Whiteley on Trial Read online

  ‘Well, I thought it’s the right thing to do,’ Morel said.

  He had previously had concerns for his safety and welfare: Siddique, he said, had ‘a tendency to be very volatile, very aggressive’. Had Siddique ever struck him physically? Richter asked. No, but he had been verbally abusive.

  ‘Were you deserving of it?’

  ‘No, absolutely not,’ Morel said, arms tightly crossed.

  ‘What was the abuse about?’

  ‘Some silly comment that I made.’

  The ‘silly comment’, it transpired, was that Morel had belittled a work of art in front of one of Siddique’s clients, suggesting that only a certain type of ‘clientele’ would find it attractive.

  The court reporters, who had far more experience than me in assessing the credibility of witnesses, thought Morel ‘petulant’, ‘vague’ and ‘unconvincing’. But I enjoyed his stoush with Richter—an exchange that bordered on farce. Morel was rebellious, talked back, cracked inappropriate jokes, swivelled in his chair. Richter called him a ‘sponger’ who had worked at Siddique’s rent-free for years. ‘He was a sponger from me,’ Morel retaliated. Richter described him as ‘spying’ on Siddique. Morel didn’t deny it. Richter accused him of moving one of the paintings from Siddique’s locked storeroom into the retouching room. Morel bristled.

  ‘Absolute rubbish,’ he spat. ‘That’s a good story but it’s absolute rubbish. I have never moved any of those paintings from the storeroom to put it into the retouching room.’

  ‘You’re prepared to stake your credibility on that, are you?’ Richter taunted in his low, deep growl.

  ‘I’ll put my gonads on there if you like.’

  ‘Okay, let’s have a look at those gonads.’

  At which point Magistrate Suzanne Cameron, who was taking no nonsense from the wayward boys in the room, intervened and said she’d prefer not, and that it might be an appropriate time to stop for lunch.

  ‘You wouldn’t lend your hand to a fraud if you were aware of it?’ Richter asked Morel after lunch. Morel said he would not. Why, then, had the paper conservator ‘authenticated’ a catalogue called A Private Affair for Siddique? It seemed absurd that Morel, who had secretly photographed a large Whiteley-like orange painting in construction in Siddique’s locked storeroom in 2008, would then agree, two years later, to help authenticate a Peter Gant Fine Art catalogue, supposedly from 1989, titled A Private Affair, that included an image of the very same orange painting. And why would he do it after handing over a CD of his secret photographs to the detective James Macdonald?

  Morel’s report, dated 21 September 2010, certified that the catalogue of A Private Affair, an exhibition which never went ahead, was created using lithographic offset printing, a traditional method predating digital printing which began in the early 1990s. This was supposed to prove that the catalogue was indeed from 1989. But there was a problem with this logic. Lithographic printing is still available today, leaving open the possibility that the catalogue may well have been created later than 1989. Morel had not gone the next step and tested the catalogue’s paper to confirm if it was indeed from 1989. Not that any of this concerned Richter. He exploited Morel’s half-hearted ‘authentication’ of the catalogue to create the impression of a man who could not be trusted, who behaved in erratic ways, and Morel’s churlish manner in court only added fuel to Richter’s insinuations. He was puncturing Morel’s position as a key witness, and in turn creating doubt about the prosecution’s vital evidence—Morel’s photos of Siddique’s storeroom.

  One man, however, seemed to deflect Richter’s sustained attacks with unexpected ease. His name was Richard Simon. His part in the story seemed relatively insignificant, but he had the best lines of all.

  In August 2007, Simon delivered doors of odd sizes to Siddique’s studio. The ‘door man’, as I came to think of him, had a broad Australian accent and a no-bullshit attitude. He was what some might call ‘salt of the earth’. Although he looked no older than forty, he had old-fashioned manners and a dislike for strong words such as ‘hate’ or ‘shifty’. He had used the latter in relation to Siddique in his original witness statement, and now asked that it be removed. Simon had neat, freshly cut hair and wore navy work slacks and a navy t-shirt with his company’s insignia on it, ‘Door Impressions’, looking as though he had slipped into court between deliveries. He had the quiet confidence of a tradesman proud of his work and reputation.

