Ace Gallery Founder Douglas Chrismas Gets Two Years in Embezzlement Case
192Jan. 15, 2025
Iconoclastic art dealer Douglas Chrismas, who this past May wasconvictedof embezzling more than $260,000 from the bankruptcy estate ofAce Gallery, the Los Angeles gallery he founded in 1986, has beensentencedto twenty-four months in prison, beginning February 17. US District Judge Mark C. Scarsi additionally ordered the eighty-year-old dealer to pay $12,809,192 in restitution. TheNew York Timesreports that Chrismas is currently free on bond.
The sentencing, which took place January 13, capped a more than decadelong saga that began when Ace Gallery filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2013. Subsequently, Chrismas wrote and signed a $50,000 check from the gallery to the Ace Museum, a nonprofit corporation that he owned; funneled to the Ace Museum $100,000 owed to the gallery by a third party for an artwork; and handed about $114,595 paid to the gallery by a third party for an artwork to the Ace Museum’s landlord, in an attempt to keep current with its $225,000 monthly rent. In April 2016, a bankruptcy court appointed an independent trustee to oversee the bankruptcy estate, removing Chrismas.
Prosecutors had sought a ten-year sentence, out of a possible maximum fifteen; Chrismas’s lawyers had lobbied for a “noncustodial sentence,” citing his advanced age.
“Instead of performing his fiduciary duty and properly managing the gallery’s bankruptcy estate, this defendant chose to use funds that belonged to the creditors of the gallery to make them whole, but for his dream of an art museum that never came to be,” said US Attorney Martin Estrada in a statement. “Today’s sentence provides a just punishment for these crimes, which were brazenly undertaken by a thief who gamed a system designed to protect those in financial desperation.”