Scamtown - The Rikers Island Dalí | 6

Episode Date: September 9, 2024

An original drawing by famed artist Salvador Dalí is donated to the Rikers Island jail inmates in the 1960s. It survives years bouncing around the prison—displayed in a mess hall, shunted into deep storage, and finally locked behind glass near a lobby soda machine—until 2003, when it suddenly goes missing. Strap in for a heist and an ongoing mystery that’s almost as surreal as the artist himself. Scamtown is an Apple Original podcast, produced by FunMeter. Follow and listen on Apple Podcasts.http://apple.co/Scamtown

Who doesn't like a good art heist story? I'm personally a fan. Oh yeah, 100%. Who doesn't love the high-low mix of the exclusive art world versus the sneaky underworld of being a criminal? Well, this heist enters into new territory. Our thieves didn't shimmy a museum wall to gain access to one-of-a-kind artwork,

but the facility was extremely secure. That would be the famed Rikers Island, historically the largest jail complex in the United States. Well, you have to wonder, why was an original artwork by the famed surrealist Salvador Dali hanging in a house of detention at all? Not to mention, who stole it and how. Welcome to Scam Town, an Apple original podcast produced by Fun Meter. I'm Brian Lizarte.

And I'm James Lee Hernandez. We're filmmakers who've been trading stories now for quite some time, obsessed and compelled to bring some of our favorites to life. We love a surprising heist, an intricate scam, or just pulling back the curtain on something you think you know. Entering a world that's stranger than fiction and writing that line between comedy and tragedy. This is Scam Town,

a place for our favorite stories that do just that. Today's episode, The Rikers Island Dali. Rikers Island, just a few miles from Midtown Manhattan. All you have to do is say Rikers Island and it conjures up vivid images of dangerous, decrepit, unsanitary,

and often overcrowded conditions for New York City residents charged with a crime. Inmates there are awaiting trial or just serving short sentences. Amid skyrocketing violence, staffing shortages, chronic medical neglect, some are calling Rikers a death trap. The notorious sprawling jail opened in 1932 on an island made mostly of landfill. Sometimes the inmates there feel discarded too.

It's basically a dump. What are some words you'd use to describe Rikers Island? Hell, plain and simple. The New York Times has called it the city's island of the damned. So you got to wonder why the renowned Spanish painter Salvador Dali agreed to lead an art class in the most unlikely place to lead an art class, this remote jail. Before we go any further, and for those living under a rock or did not pay attention in high school, a quick Dali primer. I'm Dr. Elliot King.

I am an art historian, and I've been specializing in Salvador Dali's work for about 20 years. Surrealism is very often misunderstood. It's meant to being a really emancipatory form of creativity. The goal is actually to capture the way that your mind works when it is free from moral and aesthetic considerations. I can't make out just what sort of a place it was.

Much of Dalí's work looks like you're visually eavesdropping on someone else's dream. But there weren't any walls, just a lot of curtains with eyes painted on. Alfred Hitchcock even turned to the artist to help him populate a surreal dream sequence filled with watching eyeballs and faceless men in his 1945 film Spellbound. He's most famous by far for the soft clocks. Looks like they've been heated up and they're just sort of flaccid and liquefying and dripping down and so the flies are attracting to them. He was inspired to do them by looking at a soft camembert cheese that was melting on the radiator. Beyond liquefied clocks, Dali was afraid of grasshoppers,

so he painted quite a few of those. There are double-image paintings. He even dabbled in religious imagery. And rather than simply being art famous, he was a ginormous pop culture personality and instantly recognizable. He looked like he's from another planet. I think when most people think of Dali,

they have to associate the mustache with a man. It was thin, curly, and waxed. Basically the mother of all mustaches. It keeps getting longer and longer and longer until you get to the 1950s, where the points of it go all the way up to his eyeballs. He became one of the first artists, I'd say, who was probably more famous for the way he looked than the way he painted.

