Speaker 1: Ridiculous Crime is a production of iHeartRadio Saren Burnett.
Speaker 2: It's up Elizabeth dunn not the much.
Speaker 3: How you Be Girl, I'm Elizabeth Dutton.
Speaker 2: I'm Elizabeth Dunton.
Speaker 3: And do you know what's ridiculous?
Speaker 2: I do?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 2: Yeah, tell got a sack?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Okay. Your favorite band, Guns n' Roses. So in nineteen
Speaker 2: eighty nine they were on a world tour, right, so
Speaker 2: that was like there for appetite destruction. I guess they're
Speaker 2: opening right, So they get back from the road after
Speaker 2: that tour, and then Slash has nothing to do. So
Speaker 2: what Slash gonna do?
Speaker 4: Well?
Speaker 2: Apparently being on the Yeah, being on the road had
Speaker 2: given him like a regular schedule. Without a schedule, he
Speaker 2: falls into a really bad cocaine and heroin problem for
Speaker 2: two years now. Apparently, as he said and I quote,
Speaker 2: it turned out to be the start of a long
Speaker 2: and night Marrish obsession with heroin, and it lasted from
Speaker 2: nineteen eighty nine until nineteen ninety one. While he was
Speaker 2: on that night Marrish obsession with heroin, he had a
Speaker 2: particularly funny exchange. I know you're like, how can that be?
Speaker 2: Thereon trust You'll laugh when you hear it. Dudes out
Speaker 2: there on a binch, he's like on heroin and cocaine,
Speaker 2: and just like you know, zooted to the high heck
Speaker 2: and slash. He starts tripping like hallucinating. I don't know
Speaker 2: if he hadn't been sleeping or if he's mixing in
Speaker 2: other drugs. All I can find is definitely heroin and cocaine.
Speaker 2: I'm imagining some other drugs in there too, possibly hadn't
Speaker 2: eaten well, I don't know. He's hallucinating, and he starts
Speaker 2: he's also buying you on a golf course in Arizona. Okay,
Speaker 2: so golf course Arizona, Slash hallucinating. It's nighttime. He remembers thinking,
Speaker 2: and I quote that he was being chased by predators
Speaker 2: with rubbery looking dreadlocks. So these rubbery dreadlocks predators. They
Speaker 2: also had harpoons like they were on a whaling expedition
Speaker 2: in Arizona, and machine guns, so they had hard pones
Speaker 2: and machine guns. He was booking, he was running right,
Speaker 2: So then what does he do. He runs through a
Speaker 2: glass door and then he gets into like I don't know,
Speaker 2: like a maid in the in the golf course. He
Speaker 2: grabs her tries to use her as a human shield
Speaker 2: the courage, and then the police come and they stop him,
Speaker 2: they arrest him, and he tells the whole story to
Speaker 2: the police in vivid detail. Case. He's still tripping, so
Speaker 2: he's telling them and I quote, I was still high
Speaker 2: enough that I told the story without a shred of
Speaker 2: self consciousness. Oh can you imagine, Slash tell you that.
Speaker 3: Can?
Speaker 2: So there you go.
Speaker 3: See I told you, well, yeah, that is ridiculous. But
Speaker 3: poor dear, do you know what else is ridiculous?
Speaker 2: No, but I was hoping you did.
Speaker 3: Accusing the victim of the very crime you've perpetrated against them?
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, this is ridiculous.
Speaker 2: Crime.
Speaker 3: A podcast about absurd and outrageous capers, heists and cons.
Speaker 3: It's always ninety nine percent murder free and one hundred
Speaker 3: percent ridiculous.
Speaker 2: I know you heard that.
Speaker 3: I love eccentrics.
Speaker 2: Yeah you do. You are kind of them.
Speaker 3: I have a book by Edith Sitwell called English Eccentrics.
Speaker 2: Oh yes, some of the world's best.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, it's wild. Princess Caribou is in the book.
Speaker 3: We talked about her before. There are Hermits, adventurers, Charlatan's
Speaker 3: weirdos as a weirdo. I love these folks, and there
Speaker 3: are degrees of delusion in eccentrics, some more severe than others. True,
Speaker 3: So I have for you today a grifter, an art forger,
Speaker 3: a liar, a supreme eccentric talk that talk. He has,
Speaker 3: of course, an equally eccentric wife. I mean, you have
Speaker 3: to be a straight a sort of folly ido. Although
Speaker 3: I don't want to wait into any like issues of
Speaker 3: mental illness, let's stick with eccentric for now. His name
Speaker 3: is William Toy and he was born nineteen thirty one,
Speaker 3: Tye Tolly, Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Birth. This boy, this is
Speaker 3: to get you situated in times. So he dropped, He
Speaker 3: dropped out of high school, and that seems like it
Speaker 3: was a lot easier to do in the late nineteen forties.
Speaker 2: Just had to slip out.
Speaker 3: Well yeah, I mean, like my grandpa dropped out of
Speaker 3: sixth grade to get a job to help the family
Speaker 3: back in the day, like pre that time, it was
Speaker 3: like last year anyway, my grandpa sixth grade, last year,
Speaker 3: Toy he bailed on high school and he was artistically
Speaker 3: and mechanically inclined, and he eventually worked his way up
Speaker 3: to a gig making architectural models for engineering firms. That's
Speaker 3: not bad, rrect impressive. He taught himself to paint along
Speaker 3: the way, and by the nineteen sixties he was working
Speaker 3: as an artist. That was his gig. So another artist
Speaker 3: who was also self taught but had a much more
Speaker 3: compelling and impressive story was Clementine Hunter.
Speaker 2: Don't know that name.
Speaker 3: She was born in late eighteen eighty six to a
Speaker 3: Creole family at a plantation in Nagadocia's Parish, Louisiana. Her
Speaker 3: grandparents were enslaved on a nearby plantation and it was,
Speaker 3: you know, here on this other one that she got
Speaker 3: to picking cotton and pecans or pecans, you can stay
Speaker 3: down there. She worked as a maid and a cook.
Speaker 3: And again this is like, you know, post Civil War.
Speaker 3: Here's a fun fact about her. On the morning that
Speaker 3: she gave birth to one of her kids, she harvested
Speaker 3: seventy eight pounds of cotton and then she went home
Speaker 3: and called for the midwife.
Speaker 2: Great, wait a minute, you said, on the day she
Speaker 2: gave birth. Yeah, so she's she's like hours from labor.
Speaker 2: She picked seventy eight pounds of cotton.
Speaker 3: Seventy eight pounds.
Speaker 2: Now I know a little about picking cotton from family stories.
Speaker 2: That's a lot of day. I mean, like, that's that's
Speaker 2: a real good day.
Speaker 3: She is a strong, smart woman who was denied in education.
Speaker 3: She couldn't read or write. And I think it's important
Speaker 3: to remember that when the Civil War ended and slave
Speaker 3: people weren't just free to wave goodbye to their oppressors
Speaker 3: and walk to the city and get a job in
Speaker 3: an apartment. You know, they were in economic shackles.
Speaker 2: Yeah, definitely.
Speaker 3: And for those who you know ignorantly say, oh, but
Speaker 3: they learned to trade, they had nothing.
Speaker 2: Oh no, they had nothing. I mean, coming out of slavery,
Speaker 2: you got to think about like, okay, someone used to
Speaker 2: own you, so if you let your dog go, what
Speaker 2: would they have? That was basically slavery. But you know,
Speaker 2: you just obviously I don't want to make the comparison
Speaker 2: to animals, but I'm saying, when you own something, that
Speaker 2: is a fitting comparison for slavery. They were not allowed
Speaker 2: to have anything other than like, you know, some ragtag
Speaker 2: clothing they got each year, like here's your coat for
Speaker 2: the year, here's your seeing.
Speaker 3: These animals chattel lives, so they had no money, no education,
Speaker 3: no real rights, and then so they're generally stuck where
Speaker 3: they were totally and now they're just getting a pittance
Speaker 3: and basically prevent it from advancing it anyway. This is
Speaker 3: a historical fact, it's our truth. So kick rocks. If
Speaker 3: you aren't willing to confront this and the ramifications as well,
Speaker 3: I'm not talking to you.
