See All<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\nThe police verified from dental records that the body was that of Eigil Vesti, a 26-year-old Norwegian whose disappearance had been reported three weeks before. A few days later, 22-year-old Bernard LeGeros was arrested on the basis of various tips and his own persistent calls to the police.<\/p>\n
After his arrest, LeGeros said that it was he who had fired the two rifle shots that had ended Vesti\u2019s life, but that his employer, Andrew Crispo, a 40-year-old art dealer, had been the actual architect of the act. Bernard LeGeros is now in the Rockland County jail, charged with second-degree murder. He has pleaded insanity. He is also facing charges in an unrelated case brought by a student who claims he was kidnapped and sodomized last September. Crispo, who has also been charged in this case, surrendered his passport and was released after posting $100,000 bail.<\/p>\n
Though Crispo is being investigated in the Vesti case, he has not been indicted. Rumors wafting through Manhattan suggest he is being protected by powerful persons. This is not the case. The rules of evidence do not allow the statement of one participant in a crime to be used as sole evidence for conviction of another. Kenneth Gribetz, the Rockland County district attorney, will have to come up with a more solid case if he is to indict Crispo.<\/p>\n
The rumors about \u201cprotection\u201d are not the only exotica that have attached themselves to this case. Tales about everything from snuff films to networks of necrophiliacs, anonymous smears of various prominent homosexuals, and even a threatening telephone call poured in as I pieced together the strange, sad story of Andrew Crispo.<\/p>\n
_<\/p>\n
The Andrew Crispo Gallery sits in the Fuller Building at 41 East 57th Street \u2014 \u201cthe crossroads of the art world,\u201d in Crispo\u2019s jaunty phrase \u2014 and it\u2019s a handsome place, with chastely seductive walls, flattering to art. This afternoon, though, it had a vaguely sepulchral air, unlit, with artworks stacked higgledy-piggledy against the walls. Andrew Crispo was picking his way through with an aggrieved look. \u201cThis is only my third time back here since this whole thing happened,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Some paintings were still hanging on a far wall, part of the exhibition he was installing the day the police came. It was to have included 19 Picasso plates, and it had a theme. \u201cOddly enough,\u201d Crispo said, \u201cthe theme was masks.\u201d<\/p>\n
This was our first meeting. The art dealer looked conservatively sportif (blue blazer, tan slacks, white shirt, sober tie), while his demeanor was an odd balance of high tension and aplomb. He has a powerful neck and shoulders, a soft, recently acquired belly, and an engaging smile, a bit belied by the beads of sweat on his sallow forehead, the darkly darting eyes, the fingers foraging in the pack of Benson & Hedges.<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n
Photo: New York Magazine\n <\/p>\n
We sat in a crimson-walled inner office, with shelves of art books and a clutter of art pieces and memorabilia, including what Crispo told me was \u201cthe first sculpture Georgia O\u2019Keeffe ever made\u201d (\u201cShe gave it to me. The Rockland D.A.\u2019s investigators broke it\u201d): a ball cock taken from a bathroom cistern, \u201cbecause I like the shape\u201d; a black, horned African fetish; delicate Japanese trays; and a tiny Raggedy Ann doll (which Crispo calls Little Orphan Annie) beside a furry clockwork monkey, which takes him straight back to the Philadelphia orphanage where he was deposited at birth, 40 years ago.<\/p>\n
This was St. John\u2019s. The monkey evokes the sleety day the orphans had been taken to a department store for Christmas. They had sat in Santa\u2019s lap and chosen presents. The next day, the nuns had lined the boys up \u2014 \u201cit was like a military school\u201d \u2014 to inspect the goodies. Most of the boys had piles of stuff. Crispo, who was \u201c8 or 9,\u201d had only a furry monkey. A nun called, \u201cWill Andrew Crispo step out?\u201d He did so, and became the subject of a lecture. \u201cI was an example of \u2018non-greed,\u2019\u201d he said, and doubled up a fist. \u201cBoy! Didn\u2019t they all give it to me afterwards.\u201d<\/p>\n
Crispo had foster parents for a short time, but it didn\u2019t work out. He stayed within the state system until his middle teens, when he got a job as a clerk with Judge Adrian Bonnelly, whom Crispo calls his \u201cwhite-haired angel.\u201d It was Judge Bonnelly who told the young man that Crispo\u2019s father was a man of French descent, that the name Crispo came from his Italian grandmother, and that his mother, who had been 16 when he was conceived, was now married with three children.<\/p>\n
\u201cDo you want to meet your mother?\u201d Bonnelly had asked him. \u201cI told him I wanted to think about it,\u201d Crispo said. \u201cThat was the only sleepless night I have ever had.\u201d His answer was no. One reason was \u201cI didn\u2019t feel like knocking on my mother\u2019s door.\u201d The second was that he \u201cfelt very independent. I had the wonderful feeling of being me.\u201d<\/p>\n
The past was the past. Crispo, a closed-off youth (who was, in later years, contemptuous of psychiatrists), focused strictly on the future. In 1963, on the day after he chose not to meet his mother, he met someone who was to play a part in his future \u2014 Arthur Smith, a coolly handsome young man three years older. Smith, the son of an engineer in Auburn, Georgia, worked in Manhattan for Edward Garrett, a highly regarded dealer in antique furniture. They took a liking to each other, and Smith suggested Crispo room with him in New York. Crispo, who had not been drafted (\u201cI told them I was gay\u201d), moved in five months later. \u201cI really didn\u2019t want to live in Philadelphia anymore,\u201d he said. \u201cThere was nothing I could invent or create.\u201d He and Smith have been sharing quarters for 21 years.<\/p>\n
_<\/p>\n
Crispo arrived with no job but with ebullient confidence. \u201cI walked down Fifth Avenue, because that was where all the stores were,\u201d he said. \u201cI got a job in Georg Jensen the very first day.\u201d Jensen\u2019s, the modern-design shop, hired Crispo as a stock boy. Soon, he was helping dress windows and fix table settings. One day, he helped an elderly man (\u201cHe reminded me of Judge Bonnelly\u201d) buy a blue-and-white cup and saucer.<\/p>\n
Some time later, he was walking from Jensen\u2019s, which was at 53rd and Fifth, to meet Arthur Smith at Garrett\u2019s, which was at 57th and Lexington, when his attention was caught by something in a second-floor window: a painting of a clown in a top hat. \u201cI walked upstairs,\u201d Crispo said. \u201cI had never been in an art gallery before. And there was this same white-haired man.\u201d<\/p>\n
Crispo introduced himself to the man, art dealer Maynard Walker, and asked about the clown, which was by the American painter Walt Kuhn. \u201cI called him Walter Kuhn,\u201d Crispo said. \u201cSo Walker said, \u2018Out!\u2019 I said, \u2018What?\u2019 He said, \u2018It\u2019s Walt. Out! But come back tomorrow.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