  Siddique was very pleased with Simon’s first delivery; doors of such quality were hard to find, he had told him. But then ‘things turned a little nasty’, as Simon put it in his witness statement. Siddique phoned him and said he was unhappy with the latest batch of doors, and so, on 5 November 2008, Simon drove the 75 kilometres from his base on the Mornington Peninsula to Collingwood to find out what the problem was. Another man, called Peter Gant, was also at Siddique’s Collingwood studio that day. Simon recalled all of this because he kept a diary—‘for my own personal reasons, never to be read by anyone else’, he told the court.

  Siddique was angry because there were joins on the doors—visible seams in the wood. Simon told Siddique that he knew what he was getting—oversized doors—and such large doors inevitably needed joins. In his witness statement, Simon said that Siddique had told him, ‘The artwork to be painted on these doors is worth over a million dollars. I can’t have joins.’

  Richter, in cross-examination, put it to Simon that he couldn’t possibly have heard this, as it didn’t make sense.

  ‘How is someone going to tell you that they’re going to paint a million-dollar painting on these doors? No-one would say that to you, I suggest?’

  ‘I suggest,’ Simon replied, adopting the barrister’s language, ‘that I was told that million-dollar paintings were going to be painted on these doors, and I said that these doors will eventually break down.’

  The more Richter tried to convince Simon that he couldn’t possibly have heard Siddique say that, the more Simon insisted that he had. He wasn’t having any smart-talking barrister put words in his mouth.

  ‘You didn’t think that they were telling you that they were going to forge million-dollar paintings on this door? Is that what you thought?’ Richter persisted. ‘Did you have any suspicions about what was being said, that there was a million-dollar painting going to go on that door?’

  ‘Did I have suspicions?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I thought it was one of the stranger things that I have heard but if someone wants to paint a million-dollar painting on a door, they can. I have hung doors upside down because people want doors hung upside down. I find that stranger,’ Simon said, deadpan.

  Had he ever known people to paint on doors? Richter asked.

  No.

  Did he know of a ‘gentleman’ called Brett Whiteley who painted on doors and whose paintings were worth a lot of money?

  ‘I know of Brett Whiteley. I did not have a clue, until three hours ago, that he painted on doors,’ Simon said.

  Richter tried to persuade Simon that since he hadn’t known that Brett Whiteley created expensive paintings on doors, he couldn’t possibly have been in the state of mind to hear Siddique tell him that he was going to paint million-dollar paintings on doors.

  Simon rejected the suggestion: ‘There could be a $10 billion painting on a door. I think it’s silly but, whatever.’

  Richter dug in.

  ‘The fact is, if you’d been told something like, “I’m going to paint a million-dollar painting on these doors”, you would have made a note of that, wouldn’t you, in your diary? Because it’s a very odd thing to say, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’m in the world of odd right now,’ Simon replied.

  ‘Most insightful, Mr Simon,’ Magistrate Cameron chipped in.

  Simon was an outsider. A plain-speaking tradesman caught in the rip of two colliding worlds of odd—the law and the arts. He stuck to his story despite Richter’s repeated attempts to strike it down. After an afternoon in the st
and, Simon was released from the world of odd. I felt like cheering as he left.

  Rosemary Milburn, now a yoga teacher, had worked part-time for Gant as a gallery assistant in 1988 and 1989. In her late forties or early fifties, she had long, wavy brown hair and wore a striped t-shirt, black jacket and trousers. I recognised her as the ex-partner of a former colleague from The Age. Melbourne is a small town. Before Milburn took the stand, she waited outside the courtroom, sitting next to Wendy Whiteley, the artist’s ex-wife. It was the third day of the committal. The two were chatting amicably and I thought that perhaps they were together. I was wrong. Milburn’s testimony would contradict Wendy’s, and, as far as Richter was concerned, would provide ‘incontrovertible’ evidence that the paintings in question had existed in 1988.

