This is a critical moment in the Michel Cohen multimillion-dollar art swindle. Last week representatives of Sotheby's auction house and several of the world's top art dealers met with the FBI in a judge's chambers on Center Street in Manhattan to determine the fate of the fugitive art swindler. Now it looks like even that record figure will go higher considerably. One dealer in the know even pegs the figure at potentially double that amount. Until they do, the public will never know how much Cohen really got away with.
Some dealers do want to push criminal proceedings.
But suddenly new players are emerging from the woodwork, and it looks like the edifice of chicanery put together with dazzling speed by the workaholic Cohen, before he disappeared, may be a couple of stories higher than so far have appeared. News from elsewhere has not yet been fully factored into the calculations either. Dealers in California are stewing. Like their Manhattan peers, there is a split among the injured parties. The opposing side believes he should be allowed to earn his way back into the black.