Art of the Con

He claimed a childhood in the vineyards of Bordeaux, an internship at age 17 with Picasso, and a wealthy, discerning clientele willing to shell out as much as $250,000 for his oil paintings.

"An admired friend of many 20th-century artists, he influenced the concept and technique reflected in works by Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, Basquiat and Bofill," Sonnet wrote about himself in a 2005 letter of introduction to a New York art gallery.

Yet he spoke with a Long Island accent, rattled around the Philadelphia area in a rusted '86 Volvo, and hit up a series of girlfriends for money. And he never seemed to come up with any hand-painted, original art.

The pieces he did produce were digital - mostly abstracts printed from computers, signed, and marketed online as $200 limited editions.

Several artworks on his Web site bear dates from 1999 to 2001. They certainly weren't produced in France: For most of that period, he was sitting in federal prison.

Sonnet is indeed accomplished. Not as an imported fine artist, but as the all-American con artist Richard Carl Grossman.

From 1992 to 1995, Grossman, now 57, pulled off one of the grander scams in recent local history.

Posing as a visionary psychologist, he defrauded a dozen financial institutions that had lent him nearly $18 million for a chain of dial-in, all-hours, $1-per-minute counseling clinics that never opened.

Much of that cash went into construction of an enormous Main Line mansion, a 27,000-square-foot structure so over-the-top that its roof had to be cut flat halfway up to meet Tredyffrin Township's height restrictions.

Grossman pleaded guilty to fraud and money laundering, and spent 32 months in prison. He emerged late in 2001 and, while still under federal probation, began crafting his next persona.

As Luc Sonnet (pronounced so-NAY), he boasted of hanging out with Andy Warhol in 1980s New York. Of dating supermodel Kate Moss. Of having Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards' number programmed in his cell phone.

He invited acquaintances to visit his chateau in France. He professed to be Ivy-educated. He hired a crew of graduate students to film him proclaiming himself a digital art pioneer, then posted the clip on YouTube, calling it a preview of a PBS documentary about him.

While many who encountered him found his claims improbable, even laughable, a good many others took the bait. A sample:

At least three newspapers published credulous profiles of "Sonnet" in the last year.

At least two art galleries - one in New Hope, one in Virginia - agreed to show his work, only to cancel once they caught on to him.

A Main Line mother of four let him move in with her, turned her living and dining rooms into a gallery for his prints, and registered his business - Sonnet Arts International - in her name. Alarmed, her family paid him $24,000 to leave, but not before the woman had racked up $85,000 in credit-card debt while supporting him.

The owner of a Bucks County bed-and-breakfast spent thousands of dollars to convert an old workroom into a "Sonnet Gallery." But the tenant, who had declared himself the estate's "artist in residence," moved out without finishing even one painting.

A charity run by a Bucks County political leader, unaware that Sonnet was a fabrication, auctioned three prints for $1,000 each.

Regardless of price, using false credentials to help sell one's art is illegal, said Andrew D. Epstein, a Boston lawyer who primarily represents artists and photographers.

"When you describe your history, whatever you say that's not true is part of fraud, deceit and misrepresentation," said Epstein, who lends his services to the Philadelphia Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts.

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.

Because of his mental illness, and because he had cooperated with investigators, prosecutors asked U.S. District Judge Edmund V. Ludwig to impose a sentence half as long as federal guidelines prescribed. In November 2001, he was released from the Federal Correctional Institution at Fort Dix, to remain under probation supervision for three years.

He made a beeline back to his criminal stamping ground. Within months, signs of another identity morph began to appear.

"Richard Grossman," he would later tell The Inquirer, "is a boring American name."

In August 2002, he registered two fictitious business names with the state. "Ariel Sonnet," the records say, would be a "name used in signing, promoting and selling art work"; "Ariel Sonnet Promoting" would be for "promotions and fund raising."

The Inquirer found no evidence that Grossman did business as "Ariel Sonnet." Even so, he was required to tell his probation officer that he had created an alias, according to Daniel W. Blahusch, chief federal probation officer for the eastern district of Pennsylvania.

Grossman did not.

However, the court certainly was informed - by Easttown Township police - when in May 2004 Grossman got into a road-rage hit-and-run in Chester County.

While driving with a girlfriend in her aging Volvo, he cut off a brand-new R-type Jaguar on Route 252. The other driver laid on his horn at a stop light. Grossman threw the car into reverse, struck the Jag, and took off.

