PHONE KEYS BEEP
PHONE RINGS
Oh, hello. I wonder if you can help.
My name's Vanessa Engle. I'm calling from London
in relation to a documentary that I'm making
about an art dealer called Michel Cohen.
If he surfaces anywhere, they will find him.
I mean, he's basically on the run for his entire life.
There were so many knowledgeable dealers
that were trusting him for tremendous amounts of money.
He came in and he was trying to sell us a Picasso painting
and he would just basically sign for it and take the work of art.
If you had to hazard a guess as to where he is now...
Uruguay, Panama, South America somewhere.
You know, in all the movies, they all go to Mexico
to hide out on the beach somewhere.
I believe there was a contract put out on him, and he's dead.
Did you ever hear how much money Michel stole?
I would say it had to be 40 million or better.
The total loss was a little bit over 50 million, I believe.
I would say that every month or so,
I will do a Google search trying to find out information.
And have you ever found anything? No.
Can you tell me your name?
Michel Cohen.
JAUNTY PARISIAN MUSIC
So, Michel we know is born in 1953 in France.
JAUNTY PARISIAN MUSIC
He came from a suburb of France. It was a poor suburb.
I was told his father was a cab driver.
CAR HORN TOOTS
SHOUTING IN FRENCH
I don't know if any of this is true.
He worked at night as a taxi driver.
My mother, she took some classes to learn how to be a secretary.
They did not get along at all. They were so different, you know.
It was verbal violence.
You know, I mean, a lot of screaming and it was...
..a lot of anxiety.
I think when he was maybe 16, 17,
he pushed his mother
to divorce her husband because he was abusive to her.
I think his dad, you know, abandoned them.
The only possible provider had to be Michel.
He became the man of the family and he felt that he had to
take care of his mother, brother, sister.
He had that idea that money could save the day.
How old were you, Michel, when you left school?
I was 17.
He was a high school dropout.
But he was very bright, very intelligent,
and a great memory.
He could really remember things.
EERIE MUSIC
He played chess and he was very good at it.
Chess is strategy - figuring things several moves ahead.
For him, maybe life was a little bit like a chess game.
"An encyclopaedia ought to explain as much as possible
"the order and connection of human knowledge."
I saw an ad in the paper,
and they were looking for people working door-to-door selling, erm...
..Encyclopaedia Britannica.
At the age of 19,
he was selling the Encyclopaedia Britannica door-to-door,
and he was the number-one salesman in France.
# You make me feel
# Mighty real
# You make me feel
# Mighty real... #
We met, I believe, it was 1976,
in Paris, or in a club...
..dancing.
Disco days.
# I feel real when you kiss me... #
He felt that things were not moving fast enough
and he was wanting something more,
and so we went to America to check it out.
AEROPLANE ENGINE
MUSIC: Young Hearts Run Free by Candi Staton
In or around 1980, he leaves France with Richard Roy
and arrives in America.
# Ooo-oooh, young hearts
# To yourself be true
# Don't be no fool when love really don't love you
# It don't love you
# Ooh, young hearts
# Run free
# They'll never be hung up
# Hung up like my man and me... #
I went to the States with my friend, Richard,
who is a very intelligent guy, and it was an adventure.
We kind of moved around California and went, you know,
Grand Canyon, everything.
We bought a used Cadillac.
Metallic pink with a white interior. HE CHUCKLES
Wow!
We bought a sailboat.
We lived on the boat for a year and we sailed all the Hawaiian islands.
It was really beautiful.
Yeah, I had big dreams, I think.
BOAT HORN
MUSIC: Jim On The Move by Lalo Schifrin
Back to San Francisco, always looking at things to do.
What could we do?
So I had the idea - we're French, we could make pate and sell it.
Well, the pate-making was just an idea.
And we tried and we succeeded...
..a pretty good recipe.
And so, yeah, we tried to sell the pate and then we had criticism.
"There's too much tarragon in your chicken tarragon."
So then Michel say, "OK, maybe it's not going to work.
"We're not going to become rich that way."
Then he moves on to selling posters
and framing them.
Then he met someone who had bought
tonnes of lithographs
and printed artwork in France,
and so I went back there and I bought a stack of things like that.
Maybe they cost me an average of $15 a piece.
It created my first income in the States,
and I did that for a year and then I studied visiting art galleries.
MUSIC: Bossa Em Nova York by Lalo Schifrin
I think it's around the time that we met Ed Russell,
and he was the source of a lot of information.
He was an opportunist.
He took every opportunity offered to him,
and more power to him to do that.
Because you could not help...
..wanting to help Michel Cohen.
And I got to know the owners of his galleries
and the salespeople
and I decided to put a small ad in the San Francisco Chronicle,
you know, listing some graphics for sale by this artist.
And I got calls, you know.
I met my first private clients through that ad
that I think cost me $100.
I saw an ad in an art magazine
for a gallery in San Francisco.
I called the number and he said,
"My name is Michael Cohen."
And I said, "Oh, are you Jewish?" He said, "Yes."
And I said, "I am."
And, erm, that helped us bond.
CLASSICAL MUSIC
One day he asked me to meet him for drinks
and he proposed that I lent him some money.
He told me about a New Zealand racing boat that was for sale...
..and if I lent him the money,
he promised to pay it back within three months.
How much money was it? I think it was $50,000.
And I wrote him a cheque.
And within a short period of time,
he returned the investment, and it was all good.
