ART ADVISER.FRIEND. THIEF

Lisa Schiff became America's top art consultant, with a network of close-knit clients. Then she stole millions from them. As she awaited sentencing, she revealed all to Sarah Maslin Nir and Zachary Small.

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LISA SCHIFF SITS AT HER KITCHEN TABLE, TRYING to explain how she went from being one of the world’s most celebrated art advisers to a high-society pariah and a criminal. It is her first time speaking openly about her crimes. But the setting for this unburdening isn’t her former $25,000-a-month (nearly $440,000) TriBeCa loft in New York, or the VIP lounge at Art Basel Miami Beach, where she once brokered art deals for the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio; rather, it’s a two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan's unfussy Stuyvesant Town, where, she says, she needs her parents to pay the rent. Schiff, 55, has lost her money, her friends and every shred of influence.

“You become the lie,” Schiff says, fidgeting with one of her son’s light-up Lego toys. Where once she collected artworks by Nan Goldin and Damien Hirst, today snapshots of her 12-year-old son decorate the apartment. “And I didn’t have anyone to talk to because everyone around me was either paid to be there or was family.”

While her clients and friends saw a successful woman at the top of her career, she hid a secret: she was stealing from them. To conceal her theft, she would do things like pay one client with another’s money, or leverage their friendships to keep them believing that late payments were always almost on their way. By the time it all came crashing down in 2023, she had stolen some $6.4 million from at least a dozen people.

But out of all her transgressions, she seems most ashamed of the glamour that gilded her crimes. Darting around in chartered helicopters and regularly burning through tens of thousands of dollars in shopping sprees at luxury stores, such as Loewe in Paris, wasn’t even fun. “I was miserable in that helicopter. I was miserable in Loewe in my fancy outfit,” she says, bitter about her own choices. “At the end, I thought that I was going to have a stroke.”