Speaker 2: Oh you mean, like someone would say that like coming
Speaker 2: out of slavery, you're in a good spot now you're
Speaker 2: free or something.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly. So. Clementine she couldn't read, she couldn't write,
Speaker 3: but she soaked up what she saw in the world
Speaker 3: around her. And one day in the late nineteen thirties, Clementine,
Speaker 3: now a grandmother, she found a box of paint tubes
Speaker 3: left behind by a visitor to the plantation, because the
Speaker 3: plantation by that time had become sort of a literary
Speaker 3: and artistic salon. Oh wow, it was like a retreat.
Speaker 2: Never expect that, No, not at all.
Speaker 3: So she was fascinated by the colors and the textures
Speaker 3: of the paint, and she goes back to her living quarter.
Speaker 3: She pulls down a window shade and begins conveying in paint.
Speaker 3: The realities of her daily life, the images of her memory,
Speaker 3: the musings of her imagination. Sure, she became a folk artist,
Speaker 3: sort of an outsider artist. Her figures are very much
Speaker 3: reminiscent of those in quilt making, and that was the
Speaker 3: skill in an art that she learned early in life.
Speaker 3: And eventually she would incorporate sewing and quilting and even
Speaker 3: weaving into her visual art. But for this point like
Speaker 3: she's just painting. She started selling paintings after her husband died.
Speaker 3: She put up a sign outside of her cabin that
Speaker 3: said Clementine Hunter Artist, twenty five cents to look. So
Speaker 3: she got her first shows in walk into this sailwich
Speaker 3: picking have them on display. Yeah, exactly, Maybe you can
Speaker 3: make an offer. So she gets her first shows in
Speaker 3: nineteen forty five, and then in nineteen forty nine she
Speaker 3: got wider recognition thanks to the New Orleans Arts and
Speaker 3: Craft Show.
Speaker 2: I said forty nine.
Speaker 3: Forty nine, And in nineteen fifty three she was profiled
Speaker 3: in Look magazine and that took her national So the
Speaker 3: people involved with the writers and the artist's colony at
Speaker 3: the Plantation, they helped her out. There was this journalist
Speaker 3: Francois Mignon, who was a friend of Cammy Henry. Cammy
Speaker 3: Henry was the owner of the plantation, and so Francois Mignon.
Speaker 3: He provided Clementine with paint and materials and then sang
Speaker 3: her praises to everyone he met. And her paintings got
Speaker 3: displayed first in a local drug store and they were
Speaker 3: on sale for a dollar a pop, just like twelve
Speaker 3: dollars today. But you know, she's just gaining all this momentum.
Speaker 3: In nineteen fifty six, she and Francois Mignon, they wrote
Speaker 3: a cookbook together about the food at the plantation, So
Speaker 3: she contributed recipes illustrations and these were like family recipes
Speaker 3: that went back. So she's getting this like recognition and
Speaker 3: acknowledgment in all of this. She painted for decades. She
Speaker 3: had a lot of exhibitions and shows all over the South.
Speaker 3: She was the first black artist to have a solo
Speaker 3: exhibition at the New Orleans Museum of Art. She received
Speaker 3: an invitation to the White House from President Jimmy Carter,
Speaker 3: and she got a letter from President Ronald Reagan. A
Speaker 3: Northwestern State University of Louisiana gave her an honorary doctorate
Speaker 3: of Fine arts. In nineteen eighty six, Louisiana Governor Edwin
Speaker 3: Edwards made her an honorary colonel, and in twenty nineteen,
Speaker 3: long after she passed, state legislators passed a resolution that
Speaker 3: designated October first as Clementine Hunter Day. Right, so she
Speaker 3: painted right up until the end of her life in
Speaker 3: nineteen eighty eight, at the age of one hundred and one.
Speaker 2: I love that she started late in all this. I
Speaker 2: mean charches a grammar.
Speaker 3: Versus a grandmother.
Speaker 2: That's amazing.
Speaker 3: I think that the letter from Reagan was for her
Speaker 3: one hundredth birthday.
Speaker 2: I'm kind of guessing you said forty fifty yea, guys.
Speaker 3: But to do this, to come from absolutely nothing amazing
Speaker 3: and create this in hundreds well, and by the time
Speaker 3: of her death in one hundred and one, her paintings
Speaker 3: were selling for thousands of dollars. She goes from twenty
Speaker 3: five cents to take a look to thousands of dollars.
Speaker 3: In her life, she painted four thousand to five thousand
Speaker 3: paintings like There's just tons And because of like her
Speaker 3: sort of primitive style, people thought that they could forge
Speaker 3: her work.
Speaker 2: Oh like bask yacht stuff.
Speaker 3: Yes, yes, so even her own relatives, as well as
Speaker 3: those of plantation owner Cammy Henry. They made fakes of
Speaker 3: clement Yeah, James L. We don't be going to.
Speaker 2: Exploit enough of your family, so we wanted to exploit.
Speaker 3: You, right, James L. Wilson, in his book Clementine Hunter
Speaker 3: American Folk Artists quote. In nineteen seventy four, Hunter's reputation
Speaker 3: had grown so and with it the price of her works,
Speaker 3: that the inevitable occurred. A forgery scare. Rumors that either
Speaker 3: a grandson or a nephew was grinding out Hunter copies
Speaker 3: and selling them began to fly, and in New Orleans
Speaker 3: an artist was charged with copying her paintings and trying
Speaker 3: to sell them as Hunter originals. We're going to talk
Speaker 3: about that artist.
Speaker 2: Why did you go, Elizabeth. You found a way to
Speaker 2: make me not root for a criminal.
Speaker 3: Right right now? Look at me. So like art dealers,
Speaker 3: they've been complaining about these fakes. So the New Orleans
Speaker 3: police opened an investigation.
Speaker 2: Get them.
Speaker 3: Detective Robert Poadavon and Officer Roma Kent. They answered a
Speaker 3: newspaper ad for the sale of Clementine Hunter paintings. They
Speaker 3: went undercover to meet with the seller at a house
Speaker 3: on Canal Street.
Speaker 2: On Canal Street.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the guy shows the Plaine clothes cops twelve paintings
Speaker 3: supposedly painted by Clementine Hunter, and upon inspection, the officers
Speaker 3: determined they were fakes. So they had studied up, they
Speaker 3: knew everything about her work. They arrested the cellar and
Speaker 3: they even discovered ten more fakes at his own house. Wow,
Speaker 3: who is this guy? William Toy Ah bad Billy Toy,
Speaker 3: Bad Billy Toy. He gets booked on twenty two counts
Speaker 3: of forgery and it was alleged by police that he
Speaker 3: forged both the works of Clementine Hunter and her initials,
Speaker 3: her signature. So it wasn't just like I'm painting this
Speaker 3: and it's unattributed. Remember we've talked.
Speaker 2: About that's what makes it. Yeah, fraud, that's what makes
Speaker 2: it a forgery.
Speaker 3: And that's why he couldn't say it was like an
Speaker 3: appreciation piece or whatever Tony Tetro used to say. So
Speaker 3: the police they tracked down other paintings sold by Toy
Speaker 3: and took them to Clementine for authentication. Oh yeah, she's
Speaker 3: ninety two years old. She's living in Melrose, Louisiana. She
Speaker 3: confirmed you know what, I didn't paint these and this
Speaker 3: signature total forgery. So after that, then the cops brought
Speaker 3: in another twenty two paintings for her to authenticate because
Speaker 3: they've got the source. Toy spent a day in jail,
Speaker 3: then he hired the best defense attorney in town. He
Speaker 3: posted bail via a two thousand dollars bond. The case, though,
Speaker 3: was never prosecuted, just kind of fell apart. Who knows
Speaker 3: why ninety seven he strikes.
Speaker 2: I guess they felt there wasn't a major victims.
Speaker 3: I suppose he strikes again in Baton Rouge in ninety seven,
Speaker 3: so he and his wife they consigned more paintings to
Speaker 3: the Louisiana Auction Exchange in Baton Rouge. But these weren't
Speaker 3: just Clementine Hunter pieces. They were also works by Matisse
Speaker 3: and Dega. Yeah, all fake, of course. So he accused.
Speaker 3: Toy accused the owner of the auction house, Ronald Causey,
Speaker 3: of taking the real pieces and then counterfeiting them and
Speaker 3: putting those up for sale. Oh like, I gave you
Speaker 3: the blueprint and you made a copy and that's what.
Speaker 2: So now I'm the victim, I'm the problem.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so Toy files complaints with Louisiana Auctioneer's Licensing Board
Speaker 3: against Kasey against the guy he ripped off, saying that
Speaker 3: Kasey withheld payments for the paintings that were sold at auction.
