Whiteley on Trial Read online

  ‘I didn’t walk all the way in and I didn’t necessarily want to walk all the way in,’ Wimhurst told me. ‘I didn’t even want to see what I’d already seen.’

  It looked as though someone had been interrupted in the middle of a job. There were several paintings in progress, brightly coloured in blues and yellows, scenes of Sydney Harbour, which he instantly recognised as in the style of Brett Whiteley. He also noticed a paper cut-out of a vase lying haphazardly on the storeroom floor—a vase of similar shape and size to one he had seen in the foreground of a Whiteley painting that had recently come into the studio; an unusually bleak, predominantly brown painting of Sydney’s Lavender Bay, that had not been locked up and that was always getting in the way. Siddique had asked him to remove that painting’s frame. What was going on? Why were these Whiteley-like paintings being made? He knew that Siddique would occasionally conduct little tests in the style of an artist whose work he needed to conserve, but there were too many unfinished paintings here for it to be simply an experiment.

  His boss could turn up at any moment and he didn’t want to be caught looking at this place that had always been off limits. He went quickly back downstairs and got to work. But he could not put those paintings out of his mind. What reason could there be for them? It was hard for him to come up with many legitimate motives. Should he confront Siddique? And say what? It wasn’t a crime to copy an artist’s work, was it? Later that day, after Siddique had turned up, Wimhurst went back upstairs and saw that the storeroom was once again locked. He told no-one what he had seen. But had he been right to say nothing? Should he have given Siddique the chance to explain?

  Wimhurst began to suspect other things at Easey Street—the arrival of timber panels of various sizes, some huge, others smaller. A group of these had been stacked up against Siddique’s desk. Siddique had brushed off his questions about why they were there. They belonged to Peter Gant, Siddique had said, referring to the art dealer who was often around. Why, then, had they been delivered to Easey Street? They were doors for Gant’s house, Siddique told him. Was Gant building a house for dwarves? Wimhurst had cheekily asked. Siddique chuckled and said no more. The doors disappeared soon after. Wimhurst was not alone in knowing that Whiteley would sometimes paint on smooth-faced wooden doors.

  A few weeks after finding the storeroom unlocked, Wimhurst’s workmate Guy Morel showed him something that added to his disquiet. Morel was a bookbinder and paper conservator who worked upstairs at Siddique’s studio. Born in the Seychelles, Morel was a big-hearted man with a nervous manner; he had the trace of a French accent and would stutter when anxious. He had first met Siddique in the 1980s, when Siddique was working as a painting conservator in the regional Victorian town of Ballarat. In the early 2000s, Siddique invited Morel to set up a workspace at his Easey Street studio. Morel would divide his time between Easey Street and his home studio in Brunswick. The two were always bickering about money.

  On this day, Wimhurst was working upstairs when Morel called him over. ‘Have you seen this?’ he asked, holding out a scrap of paper filled with the signature of the Australian painter Fred Williams, as if someone had been practising the name again and again. The sight of these signatures made Wimhurst break his silence.

  ‘I just said to him, “Have you seen the Whiteleys floating around?” because, you know, if there was nothing to be ashamed of they should have been out at some point. And he hadn’t seen them. So that’s when I told the story.’

  Morel decided to look for himself. The storeroom’s 2.5-metre-high walls did not reach to the top of the warehouse ceiling, so Morel placed a chair on the workbench adjoining the locked storeroom. Digital camera in hand, he climbed onto the chair and hung his camera over the edge of the storeroom walls. When he looked at the camera’s screen he saw what had been troubling Wimhurst for weeks.

  Whatever was happening at Easey Street, Wimhurst wanted nothing to do with it. His artistic career was on the brink of taking off, and he needed a bigger home studio than he could afford in the city. He reasoned that he could use this excuse to quietly depart without giving his real concerns to Siddique. By the start of spring in 2007, Wimhurst had left Victorian Art Conservation. Morel stayed on and promised to ‘keep an eye on things’. Wimhurst moved to the country with his partner and dedicated himself to his art. But the move did not quarantine him from the activities at 26–28 Easey Street.

