Home Scandal and Gossip Manhattan art advisor used stolen $6.5M on $25K a month rent, yacht...

Manhattan art advisor used stolen $6.5M on $25K a month rent, yacht & helicopters

SHARE
Lisa Schiff Manhattan art advisor pleads guilty to defrauding clients in $6.5 million wire fraud scheme.
Lisa Schiff Manhattan art advisor pleads guilty to defrauding clients in $6.5 million wire fraud scheme.
Lisa Schiff Manhattan art advisor pleads guilty to defrauding clients in $6.5 million wire fraud scheme.
Lisa Schiff Manhattan art advisor pleads guilty to defrauding clients in $6.5 million wire fraud scheme.

Lisa Schiff Manhattan art advisor to get a sweetheart deal avoiding onerous jail time after admitting to defrauding art collector clients over $6.5M which she used to fund lavish life before being found out. 

A Manhattan art adviser who worked with a coterie of NYC’s socialites and Hollywood celebrities on Thursday pleaded guilty to wire fraud– admitting to stealing $6.5 million from more than a dozen clients over a five-year span. The art dealer’s rouse was only found out after no longer being able to hide mounting debts.

Lisa Schiff, 54, pocketed the full profits from sales of her clients’ art instead of typical 5-10% commissions — while keeping them in the dark about the deals — and used the ill-gotten proceeds to live large, according to Manhattan federal prosecutors.

Schiff who had promised to use some clients’ money to buy pieces of art, instead used the ill gotten funds to pay for personal and business expenses along with mounting massive debts, prosecutors said.

European villa, yacht and helicopter

Schiff’s fraud scheme involved 55 artworks and ran from at least 2018 until May 2023, according to the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District in New York.

Assistant Director in Charge James E. Dennehy said: ‘Lisa Schiff attempted to paint a picture of a successful fine art advisory business, when in reality—as she admitted today—it was actually a multimillion-dollar fraudulent scheme.  After half a decade of deceit, Ms. Schiff will now be held accountable for her lies and duplicitous actions.’

The self admitted fraudster cheated at least twelve clients, one artist, the estate of another artist, and one gallery, together out of at least $6.5 million, prosecutors stated.

‘Instead of using client funds as promised, Schiff used the stolen money to fund a lavish lifestyle,’ US Attorney Damian Williams said in a statement.

Lawyers for several of her victims wrote in a filing in Manhattan bankruptcy court his week that Schiff had used her stolen funds leading a ‘luxury life’ including a $25,000-a-month apartment, European shopping sprees at designer boutiques, and a vacation in Greece where she rented a villa, yacht and helicopter.

She treated her clients’ funds as ‘her personal piggy bank,’ the lawyers wrote.

Lisa Schiff Manhattan art advisor pleads guilty to defrauding clients in $6.5 million wire fraud scheme.
Lisa Schiff Manhattan art advisor pleads guilty to defrauding clients in $6.5 million wire fraud scheme.

Sweetheart deal

Schiff entered her guilty plea at a hearing Thursday in Manhattan federal court. She agreed to forfeit $6.4 million and her sentencing, in front of Judge J. Paul Oetken, was set for Jan. 17.

Terms of her plea deal call for prosecutors recommending that she be sentenced to serve between 3.5 and 4.25 years in prison, despite the max for wire fraud being 20 years in a sweetheart deal involving the ‘art advisor’ in exchange for giving up the funds and admitting culpability avoiding more onerous jail time.

Her lawyer, Randy Zelin, said Schiff ‘will now work to show the court and the world that she has not only accepted responsibility, but she is remorseful.’

‘She is humbled,’ he added. ‘She is prepared to do everything to right the wrongs.’

Schiff’s art advisory business, Schiff Fine Art, served as an intermediary between art galleries and auction houses and her art collector clients according to the nypost.

At times, Schiff lied to galleries that she’d promised to buy art from using clients’ money — falsely blaming her clients for payment ‘delays’ when she’d actually run off with the funds, prosecutors said.

Eventually, Schiff ‘could no longer conceal her scheme due to mounting debts’ and ‘confessed to several clients that she had stolen their money,’ the US Attorney’s office wrote in a press release.

Schiff has also faced civil suits from clients like real-estate heiress Candace Carmel Barasch, and her husband, prominent Manhattan lawyer Michael Barasch who accused the art advisor of perpetrating Ponzi like schemes

Prior to those lawsuits, Schiff was one of the preeminent art advisers based in New York. Her client list had at one point included the actor Leonardo DiCaprio. Schiff has since shuttered her firm, SFA Advisory.

SHARE