Speaker 3: The board took no action then. Causey later passed away
Speaker 3: from lung cancer. However, Toy started spreading rumors that the
Speaker 3: FBI had been trying to conduct a raid on Casey's house,
Speaker 3: and he told people that while Kasey's wife tried to
Speaker 3: barricade the door, Kasey went to the back of the
Speaker 3: house and took his own life. Whoa he said, quote,
Speaker 3: there was a gunshot. The FBI pushed the door open
Speaker 3: and went in and found Kusey dead. None of it's true.
Speaker 3: Toy's wife, Beryl b e r Y lt Not like
Speaker 3: create Ann. Beryl Beryl wrote to a friend of hers
Speaker 3: who's also an accomplice, Robert Lucky. Quote, he stole about
Speaker 3: one point three million worth of art from us. He
Speaker 3: was a dangerous criminal who surrounded himself with other dangerous criminals.
Speaker 3: We literally hounded him to his death. They're saying that Casey.
Speaker 3: Here's what Casey's widow, Sondra had to say. Quote Ron
Speaker 3: would be the last person in the world to kill himself.
Speaker 3: He died of lung cancer. My husband was a fine,
Speaker 3: big hearted person who didn't like to think people could
Speaker 3: do bad things to you, and so he trusted mister
Speaker 3: Toy and the whole time mister Toy was deceiving him.
Speaker 3: By the time we finished dealing with mister Toy, both
Speaker 3: Ron and I were convinced he was either completely insane
Speaker 3: or completely evil.
Speaker 2: So he took the other approach on dead men, tell
Speaker 2: no tales. My dead men can't change what I'm saying.
Speaker 2: Uh huh, that's.
Speaker 3: No, completely insane, completely evil? Why not both?
Speaker 2: That's what I'm with, right, So when.
Speaker 3: We come back, we'll dive further into the bizarre behavior
Speaker 3: of William and Beryl Toy.
Speaker 4: All right, Zarenizabeth over here over here?
Speaker 3: Question? Yes, thank you? What was I talking about?
Speaker 2: Oh, Beryl good?
Speaker 3: Good call William and Beryl Toy?
Speaker 2: Like I just kept this barrel her name Beryl Beryl
Speaker 2: wise could be Beryl and boy Toy. That just sounds is.
Speaker 3: Like a really like a failed eighties movie like script
Speaker 3: that everyone got.
Speaker 2: Made once a computer.
Speaker 3: Hear me out, beryln boy Toy.
Speaker 2: No, it's not a real barrel. It's a computer. What
Speaker 2: was that?
Speaker 3: Crazy cooked out producers named Don Simpson.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, and Jerry Bruckheim cast on that.
Speaker 3: Could you believe that Beryl and boy toy? So William
Speaker 3: and Beryl.
Speaker 2: Was my friend's hero. The you looked at that, He's like,
Speaker 2: I want to be like.
Speaker 3: That, dear god man. Anyway, So these two, this gruesome twosome,
Speaker 3: they're forging paintings by local renowned folks, outsider artist Clementine
Speaker 3: Hunter and then also world famous French painters throw it in.
Speaker 3: Why they are sewing chaos and nastiness wherever they go.
Speaker 3: As their crimes advanced, so did their paranoia and delusion.
Speaker 3: Ah yes, methis people exact after the whole Causy affair,
Speaker 3: they start spiraling out. They installed bulletproof glass in their
Speaker 3: downstairs windows, which you know can't hurt. It's not cheap listen. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I would do it at my house. Did you know
Speaker 3: I had a car once that had bulletproof windows and
Speaker 3: a bomb plate underneath?
Speaker 2: What?
Speaker 3: It was so comforting?
Speaker 2: What I did?
Speaker 3: Serious?
Speaker 2: How did you have a bomb plate?
Speaker 3: I want to talk about it, but I did. I
Speaker 3: didn't know I had a bomb plate until I took
Speaker 3: it to the mechanic the first time, like you know,
Speaker 3: and they put it up. They're like, this is registering
Speaker 3: is so much heavier than it should be. And they
Speaker 3: put it up on the lift thing and like wow,
Speaker 3: why do you have a bomb plate?
Speaker 2: I'm like, stretch the length of the car.
Speaker 3: And then I had a bullet Like when you rolled
Speaker 3: the window down, it was double. They were bulletproof glass.
Speaker 2: Why are you driving one of Pablo Escobar's cars?
Speaker 3: Because for real, how did you? I want to talk?
Speaker 2: I have so many questions, Like a bulletproof car.
Speaker 3: I was very comfort comforting.
Speaker 2: I bet it was.
Speaker 3: It was. It was awesome. So they didn't stop at
Speaker 3: the glass in their house. The glass. They put a
Speaker 3: booby trap under the window in the car port, which
Speaker 3: is it's a clever one. So they had they laid
Speaker 3: down a bunch of marbles and then they put a
Speaker 3: sheet of glass on top of that. So that this
Speaker 3: is how this is what William Toy said, quote anybody
Speaker 3: who steps on it will be in for a surprise.
Speaker 2: Wait what what inside the home? Underneath a window.
Speaker 3: Outside the home outside their house, Like there's the car
Speaker 3: port and there's this window there and the like, if
Speaker 3: you try and break in, you're going to step on
Speaker 3: marbles and glass.
Speaker 2: You're not going to notice the marbles and glass.
Speaker 3: No, because who looks where they're walkings there? Yes, of
Speaker 3: course it's all very home alone.
Speaker 2: It's very home alone.
Speaker 3: So in the middle of all this, the toys are
Speaker 3: at at that the paintings they're trying to sell are
Speaker 3: totally real, totally legal, totally cool, trap home alone. And
Speaker 3: they said that they were the real victims here. This
Speaker 3: is a witch hunt. Of course, how were they the victims?
Speaker 2: Well, it's obvious they're saying they are.
Speaker 3: This is what they said. They said that international drug dealers.
Speaker 3: Of course, we're using auction houses to steal legitimate paintings
Speaker 3: from honest, trusting sellers like them. They said that the
Speaker 3: dealers switched out the good paintings with copies and then
Speaker 3: went back to the auction houses saying that the pieces
Speaker 3: were fake and they wanted their money back.
Speaker 2: Because everyone loves the investigators, like.
Speaker 3: Okay, Pablo escobars out there buying hippos with his booger
Speaker 3: sugar money. And then these supposed kingpins are creating a
Speaker 3: large number of fake paintings in order to flee small
Speaker 3: auction houses in the South.
Speaker 2: Yes, he's like, how do I get in on an
Speaker 2: in insurance scam in Louisiana?
Speaker 3: Very slow on a crew of forgers.
Speaker 2: For the kind of games that I get for are
Speaker 2: just a tenth of a plane load.
Speaker 3: Right, So the consigners of the paintings, the toys, they
Speaker 3: didn't get paid and all they had were they're worthless fakes,
Speaker 3: garbage that had been swapped out by drug dealers. Of course,
Speaker 3: they claimed that they gave the FBI evidence that antique
Speaker 3: armoirs sold at auction had hidden compartments that the drug
Speaker 3: dealers hid narcotic sin.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, made out of co game.
Speaker 3: I feel like there are less complicated ways to move
Speaker 3: drugs than hiding it in an amoir, putting it up
Speaker 3: for auctions, then the buyer sitting through said auction to
Speaker 3: get the item and haul it away. Hey, let me
Speaker 3: pay on top of it. There has to be like
Speaker 3: a more efficient and volume appropriate method. That's just me.
Speaker 3: I'm a logisticscal Oh you are?
Speaker 2: You get it? Like on a plane, maybe a small
Speaker 2: plane flying low over the radar bulletproof.
Speaker 3: So back to the art. It wasn't just Clementine that
Speaker 3: William Toy was ripping off as I said he was.
Speaker 3: He was also great at making forgeries of works by
Speaker 3: Claude Monett. He said, quote, nobody does Monet better than me.
Speaker 3: Maybe money. If you were still alive and we both
Speaker 3: did a water lily painting, tell me the difference.
Speaker 2: Nobody does it better than water lily Monet. Exactly.