UPLIFTING ORCHESTRAL MUSIC
Every weekend I would invite friends
and we would sail in San Francisco Bay.
Are you a good sailor, Michel?
I like steering the boat
and, you know, I like when it goes fast.
Michael told me the story of his family.
As the Germans marched into Paris,
Michael's grandparents said to Michael's mother,
"You need to take your younger brother and sister out of Paris
"and protect them during the war."
And she did, and they somehow were saved in the outskirts of Paris.
These are some of the documents we found relating to Michel,
which show that his grandparents, Salomon Chich and Viviane Chich,
both died in Auschwitz at the hands of the Nazis in 1942.
There were two sides of him.
There was the love of things that are simple and real and natural,
and then there was that notion that money solves all the problems
so we'd better have a lot of it to protect ourselves.
Did you call Michel Cohen Michel or Michael? Michael.
Initially it was Mike.
And did it change?
It did, after a while, and he became...
..somewhat of a serious dealer halfway through his career,
it become Michel.
Do you know why he went from Michael to Michel? I don't know.
I think it made the dealers feel good to call him Michel.
It made us feel more international.
Like, you know, of course we're sophisticated.
You would call him Michel, not Michael. He's French.
When you sell art and you're French and you have a French accent,
it's a good selling point.
Americans always think that somebody from somewhere else
is going to know more than they do.
Did he know about art, Ed? No.
Michael knew nothing about art in the beginning.
Nothing.
Michael, Michel, nothing really mattered
except the value of the commodity.
I don't think Michael knew anything about art,
and I don't think that Michael particularly loved art
or even liked art.
Michael could have sold anything
and, as it turned out, he sold art.
REPORTER: It's broken down into the regions -
the various land regions, political, arts.
I learned very quickly and I studied auction records.
In these days I had a good memory so I would really remember
the style of image and the price it sold for.
He had piles of auction catalogues.
And he would know them by heart.
I remember those catalogues, there were Post-it notes
at almost every page.
He would remember the size of the painting,
the year of the painting, the price that it did at auction -
he would remember everything.
MUSIC: Jim On The Move by Lalo Schifrin
In 1987, he gets his own actual gallery space in San Francisco.
He had a small gallery in San Francisco called Pentimento,
and I think he started out mostly with prints.
He would go to New York as being the dealer from the West Coast,
so he would go visit them, look at what they have for sale and say,
"Ooh, I think I have a client for that."
You know, "I'd like to have this photograph. Could I borrow it?
"I'll just come back in an hour."
He would borrow the painting, he would take it across the street
to another art dealer, who would never cross the street
to the first one and sell it to that guy!
HE LAUGHS
And in New York, you know,
it's very wheeling and dealing all the time at high speed,
so people are just, "Oh, yeah, let's make it happen fast."
Michel loved that. He say, "I can do a deal a day in New York."
That was what I was good at.
You know, a good image...
..and finding out what people like
because they all like different things
so you have to look for the right painting.
He could see what was selling,
and he's like, "OK, Chagall is selling. I need to get Chagall."
"Chagall prints are selling
"but, wow, there's more money in Chagall paintings.
"I need to take that leap from the print to the painting."
He figured out the game real fast.
He was a quick study.
MUSIC: Shafted by Suburban Soul Crew
He always loved nice things.
He felt that the more rich you look,
the more trustworthy you are.
You know, the nice suit, the tie, the shirt.
He had his shirt made-to-measure in Beverly Hills.
He created a little bit that character
of a very successful art dealer.
I like Porsches but, you know,
I would buy Mercedes for comfort.
Once I bought a Ferrari, but I did not like it.
You know, it's very uncomfortable, it's not good for business.
You can't bring paintings in it.
I mean, we'd walk into the Mercedes dealership,
they would just all jump up, "Oh, Mr Cohen," you know,
"how nice to see you..."
and they knew they were going to make a sale, boom, right there.
He would buy a car, drive it three months,
and then sell it and buy another one,
so I say, you know, "You actually lost $90,000 on cars this year."
"Oh, yeah, but..."
I'd say, "What's wrong with that one?" "I don't like the seats."
Was he very focused on making money?
You're asking me that?
Are you serious? I mean, my one mantra...
..to Michel Cohen was, "Michael, stop.
"There is such a thing as enough.
"You cannot be your clients. You never will be your clients."
The collectors always have more money than the dealers,
and you see how a collector lives.
I mean, you have to have money to collect art.
It is an elitist business.
These people have money and they live well.
Vacation homes, you know, all the toys, the cars, the watches.
You know all the nonsense.
And he was thrilled by that lifestyle.
He wanted to be part of that world.
Now, whether it's the classic,
"I come from poverty, I never want to go back there,"
you know, "I live in fear of going broke" -
that, I don't know, but definitely wanting the good life.
MUSIC: The Wave by Lalo Schifrin
In 1990,
he moves to LA, and around that time he meets, erm...
Oops.
..he meets Tanya Bonakdar.
She liked to work with living artist.
Her thing was to one day open up a gallery and show young artists,
so I went for the adventure again.
In 1992, he moves to New York with Tanya
and he opens a gallery at 1018 Madison.
When he opened this gallery, it was, I think, the first gallery
in the United States to show the work of Damien Hirst.
He was in partners with Tanya Bonakdar, I think, at the time
and they showed a number of artists for the first time in New York.
Damien Hirst did a show that was called The Pharmacy,
where it was bottles of medication
and the entire gallery had shelves with bottles of medication.