When police traced the Volvo, its 39-year-old owner, Charlene Welde, tried to take the fall for her companion by claiming she had been at the wheel. But Grossman fessed up under pressure from his probation officer. Charged with disorderly conduct, leaving the scene of an accident, and reckless driving, he pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct only and was fined. The other charges were dropped.

Although the arrest "was immediately reported to Judge Ludwig," Grossman was not remanded to prison, Blahusch wrote in an e-mail to The Inquirer. His supervision file is not a public record, Blahusch added, so it couldn't be discussed in further detail.

The Rev. Matthew Welde is hardly as tight-lipped. His daughter Charlene, an aspiring artist with her own mental-health issues, moved with Grossman into a backwoods rental home in Birchrunville, Chester County, in March 2004.

Though not yet calling himself Luc Sonnet, he "convinced her that he was a famous artist," said Welde, a Presbyterian evangelist. Grossman showed the minister his abstract prints and "told me that some of his pieces had been in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York."

It wasn't long, though, before "she got on to him, and then he was extraordinarily hostile," Welde said, recalling a middle-of-the-night phone call from his daughter.

"[She] told me that Grossman was beating her, and was going to kill her," said Welde, who urged her in vain to call 911.

The next day, she told her father she had lied. Unconvinced, he confronted Grossman and threatened to summon police.

"He said, 'Oh, don't do that!' " the minister recounted. " 'I'm on probation. . . . I'll go back to jail.' "

Instead, it was Charlene who left. In June 2004, telling not even her family, she emptied her bank account and flew to France, her father said. From there, she settled in Israel, where she is today.

"She didn't know how to get out from under his control if she didn't do it precipitately," Welde said.

Since then, he said, Charlene has affirmed to him her claims of abuse, adding that Grossman had locked her in and out of the house, threatened her with a knife, and drained $13,000 from her savings.

"I know from my daughter that it was a living hell," Welde said. " . . . Fortunately, God has spared her."

Charlene Welde would be but one in a fast-moving parade of women to be smitten by the darkly charming, intriguingly eccentric, sometimes Frenchified artist - and then accuse him of abusing and ripping them off.

In Grossman's version, she was but one in a bad run of needy, embittered ingrates. Reached by phone last week, he said their claims were fictions born of jealousy or addled minds and, if anything, they had exploited him for the earnings from his art.

"I'm not a mean person," he said. "I'm very kind. I care about people. I care about children. I care about animals. I care about everyone."

This much is indisputable: In summer 2004, Charlene Welde was gone. But her Volvo wasn't. He took it with him to Philadelphia, where he rented a room on South 18th Street. Soon, via Match.com, he was dating a research scientist who loved animals.

Grossman, however, did not love Liz Shea's cats, let alone her dogs, turtle and parrots. They made him wheeze, she said, and he leaned on her to get rid of them.

"He was deciding after the first date that he was going to move into my house," Shea told The Inquirer. "He said, 'So you're putting your cats over me?' And I said, 'Yes!' "

He turned his attention to her money, insisting "he could be really famous if he could get a gallery going," Shea said, and imploring her to borrow against her home.

Once, she lent him $700, she said. Another time, he nagged her into applying for a $5,000 loan for him at Commerce Bank.

"I called [the bank] when I got home and canceled," she said. "Then I told him, 'Oh, it's been refused.' "

His hard sell could be scary, Shea said, recalling his locking the dead bolt and pocketing the key. "He was really pressuring me to mortgage my house. He was saying, 'I won't let you leave.' "

Meanwhile, as Luc Sonnet, he was shopping his bogus self to art galleries.

"He was in Paris, he's got 800 people he's going to bring to my gallery, he's going to make me rich," said pop artist Perry Milou, reciting the rap when Sonnet dropped in at his Philadelphia gallery. "I just thought from day one he was a jiver."

He brought a portfolio, but the prints "almost looked like color copies someone made at Kinko's," unmatted and unframed, Milou said. "I wasn't going to just take them and throw them on a table."

Milou wasn't the only one to sniff out a "jiver."

Shea's friends did, too, and urged her to ditch him. "I don't know what I was doing," she said. "[They] were so worried about me because the guy is so very hypnotic."

When Grossman let it slip that he had done time, a librarian friend unearthed newspaper stories about his 1990s fraud conviction.

Shea stopped seeing him. But no matter. Grossman already was dating someone behind her back, she said.

