Do The ‘Mangan M*A*S*H’: Fraud, Conspiracy & Poetic Injustice From The Flip-Flopping Felon
The civil lawsuit filed August 14, 2023 by the Orlando Museum of Art against former director Aaron De Groft (and the owners of more than two dozen works of “art” previously attributed to the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat) described changes made to the fluid narrative that maintained a poem — dubiously attributing the paintings to Mumford and Basquiat, as buyer and seller — functioned as a “receipt” of the original 2012 transaction.
The tale has more switchbacks than a ride through Sonoma County’s back roads — and ends with (you guessed it) a dead woman.
Sort of.
I DO DECLARE…AGAIN
In his August 9, 2023 “declaration”, Leo Mangan stated:
In late 2015 or early 2016, I was working with an associate Torrie Geisler in trying to gather evidence about our paintings’ provenance. Torrie had a college friend who worked with Mumford as a tv writer. Her name was Adriana Trigiani, and she is a major literary figure.
Torie told me that she spoke with Trigiani about doing her a favor and asking Mumford if he had anything showing that he had purchased our paintings from Basquiat.
Trigiani later gave Torrie a Poem that Mumford had given Trigiani. Mumford told Trigiani that Basquiat and he had written the Poem.
The Poem contains numerous significant autobiographical references to Basquiat and Mumford and actually mentions “25 paintings”. I considered it a receipt from Mumford buying the paintings from Basquiat.”
In his declaration, Mangan details how he and his wife, Shelley, tracked Trigiani down, unexpectedly showing up at an unnamed “Northern New Jersey bookstore”.
Mangan stated he “asked if Trigiani recalled helping her friend Torrie Geisler obtain the Poem from Mumford.”
(I gotta stop here: it almost sounds like the “Nice place you got here. Be a shame if anything happened to it.”)
According to Mangan, Trigiani remembered the incident and “agreed to sign a statement to this effect.
An excerpt from Trigiani’s statement, signed on April 2, 2023 is shown below:
But here’s the thing: both Mangan and Trigiani misspelled Torie Geisler’s first name.
MORE ON THIS TOMORROW!