I think Dali helped kind of establish that when you're an artist, you have to look the part. Frida Kahlo embraced her eyebrows or unibrow. Andy Warhol had his famous gray wig. That was a wig? Dali's was at the top. There have been four main motives which moved the artist Dolly, and they are sex, terror, vanity, and veneration. Well, you have to add money to that list as well. For instance, Dolly was more than happy to do commercials if it meant a decent paycheck. Take, for instance, this classic one from Alka-Seltzer. First, it dissolves. Happy bubbles, but devoted bubbles.

This is a commercial. He's there in a white smock with sequins. And the Alka-Seltzer shoots into the stomach. Here, it neutralizes that bad excess acid. He has his brush, and he puts his brush up against a model. So those beautiful places will feel beautiful again. Alka-Seltzer is a work of art, truly one of a kind, like Dali. He figured out pretty quickly that all publicity is good publicity.

He was essentially an influencer, decades ahead of his time. Well, Brian, that love of headlines was part of the reason Dali agreed to lead an art therapy class for inmates on Rikers Island during his annual winter stay in New York City. He would have likely brought his pet ocelot, Babu, along too, but on February 26th, 1965, the day he was scheduled to teach, the artist woke up with a fever.

So in his suite at the St. Regis Hotel, he dashed off a black and red India ink drawing on paper of a crucifixion. It looks similar to a painting he had done called The Christ of St. John of the Cross, a very famous painting, because it has the head of Christ pointed downwards and the arms up. Looks like it has a gash in the side of Christ where he was stabbed with a spear, and sort of splatters kind of coming across from outside of the bowed head. To be sure, there are a lot of splatters. And drips. The cross and crown of thorns stand out the most. And then the dedication

in Dali's own handwriting with misspellings. For the dining room of the prisoners, Riker's Island. And his initials are scrawled underneath. Dali sends his friend and business associate to present the specially created work

to the New York City Correction Commissioner. As intended, the work decorates the inmates' cafeteria for 16 years. But true to the island, the piece takes a beating over the years, accumulating brown and red food spots. It gets hit with an occasional ketchup squirt and splashed with coffee. Sounds like they're having a lot of food fights in there.

So it finally gets placed under glass. But that doesn't exactly protect it. Eventually, someone threw another coffee cup at it and smashed the glass and got yet more coffee on said painting. And so they decided to move it down to the basement. And it was in the basement for a while. Soon after officials rediscovered the artwork, they considered selling it to raise money during one of New York City's cash-strapped phases during the

80s while Dali was still alive. Mind you, this is years before his painting started to go for millions. At the time, it was such an unpopular idea that they actually chose not to sell it. So the piece is rehung with a fancy new frame in a lobby only accessible to visitors and jail employees. It's locked in a display case near a Pepsi machine, a water fountain, and some nearby pay phones. Joseph Russo has worked on Rikers Island for decades as a corrections officer. He's currently president of the union representing deputy and assistant deputy wardens. The purpose of the painting was for the inmates, not for us. But after the inmates started vandalizing it, they moved it away from the inmates.

Next to the drawing, they thought it was a good idea to put a small plaque from the warden saying, this piece was estimated to be worth a million dollars, which basically is like saying, come and steal me. So in jail, filled with thousands of convicted or suspected lawbreakers, you're going to advertise the worth of something like this? It feels like they're asking for it. It was supposedly safe. Nonetheless, on March 1st, 2003, the drawing goes missing.

As you know, the Salvador Dali painting was removed from the inmates' cafeteria so that they wouldn't damage or destroy it. Who knew that it might have been safer left in the cafeteria? Around midnight, alarm bells rang out. Rikers Island was on full lockdown. Was an inmate making a break for it? No. Someone had pulled the fire alarm.

A fire drill was held the night of the theft. That's Rose Gilhern, former commissioner of the city's Department of Investigation. In other words, the culprits pulled a fast one by creating a disturbance, clearing out the lobby where the artwork was displayed. And non-participants were removed from the area and participants remained behind to affect the theft. Early the next morning, an employee noticed that something was amiss. There was a drawing in its typical spot, but it was different.

