Chapter 21- A Family Affair

Hilda Amiel, Leon Amiel's 71-year-old widow, died in January 1993. Before her death, she cooperated with defense attorneys in an 11-hour videotape in talking about how her late husband was close to some of the world's greatest artists, including Salvador Dali. She said the younger Amiel women who had been charged along with her with mail fraud in wholesaling Dali-attributed prints could not have known that the family business was corrupt.

Leon Amiel

Elaborating on Leon Amiel's closeness to Dali, Hilda Amiel testified on the videotape about how her daughter and codefendant Joanne Amiel "was not only invited to stay" at Dali's home in Spain during a session of print-signing but that Dali "wanted her to come the next day without her clothes...Dali was impotent and he loved to have nude women parade around and he asked Joanne if she would come the next day. Well, Leon ushered us out of there so fast that we never went back to the rest of the signing (of prints)."

Joanne Amiel, sister Kathryn Amiel and Kathryn's daughter, Sarina Amiel, went on trial in October 1993 in U.S. District Court in Uniondale, Long Island, New York. Assistant U.S. Attorneys Dave Hattem and Edgardo Ramos presented evidence that Leon Amiel's business constituted the largest source of counterfeit prints in the world, with sales in Europe, Canada, Japan and throughout the United States of prints falsely attributed to Dali, Marc Chagall, Joan Miro and Pablo Picasso. They produced checks and invoices reflecting more than $2 million in wholesale transactions, including more than $1.4 million in sales to Gallery Hall in Denmark, the European distribution nexus. They estimated public losses at the retail level associated with the four artists at up to $1 billion worldwide.

Prosecutors conceded that Leon Amiel, who had begun working at age 14 in a French-language bookstore, had become a legitimate importer of French-language textbooks and a major, legitimate publisher of art books. However, sometime in the late 1970s he began to publish and distribute counterfeit, limited-edition lithographs, etchings and aquatints allegedly created and signed by Dali, Chagall, Miro and Picasso. The Amiel women, prosecutors said, changed the name of the business to Original Artworks Ltd. after Amiel's death in 1988 and continued to knowingly sell fake prints to the network of wholesalers he had established. Former Nassau County policeman Thomas Wallace, longtime Long Island dealer Philip Coffaro and Lawrence Groeger, who had distributed Amiel prints to California's Upstairs Gallery, appeared at the Amiel trial as prosecution witnesses after pleading guilty to mail fraud. Amiel's former chromist testified that he had produced many of the artworks at issue. Defense attorneys contended that the three middlemen and other government witnesses either were convicted felons seeking lenient sentences from their plea bargains or held grudges against the Amiel family.

Contraband: New York Assistant Attorney General Rebecca Mullane stands with offerings of New York's Convertine Galleries, which included "Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus," "The Last Supper" and fake fake "Great Stallion of Port Lligat." Amiel was a source of prints for Convertine.

However, the defense was unable to refute the testimony of French art experts Jacques Dupin (Miro), Jean-Louis Prat (Chagall) and Robert Descharnes (Dali), all of whom said the Amiels' artwork was counterfeit. The defense relied on the contention that the women were unaware that the prints were fake and that the prosecution had produced no "smoking gun" proving they had knowledge of the fraud. The claim of ignorance was countered by testimony by two undercover U.S. postal inspectors who purchased directly from the Amiels and by a third undercover inspector who posed as an art dealer.

U.S. Postal Inspector Jack Ellis, head of Operation Bogart.

On the evening of December 1, 1993, after only a day-and-a-half of deliberation following a six-week trial, the jury found Kathryn Amiel guilty of 23 counts of mail fraud, Joanne guilty of 15 counts and Sarina guilty of 18. Each had been charged with 27 counts. The women sobbed briefly and hugged each other. After disposal of rounds of post-trial motions, the Amiel women were sentenced on May 12, 1995 - Kathryn to six-and-a-half years imprisonment, Joanne to three years and 10 months and Sarina to two years and nine months. The women began serving their federal prison terms in November 2000 after the rejection of their lengthy appeals.

"As we said in our opening statement" at the trial, said prosecutor David Hattem at its conclusion, "this case is about greed and not about art, and it has successfully closed down the largest single source of counterfeit prints in the world."