Inigo Philbrick In 2017, Inigo Philbrick was on his way
into Berlin on a private jet to meet a client. He was there to meet Daniel Tumpel to discuss selling
a $2.3 million work of art called “The Mirror Room” by renowned Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama.
When he landed, Inigo met up with Tumpel in a limousine and partied all over the city.
When they finally did talk business, Inigo agreed to take the “Mirror Room”
back to Miami and hang it in his gallery. Then, he’d sell it and send the money
back to Tumple, a simple enough process. However, he strung along Tumple for 10 months.
In reality, he’d already sold the painting and pocketed the cash. Tumpel grew suspicious.
Tumpel and his wife wanted to know the status of their other piece of art he had with them called
“Untitled 2010”, which was worth just over $4.8 million dollars at the time.
The Tumpels wanted to know if it was safe in Inigo’s hands.
He sent them a picture straight out of a hostage situation showing him, the painting, and a copy
of the morning newspaper. The only problem? Inigo photoshopped the painting in the picture.
In reality, Philbrick used “Untitled 2010” along with 4 other paintings as collateral to apply for
a $15 million loan. “Untitled”
Inigo rose to fame by selling high-priced art for his clients. Art dealers are like real
estate agents for expensive art. The owner gets most of the money and the dealer takes a cut.
At the time, Inigo had a piece of art for sale called “Untitled” that came with a
$5.5 million price tag. This isn’t the same artwork that had been owned by the Tumpels.
To pad his pockets, Inigo sold multiple percentages of the art to several different
people. It would be like selling a home, but you sell the kitchen to Buyer 1,
the bedroom to Buyer 2, the bathroom to Buyer 3, and the rec room to Buyer 4. Sometimes,
he’d sell more than 100% ownership of the painting. In the end, Inigo received around
$10 million in total for the “Untitled” piece. The owner of “Untitled” believed himself to be the
sole owner of the painting. So you can understand why he was confused when other people came forward
looking for their cut of the auction money! While the “Untitled” scam wasn’t Philbrick’s
first scam, it marked the beginning of the end. His investors knew they’d been duped,
so they filed lawsuit after lawsuit, looking for the money they believed was rightfully theirs.
As more and more of Inigo’s scams came to light, the pressure finally popped. Inigo broke down and
confessed to two clients about what he’d done. He even knew he was going to get caught. In the end,
he made off with $86 million worth of loans and investor cash—money he spent living a lavish life
of parties, travel, and deception. Legit Beginnings
Inigo wasn’t born a scammer. He was a graduate of the same school his father attended, Goldsmiths
University of London, a well-respected school that focused on art education. After graduation,
Inigo became pretty well-respected. He landed an internship with the owner of
the esteemed ‘White Cube’ art gallery and worked under the mentorship of Jay Joplin.
Success came quickly for a young Inigo. By 2013, he opened his own contemporary
art gallery and became a regular face at large art auctions across the US
and UK. Many considered him a bonafide art expert, and his gallery grossed over
$130 million in 2017. That same year he opened another branch of his gallery in Miami, Florida.
However, Inigo’s rise to fame didn’t come without some strange habits. Every morning, in the shower,
he’d shout his own name over and over again to pump himself up for the day. He even had a
sweatshirt with his name printed across it three times. From an early state, it was clear that
Inigo saw himself in a different kind of light. He had big dreams and bigger aspirations. However,
as is often true of the over ambitious, those aspirations led to his inevitable downfall.
Social Circles While he started legit, it wasn’t long
before Inigo got a taste for the high-flying world of multi-million-dollar art dealing. His rising
success put him in social circles with other wealthy and high-status individuals—including
his reality TV girlfriend, Victoria Baker-Harber. When the two met through mutual friends in 2016,
Inigo was actually dating someone else. A fellow art dealer, Francisca Mancini who had just given
birth to Inigo’s daughter. However, the connection between him and Victoria was undeniable.
In fact, Victoria even nicknamed him “fruit” after the forbidden nature of their love.
His new love was quite wealthy herself. She loved fashion and yachts, and her own career was nothing
short of flashy. Victoria starred on a reality TV show called Made in Chelsea that follows the lives
of rich young people in the West London area. She and Inigo split most of their time between
London and New York—flying in private planes, dining at fancy restaurants and partying until
the sun came up. According to New York Magazine, Inigo even kept a healthy stash of MDMA on hand,
a psychedelic substance. High Life
Though successful, Inigo wasn’t making enough to maintain his lavish life. Driven by greed
and the need to keep up appearances, Inigo turned to scamming. He would resell the same piece of art
over and over to multiple people promising them that they would make a profit once he sold it at
auction. Sometimes he would split the worth of an artwork into percentages and sell more than 100%
worth of ownership to its buyers. Some clients would already own expensive art and come to Inigo
for his help in listing and selling it. Instead, Inigo would apply for multi million-dollar
loans with their art as the collateral. Now that he was swimming in cash, Inigo
could afford lavish luxuries like $50,000 watches, $5,000 suits, and custom-made shoes. He proposed
to Victoria in a private villa on Ibiza, a luxury Spanish island in the Mediterranean. Inigo even
kept a house account open at Cipriani, a pricey and well-known Italian restaurant in London.
