Andrew Crispo, disgraced Manhattan Gallery owner, dies at 78

Andrew Crispo, a once high-flying Manhattan art gallery owner who was brought down by a long string of tabloid-worthy scandals, including tax evasion, extortion and involvement in the gruesome murder of a Norwegian art student in 1985, died on February 8 in Brooklyn. He was 78.

His lawyer, J. Benjamin Greene, said the cause of his death, in a nursing home, had not been determined but that it came after a decline in Mr. Crispo’s health, including the discovery of an inoperable brain tumor. Mr. Crispo left no immediate survivors, and word of his death only recently emerged.

Mr. Crispo opened his eponymous gallery on the corner of Madison Avenue and 57th Street in 1973, and for the rest of the decade he was among New York City’s best-known art dealers. Although he had no formal art training, he was widely respected for his discerning eye, with which he identified promising young painters.

“He could have been another Larry Gagosian today,” said Edward Ligare, an artist who represented Mr. Crispo in the 1970s, referring to the Manhattan megagallery owner. “He had such an enthusiasm for art and such good connections.”

Mr. Crispo eventually expanded his gallery to a second floor, with the interior decorated by his romantic partner, noted designer Arthur E. Smith. He owned an art-filled estate in Southampton, New York, and at one point had about $50 million in the bank.

Things were less rosy behind the scenes. His employees accused him of not paying bills and maintaining two price lists, one for artists and a higher one for customers, with Mr. Crispo pocketing the difference.

“It was a horror show,” Patricia Hamilton, who worked for him in the mid-1970s, said in a telephone interview. “I was convinced Andrew would never make it to next month.”

He developed a cocaine addiction and held after-hours sex parties at his gallery and in a nearby apartment. His carnal tastes tended toward the sadomasochistic, and he spent long nights in leather bars such as the Hellfire Club, in the meatpacking district of Manhattan.

On the night of February 22, 1985, he and an associate, Bernard LeGeros, met a 26-year-old model and student from Norway named Eigil Dag Vesti. They left the club and headed north to an estate in Rockland County, N.Y., owned by Mr. LeGeros’s parents.

What happened over the next few hours is unclear; all three men used drugs. But in the early hours of February 23, Mr Legeros shot Mr Vesti twice in the back of the head with a .22-caliber rifle. Mr. Vesti was naked except for handcuffs on his wrists and a zippered leather hood over his head.

Three weeks later, a group of hikers found Mr. Vesti’s body in an abandoned smokehouse near the LeGeros home. Forest animals had eaten away most of his flesh, except around his head, which was protected by the mask.

Mr. LeGeros was arrested on March 27. The case became a tabloid sensation; the news media dubbed it the Death Mask Murder. Mr. Crispo denied his involvement in the murder, and police never charged him. He also never testified, despite Mr. LeGeros’s insistence that Mr. Crispo had ordered him to kill Mr. Vesti, and despite the discovery of the murder weapon in his gallery.

“I’m honestly not shocked, but one of the most utterly ugly things to ever happen in the art world was Andrew Crispo being released without charge for the murder of Eigil Dag Vesti,” wrote Gary Indiana. told Interview magazine in 2020.

Two months after Vesti’s murder, Mr. Crispo and Mr. LeGeros were indicted in another case, accused of the 1984 kidnapping and torture of a 26-year-old bartender named Mark Leslie. The case was not heard until 1988. Mr. LeGeros pleaded guilty, but Mr. Crispo was acquitted after convincing the jury that the activity he participated in was consensual.

Once again, some people believed that Mr. Crispo had gotten away with a crime — after the trial, Joel Seidemann, an assistant district attorney in Manhattan, called him “a master manipulator who deals in art by day and tortures by night.”

While that trial continued, Mr. Crispo was accused of evading tax payments of $4 million on $10 million in income. He pleaded guilty and in 1986 began a five-year prison sentence, three of which he served. The Internal Revenue Service seized his art collection and auctioned off pieces of it for several million dollars to recoup his tax liabilities.

Mr. Crispo was released from prison in 1989. Just days after his release, his home in Southampton was destroyed in an explosion, along with the art inside. He sued the Long Island Lighting Company, claiming they had installed a gas line too close to the house. A jury awarded him $8.6 million in 1991.

With some of that money he bought one $2 million house in Charleston, S.C., where he said he planned to start a new business. But he soon had financial problems and, after going bankrupt in 1996, was forced to sell the house.