Speaker 3: So Toy said in an interview that all that kept
Speaker 3: him from being a major star, a hugely successful artist
Speaker 3: was agoraphobia. That's Emily Dickinson would like exactly, although Emily
Speaker 3: Dickinson only got published after she died, so point taking
Speaker 3: and so like. While I am not inclined to take
Speaker 3: anything this Dufis says is true, the agoraphobia angle is interesting. Well,
Speaker 3: Agoraphobia isn't just being.
Speaker 2: Afraid to leave the house outside.
Speaker 3: It's extreme cases that you know, it's it's an aspect
Speaker 3: of anxiety disorder.
Speaker 2: That's what I thought.
Speaker 3: Yes, you don't want to be somewhere that you can't
Speaker 3: quickly escape. Then you don't want to be too far
Speaker 3: from your place of safety or.
Speaker 2: Company, Like you're afraid of a field, You're afraid of
Speaker 2: being exposed.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly, and so as someone who deals with clinical
Speaker 3: anxiety and panic disorder, I've brushed up against those feelings before,
Speaker 3: you know. Yeah, and I can see how not being
Speaker 3: comfortable being out in the world would impact your art career.
Speaker 3: But dudes seem fine, gallivant and all over to sell
Speaker 3: his fake paintings. So I smell a rat.
Speaker 2: It just seems to be momentary and transactional, like, oh,
Speaker 2: it's only here that it comes out.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly, And now I have the Sunday scary Yeah.
Speaker 3: So anyway, in November of two thousand and five, Toy
Speaker 3: made a deal with a man named Don Fusin, not
Speaker 3: to be confused with Ron fusing No or Don Fuser
Speaker 3: or the.
Speaker 2: Devil in Georgia who also is out making deals.
Speaker 3: Yeah exactly, so Don. He was a businessman and an
Speaker 3: art collector from Baton Rouge.
Speaker 2: Which one Donna Ron donn okay.
Speaker 3: Don't confusing with Ron Fusan.
Speaker 2: Never so Don.
Speaker 3: He bought thirty thousand dollars worth of Clementine Hunter paintings
Speaker 3: from Toy.
Speaker 2: Actual.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, or so he thought. So. Come to find out,
Speaker 3: thanks to the FBI, the paintings were fakes. So Don
Speaker 3: said later, quote, we can all be fooled, and this
Speaker 3: man fooled me. I gave him the best benefit of
Speaker 3: the doubt at every turn, and that's not normally me.
Speaker 2: He's doing a lot of work to say he's not
Speaker 2: an idiot. So Toy, it could have happened anyone doesn't
Speaker 2: norally happen to anybody.
Speaker 3: You know what toy Toy said told Don that he
Speaker 3: got the paintings because his wife Beryl bought those directly
Speaker 3: from Clementine in the nineteen sixties. And then they threw
Speaker 3: some more on top of this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's freebies.
Speaker 3: She hung no, no, no, they threw more juice onto the story.
Speaker 2: Oh I thought she tossed in a couple you know,
Speaker 2: I like.
Speaker 3: The looks at you. Barrel hung on to them and
Speaker 3: even saved them from Hurricane Katrina. Right. In fact, he
Speaker 3: said Hurricane Katrina had wiped them out. They had nothing
Speaker 3: after the hurricane. See see, they'd had a warehouse where
Speaker 3: they kept opera sets and those all got destroyed and
Speaker 3: that's how they were making their money.
Speaker 2: Ah, of course, you know my opera set. I moved
Speaker 2: opera sets for all of the late nineties.
Speaker 3: None of this sounds on the up and up down, No,
Speaker 3: not at all. No, but don was taken, he said.
Speaker 3: Quote the story read right to me. Nothing seemed wrong.
Speaker 2: You are easily fooled. I do not believe your previous
Speaker 2: statement about this never happened to you before.
Speaker 3: Sorry for them. So many people took advantage of an
Speaker 3: absolute tragedy and disaster following Katrina, and it's sickening.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, definitely.
Speaker 3: It was so horrible.
Speaker 2: I know, a bunch of artists the French Quarter and
Speaker 2: then they were putting stuff out. This is basically before Instagram,
Speaker 2: you being like, hey, we need help, and so they're
Speaker 2: desperately to puting out on newsletters they get like emails,
Speaker 2: they're like hey, and there's so many. I couldn't help
Speaker 2: them all. But I realized very quickly they started going
Speaker 2: people are pretending to be us, and they're also asking
Speaker 2: for help. So I want you know this is authentic.
Speaker 2: I was like, oh, y'all.
Speaker 3: Are And because of the chaos of it and the
Speaker 3: lack of records in the last the Louisiana, Louisiana of
Speaker 3: it all, God bless. Yeah, it was totally taken advantage
Speaker 3: of entered you know, creat barrel.
Speaker 2: It was like the original Ppe loan scam, but completely yes.
Speaker 3: So trusting generous Don bought the paintings from Toy and
Speaker 3: then turn around and sold them to friends. And about
Speaker 3: a month later, Don started getting calls from the buyers.
Speaker 3: They'd had the pieces authenticated and experts said they were fake.
Speaker 2: My praiser wants to speak with you.
Speaker 3: OK, he's right. Well, then the FBI comes calling. An
Speaker 3: FBI agent interviewed Don and three other people who paid
Speaker 3: Toy nearly one hundred thousand dollars in total for forty
Speaker 3: fake Clementine Hunter paintings. So Don, he decides, I'm going
Speaker 3: to the toy's house and I'm getting my money back.
Speaker 2: So did the FBI clear Don? Because there like, this
Speaker 2: man's too dumb to be the master.
Speaker 3: He's like, he's such a sweetheart. They put his head sweet.
Speaker 2: Summer child, someone helped across the street.
Speaker 3: So Don Don, Don posses up.
Speaker 2: But I'm going maybe slow.
Speaker 3: I'm getting my money back, but.
Speaker 2: I'm going for my aron close.
Speaker 3: Oh yes, I want you to picture it. You are
Speaker 3: the embroidered Ralph Lauren Polo logo on Don Fusen's button
Speaker 3: down shirt. You rest elegantly over the man's heart. He
Speaker 3: has a good heart, he loves art. He's trusting, but
Speaker 3: now he's on a mission to get his money back
Speaker 3: from two lunatics. Don sighs as he gets into his
Speaker 3: car and revs the engine. He's on a mission. As
Speaker 3: he speeds down the road and with the windows down,
Speaker 3: that thick humid air whips in and you flutter against
Speaker 3: Don's body. He slows the car and comes to a
Speaker 3: stop on Katy Drive. He gets out of the car
Speaker 3: and surveys the scene.
Speaker 2: The grass hasn't been.
Speaker 3: Cutting in ages, and it's as tall as Don's knees.
Speaker 3: There's junk and garbage strewn all through the tall weeds.
Speaker 3: You can feel Don's heart beating faster behind you. He's scared.
Speaker 3: He walks up to the house and steps onto the
Speaker 3: dilapidated front porch. There are signs all over the place,
Speaker 3: do not disturb, keep out, go away, but Don will
Speaker 3: obey none of these. He steals himself and takes a
Speaker 3: deep breath. He approaches the front door. This is no
Speaker 3: ordinary front door. It is a huge iron door. Don
Speaker 3: stares at the imposing door for a moment and then
Speaker 3: begins pounding on it with his fist. Suddenly, the door
Speaker 3: creaks open. An old woman with short gray hair peers
Speaker 3: out from inside the cluttered house. At her feet are
Speaker 3: three cats circling her ankles, purring and yewing. You and
Speaker 3: Don looked beyond her into the house and see more
Speaker 3: cats lounging on the furniture under countless pieces of art
Speaker 3: hung on the walls. Beryl picks up one of the cats.
Speaker 3: The collar reads he by gebe. It's an old cat.
Speaker 3: It's hair thinning and its eyes clouded with cataracts. Beryl says, Don,
Speaker 3: you squint your embroidered eyes at her by pinching two
Speaker 3: threads together. I trusted you, and you sold me fakes. No,
Speaker 3: says Beryl. I bought those pieces myself, right from the
Speaker 3: artist Clementine Hunter sold those to me.
Speaker 2: I want my.
Speaker 3: Money back, Don yells. Beryl yells back, I sold you
Speaker 3: the real paintings, and you made copies. You forged all
Speaker 3: these paintings, and now you're trying to scam us all.
