Judd Tully’s diary of Al Taubman’s days in court.

At the end of the most important art world trial in memory neither money nor influence could buy a not-guilty verdict for A. Alfred Taubman, the former chairman of Sotheby’s and hero of one of America’s great Horatio Alger-type success stories. It wasn’t the testimonies of star government witnesses Christopher M. Davidge or Diana D. Brooks during the three-week-long trial that led the jury, after 10 hours of deliberation, to return a unanimous guilty verdict on a single count of conspiring to fix the auction commission rates charged to sellers. It was the damning paper trail, beginning in 1993, which linked the two houses and their “on high” chairmen, Taubman and indicted co-conspirator Anthony J. Tennant, that convinced the jury beyond a reasonable doubt. Tennant, as a U.K. subject, remains in Britain, beyond the reach of American courts, while Taubman, to be sentenced on April 2, faces up to three years in prison and enormous fines. As the art world watched and waited and debated while this odyssey of investigation and prosecution unfolded over four years, it seems appropriate to give our readers an impressionistic daily chronicle of United States of America v. A. Alfred Taubman.

November 8 – United jurors of Benetton
The first bloc of 24 prospective jurors files into the high-ceilinged, wood-paneled, but otherwise antiseptic courtroom of Judge George B. Daniels. Both warm and direct with the jury pool, Daniels quickly explains that the case is about the auction business and involves the sale of expensive works of art, jewelry and fine furniture. More important, he says, the case is about allegations that between April 1993 and “at least till December 1999” the former chairmen of Christie’s and Sotheby’s, Anthony J. Tennant and A. Alfred Taubman, respectively, “conspired to fix commission rates to sellers-that’s basically the substance of the charge.” Daniels takes pains to emphasize to the prospective jurors that the prosecution has to prove the guilt of the defendant “beyond a reasonable doubt,” but doesn’t go into detail in explaining Tennant’s absence. “He’s not here” is all the judge says.

The names of the first prospective jurors are read out and they take their assigned seats, in identical rows of brown leatherette-upholstered armchairs, decidedly more comfortable than the 16 rows of hard wooden benches in the spectator and press section. Resembling a “United Colors of Benetton” ad, or the number 7 train to Flushing at rush hour, the potential jurors are primarily Asian, African-American and Hispanic, with a smattering of mostly better-dressed, older white men and women. Surprisingly, when the judge polls this first batch of potential jurors as to whether they have ever heard of Christie’s and Sotheby’s, virtually all raise their hands, a notable affirmation of the brand power of both auction houses. Seven have heard of Taubman before, and three have heard of Tennant. Two have worked for or done business with Christie’s or Sotheby’s, and the majority of the two dozen candidates have read or heard about the case. It will ultimately take three batteries of 24 potential jurors before both prosecution and defense are satisfied with the final cut of 12 and 4 alternates.

One of the impaneled jurors is a young Westchester resident, a recent graduate of the City University of New York who has just secured an entry-level job at Lord & Taylor. It is hard to miss the hardback copy of celebrity lawyer and Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz’s Chutzpah nestled in his lap. An African-American woman from the Bronx, wearing a gray turban, gold hoop earrings and a bright red top, says she has a high school diploma and five children ages 31 to 40, and works as a home health aide, assisting an elderly Alzheimer’s patient. A ruggedly handsome, salt-and-pepper-haired letter carrier, wearing a tight V-necked T-shirt and faded blue jeans, tells Daniels that he hangs out with a lot of policemen and has a lawyer friend. “What kind of law does he practice?” asks Daniels. “He does everything-he got me out of two divorces,” the prospective juror says, triggering laughter throughout the courtroom. (The letter carrier, Mike D’Angelo, will ultimately be selected jury foreman.) A heavy-set. thirtysomething African-American gentleman, also from the Bronx and wearing a blue windbreaker and chinos, tells the judge he works as a station agent for the Metropolitan Transportation Authoritv and had not heard about this case When he tells the judge that it would be a hardship if he were picked for the jury since he’d lose out on needed overtime, Daniels queries, “Are you thinking about Christmas?” “No, I’m thinking about next month.”

Seated at the defense table on the opposite side of the court. room, defendant Taubman follows the proceedings with a Buddha-like and slightly bemused expression. Handsomelytai lored in a dark, three-piece suit, the brawny, 76-year-old businessman, who stepped down as Sotheby’s chairman in early 2000 but remains the firm’s majority shareholder, fiddles with his glasses or tugs at a gold cufflink on his crisply starched shirt during the arduous hours of jury selection. While he is wearing a black headset that amplifies the potential jurors’ answers and the judge’s questions, it is hard to tell if the hearing impaired owner of Sotheby’s is paying much attention. Going by the look on his face, one might well imagine him listening to an FM classical music station.

November 9 – “A simple case of price-fixing”
As the second batch of potential jurors files into the jury box, Judge Daniels begins the singsong litany of ques. tions: Have you or any of your family members ever been a victim of a crime, or accused of one? Have you ever been involved in a lawsuit? The nitty-gritty of urban life becomes apparent as most of the jury pool reports incidences of car theft, mugging, credit card fraud and, in one instance, rape. Responding to another question, several potential jurors say they couldn’t deliberate solely on the evidence because they have relatives who were unfairly prosecuted for various crimes and don’t believe in the justice system. “I don’t think my son got a fair trial,” says one woman, breaking into tears at the rec ollection. At times resembling a high-school civics teacher, Daniels defends the American system, saying, “This is the best one there is”-and reminds the jury pool, T’ll be the judge of the law, and you’ll be the judge of the facts.”

A potential juror says that he has a friend who was convicted of throwing a chair in a doctor’s office; a young fourth-grace teacher from the South Bronx pleads hardship, saying, dents cannot afford not to have a teacher for the next month.” The sad and the absurd come together in these little tales of everyday woe, while freezing drafts and numbing sounds emanate from the jumbo air conditioner hung in a niche below the tall window on the jury side of the courtroom. As the long day progresses, potential jurors and spectators nod off into brief slumbers. For whatever reason, it seems the better educated and credentialed are consistently rejected from the potential jury. As Daniels reads off a list of names of those who can leave the courtroom, the number of men in suits gets noticeably smaller.

Both the defense and the prosecution have retained jury-selection experts, who read body language and other indicators of who might be sympathetic to their side. For Taubman’s legal dream team, a blond-haired female consultant in a tan pants suit scrutinizes the assembled jurors, jotting notes. All the while, the freshly barbered defendant puts on his own display of body language, rubbing his clean-shaven chin, adjusting his glasses, taking them off, putting them back on and, for the most part, just staring. During one break, Taubman stands up, leans over the polished wood railing dividing the spectator section and the defense table and busses his daughter’s cheeks with gusto. Watching him glow, it is hard to imagine that he’s on trial, facing possible jail time and huge criminal fines.

Later, Christopher Tennyson, Taubman’s longtime PR man from Grand Rapids, Michigan, explains that the former chairman’s daughter, Gayle Kalisman, will be attending the trial on a daily basis, but that his two sons, Robert and William, will not be on hand since they’re busy running the family business. More surprising, Tennyson says that Judith Taubman, Alfred’s glamorous and jet-setting second wife, will not be there to stand by her man. If she did, Tennyson says, they’d have nothing to talk about but the trial once they were home, and that would cause unnecessary emotional wear and tear. But between the lines one can also read that the sight of the customarily bejeweled and impeccably soignée former Miss Israel seated behind the defendant could have a potentially negative impact on the jury. You certainly don’t get that impression from Judy’s stepdaughter Gayle Kalisman, however, plain as day in a ponytail, simple gold hoop earrings and conservative dark suit. At another recess, Taubman is overheard commenting to one of his lawyers (numbering eight, if you include the posse of junior associates), presumably about the potential jurors, “This is a rough group to work with.”

By lunchtime the jury of 12 plus 4 alternates has been chosen, and Daniels queries both defense and prosecution about how long their opening arguments will take. The trial has begun.

Government prosecutor John G. Greene introduces himself to the members of the jury and quickly tells them that this is a “simple case of price-fixing.” In just over 40 minutes, Greene lays out the government’s case in a stolid, matter-of-fact style with few, if any, rhetorical flourishes. Short and stocky with close-cropped gray hair, Greene appears the very epitome of the dogged bureaucrat, unemotionally hammering away at the basic story of the auction house price-fixing conspiracy. Looking at him, you think this is probably a guy with an Oldsmobile and a comfortable but not-too-posh house in the suburbs, working toward his government pension. When he gives a short discourse on the history of the fine art auction business, even the noise of the air conditioner can’t keep one juror fully awake. Greene plods on about commission rates, the meanings of “hammer price” and “guarantees,” and how the auction business slowed dramatically in the early 1990s after the boom years of the ’80s. Actually, it’s a decent primer on the business.

With wire-service-type bullet points, Greene introduces Taubman’s background in shopping malls and real estate before he acquired Sotheby’s in 1983. Greene portrays Taubman hustling over to England in his private jet for tête-à-têtes in his London flat with Tennant, the former chairman of Guinness, shortly after Tennant took over the reins of Christie’s board in 1993. After laying out the firms’ conspiracy to set virtually identical sellers’ commissions, Greene admits to the jury, “There are no innocent third parties the government can call on. The government has to call on people who were involved in the price-fixing.” He explains that Taubman and Tennant were the architects of the conspiracy and that Diana D. (“Dede”) Brooks and Christopher Davidge implemented it.

Next, it is the turn of defense attorney Robert B. Fiske Jr. He ambles up to the small rostrum adjacent to the jury box and introduces himself in a folksy manner that belies his impeccable white-shoe credentials. “My name is Bob Fiske and it’s my privilege to represent Mr. Taubman.” A former federal prosecutor probably most noted for his tenure as independent counsel for the Whitewater investigation (he was dumped by conservatives in favor of the more hard-line Kenneth Starr), Fiske has the voice of an old-time radio announcer. He tells the jury that there are two very different versions of the facts of the case, and “you’re about to hear our version.” Pausing for a second, Fiske declares, “Ladies and gentlemen, Alfred Taubman is an innocent man. These charges against him are false. The crime was committed by the two principal witnesses …. Christopher Davidge is being paid $8 million to be a witness in this case. Diana D. Brooks has repeatedly lied and is testifying because it’s the only way she can stay out of jail…. The prosecution has a heavy burden to create guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Fiske draws a heartwarming portrait of his rags-to-riches client and jabs away at Brooks’s and Davidge’s lack of credibil-ity, spending a chunk of his 40-minute performance crucifying Davidge and his conspicuously generous severance deal with Christie’s, a package Fiske claims is the sole reason the former chief executive, who has conditional amnesty, is testifying on the government’s behalf. Assailing Brooks’s motives, Fiske argues-using one of the more memorable lines of the trial-that her testimony against Taubman is her “get-out-of-jail-free card.” That part sounds convincing, and Fiske is certainly far more polished and nuanced in his initial foray than the prose-cution. What isn’t so clear is the “other version” Fiske is offering. Namely, that Sir Anthony had sought out not Taubman but Sotheby’s then board member Tommy Camoys (Lord, to you, now on the board of Phillips, de Pury & Luxembourg, to discuss the concept of non-negotiable sellers’ commissions, and that the conspiracy had taken off from there. It sounds like Camoys is about to become part of what the criminal defense lawyers on the TV series The Practice like to call “Plan B”-the introduction of an alternative (indeed, often downright fantastical) bad guy to trouble the jurors’ thinking and encourage their doubts.

