Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to the show, fellow Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so much for tuning in. Let's hear it for the Man, the myth Legend, our super producer, Max, the Surreal Williams, the Triple Hey Max. Noel and I had a question for you based on our earlier conversation in our two part series on potatoes. So potatoes are one of the seven things you can eat with a condition? What are the other six?
Frozen? Chicken and uh exclusively, Well, I have to frost. I can't have any I can't have any meats that are aged like so Noel, when we were at that lovely steakhouse in the Bahamas, Marcus Sandilson's restaurant, Marcus, you got the aged one. I got the fresh one, because I can't have anything aged.
Age.
They don't age chicken. Though you can have fresh chicken, it doesn't have to be frozen. All right, Okay, give us the last sorry, I good question question.
So yeah, yeah, and let's see gluten gluten free bread, rice, pain.
I can have pain, pain and sadness.
Oh and those last two don't count, I think.
And uh, blueberries.
Okay, okay, I suspect our producer is freestylied a little bit, but we love it.
Definitely.
Can drink coffee that is nol bread.
Coffee is is actually a questionable thing, but there is some standards. I cannot, I can, I cannot go without my caffeine. I was off of coffee for six months at one point, actually gross, horrible.
Why so that is Noel Brown, none other They called me bed bullying for tax purposes. We are thrilled to be joined with none other than Salvador Dolli. Uh did I, Noel? Did I tell you when I was I was in a situation that required me to be in Spain and I found a museum for Salvador Dolli and they were actually selling sketches that the man had made. They were quite expensive. I did suspect money laundering. Uh, and thank goodness. My girlfriend, well, we still fight about it. She talked
me off the ledge. She said, how much money do podcasters make? Do you really want to buy and original DOLLI?
Well, you know you got to park your money somewhere, and why not park it in a sketch, a tossed off sketch? Because as we know, our man Dolli was nothing if not a capitalist. Oh yes, yeah, yeah, you know it's funny. I actually found myself in Spain as well. I went to a I didn't go to a Doli museum or exhibit, but I went to this really lovely restaurant called Baboo that was named after his pet Ocelot and was very Salvador Dali coded in its decor and
was delightful. And we had a lovely waiter who gave us all kinds of tips and tricks on places to go see in Barcelona, and it was fantastic. And yeah, Baboo, the pet Oscelot. This is an interesting man, Salvador Dolli, Oh yes.
Very interested in himself, as we will find. We are putting on our ridiculous crime hats to examine one of our favorite artists and one of our favorite stories about him. Thanks to our research associate Maria, we have learned that for a long time at Rikers Island, yes that Riker's Island, the jail, there was an original drawing a piece by Salvador Dali that hung around in one of the worst places in the world for decades. Like people didn't appreciate it.
They were throwing coffee cups at it. They stuck it next to a vending machine. But get this, fellow ridiculous historians. This piece was stolen in two thousand and three from inside of the walls of one of the country's most notorious correctional facilities. So as we're as we're exploring this, our three big questions are how did it get there? To start with, who stole the painting, who has it now? And a little bit of light foreshadowing. We know two
of those answers. So Noel, can you really put us in the moment? Maybe take us back to nineteen sixty five?
Boy, could I ever February twenty sixth, to be precise, a Friday of a morning of a Friday, A morning of a Friday, on a Friday, which was the name I think? Yeah, radioheads used to be called on a Friday, So this could have been where they got their inspiration for that. Sure, probably not, who knows. Salvador Dali woke up and he was a little snuffily, a little fluish influence, was it? Yeah? He wasn't feeling, he wasn't feeling, he
was feeling out of sorts. He was supposed to spend the afternoon hanging out with prisoners at Rikers Island, like you do if you're a famous artist. Department of Corrections Commissioner Anna Moscowitz Cross believe that part of rehabilitating prisoners should include art, which I fully support and I think
that's great, and theater, which I also fully support. There's that incredible film Sing Sing that came out recently about programs in prisons to you know, you know, incorporate the arts into the day lives of inmates and really really an interesting history that goes far farther back than one might think of the arts having a place in the
prison system. So Dolly found himself on her schedule to paint, to have a little painting sessh with the inmates, ultimately part of a publicity campaign for art the Art in Prison program. Dolly was super into it because it would be a day of himself. It would be Dolly Day at Rikers and he was all about that whenever he could get a chance to be the center of attention.