  ‘I wasn’t completely surprised when I got the call,’ Wimhurst explained when we met. ‘I had a feeling something would happen at some time, if what I saw was what I thought it was. And I always hoped it would never surface, and I was wrong.’

  The call came in 2014. Siddique phoned Wimhurst telling him that he might soon be hearing ‘bad things’ about him, and that the police might come calling. Wimhurst asked what he should do. Siddique answered: ‘Tell the truth.’

  In 2016, Wimhurst told his story in the Supreme Court of Victoria—or at least as much of it as the law would allow. We had both been staggered by the restrictions placed on what witnesses could and could not say; he as a witness and I as an observer wanting to write a book on the case.

  ‘That was a shock,’ he said. ‘I thought the idea was to get to the bottom of the truth, but that’s not necessarily the case. It’s a lot more complicated than that. I understand now that it was also about Peter and Aman feeling they’d had a fair trial. But I also feel, was it a fair trial if so much was left out? I don’t know.

  ‘It makes me feel really quite confused, the whole situation. It’s hard. I want to believe the best but I’m not sure I can do that. And I don’t know whether talking to Guy was the right thing to do but I felt that I needed to do something, and I needed another opinion. There was no-one else that worked there except me at that time.’

  I asked him to describe once more the paintings he’d seen in the storeroom. He had consistently told me that they were yellow and blue, and yet, the paintings that had ended up in court were orange and blue. Was he sure he’d seen yellow?

  ‘I really don’t know,’ he said. ‘I remember seeing yellow so maybe I’m remembering it incorrectly, or it was underpainting. I mean they were in early stages. There’s so many reasons why they could have changed. I also remember them as being smaller.’

  He couldn’t even say for sure whether the paintings he saw were the same ones that had ended up in court.

  ‘I know that doesn’t link up, but I think maybe I might have seen some that were test pieces or something like that. Or ones that weren’t good enough. They did seem to be painted on those door panels that had been delivered. They were smaller than full door size, maybe a bit wider, they weren’t as large as the ones in the courtroom, so I don’t know. I know these things don’t match up, I might have seen something different, but I’m just saying what I saw. I wish I had the definitive … but I don’t.’

  A week after our meeting, there would be a definitive answer. The Court of Appeal would rule that the jury that had found Aman Siddique and Peter Gant guilty on three counts of art fraud had got it wrong. That it was not possible to find the men guilty ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ on the evidence presented to the court. It was an exceptional ruling in a judicial system that considers the role of the jury utmost. Significantly, the appeal judges made no finding on the authenticity of the paintings. So where was the truth in this story?

  At the time of Wimhurst’s unsettling discovery, I was working at The Age, and had been for ten years as an arts reporter. My knowledge of Australia’s art-faking industry was minimal and my curiosity slight. I was interested in living artists, in people who were creating, not copying. My biggest coup in 2007 was tracking down a reclusive professional gambler and self-described nerd from Hobart who would go on to build Australia’s most extraordinary museum—MONA. His name was David Walsh.

  The closest I came to writing about forgery that year was covering the National Gallery of Victoria’s shock announcement that its only painting by Vincent van Gogh, Head of a Man, wa
s not a van Gogh at all. The NGV had bought the painting in 1940 believing it to be by the great Dutch post-impressionist, only to find sixty-seven years later that it was by an unknown artist. The Van Gogh Museum and Institute of Dutch Cultural Heritage had investigated the work and found that it had been misattributed—the conclusion, based on stylistic observations, wiped a possible $20 million from the value of the NGV’s collection. The sensational result highlighted the complexity of authenticating art—and showed how even a prestigious state gallery could be fooled by a mystery artist working in the style of van Gogh.