The day ends with the first witness called by the prosecu-tion, Christie’s deputy chairman A.N.G. (Noël) Annesley, who pretty much delivers another lecture on the auction business but in an almost impenetrable upper-class English accent. There is some serious snoozing now in the jury box. It’s obvious that there’s unlikely to be any real action until Star Witness Numero Uno, Davidge, is called.

November 13 – Sir A., Anthony, Tony, ****
There’s an early morning logjam in front of the cordoned-off federal courthouse in Foley Square, as jurors, attorneys, press and the rest queue up for the security check.

Everyone’s photo ID, briefcases and bags have already been scrutinized outdoors by two federal marshals politely manning a table on the plaza in front of the gold-pyramid-capped court-house. Several submachine-gun-toting feds in jaunty blue jumpsuits and bulletproof vests patrol the steps. Security has been tightened (again) on the heels of the American Airlines Flight 587 crash in Queens the previous day. Looking around for familiar faces, I spot one of Greene’s associate prosecutors, Philip Cody, smoking a cigarette at the top of the wide granite stairs. Tall, thin and gaunt as a prisoner in solitary, Cody seems like some Dickensian character, but one chiseled from a Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post illustration. Clinking sounds divert my gaze and a very short, bowlegged marshal in blue T-shirt and baggy cargo pants cheerfully passes by, shouldering heavy strands of chains and attached handcuffs. I’m sure that at any moment now Gene Wilder will pop out in some Frankenstein routine. It takes 45 minutes to get through security, followed by yet another line to check cell phones.

Prosecutor Greene calls his second witness, Nancy Straetmans, a former appointment scheduler for Taubman between 1991 and 1995 at the Bloomfield Hills headquarters of the Taubman Company, who currently works in public relations there. Her twangy midwestern accent is a welcome relief from Noël Annesley’s plummy tones, and her testimony is-unexpectedly-riveting. As central keeper of Taubman’s appointment book, Straetmans’s job was to make sure the busy chairman “was where he was supposed to be,” which meant just about anywhere in the world. Details of Taubman’s wealth (currently pegged at around $700 million) and lavish lifestyle tumble out. There’s his private Gulfstream G4 jet, his apartment at 834 Fifth Avenue and other residences in Michigan, Southampton, Palm Beach and the aforementioned flat in London. But Straetmans, it turns out, was just one of a team of handlers in Bloomfield Hills and New York who tracked Taubman’s schedule. The number of handlers ranged from four to seven, Straetmans says.

In addition to week-at-a-glance records, the staff produced “flight analysis” reports that tracked the whereabouts of the G4, a luxury business jet Taubman had bought from longtime friend, mentor and business associate Max Fisher, and coordinated Taubman’s multiple social events with his wife’s assistant. When Patricia Jannaco, part of Greene’s prosecution team, asks why Taubman needed so many handlers, Straetmans replies that her former boss “was a very busy man. ” She attributes this to a high volume of mail and tel phone calls, most of them involving charitable requests and social invitations, not to mention Taubman’s close monitoring of the Sotheby’s and Christie’s auction catalogues that arrived in droves. At the end of the year, Straetmans collected all of the calendars and itineraries and “sent them to archives ” Unlike Richard Nixon’s hapless secretary, Rose Mary Woods, this one, it seems, didn’t erase anything.

Some of the jurors sit gaping at the description of Taubman’s routine of home administered haircuts, massages, manicures and pedicures, as well as his residence-hoppings via private jet. The earlier remark by one juror about his concern over losing needed overtime if chosen for the trial returns inescapably to mind. The social drama that is this trial’s play within a play becomes even more pronounced when I look at Jannaco’s underwhelming attire, a nubby-textured, pale-blue suit. Like her boss Greene and associate Cody, the prosecutor isn’t exactly W magazine material.

The reason for the close scrutiny of Straetmans’s duties as keeper of the chairman’s whereabouts becomes dazzlingly clear when the prosecutor introduces into evidence a group of the diary and itinerary entries. One of the entries is projected on the courtroom screen as well as on an adjacent monitor: “8:30 a.m. Thursday, April 1, 1993, Breakfast w/ Sir Anthony Tenant [sic] ® 834 Apt.” The handwritten entry is bracketed by the word CONFIDENTIAL above and below. Oops. This doesn’t look good.

Before the day ends, the prosecution will come up with a dozen alleged meetings between Taubman and Tennant in New York and London from February 3, 1993, to October 31, 1996. Tennant was variously noted in different calendars, according to the prosecution, as Sir A, A. Tennant, Anthony, Tony and, in one instance, simply ****. Straetmans is asked to identify the week-at-a-glance entries and has trouble recognizing the handwriting in some of the spiral-bound books, even with the help of her reading glasses, pointing out that other handlers had made the notations. Flustered, she says, “There’s no way to tell who prepared it.” Faced with one handwritten entry she recognizes as her own that simply records, “Breakfast mtg at 834,” Straetmans observes, “There’s no way to tell who was meeting.” Another early morning entry, from April 30, 1993, notes, “Breakfast w/ gentleman at London.

As the day wears on, it becomes rather clear that these seemingly incriminating calendar entries could turn out to be the prosecution’s key evidence, placing the two men together in the critical, conspiracy-marinating period between 1993 and 1995. The government seems to be saying, Hey, these were masked entries to disguise the fact that Taubman was meeting regularly with his ostensible competitor who was in reality his co-conspirator-and hence the need for the “gentleman” euphemism in the appointment book. (Later, the defense will establish that Taubman hadn’t asked for code names for Sir Anthony in the calendars.)

Through much of the laborious testimony, Taubman sits at the defense table, leaning back in his chair with his beefy arms folded across his chest, inscrutable. He never exhibits any emotion. He just sits there, vaguely smiling, as if stranded at a long evening at the opera.

During a late-morning recess I am introduced to the silver haired Australian screenwriter Michael Thomas who is soaking up some of the local color for a projected HBO film on Brooks and Company that will star Sigourney Weaver, who is also serving as executive producer. Bel Air, California-based independent producer and former Sotheby’s exec David Yudain cooked up the project and retained Thomas, whose screenwriting credits include Scandal (on the sex-and-spies John Profumo affair) and Indecent Exposure, based on the book on Hollywood mogul-turned-crook David Begelman.

In the afternoon, Straetmans is led through cross-examination by Scott W. Muller, the intense “second seat” on Taubman’s defense team, whose delivery mimics machine-gun fire. At various points, Judge Daniels tells Muller to slow down. When asked to explain all the crossed-out, erased and otherwise amended entries that pepper many of the calendar entries, Straetmans sheepishly answers, “We didn’t have e-mail at that time.”

Straetmans is followed on the stand by Melinda Marcuse, Taubman’s icy and elegant longtime executive assistant in New York. After some discussion as to whether she should be named as a hostile witness-Marcuse has been called by the prosecu-tion-the judge decides to let her testify without that prejudicial label. Unlike Straetmans, Marcuse still works directly for Taubman, and her manner is exponentially tougher. She describes her job this way: “I was hired to cover him when he was in New York. I’d help him get through his day.” Marcuse recalls how Tennant had called her in New York to inquire if Taubman would have any time to get together in London, where he was due for a Sotheby’s board meeting. Rattled by the prosecutor, who claims that she was trying to keep the meetings between the two chairmen secret by her allegedly veiled diary entries, Marcuse exclaims, “There’s no science to my little notations. It’s my job to protect Mr. Taubman’s privacy.” Asked if Taubman ever referred to Sir Anthony as “Tony,” the name written in a calendar entry for November 28, 1994, Marcuse replies, “I don’t recall.” That’s similar to the answer she gives about the mysterious four asterisks the prosecution claims are a coded reference to Tennant: “I don’t know what they meant,” Marcuse says. By the sound of it, Marcuse seems to equate any mention of “Sir A” or “Tony” or “the gentleman” with acknowledging the devil himself, and appears hesitant to confirm that it was Tennant. The prosecution scores points during these ugly little exchanges.

Marcuse ends this marathon day by describing a meeting at Taubman’s offices in New York between her boss and Dede Brooks, which took place not long after Marcuse began working for the Sotheby’s chairman in late March 1993. Brooks, according to Marcuse, dictated to her several pages of notes concerning various single-owner sales that had taken place the previous year at both Sotheby’s and Christie’s, including the names of the well-heeled consignors and the favorable terms they were given (guarantees and so-called non-recourse loans, a form of guarantee that does not require disclosure). “I was asked to take down the information,” says Marcuse, peering down with her fine, Camay-smooth features. She says she gave the list to Brooks and doesn’t know what became of it. Leaving the courtroom, I’m left tussling with the big notion that Tubman met with his counterpart, Tennant, in New York and London a dozen times between February 1993 and October 1996. That is precisely what the prosecution wants the jury to be focusing on.

November 14 – The prosecution must love this guy
Immaculateley coiffed and tailored, Christopher Davidge ambles to the witness stand in the late morning amid a great deal of buzz in the packed courtroom. Prompted by prosecutor Greene, the former Christie’s CEO testifies about the document that Marcuse described yesterday as having been dictated by Brooks. The courtroom lets out a small gasp as Davidge describes an identical list of single owner sales, their terms and conditions, that he received from Tennant in London. Gee, how did Tennant get hold of that?

I have to admit, Davidge’s an impressive witness, especially given his own ragamuffin-to-riches tale. A rebellious teenage dropout, he worked as a street vendor in London before join-ing, at the age of 20, a book-publishing subsidiary of Christie’s, where his father, mother and grandfather had all held rather “downstairs” jobs. But Davidge managed to work his way up the blue-blooded ladder at the auction house, eventually attaining the top position in 1993. He is as much a dandy as the American actor George Hamilton-all that’s missing is about half a foot in height and the permanent tan.

Davidge’s testimony again raises the cold, gray specter of Sir Anthony Tennant, Taubman’s indicted co-conspirator, who chose not to come to America to defend himself. He was under no legal pressure to do so, since antitrust in the U.K. applies only to corporations and not individuals. So here we are, in early 1993, with the new CEO greeting the new chairman who, when he was chairman of Guinness between 1989 and 1992, had electrified profits by chatting up a number of the brewer’s rivals. As Davidge puts it, Sir Anthony “wanted to take on a far more executive position than Lord Carrington,” the previous Christie’s chairman and former British Foreign Secretary and Secretary General of NATO, and decided straightaway that Christie’s wasn’t charging high enough commission rates.