Yeah, I'm just I'm because I as you know, guys, I am I have the dubious order of being related to a sculptor and artist of newe regionally like the kind of guy who hangs out with US presidents. And he was exactly a Dolly. So this feels very familiar. You know, there are so many many people in the world where you say, hey, do you want to talk about something, and they say, yeah, if it's me, we can hang out all day.
So he as the son of a of a relatively well known opera singer, very very very diva hard same yeah, yeah, I just loved to hold court. As they say, well, so, yeah, Dolly was no exception. And in the in the world of somewhat megalomaniacal artists.
Yeah, we we can only imagine without having met Sally ourselves. We can only imagine that he probably said, look, I have a thing where I can talk about myself. I'm going to be cheered and celebrated, kind of like Johnny Cash play in Fulsome County or Fulsome Prison Blues in a jail. So he thinks he's gonna arrive at the island by boat with his wife and as you said, his pet asolot baboo, his sweet baboo, his sweet baboo.
But unfortunately, despite the great appeal to his ego, our buddy Salvador has to cancel because he has influenced and in place of the actual appearance, he sends along as an apology or as a door prize, a huge drawing. It is four feet by five feet and it is a drawing of Jesus Christ being crucified.
Yeah, and you know, Dali had a pretty cool period. Maybe it was throughout his career, but if you look up religious iconography Salvador Dali, he does some very interesting spins on some very famous religious imagery that some might
argue border on the sacriligious. I mean you could even say that, like, for example, the Goudy Church in Barcelona, the Cigratta Familia is so weird looking and it's depiction of religious iconography that when you walk through it you almost like get are, like, Jesu Louise, what does the Pope think of this? It's like it's a lot. It's almost like like, you know, Jesus filtered through the lens
of like the Fifth Element or something like that sci fi. Yeah, I'm sure the Pope nos they finally finished the cigarette Familia. I believe I was able to tour that place as well, and it really is like walking through some sort of hr Giger church. Very very unusual, but similar to the way Dolly approached religious iconography. So he did send this painting through after, I believe, just kind of dashing it off from his hotel room in New York City.
Yeah, and it's India ink on paper. It's got a small it's got a small bit of other mediums on it. And people will call it untitled. Other people call it the a Fiction of Christ. Some will call it Christ on the Cross. But the important thing is that this is a distinct painting. It is far different from his nineteen fifty one painting Christ of Saint John on the Cross, And technically it's a drawing, this one we're talking about. You can obviously see Christ of Saint John of the
Cross anywhere anywhere you find yourself on the internet. Our buddy Dolly. He has a personal rap an agent, you could think of it that way, named Nico. And Nico takes this drawing, this mixed media work to the prison to Rikers Island and shares the following message from Salvador to the inmates. We'll read it in full. Your artist, don't think your life is finished for you with art, you have to always feel free. And he had signed it himself for the dining room of the prisoner's Rikers Island, SD.
He misspelled dining.
Oh dear, that's you know what. He's an artist. Maybe he just was reinventing the word.
I'm sure it was great for him, Noel, I'm sure it was. For about twenty years. This painting hung, or this mixed media art piece, if we're being technical, hung in the cafeteria in the mess hoole in nineteen eighty one, as we mentioned at the top, and inmate threw a coffee cup at it. It broke the stained glass. And now it's even more mixed media because now we have coffee stains on the drawing. They move it away from the cafeteria. Same year, Warden named Alexander Jenkins a new guy.
New Warden. He arrives at Rikers and he says, I don't know if this is a real Salvador Dolly drawing or if it's a fake.
Yeah, it's true, because there weren't any records on the painting, and for all I know, he said it could have been an inmates copy of a Dolly. And then it was subsequently sent out for authentication and appraisal. It came back with an appraisal of around one hundred thousand dollars, but the painting's last known appraisal in nineteen eighty five put its value a little closer to one hundred and eighty k.
Pretty good money, right, pretty good money. And the next thing our buddy Alexander Jenkins, the new Warden does is approve the Dolly piece to be shipped off to a Virginia gallery. It's on temporary display in ort exhibit centered around prison art. It does return to rikers. It's boxed up in a storage crate and get this, They hide it in the basement and forget about it. It is not until years and years later that a prison guard sees this in a trash can one day and says, hey,
that's kind of a cool drawing. I should take this out of the trash for sure.
