affidavit revealed, as early as 2013 the FBI’s New York Field Office and the Los Angeles Police Department had been investigating a case in which a series of individuals who had recently bought a bunch of artworks from Barzman (identified in the affidavit as “Buyer-1”) were pressuring another man to say that the artworks came from his storage locker. Seven months before the Basquiats were set to debut in Orlando, the FBI came calling.
“They sent this subpoena in July 2021,” De Groft confirmed to me. “And we were like, ‘Well, what are we supposed to do?’ [The FBI] go, ‘No, keep doing what you’re doing. We just want to see what you knew when you did this show.’ And then that’s when they were asking questions like, ‘How much did the owners pay you?’ I said, ‘They didn’t.’ They go, ‘Well, why would you do a show if they weren’t paying you?’ And I said, ‘Look, my job is to increase the understanding of major art exhibitions in our community.’”
(The OMA declined to comment on whether the FBI indeed told them to proceed with the show.)
When asked about De Groft’s firing, the museum declined to address it directly, and later in a statement said, “We have taken and will continue to take actions that realign the institution with its mission. These actions include Board governance training, supporting employees impacted by the exhibition, adopting new personnel policies with enhanced whistleblower protections, and working with the American Alliance of Museums to repair the institution’s standing. ”
I had been working on a story about De Groft for a few weeks when the news of Barzman’s confession broke. Part of me thought, Well, the jig is up. The court of public opinion would forever think the works were fakes. Perhaps the owners I’d been speaking with and their partners would cut their losses, and stop taking my phone calls. Instead, they tripled down, producing another sworn statement they said confirmed Basquiat’s connection with the man behind the storage locker, even after someone told the FBI under the penalty of perjury that he faked the art, the backstory, the connection. They directed me to the hundreds of documents they’ve provided the FBI. Despite Barzman’s admission that he faked the artworks and signed the statement for money, there are scores of other documents—emails, receipts, storage payment history, locker numbers, sworn statements from others about visits and phone calls—that they say build a legitimate provenance for the work.
It seems exceedingly implausible that the Basquiats really did come from a storage unit if the owner of said storage unit has confessed to the FBI that he forged them. Then again, the forces who say the works are legit have a case file that displays the kind of world-building usually reserved for video games or summer blockbusters.
In the hundreds of documents, there emerges a twisty story filled with kooks and criminals, artists and alleged forgers, collectors and crooks, more akin to a Coen brothers script than the art world. There’s Michael William Force, described to me as a “picker” who finds treasures on eBay, but pleaded no contest to drug charges in the ’70s under the name William Parks. His business and romantic partner Taryn Burns has over the years joined him in discovering purportedly important artworks, incorporating the LLCs that have been involved in various purchases. Lee Mangin, also known as John Leo Mangan III, is an old friend of Force’s who has occasionally gone into business with him. In 2014, according to the affidavit, Mangan (L.M.) purchased works that were supposedly by Jackson Pollock from a man named Jovian “John” Re (J.R.), who—incidentally—ended up pleading guilty to forging 60 works that had been attributed to Pollock and was sentenced to five years in prison. Mangan, too, has served jail time, for trafficking cocaine, in 1979 and 1991. He also pleaded guilty and served probation for his role in a pump-and-dump scheme in 1996 and settled with the FTC after a 2007 investigation into a debt-relief company he advertised. According to purchase receipts, Mangan and Force bought the so-called Basquiats with the help of a wildlife trafficker, Lumsden Quan, who was convicted in 2014 for selling rhino horns to an undercover informant for $55,000.
Bridging these two narratives was the only seemingly agreed-upon truth in the case: that it started with a storage locker owned by a man who died in 2018 named Thaddeus Q. Mumford Jr., a television writer with no clear ties to the contemporary art world.
Thad Mumford was, in the 1980s, a television writer, working on shows such as Roots: The Next Generations, M*A*S*H, and The Cosby Show. He went on to serve as a producer on the Cosby spin-off A Different World and the kids show Blue’s Clues. Before that, he had the distinction of being the first Black bat boy for the New York Yankees, cementing his lifelong love of baseball—later he’d write occasional columns for The New York Times, including an affectionate remembrance of fetching fouls whacked by Mickey Mantle.
