25 December 2013
To many people, the art dealer Jose Carlos Bergantiños Diaz seemed like an enviable man.
He came to the United States from Spain with his Mexican inamorata, Glafira Rosales, some 30 years ago, barely a dollar in his pocket, and only a few words of English at his command.
Soon, he was living life on a grand stage.
He bought a fine house in a wealthy New York suburb, opened an art gallery with Ms. Rosales and maintained auction accounts at Christie’s and Sotheby’s. He boasted of a friendship with Andy Warhol, an audience with the pope and his daughter’s violin performance at the Clinton White House. He created a charity that helped the poor and the sick in the Dominican Republic and Haiti, and won awards for his humanitarianism.
Behind the curtain, though, federal prosecutors say, Mr. Bergantiños was engaged in a very different sort of enterprise, a daring forgery swindle that fooled the art world and led collectors to spend more than $80 million on dozens of phony masterworks.
The marketing of these forgeries, many of them sold through the offices of what was once New York’s oldest gallery, Knoedler & Company, has been among the most stunning art market scandals of the last decade. But little of the focus has been on Mr. Bergantiños, who is identified in court papers only as CC-1 — or co-conspirator 1.
Most of the attention has been trained instead on his girlfriend, Ms. Rosales. She is the only person to be arrested in the case and in September pleaded guilty to the fraud.
But now, Ms. Rosales, 57, is cooperating with federal prosecutors and the authorities are focusing more intently on the role they say Mr. Bergantiños played.
He was the person, they say, who recruited a little-known artist living in Queens to create world-class counterfeits. It was Mr. Bergantiños who treated the canvases to make them look old and then forged the signatures of artists like Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell, federal authorities say. And much of the $33 million the couple garnered from the sales was shipped to bank accounts in Spain controlled by his brother Jesus.
Mr. Bergantiños, whose identity as Ms. Rosales’ partner and boyfriend is confirmed by other court papers, no longer lives at the Long Island home they once shared. He has not been charged, and efforts to reach him by telephone, email and through his former lawyer and charity were unsuccessful. His former lawyer said he believes that he is out of the country.
But Mr. Bergantiños, 58, left behind a trail of unrelated lawsuits and disputes over allegations of fake art that might have alerted dealers to problems in his business dealings, if only they had known to look.
Many details about Jose Carlos Bergantiños Diaz — one of several variations of his name that he used — remain obscure, but a compelling portrait emerges through court papers, newspaper accounts and interviews with business associates and friends, some of whom asked to remain anonymous because of the continuing police investigation.
As a young man, Mr. Bergantiños worked in Spain for a construction company run by his brother Jesus Angel Bergantiños Diaz, friends said, and later moved to Mexico where he worked in a restaurant and met Ms. Rosales. He later recounted the couple’s dangerous, dramatic entry into the United States, which he described as a midnight dash across the Rio Grande.
By 1984, he was living in New York and waiting on tables in a Spanish restaurant, according to Jesus Manso, known as Lolo, a co-worker who now owns several restaurants in Manhattan.
Mr. Manso recalled Mr. Bergantiños as a man with boundless ambition who told friends a few years later that he had entered the art business, bankrolled by his brother.
“A friend of mine told me he had bought a Picasso for $1 million,” Mr. Manso said.
He described Mr. Bergantiños as a man brimming with confidence and prone to spinning tall tales. “He believes in himself,” he said. “He believes whatever he says.”
One night, for example, Mr. Manso recalled, they went to a nightclub where the doorman balked at letting them in. Mr. Bergantiños, he said, began to chastise the bouncer, unspooling a story on the spot about how he was an American veteran and deserved more respect.
