Electroboy (25 page)

Jessica Doyle, Mark’s former assistant, and now a costume designer living in Paris, is flown to New York by the government to testify. She testifies very reluctantly. Her demeanor toward the prosecutor is bordering on rude—she gives him one-word answers and barely acknowledges him. She does tell him that I told her that Annike and I were producing unauthorized paintings and that I was selling them in Japan and also in Germany. “What did he say to you about his state of mind about this, about how he felt about what he was doing?” asks Polkes. “He told me he was nervous. He told me that he knew that it was a crazy and silly thing,” she tells him. She describes my personality as very highly strung. “Did you ever personally witness Andy Behrman sign any of the fakes in your presence?” asks Polkes. “No,” she responds. But she also supplies important information about people who signed Kostabi’s name on canvases. She goes on to testify that I had Mark sign blank certificates of authenticity, which I supplied customers with for my unauthorized paintings. She also admits lying to the police about knowing anything about the case when first questioned, “ ’cause I was being loyal to my friend Andy.” Then Stuart asks her if she was ever at Kostabi World with me and Hiromi
Nakano, the photographer, when I was writing the name Kostabi on a painting. “Not to my recollection,” she answers.

Lis Fields, a former idea person in the “think tank” and now an assistant to a film director, comes from Los Angeles to testify. She has the most difficult time on the stand—she’s unable to fight back tears while being grilled by the prosecution and explains that I had confided in her about my counterfeiting activities with Annike, after she begged me not to tell her anything about what I was doing. She has received an immunity deal to testify, having lied to the government previously about knowing anything about the case. She tells the prosecutor that I had “a mixture of fear and excitement” about the scheme. Curiously, she has kept two different sets of notes of her version of the story—one a cover story that includes some untruths and omissions that would make it look as though she didn’t know anything about the case, the other an entirely truthful rendering of what happened and what she knew. In the first set of notes she actually wrote, “I had no idea he was doing anything wrong.” She testifies that my behavior was manic and that I was taking medication. For some reason, maybe because I hate to see her go through such a stressful situation, I thank her when she passes by the defense table.

December 8, 1993. Brooklyn
.

Today is a half day in court because of Hanukkah. Hiromi Nakano, the Kostabi World photographer, testifies that the slides of the counterfeit paintings were not taken by her, because she doesn’t use a white brick wall as a background. Annike overlooked this detail. She goes on to tell the jury that she saw me late one evening, in a panic with Jessica, signing Kostabi’s name to the front of a canvas. “What did you see Andy Behrman doing?” asks Polkes. “He was signing paintings,” she answers. “Signing names on paintings?” he repeats. “Kostabi names on paintings,” she says. This seems like the most devastating evidence to be introduced by the prosecution. Fortunately, the prosecution’s own witness, Jessica, has no memory of the incident.

The prosecution calls Mark Zimmerman to the witness stand. Formerly a Kostabi groupie, “Maz” is now the operations manager of Kostabi World and says he does “basically everything.” He describes the studio’s perfectly organized system of record keeping. But Stuart questions him about signing Mark’s name on a check, and he admits to having done it before. This is the first bit of hard evidence introduced that points to Kostabi allowing an employee to sign his name.

Hiroshi Yokohama, the owner of Hama Gallery in Tokyo, testifies about our meeting at which I sold him four paintings, which I shipped to him when I returned to New York. He also testifies that I gave him instructions to wire the money into an account at Marine Midland Bank, which happens to be my personal account. The prosecutor asks him if he ever meets Kostabi. Yokohama says yes, but that he left and came back again and asked him to take the frames off the paintings. “They said that something is strange,” he said. “So Mr. Kostabi said he wanted to take these back to the United States, and he rolled them up.” In an effort to suggest to the court that it would be okay for me to accept cash for the sale of paintings from my own collection, Stuart asks Yokohama if he is aware that I have my own personal collection of Kostabis. Unfortunately, Yokohama has no knowledge.

December 9, 1993. Brooklyn
.

