‘The money is not real – it’s a feckless level of wealth’: the inside story of the biggest art fraud in American history

Orlando Whitfield was a student when he became best friends with Inigo Philbrick, ‘the art world’s Bernie Madoff’. He talks about how their decade of hustling would lead one to a breakdown – and the other to jail.

He describes the art market as a corrupt, unregulated orbit sloshing with drugs, $5,000 bottles of wine, yachts, private jets, prostitution, and populated with oligarchs and “sons and daughters of the sinister rich” – all built around betting on “wildly unstable assets of no intrinsic value”. In the end being a part of it made him sick (literally). But Whitfield’s crazed escapades contract to microscopic next to those of Philbrick, whom the FBI says committed the largest art fraud in American history. He dealt in the “secondary” market – reselling pieces that have been sold before – to individual collectors and investors who grouped together for high-value works.

Read more at: ‘The money is not real – it’s a feckless level of wealth’: the inside story of the biggest art fraud in American history