It's probably a good idea, Ben. I want to take a little moment to just talk about how you know, Dolly is an early example of the kind of insane over inflation and kind of influencer nature of the art market, This personality driven kind of pop art.
You know, He's like kind of he jumped out of the second story window to land in the bushes to get attention.
Well, yeah, exactly. He was as much a media personality as he was a painter and artist, much like Andy Warhol and his factory, you know, art studio, you know, during the second half of the twentieth century. So the fact that there's all the speculation around what is ultimately kind of a dashed off piece of work is fascinating to me. And then of course we carry that on into the modern day with stuff like Banksy and you know, the wildly speculative nature of art as stores of wealth.
Check out our Freeport episode. Check out our Money Laundry episodes, both available on stuff they don't want you to know, all right, So this guy, our anonymous hero of the story, this prison guard saves priceless drawing from the trash. They rehang it, they frame it, They place it under plexiglass, which is much more difficult to break with us frame coffee cup and this splash guard.
It is so weird.
They put it next to a vending machine in the lobby of the Eric M. Taylor Detention Center that is one of the jails in the overall Rikers complex, And I gotta ask you guys this Ma's hopping on this as well. UHL, Max. We would obviously all three of us love to have something named after us. You know, we'd love to have a library, a wing of an Ivy League institution. How would you feel about the Nole C. Brown Detention Center?
Love it? My legacy solidified.
So there's there's this place in South Carolina where you get off the highway.
It's like one of these places where it's fishing. Get off and her weak cass and there.
Is a bridge and it's just like you know, there's like three signs and there's like the first guys like named after the road. Second guy is a smaller sign is named after the bridge. And then there's a third guy with an even smaller sign. It's like like Noel C.
Brown Sidewalk, Noel Sea Brown's scenic overlook. That's what I'm hoping for.
I love the idea as well of UMAX having a sign that we could just hang up around interstates that says Max Williams presents exactly.
You know, I take it back not seeing it overlook. I would like the Nole C. Brown rest area. There we go and bench there we go.
Please note that at this point the picture of Dolly is accompanied by a plaque, and the plaque says, this is an original painting or an original work by the actual facts. Salvador Dolly, shout out more and vocal bomb. This is worth one million US dollars.
Wait a minute, when did that happen?
That's just what they said. Man, it's art, it's money laundry, of course, whatever you believe, whatever you think is worth bait. Also, we have to mention that this drawing was originally intended as a gift to the unfortunate inmates of rikers, but because it is in the life of this detention center, the prisoners can no longer see it.
You know, it's so funny too, not to harp on the whole like art market thing, but that's so interesting because it is ultimately, you know, the materials are of very little value. It is all about the name. And for something like this, it's not even a matter of like, well,
it took this many hours to make. It's all about the name of the individual and how famous they were in the cachet surrounding their kind of cult of personality, and what someone's willing to pay for it because I've been kind of getting into like watches and stuff lately and just fascinated by that market, which can also be wildly speculative. But certain watches are made of precious materials that themselves hold value. Not the case for a painting
like this or a drawing like this. More the case with maybe, like say, a sculpture made of gold or made of some sort of precious material. But this is literally just kind of like a very low fig you know what.
I mean.
Come the f all one afternoon at your hotel because you have the flu and you don't want to show up to your career day. That's what happened.
There's a group of prison employees. For anybody who hasn't been in America's infamous incarceration system. There is a hierarchy of inmates. So if you are a good boy, if you're behaving, you will have the opportunity in theory to acquire more responsibilities, right, a little bit more agency. You can become an attendee, You can become a guy works in the kitchen, right, or a guy who helps out with the admin of the place. Shout out Shawshank rediction.
These prison employees conspire to take this work by Dolly during an unscheduled fire drill. They conducted it inside that Eric M. Taylor Detention Center, and that's unscheduled. In quotes, by the way, yeah, thank you, Maria. Those are very snarky quotes, and they are earned. They did a heist inside of prison. It's one am, it's March first, it's two thousand and three. It's a BS Malarkey fire drill, and it is helpful because it clears out anybody who's
not in on the heist. They have to leave the lobby. We've been in fire drills, like when the three of us went into the office every day to record or to do our jobs. We always knew there was something conspiratorial about the fire drill. Did you ever get that sneaky message a few minutes before what like.
