A Detroit-area gallery owner was sentenced last week to five years and three months in prison for defrauding photography collectors out of $1.6 million worth of fine art photos, in what the F.B.I. has called a criminal scheme to swindle older collectors.
The gallerist, Wendy Halsted Beard, 59, of Birmingham, Mich., previously pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud for the scheme.
According to the criminal complaint filed by the F.B.I. in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, between March 2019 and October 2022, Beard agreed to sell over 100 fine art photographs on behalf of collectors, for which she’d earn a commission. Those works were instead not returned, or were sold without clients’ knowledge, with Beard keeping the profits and creating a series of excuses when her clients started asking questions.
Works from some of the most acclaimed photographers of the 20th century — Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon and Ansel Adams — were among those entrusted to Beard.
The most valuable photograph Beard sold was a mural-size print of an Adams photograph titled “The Tetons and the Snake River, Grand Teton National Park,” a dramatic black-and-white shot of the winding river below the mountain range. Beard sold that photograph for $440,000 and kept the profits instead of an agreed-upon 5 percent commission. Works that did not sell were kept in Beard’s Franklin, Mich., home or left in a Florida gallery.
Beard went to great lengths to hide her deceit, according to the complaint, claiming to have been in a monthslong coma and to have received a double-lung transplant to justify delayed answers to clients, inventing fictional employees to correspond with clients, and once swapping out a signed Adams photograph print with a $405.26 version of it from the Ansel Adams Gallery gift shop.
More than three dozen collectors trusted Beard with their artwork, according to the Justice Department release, including a longtime friend, the Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist J. Ross Baughman and an 89-year-old man with Alzheimer’s disease. As part of her sentence, Beard is ordered to pay over $2 million in restitution.
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