  I had no idea about the parallel events that were unfolding at Easey Street in 2007. It would be another three years before the case of three large suspect Whiteleys came to my attention, although one of the men involved, Peter Gant, would become known to me in 2008 for his connection to the sales of other dubious artworks. Like Walsh, he too was a gambler, but his contributions to Australian culture were of a somewhat different sort.

  After Wimhurst’s departure from Victorian Art Conservation, Guy Morel did exactly as he had promised. He kept an eye on things. For three years, from 2007 to 2010, he hung his Nikon compact camera over the wall of Siddique’s locked storeroom to record what was going on below. On one occasion, Siddique left the key in the storeroom door and Morel was able to open the sliding doors and take photographs front on. He documented the successive creation of three large paintings in the style of Brett Whiteley: a big blue painting of a harbour scene in late 2007; an orange harbour painting created in late 2008; and a third painting, of the harbour viewed through a window, produced in mid-2009. Whiteley had died in 1992, but in Siddique’s Collingwood studio, he was being resurrected.

  Detective Sergeant James Macdonald took the call that launched the investigation into Australia’s biggest alleged art fraud. It came at 10 a.m. on 4 September 2007, from an anonymous male with a ‘soft French accent’ and a tendency to stutter when excited. The man wanted advice on reporting ‘a large-scale art fraud’. In an email sent several weeks later, the man revealed his name: Guy Morel.

  ‘Investigation’ is perhaps too strong a word. It implies a thorough, well-organised, concerted effort to crack a case. There is no art fraud squad in Australia, let alone Victoria and, as Macdonald discovered, his superiors weren’t that interested in the activities at Easey Street. Despite the indifference from above, Macdonald pressed on alone.

  On 5 October 2007, the detective went undercover and met Morel at the Easey Street workshop. Morel told him to act like a ‘client’ if anyone else turned up. But the two had the place to themselves and Morel gave the detective a tour of the property, showing him the contents of the storeroom. In his witness statement for the later committal hearing, Macdonald described what he saw inside that room: a large unframed Brett Whiteley painting, which he assumed was original, depicting a view of Sydney Harbour through a window with a white vase shape on the base of the window frame; a smaller, similar style of painting with a white vase shape, lying on the floor of the storeroom; and a larger painting in progress, also in the style of Whiteley, with blue water, white buildings, a pier and three palm trees. This last work was balanced on two large cans on the storeroom floor.

  After many phone calls with Morel, the detective met him once more, on Thursday 29 July 2010, on the corner of Easey and Smith Streets in Collingwood. Morel handed him a CD labelled ‘Origin of Art’—it contained Morel’s photographs and would become a vital piece of evidence in the subsequent committal hearing.

  On 16 May 2013, almost six years after Morel’s first anonymous phone call, Macdonald gave the ‘Origin of Art’ CD to Detective Senior Constable Justin Stefanec, who had started making his own inquiries. ‘I was struggling to get anyone interested in this until Mr Stefanec came along,’ Macdonald would tell the committal hearing.

  At 7 a.m. on 5 March 2014, four police officers approached the entrance of Aman Siddique’s large family home in the comfortable Melbourne eastern suburb of Templestowe. Stefanec knocked on the door. Siddique, who had just woken up, answered and was told he was under arrest for his part in a $4.5 million art fraud involving three Brett Whiteley–style paintings. Stefanec read him his rights and asked whether he understood. ‘No, no, no,’ the stunned Siddique replied. Stefanec repeated his spiel. Another officer asked: ‘Do you understand?’ Siddique did not answer. The father of three found his wife and told her that he was under arrest. It would be a long day. His house was searched and at 8.45 a.m., Robyn Sloggett, a University of Melbourne conservation expert, arrived, advising police what to seize. The officers took thirteen paintings in the style of Howard Arkley—ten on paper and three canvases—as well as spray gun equipment and colour mixes and batches from Siddique’s home studio.