Davidge continues his fascinating narrative by describing Tenant’s account in April 1993 of his first meeting with rival Taubman, which had taken place earlier that year: The Sotheby’s chairman congratulated Sir Anthony and, given their similar corporate backgrounds and focus on the bottom line, didn’t mind telling his British counterpart that Christie’s wasn’t making “sensible” deals, especially in the area of non-recourse loans. Davidge then relates how he was given the list written in the schoolgirl penmanship of Taubman assistant Melinda Marcuse. He says that Sir Anthony expressed concern to him that “we had kept Sotheby’s at arm’s length,” and suggested that by establishing a closer relationship the two firms could eliminate “a level of competition that was unnecessary.” Davidge recounts for prosecutor Greene how he took the list and vetted its accuracy, finding many mistakes, and made his own corrections like a schoolteacher grading homework. Since Sir Anthony said he was going to meet with Taubman again to discuss a basketful of issues, ranging from the poaching of rival staff members to “spoiling tactics” on already-won con-signments, Davidge says that he wanted to make sure his new boss had the correct information.

Continuing his testimony, Davidge says that Sir Anthony had a face-to-face with Taubman on April 30, 1993-as Taubman’s appointment book indicates (“Breakfast w/ gentleman at London flat”-and afterwards sent him a note saying, “I had a good breakfast. I will make a date in your diary, to give you thorough debrief. I hope things are going well with you.” At that debriefing, Davidge testifies, Sir Anthony presented him with a handwritten, three-page memo, about which he says, “My understanding is that] it was an agreement between Alfred Taubman and Anthony Tennant.” Davidge goes on to describe the compactly written document, which he turned over to government prosecutors as part of his conditional amnesty, as “just the start of cooperating on a more extended, detailed basis.” The memo contains an enumeration of steps, agreed upon by Taubman and Tennant, to eliminate unnecessary competition between the two houses. The critical paragraph reads: “As from Sept 93 we will give no straight guarantees, make no advances on single lots, make no loans below LIBOR [the London Interbank Offered Rate and offer trade vendors nothing better than 5% with vendor paying his own insurance. We will not offer more than 90 days credit to trade buyers.” (With “straight guarantees,” the auction house forgoes taking any percentage of the hammer price from the seller once the guaranteed price is reached.)

Admitted into evidence as Exhibit 48, the memo is, in effect, the Rosetta Stone of the government’s case. Notably, however, there’s no mention of a vendor’s commission agreement-a point that will later be hammered home by Taubman’s attor-neys. The document ends with the spooky instruction from Sir Anthony, “He and I should now withdraw but stay in touch with a view to seeing how things go and intervening from on high if need be.” Who is “he”?

Davidge’s next caper involved his first face-to-face encounter with Dede Brooks in the private dining room of a London hotel. He describes to the attentive courtroom how both parties were quite nervous at the meeting. It sounds, perhaps fittingly, very much like a first date.

Davidge displays exemplary courtesy when prosecutor Greene asks him to explain such insider auction terms as “guarantee,” “non-recourse loan” and “grandfather lists” to the jury of four women and eight men. He deliberately turns left to face the jury and patiently defines the terms in a clipped and soft-spoken English accent that, even to accustomed ears, is sometimes hard to decipher, especially in the cavernous courtroom. The court stenographer has a hard time transcribing Davidge’s words, often interrupting him to repeat a word or phrase.

In describing his “8 to 10” meetings with Brooks, Davidge claims, “Neither of us disguised the meetings. Her office knew she was meeting with me and my office knew I was meeting her.” Davidge relates how he even had a special phrase for his fellow schemer when he spoke with his secretary: “I need to speak to my ‘special friend’ today, if possible.”

It appears that Davidge is trying to skewer Taubman whenever possible, recalling to the court that Brooks once told him that “Mr. Taubman was responsible for all major financial deci-sions.” The prosecution must love this guy.

Throughout Davidge’s testimony-indeed, since the beginning of the trial-Shirley and Andrea Shepard, a mother-daughter court-artist team, occupy the front row of the spectator section, sketching cameo portraits of Taubman and his defense team, the witnesses, the judge and the prose-cution. The prodigiously executed pastels on large sheets of brown paper are, say the Shepards, for the exclusive use of local NBC affiliate Channel 4 and the tabloid New York Post (whose vivid columnist, Steve Dunleavy, has come to Taubman’s defense and will soon make more than one meal out of Brooks’s testimony). “We don’t work for the Daily News,” huffs Shirley, the elder Shepard, outfitted in black leather jeans and a brightly colored scarf tied aviator-style around her neck. With long blond hair and long tapered fingers covered in pastel dust, the hawkeyed artist looks like a perfect pick from central casting. She and her daughter, sporting even longer blond locks and matching black leather pants and vest, pass the drawing board back and forth throughout the day, adding details to each other’s sketches in lightning-fast ges-tures. Whispering conspiratorially, Shirley confides to me, “I’ve made a career of copying all of the great Impressionist paintings of the world.”

November 15 – The golden carrot
Midway through the morning, and the grueling cross-examination of Davidge by Taubman attorney Scott Muller, I can’t help but feel a bit of compassion for the feisty stool pigeon as he sits in the witness box, an easy target for the sharpshooting litigator. Without a trace of embarrassment, Davidge matter-of-factly admits to lying to his company and its shareholders and lawyers on multiple occasions between 1995 and 2000 in order to cover up his own artful collusion with Sotheby’s Brooks in implementing new commission rates and other competition-busting provisions. Referring to Davidge’s juicy severance agreement with Christie’s, Muller thunders, “You lied to Christie’s to get that $8 million?” “That is correct,” replies Davidge, unperturbed. The Taubman attorney portrays Davidge’s campaign of serial deceptions as a desperate measure to end the bloody warfare between the two companies, whose respective bottom lines were being sucked dry by inducements granted to sellers during a difficult period in the art market. At one point in the withering cross, Davidge, sounding like a schoolboy caught red-handed trying to burn down the cafete-ria, says, “If I was asked the question [about collusion], I didn’t tell the truth.”

Despite the polite courtroom etiquette-which, for example, requires Muller, the pit bull, to ask the judge, “May I approach the witness, your honor?” each time he wants to hand Davidge a document-the smell of blood is in the air now. Davidge is here to help hang Taubman, and Muller’s job is to eviscerate the charming stoolie. Davidge masterfully-indeed, insou-ciantly-raises his interrogator’s blood pressure by exchanging barbs and generally not remembering or delaying answers to anything that could possibly help the defense.

In his testimony, Davidge discloses that before he signed his severance agreement he told Patricia Barbizet, managing director of Artemis, the holding company of Christie’s owner Francois Pinault, that there was “validity to the [antitrust] inquiries being made in the U.S.” In other words, Christie’s had advance knowledge that the collusion had taken place, yet went ahead with the agreement, even though it included specific escape clauses for Christie’s should Davidge do anything to bring the company into disrepute, such as breaching any regulatory requirement. “I told them before I entered into the agreement that I had lied,” says Davidge, unperturbed.

During these testy exchanges, defendant Taubman continues to sit impassively at the crowded defense table, looking straight ahead or gazing at the desk-mounted computer screen that scrolls the blazing cross-examination as fast as the court stenographer can type it. In front of him is a plastic bottle of Evian, while his lead attorney, Fiske, prefers Poland Spring. The prosecution, on the other hand, dutifully drinks out of styrofoam cups containing plain old New York tap water, served from bronze-colored plastic pitchers. The jury, of course, has to wait for a recess to get refreshment.

The trial is rife with signifiers of money and class. Davidge, as the evidence makes clear, is now a wealthy man. In addition to his £5 million ($8.1 million) severance deal with Christie’s (the final installment of which he received in December, after giving his testimony), he also has the benefit of an initial pension payment of $1.6 million, which is to be followed by annual payments of $339,000 for the rest of his life. On top of that, he has a two-year consultancy arrangement with Christie’s holding company Artemis, paying him £450,000 ($641,000) annually. Not too shabby. And something Muller keeps pounding away at, trying to make the jury believe that this big carrot is the reason Davidge is sticking it to Taubman.

Of course, Davidge is still a relative pauper compared with Taubman, and he appears to have won the hearts and minds of the prole jury. Whether coached by the prosecution or just operating from his own acute social radar-Davidge, let’s not forget, is a lower-middle-class boy whose climb at Christie’s was dogged by his origins-the former chief executive takes pains to look directly at the jurors, smile and crack little jokes between his shocking admissions of wicked untruthfulness.

When Muller tries to cast Davidge down into Hell by saying he lied to Christie’s outside counsel while looking straight into his eyes, Davidge deadpans: “I don’t remember looking him in the eyes.”

Late in the day, spectators get a surprise when Sigourney Weaver shows up in the courtroom. During a brief recess, the actress looks exquisitely casual in a pale-blue leather coat, black blouse and jeans. If the HBO project goes well, she will trade in her natural dark brown, shoulder-length hair for a blond wig and fuchsia-colored duds to play Brooks.

Some of the lesser-known aspects of the auction business come to light as Davidge answers more questions about the scope of the collusion. Besides the no-win strategy of offering big consignors zero-commission rates, the houses were also getting hammered prior to the collusion by so-called introductory commissions. These were awarded when a third party introduced a seller to the auction house and received a fee in return, which was taken from the buyer’s premium. Rates varied between the U.S. and the U.K. but could be as much as 3 percent of the premium.

Considering how cutthroat the auction business appears after Davidge describes it for two days straight, it’s a wonder any of the houses can make a profit. When Sotheby’s announced its third-quarter results earlier in the week (on November 13), the company showed a net loss of $33.1 million. The news all around seems to be getting worse for Taubman.

November 16 – “We did not discuss ‘we'”
As courtroom spectators settle into their seats, several journalists debate whether Davidge is wearing the same tailored suit for his third day of testimony. One thing is certain: He’s definitely wearing a different tie, this one silver-blue. The morning interrogation gets under way with Muller’s relentless questioning, of which everyone, not least the star government witness, seems to be tiring. As Muller hovers over a document adjacent to his microphone-equipped podium, I’m close enough to hear the litigator sniff loudly like a bloodhound on the trail. The document in question is Exhibit 48, the key, three-page memo given to Davidge by Tennant, allegedly outlining the illegal alliance that was hammered out by Sir Anthony and Taubman during their April 30, 1993, breakfast meeting, and subsequently delegated to their respective subordinates to carry out.

Muller doggedly undercuts Davidge’s account of the memo by pointing out a long section the lawyer says is the only part of the memo that could possibly be interpreted as coming from discussions with Taubman. This section-a list of steps that the reiterated pronoun “we” have taken or will take-calls for an end to disparaging remarks made by the firms about each other, described as “knocking comments to the media, in proposals or in comment to interested individuals.” The section also calls for a ceasefire in making boastful comments about market share, in poaching employees and interfering with consignment contracts from sellers who have already signed agreements. There’s language about limiting the amount of introductory commissions, not extending credit to dealers beyond 90 days and eliminating advances on single-lot consignments as well as “straight guarantees,” in which there is no upside once the agreed-upon amount has been reached. Muller points out to the jury that there’s no mention in this portion of the memo about fixing sellers’ commission rates, which, after all, is what his client is charged with conspiring on.

