THE CONFESSIONS OF INIGO PHILBRICK

The wunderkind dealer personified the art market's wealth-generating potential and its unregulated excesses-until he pleaded guilty in what was the largest art fraud in US history. Now out of prison and "wearing the scarlet letter," Philbrick is searching for a second act

- MARK SEAL

INIGO PHILBRICK AWAKENS at dawn to see what the morning’s email will bring.

Philbrick, 36, was once one of the most accomplished and admired young art dealers of his generation. Yet when we begin our correspondence in April 2023, he is prisoner 05863093 in Allenwood, a low-security federal prison in rural Pennsylvania, serving a seven-year sentence for what the FBI believes is the largest artbased fraud scheme in US history.

“There are no doors, and the noise is like a spring break bar at peak capacity—banter and arguments and all clamoring against the most unforgiving acoustics—linoleum and cement,” he says via CorrLinks, the national prison email system, around which his days now revolve. “There’s constantly a screaming argument about how much money Jay-Z has or if a certain BMW is faster than a Mercedes.”

Everyone professes innocence in prison, the saying goes, but Philbrick has already pleaded guilty—to one count of wire fraud. Now a force perhaps as fierce and formidable as the federal government is seeking his public confessionals: movie, TV, and documentary producers in a dogfight over the rights for Philbrick’s story. At 6 a.m., he lines up before a row of desktop computers, which inmates compete to use at five cents a minute. Occasionally kneeling for lack of a chair, he reads the pitches as they come.

From 2010 to 2019, Philbrick cut a swath through the highest echelons of international art. Dozens of extremely wealthy collectors bought—or thought they bought—percentages in multimillion-dollar pieces from Philbrick. Many discovered that he’d sold the same shares to others and in some cases didn’t have a full ownership stake to sell in the first place.