  In the witness box, Milburn was handed a Peter Gant Fine Art consignment book and asked to look at consignment note twenty-three, dated 28 June 1988—this was the note listing the three suspect Whiteley paintings. Milburn identified her handwriting and signature on the consignment note and said that she remembered the three works arriving at Gant’s gallery in 1988 and signing them in.

  ‘When these works arrived, were they some of the biggest works that you ever saw or received?’ Richter asked.

  ‘Well, they were—I just remember them because they were all crated up, okay, they came out of a truck, Grace Fine Art, so they were large, yeah,’ Milburn replied.

  She couldn’t remember where the measurements listed on the consignment note came from.

  ‘But the measures that are given are consistent in terms of size with the magnitude of the pictures that you saw?’ Richter asked.

  ‘I guess so.’

  ‘You did see the pictures, did you not?’

  ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘Whilst they were unpacked?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘They were pretty striking to you, were they not?’

  ‘Yeah, I remember them coming via Grace Fine Art, okay, and they were three big pieces that came and I just signed them in. It was not, you know, an unusual thing just to sign them in, it was not my job to do anything else, really.’

  I felt a hesitance in Milburn’s voice, as though she wasn’t entirely comfortable with the situation. Richter seemed to be prompting her towards a more definite point of view.

  ‘These were the paintings you believed were delivered on that day, were they not?’ he asked, indicating the paintings in court.

  ‘Well, they certainly could have been. I couldn’t be sure.’

  ‘You couldn’t be sure not because they look different but because it’s so long ago?’

  ‘Absolutely, it’s twenty-five plus years.’

  ‘When you say “could have been”, there’s nothing about them as far as you can see that says that’s not them?’

  ‘No.’

  Re-examined by Crown Prosecutor Tom Gyorffy, QC, a large, jovial man with a subtle technique devoid of the drama of Richter, Milburn was asked about the inconsistencies between consignment note number twenty-three and other consignment notes in the book. The measurements of artworks were generally not included in the other notes, and yet they had been in number twenty-three. The numbering system on note twenty-three was also anomalous.

  On the same day as the three Whiteley paintings had supposedly arrived at Gant’s, Milburn had written and signed another consignment note, number twenty-one, listing twenty-one paintings that were ‘sent out’ to ‘DC-ART’, a gallery in Woollahra—including a Whiteley. What did ‘sent out’ mean? Gyorffy asked. Had the works come in or out?

  ‘According to this it says “sent out”,’ Milburn said vaguely.

  What about consignment note twenty-two, Gyorffy asked: ‘Is that coming in or going out?’

  ‘It says here it’s going out,’ Milburn said.

  ‘Why do you say it’s going out?’ Gyorffy asked.

  ‘Because it says “sent”,’ Milburn said.

  ‘And that’s the same date, 28/6/88?’ Gyorffy asked, building his case.

  ‘M’mm.’

  ‘Why were so many paintings being sent out on 28 June?’ Gyorffy asked.

  Richter jumped up and objected.

  Gyorffy tried another tack. He pressed her again about consignment note twenty-one. ‘When I asked you the question about whether the pictures in consignment twenty-one were coming in or going out you gave an answer, didn’t you? They were going out?’

  ‘Yes, according to this, it says “sent out”.’

  The consignment note listing the three suspect Whiteleys, which supposedly had arrived from ‘Chris Quintas’, Whiteley’s studio assistant, also said ‘sent out’. So why was Milburn saying they had come into the gallery on 28 June 1988? After further questioning, Milburn seemed to change her mind about consignment note twenty-one.

  ‘That little note at the bottom to me looks like a note saying that I’ve sent out the consignment piece of paper, okay, confirming to DC-ART that we’ve got their works.’

  ‘Are you sure about that?’ Gyorffy asked.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Are you sure about that?’

  ‘Yep, that makes sense to me.’

  But Milburn wasn’t making sense to the magistrate, it seemed. She had some questions of her own.