A youth adrift, with a history of suicide attempts, LeGeros was fond of such utterances as \u201cI come into the room like death.\u201d<\/p>\n
Crispo began visiting the gallery often. \u201cEvery time I went, there was this one drawing sitting on the mantel,\u201d he said. \u201cI asked, \u2018Who did that?\u2019 He said, \u2018Robert Henri. Do you like it?\u2019 I said yes. He said, \u2018Its price is $350, but I will let you have it for half!\u2019 I said, \u2018I can\u2019t afford that.\u2019 \u2018You can pay me $10 a week.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
So it began. Another beginning was a job at Edward Garrett, where Crispo replaced Arthur Smith, who had joined the decorator Billy Baldwin. \u201cAndrew is much better at selling than I ever was,\u201d Smith said. Indeed, yes. One day, Maynard Walker told Crispo, \u201cI have a gift for you. But there are conditions.\u201d The gift was Trees, an oil painting, also by Robert Henri, and the conditions were that Crispo could keep the painting, but if he chose to sell it, he would have to use the money to buy more art from Walker. \u201cI told him I liked it, but not that much,\u201d Crispo said. \u201cAnd I sold it for $1,500 the very next day. He was quite taken aback. He sold me a number of items. I sold most of them. Some I couldn\u2019t part with.\u201d<\/p>\n
Crispo was thus launched on the lowest rung of dealership \u2014 running, or schlepping, which is buying works inexpensively from one gallery and selling them at a small markup to another. It is a fine enough way to develop an eclectic eye and to accumulate information, and Crispo\u2019s appetite for information was boundless. He had taken his first trip to Europe \u2014 Munich, Barcelona, and Rome \u2014 when he was 18, and, on later trips with Arthur Smith, he went to England, France, and Russia. \u201cAndrew was crazy about the Kremlin and the Pushkin museum,\u201d Smith said. \u201cWe looked at Victorian furniture. We looked at houses, art. Everything.\u201d<\/p>\n
Andrew Crispo\u2019s ambition and his desire for artworks were also growing. He spent $9,000 on a Louis XVI desk from Edward Garrett, who told Crispo that he was moving his business to Palm Beach and offered to take him there. Crispo pondered the offer but rejected it. \u201cI decided to go into dealing full-time,\u201d he said. Then, at the urging of George Perret, who worked at the ACA Galleries and who had dealt with the forceful young man on various occasions, he was hired by ACA\u2019s owner, Sidney Bergen. \u201cHe had a very good eye,\u201d Bergen said. \u201cHe was very charming, he knew how to treat customers. He was a happy-go-lucky kind of kid. A bit nuts, of course. But who isn\u2019t \u2014 in the art world?\u201d<\/p>\n
Others in the art world felt less warm. \u201cHe would come over and buy four or five little drawings,\u201d said a Paris dealer. \u201cHe would spend $2,000 and maybe make $2,000 on the trip. But nobody liked him. Then, suddenly, he opened this huge gallery. To everybody\u2019s amazement.\u201d<\/p>\n
The amazement was, indeed, widespread. \u201cWhen Andrew told me he was opening his own gallery, I told him, \u2018You\u2019re out of your bloody mind,\u2019 said Perret, a courtly man who was once an actor. But Crispo was nothing if not persuasive. Perret joined him as a public-relations man and as an organizer of exhibitions, the first of which opened in May 1973, five months after Crispo had bought the place on East 57th. It included a Magritte bronze; sculpture from New Guinea, the Hellenistic world, and ancient Egypt; and a piece by Nancy Grossman that shows a human form masked and bound in leather. The theme of the show, and its title, was \u201cThe Torso.\u201d<\/p>\n
_<\/p>\n
Andrew Crispo\u2019s rise from schlepper to assistant to owner of an impressive space had been rapid, and shadowy rumors clung to it from the beginning. \u201cWe never knew where the money came from,\u201d said Peter Brown, once a manager of the Beatles, and a close friend of
Crispo\u2019s in those days. \u201cWe used to tease him by calling him Funny Money, which he was amused by. He loved the mystery of us not knowing.\u201d<\/p>\n
The truth was less exotic. Josephine Gershman (now remarried but at the time a well-to-do widow of a real-estate man, and a collector who had met Crispo before his ACA days) had approached Crispo and offered to fund the gallery with $250,000. She actually came up with $60,000, but this was adequate seed money.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur only competition for the space was a massage parlor and the OTB,\u201d Crispo said. Not that he would have communicated such stuff to Peter Brown. Crispo\u2019s mystery-mongering and his glee at the speculation that the gallery was a front for money laundering were already characteristic.<\/p>\n
The first show to attract really widespread attention was \u201cPioneers of American Abstraction.\u201d Among loan pieces on view was a watercolor by Charles Demuth that had recently been acquired by the Baron Heinrich (Heini) von Thyssen-Bornemisza. Crispo said he had misspelled the name, and this was brought to his attention by a middle-aged foreigner in the gallery.<\/p>\n
How did the man know? \u201cBecause I am Baron Thyssen,\u201d he replied, according to Crispo, who does a Teutonic accent rather well. \u201cHe bought several paintings,\u201d Crispo said. \u201cMy rapport with the baron was immediate.\u201d Other sources suggest that, on this first visit to the Crispo gallery, Baron Thyssen was actually taken care of by Crispo\u2019s longtime friend and business associate, a slight, dark-haired man called Ronnie Caran.<\/p>\n
At any rate, a most fortunate connection had been made. Baron Heini von Thyssen, now 64, has holdings in steel, armaments, and much else, which makes him \u2014 depending upon whether you believe him or his ex-wife, Denise \u2014 worth either several hundred million or $1.2 billion. The fortune was founded by his grandfather, a steel magnate, and built up by his father; the title comes from his Hungarian mother. Heini Thyssen, a genial, soft-spoken man, lives mostly in Lugano, Switzerland, sometimes in England, and, more relevantly, has built up a collection of works by old and modern masters that is second, as private collections go, only to that of the queen of England.<\/p>\n
The Demuth he had bought earlier and the four paintings that he now got from the Andrew Crispo Gallery were the beginnings of another surge by this exuberant collector. Thyssen had decided to bulk up a collection of early-American modernists, and Crispo was right there on the curling wave. Emboldened, Crispo decided to rent the space just upstairs on the third floor, formerly an office for the New York Jets. \u201cAndrew told me he wanted to knock a spiral staircase through,\u201d said D. Thomas Bergen, a financial adviser to artists and galleries. \u201cHe asked my advice. I strongly advised against expanding.\u201d Crispo did it anyway.<\/p>\n
A complication now arose. Baron Thyssen had a private dealer in Europe. This dealer, a dashing Italian named Franco Reppetti, was having a far-from-private alliance with Denise, the baron\u2019s fourth wife. The baron, who not only loved his wife but was unwilling to contemplate the trauma of a fourth divorce, still allowed Denise veto power over many of his picture purchases. This meant that European dealers found themselves having to cut in Franco Reppetti.<\/p>\n