Stuart calls Kostabi’s accountant, Mel Kaplan, and questions him about the purchase of Kostabi’s $1 million apartment at the CitySpire Building. Kostabi has bartered artwork to satisfy part of the mortgage, and it has not been recorded. Stuart also finds out from Kaplan that Kostabi drew no salary in 1991, which implies that the proceeds of unreported cash sales went to him.

Outside the courtroom, during the lunch break, I see my mother talking with a woman in her midsixties. The woman inquires if this is my first trial. Yes. She assures my mother that I’ll do just fine. My mother responds by telling her that I am the defendant and not the attorney. They both start laughing.

Ron English, a former Kostabi painter, testifies that Kostabi
offered him a couple of certificates of authenticity so he could make his own Kostabis. English testifies that he never took him up on his offer.

It’s time for the prosecutor’s summation. He shuffles up to the jury box. “Now, let’s say I find a basketball in a closet. If I went to sell that basketball, I could probably get five bucks for it. Let’s say I take the same basketball and sign Jonathan Polkes on it. Probably then I’d get a dollar, but, of course if I put Michael Jordan’s name, then it’s magic. Now let’s suppose I take the basketball and I take a Magic Marker and I sign Michael Jordan’s name and I try to sell it to you for a couple of thousand bucks, I’d be cheating you. That’s exactly what this case is about. Mark Kostabi has the same ability; sign something which is a piece of canvas and turn it into something worth a lot of money. The defendant gets nervous again when Kostabi goes to Japan,” Polkes says. “And what’s Behrman’s reaction? After all I did for him, I can’t believe he fired me,” he says. “That’s the twisted mind. This guy has been cheating Kostabi, and his only reaction, all I did for him.”

A woman in dark Muslim garb appears in the back of the courtroom while the prosecutor is making his closing arguments. She sits right behind Lauren and Lucy, who are both frightened by her. At first I’m curious what her connection to the case might be until I realize that it’s Annike, who has disguised herself to come see the last day of the trial. She has borrowed the outfit from a mosque in Jersey City. At first I’m shocked, imagining the worst—that she will be discovered as the co-conspirator and arrested on the spot. But then I realize the ridiculousness of this entire scenario. I chuckle and smile at her.

Stuart starts his summation with a simple question: “Did Andy intend to defraud anybody?” He questions the money I received from Art Collection House. Miss Kawamura’s testimony supported, he argues, the fact that I had my own extensive collection of Kostabis and was entitled to any monies that I received. He accuses Kostabi of lying to Art Collection House customers by writing letters requesting to correct their paintings. “The government is accusing Andy Behrman of engaging in criminal fraud,
and what does Kostabi do? He writes letters to people saying these are real paintings. These are really my paintings. I want to, quote, change them, and he doesn’t tell them that he’s claiming now that they are fakes. What is his explanation, basically? I lied in the letter,” says Stuart. “Judge Nickerson will explain to you what an attempt to defraud means, and the government has to prove that beyond a reasonable doubt. So he can get up here and say, see, all this evidence, eyewitnesses, people saw him signing, you got all these ten different ways that we showed people signed and it wasn’t Kostabi. Big deal. Where is the proof that Andy Behrman believed that what he was doing was not in accord with—and I hesitate to use this word but I will say it—normal, within the realm of what was normal at Kostabi World? It’s so appropriate that they call it Kostabi World because that’s what it is, it’s like some other world where concepts that apply in this courtroom about truth and honesty have no meaning; where a man says he’s the world’s greatest con artist and makes a lot of money by saying it.” Then Stuart brings up the issue of how the two Kostabi brothers treated me at Kostabi World. “Before any of this ever happened, they used to go around accusing him of being a thief. There was pressure on Andy to get more sales. Not only that, ladies and gentlemen, they owed Andy a lot of money.”

After lunch in the cafeteria, I’m in the elevator with my father and some friends when my knees buckle and I nearly collapse, but my father grabs me before I fall. I’m a lot more anxious than I’ve realized. I’m huddling with my parents, holding their hands, wishing the trial could go on for a few more days and that I could have a chance to say a few words to the jury.