  After police finished, Siddique was taken to his Easey Street studio. Just after 11 a.m. he opened the building and watched as police searched the property, again seizing objects that might relate to art fraud, including three pieces of frame that appeared to be in the same style as the frames on the allegedly forged Whiteley paintings. Police also took paintings in the style of Charles Blackman. At 1.20 p.m., search over, Siddique locked the studio and was taken to the Prahran Police Station and interviewed for more than an hour. At about 4.30 p.m. he was released from custody.

  The next morning, his associate and close friend, art dealer Peter Gant, was arrested at his home in Hamlyn Heights, in the regional Victorian coastal city of Geelong. Gant was about to head to Melbourne with his son when police arrived just after 9 a.m. He was taken to the Geelong Police Station where he was interviewed for more than two hours. His home was searched, but nothing was seized.

  That it took seven years from the sale of the first suspect Whiteley painting—bought for $2.5 million by investment banker and Sydney Swans chairman Andrew Pridham—for Gant and Siddique to be arrested was not as surprising as the fact that they had been arrested and charged at all.

  It offended Siddique to enter the stuffy, packed room at the Melbourne Magistrates’ Court, joining armed robbers, drug traffickers and heroin addicts. He enjoyed his position in society; his clients included the rich and powerful. At first, he refused to enter. Unlike Gant, he had never been in trouble with the law. It was 18 September 2014, the committal mention, the first in a series of hearings that would eventually lead to their trial. The committal hearing would not occur for another six months. The trial, a year after that. I was beginning to understand just how slowly the legendary wheels of justice turned.

  Siddique’s timidity did not impress Magistrate Charlie Rozencwajg, a quick-witted man with a halo of ginger curls uncannily like Whiteley’s.

  ‘Do police know his hairstyle?’ the magistrate quipped, aware of the amusing similarity. It was as though Gant and Siddique were facing Whiteley himself.

  Rozencwajg bluntly told Siddique’s lawyer that no-one was excused from appearing in court unless the magistrate gave permission. And so Gant and Siddique were pushed to the back of the queue. Rozencwajg returned to thefts, money laundering, perjury and aggravated burglaries, while Siddique burrowed away in an interview room.

  Dug out by his lawyer, Siddique eventually entered the room and faced the magistrate, his face as ashen as his toupee. Gant wore a jumper of blazing red: the brightest man in the room, like a defiant target.

  What sort of policeman persists with a case of alleged art fraud knowing that convictions for the crime are so rare? On 9 March 2015, I met him at the Malvern Police Station, in the heartland of Melbourne’s art collecting scene, no more than 100 metres from where Peter Gant once had a gallery. As police stations go, Malvern was a welcoming building on a tree-lined corner of the well-heeled suburb. The glamour ended at the entrance. Inside, the station was utilitarian, like a veterinarian’s clinic, without the smell. I asked for Stefanec at reception and within seconds he arrived. He was tall and solid, with a friendly face, dark receding hair cut short. He agreed to let me take notes, but no recording—not on the day before the committal was about
to start. He’d hate to read about himself in the newspaper tomorrow.

  I’m not accustomed to dealing with police officers. Crime and the courts have never been my beat. But Stefanec had a warm, easy manner and he told me as much as he officially could. After almost twenty years in the police force, the case was his first involving art fraud, and his first criminal trial. This made his determination all the more unexpected—or perhaps it explained it. He could not imagine the legal minefields ahead. Nor, for that matter, could I. At this point, he had faith in the evidence he had collected, although he was concerned about whether a lay jury would be able to understand the intricacies of the case—if it ended up going to trial.

  ‘Usually such cases go down the civil path, very rarely do they come to the police,’ he said.

  This much I knew. Who then made it possible for charges to be laid?

  ‘The victims of this didn’t make a complaint at all. I contacted them,’ he said.

  So if the victims hadn’t complained, who had?

  Stefanec wasn’t giving the game away. I’d have to wait to find out.