Alec Baldwin Accused of Avoiding Taxes on Painting

In a dispute with a gallery of the authenticity of a painting, Alex Baldwin has been accused by the gallerist of having the painting, when purchased shipped from NY to his California home, and the shipped backed to his NYC home in order to avoid nearly $17,000 in state and city taxes.

The NY Times reports on the accusations

The art world feud between the actor Alec Baldwin and the gallery owner Mary Boone took another turn on Thursday when lawyers for Ms. Boone filed a motion in New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan accusing Mr. Baldwin of committing fraud by failing to pay sales tax on a painting he bought from her six years ago.

The filing comes just over a month after Mr. Baldwin sued Ms. Boone, asserting she had defrauded him in 2010 by promising him a painting, “Sea and Mirror,” by the artist Ross Bleckner, for which he had paid $190,000, but supplying him another, similar Bleckner painting, also called “Sea and Mirror.”

Mr. Baldwin’s dispute with Ms. Boone, a prominent gallerist who built her reputation in the 1980s, has lifted a curtain on a part of the New York art world outsiders don’t always see.

When Mr. Baldwin confronted Ms. Boone with his accusations in an email this year, he compared her to an armadillo, someone who was used to “blasting your way out of corners like this on more than one occasion.”

In this latest filing, Ms. Boone is fighting back.

In the motion to dismiss Mr. Baldwin’s suit, her lawyer said that when Mr. Baldwin bought the Bleckner painting in 2010, the actor left instructions to deliver it directly to his home in California, and then almost immediately after it arrived on the West Coast, had the painting shipped back to his apartment in New York.

The filing provides evidence, the lawyer said, showing it arrived in Woodland Hills, Calif., in late April 2010, and was installed back in Mr. Baldwin’s apartment in New York early the next month, describing this as a way for Mr. Baldwin not to pay taxes of nearly $17,000.

“As the documentary evidence makes clear, Baldwin sought relief from the New York state and city sales taxes — $16,625 — by causing the painting to be shipped momentarily to his California residence, with the instruction that the painting remain in California only long enough for his assistant to sign for it, after which it was to make an immediate u-turn so that it could be installed in Baldwin’s New York City apartment,” Ms. Boone’s lawyer, Ted Poretz, said in the court documents.

Mr. Baldwin’s lawyer, John Hueston, said Ms. Boone was only trying to distract attention from Mr. Baldwin’s claims.

“That is just a blatant diversionary tactic and an attempt to distract from the fraud she is not denying,” Mr. Hueston said. “We will not dignify that allegation with a response.”

“Tellingly, Ms. Boone does not deny the central allegation in Mr. Baldwin’s complaint,” Mr. Hueston added.

Ms. Boone’s lawyers rejected Mr. Baldwin’s lawsuit as false, and said it was invalidated because he waited too long to make his claim so that it now falls outside the statute of limitations, an allegation that Mr. Hueston called “incredible.”

In a sworn affidavit, Ms. Boone said, “I respectfully submit that Baldwin cannot connive an elaborate scheme to evade sales taxes and yet claim that there are any circumstances under which he is entitled to punitive or exemplary damages in connection with the same transaction.”

Mr. Baldwin first had questions about the painting after he bought it from Ms. Boone six years ago because when it arrived at his apartment in New York, he said, it appeared brighter and had a different smell than he had expected, according to his filing.

Ms. Boone quieted his concerns at the time by telling him she had had it cleaned, he said.

Mr. Baldwin has said that he was never told he was getting a different version, and that Ms. Boone intentionally created a copy to appear genuine, and to fool him by passing it off as the real thing.

In the latest filing, Mr. Poretz said that the two paintings are so starkly different from each other that Mr. Baldwin should have realized he was getting a different version of “Sea and Mirror.”

Mr. Poretz said that Ms. Boone did not know Mr. Baldwin intended to evade taxes as she alleged because he had privately given delivery instructions to the shipping company.

Source: The NY Times