Kenny Schachter Kenny Schachter is
an American artist, writer, and all-around academic. However, he wasn’t wise enough to
notice a scam when he saw one. He and Inigo were good friends—close friends, even. Still,
our art dealing con man scammed Kenny out of $1.5 million. However, Kenny was quite the character
himself, as learned in his tell-all write up about their relationship in New York Magazine.
The two met in 2012, when Inigo was an up-and-coming 25-five-year-old
Justin Timberlake-looking kid from London. He was sharp, fun, and funny,
drawing Kenny in like a fish on a line. They drank expensive wine, ate expensive sushi,
and traveled the world together on private jets. However, the most important characteristic they
shared was their mutual love of all things art. Their relationship wasn’t for nothing either.
Like most scammers, Inigo helped Kenny make a little bit of money before ripping him
off. He knew he had to gain his victim’s trust before he gauged them for all they’re worth.
He helped Kenny flip an $800,000 Christopher Wool for a few hundred grand. All the while,
Kenny had no idea what Inigo was doing outside of their relationship. He even wrote a positive
review about Inigo for ArtNet News. Six months later, Kenny finally opened his eyes.
All the red flags lined up. He recalled rampant use of illegal narcotics and times
when Inigo took Kenny’s kids out to Ibiza for three-day benders. Kenny remembered how Inigo
casually carried illegal pills through airports without a care in the world. The risk seemed
impressive at the time, but when you're scamming the art world for $86 million,
petty possession doesn’t seem all that scary. While in Ibiza, Inigo played $100,000
hands of drunken backgammon, keeping Kenny out until almost 9 in the morning. In fact, Kenny
would have to sneak in through his bedroom window since his wife locked him out of the house. Maybe
if Kenny didn’t let the facade Inigo called life cloud his judgment, he’d have realized he’d been
taken for thousands, if not millions, of dollars. Collateral
Remember that 15 million dollar loan Philbrick took out? He defaulted on $14 million worth of
that loan in 2019, which officially put a massive target on Inigo’s back. With $14 million in loans
hanging over his head and a mountain of lawsuits bearing his name, Inigo and a pregnant Victoria
fled to the Pacific Island of Vanuatu—also known as a Sunny Place for Shady People. It’s a tax
haven that criminals regularly use to hide illicit funds from the government and escape authorities.
They rented out a run-down boat house but did little to hide their identities. Remember,
Victoria was a well-known reality TV star and Inigo was the high-flying art
dealer on the run from the FBI. He even booked tennis lessons under his own name,
got coffee from the same shop every morning, and started rescuing stray dogs.
Still, one of their neighbors in Vanuatu described him as considerate and kind.
Inigo and Victoria flew under the radar for six months before the Feds finally caught up
with them. In June of 2020, while walking through the street markets on the island,
local police pulled up beside them and threw Inigo into the back of a cop car.
Victoria begged officers to let her go with her Inigo, so they tossed her in a separate car.
Police drove the pair to the airport where a gulfstream jet waited to take
them back to the U.S.—perhaps the last private jet he’d ever fly on.
“For the Money” Inigo’s trial began as soon as they landed
back in the states. The prosecution showed that his schemes also included inflating the value of
artwork with falsified documents and one contract even listed a stolen identity as the seller.
These schemes, paired with his technique of overselling ownership percentages,
were all meant to fund his lavish lifestyle. When the judge asked him why he committed these crimes,
Inigo told the truth for the first time in a long time—it was ‘for the money, your honor.”
Inigo left a trail of betrayed friends, business partners, and investors in his wake. Many of them
trusted Inigo, and he stabbed them in the back for personal gain. His friends-turned-victims
don’t feel sorry for him at all. In fact, they think he deserves what he gets.
While her husband awaited sentencing, Victoria returned to filming her Reality TVshow. This time,
she had a newborn daughter named Gaia Grace to show off. On the first episode of the most current
season, she said she couldn’t wait to get through this and have her little family back together.
She also wrote a statement to present to the Court and said that the trauma and shock felt
like death. She wrote that she was desperately lonely and questioned if she would be able to
carry on. She tells the court that she can’t function without Inigo and begged them to treat
him with leniency. Seven Years
Inigo ultimately plead guilty to one count of wire fraud and was ordered to serve
seven years in prison and forfeit over $86 million dollars’ worth of stolen funds.
Meanwhile, everything was laughs and jokes on Made in Chelsea, as Victoria joked about
visiting Inigo in jail. She said he looked good in khaki, and that orange wasn’t really his color.
Meanwhile, during the Pandemic, Inigo contracted covid twice while in prison, and complained that
the inmates were only fed peanut butter sandwiches and lunch meat for weeks due to the lockdowns.
Sharon Fletcher, the executive director of the International Foundation for Art Research learned
of Inigo’s case and said that fortunately, scams like this don’t happen that often. When they do,
they expose the soft underbelly of an art world where large sums of money are
transferred with little transparency. Inigo’s story shows what happens when
trust is misplaced and people of seemingly good backgrounds turn out to be dishonest.
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And let us know in the comment section what percent of modern art isn’t art at all to you!