As soon as Reppetti realized that millions of dollars that would formerly have been sunk into European art were being put into American works, he flew to Manhattan. \u201cI admired his honesty,\u201d Crispo said. \u201cHe came and said, \u2018Andrew, you want to sell pictures to the baron? You pay me a commission.\u2019 I said, \u2018Franco, forget it! I\u2019m not interested.\u2019 And for one year, the baron didn\u2019t buy a thing from me.\u201d<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n
Photo: New York Magazine\n <\/p>\n
But Reppetti\u2019s hold on Baroness Thyssen was already weakening, and, for him, things ended poorly. In June 1977, she was in Manhattan, supposedly holed up at the Waldorf, and Reppetti came to the city to get her back. Rebuffed, he moved into a friend\u2019s apartment in the Meurice on West 58th. He arrived one day with a small suitcase and some very pure cocaine.<\/p>\n
Reppetti\u2019s fatal dive took place some hours later. He was found sprawled over the roof of a Volkswagen van in his underpants. The small window through which he had plunged had been opened with such force that it remained stuck. None of his acquaintances believe Reppetti jumped. \u201cFranco would never be seen in public in his underwear like that,\u201d declared a young Italian noblewoman who lived in the Meurice at that time. \u201cHe was so fastidious.\u201d<\/p>\n
The body was identified by Diane von Furstenberg; the cause of death was listed as suicide. Heini Thyssen arrived in New York and arranged for the corpse to be flown back to Italy. Andrew Crispo took care of the details. Because Thyssen had bought such a huge casket for Reppetti, Crispo said, he found that a special plane would be necessary. It would cost $150,000. \u201cIsn\u2019t that a bit expensive?\u201d he asked Thyssen. He said that the baron, contemplating all those commissions he had given Reppetti, said, \u201cBelieve me, it\u2019s a bargain.\u201d<\/p>\n
_<\/p>\n
Andrew Crispo was now Baron Thyssen\u2019s main man, and the volume of business he began to do was prodigious. \u201cIn just one month [Thyssen] spent $3 million,\u201d Crispo said. Most of the paintings would come from other dealers, but they would always be routed through Crispo, whose minimum take would be 10 percent, though with judicious markups, this could rise much higher.<\/p>\n
The nature of Andrew Crispo\u2019s relationship with Baron Thyssen has been the source of unending dark speculation, especially among rival dealers frustrated at shelling out commissions. Specifically, it is said that Baron Thyssen, four marriages or no, shared interests other than art with Crispo. These rumors are baseless.<\/p>\n
The reality is more mundane. \u201cCrispo is an intelligent man. He can be amusing,\u201d said an Establishment dealer, and a Crispo foe. \u201cBut above all, he had the time to devote to Thyssen. Crispo\u2019s and his assistants would go to London, or to Lugano. They were arranging for his cars to go to the airport, things like that. This is something that the really wealthy are subject to. They travel, they have no fixed focus. Crispo and his assistants were running around being Thyssen\u2019s kind of \u2026 little gnomes.\u201d<\/p>\n
Crispo was also now increasing his leverage and his risk by buying major paintings, assuming that he could resell them to the baron. A Jackson Pollock, for instance. \u201cIt was a Pollock nobody wanted, because there had been a different painting with the same title in the catalogue,\u201d Crispo said. \u201cEverybody thought it was a fake. But I looked at it. It was silver and black, with a magical red dot. It had to be a Pollock.\u201d<\/p>\n
He researched and found a photograph: Jackson Pollock standing beside this very canvas. \u201cI paid $70,000 for it. The baron paid me close to $100,000. I sold him the Pollock and a Holbein rondelle within the same minute. I am not ashamed of any picture I have ever sold the baron.\u201d<\/p>\n
An event in 1979 cemented the relationship. Crispo had been approached by Roy Cohn, who would later become his lawyer, about an arts complex in Perth, Australia, that had run into problems putting together an inaugural show. \u201cI telephoned Heini,\u201d Crispo remembered. \u201cI asked, \u2018Do you have any business interests in Australia?\u2019<\/p>\n
\u201c\u2018Well, yes, I have a sheep farming \u2026 shipbuilding \u2026 some businesses.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u201c\u2018Why don\u2019t you lend some paintings, Heini?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
So Thyssen, who had been building up his modern collection fairly unobtrusively, went public. \u201cHe said, \u2018Pick what you want\u2019 \u2014 he gave me a free hand,\u201d Crispo said. \u201cThe show went on tour. The baron chartered a Lear. It was wonderful.\u201d<\/p>\n
It is easy, in hindsight, to say that the Thyssen connection was at once a blessing and a curse. Andrew Crispo was both thin-skinned and cocky, spendthrift and niggardly, and these contradictions were exacerbated by his position of strength. \u201cHe was rude to museums,\u201d said a former associate. \u201cHe would alienate possible clients.\u201d Also, even in this wily world, Crispo had a slightly gamy reputation. One vendor of old masters claims that Crispo proposed they join in a \u201cring\u201d operation, essentially an agreement among dealers to keep down prices at an auction (Crispo denies this, saying, \u201cAll of the fun is buying and selling\u201d). He was not proposed for membership in the clubby Art Dealers Association. \u201cWe always found him a bit \u2026 off,\u201d an Establishment figure said.<\/p>\n
But Crispo appeared to revel in this. \u201cHe was a consummate wheeler-dealer,\u201d a past associate said. George Perret said there were dreams of luring de Kooning to the gallery. Instead, Crispo brought in Lowell Nesbitt, an artist popular with the public.<\/p>\n
But mostly, there were the deals for the baron. At one stage, the eclectic dealer even held some of the baron\u2019s gems, including the Star of Peace, the 11th-largest diamond in the world. Crispo says the baron intended to plow the money into art. The problem was that Crispo was not buying pieces outright, but making down payments. His complex finances involved dealings with several banks, including the Bank of New York, and arrangements with art-financing specialists such as Gideon Strauss at Rosenthal & Rosenthal and Martin Ackerman at Sovereign American Arts. \u201cI would hedge the money coming in by going out and making commitments to purchase,\u201d said Crispo. \u201cI guess you could say I got ahead of myself. It got to be what you could call margin buying.\u201d \u201cAndrew thought the Thyssen thing would go on and on forever,\u201d an associate said. \u201cHe thought he was Baron Thyssen.\u201d The orphan commended for \u201cnon-greed\u201d wanted everything good and fine he could lay his hands on.<\/p>\n
_<\/p>\n
Andrew Crispo\u2019s private life was appropriately stylish. He bought a house on Gin Lane, in Southampton, where his immediate neighbors include Gloria Vanderbilt, Alfred Taubman, and Roy Lichtenstein. But his life remained intensely private. By his own wish, he met few of his neighbors, not even Lichtenstein, although he sold Steve Martin a Lichtenstein and the Franz Kline in front of which the actor was shown cavorting on a cover of Rolling Stone. His house (\u201cI stole the name from Cole Porter\u201d) is called No Trespassing.<\/p>\n