That was just the whole show.
I had to find all these empty medication bottles.
HE CHUCKLES
Yeah, it was a great show.
It's at the Tate Gallery now.
I heard they paid two million for it.
The nature of what he was doing was,
you get a glossy 8x10 transparency...
..and you shop it around, you bring it over with a provenance sheet,
you get it borrowed, we bring it over to your gallery,
put it on the wall and make it seem like it's in your property.
A big buyer comes in, he looks at it and goes, "No."
So you take it down, you take your own sticker off
and you rush it back to the original owner,
so you kind of, like, inch yourself into the provenance for...
..half an hour or an hour a day or whatever, depending.
Normally you would just get 10%, but if it's $1 million,
I mean, that's like $100,000 for lugging a painting
from one place to the next.
So, one or two of those a month.
CAR HORN
He went from somebody that nobody knew
to somebody who a lot of people knew...
..to a very different plateau where everybody knew him,
including the major galleries, auction houses,
dealers and collectors around the world.
He got incredible inventory.
Incredible Dubuffets, incredible Chagalls,
and, like, all of a sudden,
he was selling major works of art.
So was he considered a major dealer then? Yeah.
In all the circles and all the big-name dealers.
He was on their lips, they bought from him,
and his provenance was there. I mean, he was good.
I was selling mostly Dubuffet... CASH REGISTER PINGS
..Picasso... CASH REGISTER PINGS
..Gerard Victor, de Kooning... CASH REGISTER PINGS
..Giacometti. CASH REGISTER PINGS
And quite a number of works by Monet.
I mean, there were... it's hard to say
affordable, but you could buy good Monets
for between one and two million.
He was, I suppose, quite a bit younger than I was.
Was he good-looking?
Not my taste, but I'm sure he was to other people.
I mean, he was dark-haired with curly black hair.
I go, actually, for blonds, so...
SHE CHUCKLES
..what can I say?
All my husbands have been blond.
He was soft spoken.
He was...charming.
I don't know that I would call him a connoisseur.
I don't think he collected very much himself.
Erm, and I think he was a shrewd businessperson.
Did you like him? I did.
Did you trust him?
I did.
We did a lot of business with him. A LOT of business with him.
And he was considered one of our close associates.
When he was selling big pictures, they were up in the millions.
He would just basically sign for it and take the work of art.
Would he literally take it under his arm and walk it down the street?
Small enough, he would. Big enough, it would get trucked.
He managed to get the trust of these people
who would actually even send him paintings without any paperwork.
That's the crazy thing about the art world.
But, because of his reputation and the volume of work that he's done,
and in those days, anything that he would say he would do,
so he would say, you know, "I'll pay you on the 25th,"
he would pay a person on... It was no delay. Sure thing.
The reputation was great.
I was not a dealer who has been there two or three generations,
but I could get, erm...
..pictures, you know, for two, three, four million.
So it's your reputation.
It takes years to build and a few seconds to lose it.
Michel was essentially an intermediary
dealing in the middle impressionist market.
Pictures valued from 500,000 to a million or $2 million.
The obvious souvenir pictures -
Chagall, Picasso -
easy pictures to sell. Not particularly important pictures.
Taxi! Taxi!
I had to make a character judgment.
He had done business with Sotheby's for some time
and he was a faithful performer.
I remember going to his apartment on the Upper East Side
to meet him, just so I could see who he was and how he lived.
So, obviously there was his track record as a dealer,
but then there was the fact that he just seemed like
a fine, upstanding, bourgeois guy, is that right?
Yeah, just like me.
He needed more and more capital
and I did...
..recommend him to my father
because my father is...
..primarily involved in finance.
Michel had always been most reliable
and we started to acquire works,
if I recall, primarily by Picasso.
BELL RINGS
It's hard to put an exact date,
but it's around this time in the early '90s
that he starts options trading.
# Double your money and try to get rich
# Double your money without any hitch
# Double your money, it's your lucky day
# Double your money and take it away. #
I decided that I wanted to start day trading stocks.
I went out and bought this device called a QuoTrek,
where you could track and trade options in real time
and you can hold it in the palm of your hand.
Ready to go? Almost.
Well, no, not really. Got to keep an eye on my stock.
The volume is through the roof. Why sit at your PC?
I've got it all right here on QuoTrek.
Look - stocks, options and futures, plus news and charting.
Well, what are we waiting for? Let's go. Can I borrow that?
Sure. Well, I think you need to call and get your own.
Because Michel and I were hanging out those years,
he asked about it, he became fascinated by it,
and, in short, he went out and also opened an account,
an options trading account, bought a QuoTrek machine and went at it.
What was your first successful trade?
20,000 I invested and I made...
I got 100,000 back within days.
So I felt, gee, it's great!
It's better than art, you know.
It's liquid and the returns are tremendous.
Yeah, it's nice to make money, you know. Lots of money.
Did we roll that last 25 million that we had?
I used to see him at auctions all the time and we'd talk
and he was always on the phone talking to his broker,
on his cellphone, sell this and do that.
So, it seemed to me like he was, like,
from making all the money in the art,
he started getting involved with the stock market,
and it was more important for him to be on the phone
and doing the stocks than it was selling his art!
There was something in Michel's nature,
and I'm not a psychologist,
that never seemed satisfied with just making a good living,
which he was making, and destined to make even a much-better living
as an art dealer.
But it was too slow for him.
