Electroboy (23 page)

July 22, 1993. Brooklyn
.

S
tuart learns that the Federal Prosecutor’s Office in Brooklyn is preparing to indict me, on one count of conspiracy to defraud and four counts of wire fraud. The day has come to surrender. I meet Stuart at his office and we take a cab to the courthouse in Brooklyn. It seems like such a formal event. I’m wearing my Yamamoto suit, but I wish I had been allowed to dress more casually. I have to appear before the judge to enter a plea. When we arrive I’m taken into custody and handcuffed by a police officer—a formality, I’m told—while I wait to be processed. I’m unusually calm. But this isn’t good. I’ve lost control. It’s getting hot in this room, and I’m sweating and I want to get this over with. After about half an hour they remove the handcuffs and fingerprint me, and I’m really feeling like I’ve committed the crime of the century. Guilty. Then on to be photographed. Head on. Sideways. Holding the ID board in front of the Yamamoto suit. Right from the movies. Then Stuart and I walk into the courtroom and go before a judge, a stern man who states the name and number of the case,
United States of America
v.
Andrew Behrman
, Case 93-0515—a whole fucking country against me—and asks how I plead. Per Stuart’s advice I plead not guilty on all counts. The voice barely comes out of me. He sets the trial date. Throughout the arraignment my mood is one of high energy—though nervous, I actually enjoy the experience because after two years I’m finally dealing directly with the system and I think we’re going to win this case. We head down the long courthouse steps into a group of local photographers
and reporters who photograph me and ask Stuart lots of questions. Stuart comments to the press that “we all will be able to sleep easier now knowing that the government is going to defend Mr. Kostabi.” The next day the
New York Post
captions a photo of me “Easel Weasel” and prints an article filled with errors about the story, such as “The forger is believed to be cooperating with authorities.” The forger, Annike, is not cooperating with authorities and is not indicted by the government. Because I trust her, I am confident that Annike is not talking to the D.A. I feel relieved that the wait is over, and at the same time I’m on top of the world. I love the frenzy of the attention. My big secret is finally out—I’ve been indicted. It all appeals to my manic state of mind.

The newspaper and magazine articles generate a wave of interest from prospective clients—authors, doctors, musicians, even artists—who for some reason want to work with me now that I’ve been indicted. I’m flooded with requests from prospective clients and give Sandy notice that I want to go back to working on my own. I abruptly break the lease on the office/apartment. I also walk out on the $2,000 tab at Harry Cipriani (only to settle with them later when they track me down). I’m still off all the medications and am just self-medicating with alcohol. This causes me to make off-the-top-of-my-head business decisions without any real thought. I sign three new clients in a week, open a new bank account, and quickly become obsessed with building a brand-new business. I take an expensive office space on 57th Street and Fifth Avenue, which I can cover with the new retainers I am collecting. It costs about $3,000 a month for a space that is only about fourteen feet square, but it gives me a sense of security, and I turn it into my home and office, working and eating at my desk for marathon twenty-hour stretches, sleeping on the floor behind my desk on a roll of bubble wrap, and bathing and brushing my teeth in the men’s room sink. There are other people working in offices on the same floor, but I’m sure I’m the only person in the entire building who sleeps over. Still, I’m tired of asking to sleep on friends’ couches and imposing on them for their hospitality. One day I take my usual walk outside on Fifth Avenue to find some coffee,
and the streets are virtually empty. I come back and start frantically typing a memo to Stuart.

I spend the rest of the morning preparing press information for a client, an artist named Paul Rebhan, who paints small canvases and quietly hangs one in the Museum of Modern Art as a publicity stunt. Next to his 11-by-14-inch abstract black-and-white painting, he places a card that reads, “Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Donald Trump.” The painting hangs for two days until it’s discovered. I’m talking to a columnist at the
New York Post
. “Yeah, he actually put double-sided tape on his small canvas and stuck it on the wall without the guards seeing him, and it stayed up for two days,” I tell her. The
Post
publishes the item the following day, as does
The
New York Times
. I get a call from an English rock band that is recording an album in New York and is interested in having me promote them. This is a new direction for me. I still have diet doctors calling me. I’m sitting back in my chair, drinking my coffee, wondering why anybody wants to work with an indicted art dealer. Annike calls to see how I’m doing. We haven’t seen each other in a while. Nobody has called her from the D.A.’s office. She’s teaching German to Americans now, and things are more stable for her financially. I tell her more about the upcoming trial. “I despise Kostabi,” she says. She always says that. At about 1:45
P.M.
I leave for a massage appointment that helps me keep my head together. I love being kneaded, twisted, and stretched. I’ve become one big ache. When I return to my office, I have quite a few messages to return, but first I call my friend Deb, who invites me over to dinner. Both my mother and father called to see how I’m doing. I look up at my door, and standing there is Jason, my escort/med-student friend, who is now a doctor. We haven’t seen each other in a long time, and he’s brought a bottle of Perrier-Jouët and two plastic glasses to celebrate my troubles and catch up. We get pretty drunk quickly. I put the answering machine on, and we reminisce about the eighties and our scandalous activities. “And look how far you’ve come,” jokes Jason. “Shit, what the fuck did you get yourself into?” he asks me. We walk out together—I’m flying—and say good-bye. I head to Deb and Paul Kogan’s apartment on the Upper West Side for dinner, a much needed injection of normalcy: a good meal, good wine, music, intelligent conversation, and friendship. I’m so tired, I sleep over on their couch.

