The US television network HBO and Bad Wolf, the Welsh production company behind Doctor Who and other programmes, are developing a new series about the disgraced dealer Inigo Philbrick’s rapid rise in the art market and his scandalous fall.
According to Deadline, Bad Wolf has bought the rights to All That Glitters: A Story of Friendship, Fraud, and Fine Art, a forthcoming memoir by Philbrick’s former friend and business partner Orlando Whitfield. “Orlando’s unique voice and access makes one of the most exciting manuscripts we’ve read in a very long time,” Jane Tranter, a co-founder of Bad Wolf and executive producer of HBO’s hit series Succession, told Deadline.
In parallel, the BBC and Canadian production company Blue Ant Media is working on a three-part documentary about Philbrick, which is being developed with the cooperation of Philbrick and his fiancée, the Made in Chelsea star Victoria Baker-Harber.
Whitfield, a former friend and flatmate of Philbrick’s, went into business with him when the pair founded I&O Fine Art. At the same time, Philbrick was working at the blue-chip gallery White Cube, eventually rising to be the gallery’s head of secondary market sales. He then parlayed his success there into a gallery of his own. In a recent interview with The Guardian, Whitfield described his and Philbrick’s increasingly divergent and personal styles at the time: “He wore Milanese suits, Loro Piana shoes and was driven in a blacked-out Mercedes; I cycled to work and wore my keys on a clip on my belt.”
Philbrick made a name for himself among collectors and speculators for having a keen eye and was known to bid on blue-chip contemporary-art auctions. In 2017, his gallery reported a $130m turnover. However, by 2019 Philbrick’s reputation had begun to sour, and his business suffered when the market for some of his preferred artists (such as Christopher Wool and Rudolf Stingel) began to cool. To keep up appearances and maintain his lifestyle, the art dealer misrepresented the ownership of certain works for his benefit, sold shares of works to multiple investors for totals that exceeded 100%, used some of those works to secure loans for himself and forged consignment documents.
In late 2019, after collectors and speculators started to suspect Philbrick of doing dirty business, civil lawsuits for fraud began to pile up. In October of that year, he defaulted on a $14m loan and, just before the multiple lawsuits against him became public, he fled the US for the Pacific island of Vanuatu. He was arrested in June 2020 after Vanuatu authorities expelled him at the request of the US embassy in Papua New Guinea. He was indicted by a New York grand jury one month later. In November 2021, he pleaded guilty to federal wire-fraud charges, telling a Manhattan judge that he had done it “for the money”. Though he could have faced up to 20 years in prison, he was sentenced the following March to only seven years. He was released in February, having served around four years behind bars.
This past September, another of Philbrick’s business partners, Robert Newland, was sentenced to one year and eight months in prison by a New York district court judge after pleading guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