SHOUTING
He managed to invest, like, $35,000,
and in a matter of four months
he'd turn it into 3.5 million.
Cup number 1...
..passes through cup number 2...
..and cup number 2 passes through cup number 3....
Only twice as fast.
For him, that was it. He was in heaven, you know and he felt,
"Yeah, I can really feel the market.
"I know where it's going. I can sense it."
What happened is the classic case where a gambler starts making money
early on and believes that they've got the magic touch,
and that's what happened with Michel.
But he said, "Soon, I won't need the art any more.
"You know how much I would get if I could double, er,
"you know, every week?
"I would have $16 million in a year."
In 1996,
Michel gets lucky on the options market again
and turns a $30,000 stake
into an astonishing $14 million,
which is when he meets and marries his wife.
She was working at a gallery downstairs.
She was pretty much a private art dealer, art consultant, art dealer.
Was she an art connoisseur?
Not particularly, I don't think.
I'm not sure how she got into the business, but not particularly.
I think she was just young, very young, and eager.
So, the wedding took place in Las Vegas.
We had cocktails and dinner in Caesar's Palace.
We went to one of these little chapels in Las Vegas.
Very...
..let's go tacky all the way!
In 1997, Michel and his wife have their first baby
and then they move to Malibu, where they have a second child, and
Michel continues to buy and sell art from the West Coast.
# La mer
# Qu'on voit danser
# Le long des golfes clairs
# A des reflets d'argent
# La mer
# Des reflets changeants
# Sous la pluie
# La mer... #
My name's Tony Mark. I'm a real estate agent in Malibu.
The draw to this area is that most of these homes are on
an acre or more of land.
# La mer... #
Point Dume, as it sticks into the ocean, is surrounded
by these amazing, dramatic coves,
and beaches and cliffs,
and hiking trails and, erm...
It's truly just one of the most beautiful places in the world.
What can you tell me about Circles On The Point?
Is that a very desirable property?
Yeah, definitely. It's an amazing location.
It has a very signature architecture
so it does really stand out.
You have access to the beach, amazing views...
Yeah, the property itself has always been very well known.
I would say it's one of the more recognisable properties
probably in all of Malibu.
It was a very contemporary house, quite large.
I think it was 8,500 square feet...
..with a 60ft swimming pool.
Yeah, it was great.
A lot of movie stars live there.
You know, it was over looking the Point Dume
and you can see the ocean on both sides...
..and, er, it was good for the kids.
We went there, and it was like out of a movie.
I think he had a black Rolls in the driveway,
and my memory is he had a chef,
and to me that was it.
It was like, "This guy's got his own chef!"
There you go.
"What will we be having for lunch, Mr Cohen?"
You know, that sort of thing.
My friend and I were walking around and, of course,
he had plenty of art there.
Beautiful surroundings, the water, this, that...
And it's like he's living the dream.
It's a classic, you know, rags to riches story.
I mean, he got to the top.
He's the only one I know who got that far from nothing.
He did it.
Mythical Icarus soared so high,
the sun melted the wax cementing his wings
until he fell into the sea...
Michel was a young,
French, Jewish Icarus
whose remarkable ascent...
..it may have happened
too quickly for him.
I think that was one of the problems.
I suppose it's just such a cliche that, doesn't everybody know
that money doesn't make you happy?
Not here in America!
We haven't learned that lesson yet!
Did the spending continue, did it increase?
Oh, yeah.
Increase, increase, increase, increase.
But even with his wife, I would say,
"Don't you think that they should save a little bit?"
"I know, but, you know... He says that it's OK."
And then, "I think he's a genius. I think he can do it."
I'm like, "OK..."
So she believed in his magic, too?
Yeah.
And, of course, why not?
When you see the houses,
the cars, the lifestyle...
Why not believe, you know?
It cost me 2.8 million
and I had $1 million mortgage.
My mortgage was 10,000 a month
because I only owned a third of its value.
And the cars, you add another 5,000.
And then there was help, the gardener and all of that,
maybe it's another five, you know.
How many staff did you have? You had a gardener...
Yeah, but he did not come every day. Just came once a week.
Did you have a pool boy? Yeah, but that doesn't cost much.
Did you have a nanny for the children? Yeah.
We had one,
and we had a maid,
so these were full-time peoples.
Cos my wife was a champion
of jumping when she was 16 and 15,
so we bought a horse
and she had a coach.
We bought a pony for the kids, but they were a little young for that,
you know, they were a little scared of it.
And then we bought a share on a second horse,
that one was very good, with a coach. Erm...
How much were the horses?
Well, one horse will cost 40,000.
The pony 7,000.
And then there's the upkeep every month,
maybe it's 3,000.
So, this is all adding up, isn't it?
Yeah, but it's still within what I was making, you know.
In the autumn of 2000, Michel moves his family back to the centre
of the art world in New York.
As you can see, this is absolute iconic New York.
You're looking south over the skyline
and also a little bit west over Central Park.
One of the big attractions of this building for people
is that it has a swimming pool, has a roof deck,
it has a gym, has a concierge 24/7.
And doormen, of course, 24/7...
So you feel very secure in this building.
I was shocked. They were renting an apartment that back then
was $25,000 a month.
I remember thinking that's really way too much
than you need to be spending.
I was surprised they brought their horses with them.
I was very shocked and impressed
by how large they were living.
They were taking weekend flights to Martha's Vineyard, I think.
I mean, it was really over the top
for what I felt it should have been at that point.
