Warhol After Warhol by Richard Dorment

Author:Richard Dorment
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2023-12-05T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 23

A Cold-Blooded Murder – A Brazen Swindle

IT WAS TYPICAL OF Simon that he took the decision to go to court at a party. In April 2007, he met a hip young New York lawyer named Seth Redniss over drinks in the garden of Nick Rhodes’s house in London. When Simon told him about his beef with the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board, Redniss offered to represent him in court. He would act as a sole practitioner, assisted by two young attorneys, Brian Kerr and Lee Weiss, both of whom worked for the respected New York law firm of Dreier, LLP.

Founded in 2006 by Marc Dreier, this was one of the biggest law firms in America. With hundreds of employees, it occupied twenty-eight floors of a building at 499 Park Avenue. From April to July 2007, Redniss worked with Weiss and Kerr to prepare Simon’s complaint. They drew up a list of 157 allegations, which included a worldwide conspiracy to monopolise trade in Warhol’s work in violation of the Sherman antitrust laws, and conspiracy to persuade Warhol owners to submit their works for authentication when denial was a foregone conclusion. The complaint accused both the Foundation and the Board of unjust enrichment, fraud, and violation of the federal Lanham Act, which prohibits false or misleading statements that can confuse commerce.

Redniss and his colleagues from Dreier agreed to represent Simon on a 40 per cent no-win, no-fee basis. To anyone who has never been to court, this kind of arrangement sounds irresistible – and it would have been, had Simon been suing a double-glazing company for a botched job on the back porch. But he was taking on an organisation with unlimited resources, and Simon would still have to cover his own expenses – in a case like this, those costs could and did run into millions.

Initially, the Foundation asked the court to dismiss the suit as frivolous. It took two years before Judge Laura Swain ruled in Simon’s favour and allowed his suit to go forward. Immediately after that ruling, on 19 June 2009, the Foundation filed a counter-suit against Simon for ‘frivolous litigation’. It got nowhere, but the decks were now cleared for an epic battle that would become a milestone in the history of a new branch of the legal profession: art law.

Simon had already spent a fortune researching the history of the Red Self-Portrait. A lawsuit would require even more capital, so he hesitated. At that point, a friend from Los Angeles stepped in with an offer to cover all expenses incurred during the lawsuit. Leonid Rozhetskin was a forty-year-old Russian multi-billionaire, and a larger-than-life character. Born in St Petersburg, but raised in the US, he had been a scholarship student at Columbia University before graduating cum laude from Harvard Law School and starting work for a New York law firm. Rozhetskin made his billions in post-Soviet Russia by helping to set up the newly privatised Russian mobile-phone industry in the 1990s and later investing in Russian mining and venture-capital projects.

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