All the jury knows is that somebody has painted Kostabis and forged a signature. They are never introduced to any coconspirators. They aren’t even sure which paintings are fake. Kostabi isn’t even sure. But I can tell them apart. Judge Nickerson instructs the jury on how to determine the guilt or innocence of a defendant and sends them to the jury room. They deliberate for only an hour before he dismisses them until the following Monday to start deliberations again.

December 11, 1993. New York
.

My friend Paul takes me to see
Wayne’s World
to get my mind off the trial and the deliberations, and for two hours Garth and Wayne manage to keep me focused—it is a good diversion. I go to a party at Larissa’s, a friend of Deb and Paul, on the Upper East Side, and the intensity of my week disappears in the crowd of partygoers. Everyone is curious about how the trial is going, but I don’t have the best perspective. “We’re doing great,” I say, just glad to be out of the courtroom and in a room full of people smoking and drinking.

December 13, 1993. Brooklyn
.

I pace the area in front of the courtroom waiting for the jury to return with the verdict. I am surrounded by my family and friends and make calls to other friends on the pay phone to keep them posted. At 4:30
P.M.
Judge Nickerson enters the courtroom and everybody quickly assembles inside. He asks for the verdict from the foreperson. I am frozen. “How do you find the defendant, Andrew Behrman, as to count one, guilty or not guilty?” asks the clerk. “Guilty,” says the foreperson. Ouch! The clerk runs through counts two through five quickly, and I am found not guilty on each count. The clerk polls the jury. Judge Nickerson releases me on a personal-recognizance bond and sets a sentencing date for May 20, 1994. The prosecution team has mixed reactions, Stuart seems let down, and I’m just glad that the jury has come to a verdict I had predicted an hour earlier. I was pretty confident they wouldn’t convict me of these other counts because none of them involved unauthorized paintings.

I am now officially labeled a felon. There doesn’t seem as much of a stigma associated with being a felon as I thought there would be. So I won’t be able to buy a handgun. A few days after the verdict I’m contacted by
New York
magazine writer James Kaplan, who is working on his story of the “Kostabi affair.” He has attended the trial and wants to interview me, but Stuart asks me to decline being interviewed by him or any other member of the press because I haven’t been sentenced yet. Nonetheless, I
agree to meet with Kaplan because I feel like I can trust him and desperately want not only to be a part of the story but to exert some control over it. He agrees not to quote me. I meet Kaplan one afternoon for lunch on the Upper West Side at Lenge, a Japanese restaurant, and give him my version of the story. The article, complete with a bizarre nude photo of Kostabi, is published. It’s a cover story. My reaction to the story and the response I get is extremely positive—calls from friends, family friends, and clients are all very supportive. The article portrays me quite fairly and does not paint the most flattering picture of Kostabi. “ ‘With Mark, Andy got a tabula rasa,’ says a friend of both men. ‘When Andy wasn’t there to make him do tricks, he was boring. Where with Andy, everything was a joke, Mark had absolutely no sense of humor. He was almost like a trained dog—he’d always talk about how Donald Trump was his big hero.’ ” Kaplan asks Kostabi, “Would you ever forgive Andy Behrman?” “If he served a sufficient number of years in jail, and made financial restitution, and offered a sincere apology—under those circumstances, and those only, I would forgive him.” Kaplan writes, “For one who has often portrayed
himself
as a con artist, for one who claimed that people who bought his paintings were fools, Kostabi pursued Behrman with remarkable single-mindedness. His determination seems all the more striking when you realize that until May 1991, Kostabi had considered Behrman one of his closest friends. Oddly, Behrman seems to have felt the same. After he was indicted, Behrman told a friend, ‘I’m scared this is going to be a movie of the week, and I’ll be played by Andrew McCarthy.’ ”

The media’s attention to the trial only fuels my mania more, instilling me with an extra shot of confidence. I’m tremendously relieved that the jury has issued its verdict and that I can finally put an end to this chapter of my life. Concealed in this defeat, I think, is a small victory. I have been convicted on only the first count—conspiracy to defraud. Since I’m clear on the other four, that means I’ll spend less time locked up. So I tell myself not to worry and I go about making the best of my time before my sentencing, allowing the wounds of the past few months’ time to heal.