But by the 2010s, Mumford had fallen on somewhat hard times, his lawyer Judith Karfiol recalled this spring. He still had the house in Los Angeles, just a few steps from the Beverly Hills sign she said, but he was on the verge of losing it—he hadn’t worked in almost a decade, since getting a story credit on a cartoon called As Told by Ginger.
He was also late on payments to a storage facility where he had for years kept his belongings. According to documents provided to Vanity Fair, in April 2012 the Ortiz Bros. Moving & Storage Company sent a letter to Mumford at his home in Beverly Hills informing him that he owed $7,088.81 in back payment. Failure to fork over the cash would mean the contents of his storage locker, which he had made just one $400 payment on two years earlier, would be auctioned off on May 17. Mumford did not pay, and the contents of the locker were—according to a signed statement and alleged receipt—purchased by Barzman.
At the time, Barzman was a 34-year-old cofounder of the Shark Tank–approved power strip product called Invisiplug (an extension cord that blends in with hardwood floors) who before that spent time in the music industry managing a blip of an indie band called Ima Robot. His flirtations with fame also included a 2016 spot on TMZ after he was arrested for pointing a gun at a guy who was smoking a cigarette near Barzman’s LA property (for which he was sentenced to 180 days in prison). Barzman also managed estate auctions through various companies. Through that business, Barzman was adjacent to pickers: that most American class of entrepreneurs who buy storage lockers or units in arrears hoping to find treasures amid the detritus.
An employee at Mumford’s storage facility said the writer owned three units, and they were auctioned off by American Auctioneers, which is a favorite of the picker community. An unnamed source told the FBI that another auctioneer bargain-bin-hunter bought the contents of the locker that contained Mumford’s Emmy and then sold it to Barzman, which Barzman recalls he likely posted a photo of online.
A document resembling a receipt that was purported to be from the initial sale indicates that a “Mike B.” was the buyer of storage locker number 2125 for a total of $1,050. In February of 2013, Barzman appeared to sign a sworn statement, in which he stated that he bought the unit and said “To my knowledge the contents of the storage locker – lot #2125 were owned by a Mr. Thadeus [sic] Mumford.” It was also signed by a notary public and included photographs of what was inside: Mumford’s inscribed Emmy, a bat autographed by members of the New York Yankees, and a whole lot of works on cardboard supposedly made by Jean-Michel Basquiat.
But this is the document Barzman first told authorities that he did not recognize—before later admitting he had signed it after he says Force, Mangan, and Burns offered a five-figure payoff he says he never actually got.
According to sources, it was around the time he purchased the Emmy that Barzman hatched a plan to make a trove of fake Basquiats and sell them on eBay, connecting them to Mumford’s storage locker. Barzman had been hard up for cash for years and owed way more than he had. Since his childhood in the mid-’90s, he’d been undergoing annual surgeries on his leg due to a tumor that was discovered on his knee when he was a 12-year-old growing up in the prosperous valley town of Sherman Oaks. Each year, he’d spend months in the orthopedic department at UCLA. He lost his health insurance in 2007 and started racking up thousands in medical debt due to his regular appointments, and in 2012, he was denied insurance for the fifth year in a row due to a preexisting condition. He reached out to a childhood friend who shared his love for art and had better-than-amateur draftsmanship. The idea was to make a bunch of would-be Basquiats as soon as possible and sell them quickly on eBay, where the market for forged work was thriving and essentially unregulated. Barzman himself had recently purchased a fake Andy Warhol Soup Can.
“At the time, eBay was, for lack of a better term, just the Wild West,” one of the sources close to Barzman said. “There was so much counterfeit and just bad stuff.”
So they made the works on cardboard, quickly, without any practice, working in the free-jazz style that the artist himself would have embraced. The work found a buyer quickly.
