For Money, Your Honour

Inigo Philbrick​ looked the part. He wore ‘tailored Milanese suits and shirts’; he lived in a flat on Grosvenor Square; ‘he was known by the maître d’s at some of the toniest restaurants in town.’ His private art gallery opened in Mayfair in 2011; within six years, it had an annual turnover of more than £100 million. He opened another in Miami in 2018. Philbrick flew on private planes and bought dinners that cost more than the average professional’s monthly salary. He is said to have begun his day by screaming ‘Inigo! Inigo! Inigo! Inigo!’ in the shower. ‘He was ahead of trends,’ Orlando Whitfield writes,

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.

In October 2019, Philbrick closed his business, fled to the South Pacific and hid for several months before being retrieved by the FBI, put on trial in New York and jailed for seven years for an $87 million fraud. His ‘mistakes’, as he now calls them, were many: he sold artworks to multiple buyers at once, created paperwork trails of fake clients to increase the value of works and defaulted on loans for which he’d used artworks he didn’t own as collateral. It was an ignominious end to a short but scintillating career.

Whitfield met his subject in 2006, when they were students at Goldsmiths, University of London. Orlando and Inigo both liked contemporary art and booze and, as Whitfield says, had equally ‘silly names’. Both their fathers worked in the art world: Philbrick’s was a curator in the US, Whitfield’s a former managing director of Christie’s in London. In 2007, Philbrick suggested ‘putting together a few deals’ and Whitfield readily agreed. I&O Fine Art operated in the secondary market, reselling artworks (unlike primary dealers such as gallerists, who sell pieces fresh from the studio). Although they were essentially two students with mobile phones, their backgrounds gave them contacts with art to sell and the means to buy more. They almost sold two freshly stencilled Banksys that Philbrick spotted on late-night walks, but other entrepreneurs got there first. They did sell a Paula Rego canvas on a quick trip to Lisbon, to a decrepit Portuguese dealer who came to their hotel room and paid in cash.

The partnership ended in their final year at university, but Philbrick had caught the bug. He got a job at White Cube and was taken under the wing of Jay Jopling, its founder, who had backed the YBAs as primary propositions and was now moving discreetly into the secondary field. Philbrick, having started as an intern, stood out immediately; he was fanatical about research. Before long, Jopling had put him in charge of his new operation and, after some initial success, staked him in a separate gallery, Modern Collections. Everything swiftly grew: the sales, the numbers, Philbrick’s stock about town. He became a regular at auctions, art fairs, parties: anywhere you could obtain influence and ketamine. When Philbrick and Jopling parted ways in 2014 – relations soured when the protégé sought greater profits and less oversight – Philbrick struck out alone with his own name above the gallery door. Good art, as he saw it, was saleable art: he traded in pumpkins by Yayoi Kusama and abstract paintings by Wade Guyton – shallow and decorative stuff. And he was refining his modus operandi: treating art as a financial instrument. He would ‘flip’ a work without physically possessing it, sometimes only buying a large share in it, then selling for a profit on behalf of his investors or himself. From here, Philbrick began to deal in shades of deeper and deeper grey.

His clear-cut crimes, from the falsification of paperwork to the sales of overlapping shares, seem to have begun after 2015. It isn’t clear how he intended to make good on all these dodgy deals, though it’s impressive how close he came. His undoing was a Rudolf Stingel painting of Picasso: over the course of three years, he sold 220 per cent of it to three buyers for a total of more than $15 million. Consigning it to auction in May 2019, he was confident it needed to go for only $6.5 million for him to be able to repay them all. This may seem deranged to you and me, but Whitfield has studied the documents and thinks he was probably right – though by this point Philbrick was so adept with contractual magic (and ‘additional subterfuge’) that Whitfield won’t even try to explain how. As the auction opened that month in New York, the price seemed attainable, because Philbrick had planted bidders in various states of ignorance. They would push each other upwards, and presto. He recalled to Whitfield later: ‘Everything’s lined up … I’ve danced out of this devilish jam.’

