Sponge-Fraud!
Written by David Kushner, Vanity Fair
Friday July 6th, 2012
Artist Todd White seemingly had it all. With a multi-million-dollar art brand, collectors and clients ranging from Sylvester Stallone to Coca-Cola, and a burgeoning reputation in art-mad Britain, his days as lead character designer of SpongeBob SquarePant
Left, by Emmanuel Vouniozos; right, © Todd White. Right, artist Todd White; left, Band of Thugs, one of the paintings in his new collection inspired by the caper.
The ninjas arrived at six. Peggy Howell, the stylish blonde 62-year-old owner of Gallery HB, a bright courtyard shop at the Hyatt Regency Huntington Beach hotel, was alone. A surf song played from the ceiling speakers. Yellow glass cichlids sparkled in the light.
But the three “martial-arts experts” towering over Howell, as she would later tell it, weren’t interested in buying a “Greetings from Surf City” lithograph or a psychedelic Peter Max. One of them shoved her into a chair in her tiny back office, while another blocked the front door, she claims. “Are there any video cameras in this gallery?” she says he asked.
“Yes,” Howell said, fearfully.
“Well, make sure that they’re turned off,” he snapped. And if she didn’t do exactly what they wanted, he growled, “your life will not be the same as you know it.”
Two hours later, the gang exited the gallery, with Howell in tow and, she later estimated, more than $1 million worth of work by Howell’s favorite and most valuable artist: Todd White, a scruffy 42-year-old Texan famed for his lounge-lizard paintings, and for his work as the lead character designer for SpongeBob SquarePants.
But, as Howell told police the following day in her statement, the mastermind behind one of Orange County’s biggest art heists was no ordinary thief. It was the artist himself: Todd White. It was all part of an elaborate plot to frame Howell, steal back works she had rightfully bought, and take over her lucrative gallery, she insisted. White had hired “goons” she said, from his martial-arts club to do his dirty work: imprisoning and assaulting her in her own gallery.
“Despite White’s string of professional successes,” Howell later claimed, “his true nature was revealed on the night of August 2, 2011, when he orchestrated a malicious and brutal assault and robbery against the very woman who helped him launch his career in studio art.”
Boys in San Antonio only had three options, White says: “You either played football, baseball, or you were gay.”
White played a little baseball, but preferred sketching Iron Maiden logos in class—a hobby that got him into trouble with his teachers and his father. “He’d pop a beer, sit on the couch, make me pull his boots off,” White recalls. “He was just an angry guy.” White toughened himself up by learning Jiu-Jitsu, a Brazilian form of defense that draws from wrestling and karate.
As soon as he could, White moved to Hollywood to work as an animator on shows such asTiny Toons and the pioneering gross-out series Ren & Stimpy. In 1999, he joined the new series SpongeBob SquarePants as a lead character designer. Created by a marine biologist, the show followed the surreal misadventures of a sea sponge living in a pineapple house, and played to White’s frenetic imagination and creative energy. Colleagues recall White parading around the office in his bolero hat, and playfully challenging spindly cartoonists to Jiu-Jitsu matches on the parking-lot roof.
When SpongeBob went on hiatus, White channeled that spirit into his own fledgling art career—vying for respect in the insular L.A. gallery circles. He traveled the city peddling paintings of his own imagined universe: martini-soaked scenes of natty cads and sultry vixens. He sold works from the back of his pickup truck outside art fairs (until the police escorted him away) and hustled them in to hang in influential bars, like Nic’s Martini Lounge, the agent hub in Beverly Hills.
White’s swagger paid off, and he was soon making enough to leave animation for good. “The difference with Todd and other comparable artists is that he’s a genuine charismatic character, not unlike Warhol,” says Kevin O’Donnell, owner of the Lee Hayden Gallery in Cleveland, one of the many retailers around the country that began selling his prints. White’s paintings, once described as “Rat Pack meets Picasso,” turned the 32-year-old into a multi-million-dollar brand of his own—eventually commissioned by the Grammys to do their official poster in 2007, chosen by Coca-Cola as the first-ever artist to illustrate its bottles, and prized by celebrity collectors including Sylvester Stallone, who paid $280,000 for an original print.
With demand growing, White became the poster boy for a burgeoning form of mass production called giclées. The process takes a high-resolution digital photo of a painting and prints it directly on canvas. It is then embellished with varnish to give the illusion of brushstrokes, and hand-numbered and signed by the artist to demonstrate authenticity. A step up from paper prints but a step down from originals, giclées, which can sell for several thousand dollars, expanded the market for the lowest rung of collectors—just the sort of people who began hoarding White’s work. Soon enough, major retail operations like Bed Bath & Beyond were also carrying his giclées.