Speaker 3: And with that, Beryl slammed the iron door. You look
Speaker 3: over and you see a cat peering at you through
Speaker 3: a window. Don turns and returns to his car. You
Speaker 3: rest your logo body against his as he speedes off
Speaker 3: and heads home empty handed.
Speaker 2: There you are.
Speaker 3: A few days later, Don got a letter from Beryl. Quote,
Speaker 3: the onus is not upon us to prove that the
Speaker 3: paintings are real. It is upon you to prove that
Speaker 3: they are not.
Speaker 2: Does that?
Speaker 3: Yeah? So and he did. He proved it. He's like,
Speaker 3: guess what, they're fakes. I've taken the onus and there
Speaker 3: you are.
Speaker 2: Court.
Speaker 3: Don wanted proof from the Toys that the experts were
Speaker 3: wrong and the couple had in fact bought the paintings
Speaker 3: directly from the artist. This is what he said. Quote.
Speaker 3: I was hoping that mister Toy would say, let me
Speaker 3: get a photo album and there would be forty pictures
Speaker 3: of missus Toy with Clementine on her front porch, but
Speaker 3: there were no pictures. I was hoping he would produce
Speaker 3: a phone number of a friend who had visited Melrose
Speaker 3: with missus Toy, but they didn't have that either, So.
Speaker 2: No one had been to her Melrose place. No one. Yes,
Speaker 2: I like that they want a photo album of proof,
Speaker 2: Like what have they? My mother?
Speaker 3: I'm need to start making photo albums of proof. It's
Speaker 3: making me nervous. So Don sets up a meeting with
Speaker 3: Toy and invited along with him a well regarded art
Speaker 3: conservator named Margaret Morland.
Speaker 2: Not Margaret Moreland, Yes, Margaret Morland.
Speaker 3: Morland was a known conservator who had been in the
Speaker 3: business for twenty five years.
Speaker 2: Oh Mags of steel.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, she's a tough bird. She had cleaned a
Speaker 3: lot of Hunter paintings for Toy, and after Katrina, Toy
Speaker 3: brought Moreland even more Hunter paintings for cleaning. Moreland attached
Speaker 3: a condition report to each piece that she cleaned. So
Speaker 3: she said, quote, he kept asking me, do you think
Speaker 3: these are real? I don't want people to think they're fake.
Speaker 3: So if you have paintings that you got from the
Speaker 3: actual artist, why would you say that?
Speaker 2: Yeah? I don't. I don't get that one.
Speaker 3: So Moreland she came to believe that Toy used her
Speaker 3: condition reports as proof of authenticity to prospective buyers. She's
Speaker 3: not authenticating, she's just cleaning a painting.
Speaker 2: But he's acting like that somehow is a yeah process.
Speaker 3: And she said, there's no way I certified them. These
Speaker 3: are just notes I make for myself to keep track
Speaker 3: of them. Now, remember how the Toys said Don had
Speaker 3: recopied their legit paintings. They accused Morland's son Robert, of
Speaker 3: being the real forger in all of this. So Robert,
Speaker 3: who had considered Toy a friend, was absolutely shocked.
Speaker 2: Oh he's buddies with this person.
Speaker 3: This is what Robert Morland said, quote never, never would
Speaker 3: I do something like that. I don't think I could
Speaker 3: fake one if I wanted to. It's just preposterous. Usually
Speaker 3: when a painting is old, the older it is, the
Speaker 3: stronger the paint is. But there were times when a
Speaker 3: little paint would come up when I was using a
Speaker 3: relatively weak cleaner, and I was like, huh, that's coming
Speaker 3: up kind of easy.
Speaker 2: But what do I know.
Speaker 3: I don't know anything about Clementine Hunter, and I definitely
Speaker 3: wasn't going to say the paintings were fake because of that.
Speaker 3: Don though hits the nail on the head. Quote. Clementine
Speaker 3: was a poor black woman who painted for pennies and nickels.
Speaker 3: These people copy her work and sign her name to
Speaker 3: get thousands of dollars for something that she'd have gotten
Speaker 3: thirty dollars for. She's the person most violated by this.
Speaker 2: Don I'm so wrong. I take it back. You're not simple,
Speaker 2: You're truthful. You get right to the heart of matters.
Speaker 2: Who am I to judge.
Speaker 3: Your irritating to me about this the absolute exploitation. So
Speaker 3: Don he gathered a bunch of other victims of the toys,
Speaker 3: and he went to the state Attorney General's office. They
Speaker 3: demanded an investigation. They got nothing, of course, not at all,
Speaker 3: Don said, quote. The impression I got was that they
Speaker 3: thought this was a big white collar crime and that
Speaker 3: rich people were getting hurt, and so it wasn't a
Speaker 3: big deal.
Speaker 2: Oh, we do about that.
Speaker 3: That's kind of our motto here. But like, I don't
Speaker 3: classify these folks as wealthy. Okay, like they have money,
Speaker 3: but the losses make an impact on their livelihood. They
Speaker 3: can't just absorb these losses. I like the ones where
Speaker 3: the fat cat victim is what I call violently.
Speaker 2: Rich, Yes, or like writing it off because they don't
Speaker 2: want to be embarrassed.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you don't get to be a billionaire or a
Speaker 3: member of the one percent without stomping on and exploiting others.
Speaker 2: Yes, so simple, get it.
Speaker 3: And that, dear listeners, is why I think they are
Speaker 3: fair game and the crimes involving them tickle me.
Speaker 2: Are you recommending a cookbook to how to Cook and
Speaker 2: Eat the rich.
Speaker 3: Basically, let's take a break, let that soak in, and
Speaker 3: when we come back, we'll keep wading through the wreckage
Speaker 3: left in the wake of the USS Toy. Hey's Aaron, welcome.
Speaker 2: You got more about that boy toy, the toy boy
Speaker 2: my man creating barrel and barrel.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I do. So. We've got the toys forging paintings,
Speaker 3: selling said fakes, then turning around and accusing the buyers
Speaker 3: of forgery when caught. Yes, it's amazing. Sometimes the tactic
Speaker 3: works and sometimes it doesn't.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like when you're seven.
Speaker 3: But it always muddies the water, installs things.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: You know. One target of the toys, Janice Dealerno. She
Speaker 3: knew the ruse all too well. She's the owner of
Speaker 3: an art gallery and frame shop in Baton Rouge, and
Speaker 3: she bought five Clementine Hunter paintings from Toy. This is
Speaker 3: what she said quote. I started getting suspicious of him.
Speaker 3: He had this unending collection of paintings with anything you
Speaker 3: could possibly want. You could name the subject matter and size.
Speaker 3: I just started wondering what was going on. I think
Speaker 3: the fact that you could name fine art by artists
Speaker 3: and size of the piece should have been a good
Speaker 3: clue that he wasn't on the up and up. Yeah,
Speaker 3: made to order fine art.
Speaker 2: When you're like, have like an actual Hunter painting of
Speaker 2: Lionel Ritchie that's a seven by eleven, and you're like,
Speaker 2: I don't know why she painted that, but.
Speaker 3: You know it's it's funny, serendipitous.
Speaker 2: That she did. It's amazing and she's exactly what I
Speaker 2: wanted from my bathroom.
Speaker 3: Sodalerno. She took the paintings to an expert on Hunter
Speaker 3: pieces and learned they were fake. Surprise, and she said, quote,
Speaker 3: William Toy turns it around and accuses the person he
Speaker 3: sold a art to copying it. It's ludicrous, Like, hello,
Speaker 3: how many times you have to walk into this wall?
Speaker 2: Everybody say, it's ridiculous. Exactly.
Speaker 3: So Shannon Foley another target. She's an art dealer in
Speaker 3: New Orleans. She went to Toy's freaky house to buy
Speaker 3: the pieces. This is how she described it. Quote, it
Speaker 3: was dirty, there was dust everywhere, three four maybe five
Speaker 3: cats were around. I was pregnant, and the stench of
Speaker 3: cat urine hit me in the face. I thought, oh
Speaker 3: my gosh, this is crazy. I had to get out
Speaker 3: of there. You meet a lot of eccentric people in
Speaker 3: the art world who live in bizarre conditions and yet
Speaker 3: have valuable things. So it's the eccentricity that buys the
Speaker 3: toys credit.
Speaker 2: Not the toxoplasmosis in the nose when you go to visit, the.
Speaker 3: Ammonia of it all like. But if you have money,
Speaker 3: you can be as weird as you want to be.
Speaker 2: Look at the British were talking about at the beginning.