In part, this secrecy seems to have grown because Crispo\u2019s social mores were also changing. When he came to Manhattan, Crispo had been fairly guarded about his homosexuality. \u201cHe had a very Upper East Side mentality,\u201d said photographer Christopher Makos, who exhibited at the gallery in 1979.<\/p>\n
Privately, Andrew Crispo had always loved games. \u201cHe had a mischievous mind \u2014 I\u2019m sure it was only mischievous then \u2014 and he used to love to play tricks on people,\u201d said a friend who shared a Southampton beach house with Crispo in 1973. \u201cEverything had to be a game \u2014 I mean, if something was simple, then it was dismissed.\u201d Sometimes the youthful-looking art
dealer would hitchhike, pretending to be a college kid. That sort of thing. \u201cAndrew could border on the naughty,\u201d the friend added. \u201cBut I never saw any wickedness in it.\u201d<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n
Photo: New York Magazine\n <\/p>\n
But as the \u201970s slid into the \u201980s, Crispo became more tense. \u201cWhen I first met Andrew, he didn\u2019t even smoke,\u201d an artist said. \u201cSoon, he was drinking pretty heavily.\u201d Also, he had never enjoyed cocaine, but one summer in the early \u201980s, he began to use it with a couple of youthful assistants. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t a habit. It was a dependency,\u201d he said. \u201cIt used to make me feel good. I always kept too much inside me. It made me talk. It made me open up to people.\u201d<\/p>\n
But cocaine, chronically used, is, of course, a personality-altering substance, as is heroin, except that where heroin induces a vegetable calm, cocaine brings out a febrile animalism. Sensitivity can slide into paranoia, while overconfidence \u2014 another trait not exactly foreign to Andrew Crispo \u2014 can balloon into a reckless sense of invulnerability.<\/p>\n
Certainly, Andrew Crispo was subject to ups and downs. Lowell Nesbitt and other artists used the word \u201cmercurial.\u201d \u201cHe is hot and cold,\u201d said a former assistant, Susan Slack. \u201cHe could blow up at you one moment. The next, it was over.\u201d<\/p>\n
Also, his private mind games were moving a bit beyond the mischievous. In one, he would appeal to the compassion of a would-be lover \u2014 the straighter-seeming the better \u2014 by pretending to be a straight whose young wife had taken her own life and that of a baby daughter because she had believed him dead in a plane crash. Crispo would claim he had been unable to get it together with a woman since. (Crispo denies this. \u201cIt\u2019s not my style,\u201d he said.)<\/p>\n
Crispo and Arthur Smith left the Upper East Side in the summer of 1982. They took up residence (though now, essentially, in separate quarters) in a penthouse next to a printing-ink factory on West 12th Street and the river. The neighborhood includes nightspots of no specific sexual orientation, like the Roxy; bars for admirers of leatherwear, like the Spike; and hard-core establishments such as the Mineshaft and the Hellfire club.<\/p>\n
It is not surprising that Andrew Crispo\u2019s grasp of his business affairs was beginning to falter. Creditors claim they were finding it more and more difficult to collect even small sums. Several years ago, for instance, the Parrish Museum in Southampton printed a catalogue reproducing in color several paintings lent by Crispo\u2019s gallery, and was not paid by Crispo for months. His Southampton house appeared so unkempt that summer that a neighbor, thinking the owner had fallen on hard times, considered putting in a bid. Crispo said he refused such a bid.<\/p>\n
Andrew Crispo began to get increasingly entangled in lawsuits with other dealers. He sued and was sued back. He was sued by Christie\u2019s. He sued Martin Ackerman over the ownership of a number of paintings. (Ackerman said this case has been dismissed. Crispo says it\u2019s being appealed.)<\/p>\n
Early in 1984, the Bank of New York, claiming that Crispo owed it $700,000, enforced a lien on nine paintings. The bank got its money, the liens were lifted, but Crispo was holding several pieces intended for the baron, whose confidence in his eager-beaver dealer was thereby punctured. As of now, the baron is owed both for art that he has paid for and has not yet seen, and for art that has been sold through Crispo and for which Thyssen has not been paid. Crispo acknowledges these debts.<\/p>\n
Most important, the IRS \u2014 supposedly tipped off by a fired employee up on a cocaine rap \u2014 started investigating allegations that Crispo had withheld taxes on as much as $10 million in income. Roy Cohn is no longer on the case. \u201cWe\u2019re too busy,\u201d he told me. \u201cWe\u2019re not equipped for a 24-hour service. I just can\u2019t handle a pileup of cases that don\u2019t seem to me to be particularly significant.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cohn was replaced by Stanley S. Arkin, who was described to me by a frequent opponent, U.S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani, as \u201ccreative, straightforward \u2026 He can take very adversarial positions for his client in a way that does not involve the ego of the district attorney.\u201d<\/p>\n
Some galleries began to refuse to deal with Crispo, except by cashier\u2019s check. In June 1984, Lowell Nesbitt left Crispo\u2019s gallery after nine years.<\/p>\n
\u201cAll those legal actions,\u201d Nesbitt said. \u201cHe didn\u2019t have any time left to sell Nesbitts. As the recent figures clearly showed.\u201d<\/p>\n
Just how inevitable were these travails? Clearly Crispo\u2019s overhead was considerable, what with Southampton and West 12th Street, the $17,000-a-month rent on the gallery, and the $12,000-a-month payroll. It couldn\u2019t have helped that, toward the end of 1984, Crispo (according to Bernard LeGeros) was buying three and a half to seven grams of coke daily at, say, $90 a gram.<\/p>\n
Andrew Crispo refuses to blame his problems on cocaine. Indeed, he still cheerfully asserts that it pulled him through some dark times. But cocaine can encourage a withdrawal into the equivalent of a feudal fiefdom, and Crispo seemed oddly unwilling to pay his bills. He had large holdings in properties (in the early \u201980s, for instance, he bought a slice of a horse farm in Southampton) and, of course, in art. \u201cHe only had to sell a piece,\u201d a former associate said. \u201cI would say, \u2018Sacrifice one to save the many.\u2019 But he just couldn\u2019t let anything go.\u201d<\/p>\n
This trait \u2014 rather endearing in a dealer, on the whole \u2014 was part of Crispo\u2019s makeup from the beginning. He still has the letter of reference from Where in the World?, a Philadelphia curio store where he had worked part-time. He has postcards from his first European trip.<\/p>\n
He hauled out the Robert Henri that he had bought from Maynard Walker 21 years ago (\u201cI haven\u2019t looked at this for ten years\u201d) and indignantly showed me the Louis XVI desk (\u201cSigned by Avril. And vandalized by the Rockland cops\u201d) that he bought from Garrett for $9,000.<\/p>\n
