Genius steals, Picasso once said. But stupidity can be light-fingered, too. Angela Gulbenkian, 40, the millennial grifter who has just been sentenced to more than three years in prison on a pair of fraud charges alleging that she misappropriated more than $1.3 million, had seemed neatly positioned to have a long and perfectly respectable career in the world of art. She was a member of one of Europe’s most renowned art-collecting families. She had an eye for fashionable and commercial pieces. And she seemed to possess the contacts, the gall, and the guile that this opaque and chummy game has long required.
Unfortunately for her, she was also monumentally greedy—far beyond the common or garden-variety rapacity of your average dealer. This was a private-jet-hopping, Harrods-spree-shopping, keeping-up-with-the-Gagosians level of avarice. And it could only be sustained by one of two things: spectacular success or a spectacular swindle. It has now become abundantly clear that Gulbenkian chose to take the Picasso route.
