Thomas Doyle, once described by a judge as a “career criminal,” pleaded guilty to fraud on Friday in connection with the sale of a painting by Gustave Courbet that was purchased by Jon Landau, a longtime producer and manager for Bruce Springsteen.
Investigators said in court papers that Mr. Doyle had convinced a London gallerist to send him Courbet’s “Mother and Child on a Hammock” from 1848 and to trust him to broker a sale.
Although Mr. Doyle told the gallerist that he had sold the painting for $550,000 in August 2024, investigators said he actually consigned the work to a Manhattan gallery through a business partner, with a much lower anticipated price. Only a couple of months later, the gallery sold the work for $125,000 to Mr. Landau, a major art collector interested in 19th-century French painting.
In a statement released to announce Mr. Doyle’s guilty plea, the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, which handled he case, said that the defendant had taken most of the money from the sale.
“Thomas Doyle defrauded the owner of a valuable painting by telling a series of brazen lies to get the painting and then sell it so he could keep the profits for himself,” said Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan.
The charge of wire fraud to which Mr. Doyle pleaded guilty in Federal District Court in Manhattan carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. He agreed to forfeit all proceeds from the painting’s sale and is scheduled to be sentenced in November.
Lawyers representing Mr. Doyle and Mr. Landau, who has been Mr. Springsteen’s manager for decades, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Patrick Matthiesen, the London gallerist who sued Mr. Doyle and others over the painting, could not be reached at the time of publication.
Prosecutors said Mr. Doyle, who is of Norwalk, Conn., and has previous convictions for art fraud, had referred to himself by a different first name when dealing with the gallerist. When he was pressed for the money by the London gallerist, investigators said, he falsely accused the buyer of never having paid, even though he had already received the money.
Mr. Doyle was arrested in November 2025 in a case that was handled by the F.B.I.’s Art Crime Team. He has been convicted of multiple crimes, including at least three involving fraud in the sale of art.
In 2007, he was convicted in the case of a stolen Degas sculpture of a dancer that he fraudulently sold to a gallery.
In 2010, less than a year after he was released from prison, he defrauded a Japanese investor into buying a painting by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot for $1.1 million, getting the victim to wire $880,000. After buying the painting for $775,000 and using the rest of his investor’s money to buy a Ferrari, Mr. Doyle claimed that a middleman in a potential sale lost track of the painting after a drunken night. A doorman for an Upper East Side building later retrieved the artwork from a bush.
“You are a career criminal by any definition of the term,” Judge Colleen McMahon of Federal District Court said at the time of his sentencing in 2011.
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