At last, reality bit. The auction was a bust, with the Stingel going for just $5.5 million. Worse, in the run-up, Philbrick had left himself exposed, lying to one of the painting’s owners – a German investment partnership called FAP – that Christie’s had legally guaranteed a sale price of $9 million. It seems incomprehensible that Philbrick, who emerges from Whitfield’s book as avaricious but not stupid, could have expected FAP not to notice that the painting had actually sold for considerably less. Admittedly, these clients weren’t razor-sharp – for three months, they accepted Philbrick’s story that Christie’s was reporting a lower number for ‘confidential reasons’ – but when their money kept failing to appear, and Philbrick became defensive, they finally showed some sense and contacted the auctioneers behind Philbrick’s back. The guarantee, Christie’s confirmed, was a forgery. Lawyers were summoned. From here, there was no way out. The two other owners of the Stingel appeared, claiming what was also theirs. Philbrick began to admit privately to some of his clients how his business had functioned for years. Then a lawsuit was filed in Miami, and all the lights came on.

But by now, Philbrick had vanished, along with his girlfriend, Victoria Baker-Harber, first seen on Made in Chelsea, and the pair were uncontactable by lawyers – if not by Whitfield, who made occasional contact on Telegram. Philbrick enjoyed the sub rosa life, and Whitfield only got hints about his location: a photo of an ornate gate, the sound of rustling ferns down the line. Philbrick gave Whitfield access to his British Airways rewards account in a gesture more inscrutable than sweet. ‘Does that mean you’re not coming back?’ Whitfield messaged. ‘Not for a while,’ Philbrick replied. ‘But you’ll like it here. The food’s great.’ Whitfield asked where ‘here’ was; Philbrick read the message, and didn’t respond.

But the fun couldn’t last for ever. As the tabloids were reporting with glee, Philbrick had scammed not just individual clients and collectors, but bankers, whole companies and even Mohammed bin Salman. (Whitfield read about the last of these in the Daily Mail and sent Philbrick a worried text: ‘Fucking hell, man! Look what happened to Khashoggi!’) Then, in early 2020, the FBI assigned Philbrick’s case to their Art Crime Team. Given the documents and contracts offered up en masse by the furious elite, it wasn’t the toughest job. They soon tracked him down to Vanuatu, where his tourist visa would offer him no protection. In June, the heavies arrived, found him shopping for vegetables, and hauled him off to a waiting jet.

Whitfield claims that Philbrick’s bloodlust wasn’t unusual. Nor, apparently, were his methods – up to a point. Insider trading isn’t a crime in the art world and price-fixing is common. A sale might be restricted to certain clients based on social status or the dealer’s instinct. The value of a given work can be gauged in many ways, altered as convenient and kept opaque. There is no central register of artworks, no regulatory body, no exchange. The art market is the largest unregulated industry in the world after cryptocurrency and drugs. Collectors may never see the most expensive pieces they buy, which are often held in air-conditioned freeports in Switzerland.

Philbrick at first pleaded not guilty, blaming the murkiness of the industry. Another part of his defence, which he has repeated in interviews, was that Robert Newland, Jopling’s former strategist, had joined his operation in 2016 and turned it criminal. US government investigators found spreadsheets detailing all the oversold artworks, with the hapless investors clearly marked, along with a note reading ‘How to fuck them?’, which Philbrick still maintains is Newland’s phrase. Whitfield agrees that Newland became Philbrick’s ‘consigliere’ and that under his influence Philbrick came to see art as an asset to be fractionalised. (After Philbrick was jailed, Newland pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud; last year he was sentenced to twenty months in prison.) Elsewhere, however, Philbrick’s defence was more vaporous. Flying to Vanuatu was ‘not great optics’, his lawyer admitted, but it didn’t prove anything. What’s more, he had made no attempt to hide himself. En route to the South Pacific, as Philbrick boasted to the Sunday Times, he and Victoria had spent three weeks exploring Japan. In Vanuatu, he booked tennis lessons under his own name and had a bespoke espresso machine installed.