Email records show that in late 2012, Barzman allegedly began selling the artwork online, where he specified in the listing they came from Mumford’s locker. According to interviews with the current owners of the works, Force spotted images Barzman had posted and immediately asked his longtime business partner Leo Mangan to act as a backer. Sources close to Barzman tell a different origin story. According to the Barzman camp, Quan, the man later imprisoned for selling rhinoceros horns to an undercover agent, was the first to reach out. Then his colleagues Force, Burns, and Mangan quickly came on board. And according to an emailed “Bill of Sale” and other emails provided to VF, in October 2012, Barzman sold 13 purported Basquiat works to Quan, who paid $10,500 for the haul of cardboard, and his business associates Burns and Force quickly arranged for the purchase of several more (although, as an FBI agent noted in the affidavit, fabricated provenance documents “typically accompany forged artwork.”) Quan has since sold his interest in the collection and did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
With the deal settled, Barzman had to find a way to hand off the works to their new owners. According to a source, after months of negotiations, Barzman was too intimidated to meet them himself, so his fellow artist agreed to meet Force in Ventura, near where the source says Force was living in Santa Barbara. The alleged accomplice of the forgery tossed the works-on-cardboard in the back of a Cadillac, drove an hour north on the 101, and sold the works out of his trunk. According to sources, the new owners paid cash.
But authenticating mysterious artwork is long haul, narrative-intensive work, and Barzman and his partner were still on the hook with their buyers. Barzman admitted to the FBI that he signed a notarized document indicating he found the paintings in Mumford’s storage locker among the baseball memorabilia and the statuettes. But according to the plea agreement and the sources close to Barzman, the owners wanted more cooperation, more proof, more evidence that the works were real Basquiats. In the years following the sale, the owners kept in touch with Barzman, asking him to participate in the process of selling the works by corroborating their provenance. Mangan, in particular, seems to have aggressively pursued Barzman. The auctioneer told FBI agents that when he told Mangan he could not prove the works’ origins, Mangan “reacted with anger.” “I was not even angry on that phone call,” Mangan said in his response to the claim. “I called him back the next day at the burner number that registered on my phone and shared with him that lying to the FBI can get him five years in a federal facility.”
They’d need a more pedigreed authentication than Barzman could provide in any case. In 2017, the trio of owners reached out to O’Donnell, who had become something of a celebrity in the art authentication community. During his decades as an in-demand LA lawyer, O’Donnell built a reputation for defending the little guy against a giant Tinseltown juggernaut. (Forbes once called him “the Perry Mason of Hollywood.”) He defended Art Buchwald when he sued Paramount for stealing the idea for Coming to America (for which Buchwald was awarded $150,000 for his contribution) and backed the novelist and visual artist Barbara Chase-Riboud when she sued Steven Spielberg, nearly holding up the release of Amistad (the two sides eventually settled out of court). Spielberg, impressed, later hired O’Donnell himself. It all came crashing down when O’Donnell was indicted for illegally funneling $26,000 to John Edwards’s 2004 presidential campaign, pleaded guilty to two misdemeanors, and did 60 days in a low-security facility near Santa Barbara. O’Donnell rebounded by joining the mega-firm Greenberg Glusker, and now treats paintings like court cases he’s trying to win, and spent years trying to prove that his alleged Pollock was given by the artist to a now deceased scientist named John Adams Comstock.
O’Donnell was initially unfamiliar with Basquiat, a source told me. (He thought that Force was talking about some guy named “Brisket.”) But after the owners of the discovered maybe-Basquiats approached O’Donnell, the lawyer did his research and realized that if they were real, they were made by one of the most important artists of the late 20th century. So he agreed to buy six works and act as an advocate for the so-called Venice Collection Group—despite what he later said were his deep doubts at the time. As O’Donnell wrote in the catalog essay for the show, “When I told a close friend familiar with my fruitless Pollock labors about taking on the Basquiats as ‘a client,’ he bluntly chided me for undertaking another ‘frolic and detour.’”
