Art of the Con

Grossman left the Philadelphia area in June for Dumfries, Va., moving into the handsome brick home of his latest girlfriend. She is employed, incredibly, by the agency that had helped send him to prison: the FBI.

One summer afternoon, Grossman was surprised to find an Inquirer reporter at their door, there to question him as an investigation by the newspaper was unraveling much of his story. After a cigarette out back - "I have an anxiety disorder," he said - he admitted many of his lies.

Picasso?

"That wasn't true," he said softly.

The French chateau? Andy Warhol?

"Not the case."

Nor had he displayed his art in Europe, or done business, as he had claimed, with collectors named Guggenheim and Saatchi.

While insisting that "many people have collected my art," Grossman conceded he never sold a piece for much more than $1,000.

Forced to confront his fish tales, he said he regretted them. When asked why he had spread them further via media interviews and his Web sites, Grossman opened his arms in a pleading gesture.

"It just kept going," he said. "Once a lie starts, it is very hard to stop it. I didn't know how to stop it."

The seeds of deception

Richard Grossman's unbridled penchant for grand exaggeration is nothing new.

He has long suffered from mental afflictions that send him careening between jags of bombastic ambition and depression, according to court-ordered psychological reports. These disorders, along with a keen intellect, are among the apparent seeds of his Sonnet-sized deceptions.

While "his superior intellectual faculties" have allowed him to function, a psychologist wrote in 1999, "his record suggests difficulties approaching psychotic or schizophrenic-like proportions."

Growing up in Massapequa, Long Island, Grossman considered himself the "odd one" in his middle-class family of four, according to the reports. He roamed nomadically among the homes of friends; deeming public high school to be beneath him, he skipped much of his senior year.

After studying philosophy and computers at the State University of New York at Binghamton, he married and held a curious series of jobs - vacuum cleaner telemarketer, business consultant, real estate agent, unlicensed psychotherapist - before suffering a "breakdown" in the early 1980s, the reports say.

His adventures, and frustrations, as a patient inspired his reincarnation on the Main Line as the phony "Dr. Richard C. Grossman, Ph.D," founder and promoter of telepsychology clinics. Using falsified financial statements showing multi-millions in income, he gulled commercial lenders - General Electric Capital Corp. and AT&T Commercial Finance Corp., to name just two - into backing his couch-by-phone proposal.

"What I did was wrong, what I did was unlawful, what I did was misleading, what I did could also be called fraud . . . ," he told a gathering of outraged financiers in a transcribed interrogation in 1995. "But then again, I'm eccentric, I'm an artist, my purpose was very pure."

The courts were forgiving.