Orlando Whitfield

‘The money is not real – it’s a feckless level of wealth’: the inside story of the biggest art fraud in American history

Orlando Whitfield was a student when he became best friends with Inigo Philbrick, ‘the art world’s Bernie Madoff’. He talks about how their decade of hustling would lead one to a breakdown – and the other to jail

Wed 17 Apr 2024 13.00 BST, The Guardian

Orlando Whitfield is a youngish man, shy, with a reddish beard. His hands are aggressively tattooed, as if they’d been laid, backs down, on wet newspaper. The ink is a form of armour, he says, like his pranking brand of humour (for a while his iCloud hotspotwas “Lord Lucan’s iPhone”). But he’s earnest, too, quick to draw on a literary quotation. Today he has arrived at lunch apologetic and soaked through, having been caught on his bike in a downpour.

We’ve met at the Academy Club – his choice – an old-timers’ haunt in Soho, London, with black oilcloths on tables and stained wainscotting. “Hogarth’s dining room,” he calls it. We’re here to discuss his former best friend Inigo Philbrick, the London-based American art dealer who swindled friends, business associates, investors and collectors out of millions of dollars before going on the run in 2019. Philbrick, 36, was jailed in 2020. In 2022 he was sentenced to seven years for wire fraud and ordered to forfeit $86m (£68m). A stunned art world is still puzzling over how he pulled off this heist. The maître d’ brings a fan heater to dry Whitfield’s jeans.

Whitfield, 37, is not the obvious candidate to lay a grenade under the art market – which had a global estimated value in transactions of $65bn in 2023. Yet arguably that’s what he’s doing by laying blame with the system as much as Philbrick in his book All That Glitters. It details his decade hustling alongside Philbrick, caught in such exploits as twice trying to remove Banksy graffiti from private property; couriering, possibly illegally, a Lucian Freud in hand luggage on a transatlantic flight; selling a Paula Rego for cash in a Lisbon hotel room, as well as making hundred-thousand-dollar deals in seconds on the strength of an iPhone photo.

…read the full article in The Guardian