MASTERPIECES BY DAY TORTURE BY NIGHT

The art world was his alibi. How the gallerist Andrew Crispo got away with murder.

- BY RACHEL CORBETT

IN A FRIGID STORAGE UNIT IN ALBANY this winter, I looked through dozens of boxes belonging to the late art dealer Andrew Crispo. His troubled life was here in all its extremes: in chummy correspondence with the aristocrats and celebrity clients he worked with during the day and in prison letters from the junkies and thugs with whom he spent his nights. Sales records for works by Brancusi, de Kooning, and Degas were packed alongside an issue of the NAMBLA Bulletin, the magazine of the North American Man-Boy Love Association. A pouch of old, graying cocaine fell out of a copy of Swann's Way—he was said to be buying up to seven grams a day at one point. There was a friendly letter written by hit man Blake Tek Yoon, who was serving a stretch in prison for a job linked to the Genovese family. A can of Crisco. Testosterone patches. A business card for a “master” from the Vault, the S&M club to which Crispo once donated a functioning electric chair. And a seemingly endless trail of debt-collection letters from clients, artists, and lenders.

For ten years, starting in the early 1970s, the audacious young dealer rose from nowhere to run one of the most prominent galleries in Manhattan. He took major financial risks that, for a time, paid off in multimillion-dollar sales, mostly in American modernism, to clients including Slim Keith, Steve Martin, Julie Andrews, and the Swiss industrialist Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza, who was then perhaps the biggest art collector in the world and rumored to have spent $90 million on paintings from Crispo alone.