Muller asks Davidge whether Tennant ever told him who the source was for the points in the memo. After some sparring, Davidge declares that “Mr. Taubman was the source of the information,” and that Tennant told him that the entire memo represented a conversation between the two chairmen. (I always thought that a defense lawyer isn’t supposed to ask a question if the answer will hurt his client. Go figure.) To Muller’s frustration, Davidge tells him that, if he doubts his word, the person he really needs to talk to is the gray ghost, Sir Anthony Tennant.

The harder Muller tries to trap Davidge, the more the witness wriggles out of the trap or simply stonewalls with the reply “I don’t understand the question.” When Muller asks about the significance of red check marks in the quoted para-graph, Davidge says, “I don’t remember what it referred to.” Throughout the exchange, Davidge sounds absolutely sure about one thing, the “veracity” of the memo. Muller pushes on, demanding that Davidge explain how he knows whom the ubiquitous “we” refers to. “We did not discuss ‘we,” Davidge says, and then, moments later, “Anthony Tennant advised me [the word referred to] Mr. Taubman.” Finally, as if worn down by the wordplay and anxious to get on with his life in Bombay and London with his wife, Davidge relents slightly when asked how he could be sure that what Tennant wrote was true: “I can’t know for sure, no.”

As Muller leads Davidge through the alleged agreement between the two rivals to stop giving interest-free advances to valued clients by September 1993, he brings up the $12 million interest-free advance Christie’s gave the Jacques Koerfer estate, one of the auction house’s richest clients, that December, after the supposed agreement was set to begin. “You competed your brains out [with Sotheby’s], didn’t you?” Muller challenges. “I wouldn’t use that expression,” answers Davidge dryly, once again triggering laughter in the court-room-and in the jury box.

When Muller moves on to the issue of extending credit terms to dealers beyond 90 days as outlined in the memo, Davidge characterizes the practice as “an unavoidable fact of life.” Indeed.

Toward the end of the afternoon, prime jury-snoozing time, Muller grills Davidge about Lord Camoys, the British banker who joined Sotheby’s board in 1995. Camoys, you will recall-as Muller no doubt hopes the jury will too-is the defense’s alternate lead conspirator to fix prices. Muller tries to play up Camoys’s old-boy credentials by mentioning that he and Tennant belong to the same London club, Boodles. He asks Davidge, “He was well-known in England as Lord Chamberlain to the Queen?” “That wouldn’t make him very known,” answers Davidge, who’s obviously painfully familiar with English titles.

Muller throws out one last question for the day, and it hangs in the air, open to interpretation: “Is it true that in 1995 the change in vendor’s commission was the single most significant decision that you had proposed in your 30 years at Christie’s?” “That’s correct,” replies Davidge. I wonder what Taubman will answer if he’s ever asked the same question about his 17 years at Sotheby’s. Davidge has been a spectacular witness for the government. It’s been another rough day for the Taubman team.

Although Davidge has been on the stand all day, Muller still has more questions, so Judge Daniels dismisses the jury for the weekend. Outside in the cool evening air, a band of paparazzi await Taubman and isn’t disappointed when he lumbers along between his defense team, daughter and son-in-law. His shiny black Range Rover with Michigan plates is waiting at the curb. The flashes pop and Taubman and company go on their way. Moments later, another group descends the courthouse steps, led by the tall, gaunt Dede Brooks, bookended by prosecutor Jannaco and several other members of the government team. Brooks has been waiting at the courthouse to begin her testi-mony, but fellow witness and conspirator Davidge has hogged another day in the limelight.

November 19 – The visitor from the convent
Davidge takes the stand for this fourth and final day of testimony looking as jaunty as ever. Attorney Muller has dropped his tough guy approach, and the two are ever so civil to each other, although the animosity between them remains obvious. After more testimony about Davidge’s exchange of “grandfathered lists” with Brooks, which identified the top clients of each house who would be exempt from the new nonnegotiable seller’s commission rates, Davidge discloses that he didn’t follow Sir Anthony’s advice about keeping their discussions secret. “I did tell one or two other colleagues,” he notes. Muller presses him a bit, and like a soda dispenser, Davidge concedes that he told Christie’s executives Patty Hambrecht, Lord Hindlip, Christopher Burge and François Curiel that he had discussions with Brooks. (The latter three currently hold executive director positions on Christie’s board, with Hindlip as its chairman.) Davidge also says he told Hambrecht and Curiel about Tenant’s role in these competition-squelching discussions. Though it had been reported in the daily press months before the trial that Christie’s higher-ups knew about the collusion but did nothing to impede it nor attempted to blow the whistle, it’s still shocking to hear Davidge say it so casually in court. After a short recess, the government calls its next star wit-ness, Dede Brooks. For the first time, there are audible murmurs of excitement in the now crowded courtroom-not unlike the sounds you hear at an evening auction when an expensive picture appears on the turnstile.

In striking contrast to Davidge’s top-of-the-world, “you can’t touch me” appearance, Brooks looks awful. Wearing a plain charcoal-gray suit that accentuates her graying tangle of blond hair, and sporting little or no makeup or jewelry, Brooks looks like she could be visiting from a convent. Whether this is for show or not, she is a mere shell of the woman who used to ebulliently rule the auction world. As she recites her background and education (Yale in 1973, two children ages 24 and 19, joined Sotheby’s on a part-time basis October 1979), it is impossible for those of us who knew her in her glory days not to notice how broken she seems. That impression stays with me throughout the day, and by the time Brooks describes her current work in East Harlem, tutoring disadvantaged children and making plans to turn unused religious buildings there into boarding schools, I think she has been transformed into a kind of Mother Teresa.

Brooks recounts her dizzying climb to the top of Sotheby’s management, how by 1994 she owned 100,000 shares of stock in the company and had another 578,000 stock options. She estimates that those options, if she had exercised them, would at one time have been worth $35 million or $40 million, but says it would have been “a sign of disloyalty” to exercise them while she was still CEO. She recalls that her last bonus was awarded in 1998 and came to “a little over” $1.2 million.

The only time that Brooks steals a glance at her former boss and one-time mentor is when government attorney Philip Cody asks her to point out the defendant. Brooks shoots a long forefinger in Taubman’s direction and, just like in the movies, the prosecutor says, “Let the record show that the witness has pointed out the defendant.” It could have been an electrifying moment-the chairman and his protégée, who talked business on the phone numerous times every day, including weekends, and met at business meetings and gala functions all over the world for something like 17 years-finally making eye contact. But neither Brooks nor Taubman seems inclined to any interac-tion. After all, her sworn testimony as a government witness and self-admitted felon can send him to prison for three years.

Right off the bat, Brooks disputes the earlier testimony of Taubman’s executive assistant, Melinda Marcuse, who said Brooks had dictated to her a memo concerning Christie’s and Sotheby’s secret client deals involving both guarantees and non-recourse loans in early 1993. It was this memo that seems to have been the seed of the eventual conspiracy to fix non-negotiable sellers’ commissions. “Do you remember dictating the information to Ms. Marcuse?” asks the prosecutor. “No, I do not,” replies Brooks, her hands clasped, lips pursed, looking mournful and burdened.

She goes on to describe a subsequent one-on-one meeting she had with Taubman in London a day or so after the Sotheby’s board meeting there. The chairman told her about a private meeting he had just had with the new Christie’s chairman, Sir Anthony Tennant, at which the two “had discussed a number of topics he wanted to go over with me,” says Brooks. This is where the conspiracy, according to Brooks and the prosecution, actually got going. “He and Mr. Tennant agreed we were both killing each other on the bottom line and it was time to do something about it.” Brooks says that Taubman referred to some notes he had made about pricing, guarantees and interest-free advances during the meeting with Tennant and instructed Brooks to contact Christopher Davidge to work out the details. It was time, according to her boss and Tennant, “to increase prices,” and it was Christie’s turn to go first.

Brooks says that her initial, awkward meeting with Davidge took place in a private dining room at the Stafford Hotel in London in November 1993. But Davidge testified that the meeting took place much earlier, some four to six weeks after the April meeting of Taubman and Tennant.

Whatever the time frame, the two conspiring CEOs became more adept at meeting, either at Brooks’s New York apartment or once, as she tells it, in the backseat of her dark-blue Lexus sedan in a parking lot at New York’s Kennedy Airport. (Brooks can’t remember if it was in short-term or long-term parking.) Davidge had flown the Concorde on February 8, 1995, to do some last-minute polishing of the new sellers’ commission rates with Brooks before he presented them to Christie’s board. As she describes it, they needed more room to peruse the papers, which included a draft of Christie’s press announcement of the new rates, and exited the front seats of her Lexus for the more comfy rear. This has to be the prospective HBO movie’s touchstone scene, the image that will stick in the mind long after the credits roll.

Meeting over, Brooks drops Davidge at his terminal and heads to La Guardia Airport to catch her own flight to Detroit. She was off to another Sotheby’s board meeting, where she told Taubman in private that it looked like Christie’s was finally going ahead with the new pricing. And indeed, Christie’s announced its new non-negotiable rates barely a month later. Fast forward to late January 2000, just weeks before Taubman and Brooks stepped down as chairman and CEO, respectively. Christie’s had already met with the government to discuss an amnesty deal, and the joint defense agreement between the two auction houses was rapidly evaporating.

Brooks and Taubman were about to have one of their last face-to-face meetings at Sotheby’s York Avenue headquarters, monitored by Sotheby’s in-house general counsel Donaldson Pillsbury. Before Pillsbury walked into the conference room, Brooks tells the court, Taubman leaned over to her and hissed, “Don’t act like a girl.” At the end of the tense meeting, Taubman held up a recent copy of the Financial Times that reported allegations about the price-fixing conspiracy on its front page and featured a prominent photograph of Brooks. “You’ll look good in stripes,” quipped Taubman.

That was enough excitement for the day.

November 20 – “We weren’t doing anything that was harmful to our clients”
As spectators crowd into judge Daniel’s courtroom for the second day of Brooks’s testimony, the star witness’s twentysomething daughter, Carter, hunches over her Blackberry, tapping away on the tiny keys. The willowy blond in a smartly tailored dark suit is joined by her father, Michael, a general partner with the venture capital firm Venroch Associates in New York. Unlike the defense’s seeming strategy to keep the glamorous Taubman spouse away from the court-room, the Brooks family is here for Mom.

