Late last year, budding reality TV personality Oscar Roberts walked into Yossi Dina’s Beverly Hills pawnshop, Dina Collection, and offered four paintings by famed American illustrator N.C. Wyeth as collateral for a $100,000 loan.
Roberts wasn’t a regular customer, but a person Dina described as a “very famous actor” vouched for him. Besides, Dina requires customers to leave a copy of their driver’s license, and his store also keeps a copy of each person’s thumbprint and everyone is captured on numerous security cameras.
“You have to be an idiot to come to me,” Dina said of someone trying to pull a fast one. And so, despite some lingering concerns, he made the loan.
“It’s like Vegas,” said Dina, the star of Reelz channel reality show “Beverly Hills Pawn.”
“It’s gambling.”
But Dina lost this bet. It turned out the paintings were among six stolen in May 2013 from the home of an art collector in Portland, Maine, and Dina’s now on the hook for the money since his $20 million insurance policy doesn’t cover the purchase of stolen goods.
In retrospect, Dina concedes, he should have known better. Though he couldn’t find any evidence to confirm it at the time, he said something about the demeanor of Roberts and his companion, a woman named Charlotte claiming to be Robert’s attorney, made him suspicious.
“They acted like arrogant big shots,” said Dina, who explained that’s often a tipoff that prospective sellers are nervous about something.
As it turned out, Roberts had a good reason to be on edge.
About a week earlier, he had been interviewed by agents from the FBI’s art-theft unit who questioned him about the missing paintings. According to a criminal complaint, Roberts told the agents a friend named Dean Coroniti had asked him to help him sell the pieces, which Coroniti claimed were inherited.
Roberts told federal agents he would try to locate the missing pieces. Instead, he went to Dina in an effort to offload them and make some money while he still had the chance, according to a court filing. He even texted Dina soon after they met, asking that the asking price be lowered in an effort to speed up the sale.
The FBI said Dina, following state regulations, submitted a routine pawn ticket for the paintings to the Beverly Hills Police Department, where a detective unit employee discovered through the online FBI database that the paintings were stolen. The police then notified the FBI, according to the bureau’s account, at which point agents visited Dina’s store and recovered the goods.
The FBI disclosed these details last month at a press conference in Los Angeles during which the bureau also said it was offering $20,000 for information leading to the recovery of two Wyeth works still missing.
Cross-country trip
Roberts and Coroniti, who according to court documents created a reality television pilot called “Heaven and Hollywood” about an up-and-coming hip-hop record label, were arrested in the wake of the FBI’s visit to the Dina Collection.
Roberts, a 37-year-old North Hollywood resident, pleaded guilty in February to using stolen goods as collateral for a loan and was sentenced in April to 28 months in federal prison in connection with the Wyeth works. Coroniti, 55, also of North Hollywood, pleaded guilty to possession of stolen property in March and is scheduled to be sentenced in October.
A third man, 65-year-old Massachusetts resident Lawrence Estrella, pleaded guilty in February to transporting the four paintings across the country in an effort to sell them. He was sentenced to 92 months in prison.
James A. Bowman, a former assistant United States attorney in Los Angeles who prosecuted the case, declined to comment as to whether it has been determined who stole the art other than to say no one has been charged with that crime.
The FBI announced the recovery of the four paintings and the sentences last month. At the same time, it offered a reward of up to $20,000 to anyone who could provide information leading to the recovery of the two Wyeth pieces that remain missing.
As for Dina, he was enticed to make the loan by the prospect of a big payday.
Given that Wyeth’s work is coveted among collectors, he said that he thought he could sell the paintings collectively for about $1 million.
Indeed, each of Wyeth’s works routinely fetch hundreds of thousands of dollars, occasionally a million or more. Although his son, Andrew, is a more famous artist, N.C. Wyeth was an accomplished painter and is regarded as one of America’s best illustrators. He died in 1945 at age 62 when his car was struck by a train.
Given the Wyeth name, Dina didn’t consider a $100,000 loan to be that big a risk. Besides, he said that he’d been taken in only once before, with the sale of some high-end jewelry.
He is used to finding buyers who shell out big bucks for famous art. He said that he recently found a collector who forked over $14 million for a painting by Dutch-born abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning.
Big help, no reward
While Dina is still trying to recover the $100,000 he loaned, Bowman, the former federal prosecutor, said the pawnshop owner played an important part in solving the case.
“He was very helpful and the information he gave us allowed us to move very quickly,” he said.
After meeting with authorities, Dina turned over all evidence he had concerning Roberts’ visit as well as his text communications, according to court documents.
But Dina is not entirely happy with the way things played out.
Before agreeing to the loan, he said that he checked the FBI’s public database of stolen artwork to see if the paintings were listed but couldn’t find any mention of them.
“I’m very upset about it,” said Dina.
The FBI disputes Dina’s assertion that the paintings weren’t listed.
“I know for a fact they were there,” said Laura Eimiller, a spokeswoman for the bureau in Los Angeles.
Whether or not he was responsible for tipping off the feds, Dina has some reason for optimism. Roberts was ordered to pay $100,000 in restitution as part of his sentence.
Dina claims that authorities have so far recovered $25,000 from Roberts, which has yet to be repaid to him. He also said the actor who vouched for Roberts has agreed to give him $50,000 in order to avoid a lawsuit.
The FBI’s Eimiller said the money is in the process of being recovered from Roberts, though she couldn’t confirm how much had been seized so far and what the timetable is to recover the full amount.
“They have it,” said Dina. “It doesn’t belong to them.”