At the time they were renting an apartment in New York,
I think that was like $35,000 a month.
They had a big Mercedes with a professional chauffeur,
because it's annoying to park in New York.
You cannot park, so, you know...
And so...
..from the outside, everything looked fine.
Though there are people who would call me and say,
"Is everything OK with Michel?
"He looks strange, he's lost weight, he looks very fidgety."
I know we're getting very close
to the drama point.
He was living, not just a high life,
he was living an incredibly fast life.
He's living across the street from Gianni Versace.
He apparently was taking private planes to Martha's Vineyard
or the Cape every weekend.
Those are serious, serious outlays of cash...
..and maybe he was running, trying to keep up with his lifestyle.
I knew that there were certain days where he would just lose
a vast fortune that he couldn't afford to pay back,
but I came into my office and he was sort of sitting there like this,
holding his QuoTrek machine.
Practically, the QuoTrek looked like it was smoking
from how devastating his day was.
He'd basically just lost $1 million that day
just from bad investment choices.
So you can buy or sell at the right time, every time, with QuoTrek.
Michel didn't have a clue what he was doing in the options market,
a couple of the brokerage houses shut him down
because they didn't want liability charges,
dealing with somebody who was so uninformed
about what they were doing and losing such a huge amount of money.
We were literally doing nothing more than throwing dice.
How much was the debt in the summer of 2000?
It was less than...
..15.
Million? Yeah. Yeah!
I was just stressed out, it was just too much,
between the socialising, the entertaining.
You know, the hours I was pulling out, you know,
getting up at 4:30 to do trading,
you're always thinking about, er...
..you know, your debts.
And what happened is like with any gambler,
he would take a position, he would lose.
He would take a bigger position, he would lose.
He would take even a bigger position
and, at some point, Michel ran out of money.
I don't know how quickly or how much it was...
..but then he started getting involved needing money
from outside to support this,
because he was of the belief that,
"I know I can get it back and I can repay my debts.
"All I need is more capital."
I was observing like
a train crash in slow motion
because the level of debt...
..things became really crazy because...
..then he used the money of the painting to play the market.
That's when he started going to his colleagues,
his collectors and to Sotheby's...
..asking either for loans
or for consignment of artworks,
that he could then put in the options market
and cover his losses and make the money and get back on track.
In 2000, Michel crosses the line
and starts doing actual fraudulent deals in the art world.
Michel came in and we had a big Picasso painting -
it was in the millions.
He said, "Oh, I have a client for that." I said, "Great."
He said, "I want to take it to a warehouse to show them."
That's often done in our business
so that the client doesn't actually come into our gallery.
He would take it to a warehouse, show it at the warehouse,
and then either sell it or return it.
And he said, "I can get you a $25,000 deposit for it."
And I said, "That sounds fine." This was Michel.
Of course, that sounded totally fine.
And I went into Jim and Jim said, "No, I don't think so."
So, we didn't let him take the paintings, and after Michel left
I went into Jim and I said, "Why did you say that?"
Jim said, "Something's not feeling right.
"I don't feel things are right with him."
I didn't sense it.
Jim Goodman sensed it,
and thank God.
He came in
and he had a transparency with him
and he said this...
..painting could be for sale.
An early Monet painting,
Le Repos Dans Le Jardin, Argenteuil.
And he said,
"It is at the Metropolitan Museum.
"And I need to put a deposit down."
So, Bill...
..writes a cheque for $2.5 million,
and...
..we don't think anything more.
He called me and asked me if I still had a work by Picasso
that he remembered seeing a couple of months before.
I said, yes, and he said, "I think I might have somebody
"who could be interested in it."
We looked at the work together, we agreed on a price,
he signed an agreement,
we had the work released to his shipper,
who took it to a warehouse here in New York,
where he planned to show it the following week.
How much was the painting worth?
About $2.5 million.
DRAMATIC MUSIC
The last deal that we made
in order to purchase a couple of paintings by Picasso.
We had a lunch and hands were shaken,
and funds were forwarded.
Do you know roughly how much that deal was worth?
I think we were into $3 million,
maybe $3 to $4 million.
I traded to get back losses, and then I used other people's,
you know, loans, the proceeds, I mean, er...
..to try and make some money
and pay the loans off
like I did before.
Yeah, in my mind, I always thought that I would pay them back.
One good trade, and I would have made the money
and nobody would have known what I did.
These are their American Express bills.
Even though he's in dire straits, financially,
his spending is still through the roof.
1,800 in Prada.
$2,500 on bed linen
and more than $13,000 on a hotel in Palm Beach.
$500 on children's clothes.
Six weeks before he fled,
and he's spending nearly $4,000 in a watch shop.
Same week, he spends $22,500 on a Steinway piano.
This is the man who is going under, financially,
but it doesn't seem to be holding him back,
and still spending thousands of dollars on his gym membership.
Self-reassurance,
feeling that the good old days are still the good old days.
I don't know, but it's absurd.
You bought a Steinway piano for $22,500.
Do you remember doing that? Yeah. Why did you do that, Michel?
Because I wanted the kids to learn piano.
The thing that's a bit contradictory for me is that, on the one hand,
you're saying you wanted to pay everybody back,
at the same time you're spending $22,500 on a piano,
$1,300 at Ralph Lauren,
$13,000 at the Palm Beach Hotel, etc...
Yeah, it was a holiday.
