LAWRENCE B. SALANDER PLEADS GUILTY IN $120 MILLION FRAUD CASE

Art dealer Lawrence B. Salander pleaded guilty on Thursday to a $120 million fraud scheme, admitting he sold paintings he did not own and at least once sold fractional shares of a painting that added up to more than 100 percent, the New York Times’s James Barron reports.

“I am deeply ashamed and sorry for my actions,” the sixty-year-old dealer said after acknowledging that he had defrauded clients including the tennis star John McEnroe; Roy Lennox, a hedge fund manager; and Earl Davis, the son of the painter Stuart Davis.

Salander’s gallery, the Salander-O’Reilly Galleries, had occupied a townhouse on the Upper East Side, where it rented for $154,000 a month. It shut down in 2007. The gallery had displayed paintings as varied as English landscapes by John Constable and modernistic scenes by Robert De Niro Sr., the actor’s father, who died in 1993.

At the State Supreme Court in Manhattan on Thursday, Salander read an eight-page statement, admitting to twenty-nine charges of grand larceny and scheming to defraud investors. Among other things, he said he had bilked McEnroe out of about $2 million and the estate of De Niro out of more than $1 million.

Salander had been promised a prison sentence of six to eighteen years, although Justice Michael J. Obus of the State Supreme Court in Manhattan indicated that in making a final decision, he would consider how much money had been repaid to Salander’s former clients.