But O’Donnell started racking up some wins. The Basquiat estate was no longer authenticating works—the artist’s family ceased all such services in 2012, following a 2008 lawsuit—but the handwriting expert James Blanco said that the script was consistent with the artist. Dr. Jordana Moore Saggese, currently an art history professor at the University of Maryland, wrote in a report commissioned by the owners that several of the works in her professional opinion, “may be attributed to Jean-Michel Basquiat.” Diego Cortez, an old associate of Basquiat’s, saw the works in person in New York and, according to the catalog, told everyone they could be legit. (Cortez died in June 2021 before the Orlando show opened.) Michael Klein, a dealer who worked with the Soho gallery owner Annina Nosei when she gave Basquiat a studio in the basement and often watched him work, contributed to the museum catalog and told me he brought Al Diaz, Basquiat’s old graffiti partner, to see the works in New York. According to Klein, Diaz gave them a “thumbs up.”
“Yeah, they looked real,” Klein said. “I mean, I’ve seen fakes, and when you see a fake, you know it’s a fake. I mean, it’s very hard to recreate that.”
When reached on the phone this month, Diaz said, “Of course I’ve never seen [Basquiat] doing stuff on shitty cardboard—I never believed it was real.”
“The owners called me and I was like, I don’t want anything to do with your collection,” he went on. “The way [Mangan] approached me, he acted like a Texas tycoon. What he’s trying to do is set me up to believe that these are really nice people. And I’m a New Yorker—I can’t be fooled. I didn’t believe that it was real.”
Repeating an anecdote that originates with Mangan, De Groft told me Richard Marshall, the curator who staged the first big posthumous Basquiat show in 1992 at the Whitney, was given a tour too, and upon seeing the works supposedly said “they were some of the most spectacular Basquiats that he’d ever seen.”
“He was going to write a thing, and he died two weeks later,” De Groft said.
And then there was the poem. Somehow, the owners of the paintings also had in their possession a poem, acquired not from the storage locker but from somewhere else, that Basquiat was said to have written with Mumford to commemorate their friendship. Quite amazingly, the text specifically refers to “25 paintings bringing riches.” At the bottom are the initials “JMB,” once again authenticated by Blanco.
So did Basquiat and Mumford know each other? There are no photographs of the two together, but they were at least in Los Angeles, a city of then about three million people, at the same time. In the early 1980s, the artist had stayed for a time in Larry Gagosian’s house in Venice. Basquiat would use part of the home as a studio to make work for his second solo show at Gagosian’s LA space, set for the spring of 1983. He was new to Los Angeles but befriended the gallery’s staff there and fellow artists, and brought out his girlfriend for a week, an aspiring singer who performed under the name Madonna.
But there is little in the way of indisputable proof that Basquiat and Mumford met. Taryn Burns claims she received voicemails from Mumford confirming that he knew Basquiat, but she couldn’t produce them. A Toronto art dealer named Talin Maltepe signed a sworn statement saying she spoke with Mumford over the phone, as did her friend, the documentary filmmaker Ed Celis. Recordings of those conversations do not exist. Force and Mangan claim to have visited Mumford at his home, but they have no photographs of the meetings and no recordings. Mangan was detailed when he discussed Mumford’s carpal-tunnel braces but had no items Mumford gave him or pictures he took while he was there.
Karfiol, Mumford’s lawyer, says she was approached by Force and Mangan to make an in-person introduction—according to the affidavit, Burns and Mangan offered to fund a TV show Mumford would produce once the works sold for $1 million if he would sign a sworn document. Mumford never agreed, despite his financial woes. Karfiol says she never arranged a meeting.
“I don’t believe they spoke to him,” Karfiol said. “I don’t believe for a minute they talked to Thad.”
Mumford denied ever meeting the artist, signing a document in August 2017 in the presence of special agent Elizabeth Rivas that stated: “At no time in the 1980s or at any other time did I meet with Jean-Michel Basquiat, and at no time did I acquire or purchase any paintings by him. Furthermore, at no time did I store any Basquiat painting at Ortiz Brothers Moving and Storage in Los Angeles or anywhere else.”