Courtesy of Peggy Howell.
In 2003, at an art show in Los Angeles, White met Peggy Howell, who showed an immediate and intense interest in his work. Howell and White had plenty in common. Like him, she was a self-made go-getter from the South—an army brat from Arkansas who, after a career in corporate architecture, clawed her way up the art market. “Peggy was a hustler,” White says. “She was a mover, a shaker. She could sell art.” White recalls Howell telling him that she had once convinced a gowned bride in the bathroom of the Hyatt to buy one of White’s pieces before her ceremony began.
Howell was just as impressed by White’s ambition. “He was absolutely determined to be one of the top living artists,” she says, “and I could see it in his eyes.” Howell, who introduced herself to White’s friends as “Mama Peg,” took an almost maternal interest in the rising star. She was also his passionate promoter, transforming the Hyatt gallery from a second-rate tourist shop to a destination for the well-heeled patrons of Orange County. “She wanted to be Todd’s number one gallery,” O’Donnell says. At one party for White, she had the hotel arrange a platter of chicken wings in the shape of his painting When Angels Sell Their Wings.
With his designer shades, tight black T-shirts, and bawdy Lone Star tales, White’s gonzo persona seduced buyers from Beverly Hills to Britain, where he became even bigger. “I call him John Lennon with a paintbrush,” says Rod Lacey, who runs his U.K. publisher, White Space. Women began showing up at his events with tattoos of his paintings on their backs, and after he posted a photo online of a jacket given to him by one admirer, fans started regularly tossing him their coats. “He’s got a few stalkers,” Lacey says.
Not everyone was taken in by White’s charm. Clifford Bailey, another successful Los Angeles artist, was vocal about his belief that White borrowed too freely from his style. One evening, Bailey met White at a Hollywood party and suspected that his nemesis expected a duel. “At some point,” Bailey recalls, “I went to get my wallet out of my pocket, and he jumped and grabbed my arm and said, ‘What are you doing?’ I said, ‘Don’t worry, Todd—I’m not going to shoot you.’ And he said, ‘I’d like to see you try, because I know Jiu-Jitsu and I can snap your arm in two seconds.’” White’s attorney says this story is “100 percent false.”
Capitalizing on his rebellious persona, Howell made a cover for her overstuffed binder of press clippings on White. It showed a photo of him mugging for the camera, over which she wrote the phrase: “Buy my art . . . or I’ll kick your ass.”
Before long, at least half of the artwork in Howell’s shop was White’s. As White’s empire mounted with more high-profile deals—a tribute to Princess Diana and Warner Bros.’ 70th anniversary of The Wizard of Oz—so did Howell’s sales. Within several years after they had begun working together, Howell was selling upward of $60,000 of his work per month. Howell got herself a new house on a cul-de-sac in a gated community and a white BMW.
One afternoon last summer, White returned from a doctor’s appointment to find Peggy Howell waiting for him. It wasn’t unusual for her to track him down and show up like this with an urgent request, especially when she had art to sell. She handed him one of his giclées,Someone’s Pretty Baby, and asked him to personalize it for the buyer.
But when White saw the print, which showed a slinky brunette holding a glass of red wine, he thought something was amiss. The canvas looked cheap, and the signature was sloppy. “I go, ‘Where did you get this?’” White recalls. “She just, like, froze for a moment and she said, ‘I got it from you.’ And I go, ‘No, you didn’t, this isn’t mine. This isn’t my signature.’” Howell insists it was an older legitimate print and that White, at the time, was disappointed with the quality of the printing of the piece, but didn’t question its authenticity.
White had seen fakes of his work before. The downside of the art world’s new production techniques is that anyone with a good digital photo of a painting and access to a high-end printer can become a pirate. White and Howell had caught a vendor in a big-box store unknowingly selling Chinese copies of his work and two young guys from L.A. replicating his art from online images and selling it for five figures. Growing suspicious, White phoned Howell’s young store manager, a clean-cut former airplane mechanic named Peter Lavoie, to find out if he’d noticed anything strange.
Lavoie said he had. A couple of clients had reported getting prints with duplicate edition numbers, and Lavoie himself had seen a print that seemed to bear a dedication that wasn’t in White’s hand. Lavoie confided that he suspected Howell of making unauthorized giclées herself, including multiple copies of a painting called Playing Around, which she had commissioned from White herself (it portrayed a scene of her and her friends gathered around her piano). Howell says that White had given her permission to make copies of the piece, an assertion White flatly denies.
