In late February 2018 I woke up in the psychiatric ward of a hospital in West London. Outside, thick snow covered everything. I’d slept fitfully, waking every 15 minutes throughout the night when a nurse or orderly would open the door to my room to check on me. I was on suicide watch.
Over the past year my life had started to unravel. I’d been drinking heavily, mixing alcohol with Xanax and tramadol. My relationship with my dying father was at a silent impasse, and on Valentine’s Day my girlfriend had broken up with me by phone.
Beyond my crumbling personal life, I was struggling at work. It had been 11 years since I’d become an art dealer, and the ensuing decade had had the feel of several lifetimes. The incessant traveling that a career as a dealer demands—to New York and L.A. several times a year, as well as frequent European trips and to art fairs in between—had ground me down; but the lies, one-upmanship, trophy-touting, and greed that the industry runs on were the real poison.
Duplicitousness had become my way of life, the constant demands of clients and artists leaving me nothing of myself.
But my story starts more than a decade before any of this—long before I started a gallery; before I learned to lie as easily as I breathed air; long before art was reduced in my eyes to no more than numbers on a spreadsheet; before I had even thought of entering the art world at all.
My story starts with a friendship, with a young man called Inigo Philbrick.
Playing to the Gallery
When you embark on something at 20, which is when Inigo and I, inexperienced and wet behind the ears, started dealing art together, there’s no telling where it will go, how boundless an opportunity it might reveal itself to be. It was the beginning of a friendship which, more and longer than any other, has shaped the way I experience and confront the world, and the whole direction of my adult life.
Inigo had grown up in a family that was deeply rooted in the world of contemporary art. His mother was an artist and his father was director of the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, a well-respected regional institution in southern Connecticut; his grandfather ran a fine-art foundry that worked with artists like Frank Stella and Joel Shapiro.
Inigo himself had already interned at the prestigious White Cube gallery and continued to do odd jobs there. He lived in a Georgian house in Bloomsbury, a bourgeois squat that belonged to the British Museum, that was populated by artists and curators and designers.
In his father, Inigo told me, he had seen the struggles of working in museums—the interminable committee meetings and the schmoozing of self-serving donors, the inclusivity quotas, the health and safety measures, and the marketing campaigns, and all before you got anywhere near an artwork or an artist. Inigo didn’t want to end up in all of that. He preferred the immediacy of the commercial art world.
“The commercial gallery world is, as I see it, where the really exciting stuff happens,” he said. “When you’re a gallerist talking to an artist, you can help shape their body of work, you can contribute something to their practice, to their career. When you sell the work, though, when it goes to a big collector who then gives it to a museum—then you’re changing art history.”
He stopped, almost as impressed as I was with his impassioned eloquence. “Plus,” he said, grinning, “I don’t want to live in a basement … for the rest of my life. I want to make some fucking money.”
One Saturday in the late summer of 2011 Inigo had lunch at Chucs, a Mayfair restaurant that is home to the kind of room-service-inspired food beloved by the sort of people who spend a lot of time in high-end hotels.
Inigo’s mood that day was pretty great. As usual, he’d had a profitable summer; where many other dealers stopped working in favor of a supine August of fresh fish and rosé-pink flesh, Inigo always doubled down. All summer long he would buy and sell with furious abandon, catering to the needs of clients whose fear of losing money was exceeded only by their fear of financial inaction.
As he sauntered down Dover Street he looked every inch the carefree man-about-town, a modern-day Beau Brummel in his bespoke shirt and Prada jeans. Both his phones (by this time Inigo was carrying a BlackBerry just for e-mails and an iPhone for everything else) were vibrating regularly in his hand, and he had a pleasant buzz on from the wine at lunch.
As he turned east on Stafford Street and then south onto Albermarle Street, Inigo switched from one call to another, more important one. He entered the Royal Arcade, a glossy snicket that runs from Albermarle into Old Bond Street. Inigo was tiring of his caller’s conversation as he looked at the shoes in the window of George Cleverley, all scalloped calfskin and effete toes.
A little further along, he stopped in front of a shop called the Watch Club. A shiny array of watches was arranged over two velvety levels beneath the convex window. Inigo’s eye ran over them: metal and leather and crystal and price tag and all their slyly moving parts. Still his caller droned on.
“I don’t want to live in a basement … for the rest of my life. I want to make some fucking money.”
Opposite him was the Burlington Arcade. He walked past windows stuffed with cashmere and windows stacked with shiny black pens. Halfway down he stopped in front of another watch shop: more of the same—vintage Rolexes and Omegas in serried rows, buffed to perfection like guardsmen outside a palace.
