Inside the biggest art fraud in US history - podcast
Orlando Whitfield, the author of All That Glitters, on his years of friendship with the art fraudster Inigo Philbrick
Orlando Whitfield, the author of All That Glitters, tells Michael Safi about his former friendship with Inigo Philbrick, who was sentenced to seven years in 2022 for wire fraud and ordered to forfeit $86m (£68m).
As students at Goldsmiths University in London, Whitfield and Philbrick decided to start dealing in art together. They sold their first piece for €15,000 (£12,600).
“We did that thing that you sometimes see in, not exclusively, hip-hop videos, where cash is thrown willy-nilly into the air,” Orlando says. “Which is kind of fun for like the first sort of 10 seconds. And then you suddenly realise that not all of the money is yours. And in fact, the vast majority isn’t, and it took us about 20 minutes to clear it up.
“There was a point at which we’d ordered, you know, frivolously a bottle of champagne and some club sandwiches in room service, and this Portuguese waiter comes up with our food and he’s clearly the same age as us and he’s like two young men in a room full of cash and I think that was quite an odd moment. It’s not not my finest hour.”
In the following years, Philbrick went on to commit the largest art fraud in US history, according to the FBI. How did he pull it off?
The Guardian is editorially independent. And we want to keep our journalism open and accessible to all. But we increasingly need our readers to fund our work.
Support The Guardian