Cross-examination begins with attorney Fiske, who came out of semiretirement to defend Taubman, steering the testy witness back to the summer and fall of 1992 to discuss her role in setting a new buyer’s premium at Sotheby’s. That change was announced on November 2 of that year and went into effect on January 1, 1993. Brooks replies that she had little to do with that decision, since her predecessor, Michael Ainslie, was still CEO of Sotheby’s. But Fiske is trying to show that Brooks was involved in collusion with Christie’s years before the agreement on sellers’ commissions and that she had engaged in several conversations about it with John D. Block, then Sotheby’s New York jewelry head-and now the CEO of North America operations for Phillips, de Pury & Luxembourg. (If Fiske can show that Brooks had already done some price-fixing without Taubman’s knowledge or consent, what was to prevent her from doing it a second time?) Block had already stated in testimony to the grand jury that he’d had discussions about raising the buyer’s premium, and whether Christie’s was considering doing the same, with François Curiel, his Christie’s counterpart. Block, Brooks recalls, told her that he thought that if “we changed pricing, Christie’s would probably follow.” Brooks admits she never told Ainslie or Taubman about the obviously improper conversations.

Growing more prickly as Fiske continues this potentially damaging line of questioning, Brooks snaps, “I never trusted anything François Curiel and John Block talked about.” Fiske continues to probe the witness on whether she ever told Block he shouldn’t be talking to the competition, but Brooks repeats her comment about not believing any of Block’s reportage from behind enemy lines and snaps again: “Mr. Fiske, I can’t remember what I had in my mind 10 years ago.” It’s going to be one of those days.

Fiske soon drops the buyer’s premium assault and moves on. Next stop: Brooks’s earlier testimony about meeting with Taubman at Sotheby’s headquarters in London to discuss his reportedly fruitful tête-à-tête with Tennant. Brooks has trouble remembering the date of the fateful meeting, saying it was either in April or June-board meetings were held in London on both dates. This, of course, is the meeting at which Brooks supposedly agreed to carry out her boss’s plan to fix prices with Davidge. “I was nervous about it, but I agreed to do it will-ingly,” says Brooks, looking drawn and tired.

What seems most remarkable is the way Brooks talks about her decision to enter into the conspiracy-as if she were a super-loyalist prepared to do anything to shore up her company’s bottom line. She even goes so far as to say about the price-fixing, “We weren’t doing anything that was harmful to our clients.” Apart from her sad manner, there doesn’t seem to be an ounce of remorse over her role in the conspiracy, which raked in another $10 million to $15 million a year for Sotheby’s. (Davidge had put the figure at $15 million to $20 million for Christie’s during his testimony.)

Fiske plows through various defense exhibits, highlighting selected minutes of Sotheby’s board meetings from mid-1993 and into 1994, which regularly discussed “deteriorating vendors’ commissions,” characterized in the June 17, 1993, meeting as “currently the biggest single concern of the com-pany.” Though there was some consideration given to raising the “breakpoint,” or ceiling, of the 15 percent portion of the buyer’s premium from $50,000 to $100,000, there wasn’t a peep in the boardroom about raising the seller’s commission. I guess Fiske is trying to show the vendor’s commission pump wasn’t even being primed for a raise, something you might expect to have seen if Taubman was engaged in a 22-month-long campaign to set higher rates, as the prosecution claims.

As lunchtime approaches, Fiske paints a revisionist portrait of Brooks’s Golden Girl trajectory at Sotheby’s: a brand-new, uncertain CEO in the spring of 1994, watching the auction house’s stock plummet from a high of $18.38 in mid-May to $11.88 in late June. Sotheby’s also had a red-ink night (and Brooks, a black-mark one) on May 4, when Jasper Johns’s Highway, the cover lot from the collection of newsprint mogul Peter Brant, bought in at $7.2 million. It had been guaranteed for $9.5 million. Insider details like this make it worth enduring the unforgiving hardwood benches and the dreary passages of legal sparring

Listening to Fiske portray an ever more desperate Brooks, you can almost picture the various episodes he touches on. In one, crusty Max Fisher, Sotheby’s vice chairman, is lambasting Brooks during a February 1995 performance review in the audit-and-compensation committee as a “trigger-happy” executive who makes decisions without consultation and surrounds herself with yes-men. That review took place in Michigan, the day after Brooks’s meeting with Davidge in the backseat of her Lexus at JFK. Like the eternal honor student who’s unexpectedly been knocked down a peg, Brooks plaintively insists to Fiske that Fisher also told her that overall she was doing a good job. Another scene is the recollection of her Oscar-worthy performance feigning total surprise at a Sotheby’s management meeting in London a month later, when the meeting is interrupted by a messenger breathlessly announcing that Christie’s has just changed its sellers’ commissions.

Fiske, though, has a real kicker: He ends his cross-examination with a devastating video clip of Brooks in a December 19, 1997, segment of Louis Rukeyser’s TV program, Wall Street Week. In one freeze-frame moment, the high-pow-ered Sotheby’s CEO, dressed to the nines and answering a question about a recent investigation into smuggled art sold at auction, says, “After all, our integrity is all we have. I feel very strongly about that.” The image fades slowly from the screen, and on the witness stand Brooks appears to be near tears. She recovers and answers in the affirmative that at the time of that television appearance, she was engaged in a full-blown price-fixing scheme.

November 21 – J. Carter Brown to the rescue? Christopher Burge?
Brooks returns to the witness stand, this time in a forest-green outfit. Hands clasped in front of her, she answers more friendly questions from government attorney Philip Cody, who’s taking what’s called redirect, following the defense’s cross-examination. Going back to her earlier testimony about the $9.5 million guarantee for Johns’s Highway, Brooks explains that she had authority to approve such decisions up to $10 million; for sums above that, she needed approval from the other two members of the holding company’s executive committee, Taubman and Fisher. Prompted by the rail-thin prosecutor with his smoker’s voice, Brooks tries to distance herself from the defense portrayal of a trigger-happy executive, adding that she also sought advice “from a number of my senior colleagues.”

May 1994 is a critical period for the company and for the chronology of the price-fixing conspiracy. Brooks affirms that Sotheby’s profits and financial outlook in 1994 were brighter than portrayed by the defense-indeed, were the highest since 1990. “At any time in 1994-95 did you have the slightest fear of losing your position at Sotheby’s?” asks Cody. “No, I did not.” It’s all part of the cat-and-mouse game played between defense and prosecution, the former trying to show a desperate CEO seeking a way to boost profits by consorting on her own with the enemy, and the latter, a team player, taking orders from the boss.

Cody introduces another government exhibit consisting of a five-page, April 29, 1997, memo from Brooks to Jeffrey Miro, Taubman’s personal lawyer and a member of Sotheby’s board of directors. “Jeff: I need some time with you, Al and Max ASAP-Re: In my view we either need to hire a co-chief executive or a full-time chairman-and really believe that the time has come for Al either to be chmn of the holding co. and have an auction company chairman or Al should step down (this would be preferable) and have him be chrmn of the Executive Comm-We are constantly outgunned by Christie’s having Davidge, Hindlip, Burge and the CEO of Spink-Michael Spink.”

Brooks had good reason for her urgent letter to Miro, Taubman’s confidential associate and attorney: “More and more the clients everywhere (Asia, Europe, U.S., South America) want the CEO or the Chrmn of the whole co. to visit them or be heading up ‘the deal’-in the last 3 mos. I have taken a lot of heat in Asia, Calif., South America and Europe for not being there a lot more.” Brooks wanted to get someone like J. Carter Brown, director emeritus of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., or Christopher Burge, then chairman of Christie’s America, for the new post, because Al “would really like to hire” them. She confided to Miro that Taubman had told her he would step down “any time I want.”

It occurs to me that Brooks’s memo in large, block-type handwriting is the only sample of her jottings presented as evidence in the case. I wonder where all her other notes went. (She testified earlier that she had made some notes on the front of a Filofax card about a 1993 meeting she had with Taubman, but hadn’t saved it.) Listening to her and watching her body language on the stand, it sounds highly unlikely that the once glass-ceiling-busting executive would have agreed to take on a co-chief executive. More likely, her memo was some sort of complex maneuver to get out from under Taubman. But when Cody asks the witness why she wrote the note, Brooks recalls that Sotheby’s had just lost out to Christie’s on the John and Frances L. Loeb estate, valued at $90 million to $100 million, and the Victor and Sally Ganz collection, valued as high as $200 million. “We had to have more people at the top because we were getting killed.”

Brooks tells Cody she could have made a much better deal with the government if she had pleaded guilty to fixing the buyer’s premium and implicated her boss in it, even avoiding any chance of prison, but she didn’t “because it wasn’t true.” That doesn’t seem to carry much weight with Fiske, who cross-examines Brooks again about her conversations with John Block, trying to score points on the bigger, earlier conspiracy theory. “I really didn’t believe Mr. Curiel and didn’t trust Mr. Curiel, therefore I didn’t see any reason to pass it on to Mr. Taubman or Mr. Ainslie,” she says. Fiske withdraws and prosecutor Greene stands. “The government rests its case, your honor.”

November 26 – Who’d look good in stripes?
Following the long thanksgiving break, the proceedings get off to a sluggish start. Scanning the room for familiar faces while the defense and prosecution bicker over a witness in Judge Daniels’s chambers, I notice David Redden, the Sotheby’s vice chairman and senior vice president of books and manuscripts, who in the heyday of the firm’s fledgling dot-com business was known as the company’s online Pied Piper. By my count, this is Redden’s third day of viewing, begun with the testimony of Brooks, his former boss. Curious, I tentatively approach the expert who introduced such nontraditional collectible categories as Soviet space memorabilia and ask what brings him downtown again. “I want to know the truth,” he says, “to find out for myself what this was all about.”

The morning session also brings out the well-tailored likes of Ed Hayes, whose tough Bronx D.A. demeanor was captured by Tom Wolfe’s character Tommy Killian in The Bonfire of the Vanities. In a later incarnation, Hayes served as the Andy Warhol estate’s lawyer and challenged Christie’s appraisal of the Warhol art inventory in Manhattan Surrogate Court. He sits next to star Vanity Fair court reporter and former Hollywood producer Dominick Dunne, who looks rather ferociously professorial in a pair of imposing tortoiseshell glasses.

The jury is finally ushered in to hear the first of two character witnesses called by the defense, Damon J. Keith, a distinguished African-American judge from the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. “I think his Taubman’s] record for truthfulness and honesty is impeccable,” Judge Keith says, noting that it was the only time in his 34 years on the federal bench that he has testified for anyone as a character witness. For the first time, I notice the defendant’s Buddha-like countenance change into a broad smile of obvious appreciation. It is hard to discern the impact of Keith on the jury, though all eyes are riveted on him. In cross-examination, the prosecution simply asks a half-dozen or so questions, including whether Judge Keith had ever heard Taubman tell him that Tennant had visited him in his London apartment. All of the answers are in the negative, and Keith is dismissed.

