Art Thieves, Fakers and Fraudsters by Penelope Jackson

Author:Penelope Jackson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Awa Press

In May 2010, having heard nothing and becoming increasingly concerned that Maurice Bullmore and Pat Condon were not being investigated, Marianna contacted the Christchurch police. She was surprised and annoyed to discover that the detective in charge of the case was now working only part-time in order to pursue a career change as a beauty therapist. She felt the police had strung her along into believing they were working steadily on the case, when in fact there had been little progress. It now appeared Maurice Bullmore might escape culpability on medical grounds. The detective explained by email that she had spoken with Bullmore’s doctor at Sydenham Medical Centre and been told that Bullmore had advanced dementia and was spending a lot of time at Hillmorton, a hospital providing specialist mental health services. She was, she said, unsure whether he understood what a caution was.

Meanwhile, the ‘other chap’ (Pat Condon) had been avoiding her, missing appointments on the grounds he was too busy. Although the detective admitted having interviewed Condon once, there was no record of this. He had, she said, been given two weeks to front up to the police station or be charged. In the event, he didn’t show up and wasn’t charged.

On August 10, 2011 Detective Mike Bridgman notified Marianna that the police would not be pressing charges. The case, he said, was heavily reliant on further interviews with Pat Condon and Maurice Bullmore. Bullmore was in no state of mind to be interviewed and Condon had declined on the basis that he had already cooperated by being interviewed once. ‘The inability to interview those two individuals,’ Bridgman wrote, ‘leaves us in a position where the evidence we have is insufficient to establish a prima facie case in terms of any offences that may have been committed by these two individuals.’

It had been four years since Marianna had first approached the police and by now the force had more pressing priorities, including the aftermath of the devastating Christchurch earthquakes of September 2010 and February 2011. With 150-plus works still missing, money still owed, and the police uninterested in pursuing the case, she approached The Sunday Star-Times.

A media storm erupted, and not all of it focused on the works that were still missing. There was also considerable interest in the purchase by the national museum of Portrait of Jacqui. The newspaper’s headline read: ‘EXCLUSIVE – Te Papa caught up in major art scandal’. Although Te Papa had bought the painting in good faith from a reputable dealer, questions remained. Why had the museum not fully investigated the painting’s provenance – by, for example, contacting the family, a reasonably common way of finding out more about the content and provenance of an artwork? And why had it simply accepted the asking price of $150,000 when a larger work by Edward Bullmore, The Family, had sold in 2002 at Webb’s auction house in Auckland for only $100,000? It emerged that, as a sweetener, the dealer had suggested that a 1959 companion

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