Speaker 3: That's why I need to win the lottery.
Speaker 2: Yes, you can be eccentricause you want to be exactly.
Speaker 3: So the Toys they were opera aficionados, and they named
Speaker 3: their cats after characters from Gilbert and Sullivan musical.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, you have name games.
Speaker 3: Yes, yes, Toy once said, quote, do you know we've
Speaker 3: had one hundred and six cats since nineteen seventy seven.
Speaker 2: Oh wow.
Speaker 3: Coco was the first. Yum Yum was second. If you
Speaker 3: have all day, I can tell you about every one
Speaker 3: of them. We didn't want all the yelling and screaming,
Speaker 3: so we adopted cats instead. I contacted a funeral home
Speaker 3: about where to get gravestones for the cats. So I'm
Speaker 3: going to have a load of gravestones delivered, and we're
Speaker 3: gonna put one at the head of each grave.
Speaker 2: Okay, just so much to go with there. But my
Speaker 2: favorite possibly is a load of gravestones, a load of
Speaker 2: can maybe a load of half a gravestone.
Speaker 3: Then here's barrel. She chimes in, quote, we know where
Speaker 3: they all are. Taddy's in here, Janie's here.
Speaker 2: Oh no, she's just in the house. I suppose over
Speaker 2: there in that.
Speaker 3: Bag in her pocket. So back to Shannon.
Speaker 2: Foley The Pirates of Penzance.
Speaker 3: A now fully wades into cat Pea Central and buys
Speaker 3: five paintings get out, and then she bought fourteen more
Speaker 3: via mail after she sold those origin four. Now they
Speaker 3: had to smell terrible. It's why they have to get
Speaker 3: Oh my god.
Speaker 2: Yeah, i'd be like a smoker's house, but its capit.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Also, I'm thinking she thought that's what made it more artistic.
Speaker 2: It's like, oh, it was so funky. Yeah, have toists.
Speaker 2: They can't be people who live like that.
Speaker 3: Well, so all said, fully paid forty four thousand dollars
Speaker 3: for nineteen paintings.
Speaker 2: Oh man, She.
Speaker 3: Listed some on a website and then she put others
Speaker 3: up at an auction house. And soon enough she finds
Speaker 3: out they're all faked, so she reaches out to the
Speaker 3: toys demands her money back. Quote they said all these
Speaker 3: people were jealous of them, that other people were the forgers.
Speaker 3: It's like they're scripting their own reality. I love the
Speaker 3: journey that everyone goes through of like, oh my god,
Speaker 3: they have these paintings. It's kind of a bargain.
Speaker 2: I'm gonna exploit them.
Speaker 3: They smell like pee, but like, I don't know, they're
Speaker 3: kinda they're They're weird, artistic centric type.
Speaker 2: And I'm going to get a good deal. I just
Speaker 2: got con the oh.
Speaker 3: And now they're saying I faked them. Anyway, so she
Speaker 3: tries to sue.
Speaker 2: These people are crazy.
Speaker 3: She tried to sue them, but she could never get
Speaker 3: the papers served. They wouldn't open the door.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, no, of course not. I think that
Speaker 2: they would have to go to like some kind of
Speaker 2: collector from the mob to get their money.
Speaker 3: Totally.
Speaker 2: You need someone in a long black leather jack.
Speaker 3: You need to know some Hell's.
Speaker 2: Not a lawyer exactly that would do it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you always say, and I'm always like, I wish
Speaker 3: I knew some Hell's Angels.
Speaker 2: See this is our California, New Jersey to buy exactly. So.
Speaker 3: Another gal, the owner of Baton Rouge financial services company,
Speaker 3: named Stephanie Hardy. She met toy in around like two
Speaker 3: thousand and six, two thousand and seven when he came
Speaker 3: in looking to get a loan and Hardy denied him
Speaker 3: alone smart at which point he said, well, I've got
Speaker 3: all these Clementine Hunter paintings. Let's use him as collateral.
Speaker 3: So what does Hardy do? She's like, I have a collateral. No,
Speaker 3: she buys five of the paintings. God, She's like, don't
Speaker 3: worry about the loan. How I could take those off
Speaker 3: your hand. He's like, okay, seventy five hundred dollars and
Speaker 3: she talks him down to twenty five hundred dollars.
Speaker 2: This is classic con behavior. Everyone thinks they're getting one
Speaker 2: over on him.
Speaker 3: Here's what she said. This is how she said. Quote.
Speaker 3: Some were rare ones, like a Christmas tree. When I
Speaker 3: asked what else he had, he gave me a spiral
Speaker 3: bound notebook with polaroids of the paintings. He told me,
Speaker 3: I can get you any of these that you want,
Speaker 3: in lots of sizes, in lots of sizes, like the
Speaker 3: alarm bell is going off, and she's like, I got
Speaker 3: some rare ones for twenty five hundred. How did she
Speaker 3: not see this scam?
Speaker 2: Why can't we get jobs?
Speaker 3: Back it up so he doesn't qualify for a loan,
Speaker 3: she buys paintings from him, and then he's like, you know,
Speaker 3: I can get him in any size. It's like when
Speaker 3: you order a T shirt online and then they say, oh,
Speaker 3: you can also get the design on a mug or
Speaker 3: a mousepad, Like why do I want an Elliot Smith
Speaker 3: mouse pad? Scratch that it sounds kind of cool anyway?
Speaker 3: What else was in the Magic Art catalog notebooks?
Speaker 2: Eron it would go through Elliot Smith mug so masch set?
Speaker 2: What else was in a notebook?
Speaker 3: Let me tell you the glute? Inside was a letter
Speaker 3: dated nineteen seventy three from Mark Antony of the three
Speaker 3: three one gallery in New Orleans. Okay, here's a small problem.
Speaker 3: The place closed in nineteen sixty six and the letter
Speaker 3: was from nineteen seventy three.
Speaker 2: That doesn't work out, It doesn't.
Speaker 3: The letter said the toys owned four hundred and thirty
Speaker 3: eight Hunter paintings and with a total worth of approximately
Speaker 3: forty five thousand dollars.
Speaker 2: No to his credit, could this have been like, you know,
Speaker 2: we lost the brick and mortar, but now we're a
Speaker 2: floating gallery.
Speaker 3: An online Now that was like.
Speaker 2: The brick of Dune of we appear every four years.
Speaker 2: So toy.
Speaker 3: He gives copies of the letter to both Dalerno and
Speaker 3: Foley as provenas for the paintings. Hardy, though, she gets
Speaker 3: the hold her hands on the whole notebook and turns
Speaker 3: it over to the FBI.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, wow.
Speaker 3: So January of two thousand and nine, Well, she best
Speaker 3: with a banker. The banker's like, okay, we have federal
Speaker 3: issues here.
Speaker 2: But how did you get her hands on the note
Speaker 2: Did she break in?
Speaker 3: She was like, can I just take it home? And
Speaker 3: like just and she put it in a ziplock bag
Speaker 3: because it smelled so bad I want to stinking up
Speaker 3: my car. January two thousand and nine, the FBI got
Speaker 3: in touch with Lindel King, the director of the Wiseman
Speaker 3: Art Museum at University of Minnesota. The FBI thought that
Speaker 3: the Hunter paintings on display there that were gifted from
Speaker 3: a local collector and his family were forgeries. FBI came
Speaker 3: and took pictures of all thirty eight Clementine Hunter paintings.
Speaker 3: There who now that March FBI special agent Randolph Deeton
Speaker 3: the fourth not the fourth. Yeah, he contacted the museum
Speaker 3: to let him know that five of their thirty eight
Speaker 3: Hunter paintings were likely fake. In an interview with the Toys,
Speaker 3: Beryl said, once they leave our hands, we have no
Speaker 3: control over what happens to them. We had the real
Speaker 3: ones and everyone else was faking them. And then William says,
Speaker 3: I didn't confess anything because I didn't do anything. People.
Speaker 3: They're amazing.
Speaker 2: So they're like the long shag carpet of people.
Speaker 3: It's like, collect so much gross, don't walk on it barefoot. So,
Speaker 3: when asked about Clementine Hunter's work, Toy said that he
Speaker 3: hated it and he wouldn't let his wife hang the
Speaker 3: pieces in the house. Quote, they're junk and really only
Speaker 3: good as dart boards. The only thing that Clementine Hunter's
Speaker 3: good for is a stepping stone in a muddy field.