No, it's, er, if you were 20 or 30 million,
it's not making any difference if you spend 50,000 that month,
especially with an American Express card,
because you don't have to pay it. You just pay the interest.
I suppose some people, when they get into debt,
they do everything they can to claw back every dime,
but it sounds like you sort of weren't doing it.
Well, the apartment was empty, I had to furnish it,
because I did not have an office, or a gallery,
and we had clients coming in,
so you could not have an empty place with just a sofa
and a couple of paintings.
I noticed he had that way of being able
to re-twist things in his mind
that would follow a narrative that would be good for him.
Do you think he had a guilty conscience about what he was doing?
You know, I think maybe not.
And then there came a time where he wasn't returning my calls.
I went to our legal department
and said, "He's not returning my calls."
When that happens, when somebody starts doing that,
you know that he has other creditors than you,
and then it's going to be a race to the courthouse
to get what's called a lean on his remaining assets,
and you're going to have to liquidate that person,
or that person's assets,
and whoever gets to the courthouse and sues first
comes out ahead of the other guys,
because it's time-stamped when you do it.
So, in January 2001, when Sotheby's realised
Michel has defaulted on the $10 million he owes them,
it's them that call the cops and blow the whole thing wide open.
There was a story posted online about Sotheby's filing suit
against him for the recovery of some loans that were outstanding.
And, you know, that's when we began to be concerned about his viability
as a consignee.
As each day went by, it became clearer that we were not alone,
that galleries like Beyeler in Switzerland
and Acquavella here in New York and Paul Kantor in Beverly Hills,
that there were many of us who were owed millions.
This is the breakdown of what the FBI know
to be Michel's fraudulent...
what the Americans call wire transfers.
So you can see the names of the artists and the amounts.
So we've got a Picasso - 200,000.
The Monet in the Met -
someone sent him over a million for that.
Another five million for that.
This is for another Picasso.
A Dali - nearly three million.
Chagall, Chagall, Pissarro.
That's another Monet.
That's that Picasso again - another 3.9 million.
And that's that Picasso again - four million.
So selling the same painting over and over again
for very large amounts of money.
This is the Picasso you borrowed from Paul Gray.
He gave it to you on consignment.
You didn't pay anything for it,
and you told him that you could sell it for 2.2 million...
Yeah, that's right. ..and then, without his permission,
you put it on a private plane to Iowa,
where you sold it to a collector for 4.5 million.
It's completely false.
So when Paul Gray says that you took the painting and never paid him,
are you saying to me he's lying?
No, I never paid him. You never paid him?
They invoiced me, so I owned it.
You own it completely when it's... When you pay for it?
Yeah, but I have an invoice for it,
and I may be able to... to get hold of that.
We're sort of splitting hairs, aren't we?
Cos you took a painting from him worth 2.2 million
and, whether or not there was an invoice,
you never returned the painting.
So you stole a painting worth 2.2 million.
It's not stealing, when you steal...
It's like a robbery.
It's not stealing. He invoiced me.
There are many...
..examples of galleries who buy a picture, and they don't pay,
or they pay half if they have money problems.
That's not stealing. Stealing is when you rob something.
But if you take the painting
and you never pay for it, that's stealing.
No, it's not. You owe them money, if you are invoiced.
So you... It happened. I'm calling it stealing.
You're saying you still owe him 2.2 million? Is that right?
Yeah, whatever the invoice says, but he invoiced me for that picture.
He even got a cheque of 200,000 that bounced.
So that's the proof in itself that it was a sale.
And then everybody starts telling me about all these stories.
And I was shocked, shocked!
I said, "No, that can't be Michel -
"not the Michel I know."
I said, "It can't be."
And it didn't take long, and I heard about all the dealers and everybody,
that this one's chasing him for ten million,
this one's chasing him for three million,
he never paid this one on Picassos.
Everything broke loose.
People started saying, you know, "So and so's lost money,
"they're looking for Michel.
"Anybody know where Michel is?"
And then we realised that we were not going to get our painting.
So we lost $2.5 million,
which in 2000 or 2001...
..would have been the equivalent to, what,
ten million now, eight million now?
I mean, it was a lot of money.
As well as selling Bill Beadleston a half share in the Monet,
at the same time, you sold that painting to a gallery
in Switzerland for five million
and to an investor in LA for another five million.
So three different people in total gave you 12.5 million
for that one painting, which wasn't even for sale.
Yeah, but don't forget, these are all loans, you know.
They're all loans you haven't paid back.
Exactly.
This is why I'm saying to you, Michel,
that I'm not sure whether you're being dishonest with me
or whether you're being dishonest with yourself,
because to say, these are all loans 18 years after the event,
when you've taken 12.5 million from people and never paid them back
and have no means of paying them back -
that is not a loan.
That is theft.
Yeah, but, um...
Yeah, I mean...
Yeah, they were loans at the time.
You asked me at the time, and I did not know, 18 years later,
I would not be able to pay them back.
He was a little delusional about it for quite a while.
You know, they say that gamblers...
..gamble until they lose, not until they win.
I think that's him also - he gambled until he had lost everything
and there was nothing left to gamble.
They served papers at the apartment building where we lived,
and they were staying there in limousines for hours, even at night.
You know, we were followed.
So it spooked me.
I went with the sheriff to Michel's apartment,
where I'd met him two years before.
And we walked up to the door,
and there were like seven New York Times piled up against the door
from the delivery person.
And I knew that that apartment was empty.
Up until the very end, there was always a chance
he was going to pull a rabbit out of his hat. You know?