But Lavoie couldn’t believe she would actually resort to forgery. “I’m thinking, holy crap,” he recalls, “this is absolutely crazy.”
Convinced Howell was faking his works, White hired a private investigator, Dave Hance, to try to buy a bogus print. Wearing a wire, Hance showed up at Gallery HB and recorded himself buying a print of Playing Around for $2,000. Howell told Hance she’d send it to White for embellishment, and call him when it returned. Two weeks later, the private eye received a voice mail from Howell telling him his giclée was ready. “I look forward to seeing you and the expression on your face,” Howell trilled, “when you see your new embellished Todd White,Playing Around.”
When Hance told White about his purchase from Howell, the artist was crushed. He says he hadn’t heard from Howell about the giclée at all and hadn’t signed a thing. “I felt stabbed in the heart,” he recalls. But he says he worried that if he reported the fraud to the police, the legal maneuvering could give Howell time to unload his works on the Internet. White says he also worried that making Howell’s malfeasance a matter of public record could contaminate his hard-earned market and depreciate the value of his work. Instead, he’d settle the matter on his own.
Seeking to keep himself out of the fray, White solicited the help of his lawyer, Keith Davidson, and two men he knew from his martial-arts gym: his manager, Bryce Eddy, and an off-duty L.A.P.D. officer, Mark Mireles. The plan was simple: the three men would retrieve White’s works and get Howell to sign a settlement agreement, barring her from ever selling White’s art again, agreeing to relinquish all of his work that she still had in her possession, and requiring her to give up her lease at the Hyatt.
On August 2, after notifying the hotel management of their plans (Hyatt declined comment), Eddy, Davidson, and Mireles strode past the sandaled tourists in the shiny lobby and made their way to Howell’s gallery. A gallery employee told them that Howell was at the hospital with her ailing mother. Mireles said he was a buyer from the Brazilian consulate eager to buy one of White’s works. The employee called Howell, who said she would be able to return in 10 minutes.
“We’re here to discuss some important matters related to Todd’s work,” Eddy says he told Howell when she arrived. White’s crew insists that what followed was not an assault or imprisonment but, to their surprise, an almost matter-of-fact business meeting. Howell invited the three men inside, and “she immediately decided to come clean,” Eddy recalls. (The idea that they were White’s muscle, as Howell alleges, was “so absurd it was funny,” Davidson says. “It’s like, SpongeBob has ninjas in the O.C.!’”)
Howell seemed relieved to have been caught, and eager to settle on her own, Eddy says. They told her they were recording the conversation on Eddy’s iPhone. As she was being taped, Howell explained that the trouble began in the summer of 2010, when she realized “the ease” of making unauthorized giclées. Struggling with the financial “quagmire,” as she put it, of a deal with the nearby Pechanga Casino, Howell thought she could dig herself out of the hole by selling fakes. “It was primarily greed,” she told the men, “and admittedly so.”
Howell confessed to making dozens of fraudulent giclées, even offering up the name of the printer she used. She also owned up to swapping edition numbers, forging White’s signature, and embellishing giclées on her own. When Howell began to cry, one of the men offered a tissue. “No, it’ll ruin my makeup,” she said. “I respect Todd,” she went on. “I was tempted, I did it, and I apologize to you and him. He’s my favorite artist.”
After signing the settlement (which Davidson had drawn up in advance) and expressing contrition, the men say Howell assisted their movers and them in clearing out White’s work from her gallery. The men then drove with her to collect the rest of White’s artwork from her home. By three A.M., Howell was alone in her mansion, a constellation of hooks on the wall by the piano where Playing Around—the painting of her and her friends that she had commissioned from White—used to hang.
The driver of the moving truck, James Walsh, later told police that Howell seemed “very jovial” that night, and not at all the victim of an assault. At one point, he recalled, she turned to him and said, “I wish I never did this.”
“Why did you do it?” he asked.
“I don’t know. It was silly of me.”
“Well, you’re making amends.”
“I hope you don’t think I’m a bad person,” she said.
Howell returned to the Hyatt the next day, but waited until that evening to call the Huntington Beach Police Department—and reported her own version of the previous night.
Claiming that she had been assaulted and imprisoned, Howell told the cops that she only agreed to be recorded by the men because she was scared. “She was extremely afraid for her life,” the officer noted. Terrified for her safety, according to the report she gave the police, she told Eddy and the others what they wanted to hear and signed the settlement only because she had been coerced. She suspected that the caper was designed to eliminate her from White’s life and allow him—and Lavoie, who now worked as White’s office manager—to take over her lucrative gallery themselves. Later that month, she filed a lawsuit against White seeking $7.5 million for physical and emotional trauma. The settlement she had signed that night had no merit as far as she was concerned, and she would continue her business at the Hyatt as normal.