Next is Sotheby’s in-house counsel, Donaldson Pillsbury, identified by Brooks in her testimony as the third party present at her tense meeting with Taubman in January 2000 after both executives had been subpoenaed by the grand jury and had retained separate lawyers. It was at that meeting, Brooks claimed, that Taubman waved the Financial Times with the front-page price-fixing story and her picture and said to his pro-tégée, “You’ll look good in stripes.” But Pillsbury, a former senior partner at Davis Polk & Wardwell, the very firm now representing Taubman, testifies that the grumpy Taubman in fact said, “How do you think I’d look in stripes?” Pillsbury adds that Brooks gave him an incredulous look, as if to say, “I can’t believe you’re saying this.”

The room buzzes at the whopping contradiction between the sworn statements of the two witnesses. Pillsbury also says that Taubman often made “slightly provocative statements.” In another jab at Brooks’s credibility, Pillsbury testifies that, shortly before he accepted the job of Sotheby’s general counsel in 1998, he asked Brooks to tell him whether he “wasn’t stepping into a mess of some sort, that this [the Department of Justice investigation] was not a serious problem.” He says Brooks assured him that he “didn’t have to worry about this.”

The defense calls another character witness before the lunch break, and Robert C. Larson, chairman of the investment banking giant Lazard Frères, from Bloomfield Hills, waxes poetic about the charms and attributes of his former business partner. Once again, Al is beaming, especially when Larson says, “Alfred Taubman would never do anything even close to being illegal.” Perhaps inadvertently, Larson adds a chink to this character-building by mentioning that in the early 1990s he met Sir Anthony Tennant, who told him that he and Taubman “were social friends.”

After lunch, former Sotheby’s CEO Michael Ainslie, now an investor and charity maven in Palm Beach, testifies for the rest of the afternoon. There are some spectacular moments, as when Ainslie claims that Brooks overstepped her authority as CFO and alone offered Aussie businessman Alan Bond a loan for half the value of van Gogh’s Irises, which he subsequently bought for $49 million in November 1987, burdening the firm with a $27 million loan. But the afternoon is mostly a crashing bore. The tedium of hearing about numerous Sotheby’s board meetings is broken only by Ainslie’s references to Taubman’s incomprehension of numbers and lack of concern for things like pricing. Ainslie characterizes his former boss as an excellent architect, but dumb as a post about numbers. What’s more, Ainslie says, the guy was more concerned with “threshold resistance”-a marketing phrase referring to consumers reluctance to do business with Sotheby’s because they were turned off by the firm’s “hoity-toitiness”-than with the bottom line.

This appears to be part of a defense strategy to show that the real financial strings at Sotheby’s were being pulled by the incomparably savvier Brooks. Ainslie says that during the three-to-four-hour board meetings that would take place some five times a year, Taubman would actually fall asleep. The comment triggers an audible guffaw from the defendant, who seems to get a big kick out of being made to look so lovably marginal to the inner workings of Sotheby’s.

November 27 – “I smell a rat”
The spectator sectionon of the courtroom has taken the appearance of economy class on a transatlantic flight. Newspapers are sprawled everywhere and rucksacks and briefcases are pushed under the pewlike benches to make more room. Snickers are heard from one quarter passing around today’s New York Post column by Steve Dunleavy that likens Dede, “Our Ms. Brooks,” to Sammy “the Bull” Gravano, the Mafia hitman turned government witness. “I smell a rat,” fumes the ever enjoyable Dunleavy. One reporter alerts the rest of us to the earthshaking news, “Al’s wearing a different tie today!” and heads swivel to see the defendant stride to his seat in a mineral-colored, cobalt-blue patterned silk tie. This is all beginning to feel like a bad case of cabin fever.

The morning session finally gets under way with the last bits of direct testimony from Ainslie, followed by a relatively brief cross-examination. Ainslie notes that the art market dropped precipitously in the fall of 1990, and that Sotheby’s sales went from $3 billion that year to $1.1 billion in 1992, the year it initiated a buyer’s premium increase from a straight 10 percent to 15 percent on the first $50,000 and 10 percent thereafter. “The market just collapsed and our profits significantly declined,” recalls the former CEO, who was succeeded by Brooks in 1994. Similarly, profits tanked from a high of $112 million in 1989 to a measly $3.9 million in 1992.

The defense has been laboring to establish the existence of a collusion that predated the seller’s commission fix by almost three years, one that Brooks was also intimately involved in. Though Ainslie-the defense’s own witness-takes full credit for initiating the buyer’s commission increase and testifies that the firm had no idea whether or not Christie’s would follow suit, Taubman’s lawyers offer tantalizing nuggets suggesting that an executive at Sotheby’s had a fix in with Christie’s through a subordinate, and that Brooks was pulling those strings as well. Ainslie, for instance, was unaware that John Block, the witness set to follow him, had reported several times to Brooks, in the spring and summer of 1992, about his industry intelligence-gathering conversations with François Curiel at Christie’s.

Block, visibly fidgeting on the stand and tugging at his chin as if trying to unlock some deep memory, says he reported back to Brooks that Curiel indicated that Christie’s was also considering raising its buyer’s premium and would probably do so if Sotheby’s did. Compared with the cool and collected Ainslie, Block, despite his pin-striped suit, is a jumpy mess as defense interrogator Muller pulls at his foggy recollections. Block is testifying under subpoena for the defense and admits he declined to be interviewed by Muller during pretrial discovery on the advice of his lawyer. “I don’t recall who said it first, but one of us said, ‘Yeah, we’re considering raising the buyer’s premium,” he recalls of a conversation with Curiel. He places their first conversation in Geneva in May 1992. Muller asks, “Did there come a time, sir, when you reported to Ms. Brooks that you had spoken to Curiel that if Sotheby’s changed pricing, Christie’s would probably follow?” Block says yes.

During a late morning recess, the marble-floored corridor outside the large courtroom fills with spectators. I ask Wendy Monk, a frequent attendee at the trial, what brings her downtown. “I’m doing research for a murder mystery about the auction world,” says the art historian wife of art dealer Robert Monk, the former head of contemporary art at Sotheby’s, who now works for Larry Gagosian. Monk says she hasn’t started the novel, which she intends to call Fair Warning.

Another spectator drifts back into the courtroom, whom I recognize, though he is casually dressed in corduroys and a pullover, as none other than megacollector Hubert Neumann, whose father, Morton, established a legendary modern art collection in Chicago. Some of those pictures sold at Sotheby’s New York in November 1998 for a total of $17.6 million, including Picasso’s 1909 Cubist oil Femme nue, for more than $11 million. Neumann admits he’s finding the proceedings utterly compelling, but that “no matter how you slice it, no one’s going to come out a winner.”

In the afternoon, prosecutor Jannaco leads a brief cross-examination of Block, who is followed on the stand by Rena Neville, a former in-house attorney for Sotheby’s. Pert and pretty in a double-breasted jacket, silk top and cream-colored skirt, the lawyer testifies about the period in the summer of 1997 when the government first issued subpoenas for documents as part of its nascent antitrust investigation. The company determined that no more than five key players should pony up their diaries, notes, records, bills, Rolodexes and telephone logs. Curiously, Sotheby’s did not ask for any such documents from Taubman. “We didn’t go to all 2,000 employ-ees-we went to the five key decision-makers and tried to focus our energies on that,” says Neville.

The interesting question lingering behind that decision is whether Brooks, who advised Neville on the list, was trying to shield Taubman from government scrutiny, or whether Taubman simply was not on the radar screen because he was so far removed from pricing decisions. When, one might ask, did Brooks implicate Taubman?

Neville further notes that when Steven Reiss of the New York firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges, the outside counsel hired for antitrust consultation, told Sotheby’s top brass in August 1997 that the government’s investigation would take two to four years, Brooks appeared “frustrated, irritated and annoyed.”

As the afternoon wears on, more witnesses for the defense are called. Longtime Taubman financial adviser Bernard Winograd testifies that despite several reversals of fortune with investments, including the $400 million failure in the early 1990s of the Woodward & Lothrop department store chain in Washington, D.C., Taubman had a net worth between $700 million and $1 billion in the middle of 1993. Presumably, that would have made it less pressing for the Sotheby’s chairman to enter into some kind of high-risk, restraint-of-trade behavior, or so the defense hopes to convince the jury.

Winograd also buttresses some of Ainslie’s comments that Taubman was a bit slow with numbers, going so far as to say that his former boss was dyslexic and that he also suffered from a sleeping disorder. “It’s difficult for him to understand written information,” Winograd says. Pride is obviously one thing Taubman can’t afford just now. In this case, it seems that the defendant, still worth hundreds of millions of dollars, gets dumber and dumber with every witness.

George Bailey, managing director of Sotheby’s Europe, next testifies that in all of his dealings with Taubman in London, the chairman had a one-track mind. “Mrs. Brooks was completely hands-on,” says Bailey, who started at an entry-level position at Sotheby’s in 1979. “Mr. Taubman seemed to have only one interest-the real estate projects.”

November 28 – Into the statistical thicket
The mother-and-daughter courtroom artists Shirley and Andrea Shepard are sketching away before the morning session begins. They’re working on more pastel cameos of the defendant and Judge Daniels, a Clinton appointee who at one time served as former New York City Mayor David Dinkins’s chief counsel. Andrea, it turns out, is a Columbia-trained economics Ph.D. who decided to join her mother sketching in court. She jokes that she is probably one of the few people in the courtroom who can actually understand the economics behind the price-fixing charge.

Meanwhile, several loitering journalists speculate whether Taubman will take the stand. According to one source, the ex-chairman of Sotheby’s is burning to tell his side of the story, but his defense team is still debating the huge risk of exposing him to cross-examination. What the heck did he do and say at those dozen or so meetings in London and New York with Sir Anthony? It is already approaching the 11th hour on the defense side, and odds are growing that Taubman will stay out of the witness box. Additional scuttlebutt is critical of defense team member Scott Muller and his effectiveness at cross-examination, especially against star witness Davidge and even in his briefer skirmish on direct with John Block. This is all beginning to sound just like art world gossip.

The first witness of the day, called by the defense, is Michael Guy Lister Curle, a former financial director of Sotheby’s Europe, who seems to have a single mission to accomplish today. During a meeting in London in late 1996 with Bailey and Brooks, Curle testifies, Bailey began to discuss a point about Sotheby’s operating plan for 1997 in Europe, but before Bailey finished his sentence, “She [Brooks] cut him off and said, ‘Alfred Taubman doesn’t run this company, I do.'” Asked by defense attorney James Rohandeh if he took any action following that meeting, Curle replies, Yes, not to solicit views from Mr. Taubman on such matters.”

Christopher Mason, a New York journalist who is writing a book on the trial, speculates to me during the break that Curle has been flown in by the defense solely to supply that key Brooks quote. Evidently, Bailey had forgotten that bit in his testimony.

Christine Nelson, a Boston-based economic consultant and managing director of Cornerstone Research, crunches a mountain of numbers for almost two hours on the stand, picking apart an exhaustive trove of financial data she organized that tracked Sotheby’s and Christie’s auction transactions between 1992 and 1995, the period when the conspiracy was hatched. Sounding every bit like the MIT Sloan School of Management grad she is, Nelson is led through a thicket of defense exhibits that relate to the all-important memo that Tennant gave to Davidge on April 30, 1993-Exhibit 48—which allegedly spelled out the initial agreement between the two houses: no straight guarantees; no advances on single lots; no loans below the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) and nothing to dealers better than 5 percent; no more than 90 days credit to dealers; and require sellers to pay their own insurance.