The inside scoop? Yeah, I don't know. I wasn't on that. I wasn't not on that email right now. I do remember though, when we used to work in Buckhead at the old House stuff Works office, we had a fire drill one three. We all went outside and everyone was like given ice cream. It felt very middle school coded. It was great. It was a field trip.
Basically, yeah, so these guys do this heist, this field trip. Two thousand inmates get locked down and one of the co conspirators is a lookout. Another is monitoring the fire drill, so we really have two lookouts. And while they're looking out the.
Main lookout and then the fire marshal yes, right right, trust safety monitor.
Yes, it's our main takeaway. But old, this third person, this third individual, this is our hitter. This is our heavy mover, this is our operator. This third person removes the drawing and replaces it with the help of a fourth conspirator. They've taken the original drawing by Salvador Dolly and they have replaced it with a very temu coded replica.
Yeah, I'm trying to get a look at it. We haven't really described We did a little bit. We described the text on it. But boy, oh boy, when I said when we say dashed off, we mean dashed off, it is, you know, it is. It's like he's splattered
India ink on it. It's kind of cool. Actually, now I'm sort of taking it back because there is a semblance of the shape of Christ in these sort of Ralph Stedman s ink splatters and then in the center there is a crown of thorns, and the gauche I believe, which is the other material that is used, sort of creates this smudge in the shape of Jesus's head, and the cross is more just sort of like negative space that's created by more aush framing the edges of the cross.
And he's drawing clearly it's inked out like the sketch of a cross. It's like seeing a comic book penciler's work before polarists get in.
So I could see how one might think it's one of those things where you hear people say, oh, my kid could have done that. And if you look at the other Christ depiction that we mentioned from Dolly Christ of Saint John on Lacrosse, it is much more in
the style of a classical painting. The dude could paint, but he also was one of these fascinating sort of more like I guess proto pop artists that while he had the training, he also kind of got off on doing some more bombastic things that he could could get away with a lot and call it a piece of art. And this is one of those examples.
So I imagine it reminds me of Picasso actually, because it is a hyper realistic artist in his earlier days and then like Colonel Kurtz in a pot, now he just went off the deep end.
Funny you should say that, Ben. I was just in New York City a week or two ago, and I went to an exhibit at the moment of the work of Marcel Duchamp, who many of us probably know from like art class or like, you know, humanities in college. He was the guy that wrote he signed a toilet seat as our mutt, and then that was sort of like the first example of like found object, sort of
super super out there, outrey kind of modern art. But this exhibit was super cool because it traced his whole trajectory from his earliest works into the more outlandish kind of like okay, now I'm just hanging snowshovels from the ceiling by a piece of rope. His early stuff was like mega expressionistic kind of landscapes and you know, much more classically trained looking pieces. So Dolly was much from
that same tradition. So you could see how the inmates or the folks that we're pulling off this heist might have looked at this original work and said, ah, we could do that. I could do that, but they kind of couldn't because they tried to replace it with a replica, and even folks on the crew were like, this, this isn't it.
This is not on. Yeah, it was. It was not the best replica or the best forgery. And again, these folks are working with limited materials. So just a few hours after they complete the heist, there's a guard who is off duty and is you know, pretty much on his way home. He's walking through the lobby of this tailored detention center. He looks at the Dolly as he does every shift because he likes art, and he notices, hey, this is different. Here's where they screwed up. So the
replica is not the same size as the original. It's a lot smaller. It is made with oil paint. It is on canvas, It is not in a frame, and they had literally painted like an impression of a brown frame around this drawing, which seemed to this guy childlike. It was not mounted, it couldn't be hung correctly. So they stole this plexiglass framed mounted piece by Salvador Dolly and they literally get this, folks. They stapled up the
replica click click click click. They just needed enough time to get away.
Rose gil Hearn, the Commissioner of the Department of Investigation, said, of the theft, who knew? Who knew that it might have been safer left in the cafeteria.