By then, however, he had managed to reclaim the remaining art that had been seized by the IRS. He sold pieces of it, raising $14 million, which he put into his comeback, an art space he said would be “the largest sculpture gallery in the world.” the world,” located in the meatpacking district.

“I really think I’m on my way to great success,” he told The New York Times in 1998, “and I don’t think I’m going to let anyone be disappointed.”

The gallery would open its doors in mid-1999. But in May he was arrested again, this time for threatening to kidnap the four-year-old daughter of a lawyer involved in his bankruptcy case.

Mr. Crispo had become enraged after the law firm, which managed the money during his bankruptcy proceedings, delayed sending him a $2,000 check. He told the lawyer that he had photos of her daughter at a playground, knew where she lived and that he would kidnap the child if the check did not arrive soon.

The magistrate judge, Michael H. Dolinger, refused to release Mr. Crispo on bail.

“The defendant has certainly had a checkered history to date,” Judge Dolinger said, “and there is ample threat of irrational behavior.”

Mr. Crispo was convicted and in 2000 he was sentenced to seven years in prison. He left in 2005.

Andrew John Crispo was born on April 21, 1945 in Philadelphia. He never knew his parents, who placed him in an orphanage shortly after his birth.

By his late teens, he spent most of his time on the streets of downtown Philadelphia, working as a prostitute around Rittenhouse Square.

By the early 1960s he had attached himself to a particular client, Henry McIlhenny, a wealthy art patron and chairman of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. According to David France, in his book “Bag of Toys: Sex, Scandal, and the Death Mask Murder” (1992), Mr. McIlhenny tutored Mr. Crispo in art, which helped him find a suitable student.

Convinced that art was his future, Mr. Crispo moved to New York City in 1964. He worked as an art runner, a kind of flipper who bought an undervalued piece from one gallery and immediately sold it to another for a profit. The work required charm, financial shrewdness and a keen eye for art, all of which Mr. Crispo possessed.

In 1967 he found a job at the ACA Gallery, a bastion of New York’s contemporary art scene. It soon became apparent that he had a better eye and sharper business sense than many of the trained older gallerists on staff, and by 1970 he was working with his own roster of artists.

He opened the Andrew Crispo Gallery after securing financing from a client, and he made an immediate impact. In the early 1970s, he organized a series of blockbuster exhibitions, with glittering openings that attracted celebrities such as Liza Minnelli and Leonard Bernstein.

While his reputation among collectors and artists grew, his standing among other gallerists was mixed. He was known to play loosely with rules about provenance and to delay paying insurance or shipping costs, if he paid them at all.

He was often involved in legal battles and was represented at least once by the lawyer Roy Cohn, involving a wealthy Romanian art collector over a Constantin Brancusi sculpture. Mr. Crispo won that fight and, after another complicated lawsuit with the Guggenheim Museum over the same piece, received a $2 million payment.

As the New York gallery scene moved downtown from the Upper East Side, Mr. Crispo found himself left behind — though he retained a few ultra-wealthy clients, including the Swiss industrialist Hans Heinrich Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza. He closed his gallery in 1986, around the time he went to prison.

Mr. Crispo’s partner, Arthur Smith, died in 1997. Mr. Crispo lived in Mr. Smith’s apartment in Manhattan, but Mr. Smith’s family forced him to move out after the death.

After getting out of prison for the second time in 2005, Mr. Crispo bought a co-op apartment and two ground-floor spaces in a residential tower in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, with the intention of opening another gallery.

But his plans never came to fruition and in 2017 he was faced with bankruptcy again. He took out a series of loans from a real estate company, using his cooperative shares and some of his artwork as collateral. When he defaulted on the loans, the real estate company took over the shares.

Mr. Crispo refused to leave the apartment and set up a series of legal roadblocks to delay the eviction. At the same time he became erratic; he continued to use drugs and throw sex parties in his apartment, and was seen naked and defecating in the hallway at least once.

The real estate company ultimately filed an eviction notice on March 17, 2020, just as the pandemic broke out and not long before New York Governor Andrew M. Cuomo imposed an eviction moratorium.

By the time the moratorium was lifted in 2022, Mr. Crispo’s health had deteriorated significantly. According to medical records he submitted to the court, he suffered from high blood pressure, heart disease and depression, among other conditions, and used his condition to further delay the deportation.

In September, a judge ordered the deportation to proceed, a decision Mr. Crispo appealed the next day. At the time of his death the appeal was still pending.