He had done it before.
Never quite on that scale.
And then there was the final phone call
where he just seemed kind of sad and lost.
I was like, "Oh, my God! Michel!"
It's like seeing your parents cry or something. It's like, "No..."
And then that was it - he was gone.
Was he the kind of person who would do something as extreme
as going on the run?
Yeah, I think so, yes.
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
There was like...
You know, it was kind of like...
..the end justified the means.
Yes, there was that extreme part of him.
And then, you know, Richard told me, "You're not getting paid."
"So they left a bunch of stuff behind.
"If you see some shirt or something you want,
"just grab it before it's seized."
And did you? Yeah.
I mean, you know, I think I grabbed the TV.
CAR HORNS BEEP
MUSIC: Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien by Edith Piaf
And then the accountant called me
and was just like, "Go look at the paper."
And that's how I kind of saw I had no job,
I was looking at the New York Post headline.
You know, like, "The biggest art swindler ever!"
That's my boy!
MUSIC CONTINUES
There was a story he went to Germany cos his wife was German.
We suspected that he had moved to Israel.
Unfortunately, I imagine that he's in prison.
And I still think I see him sometimes. Do you?
He could be around.
He's pretty sneaky.
And I don't know where he is to this day,
if he's in fact alive, and I have no idea.
I know there's a lot of people
who are really angry, who probably would like to have him killed.
Were people very angry with him? Oh! Angry? Angry?
They were crazy!
I mean, oh! They were doing this, and, "I'm going to have him killed,"
and stories that they hired hitmen to kill him,
they didn't care about the money - they just wanted him dead.
I heard crazy stories!
I think everybody was in such shock
that Michael Cohen, or Michel Cohen,
pulled off or did anything like this.
It was a shock to the art world.
There are people who have assets of 50 million to billions.
So it did not affect their lives, but my life was affected.
I feel bad, but not as bad if you lose money
for somebody who needs to survive on it.
What was your reaction to that, Susanna,
to being swindled in that way?
It was disgust.
It was outrage.
For us and for everybody else.
There was no sense of remorse on his part, because he'd gone.
Did you ever consider staying and allowing yourself to be arrested?
Yeah, but when the lawyer told me...
..in the States, it's five years per count, so if you have 12 counts...
You actually had 24 counts in the end.
Then it's five times 24.
And, you know, maybe it will have been five times 15 at the end.
But any way you look at it, it's like a death penalty.
So...
..I was...
..49 years old then, I think.
Yeah, 48 years old.
So why should I wait for...
..you know, a 20-year sentence or a 15-year sentence?
I did not kill anybody.
What was your reaction to the fact that Michel went on the run
rather than face the music?
Coward!
Coward, coward, coward.
I was able to take $8,000.
And I did not know where to go, so I flew to Madrid, and I said,
"Where should I go?" And I looked at the departure board,
and I saw Buenos Aires, so I thought, "Yeah, maybe."
And then the flight was quite a few hours ahead.
And then there was a flight...
..not sooner, before...
..to Rio.
So I said, "I'll go to Rio. That sounds great."
So you just chose Rio at random, just because it was the next flight?
Exactly.
Did you know anything about Rio?
No, I'd never been to Brazil.
Did you know anybody in Rio? No.
Did you speak Portuguese? No.
Another adventure!
I just focused on finding a place and knowing my way around
and looking at the schools.
So I just focused on that, like I was starting a new life.
Antonio, when you met Michel,
was he using his real name, Michel Cohen?
Did Michel appear to have money?
Did you have any sense of where the money was coming from?
Did you get a job in Rio?
I did find an activity with trading after I raised a little bit
of money from friends and family.
And were you making any money? Making, losing,
but overall there were losses, you know.
In the middle of 2002, we had another child,
and it was great, so you forget
your previous life in the States, you know.
It was a happy moment.
But I got to live with him just six months, you know.
And then what happened?
When I got on my way to work, I got arrested on the street.
After two years of hiding out on the beach,
Michel is arrested in Rio in May 2003.
Did he seem surprised to be arrested?
Which prison did they take you to?
It's an underground prison.
It's way out, outside Rio.
They take you down a dark...
..corridor underground and down the stairs.
Everything is narrow and you look on your right,
you have like a cage with some people in the dark,
standing up in their underwear.
They look, you know, dangerous.
And I learnt these guys how to play chess.
I taught at least 12 people how to play,
and they loved it.
At some point, my brother received a phone call from Michel's wife,
who claimed that they were in Rio.
And she claimed that Michel was in prison.
And she asked my brother for... I believe it was $150,000...
..to get Michel out on bail.
My brother said no.
I could not take it for much longer.
You know, something had to happen.
I had a flash one night before I escaped.
You know, how I could escape.
It came to me, you know, before I went to sleep.
And I asked for a few days to go to a hospital,
and the ambulance was broken.
I sit in the back, and the guards are in front.
They have two guns -
one between their legs and one on their side.
We got into a one-way street that was very crowded.
For me, it was the sign to get out of the car and run.
I ran really fast - I mean, so fast, you know.
After a few hundred metres, I thought I would have a heart attack.
I just could not run any more.
I saw a taxi. I had him drop me off at a shopping mall not far.
So I bought a baseball cap and some cheap sunglasses.
Having escaped from prison, Michel vanishes without a trace
and leaves his wife and children to fend for themselves in Rio.