Right, because that's a more difficult area to heist, right, because because more it made square right right, right, Yeah, it's a common ground. No one initially suspected that the inmates were involved, because again, the inmates cannot access the lobby. So Rikers who contacts the New York Police Department and they start investigating the theft. Originally they're looking at the CEOs, they're looking at the officials. They might even be staring
and scance at the warden. They're asking themselves who has access to the key to the plexiglass box that protects this painting. They do have surveillance cameras, because again this is this is the modern day. The surveillance camera pointing directly at the work of art is connected to a recorder in the warden's office. Yet, mysteriously that video feed had cut, It had stopped working overnight.
Shadows that classic mission impossible stuff cut The feed vari eleven like.
We can cut the feed, you'll have two minutes to get past the lasers.
Exactly lower down from the ceiling and all that. So we've got some suspects in our little game of clue here. Benny Nutso, who was the assistant deputy warden aged forty nine at the time, Mitchell Huckhauser, great name. All these are great names. Actually, assistant deputy warden aged forty Timothy Pina I believe or Pena officer aged forty four, and Gregory Sokol, officer aged thirty eight. So we started to see some interrogations going down.
Yeah, boom boom, boom boom.
So we're talking careful, we're gonna get sued.
It's okay. I made sure to do it off key. We're speaking with Officer Timothy Pena, right, he is a CEO. He's been employed at Rikers for sixteen years, so he's put his time in.
At the night of the theft, he is working a graveyard shift, returns home and he is so panicked that he considers.
Ending his own life. At least that's what he tells investigators later. He said, I felt so desperate I actually pointed my firearm to my head instead. I have decided for you in YPD that I will confess to this crime. I will name all my co conspirators, Benny, Mitchell, Gregory, everybody.
And he says, look, four months before the theft, Benny and Mitchell came up to me and they had a plan to steal this drawing, and they said, hey, you know, you know nobody's gonna notice of fake in its place, weeks, months, maybe even nev We're gonna get away with this, and Noel to your point, Benny Muzzo would joke often about this Salvador Dali painting and exactly the way you did earlier, say like it could draw up better than that.
It looks easier than it actually is. You gotta have style, you gotta have flair, you gotta have that artistic panash. And your kid may or may not have that, but it would seem that these conspirators did not have that. So when these other employees approached Pina, he thought that they were just having a having a bit of a
josh around. Yeah, laugh, he thought so until he began to notice that A. Nutso and Hawkhauser were spending a lot of time case in the joint over there in the Taylor Center's lobby where the Dolly was hanging, and also where Pina himself was stationed. He was the inside guy, right, He's the inside man at the front entrance's security desk. He was promised that his cut would be fifty grand and that Benny and Mitchell would split the rest.
Yeah, which sounds like a you know, sounds like a deal, I guess, depending on where you are at a life. And so Noel, as we're saying, Pinia does make this statement to the and he says, yeah, I agreed to it, but you guys, I feel like I was being bullied. And there's some sand to that because Benny, one of the only bad bends I've encountered, was his manager.
Oh bad Benny Nutsoty. He was exactly was. He was his superior officer and was known for bullying behavior and threats of violence and actual acts of violence in order to get what he wanted. So it was decided by the Trio they needed one more member of their crew to look out and watch the lobby and the small
room that was connected to it. That's when we see Gregory Sokell, a riker's officer who worked with Peena for about a decade entering the heist team, the men both lived in Staten Island and they would often carpool to work.
It's nice, okay, and it's also helpful, were investigators as they unravel the conspiracy of the heist Greg. So let's meet him. He is also long toothed in the game. He's been working at Rikers for fourteen years.
He is in.
Charge of the phone coms at the Taylor Center control room, and so he is you know, he's already very financially motivated, we could say, because he has another side gig where he sells real estate on Staten Island. And this is this is nuts because okay, our pattern of investigation escalates. Pina confesses to the authorities and then they say, okay, man, act like nothing is weird. We need you to go
meet your buddy Greg at the Java Dead on that island. Yeah, and we need you to wear a wire and we need you to talk him in to confessing.
Scary stuff. No, I mean you know snitch, I mean have a cell phone already for sure snitches end up in stitches, uh to get him there. Pena had told Socol that he felt like the police were already closing in on them, and he felt like he was going out of his mind. Socle, it turned out, felt the exact same way. So here's how the meeting went down.
