Andrew Crispo

Andrew John Crispo (April 21, 1945 – February 8, 2024) was an American art gallerist and convicted felon.^[1][2] In 1985 Crispo was implicated in the so-called Death Mask Murder of Norwegian fashion student Eigil Dag Vesti. The murder, committed by Crispo's employee Bernard LeGeros, shocked the global art community and has since received wide international coverage by authors and journalists,^[3][4] with writer Gary Indiana noting that Crispo never being charged in the murder was "one of the most surpassingly ugly things that ever happened in the art world."^[5]

Crispo was born in Philadelphia on April 21, 1945. An abused child, he was brought up in an orphanage.^[6][7] He went on to found and run an eponymous high end art gallery on East 57th Street in the famed art deco Fuller Building^[8] and had clients such as Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza.^[9] Over the course of the gallery's history it exhibited such artists as Richard Anuszkiewicz, Richard Pousette-Dart,^[10] Charles Burchfield,^[11] and Lowell Blair Nesbitt. Often Crispo would write essays for the catalogues which he published to accompany the gallery's exhibitions.^[12] Meanwhile, he was involved in S and M activities sometimes at his gallery.^[13]

On February 22, 1985, Crispo and his cohort and "executioner" Bernard LeGeros (the son of United Nations Development Fund official John LeGeros^[14]) were on a drug-fueled nightlife run when, at The Limelight, they picked up a 26-year-old Eigil Dag Vesti, a Norwegian student Fashion Institute of Technology.^[6] They handcuffed and hooded him with a black leather mask, and brought him back to the LeGeros family estate in the hamlet of Tomkins Cove, New York.^[6] Overnight, LeGeros shot Dag Vesti twice with a rifle in a smokehouse on the grounds of the compound.^[6] Three weeks later, hikers discovered the victim's severely mutilated remains; the body had been burned and wild animals had largely eaten it away, with the exception of his face, which was covered by the mask.^[6][15] Rockland County District Attorney Kenneth Gribetz, who prosecuted the case, said that had it not been for the mask, it is unlikely that the victim would have ever been identified.^[15]

Crispo was implicated but never charged with murder or any other crimes associated with the homicide.^[16] LeGeros was convicted of the murder and sentenced to 25 years to life; he served 33 years at Attica State Prison and was paroled in 2019.^[15] Gribetz later wrote about the case in his book (co-authored with H. Paul Jeffers) Murder Along the Way: A Prosecutor's Personal Account of Fighting Violent Crime in the Suburbs.^[17][18] David France also penned a book about the case, Bag of Toys.^[19]

Crispo was later charged with the 1984 kidnap and torture of a 26-year-old bartender, but was acquitted in a 1988 trial.^[6] Meanwhile, in between the two trials (one in which he was implicated and one in which he was charged) over violent sexual misbehavior, Crispo was convicted of federal charges of tax evasion in 1985, and sentenced to five years in prison.^[6][20] In 1985, Crispo was also involved in a dispute with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum over Constantin Brâncuși's 1912 sculpture "The Muse" which ended in the museum paying $2 million US for the artwork, at the time believed to be the most ever paid for a 20th-century sculpture. At that juncture, Crispo was free on $300,000 bail while under indictment on the tax evasion charges. The bail had been guaranteed by the artwork and was now in turn guaranteed by the newly liquid funds.^[21]

In 1989, while Crispo was serving his sentence for tax evasion, his home in The Hamptons suffered a catastrophic explosion due to a natural gas leak.^[22] In 1991, a court ordered that the Long Island Lighting Company pay him $7.6 million losses to his home and art collection.^[23] He went through bankruptcy proceedings in the late 1990s, while attempting to open a new art gallery, and in 2000, he was sentenced to seven years in prison for extortion, after threatening to kidnap the daughter of a lawyer who had worked on the case; he served five of the seven years.^[6][24]

Following that release, Crispo sought to open another gallery in a space he purchased in a Brooklyn building, but could not raise sufficient funds. By the late 2010s, he was facing additional bankruptcy proceedings and an eviction proceeding for the apartment he resided at in the building.^[6] His eviction was suspended from 2020 to 2022, due to a freeze on evictions in New York during the COVID-19 pandemic, and he later filed an appeal against the eviction which was unresolved at the time of his death.^[6]

For a time, Crispo owned the historic Pineapple Gate House^[25] (known formally as Simmons-Edwards House) in Charleston, South Carolina.^[26]

From 2016 to 2018, alleged representatives of Crispo engaged in an extensive online dispute^[27] over the provenance of an uncatalogued Picasso sketch bearing a supposed Andrew Crispo gallery label.^[28] Crispo's alleged representatives, claiming to speak directly for Crispo, vehemently denied ever having the Picasso in their collection and declared the sketch a fraud.

Crispo died at a nursing home in Brooklyn, New York on February 8, 2024, at the age of 78.^[6]