You can see that the original painting is in a wooden gilded frame, and the fake is not in a frame. It's basically a poster staple gunned to the display case, and the artist, for lack of a better word, painted a frame around the poster. You're planning to replace an original framed artwork only to insert a fake with a frame painted on? Yeah, in this case, stapled gunned to the display case. Classy. So there actually isn't the frame, but there are some gold markings that are meant to,

I guess, fool one into thinking that it's still in that gilded frame. That wasn't the only giveaway. The fake was also noticeably smaller. I mean, if you were going to do this the right way, you were supposed to make the copy the exact same size. It looked like it got shrunk in the wash. You know, art heists are kind of the thing of movies. You know, you read like Thomas Crown Affair or something.

You kind of expect people to come rappelling through the ceiling with something really exciting and clever. I don't know why this part of the master plan wasn't better thought out in terms of the size and everything else because it is because the painting really wasn't being cared for very well I can imagine that people might not have noticed too quickly if it had been a halfway decent reproduction. It was very poor reproduction and to my surprise the staff noticed. I would guess we wouldn't. I didn't think anyone was paying attention to this painting. And I never noticed this painting.

Apparently, it was an officer who prayed near the drawing every day who first noticed something was off. So investigators were called in. At first, Russo suspected, you know, the usual suspects. Right away, I think, what would the inmates do? Rip it down? Rip it apart?

Except the glass on the display case was not broken or meddled with at all. So it could have only been an inmate if they had the key. And if they had access during a fire drill, two words come to mind, James. Pizza party. Inside job.

We're not talking about a handful of employees. It's actually thousands. Rikers isn't just one big jail. There are a half dozen buildings that house inmates, plus a hospital and a disease unit. So like 12,000 people were being held at the same time, plus all the civilian and uniformed employees. And wouldn't someone on the janitorial staff have a key to clean the display case? Yeah, except because of the fire alarm, only certain employees were on the premises and had access to the locked art inside the Eric M. Taylor building lobby.

So when investigators were called the day after the fire alarm, they immediately checked surveillance footage. But conveniently, the cameras weren't working that night. So there was no recording of any shenanigans near the artwork. But there was some grainy footage of a car leaving the island. Investigators believed that it was transporting the original piece of art to its now illegal new home. It didn't take long for officials at Rikers Island to figure out it was an employee vehicle. And within three months, former Bronx District Attorney Robert Johnson held a press conference about the high suspects. We are announcing today that we are unsealing indictments with respect to four employees of the Department of Corrections.

Two assistant deputy wardens, Mitchell Hochhauser and Benny Nuzzo, and two correction officers, Greg Sokol and Timothy Pina. Each of the four is being charged with grand larceny in the second degree. Felony charges. They were facing up to 15 years in prison. We are alleging by these indictments that DeFora conspired and did in fact steal a painting that had been donated to the inmates by the world-renowned artist Salvador Dali.

Talk about a movie plot. Going from guard to inmate. That'd be tough. Pretty sure having worn the uniform doesn't make for a fun time in the general population. This crime is a result of shameless arrogance fueled by greed, that it represents a serious betrayal of the public trust, but also undermines the professionalism of the vast majority of the correction department employees who perform their duties with dedication and integrity.

At any given time, about 7,000 officers work for the Department of Corrections. Remember how we said at the beginning that Rikers was basically hell on earth for inmates? Well, it can be brutal for workers too. After decades of working on the island, Joseph Russo should know. He says guards and deputy wardens struggle to serve out their time on the island, too. I'm sorry to say this. I'm talking about my people here. Don't say this lightly. You've got to be desperate to work here. As a 27-year New York City employee, the environment that you're working in is broken and hostile,

and it should be avoided at all costs. Russo says he's had battered and bruised and skirmishes with inmates countless times over the years. He's even broken bones in both of his hands. In his 50s, he still doesn't look like somebody who would back down from a fight. His white button-down shirt works like a highlighter pen on his muscles. Overall, he says, compared to his colleagues, he feels resilient. The vast majority of people dread coming to work. They hate it.

