Art of the Con

It was a handy refuge for Grossman when his tenure at the farm ended in June.

Two months before, he had planned a grand opening of Mill Creek's "Sonnet Gallery," to include prominent guests, finger food, a string quartet.

Trouble was, no art.

Prodded by Brame, he bought canvases and had frames built at a lumberyard.

Still, weeks passed with little progress, and an extra assistant, a Doylestown art student, was enlisted. Soon, Mill Creek's old pool house was filled with 14 big canvases, each with spare lines for his helpers to fill with color.

"He said all the great artists do it that way," Brame recalled.

Yet nothing was close to completion by April, or May. Nicole Cordisco had quit in a huff, and Grossman contends he stopped painting in a dispute over Brame's cut.

By Memorial Day, he was packing up to leave. A moving van appeared June 4. It was followed by a Buckingham Township patrol car.

The exiting artist had called the police because Brame, angry over unpaid phone and Internet bills and broken promises, had confiscated the canvases. Brame was ordered to hand them over, Sgt. J.R. Landis said, and advised to take it up in small-claims court.

Soon the finished basement of the Birdsong home was ringed with unfinished Sonnets. And their creator had a new world of galleries to troll.

At the upscale Principle Gallery in Alexandria, he told director Amy Morton that he wanted up to $300,000 for his oils, she said. "He either had an accent or in some way represented himself as French. . . . I told him flat-out he wasn't right for our market."

He was successful, briefly, at a Georgetown gallery owned by Ed Chasen, who agreed to exclusively represent Sonnet in the D.C. area. But days later, the contract was in shreds.

"There was no art," Chasen said. "All he had were prints."

In last week's interview, Grossman said he, not Chasen, broke the contract, so not to be shackled to one venue.

Along with galleries, he also pitched himself to D.C. models.

Through a modeling Web site, he met Mariana Gerzanych, a statistical analyst when not posing, and he e-mailed her samples of his work.

One was a nude shot of his FBI flame lying on a couch.

Grossman acknowledged last week that he had circulated it without Birdsong's consent. "She didn't know," he said. "It was only one."

Back in the summer, he had told an Inquirer reporter that Birdsong knew "everything about me," and had agreed to take him in if the dissembling stopped. He pronounced himself happy, busy, and in love.