It was three days before Christmas when cops arrived to arrest aging billionaire Hubert Neumann at his NYC townhouse.
His own son-in-law had called the cops on him amid a huge family feud over their astonishing art collection.
Hubert, now 91, was hauled away on December 22, 2018, at age 86, after Jeffrey Donnelly, married to his daughter Belinda, accused him of a ‘shoulder shove’.
He spent the night sleeping on the freezing cold floor of a police cell, surrounded by vermin.
Speaking about the moment he was put into a cell with two other men, Hubert, who was 86 at the time, told The Post: “These guys said, ‘Hey man, what are you doing here?’ Because they said I was an old guy. I said, ‘My family put me in jail.’ They said, ‘What kind of family you got, man?’”
More than four years later, the battle has only got worse.
It is so reminiscent of HBO hit ‘Succession’, that Hubert’s youngest daughter Melissa Neumann, who remains close to her dad, admitted: “I had to stop watching it as it hit too close to home.”
Billionaire Hubert Neumann and his youngest daughter Melissa Neumann at his NYC home – as he discusses his 2018 arrest.EMMY PARK
The moment Neumann was arrested on December 22, 2018, was caught on home security cameras.
Neumman, a Chicago mail-order cosmetics heir, has a collection of art ranging from Picasso, Miró, and Matisse to Warhol and Koons, which he began collecting 50 years ago with his late father Morton.
Neumman was and is prolific, befriending artists including Basquiat before they found fame, still buying up-and-coming artists, and building a collection that he sees as his legacy.
But he’s embroiled in a legal fight over the future of the artwork, brought by Belinda, the second of his three daughters.
Neumann, then 86, was led away by cops in handcuffs.
She is attempting to get him thrown out of two trusts he oversees.
Hubert fears that if she succeeds, she could sell most or all the art collected over five decades.
Now we can reveal the full ugly extent of the battle, with Hubert’s arrest being matched by accusations that he was a wife-beater.
Neumann, in front of a Warhol painting of Elizabeth Taylor, Janet Leigh, and Tony Curtis, at his NYC home.EMMY PARK
This was alleged during a court fight over Hubert’s ex-wife Dolores’ will. Neumann claimed it was secretly changed before her death to give Belinda 80 percent of the estate, and the other two daughters the remaining 20 percent.
A court recently ruled that Dolores was in sound mind when she made the amendment.
With a slew of ongoing court cases about the two trusts that Hubert oversees, a spokesperson for Belinda and Jeffrey told The Post: “Hubert’s physical abuse of Dolores is just one element of his 40-plus years of fraud and criminality which, as alleged and will be proven in ongoing litigations.”
Neumann has denied all allegations of wife-beating; the claims have not been ruled on by a court.
The spokesperson for the Donnellys highlighted a head-spinning slew of allegations made in court.
They include that Neumann “fraudulently altered” a co-op stock certificate to steal Dolores’s 50 percent ownership of a jointly-owned apartment, “falsely claiming” that he is the sole owner of more than $100 million of art “which he in fact co-owned with Dolores and/or his daughters”, “fraudulently siphoning” off millions of dollars from his daughters’ trusts to pay 50 percent of his and his girlfriend’s lavish lifestyle…” and stealing Belinda’s stock in a family corporation which owns hundreds of millions of dollars worth of art.”
Neumann, his youngest daughter Melissa, and middle daughter Belinda Neumann-Donnelly, who has brought multiple legal suits against him.OWEN HOFFMANN /PatrickMcMullan.com
Neumann and his daughter Belinda were seen together in public at a Picasso show at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC in February 2011.OWEN HOFFMANN /PatrickMcMullan.com
In response, Jay Itkowitz, attorney for Hubert, said the Donnellys were “throwing dirt”, adding: “The subject here is why daughter Belinda and her husband Jeffrey Donnelly would cause an 86-year old father and grandfather to be arrested a few days before Christmas 2018 because of an alleged ‘shoulder check’ by Hubert Neumann, as stated on Jeffrey Donnelly’s police report. As a result, Mr. Neumann was kept overnight, and he had to sleep on a concrete floor for his own safety in an NYC jail.”
Hubert said Belinda, 56, her husband Jeffrey, 55, and their three children moved into Hubert’s home back in September 2012, ostensibly to care for him in his old age – and paid no rent.
To this, they claim he asked them to move in.
Neumann was accused of beating his former wife Dolores, which he has denied.EMMY PARK
But he fell out with Belinda when he asked her to share her mother’s estate equally with her sisters.
Hubert started eviction proceedings against the Donnellys in May 2018.
