A jury final Friday (31 Could) convicted the infamous Los Angeles-based artwork vendor Douglas Chrismas of embezzling greater than $260,000 from his gallery’s chapter property within the spring of 2016. The 80-year-old founding father of Ace Gallery, a robust presence within the West Coast artwork scene throughout 5 a long time, is now dealing with as much as 15 years in federal jail.
Chrismas first began dealing artwork as a teen in Vancouver, Canada, throughout his summer season holidays from faculty. He moved to California within the Nineteen Sixties and, by means of his institution and bold enlargement of Ace Gallery, turned an early champion of Minimalism, Gentle and Area and Land Artwork, giving early exhibits to such now-canonical artists as Richard Serra, Donald Judd, Michael Heizer and James Turrell.
But Chrismas and his gallery appeared nearly perpetually embroiled in controversy. He had filed for chapter quite a few instances by 2006, and by 2016 he had been a defendant in no less than 55 lawsuits, together with by artists alleging that their consigned works had been taken with out pay, that their share of gross sales proceeds had been withheld or each. Chrismas pleaded no contest in 1986 to stealing seven works value a mixed $1.3m by Judd, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella and Andy Warhol. In 2007, he offered a Roy Lichtenstein piece that had beforehand been smuggled into the US by a Brazilian cash launderer, entangling him in a $1bn worldwide artwork fraud scandal.
The highway to Chrismas’s embezzlement prices started in 2013, when Ace Gallery filed for Chapter 11 chapter, a measure designed to guard distressed companies within the US whereas they restructure their money owed, property and operations in hopes of re-emerging as going considerations. Chrismas nonetheless remained in charge of the gallery till April 2016, when a missed cost within the chapter settlement compelled the courtroom to nominate an unbiased trustee to supervise the corporate’s property.
The trustee, the forensic accountant Sam Leslie, initially stated he supposed to maintain Chrismas on to steer Ace’s exhibition programme and gross sales efforts. However inside one month, Leslie as an alternative terminated Chrismas after discovering that tens of millions of {dollars} had been diverted from the gallery to mysterious personal accounts, and that dozens of artistic endeavors had been moved to non-public storage. Leslie ultimately introduced a civil lawsuit in opposition to Chrismas that resulted in a Could 2022 courtroom order demanding that the vendor repay $14.2m in gross sales proceeds to the gallery’s collectors. To attempt to bridge the hole, a whole lot of artistic endeavors and ephemera from Ace’s remaining stock have been liquidated in a web-based public sale final autumn.
Whereas the civil lawsuit was enjoying out, nevertheless, the FBI arrested Chrismas in July 2021 on separate prison prices that he had embezzled round $265,000 from Ace Gallery’s chapter property simply earlier than his removing by Leslie. In line with proof introduced at trial, Chrismas illegally funnelled the cash to an entity referred to as Ace Museum, a non-profit he managed with the alleged intention of opening and working a public establishment of that identify within the Mid-Wilshire district of Los Angeles.
Prosecutors introduced three separate counts of embezzlement from a chapter property in opposition to Chrismas: the primary stemming from his drawing a $50,000 test in opposition to the Ace Gallery property and signing it over to Ace Museum; the second from rerouting $100,000 in gross sales proceeds owed to Ace Gallery by a 3rd occasion who had bought work from the dealership; and the third depend from doing the identical for $114,595 value of artwork gross sales to a different shopper. In all circumstances, prosecutors stated, Chrismas paid the sums to the owner of the property leased by Ace Museum to maintain the latter present on its $225,000 month-to-month lease.
The jury discovered Chrismas responsible of all three counts of embezzlement after lower than one hour of deliberation, in response to the Los Angeles Occasions. His sentencing is scheduled for 9 September.
