In This Economy?

A New York City art dealer named Lawrence Salander (pictured at the right doing his “I just took all your fuckin’ money” face) was arrested on Thursday for allegedly perpetrating a massive art investment scam.

According to authorities, he is responsible for scamming $88 million from a group of investors that included tennis legend and commercial whore, John McEnroe.

The main scam, as best as I can understand it, worked like this: Mr. Salander (which just sounds like a shady dude’s name to me…Larry Salander…yeah, definitely) would convince rich folks to invest in a particular work of art. The only problem was that Larry didn’t actually own the art he was accepting money for, and, well that’s not really very cool.

Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau also described other concurrent scams Larry had going. More common fare like convincing people to invest in things that aren’t going to yield any profits.

The overall point is that Larry Salander had a lot of dog-eared pages in his A Complete Idiot’s Guide to Scamming Rich People book.

Oh, and just in case you were wondering, the art that John McEnroe got scammed on was Arshile Gorky’s Pirate I and Pirate II.

Johnny Mac loves the Gorky.

Tags: Arshile Gorky, fraud, John McEnroe, Lawrence Salander, new york city, Robert Morgenthau, scam alert

This entry was posted on Friday, March 27th, 2009 at 12:47 AM and is filed under Bad News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.