Nelson has gathered information on all transactions at both houses between 1992 and 1995 and, backed by hard copies of consignment agreements, developed software programs to analyze the data. One of the entries involved straight guarantees. Christie’s had two such straight guarantees before September 1993 and two after that date, notes Nelson, seemingly calling into question the notion that any fix existed to eliminate this practice. Sotheby’s had no straight guarantees either before or after September 1993.

Regarding loans below LIBOR, Nelson says she found even less compliance. For example, the value of below-LIBOR loans at Christie’s rose from around $10 million in 1992 to $40 million in 1994. But more tantalizing than those dry numbers and the bar graphs so impressively projected for the jury on the courtroom screen are the glimpses of confidential consignment contracts for high-value guarantees. For the May 1994 sale of the estate of H. Gates Lloyd, the interest-free advance was pegged at 98 percent of the low estimate, or $16.5 million, and Sotheby’s would receive 50 percent of the hammer price above that amount. The deal called for zero seller’s commission.

On the other hand, Christie’s March 1994 deal with the estate of Alice Tully had a straight guarantee of $22 million and zero percent upside for the house. For the Joseph Hazen sale at Sotheby’s in November 1995, which brought $51.8 million, the estate received a guarantee of 90 percent of the low estimate, or $27.5 million, and 40 percent of the upside over that figure. But for the Pamela Harriman estate sale at Christie’s, also in 1995, the estate received a $17.5 million guarantee and Christie’s upside was capped at 10 percent for anything over that amount; the sale brought $18.6 million.

“Were Sotheby’s and Christie’s using the same guarantee formula in 1995?” asks Rouhandeh. “No, not at all,” Nelson replies.

As the court adjourns early for the day due to a juror’s request, one exiting attorney observing the trial quips to a col-league, “You don’t have to have a successful price-fixing scheme in order to be guilty of the charge.”

November 29 – The lone ranger
The final day of defense testimony kicks off with Jannaco resuming her cross-examination of Nelson. The dark-haired prosecutor has a steep hill to climb in challenging the economic consultant’s battery of statistics and charts that show, at least by Nelson’s massaging of the numbers, that there is no evidence of any agreement between Christie’s and Sotheby’s to cease certain profit-sucking activities such as single-lot advances and straight guarantees in the period following the alleged compact of April 30, 1993.

While Nelson effectively repels efforts by Jannaco to poke holes in her testimony-insisting that “the economic evidence is not consistent with there being an agreement”-it becomes obvious that she has been instructed by Taubman’s lawyers to only interpret data between 1992 and 1995. If later data was used, more similarities relating to the agreement might emerge. Indeed, in the afternoon, the government introduces an 11th-hour witness, Jade Burns, a Berkeley-edu-cated para-legal working for prosecutor Greene, who produces her own graphs based on Sotheby’s transactions between 1993 and 1998 showing that revenue from sellers’ commissions rose after 1995.

But is any of this statistical barrage seeping into the minds of the jurors? Good question. Throughout the trial, Gail A. Jaquish, the ponytailed dark blond Ph.D. seated at the defense table with her chair positioned at an angle to better watch the jury, seems to be the only person around who can assess that imponderable. Though she declines to even identify herself to Art & Auction, let alone be interviewed, an Internet search reveals that she is the founder and president of the Redondo Beach, California-based JURIX, and “has designed and implemented jury research, conducted witness preparation, produced all forms of demonstrative exhibits and assisted trial lawyers with the development of litigation strategies on cases involving antitrust, bank failure,” and so on. For hours each day, the steely-eyed consultant peers at the jury in a kind of meditative trance.

Jaquish’s presence again demonstrates the unlimited resources of the defendant. Taubman may be practically a dyslexic dummy, if you believe the defense, but nonetheless he is a very deep-pocketed one. And during a brief recess, one of the Detroit-based reporters recounts a celebrated local anecdote about Tubman’s ability to stand in an empty field and mentally calculate how many square feet and how many dollars could be squeezed out of the undeveloped real estate. How dumb is that?

Taubman’s intelligence, attention span, appetite and general competence are battered again and again with the day’s most entertaining witness, Bill Sheridan, Sotheby’s chief financial officer. Though Taubman attended all the board meetings and the more intimate audit and compensation committee pow-wows, the $700 million man rarely, if ever, asked questions about the bottom line, Sheridan tells the court. “He was virtually silent. He rarely said anything. Mr. Taubman was more concerned with what time lunch was going to be served and what would be served.” (After three weeks of this trial, I can sympa-thize.) Even when the former chairman spoke up at such events, he was chastised by Brooks, who on one occasion loudly rebuked him, “Alfred, you don’t really understand your business,” according to the plain-speaking CFO. “He was pretty meek for a guy who owned all that stock, and crawled back into his shell.”

But Sheridan also reveals a major misstep by Brooks on May 9, 1999. According to Sheridan, Brooks met with a new client shortly before the Impressionist and modern sale that evening and extended him credit on the spot for $105 million. The unidentified collector (Sheridan refuses to name him in open court and will only say that the fellow’s mother “had substantial wealth”) went on to buy $100 million worth of art, including the evening’s top lot from the collection of Mr. and Mrs. John Hay Whitney, Paul Cézanne’s Rideau, cruchon et com-potier, for a record $60.5 million. The hitch came in July, when the buyer didn’t make his first payment and Brooks, who hadn’t told anyone in the company about the deal until then, made S.O.S. calls to the executive committee, Sheridan and Mitchell Zuckerman, president of Sotheby’s Financial Services. Fisher gave her a public dressing-down for the unauthorized loan, which should have been vetted by the committee. Riding back to York Avenue after that meeting, Brooks was furious. (The record Cézanne was later resold privately to then Mirage Resorts chairman Steve Wynn for an undisclosed, lower sum.)

The incident seems effective for the defense, showing late in the trial that Dede could play the Lone Ranger and, worse, that she belittled the very owners of the company. This will have to serve as the defense’s major card, since it is now plain that Taubman won’t be testifying.

The “Evil Dede” theme is played again by the defense’s last witness, Steven Reiss, a partner at the New York law firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges, who led that firm’s assistance to Sotheby’s after it was subpoenaed by the feds in the spring of 1997. Though he interviewed Brooks numerous times and asked her an array of questions about her possible involvement in price-fixing, she continually denied it. “It wasn’t a simple denial, it was a vehement denial. It was an extraordinarily convincing denial,” Reiss tells the court. However, on cross-examination, Greene points out that Reiss never interviewed Taubman nor asked him to produce any of his diaries, the very ones the prosecution is hoping will win them a conviction.

After the jury is dismissed by Judge Daniels for a long weekend before the final summations and jury instructions, I pass a white-bearded fellow with a baseball cap and outer gear at the rear of the courtroom. He introduces himself as Jim O’Reilly, a semiretired computer consultant who, it turns out, is married to prosecutor Jannaco. Asked how he feels his wife is doing, O’Reilly says, “I understand it’s very good, based on the evaluation of other lawyers.” He turns, flashes a brilliant smile and waves at his wife. Clearly, the prosecution doesn’t seem especially worried.

December 3 – Punch and counterpunch
Before the prosecution and defense present their summations to the jury, there’s a firefight in the courtroom over whether to allow the government’s use of a quote and accompanying chart by the 18th-century Scottish political economist and philosopher Adam Smith: “People in the same trade seldom meet together even for merriment and diversion, but a conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public or in some contrivance to raise prices.” Smith’s searing observation sure puts a nasty spin on Taubman’s meetings with Sir Anthony. Standing to face Judge Daniels, Fiske objects and says,

“As far as I know, Mr. Smith is not a witness to this case.” Daniels shoots back, “There have been so many I may have missed it.” While Daniels strikes the use of the chart, he allows Greene to use the quote and Fiske grows more agitated. “That is extraordinarily prejudicial, your honor.”

In his flat Brooklynese monotone, Greene tells the jury, as he did in his opening, “This is a simple price-fixing case.” He doesn’t waste time telling them that Alfred Taubman is guilty of the charge beyond a reasonable doubt. The prosecutor roasts the defense for playing the “dumb and hungry” card-that Taubman, a self-made billionaire, was mostly asleep at the wheel. “Ridiculous,” he huffs.

While certainly not elegant in delivery, Greene keeps his guard up and jabs like crazy, hitting again and again on the fact that Taubman and Tennant met numerous times and dispatched Brooks and Davidge to carry out the conspiracy. Having already quoted Adam Smith, Greene appropriates a line from Fiske’s opening remarks to the jury three weeks ago about Brooks having the motive and capacity to carry out the conspiracy with Davidge. Turning that around, the prosecutor nimbly says it was Taubman who had motive, capacity and opportunity to launch the conspiracy.

A half-hour into Greene’s 100-minute wrap-up, I have to give him credit for drilling holes in some of the defense’s most important arguments, namely that Big Al had no interest in Sotheby’s bottom line. He brings up Brooks’s testimony about the pair’s frequent conversations that “we were getting killed on what we were giving away” (to sellers) and “we discussed on a number of occasions how much our bottom line was suffer-ing.” And if the math was too hard for Taubman, as several defense witnesses testified, Greene says that Sotheby’s chairman had the “financial genius” of Max Fisher to lean on.

Greene also reminds jurors of the alleged meeting between Taubman and Brooks, at which Melinda Marcuse says she took notes from Brooks about pricey deals both houses had cut with consignors. Taubman railed to Marcuse about Christie’s use of non-recourse loans, which he thought was damaging to both houses’ business and “threatened the bottom line.”

As to co-conspirator Tennant’s April 30, 1993, memo to Christopher Davidge that the two chairmen “had a good breakfast,” Greene tells the jury that Sir Anthony wasn’t “commenting on the cuisine” but on the collusive nature of his meeting with Taubman. Throughout his delivery, the prosecutor is visually overshadowed by a towering graphic displaying Taubman’s dozen meetings with Tennant. It could almost be a contemporary cut-and-paste painting by Guillermo Kuitca.

And if there was any doubt about who was behind the memo containing the kicker: “He and I should now withdraw but stay in touch with a view to seeing how things go and intervening from on high if need be,” Greene squawks, “Who is on high at Christie’s? Tennant. Who is on high at Sotheby’s? Taubman.”

There’s a standing-room-only crowd for Greene’s summation, including Sotheby’s CEO Bill Ruprecht and his worldwide head of corporate affairs, Diana Phillips, both making their first appearance at the trial.