And then, if you’d been there, you might have noticed a brief moment, a firework burst of something like inspiration or sudden recognition flash across Inigo’s face. His phone disconnected with his ear as he leaned forward to press his face to the glass.
Inigo turned on his heel and retraced his steps. By the time he’d left the Burlington Arcade the same way he entered it, he’d ended his phone call. Enough was enough and besides, he had the scent of something else, something more immediate, in his nostrils now. He walked quickly, almost trotting, all the while maintaining the dignity of a Mayfair man. Once back inside the cool, shadowy recess of the Royal Arcade, he holstered both his phones and walked into the Watch Club.
Ten minutes later, he left the shop with a Rolex Explorer from the 1970s boxed in a stiff paper bag. Walking again in the direction of the Burlington Arcade, Inigo removed the watch box from the bag before pocketing the receipt and throwing the bag away in a bin on the corner of Old Bond Street.
With the box under his arm, he walked into the second watch shop and showed his new watch to the man behind the counter. A quarter of an hour passed, and eventually Inigo came out of the shop minus the watch but holding an envelope containing a check. It was made out for £500 more than he’d bought the watch for a little less than an hour previously.
In the following years, Inigo rapidly became seen as one of the best secondary-market dealers, not only of his generation but in the world. He was, so he would tell me, regularly dealing with some of the biggest players in contemporary art, from household-name galleries like Gagosian and Hauser & Wirth to the kind of rarefied secret money that is the stuff of most art dealers’ dreams. He was ahead of trends, asking tomorrow’s prices for today’s paintings—and achieving them.
His collectors kept coming back not simply because he seemed to have the most amazing access and to be able to help them acquire artworks that would improve the value of their collections and provoke the envy of their friends, but because when they came to sell—and they almost always did, through Inigo—their initial eye-watering outlay would be rewarded with a robust return. Inigo, everyone agreed, was the real deal.
Inigo and I saw each other only very occasionally around this time. Once, he invited me to fly on a private jet to Ibiza with him and some friends to see DJ Solomun play his last set of the season at Pacha. On another occasion, I joined him and his girlfriend and some of their friends for dinner at Min Jiang, a Chinese restaurant at the top of the Royal Garden Hotel in Kensington. Below us Kensington Gardens, one of the most expensive residential streets in the world, looked paltry and down at heel.
As Inigo leapfrogged his way up the art-world food chain, the people he surrounded himself with gradually but noticeably changed. At the beginning, he had mentors; next there were wonky auction-house guys whose understanding of the market was all head and no heart; then there were the serious collector-collaborators, all with serious money, many of them esoterically Belgian; lastly, there were the frivolous sons and daughters of the sinister rich, playing with their parents’ cash after they’d figured out the really good parties weren’t in the fashion world anymore.
Inigo was ahead of trends, asking tomorrow’s prices for today’s paintings—and achieving them.
These people were bored-by-it-all rich, fuck-you-don’t-talk-to-me rich. They spoke with barely varnished ignorance and displayed unconcealed contempt for people less wealthy than themselves—which was almost everyone. They spent their money like water precisely because it wasn’t their money. And, good Lord, were they dull.
With them, Inigo was a pale imitation of the young man I had met 12 years previously. He had vanished into his bank balance.
It’s around this time that things were beginning to come apart for Inigo. He had fallen foul of convention too many times in the London art world—as well as the worsening of his relationship with his mentor and backer, the founder of White Cube, Jay Jopling, Inigo was on the outs with a number of influential players on the London scene—and his finances were, as I now know, stretched to breaking point. He was going to greater and greater lengths to make things add up, doing things that were far beyond the realms of art dealing.
Inigo had always worked at the edges of the acceptable in the art world—and those are some pretty distant boundaries—but until he was talking to me, years later, from the comfort of his desert-island hideaway, I had no idea the lengths to which he had gone to stay afloat.
Miami Heat
In London, Inigo had largely been a private man; in Miami, where he moved in 2018, he became a very visible man, selling very visible things.
The oft-quoted line of Gertrude Stein’s, that when she arrived in Los Angeles she found “no there there,” might as well have been written about Miami. Despite its high-rise skyline, its Art Deco hotels awash in pastels; despite the neon clamor of its beaches and the insistent hue and cry of music everywhere calling you to an after-party that never seems to end; despite all this, Miami has a sense of impermanence that is pervasive.
The air on the morning of October 12, 2019, must have felt thick as a curtain. When Inigo leaned his head against the greenish tempered glass of the penthouse apartment he was viewing with his fiancée he felt no relief from the feeling that a crack which was opening beneath him would soon swallow him whole.
