Former UES Art Dealer Charged with Tax Fraud
By Tom Hays
A little-known art dealer already suspected of selling millions of dollars in counterfeit paintings for clients who themselves didn't exist was accused Tuesday of falsifying something else: her tax returns.
Federal prosecutors charged Glafira Rosales with failing to report $12.5 million in income from the sales to Manhattan art galleries. She had sold most of the works through Upper East Side gallery Knoedler and Company, which at the time in the 1990s was New York's oldest gallery.
A magistrate judge ordered Rosales, 56, of Sands Point, N.Y., held without bail after prosecutors argued she had the means to flee the country.
The art sold by Rosales - purportedly by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and other famous artists - already had been the subject of civil litigation challenging its authenticity. In one case, a piece was declared a forgery, prompting an FBI investigation.
"As alleged, Glafira Rosales gave new meaning to the phrase 'artful dodger' by avoiding millions of dollars in income from dealing in fake artworks for fake clients,'' U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said in a statement.
The Mexico-born Rosales appeared on the art scene in the 1990s and began selling previously unknown works by Modernist masters like Pollock. Two Manhattan galleries paid more than $14 million for about a dozen pieces between 2006 and 2008.
According to a criminal complaint, Rosales told the buyers she represented one seller who inherited the painting and wanted to remain anonymous, and another who was a collector from Spain. She also claimed she would collect a commission and forward the proceeds to her clients.
But an investigation "has revealed that experts in the fields of art, art history and materials science have concluded that at least several of the paintings are not by the hand of the artists that Rosales represented,'' the complaint says with indicating where she got the alleged fakes.
Authorities also have accused Rosales of keeping most of the proceeds and depositing the money in a Spanish bank account to try to hide it from the Internal Revenue Service.
At the bail hearing in federal court in Manhattan, defense attorney Steven Kartagener sought to assure the judge that Rosales was "not looking to cash in and run off."
But prosecutors argued she was a flight risk because of her wealth and her strong ties to Mexico, Spain and the Dominican Republic.
"We're very disappointed, but this is the first stop in a long journey," Kartagener said outside court.