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ILL-GOTTEN GAINS
The art of crime
BY DAVID S. BERNSTEIN
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US Attorney Michael Sullivan filed suit last week for custody of Amedeo Modigliani’s 1917 painting Jeune femme aux yeux bleus as a forfeited asset. The $2.5 million example of Italian Expressionism was previously in the possession of Shirley Sack and Arnold Katzen, who allegedly helped drug dealers move money out of the US by converting the cash into valuable paintings, exporting the artworks, and then reselling them. Sack and Katzen, arrested in 2001 with this Modigliani and a $1.6 million Degas pastel titled La coiffure (forfeited to the government last year), ultimately pleaded guilty to tax evasion, receiving three years’ probation. Sullivan’s office also filed a forfeiture claim last week on a 1979 Rolls Royce Silver Wraith II, into which Harry Smith of Yarmouth was seen allegedly placing a two-and-a-half-pound package of marijuana he had just received in the mail. But the best booty Sullivan is currently seeking may be Flash II, a star-class sloop once owned by John F. Kennedy — and later allegedly purchased "from proceeds obtained, directly or indirectly, as the result of narcotics distribution." No estimate is available on its value.
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