Collector sues Atlanta dealer, claiming lifelong friend sold him $20M in counterfeit art

A Florida collector has filed a $20 million lawsuit against an Atlanta antiques dealer who allegedly sold him fake artworks purported to have been made by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Salvador Dalí, Jackson Pollock and other artists.

The lawsuit was filed by Beaux Arts Museum LLC, a company owned by 92-year-old collector Alvin Malnik, against dealer Allan Baitcher and his firm Peachtree Antiques, according to court documents obtained by Urgent Matter.

The complaint accuses Baitcher of racketeering and running an elaborate scheme that exploited a decades-long personal relationship.

“Baitcher exploited a multi-decade relationship with Alvin Malnik … to sell him millions of dollars of counterfeit art,” the lawsuit alleges.

Malnik said in the lawsuit that he had known the younger Baitcher “since he was a toddler,” had followed “his progression through the art world” for decades and “considered him a friend.” Baitcher’s father worked for Malnik and introduced his young son to the collector.

“Ultimately, Baitcher betrayed Malnik’s trust and used it against him by selling him thousands of pieces of counterfeit art,” lawyers for Malnik’s Beaux Arts Museum said.

Lawyers for Malnik’s company accused Baitcher of creating fake appraisal firms to authenticate pieces of art, and sending emails from several fake email addresses purporting to authenticate the artwork the dealer acquired on Malnik’s behalf.

After decades of buying art from Baitcher, Malnik began to catch on to alleged irregularities in authentications and appraisals, the lawsuit alleges.

The lawsuit noted a 2019 interaction when Malnik tried to authenticate three paintings purported to be by the artist Joan Miro only to be told by Baitcher that the works would have to be sent to Fundacio Joan Miro, which would destroy them if they were fake. Malnik received the works back with an authentication letter purported to be from the foundation.

But when Malnik tried in April 2024 to request a confirmation of the letter’s authenticity directly from Fundacio Joan Miro, he learned the signature was allegedly faked.

“After this revelation, [Malnik] sought to confirm the provenance of other art acquired through Baitcher,” his lawyers said in the lawsuit. “Each and every institution that responded did so in the same way – each authentication provided by Baitcher was false.”

The lawsuit also alleges that Baitcher invented museum officials and created fake institutional email domains to bolster the appearance of legitimacy. According to the complaint, he fabricated a supposed director at the Hong Kong Museum of Art and used emails from a counterfeit “HKMOA.org” domain to send Malnik forged authentication letters.

When Malnik later contacted the real museum, staff told him they had no record of the official, had never reviewed the works and did not issue the documents he had received.

Malnik also learned that many of the works he thought he owned had been auctioned elsewhere. One such work that Malnik claimed to have purchased and had authenticated was Salvador Dali’s Le Visage de le Guerre, which is in the collection of the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam.

Another is the sculpture Le Nez by Alberto Giacometti, which sold for $78.4 million at auction earlier this month—nearly four times the amount Malnik is seeking in his lawsuit against Baitcher.

Malnik allegedly confronted Baitcher with his preliminary findings twice last year.

“After initially offering excuses for the findings,” Malnik’s lawyers said, “Baitcher ultimately admitted that he had acquired counterfeit and replica artwork for Plaintiff, had lied to Plaintiff about the provenance of the artwork, and had fabricated the people with whom he purportedly worked with in acquiring the artwork.”

Follow along with other lawsuits at Urgent Matter's art lawsuit tracker.