Within six months, the new girlfriend was at the Marple Township Police Department in Delaware County, complaining of domestic violence.

She wanted no charges pressed, just the abuse put on record.

According to a July 8, 2005, report, Grossman "forcibly restrained her" from showering the previous night at their Broomall apartment, bruising her arm before she fled to her sister's house.

Neighboring tenants "saw him chasing after her in the parking lot," landlord Domenico Odorico recalled.

It was nothing new, the woman told police. Grossman had been "physically and mentally abusing her" since the previous February, when "she told him she wanted out of the relationship," according to the report.

He "has threatened to commit suicide if she left him," holding "knives to himself" and trying "to get her to plunge a knife into him," the report said.

This time, there would be no call to his probation officer. His supervision had ended nine months earlier.

Contacted recently at her Montgomery County home, the woman, now 54, insisted that her name not be published, saying she still fears him.

By September 2005, Grossman had yet another new love: a Main Line woman who would fall hard for both him and his charade. She would promote him and pay his way for months - until her family went to extraordinary lengths to disentangle her.

'Luc Sonnet' emerges

Debra Robinson was 45 and soon to be divorced, with a child in college and three at home in Lower Merion.

None liked the artist their mother had met on a Jewish dating site, and her father and siblings soon concurred.

They smelled a phony when Grossman ran on about his Ph.D from Cornell and his international acclaim as "Luc Sonnet" - his "professional name," he said. They checked the Sonnet Web site, featuring the Picasso-protege shtick, and the odor intensified.

Her twin sister, Patty Adler, plugged his real name into The Inquirer's electronic archive - and up popped his felonious past. Printouts in hand, she flew in from her home in Ohio to confront Robinson, who then reluctantly broke up with him.

But not for long.

Within a month, Grossman was back in touch, Robinson said. They spent a week together at Mill Creek Farm, a Bucks County bed-and-breakfast near Peddler's Village.

"There was something intriguing about him," Robinson said, and she believed she could help sell his art. Her divorce finalized, "I wanted to make my own money."

She began to isolate herself from her family to appease her beau. Her children went to live with their father, enabling Grossman to move in in May 2006.

"He convinced her that we were all wrong . . . that we were crazy," sister Adler said. "He saw to it that she lost contact with each one of us."

With Robinson's help, the enterprise of "Luc Sonnet" began to grow legs.

In June 2006, she filed the name "Sonnet Arts International" with the state, listing herself as the registered agent and her home as the primary place of business.

She bought frames and pricey glass for his prints, hanging them in her living and dining rooms and hosting a July "gallery opening." She purchased an expensive printer for his high-tech inkjet, or giclee, prints. She gave him a used Jeep Cherokee when Charlene Welde's Volvo quit.

She said she did it mostly on credit cards, landing her $85,000 in debt.

Her family, who helped her financially after the divorce, had cut her off, fearing the Grossman siphon. But when they sought counsel - from a psychiatrist and a clergywoman experienced with cults - they were told that Robinson was now too isolated, Adler said, and that someone had to reestablish contact.

To that end, Adler and her husband made up with Grossman - a "fake friendship," she called it. And they bided their time.

Meanwhile, he began booking "live art to live music" performances. He sought out small venues where, using a laptop, digital pen and graphics tablet, he would create abstracts as musicians played and project his works-in-progress onto a large screen.

He and Robinson talked up the management at MilkBoy Coffee, an art and music venue in Ardmore, which agreed to hang his prints during October 2006. He did several live-art shows there, co-owner Jamie Lokoff said, but never delivered the big-name music talents - like British pop star James Blunt - whom he claimed to know very well.

"You're skeptical, but what if it is true?" Lokoff said. "That's how, in my opinion, he gets through with all of this."

Grossman got a big boost from a guileless press, inducing two newspapers to swallow the tale of "Luc Sonnet" virtually whole.

"We're confident that it won't be long now before Luc Sonnet takes the country by storm . . . " began a story in the Nov. 15, 2006, issue of Play, an area entertainment weekly.

Under the heading "Buy a painting," it concluded: "They're not cheap, but they're beautiful. Oils run between $75,000 and $250,000. Sonnet acrylics typically go for $25,000 to $50,000 . . . "

One month later, after a sparsely attended live-art concert at the University of Pennsylvania's Irvine Auditorium, it was the Jewish Exponent's turn.