The men agreed that they'd wish they'd never gotten involved in this scheme to begin with, and promised that they wouldn't rat on that each wouldn't rat on the other, right, Yeah, of course they'll see how that quickly that last ones they're separated, and you know, the screws are put to them, as they say, and Maria are amazing research so shot on this. One pointed out that at some point she felt that they all said this exact same thing to each other. The only one to rat you out is
you man. So they chatted it out for hours. Pina confided Socle that he felt like they were brothers. You know, I would never betray you. There's the Socle confession. Oh yes.
Sucle gets into his vehicle just before ten pm and investigators are waiting to swoop in because they know they found the weakest link or the second weakest link. He immediately caves, just like Pina, and he says, look, I'll talk to you, and Greg says, I only learned of this big scheme to steal the work of art by Salvador Dolli a few weeks before stuff went down, and Pinya had given him a broad rundown of the plan, literally as they were carpulling to work from Staten Island.
And the plan was, look, we stage a fire drill, we swapped the Dolli with a fake. Don't worry, Benny's kid can paint it. Essentially, they would get fifty thousand US dollars each, which was a even bigger deal than it is now. So soapl also starts crying bully. He says, I was afraid that Nuso and Holkhauser will retaliate against me if I don't go along with the plan. I'm afraid that they will retaliate against my family if I cooperate with investigators. But yeah, I'll hang out. I'll wear
a wire. So they send a second guy in with a wire and he records again one of the only few bad bends in history. Benny Neuso discussing the crime. He has all four people talking about the theft on tape.
Yeah, seems like a bit of an open and shutcase, which we're about to get to whether or not it's open and shut TBT. Three men were held at least partially responsible for the heighst the fourth considered the mastermind not at all. Hmm, okay, appreciate Pena was sentenced in Bronx Supreme Court to five years of probation and he resigned from his job at the Department of Corrections as part of a plea deal on the third degree grand larceny charges. Now we have Gregory.
Sokel, and real quick before we get to greg this is something that has always been on my mind. I didn't really know what larceny is. Larceny is technically a crime involving theft or unlawful taking of personal property of another individual or a business. So what is grand larceny?
That's probably over a certain amount, a grand theft, grand larceny, et cetera. I always it is a little vague thought. What the difference between It's a fun word that larsony is. Yeah, it is funny. Are you are you a if you're a person, are you a larcenist?
Do we call it larsonist?
I don't know.
So Socle is also Gregory Socle is also charged with larceny, second degree grand larceny. He testifies, He sings for a plea bargain, and he says, look, that guy Tim Peanut is the one who opened the locks on this plexiglass case. And he did it because Benny Nouzo told him to do so, and then Newso told Greg and Tim to remove the original art. But they were anxious, right, They had a small time window with this fire drill, so they they managed to get it free. They handed it
to Benny Newso. He left the building, he ghosted, and then he returned with this replica. They also did, I mean credit where it's due. They also did try to replicate the signature and the tagline, so they they were smart enough cognizant enough to misspell dining. Otherwise they screwed up. They really just fumbled the bag. It's like a horrible replica. It's like that remember that lady who tried to fix that painting of the Mona.
Lisa what but putting a mustache on it. That's also that's also a Marcel de Champ thing. There was no, it's not Mona Lisa. It's it was like one of those talking about it was one of those like religious fresco things like and she yeah, it was an.
Older lady trying to repair it.
She was trying to repair it, and she made it look really really goofy. So it's like that level. It is that level. Yeah, No, it's real, real bad. Having a hard time finding an image of the forgery, but I think the description, you know, we can use our imaginations, just pick sure something that looks bad, Yeah, based on something that already you know, arguably wasn't Dolly's best work.
Yeah, And they they do get the conspiracy exposed. Our two ringleaders are Benny Nuzo and Mitchell Hokhauser. And they said to the Assistant district Attorney at the time, Wanda Perez Maltinato, that they thought they could maybe get five hundred thousand US dollars for the painting. But the ADA believes they were trying to sell it for one million. So maybe they changed said right, Maybe they tried to change their story to lower the number in an attempt
to get in less trouble. But Mitchell also gets convicted. He pleads guilty to one count of second degree attempted grand larceny. He is sentenced to three years in state prison. And just so you know again, folks, we hope you never get jammed up, but you must realize that for CEOs or former prison carcerle system employees, actually going to prison yourself is very dangerous.
Kind of a death sentence in many cases.