Even as Andrew Crispo\u2019s problems grew through 1984, he held onto his possessions with ferocity. Stanley Arkin, meanwhile, was addressing the IRS problem. \u201cI finally had a deal worked out,\u201d he said. That was until a corpse was found in Rockland County.<\/p>\n
_<\/p>\n
Eigil Vesti, the only son of a close-knit family in Oslo, Norway, had made up his mind to go into the fashion business when he was in his middle teens. Preferably in Manhattan. He made his first attempt in the winter of 1982. \u201cWe met at a party in the Underground,\u201d said Denis Hand. \u201cIt was given by Ludovic Autet for the designer Gustav Novoa. Eigil had only been in New York a few days. But he always got into the middle of things, somehow. He was open and loving.\u201d<\/p>\n
Denis Hand, who, by his own account, \u201cmanages designers and celebrities,\u201d kept in touch with Eigil, who was 23 and was trying to get into the Fashion Institute of Technology as a merchandising student. \u201cHe failed the examination,\u201d Hand said. \u201cHe spoke good English, but his written English was shaky.\u201d<\/p>\n
He returned to Norway. His mother found him a job on a couple of long-distance cruise ships, the Saga Fjord and the Vista Fjord. Eigil ran the ships\u2019 boutiques. The following year, he returned and passed directly into FIT.<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/150a31feb12011d6180ede2848b8c91bb7-IMG-7332.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
Photo: New York Magazine\n <\/p>\n
\u201cI saw Eigil the first day he arrived,\u201d said a green-eyed southern girl whom I shall call Lisanne. \u201cHe was so striking-looking \u2014 everybody was bowled over. I went up and asked, \u2018Are you gay?\u2019 And he said yes.\u201d Lisanne decided they should be best friends anyway.<\/p>\n
A close friend of Eigil\u2019s, a serious youth whom I shall call Jess, said, \u201cEigil put polish on me. I was rough around the edges. He knew what wines to drink.\u201d<\/p>\n
Eigil confided his dreams, which were harmless enough. \u201cHe would have liked to be a TV fashion designer, like Nolan Miller at Dynasty,\u201d Jess said. \u201cHe had a flair. He would always be wearing the belt or the sunglasses that people would be wearing two years later.\u201d<\/p>\n
The months passed, and Jess became aware that Eigil was being attracted to a different crowd, people with whom Jess felt ill at ease. \u201cThe glitter people,\u201d he called them. Last spring, for instance, Hamptons Newspaper\/Magazine carried a photograph of Eigil and a couple of fashion models at Area (whose theme-of-the-moment happened to be confinement, psychological and
physical). \u201cEigil wanted comfort,\u201d Jess said. \u201cHe liked the feeling of a wad of 20s in his pocket.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dallas Boesendahl, who is best known as a professional party-giver, is one of those whom Jess would describe as \u201cglitter people.\u201d He grew close to Eigil but denies that Eigil was normally a club type. \u201cHe was big on dinner parties,\u201d Dallas said. \u201cTheater, movies.\u201d He was not inclined toward hard drugs. \u201cIt was a big thing for Eigil to walk down to the Hudson, sit on a pier, and smoke a joint,\u201d Dallas said.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe was a romantic. I took him to a little town upstate once. It was the first time he had been out of Manhattan. He said, \u2018This is just like in a book.\u2019\u201d Others mentioned his inquisitiveness. \u201cHe would talk to bag ladies and winos,\u201d said Jess. \u201cHe said he wanted to know about everything.\u201d<\/p>\n
Eigil was also working part-time. In the fall of 1984, he took a job selling in the showroom of the Seventh Avenue designer Nicole Miller. \u201cEigil was quite a flirt. He adored all the girls. He was pleasant, and he always had a nice thing to say, a smile on his face,\u201d Miller said. \u201cWe even sent him to Los Angeles in January. But he wasn\u2019t a hard worker. More like a spoiled kid, actually.\u201d Finally, he was let go at the end of January. Was he bothered? \u201cNot at all,\u201d she said. \u201cIt was as if everything was a game.\u201d<\/p>\n
Perhaps. Both Jess and Lisanne had a sense that Eigil had drifted toward some darker stratum. \u201cHe told me that he had been to a dinner party, and that he had been drugged,\u201d Lisanne said. \u201cHe had simply lost eight hours. But he felt that he had been sexually used.\u201d<\/p>\n
He told the same story to Jess, adding \u2014 to Jess\u2019s astonishment \u2014 that he had seen the same people again. \u201cHe had been back,\u201d Jess said. \u201cIt was unbelievable.\u201d<\/p>\n
They knew that Eigil was facing problems. He was about to be graduated from FIT, for instance, and would need a green card. \u201cMaybe we should get married,\u201d he would say, mostly jokingly, to Lisanne again and again. Suddenly he stopped. \u201cThe green card is being taken care of,\u201d he told her.<\/p>\n
_<\/p>\n
But this wasn\u2019t the only pressure. Eigil\u2019s parents were keen that he return to Norway, and Eigil himself seemed to have soured on the New York experience. \u201cHe was nervous,\u201d Jess said. \u201cHe began to face reality, and he couldn\u2019t stand it. He was suffering from strain. I guess he was weak. His dream was crushed.\u201d Jess added, \u201cSpiritually, I think he asked for death.\u201d<\/p>\n
It is perhaps too easy to moralize in retrospect, and Dallas Boesendahl will hear nothing of this. On the evening of Friday, February 22, Dallas met Eigil, and found that Eigil, who was supposed to have been working on his r\u00e9sum\u00e9, had spent a pleasant afternoon at the Metropolitan Museum. \u201cI guess I kind of yelled at him,\u201d said Dallas.<\/p>\n
They dined with friends \u2014 a male model and a young talent agent and his wife, the daughter of a celebrated actress \u2014 at Rick\u2019s Lounge, which is a modish Tex-Mex place at Eighth Avenue near 19th Street. \u201cSesame-chicken fingers, guacamole, nachos,\u201d Dallas remembered.<\/p>\n
They left at midnight. Dallas and Eigil had a nightcap with the agent and his wife, and departed. It was an unusually warm night, and Eigil suggested they go on for another nightcap. \u201cHe asked me two or three times,\u201d Dallas said. \u201cIt was a Friday, and normally I would have said sure.\u201d But Dallas, tired, said no.<\/p>\n
Eigil Vesti returned home alone. His roommate, photographer Stephen AuCoin, was asleep. Eigil called Lisanne and asked if she would meet him. She, too, was tired. Eigil Vesti took off into the night.<\/p>\n
Eigil told me he had been to a dinner party and that he had been drugged,\u201d said a friend. \u201cHe had lost eight hours.<\/p>\n
The tale of Eigil Vesti\u2019s last night on earth has yet to be pieced together. What is now known is that curiosity had taken him, in the past, to such places as Rounds, a midtown bar frequented by hustlers. What is believed is that sometime around four in the morning the day he died, Eigil Vesti was in the Hellfire.<\/p>\n
The Hellfire is frequented by both male and female homosexuals and an indeterminate number of heterosexuals. It was here that Eigil is said to have met the charming and well-connected Andrew Crispo. And it was through Andrew Crispo that he met Bernard LeGeros.<\/p>\n
_<\/p>\n
