Dan's Papers - October 19, 2007

There are many ways to protect your home from fire and theft. You can keep fire extinguishers in every room and locks on the doors. You can call an insurance agent and buy homeowners insurance. You can hire a home security company to come in and install everything from TV monitors and motion detectors to window and door alarms. You can even put bars on all your windows.

Once you've done all that, however, the icing on the cake is probably to hire a caretaker. The caretaker lives in the house and keeps an eye on it. What could go wrong?

On February 1, 2006, the 11,000 square foot mansion of a prominent international CEO named Jerry W. Levin burned to the ground. Levin in the last ten years has guided Revlon, Sharper Image and Coleman Camping, and at the present time is Chairman and President of his own investment firm called JW Levin Partners.

Firemen in Quiogue searching through the still smoking ruins of 111 Meetinghouse Road said that the fire was not of a suspicious nature. Levin, meanwhile, after talking to his caretaker Pat Padden, age 50, to see that he was all right, which he was, then called his insurance company to make a claim. The property was worth six million dollars. And among the things in the house, the most valuable was a collection of oil paintings, now gone, all gone, by notables such as Larry Rivers, Jean Dubuffet and Jean Metzinger. The collection, in total, was worth $600,000. The insurance firm settled the claim for $1 million.

One year later, the Michelle Rosenfeld Gallery of Manhattan got an email from a man who wanted to know if a painting entitled "Woman with Basket" by Jean Metzinger would be of any interest to them. The person sending the email said he was Vincent Scheraldi and he represented the paintings owner, a man who wished to remain anonymous. It had been appraised at $420,000, he said, but he was willing to let the painting go for just $350,000 in cash if they were interested.

The manager of the gallery wrote back that she might be interested in that piece and would get back to him. She then called Jerry Levin, after which she called the District Attorney's office. And Jerry Levin called the FBI.

Apparently, in an amazing coincidence, Scheraldi had chosen three Manhattan art dealers at random to send emails, and one of the three, the Michelle Rosenfeld Gallery, had been the gallery that, years before, had sold Jerry Levin this painting, and since the fire, had worked with the insurance company to appraise that lost painting.

From what investigators can piece together, this seems to be what happened during the weeks and months leading up to the fire.

A friend of Levin's caretaker Patrick Padden named James Schmidt talked with Padden about some camping equipment and outdoor lawn furniture that was in the basement of the Levin house. These items had been there for years and had never been used. Surely Levin would not miss them if they were taken and used by somebody else, or sold to somebody else. And it would be easy. With Levin only there on weekends, all they'd have to do is haul this stuff away. And so they did.

When Levin came out to the house and didn't notice the difference, the two men thought they ought to try something else. Levin had these wonderful paintings on his walls. And in a storage room, in wooden racks, he had more of them. Items from this second lot of paintings were sometimes swapped out with certain paintings on the walls to keep things interesting. They must be worth something. Would he miss one?

Padden took what he thought was the best looking painting in the rack. He really didn't know one from another, but this was the one he liked. It was by somebody named DeBuffet. What could that be worth?

The two men brought the painting to the home of one of their friends, Ronald Jiminez, 58, of Southampton and he then took it over to the home of Brian Marbach, 18, of Hampton Bays, who went on the Internet to see what the value of this painting was. It was worth $30,000. They were amazed.

And so, the grand scheme was hatched. Padden took a count of the number of paintings in the Levin house, and announced that the total was 31. If you used the Jean DeBuffet painting as a rule of thumb for their value, you were looking at about a million dollars worth of paintings. They'd go in, take them and hide them at Marbach's house. And then they'd burn the Levin mansion down. Who would be the wiser? All lost in the fire. Too bad.

James Schmidt, who is now doing all the talking, said that according to police, the man who took on the job of burning the house down was the caretaker himself, Patrick Padden. The reason the fire department declared that the fire was not of a suspicious nature was because Padden had learned that if you use an accelerant, every trace of it burns when you light it up. So he used an accelerant.

At this point, Padden, Schmidt, Jiminez, Marbach and Scheraldi are all under arrest. Schmidt has pleaded guilty to an unrelated burglary case. Lawyers for Padden and Jiminez say their clients all claim to be entirely innocent and the whole thing was thought up by Schmidt.