And they can't wait for this to end by any means. In short, even though the guards and middle manager wardens could make upwards of six figures and a full pension after 20, or in some cases, 25 years, many of the people who operate the jail can't hack it for that long. As they're walking out the door, I can't deal with this anymore. And they're leaving. Newer people that come on the job, they quit two or three a day. Brian, smells like motive to me. Yeah, I'd say so. This sounds like a political answer, but it is.

I'm telling you, this is, I believe this to be very true. The vast majority of us are working people, and we're not committing crimes. There may be, certainly, I would not tell you that every one of us is an upstanding, law-abiding citizen. We have some bad apples in there. Once the pressure was on them, they folded immediately. So these are not hardened criminals. It seems like they were like almost bumbling criminals that were not really committed to doing this. As in, one of the suspects confessed right after the heist.

According to court documents and reporting at the time of the investigation, a lower-ranking correctional officer, Timothy Pena, opened up to investigators, unspooling his version of how this caper went down. He alleged the two higher-ranking deputy wardens approached him about five months before. He thought they were joking at first.

But then they started taking photos of the Dali. And a month before the heist, he was told the plan was a go. Pena was supposed to man the security desk in the main lobby. He agrees to wear a wire on one of his co-conspirators, another guard and fellow carpool buddy, Greg Sokol. They meet at a coffee shop and share how stressful the fallout from the caper is now that the heat is on. The two head out, and within minutes, Greg is stopped and questioned by investigators. And just as quickly as Pena flipped, so did he, and confessed to his part of the scheme. This new confessor, Sokol, agrees to wear a wire himself on the remaining alleged conspirators,

the two higher-up assistant deputy wardens. That's a lot of wires. It seems kind of easy. Easy in one sense that they agree to wear wires, but difficult to actually hear what's on some of these recordings because jails aren't necessarily quiet places. They're having conversations in an empty locker room near a boiler. And so they're picking up some stuff, but not everything. After the arraignment, the dolly is still missing. Three of the four officers strike plea deals with prosecutors, but Assistant Deputy Warden Benny Nuzzo is the lone holdout. Investigators believe that he was the one that drove off with the artwork on the security footage.

And they explain how this happened, admit guilt. They all suffered because of this. And then they name someone who's completely innocent and had nothing to do with it as the ringleader. Wow, what's the chances of that? Naturally, Nuzzo hires representation. My name's Joe Tacopina and I'm a lawyer. I'm a trial lawyer. Tacopina is a former prosecutor turned attorney to the stars.

The walls of his offices in Manhattan's Upper East Side are filled with photos of all the celebrities he's represented over the years. A-Rod, Alex Rodriguez, Meek Mill, A$AP Rocky, Jay-Z, and former president, President Trump, Michael Rubin of Fanatics, the owner of the 76ers. That is quite the resume list. True. And add on top of that, an assistant deputy jail warden accused of art theft. He accepted Benny Nuzzo as a new client because he was intrigued. So that case ranks up there, probably the most memorable and certainly the wildest case of them all. It certainly didn't look easy from the outset.

It was a case that at first glance looked pretty damning. They started flipping on each other, you know, wearing wires on each other. And Benny was the only one who stood strong and didn't let his knees buckle. He was a tough guy and he was a warden and was like, I didn't let his knees buckle. He was a tough guy, and he was a warden, and was like, I didn't do it. I'm not taking a plea. I'm not losing my pension. I'll go to trial.

On the one hand, the prosecution had his client on tape, possibly contradicting his claim of innocence. On the other, this was an inside job turned inside out. Look, this clearly was inside job turned inside out. Also relevant, who are these guards planning to sell the Dali to? Coffee stains and all. Especially if the original is supposed to be hanging up in the prison. Running off with priceless art is certainly the stuff of movies,

but no amount of security has kept real-life thieves from trying. And they make away with the goods more often than you think. According to the FBI, less than 10% of missing art is ever recovered. Paintings like Portrait of a Young Man by Raphael and The Concert by Vermeer have been missing for decades. Rewards promising millions of dollars haven't brought them back. It's not something you sell easily or readily. I mean, you know, it's, look, put this mildly, this was not really a well-thought-out caper from A to Z, okay? There was no endgame here at all.