Bernard LeGeros, now 23, the son of U.N. official John LeGeros, has the dark and sullen good looks of a rock star of the late \u201950s \u2014 a Paul Anka, say, or a Frankie Avalon. Billy Mayer, a friend since LaSalle high school, described LeGeros as having a streak of morbid poetry; he was fond of such utterances as \u201cI come into the room like death.\u201d He also was a youth adrift, with a history that included a couple of serious suicide attempts (cyanide is serious) and, most recently, dropping out of NYU film school. He had first met Crispo in his mid-teens while working for a travel agency. Last August, Crispo hired him as a sort of gofer when, at Stanley Arkin\u2019s urging, he finally began to grapple with his tax problems.<\/p>\n
People in the gallery saw little of Andrew Crispo for many weeks. His whereabouts were supposedly secret, though it was soon known that he had rented an apartment in the Galleria, near the Fuller Building. It was also clear that Crispo\u2019s need to focus on his financial situation was not affecting his intake of cocaine. \u201cI called him,\u201d one of the former gallery associates said. \u201cAnd I heard the doorbell go. Andrew said, \u2018Oh, I know who that must be.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
The caller then listened to the familiar chinka-chinka-chinka sound of coke being emptied from a bottle onto a hard surface. Again the bell rang.<\/p>\n
\u201cOh,\u201d Crispo repeated, as though he had not spoken. \u201cI know who that must be.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bernard LeGeros started working at the gallery the week before Christmas. His name was added to the payroll, and he took over the front desk. His relationship with Crispo was obviously intensely close but was not physical (Bernard, who was planning marriage, has always claimed to be wholly heterosexual).<\/p>\n
In business, though, it was plain that Crispo was functioning through LeGeros. It seems that the first to bear the brunt of the new association was Ronnie Caran. Caran, who had been the number-two person at the gallery since it opened, is a decorous man, lacking Andrew Crispo\u2019s enlarged appetite for art, or for life. In those final months, he was appalled to find a \u201cstreet person\u201d freebasing coke in an upstairs viewing room.<\/p>\n
But Andrew Crispo seemed oblivious of his longtime associate. The freeze was sudden and total. \u201cWhenever I try to go into the back office to see Andrew, suddenly Bernard is following me,\u201d Caran fumed to a friend. \u201cHe says Andrew doesn\u2019t want anybody back there.\u201d \u201cAndrew would just be sitting there,\u201d another employee said. \u201cWe knew how high he was by the buzzer. If he was straight, it was bzzz. When he was high, it was bzzz \u2026 bzzz \u2026 bzzz \u2026\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Financially, things were going increasingly awry. The stationer downstairs got paid only by marching into the gallery and confronting Crispo directly. The place was disheveled, staff was dwindling, and Crispo not only was in arrears with the rent \u2014 this was not unusual \u2014 but was also late with the payroll. Sometimes the payroll had to be met by George Perret, who stoutly asserted that \u201cAndrew always paid me back,\u201d but admitted to watching some \u201csleazy types\u201d drifting into the gallery. Another employee told Crispo he should get rid of Bernard after hearing the boy boast about his gun collection. \u201cThe boy\u2019s a psychopath,\u201d he told Crispo.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut he\u2019s so loyal,\u201d Crispo said.<\/p>\n
Friends say that Caran was also finding LeGeros increasingly oppressive. Of Andrew Crispo he wasn\u2019t fearful. Crispo had always been given, when the mood took, to boasting that he would have such and such a person\u2019s legs broken. He had always been inventive \u2014 even back in the days when he would send mock-illiterate letters of attack to a newspaper that had neglected to review a Crispo show. True, there was now a darker sparkle to his imaginings. Caran would find his letters opened and tossed into the trash. A friend who telephoned him had the call intercepted by LeGeros. Minutes later, Crispo was on the line. \u201cWhat do you want?\u201d he demanded. \u201cIt\u2019s my name on the door here. I\u2019m going to get to the bottom of this.\u201d<\/p>\n
But Caran was only concerned that LeGeros would misinterpret one of Crispo\u2019s bouts of spleen. One day, Crispo had a dispute with a youth over moving art \u2014 a trivial spat. LeGeros approached an employee later, glowing with pleasure. \u201cAndrew let me beat the guy,\u201d he said. Crispo\u2019s lawyer wouldn\u2019t let him discuss this subject.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s as if he were trained by a foreign army to intimidate people,\u201d Caran told a friend fretfully.<\/p>\n
There was also an increasing desire for privacy. LeGeros would appear at 5 or 5:30 p.m. and tell what remained of the staff to leave. Nobody drew any sinister conclusions \u2014 it was just another sign of the place\u2019s lowered vitality. Ron Caran would tell his friends that it was only the fact that he was owed money \u2014 he is now suing Crispo for $6 million \u2014 that kept him in the place at all. But on February 18, he left the gallery at last.<\/p>\n
_<\/p>\n
It was, of course, after it closed for the day that the Andrew Crispo Gallery came to life. Christopher Colt, as I\u2019ll call him, is typical of the street youths who were always welcome to drop by the place and score coke. Bernard LeGeros was always there, but as a subservient presence. \u201cHe hardly said anything at all unless it was yes or no or okay,\u201d Colt remembered. \u201cLike a puppy dog to his master.\u201d<\/p>\n
One September evening, Colt came by. He found Andrew and Bernard seated, surrounded by sex toys of the sort the Pleasure Chest sells \u2014 harnesses, collars, handcuffs, clips for various parts of the anatomy, together with wristbands, ankle harnesses, and a leather mask with a zippered mouthpiece. They were talking, rather meaningfully, of their \u201cgames.\u201d It happened that Christopher Colt, a tough street kid, had a fondness for leather as a style but was bored \u2014 and mildly repelled \u2014 by the little that he knew about S&M.<\/p>\n
\u201cI went into the office and snorted some lines,\u201d he said. \u201cWhile Bernard went on some errand \u2026 Andrew turned the conversation to whether I\u2019d do some mesc, angel dust, and expensive, vintage wine, and get \u2018really high.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Nothing doing. Christopher Colt was leery of anything except cocaine. Bernard returned, sat in the corner, and began playing with some video equipment. \u201cHe and Andrew talked sometimes about making snuff movies,\u201d Colt said. \u201cAndrew used to claim he sold these tapes \u2014 some VHS tapes he held in his hand \u2014 for thousands of dollars to people who wanted to see people die. I thought that, too, was a lot of coke.\u201d<\/p>\n
Crispo insists his \u201cgames\u201d were consensual. But he seems to have become entranced by death and its instruments.<\/p>\n
While Crispo was on the telephone, Colt fiddled with the harness. He snapped the ankle harness on, and one of the wrist pieces, but changed his mind when he saw Bernard looking at him and sharpening a long knife. Colt quietly unsnapped himself and, still fiddling, tried on the leather mask.<\/p>\n