Speaker 3: Damn backup, did.
Speaker 2: Dude, I'm about to fight on these words. Clementine Hunter
Speaker 2: don't deserve that.
Speaker 3: So again September two, two thousand and nine. So we're like,
Speaker 3: you know, after they've contacted the museum. Earlier in the year,
Speaker 3: the FBI they raid toys home in Baton Rouge. They
Speaker 3: seized art supplies, computers, documents, typewriters, and according to the toys,
Speaker 3: the only paintings the FBI found were four small Hunter
Speaker 3: pieces that were left over from the four hundred piece
Speaker 3: collection that Beryl got decades prior when she was friends
Speaker 3: with Clementine Hunter.
Speaker 2: That's what the toy said.
Speaker 3: That's what the toy said. Say And like Beryl again,
Speaker 3: she said she started buying the pieces from Hunter in
Speaker 3: nineteen sixty nine, you know, typically paying like thirty five
Speaker 3: to fifty dollars of painting. Hold up. Retired Associate professor
Speaker 3: of journalism at Northwestern State Tom Whitehead christ Fowl. He
Speaker 3: was close friends with Clementine Hunter, and he visited her
Speaker 3: once a week beginning in nineteen sixty nine. He said
Speaker 3: in an interview that he never once crossed paths with Beryl,
Speaker 3: and Hunter never once mentioned her name. So if this
Speaker 3: woman is showing up and buys four hundred pieces.
Speaker 2: You would think he would say that she might come
Speaker 2: up in conversation.
Speaker 3: Beryl's undeterred. No, of course, they were pointing fingers at
Speaker 3: me and I can't paint. And then they thought they
Speaker 3: could trick me. They said, well, your husband's confess to it,
Speaker 3: and we're going to take them down to Central lock up.
Speaker 3: And I said, but he couldn't have painted them either,
Speaker 3: because I bought them from Clementine. I said, okay, I
Speaker 3: painted them. I painted them right after I finished helping
Speaker 3: Michaelangelo paint the Sistine Chapel and Chagall paint the lobby
Speaker 3: of the Met. This of course, went above their heads.
Speaker 3: Oh my god, I know they are so Animal Control
Speaker 3: at the Raid gets.
Speaker 2: All snob over, these Louisiana police who say that I'm
Speaker 2: the criminal. Ma'am, you are the criminal.
Speaker 3: Animal control is called.
Speaker 2: Animal control nights. I got the dog catcher on.
Speaker 3: Well, they had to get a bunch of cats out
Speaker 3: of the house bi Raid. Something bad happened to he BGB.
Speaker 3: We won't go into but Beryl had a meltdown.
Speaker 2: Are you kidding?
Speaker 3: I'm not kidding you.
Speaker 2: I mean, yeah, I want to I don't want to hear.
Speaker 3: So Beryl has a meltdown and tried to attack an agent. Wow, okay,
Speaker 3: I'll tell you what happened here. PBGB got spooked and
Speaker 3: ran out in the street and got hit by car
Speaker 3: rip HEBGB, but he BGB had cataracts and was like,
Speaker 3: not not long for this world.
Speaker 2: Okay, that's terrible. So it's just nature doing it in
Speaker 2: a weird way.
Speaker 3: Right, But so Beryl loses it, which I mean, okay,
Speaker 3: I get it. I would, and starts attacking an FBI agent,
Speaker 3: which you know would he would, And they had a tranquilizer,
Speaker 3: which like, okay, I'll take it. So when she got home,
Speaker 3: Beryl told an interview quote, they're watching us from the
Speaker 3: top of that building as we speak. The FBI has
Speaker 3: us under twenty four hour surveillance. They see everything we do.
Speaker 3: They sprayed a special powder on our car. Whenever William
Speaker 3: goes anywhere, like to the market, they can track him
Speaker 3: from a satellite.
Speaker 2: A satellite.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is the spinning. The spinning is happening. So
Speaker 3: then William joins in quote. When they were clearing out
Speaker 3: the land behind us to build that building, they took
Speaker 3: out a forest. The guy operating the cat tractor found
Speaker 3: a human skeleton holding a high powered rifle. The skeleton
Speaker 3: didn't have identification, but we're certain he was an assassin
Speaker 3: hired to kill us. He died back there. Somehow it
Speaker 3: never made the papers. Of course, we'd moved from eccentric
Speaker 3: into and two.
Speaker 2: I was talking to my Brocowy this morning at breakfast,
Speaker 2: and it told me that.
Speaker 3: This is what their neighbor, James Breedlove observed. Quote. I
Speaker 3: had so many people come over I could have sold tickets.
Speaker 3: The agents had a card table set up in the
Speaker 3: front yard and they were bringing out paintings. They would
Speaker 3: wrap the paintings in brown paper and log them into
Speaker 3: a yellow pad on a clipboard. Finally, a fire truck
Speaker 3: and an EMS vehicle showed up. I later learned that
Speaker 3: Beryl went bokers. They took her to the psych board
Speaker 3: of a local hospital for three days. But we didn't
Speaker 3: understand all this at the time. All we saw was
Speaker 3: Beryl coming out on a stretcher. It was quite a show.
Speaker 2: I'm telling you, I bet it was right.
Speaker 3: But like, here's the thing. Beryl's likely only took four paintings,
Speaker 3: and this guy's like they had to set up a
Speaker 3: whole lot for day.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, one after the other.
Speaker 3: So Toy thinks that Beryl now suffers from PTSD as
Speaker 3: a result of the raid, and he thinks that she
Speaker 3: should have shock therapy.
Speaker 2: Oh, I don't know. Maybe he wants to make electro
Speaker 2: convulsive shock therapy. Yeah, that ain't no joke, no h.
Speaker 3: And as to the fake paintings, Toy accused their pal
Speaker 3: Robert Lucky, of the forgery.
Speaker 2: They were noticed with electric shock therapy. It's always we
Speaker 2: should do this as someone else. No one ever goes
Speaker 2: you know what I would electric shock therapy exactly, Okay, anyway, exactly.
Speaker 3: So Toy turns on Robert Lucky, who was like their friend.
Speaker 3: He accused the FBI of planting fakes in his home
Speaker 3: during the raid. Quote they had a painting, supposedly a
Speaker 3: Clementine that I had never seen before. They have to
Speaker 3: have brought it with them. We don't even know it
Speaker 3: was there.
Speaker 2: Of course, that seems very reasonable.
Speaker 3: Beryl doubles down. Quote, the FBI just wants us out
Speaker 3: of the house so they can come back and steal
Speaker 3: the dega we have stored in the closet. But I
Speaker 3: have a message for them. We're not leaving. Let them
Speaker 3: come get us. She's like, we got marbles, we got
Speaker 3: panes of glass.
Speaker 2: We're gonna go. Look out the world. You know that
Speaker 2: people in the Pennsylvania should probably tell this story they have.
Speaker 2: They said they found a bunch of gold from like
Speaker 2: the Civil War, and then they claimed the FBI came
Speaker 2: in and stole the gold from them overnight. That's why
Speaker 2: these people will not be believed is because of Beryl and.
Speaker 3: Bill Toy, right exactly exactly, Well, Bill Toy, he's a
Speaker 3: tough talker too. Quote the FBI doesn't scare me. Try
Speaker 3: standing before an orchestra of sixty eight musicians, Now that's terrifying.
Speaker 2: Oh yes, Like, okay, where.
Speaker 3: Did you get that? Dude?
Speaker 2: Like okay, seels like he plays mad libs in his
Speaker 2: head and says them.
Speaker 3: He just eternally in my head gets the jay z Okay.
Speaker 3: Robert Lucky he told the FBI that he met the
Speaker 3: Toys around nineteen ninety nine and that he had sold
Speaker 3: approximately one hundred paintings that he got from them. And then,
Speaker 3: according to the FBI, Lucky was informed by Hunter Art
Speaker 3: Exs that the pieces he was selling were fake, but
Speaker 3: he just kept selling him. He's like all right, yeah,
Speaker 3: So Lucky denies this. He said, quote, I never sold
Speaker 3: a painting that I thought was a forgery, but.
Speaker 2: I thought not that I had been told was a forgery. Thought,
Speaker 2: I don't know much about art.
Speaker 3: So Special Agent Deeton wrote in court documents that Robert
Speaker 3: Lucky was suspected of acting as an intermediary for the
Speaker 3: toys by way of helping them sell the forged paintings.
