A Detroit-based gallery owner has been sentenced to five years and three months in prison over a scheme that defrauded collectors of fine art photography out of $1.6 million. Wendy Halstead Beard, 59, of Birmingham, Michigan, targeted a dozen older collectors in the scheme. She earlier pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud.
Between March 2019 and last October, over 100 fine artworks were consigned to Beard to sell on behalf of collectors for a commission. Rather than returning unsold works or splitting sales proceeds, she pocketed the money and stopped responding to her client’s queries.
The photographs represented the works of some of the most recognised photographers in the 20th century, including Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, and Ansel Adams. The most valuable piece she sold was a large-scale print of “The Tetons and the Snake River, Grand Teton National Park” by Adams, which she sold for $440,000 but kept all the proceeds rather than take what had been agreed a 5% commission.
Unsold photographs were either relegated to a storage facility in Beard’s Franklin, Michigan home or were left languishing in a Florida gallery. As collectors began to ask pointed questions, Beard resorted to extreme ends to keep her scheme under wraps. According to the criminal complaint filed by the FBI, she concocted fantastic, the most outlandish of which was that she had been in a coma for months and had undergone a double-lung transplant. She also created fake employees to communicate with collectors and, at one point, swapped a signed Adams print with one from the gift shop that cost $405.
Beard’s scam involved more than three dozen collectors, including Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist J. Ross Baughman and an 89-year-old man with Alzheimer’s disease. Under her sentence, Beard has been ordered to pay more than $2 million in restitution.
The FBI branded the scheme as a deliberate act to defraud unsuspecting collectors, adding insult to injury in an already serious case.