So about a year after the heist, in May of 2004, they head to court. Now, with everything you've heard so far, you might think, this is an open-and-shut case. But let me assure you, there are more surprises to come. Takapina's first strategy was to challenge the actual worth of the now immortal Dali drawing. His witness was not only a Dali art appraiser, but someone he'd actually worked with. We had an expert witness who was one of Dolly's closest friends. So he was, he was terrific. I mean, he just really, you know,

put the value of this thing next to nil because of its condition and all the host of other factors. Meaning those food stains and basement water damage. Also, it was a somewhat undetailed drawing versus a finely rendered oil painting. Remember, he did this the morning he was sick. And I'll tell you, nothing I do when I'm sick ever seems that good. I've actually puked on the floor and it looked like a Jackson Pollock.

To the flu. Takapina's expert put the worth at $20,000, not the hundreds of thousands of dollars alleged by our prosecution, nor the million dollars that the plaque in the jailhouse said. Casting doubt on the value was massive because it could mean the difference between a felony and a serious sentence, or not. Obviously, anything over $250,000

was a high-level grand larceny, and that's what they were really playing for. But it carried upstate jail time, double-digit jail time. So anything under the $25,000 range, my recollection is, was that it becomes a misdemeanor. The next point in the defense was, how did anyone know that the stolen artwork was the real McCoy? Exactly.

And since the prosecution had yet to recover the drawing, all they had was a photograph. Not being able to inspect the work itself is known in the art world as hypothetical assessment. The biggest challenge is, how do you defend a client who was recorded? And that's approaching magic trickery level. We had a tape recording that I thought I had some wiggle room with. The case was built primarily on the words of cooperating witnesses, people who are motivated to blame other people

to get out from under. On a crucial recording for the prosecution, Nuzzo allegedly says, don't worry about the painting, they'll never find it. Yikes. But as we know, the tape was partially inaudible because it was recorded in a basement of the jail. So they played the tape. They presented the jury with their transcripts, their version. I then cross-examined the witness.

I presented the witness and the jury with my own transcript, which I made some subtle changes in without pointing out where the subtle changes were. All right, this is pretty wild. I don't even know what to say. I didn't know that you could actually do that, alter what's in an original transcript. One of the subtle changes were,

I don't know where the painting is, or who knows if they'll ever find it again. I don't know where it is. We changed some words that would have implicated Beninuzo to words that would have exonerated Beninuzo. I got through that chunk and I stopped and I said, do you have any changes to the transcript or is everything on that transcript what you just heard in that tape? And he read it.

He's like, yeah, that's exactly what I heard. So we went right along. And so he adopted our version of the transcript. So if the guy who made the tape and was part of that conversation can't tell you which version is the accurate one, how can you know which version is the accurate one? Have we talked about your favorite courtroom scene? I have a few. a minute i think i know you've definitely yeah there's one yeah what is it well number one has to be a few good men i'll answer the question you want answers i think i'm entitled you want answers i want the truth

you can't handle the truth i was gonna say I thought it was my cousin Vinny. That was like. That's number two. Okay. Number two, you know, the Buick Skylark. Can't make those marks without pods attraction, which was not available on the 64 Buick Skylark. That's, I mean, it's just marvelous. But the Dark Horse, probably my number three is Legally Blonde. Exactly. Because isn't it the first cardinal rule of perm maintenance that you're forbidden to wet your hair for at least 24 hours after getting a perm at the risk of deactivating the ammonium thiglocholate?

Setting up an entire defense around not washing your hair withins the jury's marshmallow on the open fires of doubt. I ask you to return a verdict that's consistent with an utter failure to prove this case beyond a reasonable doubt. That's consistent with what Greg Sokol said he heard, depending on whatuzo saying on that tape the second time around, which is, he didn't know, he didn't do it. I ask you to stick to your guns, whatever they may be, and whatever you come out with, we will all live by that decision. We thank you very, very much.