\u201cAndrew kept signaling,\u201d Colt said, \u201c\u2026 to zipper the mouth, the eyes, or the neck.\u201d Again, nothing doing. Colt slipped off the mask. When Colt did a line of coke, Andrew Crispo seized his wrist and snapped one handcuff on. But Christopher Colt is a rough little guy. \u201cI threw Crispo against the wall,\u201d he said. \u201cThen I saw the key \u2014 and about an eighth of coke \u2014 in his pocket.\u201d Colt ripped the pocket off, grabbed the key, and undid the handcuff. Angrily, he noticed that the crystal on his just-purchased Pierre Cardin watch was broken. Meekly, Andrew Crispo asked for his cocaine back. They did a few more lines. And that was that. Crispo admitted that Colt made social calls, but described his account as \u201cfantasy.\u201d<\/p>\n
There are other tales similar to Colt\u2019s. Apparently, Crispo\u2019s preferred modus operandi was to call a public telephone (the telephones near Abingdon Square and the one near the Spike were much used), and if a male voice answered, it could be assumed that its owner was open for an invitation to the gallery or apartment. Actually, this was a technique that Crispo had been using for years \u2014 in the mid-\u201970s, he had examined passersby from the window of his East 79th Street apartment with the help of a telescope, and had called up handsome males on the corner telephone.<\/p>\n
Indeed, Crispo even tried making random calls to public phones in Southampton. Once, at a phone outside the police station, one such call was taken by a cop. Cocaine was by then among the offered treats.<\/p>\n
Clearly, cocaine unbottled demons in Andrew Crispo, this orphan who despised psychiatrists. The young men who strayed into Crispo\u2019s sexual orbit often found themselves involved in threatening scenarios. Eight have spoken with Rebecca Porper of the New York Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project. David France of New York Native interviewed four. One has gone to the police. His is the case in which Crispo and LeGeros have recently been charged. Robert Kasanof (who is Crispo\u2019s lawyer both in this and the Vesti matter) said the conduct would be shown to be that of a \u201cconsenting adult.\u201d<\/p>\n
All these incidents took place in the last 18 months. One young man, for instance, told an investigator he had refused to submit to sex with a handgun, but that he had engaged in mild S&M with Crispo and four or five kids, and he\u2019d enjoyed it. He even tried on the black leather mask. \u201cHe was blond, and apparently only blonds were asked to put on the mask,\u201d said the investigator.<\/p>\n
But suddenly Crispo brought out some \u201creally heavy-duty spiked belts.\u201d \u201cHey!\u201d the man said. \u201cI\u2019m not into that. I\u2019m leaving.\u201d<\/p>\n
Crispo swore at him. \u201cYou\u2019re breaking the rules,\u201d the man said. \u201cWhen I say stop, it\u2019s stop.\u201d He added, \u201cDon\u2019t come near me. I do karate.\u201d (Crispo said, \u201cI don\u2019t have a gun. I can\u2019t even fire a gun.\u201d)<\/p>\n
With the coming of Bernard LeGeros \u2014 whom Crispo would affectionately refer to as \u201cmy bodyguard\u201d or \u201cmy executioner\u201d \u2014 things took a baroque turn. Crispo and his \u2014 still willing \u2014 partner would be getting things going. Crispo would find a reason to leave, and LeGeros would come in, as if unexpectedly, dressed as a security guard and wielding a handgun or a nightstick. The handcuffed subject would be savagely whipped, often for hours, as a procession of young toughs drifted through the gallery. Often, these would be straight street kids whom Crispo would pay for their exertions with the lash. A young man who claimed he was at a sex session said, \u201cI never saw Andrew hit anybody himself.\u201d He added that \u201cthe most emotion I ever saw him show\u201d was when a trick stumbled against a favorite Art Deco screen.<\/p>\n
Crispo would usually be sodomized (he admits this blithely), but his conversation could be virulent in its denunciation of homosexuality. One person was told he would be \u201cforgiven\u201d if he started going out with girls. Crispo, indeed, would often talk about women. One man was asked to a \u201cparty.\u201d He was told that they would all be having sex with one girl. He wasn\u2019t interested, and left. As he walked out of the elevator, six Hispanic toughs were getting on. He remains convinced that he was to have been the \u201cparty\u201d himself.<\/p>\n
The world of S&M is a realm of master and slaves, pain and domination. Clearly, it is a world where strict codes are necessary \u2014 rules of war, so to speak. It is a world in which anyone who breaks the rules is functioning as a rapist. Crispo insists all his \u201cgames\u201d were consensual. He seems, however, to have become increasingly entranced by death and its instruments.<\/p>\n
In Southampton, he once pointed to a piece of sculpture on his lawn \u2014 a black metal piece by Douglas Abdell \u2014 and told a young artist, \u201cThat is where I bury my enemies.\u201d Late one night, he chose to discuss necrophilia with a fellow partygoer, and indicated it was a desire he was able to satisfy. Another time, he pointed to some pinkish splotches on the walls and ceiling of his apartment bathroom and told a visitor that it was blood he had not been able to remove. He boasted that he had slit a young woman\u2019s wrists there at her request.<\/p>\n
On another occasion, he is said to have asked a young man if he knew anybody it might be appropriate to kill. And on yet another occasion, he was in his inner office with a former employee. They were speaking of somebody who Crispo felt had cheated him of money. Crispo announced that Bernard LeGeros would kill the miscreant for him for just $200.<\/p>\n
Bernard happened to be passing. Crispo repeated his claim.<\/p>\n
The man said that Bernard told Crispo, \u201cFor you, Andrew, I would do it for nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n
The people listening to these stories \u2014 all firmly denied by Crispo \u2014 assumed that they were the wild humors of cocaine. Billy Mayer talked of Crispo\u2019s suggesting that Mayer and a group of friends dress up in Nazi uniforms. Colt spoke of Crispo\u2019s describing the killing of a young woman while performing a sexual act. \u201cSure, Andrew\u201d was Colt\u2019s response. \u201cLet\u2019s do another line.\u201d Mayer described the talk between Crispo and LeGeros \u2014 \u201cthey would invent stuff about how to smuggle, or how to kill somebody\u201d \u2014 as just \u201ccoke talk.\u201d Games.<\/p>\n
_<\/p>\n
On Friday, February 22, while Eigil Vesti was having dinner in Rick\u2019s Lounge, Crispo, Le Geros, and Billy Mayer had dinner with Edo Bertoglio, a Swiss photographer much admired by LeGeros (he has described him as a \u201cmagician\u201d). During the meal, Bertoglio recalled a recent fracas in Puerto Rico.<\/p>\n
Edo and his girlfriend had been staying in the same place as a man I shall call Freddy, who works for Limelight. Freddy\u2019s version is that he turned out Edo and his girlfriend for such misdemeanors as nosing open the front gate with their (absent) host\u2019s automobile. Hard drugs also figured in Freddy\u2019s version. Edo\u2019s girlfriend claimed that Freddy had tried to run her down.<\/p>\n
