Alleged Warhol art fraudster makes bail
FBI: Man stole works, duped buyer
A 43-year-old Lynn man who federal prosecutors say stole two Andy Warhol paintings from a former college classmate and then used them to produce counterfeits he sold to a Los Angeles gallery owner he met after posting them on eBay was released yesterday when his mother posted his $75,000 bail.
Brian Walshe was arraigned in U.S. District Court in Boston on one count of wire fraud for allegedly lying about the authenticity of the knockoffs and failing to return $50,000 of the $80,000 purchase price to Ron Rivlin, the owner of Revolver Gallery.
Magistrate Judge Jennifer C. Boal ordered Walshe to have no contact with his college roommate or Rivlin, submit to electronic monitoring and surrender his passport, among other conditions of his release.
The defendant took two paintings from Warhol’s 1974 “Shadows” series belonging to a former Carnegie Mellon Univer- sity classmate, telling him he could sell them for a good price for him, according to a criminal complaint.
The former classmate never received anything in return for them, prosecutors allege. In 2016, Rivlin contacted Walshe through an eBay post, which claimed he was selling the works at a steep loss to pay for home renovations.
Walshe offered Rivlin documentation proving the works’ authenticity, specifically noting the works’ Warhol Foundation registration numbers printed on the backs of the paintings, according to the criminal complaint.
Rivlin flew an associate to Boston to meet with Walshe at the Four Seasons Hotel, where he gave him an agreed-upon $80,000 cashier’s check in exchange for the paintings. At the time of the exchange, the frames on the paintings obscured the registration numbers, prosecutors allege.
Once the associate turned the paintings over to Rivlin, the complaint said, he noticed they did not match the photos Walshe had posted on eBay. The numbers were missing from the backs and the canvases did not appear to be from the 1970s.
“Mr. Walshe tried to make it right” and was stunned when the FBI turned up at his home Wednesday and arrested him, his attorney, Samuel B. Goldberg, said.
But Walshe’s own phone records show that he received 16 calls and texts from Rivlin from Nov. 8-12, 2016, according to the complaint, and all of them went unanswered.
When Walshe refunded Rivlin just $30,000 of the $80,000 purchase price, the gallery owner told him he had contacted the FBI, the complaint said.