Yeah, and part of his job during the heist, Mitchell's is to make certain that other guards who are not in on the conspiracy stay out of the way, making sure they are not in the lobby. Hokhauser Mitchell Hokhauser sings against Benny Nuzo and he says, look newso orchestrated this whole thing. He told me that he thought it would be a laugh, It would be funny, the guy said.
He's the guy who came up with the idea to use the fire drill as a diversion and to swap out the scheduling for the lobby guards to make sure that Tim and Greg are on duty that night. He took a polaroid of the dolly drawing. That's how someone attempted to replicate it.
Yeah, they may as well have just been doing it for memory though, to be honest.
I mean, we're still looking for a picture of the replica. And you know, what's funny that you're bringing that up, though, because at this point in history, I bet the replica itself is a collector's item.
Oh absolutely, sort of like the shredded Banksy.
Yeah, just so, just so, the night of this theft, these four co conspirators they hide the original Dolly painting in an attic in Brooklyn. They take it to Benny's mom's house, which doesn't sound super well thought out.
Yeah, and the next day he told his co conspirators that he'd destroyed the painting, he'd torn it to pieces. Whether that's true or not, no one knows, but it hasn't been seen since.
Okay, that's super sketchy because obviously these four guys don't trust each other, and obviously this is a bad bet. I apologize to everyone. Hul Kauser says he thinks Benny was lying. He thinks Ben had the drawing and decided not to give it up because then he can cut his other thieves out of the grift. Is such a new it's classic Newso.
Dude, Yeah, real, bully, he was the last person seen with the Dolly. This is true. Nuso's lawyer, Joseph Takapina, focused on minimizing two big things in his defense, Socl's secret recording in the locker room and the actual value of the drawing itself. An acoustics expert testified that the garbled nature of the recording and the unintelligibility of the voices from the locker room conversation locker room talk made it difficult to identify who was speaking exactly in some sections,
placing doubt about Nuzzo's involvement or level of involvement. Interesting, Okay, so they're playing the tape because we we had these guys, we had greg ware and a wire.
Right, So they're playing the tape of the four people talking, and it's difficult to discern who is saying what. They also, to your point, now, they also argue in this trial that the DOLLI may not be worth that much. So Tacopina calls the publisher and chairman emeritus of the Salvador Dali Research Center, which is very much a think. It's a guy named Alex Rosenberg. He goes to the stand and he says, all right, here's how much I think this is worth. Prosecutors are not claiming it's worth a
million dollars. They're saying two hundred and fifty dollars. And it's an interesting threshold here because under the laws of New York State, anybody convicted of selling property between fifty thousand to a million dollars can go to prison for fifteen years, but less than fifty thousand means a maximum
of seven years in prison. So if you divvy up the pie between these four people, right, you can say that at the top of the trial, each of these people is facing fifteen years in the whoscal None of them got that sentence because Rosenberg says again, this is the guy from the Salvador Dali Research Center. He says, look, this is not a painting, it's a drawing. It's in bad condition too. It's got water damage.
Cottm stains, someone threw coffee at it. It's all scraped up.
He says, Look, this is maybe I love the guy I work for the Dolly Research Center. This one is at best twenty thousand dollars.
At best, Rosenberg added, the Dolly would have had quite a laugh about it all. And I was gonna say, man, if he was still living at this time, he would all have a field day with it.
He would have gotten involved in the front row.
My gosh, this is exactly the fifteen minutes of fame kind of you know fiasco that that T Warhol was talking about. That Dolly would have appreciated it.
The sideway I can see because you know, you and I are both related to people of this level of renown, and I can one hundred percent see my grandfather, your father, or Salvador Dolli at a trial like this, sitting front row and continually trying to get on the witness stand.
Well, Bennett, I don't know if you know that the Salvador Dolli was in fact my father.
It's making sense.
Yeah, yeah, I mean that. Now you can see why I wear my mustache this way. It just it just comes this way. That's genetic.
Okay, all right, well, congratulations on slipping past the Adolph mustache. So here is a Shamalan plot. Twist, another one, another one, twist upon twist. On June fourth, two thousand and four, Benny Nowso gets away. He is acquitted by a bronx jury, and he looks just as stunned as everybody else when the verdict is handed down. It's like that, uh, that climactic moment in law and order copaganda episodes where the jury says not guilty and he looks around like lottery, Yeah,
but I'm so guilty. Yeah, he's like, oh wow, I definitely did it. Though. He offers theories to explain what happened, what happened, and how he got into the predicament, and he said, look, I've been used as a scapegoat. I'm as much of a victim as Salvador dot Lee.
