From Gallery to 'Washing Machine': How One Art Dealer’s Love for Banksy Served as Cover for an International Drug Ring

On 11 May 2022, officers involved in the Eurojust 'Arkan' operation, assisting in the investigation begun by the District Anti-Mafia Directorate, deputy prosecutor Silvia Bonardi), and the Italy's Polizia del Stato raided 47 locations in Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands.  Their goal, the simultaneous arrest of as many as 31 suspects allegedly involved in an international narco trafficking ring.  One of the suspects on police radar was the much-hyped, Italian art collector and street art enthusiast-turned gallerist, Andrea Deiana.     

Prosecutors and law enforcement officers working the investigation had determined  that multiple organised crime groups (OCGs),  involved in the highly profitable illegal trade, were utilising a protected communications tool called EncroChat, which offered its subscribers and the drug syndicates the use of modified smartphones for encrypted communication which offered self-destructing messages, an encrypted vault and a panic button in the event the user believed their device had been compromised.

White Hat cyber-exploit hackers in the European police had cracked the EncroChat phone system and began listening in, striking more intelligence gold that miners working South Deep in Africa.  By 2023, officers had intercepted some 115 million criminal conversations, by an estimated 60,000 users in which criminals openly negotiated, sometimes in extremely granular detail, money laundering, murders, counterfeiting, drugs, and firearms trafficking.  By 2023, law enforcement's analysis of these messages and photos resulted in some 6658 arrests worldwide following the interception and analysis of over 115 million criminal conversations, by an estimated 60,000 users. 

Key members of one identified OCG which traded cocaine, ketamine, and cannabis on a large scale used the nicknames: Obi-Wan Kenobi, Pinocchio, Grandma Maria, Milly, Nestor, (the name of a Ukrainian anarchist revolutionary, Nestor Ivanovic Machno) and the street artist "Banksy".  The latter being the nom de plum used by Andrea Deiana.

According to reconstructions by prosecutors, decrypted messages sent by Deiana in 2020, discussed ways to "clean the money" made through the network's drug trade, using sales of works of art and, in at least in one case, through the purchase of a lithograph by the street artist Banksy brokered via Deiana and his gallery in the heart of Amsterdam.  

Speaking to then-fugitive-from-justice Vincenzo Amato, a member of the Coluccia clan of Galatina in the Salento hinterland, Deiana wrote, "you can clean money without paying expenses, on the contrary, earning" and openly boasted about using his Dutch art gallery as a "washing machine." 

The Italian art dealer then is alleged to have funnelled €500,000 in proceeds from drug dealing into the purchase of an important autographed lithograph by the street artist Bansky which depicts the famous mural painted by the artist in Jerusalem on the wall between Israelis and Palestinians, known as The Flower Thrower.  Afterward, Deiana flipped the lithograph via his cuban girlfriend, to Pier Giulio Lanza, the controversial founder of The Dynamic Art Museum, for €200,000, plus a future balance of investments of digital NFTs, which apparently never took off. 

As part of a prosecutorial action, in May 2020 the Dutch judicial authority sealed Art3035,  Deiana's and his girlfriend Chiara D'Agostino's contemporary gallery on Amsterdam's Keizersgracht, one of the three main canals in the Dutch city  in compliance with an international rogatory.  On or around this date their socials also went dead.

After a year and a half on the run, Deiana was dragged back to Italy from Mexico City on 13 January 2024 in order to stand trial on drug charges in Italy.  Sentenced quickly  thereafter, in the court of first instance, to 16 years and 8 months in prison as the promoter of the criminal association, his lawyers quickly appealed.  This week, the Court of Appeal of Milan upheld a sentence of 12 years incarceration plus the confiscation, at the request of the deputy attorney general Paola Pirotta, of  The Flower Thrower lithograph by Banksy. 

Deiana's conviction is a textbook example of how the subjective valuation of art can make it an effective tool for money laundering. Criminals and “prestanome” (or front) dealers can move large sums of illicit money through art transactions without attracting the scrutiny of banks or regulators, effectively masking the money’s illegal origins. Artworks are also highly portable, making them ideal for transferring illicit funds across borders and further complicating efforts to track and control the flow of illegal money.

By:  Lynda Albertson