After lunch, there’s an even bigger crowd in attendance for the defense summation. Fiske is a brilliant performer, a pleasure to watch and listen to. Working from his yellow legal pad, the veteran litigator offers a strikingly different portrait of the defendant and plays up the theme of Dragon Lady Brooks. Fiske quickly dismisses Davidge’s credibility-there’s that grant of immunity and the $8 million payoff to “come over here and be a witness in this case,” he tells the jury. Fiske says it all boils down to a one-witness case-that is, Brooks-and discounts the veracity of the woman who lied to her employees and outside counsel in 1997 during the government’s investigation of price-fixing. She was lying then and she’s lying still-copping her plea and fingering her boss for a leniency deal, and lying on the witness stand to unfairly implicate Taubman. He damns Brooks as “a walking reasonable doubt,” and puts the jury on notice: “If you don’t believe Brooks beyond a reasonable doubt, you must acquit.”

Several times, Fiske reminds the jury that the defense attorneys “have no burden to prove anything to you” and that “the burden is entirely on the government.” If you buy Fiske’s story, the conspiracy didn’t start in Taubman’s flat in London but in the backseat of Brooks’s Lexus at Kennedy Airport.

Fiske also attacks the government’s paper trail, and above all, Exhibit 48, the document that allegedly laid out the conspiracy masterminded by Taubman and Tennant on April 30, 1993. “There’s nothing in there that says anything about a seller’s agreement,” Fiske reminds the jury. Punching harder now, he delivers one of his best lines: “It’s not that they made an agreement and broke it, there never was an agreement in the first place.”

But he gets downright saccharine when he tells the jurors that they’ll remember this day with pride for the rest of their lives if they free “this honest and decent man of the terrible burden that he’s been under.” Gosh, he’s a bloody preacher.

Earlier, after Greene’s summation, I had strolled out of the courthouse to grab some lunch in Chinatown, thinking that Taubman was going to get fried by the jury. But now it seems to me that the tables have turned and Taubman seems prime for an acquittal.

After Fiske’s two-hour-plus oration, Greene gets one last stab at the jury. He tells them that their sole responsibility is to evaluate the facts of the case. My head spinning, I have to believe that the jurors’ are doing the same.

December 4 – Burden of proof
It’s the morning Judge Daniels will hand the jury the case, and the defendant looks characteristically serene as he sits at the defense table reading a New York Post editorial,

“Israel’s Test.” The only difference, it seems, between Taubman and any other of his prosperous, New York elite peers this morning is that he’s in a courtroom, facing three years in federal prison. It continues to astonish me that he can look so relaxed, concentrating on a tabloid. I wonder if his defense team cautioned him against reading the more upmarket New York Times or Wall Street Journal.

With the words “We’re ready to go,” Judge Daniels begins to instruct the jury on the law. “You’re about to enter your final duty-you have to pay close attention to what I say,” he intones. It’s really chilly in the courtroom, the AC is humming, so there’s scant chance of anyone dozing off during this session. Daniels clearly relishes this aspect of the high-profile case, and rapidly reads from his 45-page typescript. He tells the jury that they must take the law “as I state it” and decide the fact issues of the case. “You must rely on your own recollections of the evi-dence-you are the sole, exclusive judge of the facts.” Daniels races on in his animated way, doling out bits of wisdom: Questions asked by lawyers are not evidence, only the answers of witnesses; the government has the burden of proof; and the verdict must be based exclusively on the evidence or the lack of it. “If you have any hesitation about the government meeting its burden, you should acquit,” he admonishes. But if that burden has been met, “you should not hesitate to deliver a verdict of guilty.”  One the matter of missing co-conspiritor Tennant, Daniels instructs the jurors they they shouldn’t draw any interfereance, favorable or unfavorable, from this.  For those who did testify, “You are the sole judges of credibility of all witnesses.”

Watching the jurors take in Daniels’s careful explanations of legal terms-such as the difference between direct and circumstantial evidence (to my surprise, circumstantial evidence carries no less weight than direct evidence) -I put myself in their place, wondering how I would view the credibility of Davidge and Brooks. Taubman should only be so lucky. “Ask yourself whether the witnesses’ recollections of the facts stand up to all other evidence. Use your common sense.” The judge cautions the jury not to make any adverse inference from Taubman not testifying. “You must be satisfied with the guilt of the defendant beyond a reasonable doubt before you can convict.” Referring to Brooks and Davidge, the judge says that jurors should consider whether such witnesses have a motive to testify falsely or have a stake in the outcome. Daniels adds that jurors can convict a defendant based on the testimony of a witness who has been promised not to be prosecuted, but that such testimony should be scrutinized with great care.

On the actual charge of violating Section One of the Sherman Act to fix auction commission rates charged to sellers in the U.S. and elsewhere, Daniels tells the jury there are three elements that need to be proved beyond a reasonable doubt: That there was an agreement to fix prices in the period specified (1993-99); that the defendant knowingly understood that it was such a pact; and that he entered into it to unreasonably restrain trade. “The agreement itself is a crime even if it is never carried out.” Daniels also explains that the indictment does not involve guarantees or other agreements, though I do some quick mental calculation and estimate that easily 70 percent of the trial has been based on these issues-and wonder whether the jury will be able to sort through this mountain of subtle distinctions. As Daniels says, “Knowledge of the conspiracy without participation in it is not enough.” (That must be a relief to Lord Hindlip, Christopher Burge, Patty Hambrecht and Stephen Lash, to name a few.) For the conspiracy charge to stick, there must be joint actions between the defendant and a competitor, and not independent actions. The meticulous judge ends his 50-minute treatise on antitrust law, and the jury heads off to its deliberations.

Later that afternoon, a note comes out from the jury room asking for a rereading of the relevant portion on what constitutes antitrust from the judge’s instructions, as well as a request for certain government exhibits, including Exhibit 48, the memo that Tennant allegedly wrote after his April 30, 1993, meeting with Taubman. Day one of jury deliberations ends without a verdict, and I’m quietly panicking at the thought of enduring more long hours of this tense vigil. Think how Taubman must feel.

December 5 – You can’t do that here
The Jury starts its second day of deliberations, and the edgy waiting game inside the courtroom continues. Several journalists stand around listening to a colleague read aloud Taubman’s horoscope for the day. He’s an Aquarius: “Setbacks at work may trigger a breakthrough. Your romantic life will progress naturally if you don’t force it-avoid getting too close too fast.” Horoscopes-it’s gotten that bad.

At 11:05 a request comes from the jury to hear some of the testimony of Melinda Marcuse about the meeting that took place sometime in early 1993 at Taubman’s New York office, where Brooks and the chairman met. Marcuse testified she took dictation from Brooks about auction house deals at both Christie’s and Sotheby’s, involving both non-recourse loans and guarantees. That document soon wound up in Davidge’s hands. The court stenographer reads the pages of trial tran-script, and it’s obvious the jury is intently listening. They return to the jury room.

Then, at 2 p.m., the court clerk strides in and announces that a verdict has been reached, which will be read in 15 minutes. Though no one’s saying so, it’s obvious from the body language of several of the government lawyers huddling in one of the spectator pews that they think they’ve got a conviction.

No one is talking at the defense table either, but the body language there is very different. Taubman, still with his cordless headset on, stares straight ahead, though he’s sunken deeper into his leatherette armchair and his face looks flushed. Lead attorney Fiske has his back turned to him and nervously drums his fingers on a crossed leg. Perhaps he’s thinking, “Is this what I came out of retirement for?”

The jury files in and the foreman, muscled Manhattan mail carrier Mike D’Angelo, practically whispers the verdict to the courtroom: Guilty.

There’s not another sound. Judge Daniels instructs the clerk to poll each juror, and one by one, they repeat the guilty ver-dict. Even though I more than half expected this outcome from early on in the trial, the stark reality of the moment sinks in. I feel stunned. Poor Al.

The jury is thanked by Daniels and dismissed. The judge sets an April 2 sentencing date and the prosecution files out. The Judge departs. No one at the defense table moves. The gaggle of journalists hover by the railing. Gayle Kalisman, Taubman’s daughter and the sole family member present, politely passes to join her father, tears streaming down her cheeks. Devastated, She stands behind him, gently rubbing his right shoulder. He doesn’t turn around. We’re told that Fiske will make a statement outside the courthouse, and we reluctantly leave.

There’s not much to say. “We’re of course very disapPointed in the verdict and we’re going to review our options for what we do next,” says Fiske. He refuses further questions and hustles away. Moments later, Fiske reappears at the top of the courthouse steps, firmly at Taubman’s side, and the entire defense team descends the steps together. Though I’m standing in the street, it’s clear from my vantage point that Taubman is physically shaking as he’s strong-armed through the crowd to the front seat of his waiting Range Rover. There’s plenty of bumping and shoving as press photographers surge for a good shot.

I buttonhole Christopher Tennyson, Taubman’s top PR man, and ask about the future of Al’s holdings. “I think it’s an issue that’s ahead of us, but we haven’t made any decisions whatso-ever.” Later that afternoon, I learn that Sotheby’s shares shot up 15 percent on the wire-service news of Taubman’s convic-tion, closing up $1.83 at $15.67 on a huge trading volume of 335,500 shares. It’s still a money game. Next, the government team trots down the courthouse steps, but Greene refuses to comment despite some loud encouragement from New York Times reporter Ralph Blumenthal. Ralph Giordano, head of the Justice Department’s antitrust division in New York, stops for a few words: “The jury has spoken. We’re obviously satisfied with the verdict. It was a full and fair trial. John Greene and his staff did a very outstanding job.”

But these sound bites don’t convey any of the drama that went on inside Judge Daniels’s courtroom or in the 10 hours of jury deliberation. I shoulder my way into a crowd of reporters and hear foreman Mike D’Angelo say that he would have liked for co-conspirator Tennant to be here, “but I wouldn’t have showed up either,” he quips. He explains that the judge’s instructions that the defendant could be found guilty of a conspiracy to fix prices whether it was actually carried out or not helped the jury focus. “This is America,” D’Angelo adds, “You can’t do that here.”

I spot another juror, Jeff Goodwin, a 42-year-old gourmet deli owner from Katonah, New York. He tells me, “It wasn’t a very easy decision, and everybody put a lot of care into it. What we all kept reviewing were the facts presented to us, and ultimately put it in chronological order. We devised many ways for 12 people to see it in the same way.”

Though Goodwin declines to discuss how split the vote was initially, Elliot Lopez, a college adviser from the Bronx, says it was 8-to-4 in favor of a guilty verdict late yesterday afternoon and 10-to-2 this morning, and then 11-to-1 by 11:30. The lone holdout turns out to be the youngest jury member, Lydell Durant, a fork-lift operator from the Bronx who felt Taubman was too old to be convicted and confided to his peers that he “let his emotions get away from him.” I ask juror Deborah Robinson why she thinks Taubman did it. She doesn’t hesitate. “He wanted to win.”

Walking away from the media frenzy, I flash back to the stunned look on writer Dominick Dunne’s face when the jury’s decision was announced. The storied Vanity Fair social chronicler and crime reporter told me he was shocked by the guilty verdict. Of course he was. After all, he was there when a jury took just two hours to set O.J. free.