INAUDIBLE
SINGING
I went into an Evangelist-type church,
and they helped me find a place to stay.
They did not know my story,
but they knew I needed to have a place somewhere
and find a way out of Brazil.
I knew the only way out,
since I had no passport and no IDs,
was to somehow cross the Amazon and get on the other side
to Guiana, which is French territory.
You take a boat on the Amazon, and it takes...
..two days and one night.
You can see at night,
you know, these crocodiles, which are quite nice.
And then you have to cross the river on a boat.
Then I could see the French flag, and I was there,
so that was a great feeling.
He spent about six weeks travelling across Brazil,
crossing the Amazon into French Guiana,
where he arrived in January 2004.
And then, in August of that year,
Michel flew back to France.
MUSIC: Ne Me Quitte Pas by Jacques Brel
I had a distant cousin who is married to an Orthodox Jew.
A man I met there let me stay at his office.
And I stayed there a couple of years almost.
After he left Brazil, would he call you?
Yes.
We talked a few times, and he was mostly out of money all the time.
So he would borrow money... "Borrow" - ask me for money
to help him. So I would send, you know...
At first, I would send like $500 or $1,000 once in a while,
but I could not really keep doing that too long. So...
Sometimes, I had to tell him, "You know, I have bills to pay myself,
"so we cannot keep doing this."
When I ran out of money, I had times where I did not eat, you know.
Once it happened four days in a row.
So I just had hot water and sugar, but then I could not sleep
because, when you have too much sugar, you just...
..you know, you can feel your pulse in your head.
You know, it's a very strange feeling. It's awful.
I think he wanted to go back into the market.
It was a total obsession.
That's what he wanted to do - day trading.
To me, it felt like a drug addict.
He had to have it, no matter what.
Orthodox Jews - they helped me.
One of them, his father was very wealthy,
so they invested some money with me.
I mean, I think we started with 70,000 euros.
So with that, I did quite well for...
..not long. Maybe four or five months.
But at the end, he lost his principal.
So he lost the lot?
Yeah.
I could not stay in that office any more.
At this point, Michel hits rock-bottom
and finds himself homeless on the streets of Paris.
I never...
..you know, felt so low.
Did you blame yourself for the situation you were in?
It's... I don't know.
I tried to focus on the future
and not dwell on the past, because it's not productive.
I mean, there are so many things I could have done or not done,
mostly not done.
It's not in my mentality to have regrets.
After five years of not seeing his family,
Michel is finally reunited with his wife and three children
when they fly back from Rio to join him.
Seeing my children was...
..you know, a very intense...
..moment. And presumably your youngest child had been a baby?
Yeah, he was looking at me like, who am I?
His older brother -
I think he was standing - told him, "That's...
"..Pappy."
Describe a typical day for you now.
Well, now...
..I take my son to school...
..at 7.30.
How old is your youngest child now?
He's 16 now.
OK, so you take him to school in the morning, and then?
And I take my wife to the train station.
I take the dog for a walk.
And then I do the laundry.
And what do you do for money?
I don't do anything.
Are you on welfare?
Yeah, I am, yeah.
And do you have friends?
No.
I have my kids, and I really...
..don't feel a need for it.
I don't socialise at all, you know.
Do you still think much about the past?
Do you talk to anyone about the past?
No.
I mean...
No.
I don't talk to people.
Do you still stay in touch with Michel?
No, I haven't talked to him in a long time.
Come in.
At some point, I got a little disgusted
that the only conversation we could have
was about me sending him money.
What would you like the ending to be?
I'd like him to be living in the six-by-six-foot cell with bars.
I would like to have gotten our money back.
Well, I would like him to be in jail.
What was the consequence for you and for the Beadleston Gallery?
Billy became so disillusioned, he just gave up.
He said he didn't want to be in that business any more.
And so he closed the gallery? Mm.
And you lost your job?
I lost my job.
Do you know what happened to Bill Beadleston? No.
Did you know that he was so demoralised by that theft...
..that he closed his gallery
and everyone who worked there lost their job? No.
Cos I always thought of him as a very...
..wealthy man and I thought he was doing so well with his artists.
I think it was the betrayal that destroyed him.
Really? I'm sorry.
MUSIC: Yesterday, When I Was Young by Charles Aznavour
because I don't think you go from one day to another,
from one day, you're good, and, the next day, you're bad.
And he was very methodical
about how he was doing these things.
This was not just fly by night.
He must have been thinking about these things for a long time.
You know, they were over months.
I don't think you can be a good person
to be thinking those thoughts.
People got hurt, financially.
It was a fraction of what they owned,
but they lost millions of dollars, and they have a right to be angry.
But it is my opinion that Michel was not somebody
who put together some grand scheme to defraud these people.
The outcome for him was far more serious
than it was for the people who lost money.
Michel lost everything.
He was not a conman in the beginning - never ever.
He was one of the most accomplished salespeople I've ever seen.
I knew what I was doing was wrong,
you know, and I was hoping it doesn't come out,
and I'd just pay it back with interest,
and I'd start from scratch again.
It was, you know, a nightmarish time.
I had a good, peaceful life,
and I got mixed up with something crazy.
It's like total madness, you know.
There's always the possibility he's going to get caught and go to jail.
It doesn't matter how old you are.
Eventually, eventually, if you're going to dance,
you've got to pay for it. And eventually, something comes out.
Does the FBI know where you are now?
I don't know. I don't talk to them.
But I think, if they do, they know they can't extradite.