He wrangled his way out of another one.
Yeah, little Weasley guy, little slippery fella. His narrative is that the top brass at rikers forced the other three co conspirators to make him look guilty. He also says I don't know where the dolly is. He says someone else probably stole the original way before we did our heist in two thousand and three. Maybe it's in storage, maybe the one that they thought they stole, because he's not saying we thought we stole. Maybe the one they thought they stole had been a forgery the entire time,
So maybe we're replacing forgeries with forgeries. And maybe here we take a second to talk about the art loss register.
Wow, Ben read my mind. I didn't know about this. It's so cool. Go to artloss dot com. It is a database, the leading database due diligence provider, as they call it for the art market, maintaining the world's largest private database of stolen art, antiques and collectibles, currently boasting around seven hundred thousand plus items. Pretty cool. I didn't know it's existed. I want to do a little bit of rabbit holing on the site.
We should do an episode on it because it is tremendously important to human civilization, especially considering.
That things that get looted and the horrible.
Priceless works of art have been so I'm thinking in particular of the Holocaust. But we know that there are private collectors out there right now who have stolen priceless works of art and they just keep it on their estates. We also know that the officials in New York, the authorities still have not recovered this original drawing. Our research associate does want to take a long shot from the hip out in the dark for any one with information.
If you know where this drawing is, you can contact the Department of Correction Inspector General at two one two two six six one nine.
For sure, and to wrap it up a little bit of Where Are They Now? Timothy Penia became a children's book author. You love to see that. I'm glad he was able to get his life back on track, and he wrote a fictional book about a young Benjamin Franklin's encounter with bullies. He must have been inspired by his relationship with Little Nutso Gregory Sokel maintains a real estate license, and Mitchell Hawkhauser was released from prison in two thousand
and five and seems to work in property management. Now what happened with old Denny Knuts?
Though, oh my gosh, well Benny classic Newso he has not spoken with his former friends Penia, Socle or Hokhauser since they were arrested. This is the story. This is active case. So please, if you have come into possession like I almost did, of a sketchy Salvador Dolly sketch, let us know the numbers two one two, two sixty six one nine zero zero.
And if you're looking for a movie to watch this weekend, uh check out The Mastermind Kelly reichart film about a I think it's in the sixties, A like the draggled kind of what's the word woodworker who had aspirations to be an artist. He went to art school but kind of failed as an artist, and he gets a gang of sort of like Massachusetts old old buddies from the old neighborhood together to pull off an incredibly bumbling art heists. And it's a little bit of a slow burn, but
I really loved it. It seemed like it was a little divisive. Some people found it boring, but I really think it's great and quite a special movie.
So do check it out, and if you would like to learn more about the work of the legendary surrealist painter, solve it do wor while you're on the internet, folks, check out Destino. It's an animated short film that was released finally in some version in two thousand and three, but it started in nineteen forty five, a collaboration between Walt Disney and Dolly himself. It's a heck of a ride, just like this story. We cannot thank you enough for
tuning in, but here it goes. Thank you big thanks to our research associate Maria Big, Thanks to our super producer mister Max Williams, and also our composer. This slap and bop you're hearing is courtesy of Alex Williams, who I bet is a Dolly guy. I bet Alex loves Dolly.
Oh yeah, no, I mean, what's not to love. Also, it's funny if you've ever been to the moment like I was talking about. In New York, they have the most famous iconic Dolly painting, which is the Melting Clocks, which is actually like the size of a mouse pad. It is incredibly tiny, but it's a really cool thing to see person. So if you ever make it out there, do check it out. Yeah, huge thanks to Alex Williams again who composed this theme. Max Williams are long suffering
producer and research associated. Of course, Maria our research associate on this episode.
Big big thanks of course to the rude dudes are ridiculous crime. If you dig us, you'll love them. Aj Bahamas, Jacobs, doctor Rachel Big Spinach Lance the world's foremost authority on underwater explosions. And of course big thanks to all the Bens who are better than Benny News.
Yeah, we'll see you next time, folks. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.