Inigo had been in Miami on and off for about two years by this time. To others in the art world, opening a gallery there was an odd move, one which smacked a little of desperation. Miami is an art town for only a couple of weeks a year, when Art Basel Miami arrives in early December. There are a few major collectors in the city, but none of the major galleries consider it worthwhile having permanent spaces there. But for Inigo, the move to Miami was something of a fresh start.
The opening of his Miami space on December 8, 2018, was a success. Crowds of collectors flocked to Miami from Europe and South America and New York and L.A. But underneath Inigo’s confident demeanor was simmering panic.
Inigo had always worked at the edges of the acceptable in the art world.
Around the same time, Inigo was fielding increasingly concerned e-mails from Daniel Tümpel and Loretta Würtenberger, of Fine Art Partners (F.A.P.) in Berlin, with whom he had been doing business for a couple of years by this point. F.A.P., whose suitably vague corporate motto is “providing professional services to the art world,” essentially acts as a private bank and uses as collateral high-value artworks owned by dealers or collectors in exchange for high-risk, high-return financing. But a spate of recent deals which Inigo and F.A.P. had entered into were taking longer to conclude than Tümpel and Würtenberger were comfortable with.
As the new year rolled around, Inigo did his best to make everything appear normal. His inbox told a different story. As well as F.A.P., a company called Athena Art Finance was chasing missed payments in increasingly agitated terms. He later told me that his monthly interest payments to Athena were $150,000. I couldn’t fathom that kind of pressure and wondered, not for the first time, if Inigo and I were made of very different stuff.
Still, even Inigo’s hardened nerves were starting to fray. Over the next few months he did what he could to extricate himself from the mess he was in, frantically moving money around and juggling the anguished calls of his many creditors in his trademark meretriciousness.
The desperate measures that had long characterized his modus operandi were repeatedly failing him, however, and when he stood with his head against the sweating glass in Miami in early October, in his pocket, on his phone, was a list of the countries that have no extradition treaty with the U.S.
It was time to run.
Confessions of a Fraudster
I spent so much of the past two years wanting to believe Inigo’s version of events, defending him to friends, feeling outrage at his treatment in the media: What did they know about this man who had been my friend for 15 years? In the conversations he and I had, over months, he had put across a persuasive picture of a young man in over his head, and I believed it wholly.
Yet eventually, I had to conclude what no one could fail to: that these were not wholly the actions of a young man who got in too deep but rather those of a charming and devious fraudster, too. I had been of a mind—of a desire—to believe that these were in a sense victimless crimes, that this was a case of a rich young man stealing from other rich people in some bathetic version of Robin Hood. It wasn’t true.
We saw the signs, I more than most—the bombastic, generous displays of wealth; the smothering magnanimity; the increasingly frequent contact with solicitors and accountants; the interminable communication blackouts—but we ignored them. As Inigo later said to me, “No one makes that much money that quickly in the art world. It’s not possible, it’s never been done, and never will be done … A lot of people knew, and thought that I would land the trick.”
But no dance goes on forever, and eventually Inigo ran out of moves. In June of 2020, Inigo was arrested by the F.B.I. in Vanuatu and extradited back to the U.S., where he was charged with wire fraud and aggravated identity theft.
The evidence against Inigo was overwhelming, and it is likely that his lawyers had advised him that juries wouldn’t understand the crimes he’d been charged with. He also was young and rich, a combination that would surely count against him if he were to be judged by ordinary members of the public. By the time Inigo stood up in Judge Sidney Stein’s courtroom on that warm November day, it had been just over two years since his disappearance in October 2019 and almost 18 months since he had been in federal custody. In all that time he hadn’t said a word publicly.
Stein instructed Inigo to tell the court, in his own words, what he did. “From or in about 2016,” Inigo began, “up to and including November 2019, within the Southern District of New York and elsewhere, I knowingly engaged in a scheme for obtaining money and property by false pretenses, representations and promises which was transmitted in interstate and foreign commerce…. I knew that my actions were wrong and illegal.”
The courtroom fell quiet, and Stein said, “Mr. Philbrick, let me ask you this. Sometimes defendants don’t know the answer to it. Sometimes they know it, but can’t articulate it. Sometimes they know the answer. Why did you do this?”
“For money, Your Honor,” Inigo replied.
“That simple?”
“That simple.”
Orlando Whitfield is a former art dealer. His writing has appeared in The Paris Review, The White Review, and The Sunday Times
