Orlando WhitfieldAuthor All that glitters,tell Michael Safi He spoke about his former friendship with Inigo Philbrick, who was sentenced to seven years in prison in 2022 for wire fraud and ordered to forfeit $86 million (£68 million).
Whitfield and Philbrick, who were students at Goldsmiths College in London, decided to go into the art trade together and sold their first piece for €15,000 (£12,600).
“I did this thing you see in hip-hop videos and stuff, where you throw cash in the air,” Orlando says. “It’s fun for the first 10 seconds, and then all of a sudden you realize that none of the money is yours. In fact, most of it isn’t yours, and it took me like 20 minutes to clean it up.”
“We ordered a bottle of champagne and some club sandwiches from room service and our food was brought by a Portuguese waiter. He was clearly around our age and looked like two young people in a room full of cash. It was a pretty strange moment, I think. Not the best moment.”
Over the next few years, Philbrick went on to perpetrate what was, according to the FBI, the largest art fraud in U.S. history. How did he pull it off?
Photo: Kate Peters/The Guardian