"His success got the attention of Pablo Picasso, who invited the then 17-year-old for an internship program that he ran from his private estate outside of Barcelona," the Dec. 21 profile said. It went on to quote the "rather well-known artist" observing that Picasso " 'wanted to know everything about you.' "

Yet even as his half-baked star ascended, Grossman was about to be put out to pasture - for a price.

Robinson wanted to shed him. But she didn't know how.

Her artist-in-residence, she said, had grown abusive. His all-night chatter deprived her of sleep. He controlled where she went, sometimes locking her in, she said. And he angered quickly when his artistic pedigree was challenged.

"He swore to me it was true," she said. "If I questioned him on it, he would explode. . . . He held a knife up to me once [and] pulled me down the steps by my hair."

Despite being vice president of a Montgomery County domestic-violence organization, she took no action.

But her housekeeper did.

On Nov. 14, 2006, the couple quarreled at a nearby Wawa and Robinson drove off, leaving Grossman there. Fearing his return, the housekeeper summoned Lower Merion police, according to their report.

Robinson told officers she wanted Grossman out, calling him "emotionally abusive." But they said she would need a court order, since he had established residence there for six months.

That, said Adler, is when Robinson and her family decided to "turn the con."

Robinson told Grossman that she wanted her children back, impossible with him there. Knowing he had nowhere to go, Adler and her husband offered a deal:

If he'd leave, they would pay $12,000 for six months' rent at Mill Creek Farm, the Bucks County bed-and-breakfast. As a sweetener, they offered another $12,000 for art supplies.

Grossman accepted.

"Without buying him off," Adler said, "I don't know how we would have gotten rid of him."

A Bucks County idyll

On one hand, the arrival of Luc Sonnet in late December 2006 meant income at a slow time of year for James Brame, Mill Creek's owner.

On the other hand, Brame said, "I told him at one point I would be happy to refund all the money he had not yet used if he'd get the hell out."

That parting wouldn't come until June 4, with a moving truck and a police cruiser sharing the driveway.

In the interim, things on the farm got weird.

Sonnet - the only name by which Brame knew him - was given the Jefferson Room. It is one of five units in a colonial-era manor house on the 14-acre estate, which features stables, a pool, a tennis court, a pond - and a 44-by-20-foot workroom where the newly arrived artist wished to create a gallery.

Sonnet was to produce, display and sell his art there. Brame was to get a cut, although how big became a point of bitter dispute.

Today, there is only an empty, wainscoted room looking out on a pasture, with ceilings and walls freshly painted and the floor newly carpeted in beige - a project that, Brame said, cost more than $10,000.

"It's all here for Mr. Sonnet," he said.

But Mr. Sonnet never completed any paintings to put in it. By the time he left, he had more than a dozen large canvases here and there, Brame said, bearing only preliminary brushstrokes.

Instead of painting, the innkeeper said, he spent most of his time holed up in his unkempt room, which Brame had agreed to wire for high-speed Internet access. When seen on the grounds, Brame said, he skulked around slump-shouldered, a cell phone ever pressed to his ear.

A stream of female visitors came and went, disappearing into his room "to do whatever it was they did," Brame observed. "He said he specialized in nude photography."

Sometimes he marketed his services online as "Luc Sonnet Photography."

Emily Van Loon, a college student and model in Monroe, La., said he contacted her online at her MySpace.com page and by phone, inviting her to a shoot at the farm.

"He told me Kate Moss was his girlfriend for about a year and a half," Van Loon, 23, recalled. "He said he knew all these supermodels."

He boasted that "he was this great painter, and was showing his art in galleries all over the world," she said. "He knew all the right people and could make me rich."

He also dissed the master, she recalled: "He said Picasso was grumpy, and he didn't even like him. He said he was cold, kind of a jerk."

Van Loon, a criminal-justice major, said Sonnet offered to pay for her visit. He also "wanted to paint me, and started talking about doing some nudes. I told him, 'I don't think so.' "

But the real deal breaker might have been her insistence that her mother, a retired art teacher, chaperone the shoot. "All of a sudden, something came up and he couldn't do it," Van Loon said.

Besides, she recalled him explaining, his artistic tastes ran to small-breasted women. Hers were too large.

Elsewhere on the Internet, he created photography sites under the name "Avedon" - as in Richard, the late iconic photographer - and listed business addresses in Buckingham, Los Angeles, New York and Washington.

