Orlando Whitfield, the writer of All That Glitters, tells Michael Safi about his former friendship with Inigo Philbrick, who was sentenced to seven years in 2022 for wire fraud and ordered to forfeit $86m (£68m).
As college students at Goldsmiths College in London, Whitfield and Philbrick determined to start out dealing in artwork collectively. They offered their first piece for €15,000 (£12,600).
“We did that thing that you sometimes see in, not exclusively, hip-hop videos, where cash is thrown willy-nilly into the air,” Orlando says. “Which is kind of fun for like the first sort of 10 seconds. And then you suddenly realise that not all of the money is yours. And in fact, the vast majority isn’t, and it took us about 20 minutes to clear it up.
“There was a point at which we’d ordered, you know, frivolously a bottle of champagne and some club sandwiches in room service, and this Portuguese waiter comes up with our food and he’s clearly the same age as us and he’s like two young men in a room full of cash and I think that was quite an odd moment. It’s not not my finest hour.”
Within the following years, Philbrick went on to commit the biggest artwork fraud in US historical past, in keeping with the FBI. How did he pull it off?
{Photograph}: Kate Peters/The Guardian
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