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Showing posts with label Murder. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Murder. Show all posts

November 7, 2024

Thursday, November 07, 2024 - ,,,,,,,,, No comments

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

March 8, 2012

Thursday, March 08, 2012 - ,, 3 comments

Former LAPD Art Crime Investigator Lazarus Found Guilty of the First Degree Murder of Sherri Rae Rasmussen almost three decades later

by Catherine Schofield Sezgin, ARCA Blog editor

LOS ANGELES - A murder committed before DNA samples were used in court to convict ends in a guilty verdict due to the hard work of the Cold Case Homicide Unit for the Los Angeles Police Department.

Betsy A. Ross, Owner of the Trial and Tribulations (T&T), which has been covering People v. Stephanie Lazarus, reported a few minutes after 2 p.m. on Thursday:
"GUILTY OF FIRST DEGREE MURDER
Stephanie is facing 27 years to life." 
The former art crime investigator for the Los Angeles Police Department, Stephanie Lazarus, was found guilty after a four week trial for the 1986 murder of Sherri Rae Rasmussen, the wife of Lazarus' former boyfriend.  The jury deliberated for about two days.

'Jealousy drove LAPD detective to kill woman, prosecutor says, ran the headline on the Los Angeles Times blog.

Twenty-six years ago last month,  29-year-old Sherri Rasmussen, a nurse, was found dead in the Van Nuys apartment she shared with her husband, John Ruetten, three months after their marriage. The six-foot tall Rasmussen had fought her assailant until shot three times in the chest with a .38 caliber gun. [Matthew McGough wrote "The Lazarus File" for The Atlantic Magazine in June 2011 that details the forensics involved in the case.]

Ross of T&T summarized the investigation which is covered extensively in McGough's Atlantic article:
It was Detective James Nuttal of the Van Nuys Homicide Unit that looked at the case with fresh eyes in early 2009 that eventually led to her [Lazarus] arrest.  The Cold Case Squad realized there was DNA and got that tested in 2005.  It wasn't until the file ended back up at the originating station and out of the Cold Case Unit's hands that the file was opened once again.
A time line of the case is offered here by streetgangs.com, including information that Lazarus, now 51, met Ruetten when they were both students at UCLA in 1978 and dated before Ruetten met his wife in 1985, then again three years after Rasmussen's death.  According streetgang.com's time line "from investigation to People v. Stephanie Lazarus",  Lazarus purchased a .38 Smith and Wesson Revolver in 1984 and reported it stolen within two weeks after Rasmussen's murder.

Detective Lazarus, a police officer at the LAPD since 1983, worked on the nation's only full-time police squad dedicated to the prosecution of art crimes and recovery of art, LAPD's Art Theft Detail, until her arrest in 2009 when a DNA sample from Lazarus' discarded drink cup was allegedly matched with  the DNA of a saliva sample from a bite mark left on Sherri Rasmussen's arm.  Lazarus, in jail since her arrest, retired from the LAPD before her trial.

Closing trial arguments began on the morning of Monday, March 5, and lasted more than two days before the jury received its instructions.  Lazarus will be sentenced May 4, on her birthday.

For more details on the trial, consult Sprocket & Company's Trials and Tribulations.

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