  ‘As you look at that book, what’s an “in” and what’s an “out”?’, the magistrate asked.

  ‘This is an “in”,’ Milburn said, referring to consignment note twenty-three.

  ‘And you know that how? Sorry, because it says “sent out”?’

  ‘No, no, no, the “sent out” is that I have sent out to Chris Quintas acknowledging that we’ve got the works, okay? That’s all that is,’ Milburn explained.

  ‘So what on that document says that that’s a receipt of work?’

  ‘The fact that it’s in the book,’ Milburn answered.

  ‘You’ve just said the book has ins and outs,’ the magistrate reminded her.

  ‘No, no, look really, this is an in, this is an in book.’

  ‘The whole book is an in book?’

  ‘Looks to me to be the case but I haven’t gone through everything so …’

  During a break after Milburn’s time in the stand, I heard Gant’s high-pitched voice saying, ‘He gave her such a hard time. She was great.’

  Siddique’s solicitor George Defteros replied, ‘It’s all an illusion.’ But whose story was the illusion?

  With her reputation for bohemian glamour, Wendy Whiteley, the artist’s ex-wife, didn’t disappoint when she arrived at the committal in full regalia: billowing black coat, greying hair wrapped in a towering pile of printed black-and-white cloth, and a clutter of bangles, one of them emblazoned with the word ‘reality’. Pity she couldn’t be filmed in court, turning to look at Orange Lavender Bay with an expression of pure disdain.

  Her views on the two paintings in court were categorical: fake, both of them. Dead. Stiff. Wrong. That afternoon, Richter had another tough one on his hands. Wendy opposed him with explosive conviction. His 2-hour interrogation did not intimidate her. She would not budge, batting off the expected questions about her dissolute, drug-ridden life with Brett.

  As she wrestled with the tenacious defence barrister, she described Orange Lavender Bay as so bad that ‘you’d have to be blind not to have recognised it as a fake’. Of Big Blue Lavender Bay she said: ‘It’s dead. And I’m sorry that the faker is so bad at it.’

  Richter suggested that she could not possibly know everything Brett Whiteley painted in 1988, a time when the couple had separated and lived apart, when Brett was using heroin, selling paintings surreptitiously for cash to buy drugs, and also attempting to hide paintings to keep Wendy from claiming them as part of the divorce settlement.

  In her strong, throaty voice Wendy stared Richter down and replied: ‘I do not know everything he did paint because I wasn’t there but I do know what he didn’t paint. And in my view he didn’t paint these.’

  Richter put it to her that she
must be wrong if there were evidence that these paintings existed in 1988—and there was, a catalogue called A Private Affair, which included an image of Orange Lavender Bay, prepared for an exhibition that didn’t go ahead.

  Wendy turned the tables on him.

  What year was the exhibition supposed to have taken place? she asked.

  ‘1989.’

  ‘Right, so it didn’t happen.’

  ‘No, it didn’t happen, but the catalogue was published in 1989.’

  ‘Was it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well—and you can prove that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The magistrate intervened and explained to Wendy that she had to answer questions, not ask them. Richter carried on, suggesting that if the catalogue was proved real, then Wendy’s opinions were worthless. Wendy vehemently disagreed.

  ‘You would have to accept that that was Brett’s work, wouldn’t you?’ Richter asked.

  ‘No, of course not,’ Wendy insisted.

  ‘You would accept then that that was a work by Brett Whiteley?’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t! No, I wouldn’t!’

  ‘Did anyone ever tell you that a photographer by the name of Jeremy James made a statutory declaration in court proceedings in Sydney in which he swore that he photographed this orange painting back in 1989?’

  ‘No. I don’t know who this man is. I don’t know whether he is telling the truth … this is a farce!’ she scowled.

  Undeterred, Richter kept insisting that if the catalogue were real, then Orange Lavender Bay would have to have been painted before 1989.

  ‘I don’t know why we keep going round in circles with this catalogue,’ Wendy replied furiously. ‘I don’t believe the catalogue is real. If it is real then it still doesn’t make me believe the painting is real.’