Still, he knew what was coming. Shortly before his capture he sent Whitfield a dossier of information, including email exchanges, financial spreadsheets and falsified documents spanning his brief career, in the hope that his old friend would tell his side of the story in a magazine article. It was another attempt at damage limitation, and one which has to some degree paid off here. Whitfield tries to frame the trove as ‘the Pentagon Papers of the art world’, making Philbrick’s argument that he was no more corrupt than anyone else: ‘While these documents do not exonerate Inigo, they paint a picture of a world in which some of his actions – now widely decried – are common practice, even encouraged.’ But in advancing this case, Whitfield shows the difficulty of escaping the orbit of a narcissist. At one point in 2012, after a miserable spell in publishing, Whitfield returned to his old friend’s side, working as Philbrick’s ‘exhibitions manager’ at Modern Collections. The job title was a nonsense: Philbrick was more interested in making deals from his phone than in mounting shows. Eventually, Whitfield left to open his own gallery and their meetings became infrequent. Whitfield describes an evening at the Connaught Bar in 2017. Philbrick had just returned from Australia and strode in late, part way through a call. He ordered some ‘snacks’ – shrimp satay, Ibérico ham, truffle croque madame (‘hold the fries’) – and Dom Pérignon 2008. ‘Funny world, my friend,’ he said, ‘funny fucking world,’ and picked up his phone again. He repeated the line over dinner. Soon afterwards, he stiffed Whitfield on a deal, withholding $500,000 for a work he had received. Whitfield was forced to shutter his gallery and the following year had a breakdown. From hospital, he tried to call Philbrick, ‘repeatedly, to no avail’.

None of this should have come as a surprise. Philbrick was born to the art trade but was only ever interested in the opportunities it provided to enrich himself. When asked by the judge why he did it, he replied: ‘For money, Your Honour.’ Whitfield tells us that Philbrick loves art, but there is little evidence of it. He also claims that he ‘was just as happy at a good pizza joint or a roadside taco stop as in a Mayfair restaurant with a sommelier’. But Philbrick knew that appearances, in this world, matter more than essences. No oligarch puts their money into hands that have held tacos from a van.

All That Glitters succumbs to a weakness that Philbrick never had: uncertainty about what to think. Whitfield is no longer a dealer, yet he still attends gallery dinners and travels to art fairs. He is under no illusions about the industry’s ‘gooey layers of absurdity and frivolous late capitalism’, yet his colourless descriptions are caught between fascination and condemnation. The overall mood is suspicious, unhappy and more than a little pained. Whitfield’s best and most sustained chapter is the one where he escapes the gaudiness for a time. Under unsustainable pressure, he takes up paper restoration, working in a quiet studio in Camberwell, in ‘a room packed full like a midden … The painted wooden floor is pebbly with the rivets that once held machines.’ His work, under the veteran conservator Piers Townshend, consists of lifting flecks of dirt from mezzotints and lithographs. The smell of Lapsang curls off the page. ‘It was the most peaceful that I had felt in years.’

Whitfield seems never to have really questioned Philbrick’s extraordinary wealth: ‘I had an inkling,’ he admits, ‘that the money Inigo was making could not possibly be the proceeds of straightforward art dealing. Surely those people he was working closely with could sense this, too? Or perhaps, like me, the moral temperature of the art market made what they could see seem reasonable.’ He doesn’t go so far as to agree with Philbrick’s claim that ‘a lot of people knew’ of his crimes, and merely ‘thought that I would land the trick.’ This is ‘inconceivable’, Whitfield protests. ‘Certainly none of those people have come forward.’ I find him at best naive, and I suppose he would agree, given how keen he is to declare that he was ‘taken for a fool time after time’ and ‘shamefully duped’. For the record, nobody in the art world thinks that the biggest players have always stayed within legal bounds, and the reason interested parties stay quiet isn’t really that hard to conceive.

Whitfield does his best to make Philbrick a sympathetic figure – he was a great raconteur, we’re told, a good listener and fun to go bowling with – but the quotations in Philbrick’s own voice keep sabotaging his attempts. The wunderkind talks about the art market as though it’s a poker match: he likes to say X or Y is ‘to play for’; he calls Whitfield ‘playboy’ or ‘player’. (The writer and dealer Kenny Schachter, who is working on a screenplay about Philbrick, recalls him saying that his victims – Schachter was one of them – ‘shouldn’t have been in the game’.) His confidence was such that it took years for any of his clients to call his bluff. Whitfield’s best explanation is that Philbrick’s ‘excuses … were somehow always credible. He’d always come good in the end, and together they’d made a lot of money.’ Philbrick himself told Vanity Fair this spring that ‘I did things the wrong way, but creatively and with the best of intentions.’ He is now out of jail and plans to return to dealing. I’m sure he’ll do very well.