They were set to be thrown out that same month, but two days before the eviction date, Belinda and Jeffrey got a temporary order of protection (TOP) against him in family court, accusing him of threatening them with physical harm.
They also sued Hubert in the supreme court for financial damages, seeking to remain in the house.
And this was just the start.
On May 25, 2018, the Donnellys called the police, claiming that Hubert had violated the order.
The police visited, and questioned Hubert, but no arrest was made.
A painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat, one of the artist’s work that Neumann owns. Neumann befriended Basquiat before he was famous, making his collection an important repository for knowledge about the artist.EMMY PARK
On May 29, 2018, Belinda and Jeffrey’s lawyer filed a second restraining order, requiring Hubert and his live-in partner Debra Purden, a writer and curator, to stay only on the fourth and fifth floors of the house, and lock elevator doors to the second and third floors, which kept him from gaining access to his art collection and valuable documents. (The family court later required the locks to be removed from those two doors for safety reasons).
The Donellys also called the police on Hubert on two more occasions, on June 11 and September 21, 2018, claiming Hubert violated the TOP.
But things really escalated on December 22, 2018, when Jeffrey called 911 — in a call heard by The Post — and claimed Hubert had shoved him.
Later, in his hand-written police report the night of the arrest, Jeffrey said: “[Hubert] was passing [Jeffrey] on the staircase and shoulder checked [Jeffrey] into the door causing [Jeffrey] to fear for the safety of his family.”
Neumman fears that if his estranged daughter gains control of the trust, a collection gathered over decades and two generations, and meant to be seen in its entirety, would be torn asunder.EMMY PARK
Recalling the day, Hubert said he arrived home to see Jeffrey sitting amid boxes in the entry hall to the house.
Hubert walked past Jeffrey on the stairs and peeked into the dining room on the second floor.
Jeffrey then allegedly slammed the doors before Hubert could see into the room.
This was caught by a video camera that Jeffrey had set up without Hubert’s knowledge.
On the tape, obtained by The Post from public records, Hubert is heard saying “You pushed me.”
One of Andy Warhol’s famous Campbell’s tomato soup can paintings is on the wall at the house. Neumann built his collection on “gut” over 50 years, making it a tour de horizon like few others.
Hubert then went up to his bedroom on the fifth floor, where at 6 pm, police knocked on his door.
“The police said, ‘Will you please dress up because it’s cold’, and so I had to change and put on a coat and hat. Basically, I got the impression that the police were reluctant to arrest me. So they put handcuffs on me, for the first time in my life, and it hurt — it hurt.
“I walked past Jeffrey who was sitting there, no expression on his face as he looked at me in handcuffs, and I walked into a paddy wagon. I couldn’t even believe it was happening.”
Jeff Koons’ “Amore” sculpture takes pride of place in the Neumann house. Koons is a friend of Neumann, which has informed his collecting.EMMY PARK
It was then that cops told him he had violated the protection order.
Hubert was taken to a precinct near his home where he said he was “freezing cold and disoriented.”
“You lose all your sense of privacy,” he said: “So I say, ‘I have to go to the bathroom’, I get walked out, and the guy’s looking at me going to the bathroom. And it’s humiliating.
“I was frightened. I heard scratching that I feared was rats. I heard screaming from inmates in other cells. I was very frightened.
“You say how do I feel? I feel I’ve lost my privacy. I can’t even believe it.” He was fingerprinted and interviewed, “then I had to go to sleep, and there’s a stainless steel bench. I said, ‘I’m not sleeping on that, I’ll fall off and break a hip or something’. So I lay down on the floor. A cement, cold floor.
Donnelly sits by as Neumann is led away in handcuffs.
“It took me a long time to get to sleep, finally there’s a cop in the cell and he taps me. and says, “I’m just checking you’re still alive’.”
Debra and Melissa soon arrived at the precinct with pizza and a dressing gown for Hubert but were banned from seeing him.
Melissa, a noted art collector herself, said: “I was just worried for his safety.”
He burst into tears when he eventually saw Melissa and Debra the next morning at the criminal court downtown after he was booked.
Neuman and his daughter Melissa Neumann want to preserve the family’s artwork for generations to come – not sell it off. Among the works they seek not to lose is a Miró.EMMY PARK
But, on February 6, 2019, Jeffrey withdrew his family court complaint without giving Hubert the chance to present evidence that the case was false, and on July 15, 2019, the Manhattan DA’s office announced they would not prosecute and the matter was dismissed.
Hubert allowed the matter to be unsealed.