Speaker 2: I'm with him and that.
Speaker 3: He quote engaged in a conspiracy and a scheme to
Speaker 3: defraud several victims in Louisiana and in other states and
Speaker 3: knowingly sold forgeries as original, authentic works of art by
Speaker 3: Clementine Hunter.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's the equivalent of their fence.
Speaker 3: Yes completely so. FBI documents also said that it was
Speaker 3: around two thousand, in the year two thousand, the same
Speaker 3: time that Lucky moved to New Orleans, that faked Hunter
Speaker 3: paintings began appearing on the market.
Speaker 2: Coincidence.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Lucky sold about fifty to one hundred paintings on
Speaker 3: behalf of the toys Arkansas, Louisiana, New York, Texas the
Speaker 3: prove and to the paintings always misrepresented. The buyers were
Speaker 3: told that the sources of the paintings were like other
Speaker 3: Hunter collectors, not the toys. So he gets them from
Speaker 3: the toys. He's like, no, that lady who really loves Hunter.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's in New York. You don't know her.
Speaker 3: So for a while there, Lucky owned an antique shop
Speaker 3: where he sold paintings.
Speaker 2: I don't trust those places anti shops.
Speaker 3: No, it's like an interesting little front.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so they're like, you know, like pawn shops, but
Speaker 2: they're always kind of hanky. Yeah, that's how I feel
Speaker 2: about an antique shop.
Speaker 3: Greed, Yeah, he reported When he had this antique shop,
Speaker 3: he reported that someone had stolen thirty two paintings from
Speaker 3: his shop. This was in ninety two, and he told
Speaker 3: newspapers that it was an eighty thousand dollars loss, but
Speaker 3: don't worry, it's covered by insurance. He was arrested in
Speaker 3: nineteen ninety nine on felony charges in Shreveport, Louisiana, because
Speaker 3: he'd failed to deliver three hundred paintings that he sold
Speaker 3: for twenty one thousand dollars, later released on bond. In
Speaker 3: two thousand, a New Orleans physician named Robert Ryan was
Speaker 3: selling part of his Hunter collection and he got a
Speaker 3: judgment against Lucky for twelve grand, which is the amount
Speaker 3: that he paid Lucky for the paintings. Because he found
Speaker 3: out that everything he bought was fake. He was able
Speaker 3: to get Lucky's wages garnished and he collected his final
Speaker 3: payment in two thousand and five.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: June of twenty eleven, Toy pleaded guilty to selling forged paintings,
Speaker 3: misrepresenting the provanas to buyers, and painting the forgeries. His
Speaker 3: plea agreement allowed him to avoid time in prison, which
Speaker 3: was like a maximum of five years, but he was
Speaker 3: kept under supervised release and he had to pay restitution.
Speaker 2: So his real payment was restitution.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he attacked a photographer with his cane on the
Speaker 3: way out of the courthouse. You know, you got to
Speaker 3: keep it real. In September of the same year, the
Speaker 3: both of them pleaded guilty. Both Toys pleaded guilty to
Speaker 3: mail fraud. They got sentenced to two years probation and
Speaker 3: they had to pay four hundred and twenty six thousand
Speaker 3: dollars in restitution.
Speaker 2: Oh that's not bad for mail fraud.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the hit Lucky also got convicted of mail fraud.
Speaker 3: He got sentenced to twenty five months in prison and
Speaker 3: then he had to pay three hundred and twenty six
Speaker 3: thousand dollars in restitution.
Speaker 2: It's interesting that he gets popped, not them on the
Speaker 2: twenty five months. It seems like they would all get
Speaker 2: twenty five months.
Speaker 3: That's what I would think. Well, he serves his time.
Speaker 3: He had three year supervised release after and two hundred
Speaker 3: hours of community service. So all's well, that ends well,
Speaker 3: they all pay the price.
Speaker 2: Now, did Beryl ever agreed that her husband convicted for
Speaker 2: it actually painted the painting. She's still going but it
Speaker 2: was space aliens in the FBI.
Speaker 3: Yeah, everyone's trying to make them the victims.
Speaker 2: Saron Powder, As you can see from satellite.
Speaker 3: What's your ridiculous takeaway?
Speaker 2: From the beginning to the end.
Speaker 3: It's all ridiculous.
Speaker 2: That was it. It's all so ridiculous. I'm taking the
Speaker 2: whole thing away as ridiculous, and.
Speaker 3: Again, I want to make sure that everyone understands it.
Speaker 3: I'm not making poking fun at mental illness.
Speaker 2: Qualify as art eccentrics more so mentally ill from what
Speaker 2: you were describing, I don't.
Speaker 3: Know, you know, it's more than it's just the things
Speaker 3: that they do so much so anyway, but I do
Speaker 3: want to make that absolutely clear that that's you know,
Speaker 3: you know what my ridiculous takeaways? Thanks for asking.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, hey, what's yours?
Speaker 3: I'm calling back to your what's ridiculous at the top
Speaker 3: of the show, which was about Slash. Do you follow
Speaker 3: him on Instagram? Uh?
Speaker 2: You told me to do that a long time ago
Speaker 2: and I have not.
Speaker 3: It's it's like a thirteen year old boys Instagram. It's
Speaker 3: so great. It's either like wishing happy birthday to other
Speaker 3: musicians and he has like this little thing that he
Speaker 3: types out with like brackets or whatever to make it
Speaker 3: look like Slash or like early pre emoji stuff, okay,
Speaker 3: or it's just like weird like heavy metal magazine, you know,
Speaker 3: like the horror like sexy or stuff and weird stuff
Speaker 3: like that's trippy.
Speaker 2: It's like you gotta follow.
Speaker 3: It's amazing.
Speaker 2: So like you want me to to check out his
Speaker 2: like a dark light or black light posters. And then
Speaker 2: also does he do like any like pictures of him
Speaker 2: with celebrities and wish birthday or just a random picture.
Speaker 3: It's a random picture that's spreading on stage.
Speaker 2: Yep, so follow is it always a picture of Hambergery
Speaker 2: sent a picture of them like birthday?
Speaker 3: Yeah, he doesn't appear on his own thing.
Speaker 2: That's classics seriously, And the rest of the times it's like,
Speaker 2: look at this giant snake, a.
Speaker 3: Lot of snake content. Okay, thirteen year old boy, it's amazing.
Speaker 2: He's true to himself. That's exactly who you wanted.
Speaker 3: I love that kind of authenticity with people.
Speaker 2: I thought I met him, he was exactly what I
Speaker 2: wanted to be in person. And now you're just confirming
Speaker 2: for me. He stayed that guy. Follow on. This be
Speaker 2: your best right. That's all I have for I love it.
Speaker 3: You can find us online at ridiculous crime dot com.
Speaker 3: We have T shirts. No, I don't think we do.
Speaker 3: I don't know what we have there. Cats.
Speaker 2: We should get some.
Speaker 3: Gifts, we should do some shirts. We're a ridiculous crime
Speaker 3: on both Twitter and Instagram, ridiculous Crime at gmail dot com.
Speaker 2: The interns showed me a really cool T shirt idea
Speaker 2: we got from somebody. I think it was today or yesterday.
Speaker 2: I thought that was so. If you guys have T
Speaker 2: shirt ideas, yeah, because respondings some out.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Look at the interns sewing their little tiny fingers
Speaker 3: working leave a talk back on the iHeart app. I
Speaker 3: know people don't like to download apps. That's what we've
Speaker 3: been finding out. They say, I don't want another app. Well,
Speaker 3: guess what I don't care, send me a talk about.
Speaker 2: The apps.
Speaker 3: Pleased another app and add that one in, So that's
Speaker 3: my thing. Reach Out Baby. Ridiculous Crime is hosted by
Speaker 3: Elizabeth Dutton and Sarah Burnette, produced and edited by Dave Kusten.
Speaker 3: Professional cat wrangler research is by Marissa I Want to
Speaker 3: buy a Monette Brown and Andrea do you have any other?
Speaker 3: Or a five x eight song Sharpened Tear. The theme
Speaker 3: song is by the auction House of Lee and Dutton.
Speaker 3: Executive producers are Ben have you seen my Cat? Bowlin?
Speaker 3: And Noel who hasn't seen your cut Brown? Cryme say
Speaker 3: it one more time? Riudiquious Crime.
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