The Brugnara Art Fraud
Eleven million dollars in art, and a defendant who ran his own defense
Image: courtesy / press
San Francisco real-estate figure Luke Brugnara accepted $11 million in art — Degas, Picasso, de Kooning, Miró — then declared them gifts and refused to pay. His 2015 fraud trial became a courtroom spectacle.
In 2014 a New York dealer shipped Brugnara crates of art on approval: a Degas bronze of the Little Dancer, Picasso etchings, sixteen de Kooning paintings, works by Miró and George Luks. Rather than pay or return them, Brugnara claimed they had been gifts.
Charged with mail and wire fraud, he dismissed his lawyers and represented himself, turning the proceedings into theatre — berating witnesses, insulting prosecutors, briefly escaping federal custody before being recaptured near Los Gatos, and drawing an additional citation for contempt.
A jury convicted him in 2015 and he was sentenced to seven years. One crate — said to contain a $3 million Degas bronze — was never accounted for after the FBI raid, its fate the subject of competing and improbable explanations. The case is a modern parable of how the informal, trust-based customs of the art trade can be exploited.