In April 2019 the NY Appellate division denied the Donnellys’ bid to appeal the eviction, and they were ordered to move out by May 15, 2019, and pay back $24,282.57 in rent.
They now live in midtown.
Neumann says he still loves his daughter, Belinda, despite everything.EMMY PARK
For Hubert, the hurt remains.
After his arrest, he was delayed twice by customs while coming back into the country as his record was still tagged with his arrest.
Yet he repeatedly told The Post: “I still love my three daughters, including Belinda. I just want peace and love in my family.”
Neumann was forced to sleep on the cold cell floor after his arrest in December 2018. He was reunited with his daughter and his partner after leaving central booking.EMMY PARK
Melissa Neumann said she is hurt by all the family in-fighting, especially by losing her relationship with her older sister. “It’s going to be very hard to repair a family like this,” she said.EMMY PARK
Melissa, who is set to take over as a trustee in the event of her dad’s death, said: “In my capacity as a trustee I want to be objective as I can, on a personal level I think it’s going to be very hard to repair a family like this.
“This all didn’t have to happen this way, the reading of my mother’s will definitely changed my life trajectory and my sister’s trajectory.
“She is my older sister and had always been somebody I looked up to and we helped each other, the personal part is what I think hurts the most for me.”
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
In a case that has sent shockwaves through the Vancouver Island art community, a local art dealer has been charged with one count of fraud over $5,000. Calvin Lucyshyn, the former operator of the now-closed Winchester Galleries in Oak Bay, faces the charge after police seized hundreds of artworks, valued in the tens of millions of dollars, from various storage sites in the Greater Victoria area.
Alleged Fraud Scheme
Police allege that Lucyshyn had been taking valuable art from members of the public under the guise of appraising or consigning the pieces for sale, only to cut off all communication with the owners. This investigation began in April 2022, when police received a complaint from an individual who had provided four paintings to Lucyshyn, including three works by renowned British Columbia artist Emily Carr, and had not received any updates on their sale.
Further investigation by the Saanich Police Department revealed that this was not an isolated incident. Detectives found other alleged victims who had similar experiences with Winchester Galleries, leading police to execute search warrants at three separate storage locations across Greater Victoria.
Massive Seizure of Artworks
In what has become one of the largest art fraud investigations in recent Canadian history, authorities seized approximately 1,100 pieces of art, including more than 600 pieces from a storage site in Saanich, over 300 in Langford, and more than 100 in Oak Bay. Some of the more valuable pieces, according to police, were estimated to be worth $85,000 each.
Lucyshyn was arrested on April 21, 2022, but was later released from custody. In May 2024, a fraud charge was formally laid against him.
Artwork Returned, but Some Remain Unclaimed
In a statement released on Monday, the Saanich Police Department confirmed that 1,050 of the seized artworks have been returned to their rightful owners. However, several pieces remain unclaimed, and police continue their efforts to track down the owners of these works.
Court Proceedings Ongoing
The criminal charge against Lucyshyn has not yet been tested in court, and he has publicly stated his intention to defend himself against any pending allegations. His next court appearance is scheduled for September 10, 2024.
Impact on the Local Art Community
The news of Lucyshyn’s alleged fraud has deeply affected Vancouver Island’s art community, particularly collectors, galleries, and artists who may have been impacted by the gallery’s operations. With high-value pieces from artists like Emily Carr involved, the case underscores the vulnerabilities that can exist in art transactions.
For many art collectors, the investigation has raised concerns about the potential for fraud in the art world, particularly when it comes to dealing with private galleries and dealers. The seizure of such a vast collection of artworks has also led to questions about the management and oversight of valuable art pieces, as well as the importance of transparency and trust in the industry.
As the case continues to unfold in court, it will likely serve as a cautionary tale for collectors and galleries alike, highlighting the need for due diligence in the sale and appraisal of high-value artworks.
While much of the seized artwork has been returned, the full scale of the alleged fraud is still being unraveled. Lucyshyn’s upcoming court appearances will be closely watched, not only by the legal community but also by the wider art world, as it navigates the fallout from one of Canada’s most significant art fraud cases in recent memory.
Art collectors and individuals who believe they may have been affected by this case are encouraged to contact the Saanich Police Department to inquire about any unclaimed pieces. Additionally, the case serves as a reminder for anyone involved in high-value art transactions to work with reputable dealers and to keep thorough documentation of all transactions.
As with any investment, whether in art or other ventures, it is crucial to be cautious and informed. Art fraud can devastate personal collections and finances, but by taking steps to verify authenticity, provenance, and the reputation of dealers, collectors can help safeguard their valuable pieces.