Thank you, Your Honor. The jury deliberated only for a few hours before reaching a verdict. Nuzo and the team nervously returned to court. The first count was grand larceny in the first degree. That was the big one. And the jury said not guilty. And my partner, Chad, and I, and Benny said over there, just I felt the tension from our bodies just exhale,

like both of us simultaneously, because that was, you know, that was big time jail. Oh, my God, we got the misdemeanor. I'm thinking, no, they really devalued this thing. We did a great job. They get to the pettit larceny, and then they say not guilty. I look at Chad and go, is that not the count? And he said, no, that's it. And I had the strangest, you know, as a trial lawyer, you learn to be a poker player and have a poker face.

I looked at the jury like, what? Are you sure? And I was really happy, obviously. Surprised, to put it mildly, but not as surprised as my client. Benny Nuzzo says quick thank yous to his attorneys, and then he hauls ass out of there. I mean, we're talking no high fives, no hugs of relief, no impromptu press conference, no victory cigar out on the steps in front of the courthouse. He's just gone.

Is he kidding me? I said, what? That's what he got? Thanks, and he leaves? Like, not like, oh my God, you guys saved my life. Nothing. He just left like that. And I called him.

I said, Benny, it's Joe. I said, why'd you run out like that? He goes, I was afraid the jury was going to change their mind. I started laughing so hard. He goes, I just had to get out of there before they changed their mind. So he thought he exited the building. Literally, that's his exact words. And we laughed so hard about that.

They really swung for the fences and pulled it off. Right. And Tacopino became such a fan of Salvador Dali after working on this case, he purchased his very own piece. One of Dali's original sketches now decorates his waiting room. But Dali's other work in question?

Still missing and never recovered. But keep hope alive. I, for one, would be scouring thrift stores in the Bronx if I lived in New York. Isn't it just perfect that the painting is never recovered and the guy that's accused of having the chutzpah and the wherewithal to keep his cool, to never break, never to admit it. And they say he either has it or he destroyed it and he never confessed. It just works perfectly. Nuzzo didn't get off scot-free.

During the search of Nuzzo's mother's house, investigators looking for the missing art found some other stolen items. We're talking about some pretty serious theft here. I'm kidding. Right. And don't forget the three-pack of yellow legal pads. They estimated that all of this was worth $1,052. I guess I always underestimate how much I'm going to spend when I go to Staples. Yeah, and the lockers are probably the big ticket item. Sure. He wasn't looking at any jail time, but due to the fact it was that much money, they were able to fire him, which meant he was not able to receive his full pension. Well, it looks like they did make something stick.

Only one of the guards who admitted guilt in the heist served time behind bars. He did one year. In exchange for their plea deals, the other two were given probation. Now, the real question is, whoever made that bogus, shrunken drawing with the painted on frame should have at least have done community service or something. I mean, I want to know who did that. Yeah. I wonder who, I wonder who did that. But the real question I have is, is that painting currently hanging at Rikers right now? And how much is that one worth?

That's definitely at least five bucks. Oh, you know what? A couple of boxes of chocolate milk. There should be a plaque next to it with its value. Five chocolate milks. Brian, I'll sum this all up by a quote from the man himself, Salvador Dali. One day it will have to be officially admitted that what we have christened reality

is an even greater illusion than the world of dreams. On the next episode, an unusual scam by the Italian mafia to fool American consumers. We are talking about one of the most important, if not the most important clan of the Ndrangheta ever since God knows when. That's next week on Scam Town. Scam Town is an Apple original podcast produced by Fun Meter.

New episodes come out each Monday. If you want to check out a few extras from our show, you can find us at FundmeterOfficial on Instagram. The show is hosted and executive produced by us. I'm Brian Lizarte. And I'm James Lee Hernandez. Kathleen Horan produced this episode. Clarissa Sosin was our researcher. Our senior producer is Christopher Olin. Our co-executive producers are Shannon Pence, Nicole Laufer, and Matt Kay. The show was edited and sound designed by Jude Brewer. Final mixing by Ben Freer from Fiddle Leaf Sound. Music for the podcast was composed by James Newberry.

Additional music by Five Alarm. And thanks to WNYC. Follow and listen on Apple Podcasts.