The affidavit has other details, including some that call into question the Basquiat-expert cosigns that the owners have used to trace a provenance for the artworks. Agents got in touch with the veteran art dealer John Cheim, who has staged a Basquiat exhibition at his gallery Cheim & Read, and served on the Basquiat authentication committee before it disbanded. According to agents, while trying to convince Karfiol that the works were legit, O’Donnell told her that Cheim was one of “two leading Basquiat experts [who] confirmed their authenticity several years ago when they viewed them in New York.” But when the feds interviewed Cheim, he told them he “immediately had suspicions about the artwork’s authenticity and thought that they were fake.”
When I reached Cheim over email, he said “They looked fake the minute we saw them—though more accomplished than many. It’s quite incredible what people assume a Basquiat looks like.”
He added that he went with Richard Marshall, the Whitney curator who De Groft said was going to write an essay before he died. In an email to me, Cheim said, “We both dismissed them—amazing to me that it has taken this long to round them up.”
Another scholar mentioned in the catalog was Saggese, who upon seeing the Basquiats told O’Donnell, according to the catalog, “These are marvelous works in excellent condition that have many of the distinctive elements of Basquiat’s best paintings.” According to a 2017 document provided to Vanity Fair, Saggese had accepted a fee of $60,000 from the Basquiat Venice Collection Group—the consortium, of O’Donnell, Force, Mangan, and Burns that owned the works—to look at what was then 27 pieces, with the contract stating that they would accept her findings regardless of what they were.
The document is signed by Saggese, and it also states that the professor “shall grant us a license to use your report in connection to the marketing and sale of the paintings.”
According to the catalog, she later said, referring to the works that she was allowed to see in person, “[I]t is my professional opinion that [these six paintings] may be attributed to Jean-Michel Basquiat based on their comparison to known works, with which these paintings share imagery and icons.”
But according to the affidavit, Saggese appeared to have a change of heart, and in February 2022 emailed O’Donnell and De Groft furious that her name was being used to promote the show, despite the contract.
“As I stated before I am in no way authorized to authenticate unknown works by Jean-Michel Basquiat and want no involvement with this show,” she wrote. “I do not want to be further associated with any promotion of these works for financial gain or otherwise.”
The next day, De Groft responded, cc’ing O’Donnell.
“You want us to put out there you got $60 grand to write this? Ok then. Shut up. You took the money. Stop being holier than thou. You did this not me or anybody else,” he wrote. “These are real and legit. You know this. You are threatening the wrong people. Do your academic thing and stay in your limited lane.” Saggese did not respond to multiple requests for comment. In a statement released last July, she wrote that when she tried to disassociate herself from the exhibition, De Groft “bullied and insulted” her.
When asked about this email, De Groft clarified that he was not involved in paying her, and she was not paid to authenticate—she was paid to write a report, good or bad. He also said the contract had allowed her name and report to be associated with the works, and if she said the paintings “may be attributed to Jean-Michel Basquiat” in the past, she can’t unring that bell years later.
“I was rude to an academic colleague,” he said. “I should not have been rude, but it was taken out of context, because I was in a dispute with her, because she had written three reports about these paintings, and attributed them all to Basquiat, based on certain things.”
But he also said that, seeing as his email was a major catalyst for his firing, he thought things got a bit out of hand.
“I certainly did nothing wrong. All I did was bring an art exhibition to a regional museum and made it internationally famous. I’m the major casualty here, because they wanted a scapegoat,” De Groft said. “They wanted a sacrificial lamb. You’re going to fire me because of an email that’s about 10% as rude as Donald Trump has talked to people internationally?”
If the works and provenance were real, why would Mumford risk a perjury charge and tell the FBI they were never in his possession and that he never met Basquiat? “If I had the FBI sitting with a spotlight on me, which unfortunately I’ve had before, things get very real, very fast,” Mangan said.
Mumford was already quite sick and perhaps wasn’t thinking straight, other owners suggested—just one of several theories they’ve put forward to salvage their narrative. One of the owners also points to the fact Mumford had declared bankruptcy years earlier and, the owner speculates, didn’t mention any Basquiats in the disclosures, so perhaps he was worried he’d committed tax fraud.
