Art caper crushed
Money launderers undone in ‘Picasso’ sting
THESE CROOKS thought they could get away with a masterpiece of a money laundering scheme.
Brooklyn federal prosecutors announced a $50 million fraud indictment Friday involving a failed effort to buy a Picasso painting.
The charges focus on a farflung scheme to profit off manipulated stock prices. Six people, from locales including London, Mauritius and Budapest, were charged.
Matthew Green, a London art gallery owner, and co-conspirators were looking for a way to sanitize some $9 million that an undercover agent was offering them, telling them it was securities fraud money.
The art business was the “only market that is unregulated,” one of the defendants claimed during a secretly recorded December meeting. They proposed the agent buy Pablo Picasso’s “Personnages, Painted 11 April 1965” from Green. Prosecutors said the men were caught red-handed by the undercover agent’s artful sting operation.
Brooklyn U.S. Attorney Richard Donoghue said the defendants “engaged in an elaborate multi-year scheme to defraud the investing public of millions of dollars .”
Arvinsigh Canaye, 30, of Mauritius, was the only person arraigned Friday in Brooklyn Federal Court. He wasn’t linked to the Picasso deal, but was a manager of a company charged in the case. He pleaded not guilty.