The art world had heard its share of shocking allegations but nothing like this. One blogger dubbed it “the weirdest art case ever.” With SpongeBob and ninja jokes sailing around the Internet, White countersued Howell for $5 million in punitive damages for copyright violation and fraud. In October, Howell struck another blow when she filed a class action and began to assemble co-plaintiffs, claiming that White had trained his former manager, Mary Denault, and others to sign his name. Denault backs up this assertion in a deposition, saying that she’d signed for White hundreds of times. While White openly employs assistants to embellish his giclées, he says the suggestion that he would have others actually sign his own name is “ridiculous.”
White had always been prolific, heading off into his cluttered home studio each evening to crank up Howard Stern and paint into the wee hours of the morning. But now he was too angry and depressed to lift a brush, even though, he maintains, “At the end of the fucking day, I know what I did, and I did nothing wrong.”
Unbeknownst to him, a familiar artist was already taking his place at Gallery HB: his old rival, Clifford Bailey. In a deft and devilish twist, Howell struck a deal to feature Bailey’s works where she had once hung White’s. “It feels like a little bit of redemption, to be honest,” Bailey says. But, at the same time, he has his reservations. “I did just meet Peggy,” he adds. “I certainly hope what she’s telling me is true.”
In December, during a deposition with White’s attorney, Paul Berra, Howell confessed that she had never gotten White to sign or embellish the copy of Playing Around that she had sold to the private investigator; she had done the markings herself. She also admitted that, despite her allegations of being assaulted, she had no visible bruises, and she revealed that her insurance company had declined her robbery claim, although she refused to cite the reasons given.
Perhaps most damningly, Howell admitted to using a substance called “Goo Be Gone” to remove the markings from one of White’s prints and then fraudulently number it as a significantly more valuable artist’s proof, along with forging a personalized message on the print—“Cheers!”—and signing White’s name. When Howell insisted she had no intention of selling the piece, Berra asked why she would have doctored it at all. “Because I’m unstable,” she replied—though it was unclear if she was being earnest or sarcastic.
But Howell is not backing down from her story and she still has her supporters, including Kornelius Schorle, a printer who produced some of her giclées. “I think something went haywire in his brain,” Schorle says of White. “He had no reason to call six [sic] ninjas.” Schorle is accused of no wrongdoing and recently relocated to Hawaii.
Whatever the resolution, the caper shows just how easily collectors can be duped in the digital age. “I don’t know if those galleries that deal in these reproductions have any ethics or mores,” says Michele Senecal, executive director of the International Fine Print Dealers Association. One by one, Howell’s uneasy buyers are reacting to the news. “I feel more betrayed than anything else,” says one collector of White’s work, an aerospace engineer named David Kellams. “Art is an intimate thing and an expressive thing, so when your trust is betrayed on such an intimate level, it’s difficult to sort out in your head.”
White says he’s taking new steps to ensure the authenticity of his future work, such as watermarking digital images and sealing his giclée inscriptions so they can’t be erased or changed. He’s also talking about starting a guild for artists to help navigate the gallery business and draft contracts with sellers for added protection. “He’s been taken on as almost a Spartacus figure for the art world,” Rod Lacey, his U.K. publisher, says.
And he’s finally painting again. White told me this one afternoon as we walked past shelves full of superhero dolls and SpongeBob sketches in his studio. White was unshaven, dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt. The Howard Stern Show played on iPod speakers. “I’m on a new series now,” White told me in his slight Texas drawl. “It’s of scoundrels and rascals and cheats and thieves and bandits.” The first of the series was drying against the wall. “Here you’ve got the story we all know very well,” he said.
The painting is called Nice Doing Business with You. It shows a fiendish group of men and women smiling manically as they wield poisons, knives, and guns behind one another’s backs. The only person without a weapon is a wavy-haired guy in the middle with an obvious resemblance to White.
“Who’s that guy in the middle?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” White says, coyly putting his hands on his hips. “Who would that guy in the middle be? He’s just a guy who’s just getting taken.”
On one side of White’s doppelgänger is a busty brunette, clearly modeled on his former manager, Mary Denault. On the other is a haggard older woman holding a gift box in one hand and knife behind his back in the other: Peggy Howell, it seems. “And who’s the blonde?” I say.
“You know,” White replies with a smile, “that’s just the way I felt that scoundrel would be.”
Editor’s note: Last week the parties reached a settlement, the terms of which are confidential.