Other owners made a much more personal, and unverifiable claim: Mumford and Basquiat were not just friends, but had a romantic relationship that Mumford was trying to cover up. Mumford had a long-term female partner who died in the ’80s, Karfiol told me. He never married. While he mostly had long-term relationships with women, Basquiat seems to have had some sexual experiences with men. According to Phoebe Hoban’s book Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art, he had early sexual experiences with men while living in Puerto Rico; Hoban recounts the critic Rene Ricard saying Basquiat would turn tricks in San Juan’s Condado neighborhood. In his Vanity Fair story on Basquiat published shortly after his death, Anthony Haden-Guest wrote that Basquiat had “a brief fascination with bisexuality” early in his career. Suzanne Mallouk, his girlfriend in the early ’80s, said that he had “a history of being bisexual.”
When I asked De Groft for more information on the basis for this claim, he said, “When you look into Mumford, multiple websites, they say, ‘Yeah, he’s born this day, raised, blah, blah, blah.’ And then it’ll say that he’s gay.” I could not find the websites he was referring to.
Mangan brought a poem to De Groft that the owners say was written by Basquiat and Mumford, a piece of evidence that was so integral to the provenance narrative that it was plastered on the wall of the museum during the exhibition. The poem that they allegedly collaborated on has lines such as:
Mangan said he acquired the work via the novelist Adriana Trigiani. From 1989 to 1992, Trigiani served on the writing staffs of The Cosby Show and A Different World. According to a sworn statement, in “late 2015 or early 2016” Trigiani was approached by a woman seeking evidence that Thad Mumford, whom Trigiani worked with on A Different World in the ’90s, had some kind of relationship with the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. In a sworn statement signed in April, Trigiani said she had reached out.
“I was able to contact Thad and told him what I needed,” Trigiani said. “Thad came back to me with a document that he called ‘a poem written by Jean and me.’”
Vanity Fair reached out to Trigiani multiple times following Barzman’s confession but did not receive a response.
The affidavit issued for the search warrant and the plea agreement only mention the poem in passing, refusing to take any side on whether it helps prove the authenticity of the works. But, given that the FBI’s acceptance of Barzman’s version of the story indicates it believes he made the “Basquiats” and pretended to find them in Thad Mumford’s locker, it’s very unlikely that a poem cowritten by Mumford and Basquiat is real. Sources also said that the lack of a fraud charge against Barzman could have to do with his cooperation. A spokesperson for the FBI declined to comment on an ongoing investigation.
William Force, Taryn Burns, and Talin Maltepe did not respond to emails. But a former FBI agent had some idea of where the case is headed in the coming months. Robert Wittman is the founder of the FBI’s Art Crime Team and has written books about his time at the Bureau. I wanted to ask about proving the accuracy of the provenance documents I’d received, and I wanted to know whether such evidence in art fraud cases is often fabricated. Certificates of authenticity, he said, are easy to fake.
“I had a case involving fake Basquiats and individuals and artists in New York—Alfredo Martinez, Alfredo wanted to sell these Basquiats,” he said. “He did sell one to a gallery, and then the gallery found out that the certificate, the number on the certificate, was too high. It didn’t exist yet.” (Martinez served two years in prison for forging Basquiats.)
Rivas stepped down from the head of the Art Crime Team last year, handing the reins to Allen Grove, an agent who’s been working with Rivas for the last few years. The statute of limitations on this case is five years, according to Wittman, so Grove has four years remaining to decide how to further pursue charges.
As for the paintings, Wittman said that the government could move to put the art in forfeiture, meaning the work would be used for various functions—say, props in a drug sting.
“If you have a high-end situation where you’re dealing with, say, Colombian cartels, where they have lots of money—and I’m not talking about street dealers, I’m talking about the actual individuals who are high up—you might have an apartment where you want to have some nice looking art,” Wittman said. “I used it on one case on a yacht in Miami to encourage a criminal to work with me—I paid him in diamonds to help me move five pieces of art for our Colombian drug dealer.”
Or the more likely outcome would result in the evidence being disposed of.
“Basically, the government would probably move for forfeiture of the artwork,” Wittman said. “It wouldn’t be allowed to go into the public commerce, at which point, yeah, it would probably be destroyed.”