I’m thrilled with the media coverage and the rush it induces—it’s as good as a manic high or a cocaine high. I enjoy seeing my name in print and being the topic of conversation around town. It’s particularly exciting to me that the indictment has been given space in
The New York Times
. All of the New York newspapers have covered
it, and the story has even appeared in
USA Today
and the
Los Angeles Times
. Some of the reports are ridiculously inaccurate: “A knowledgeable observer said the forgeries were of markedly lower quality than genuine Kostabis,” reports the
New York Post
. Some are humorous: “The U.S. Attorney’s office in Brooklyn, perhaps lacking an appreciation for dada, has shattered this house of mirrors by indicting Andrew Behrman, the salesman, on charges of fraud and criminal conspiracy. If convicted, he faces up to $250,000 in fines and 25 years in prison, where the Government may well envision him lovingly attending to license plates,” writes the
New York Observer
. Everybody seems to know that I’ve been indicted. Stuart gets to work on the case immediately. He prepares our pretrial motion for dismissal. Stuart argues that the acts I’m charged with committing don’t amount to a criminal offense under the wire-fraud statute. But the judge rejects this argument; we’re going to trial.
United States of America
v.
Andrew Behrman
. We have five months to prepare our case, and there’s a tremendous amount of material to review—government exhibits, documents, and grand-jury testimony (from more than a year ago)—in a short period. There’s research and strategizing to do. The government has had a full year to prepare for this case and has a large staff and unlimited resources with which to prosecute me. Stuart and I meet regularly to discuss my defense. I continue to be in touch with Annike, who has not been indicted; because they don’t see her as the mastermind of the scheme they’ll have difficulty proving that she actually painted the paintings, and she can just flee the country. And I am the one who has carelessly left the massive paper trail—tons of invoices, receipts, checks, and wires that are all in the hands of the government. I’m feeling confident that we’ll win the case and that no jury will find me guilty of producing or selling “counterfeit” Kostabis. There’s just no such thing as a fake Kostabi, since he doesn’t paint any of his own paintings. I don’t believe a jury will buy the fact that these paintings are his creations just because they have his signature on them. So technically there can be no forgeries. The issue here is about “authorized” versus “unauthorized” paintings—what is a genuine
Kostabi? Is a Kostabi only genuine if it has the Kostabi signature, the Kostabi blessing? If we can prove not only that he doesn’t paint his paintings but also that he sometimes doesn’t even sign his own name on the paintings, I’m convinced the jury will have to find me innocent. Other times I fantasize that the jury will find me guilty, and I imagine myself eating bread and water for the next five years, banging my tin cup against the bars of my cell in some jail somewhere in the middle of the woods in North Carolina. And then I counter by asking myself, is a jury really going to side with a self-described “con artist” who makes millions of dollars paying people minimum wage to paint his ridiculous faceless paintings?

It all drives me crazy, and I fight hard to maintain some level of sanity. Because I really think I’m losing my mind. I spend hours at Stuart’s office examining hundreds of pages of government exhibits, documents, and grand-jury minutes, filling him in whenever he needs a question answered or an issue clarified. I’m intrigued by the case and fascinated that these details that we are working with trace
my
moves over the last years, because oddly I feel as though I’m working on somebody else’s defense. I agonize over facts, searching for loopholes that might help us win this case for “the defendant.” Sometimes I’m stunned that someone has made such blatantly foolish mistakes committing a crime—having monies wired directly into his personal bank account, signing receipts for cash, and issuing invoices separate from those of Kostabi World. Clearly I wasn’t thinking about the consequences of my actions. I set myself up for my fall. I stay up until four or five in the morning, looking for clues to help Stuart and this pathetic defendant. I seize every opportunity I can to make money. Obsessing about the case induces my mania, and I go for days without sleep, becoming less lucid and more incoherent. I start believing that this is the most important legal case of our time. Stuart realizes that I am a bit out of control and obsessed, but he never loses focus and lets me continue my own investigation.

When I can no longer handle my manic obsession about the case, I try to divert my attention to some other activity. I usually go on a strict 800-calorie-a-day diet of egg whites, tuna, and tofu
and a vigorous exercise program, starving myself until I lose thirty or forty pounds in two or three months. Ultimately, I break down and gain the weight back within a month, but I get tremendous gratification from watching myself losing the weight. At my most manic period, I weighed about 175 pounds at six-feet-one, rather lanky. I returned to 195 pounds.

I go back to see Dr. Solnick. I tell him I’m feeling much worse since I last saw him, and he tells me not to worry, that this is a typical response to coming off the medication. Finally, after a month of talk therapy and downward spiraling, I leave his care. A year later I learn from a psychiatrist I meet that the infamous Dr. Solnick practiced without a medical license because of an incident in which he allegedly seduced a patient, and that he was not a proponent of medication because he was no longer able to write a prescription. I call to thank Jonathan for the recommendation, and he is rather amused by this story about his miracle shrink.

Stuart decides that I will take the Fifth Amendment because the prosecutor will have a field day cross-examining me. Certainly I will appear guilty. There’s no reason for the jury to hear what they will hear from witnesses coming from my mouth as well. But the thought of sitting silently at my own trial drives me crazy. They might as well handcuff me, too. And I worry that the average juror will question why I choose not to testify. Stuart is a brilliant attorney and can handle the case without using me as a witness, but still I feel powerful enough to convince anyone of anything, including my innocence. My thinking is so delusional that I really believe I can bond with each juror one-on-one, explain exactly why I am innocent, and answer any of their questions face-to-face, without lawyers, in a friendly way.