Crispo, LeGeros, and Mayer left Edo and went to Limelight looking for Freddy. According to LeGeros\u2019s confession, they intended to lure Freddy away and kill him. Freddy, who is homosexual, knew Andrew Crispo, and he considered Bernard LeGeros a friend. \u201cThey asked me to go with them to a party over the George Washington Bridge,\u201d Freddy said. \u201cThey asked three or four times. I said I was too busy.\u201d At about 3:45 a.m., after Freddy declined for the last time, LeGeros and Mayer left Limelight.<\/p>\n
According to Murray Sprung, LeGeros\u2019s lawyer, Crispo met Eigil Vesti in the Hellfire. \u201cEigil would have no reason to be suspicious of a man like Andrew Crispo,\u201d said Jess. \u201cHe would have trusted him.\u201d (Crispo denied that he met Eigil at the Hellfire. \u201cPeople like to fantasize,\u201d he complained.) Nevertheless, LeGeros and Mayer say they found Eigil with Crispo in the West 12th Street apartment. Among the reassuringly cluttered elegance \u2014 the head of Antinous, the black sculptured tigers, the lustrous Art Deco pieces by Jean Dunand, Lalique, Jean-Michel Frank \u2014 Crispo and Vesti used cocaine, and Vesti was subjected to violent sex.<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/2971c7854cb59964f433c2ba2513af5479-IMG-7333.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
Photo: New York Magazine\n <\/p>\n
At five in the morning, Billy Mayer, who is straight, was driven home by LeGeros. Bernard then drove to his apartment, picked up his rifle, which is an unimpressive .22 (\u201cIt has a plastic butt,\u201d Mayer said. \u201cIt floats!\u201d), rejoined Crispo and Vesti, and drove them to Rockland County. There is a poignant moment in the LeGeros confession. It seems that Eigil had aroused himself, and looked at the wintry hills. \u201cMaybe I should have brought my skis,\u201d he said. \u201cThis is nice up here. Where are we going?\u201d<\/p>\n
According to Bernard LeGeros, Crispo said, \u201cYou\u2019re going to Norway in a fucking box.\u201d It was then that LeGeros realized the game was being played to the end at last.<\/p>\n
Outside the pre-Revolutionary smokehouse, there was a moment (again according to LeGeros) when the abused youth almost saved his life; he grabbed the .22-caliber rifle and asked what was to prevent him from killing Andrew Crispo. LeGeros claims he wrestled the weapon from Vesti. According to LeGeros\u2019s original statement, it was he who fired two shots into the back of Vesti\u2019s head. This was soon after daybreak. It was, in LeGeros\u2019s telling, Crispo who vented a necrophiliac urge, and it was Crispo who tucked the tongue into the mouth and zippered the mask. They piled twigs and a screen door on the body, doused the whole with gasoline, and lit a pyre. Bernard LeGeros found things had gone as easy as pie. And Andrew Crispo? He told me he would \u201cneither confirm nor deny\u201d his presence at Tomkins Cove. Indeed, his lawyers would not let him discuss the case at all.<\/p>\n
The next morning, Billy Mayer, who thought the Limelight episode had been a piece of dark make-believe, called Crispo. \u201cI\u2019ve got hold of a gun,\u201d Mayer joked. \u201cI\u2019m going to kill Freddy!\u201d Crispo, he said, got \u201cpanicky.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bernard, also that morning, told his brother, David, that he had killed a man. He added that he had drunk the victim\u2019s blood. Others to whom he bragged included Mayer, who had heard Bernard\u2019s stories before. \u201cI just thought, Wow! This one is a doozy!\u201d he said. LeGeros was believed by nobody \u2014 until poster-portraits of Eigil Vesti sprouted throughout Manhattan, put up by Dallas Boesendahl and a group that included the Norwegian\u2019s two sisters. That changed people\u2019s minds.<\/p>\n
Bernard LeGeros now angrily denies the story of the blood. And thus we find ourselves in a half-lit landscape. Andrew Crispo and Bernard LeGeros both told many tales, and Crispo has been especially prolific, graphic, and gleeful; but just which are cold truths and which are gross and feverish images magnified by the crystal lens of cocaine? Police dug up portions of Crispo\u2019s horse farm and the lawn of the Southampton house, and investigated the cesspools, but found no corpses. It is possible that further evidence of lethal savagery will surface, but it is also possible that we are dealing with empty, drug-generated imaginings.<\/p>\n
In which case, the fantasies took real form only once: in the brutal and gruesome sequence of events that culminated in the murder of Eigil Vesti. For his crime, Bernard LeGeros awaits trial, while Andrew Crispo \u2014 whose case of criminal tax evasion may be resolved shortly \u2014 awaits developments. \u201cI am now oblivious to bad publicity,\u201d Andrew Crispo told me at one point. But at our last meeting, he said, \u201cI had to shut down my gallery today,\u201d adding that he had closed off his Southampton front drive to discourage gawkers. A statement he scrawled on a sheet of yellow legal paper ends: \u201cI try not to think about the besmirching gossip and headlines because when I do I get a feeling of hopelessness which is unimaginable. Even after I\u2019m vindicated what will be left?\u201d<\/p>\n
But as he lighted yet another cigarette \u2014 Crispo has forsworn cocaine \u2014 he talked of the \u201cwonderful marble head\u201d by Brancusi he was selling. Spirit lifting, he spoke of plans to reenter the art business, dealing from a warehouse, and showed me the May 30 letter he had received from the Museum of Modern Art, thanking him for being among those dealers who had helped with \u201cre-evaluating our Painting and Sculpture Collection.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve closed the books on the first 40 years of my life,\u201d Andrew Crispo concluded, with a blitheness that was almost terrifying. \u201cI am a satisfied dreamer. I am totally at peace with myself.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n Editor\u2019s note: As we digitized this story, we made one change throughout: Bernard LeGeros confirmed to Rachel Corbett that his surname, spelled \u201cLe Geros\u201d in the original, is usually rendered without the space.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Editor\u2019s note: This story first appeared in the issue of New York dated June 24, 1985. We\u2019re republishing…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":210142,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[25189,1149,83187,303,83186,75,84,83,9,24,63,6375],"class_list":["post-210141","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-manhattan","tag-andrew-crispo","tag-art","tag-bernard-legeros","tag-crime","tag-from-the-archives","tag-manhattan","tag-manhattan-headlines","tag-manhattan-news","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-true-crime"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210141","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=210141"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210141\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/210142"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=210141"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=210141"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=210141"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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