When Brame was shown printouts of Sonnet's online sample photos by The Inquirer, his eyes widened. Behind and beneath the naked women were things he recognized: Mill Creek's parlor couch, Mill Creek's doorway, stairway and hallway.

"That's my kitchen!" Brame exclaimed.

Clearly, his "artist in residence" had taken the modeling sessions beyond the walls of the Jefferson Room.

In late 2006, Grossman had gotten Robinson to pay a crew of film students, mostly from Temple, to document him creating abstracts at the Irvine Auditorium show.

They resumed filming at Mill Creek, where, in the bucolic surrounds, he proclaimed his intention to educate the art world about his "new" technology.

A small, contemporary gallery in New Hope hosted what may have been his last live-art show. Having read the breathless coverage of Sonnet's show at MilkBoy, owner Brian Hanck let him into his ARTisZEN Arts gallery one weekend in January.

Soon after, though, Hanck ended the relationship.

Chief among the reasons was a damning series of e-mails from a woman who said she once dated Sonnet.

That name, she wrote, "is an alias. He is the ex-con scam artist Richard Grossman. . . . He has no doctorate and surely did not have an internship with Picasso! He is a pathological liar and has made up a whole new life."

The anonymous sender turned out to be Liz Shea, bent on outing the man who hated her pets.

More connections

Upon his arrival at Mill Creek, Luc Sonnet advertised on Craigslist.org for an artist's assistant to help promote his art. Among other duties.

"The first time I met him, he talked to me about modeling for him," said Nicole Cordisco of Doylestown.

Desiring both to work and to remain fully clothed, she said she managed "to weasel my way around it," putting him off with a "maybe."

A novice artist, Cordisco agreed to sell his work on commission, hoping she'd learn something. What she learned was that he coveted the connections of her father, John Cordisco, chairman of Bucks' Democratic Committee.

"He kept saying, 'Why not let your dad's friends sell the art?' " she said.

As a father, John Cordisco was wary of Sonnet's intentions. Over dinner at Esca, a New Hope restaurant, Cordisco grilled the quirky artist, worried that he was simply pursuing his daughter.

"He seemed to know, or have a pretty good grasp of, the art world," Cordisco recalled. Sonnet insisted he would mentor Nicole, and held forth on his credentials and his Picasso connection.

Afterward, Cordisco was surprised to find little on Google about Sonnet. Unable to disprove the claims, he accepted the artist's offer to donate three abstract prints for auction at an annual fund-raiser for a children's charity Cordisco runs.

About 150 guests attended the March 1 auction at Jericho National Golf Club. Posted near the Sonnet prints was the fabricated bio he had shown Cordisco over dinner.

The artist attended in a dark suit, crisp white shirt and yellow tie. At his side was a slender, striking redhead named Sandy.

"It kind of put to rest for the moment the suspicions I had," Cordisco said. "OK, so he's not hitting on my daughter. And he's got the art."

Each print went for $1,000.

Told recently by The Inquirer that Sonnet was an impostor, Cordisco was aghast.

"Oh, my God," he said, adding that he would contact those who had bought the prints and offer refunds.

"Art is in the eye of the beholder," he said. "But he had that bio out there. I think that was definitely something that intrigued people."

Further burnishing the Sonnet image was the woman he'd had on his arm.

She had been with him at his ARTisZEN show. She had stayed with him at Mill Creek. And she accompanied him when he approached the owner of Puck, a popular new nightclub in Doylestown, about doing a live-art show.

"He talked like he was with the big boys," owner Lynn Goldman said, noting that he also dropped Cordisco's name.

Goldman was too skeptical to bite. But what nearly sold her, she said, was Sandy, who "gave him some credibility because she looked like this Town & Country woman."

The artist never said, not even to his innkeeper, how he and Sandy had met.

But he did tell Brame that she worked for the FBI.

It sounded like another Sonnet whopper. Except that this one was true.

A move to Virginia

Sandra Michele Birdsong is 46, with a master's degree in forensic science.

Citing privacy issues, the FBI will not reveal her job title. But a switchboard operator at her workplace - the FBI Academy in Quantico, Va. - told a caller that Birdsong is in counterintelligence.

The academy is 15 minutes from Dumfries and the tidy subdivision where she has a four-bedroom home on a street of $400,000 properties.

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.

"I'm trying to start a new life here, an honest life without any lies," he had said, and blamed a New York art promoter - whom he refused to name - for concocting the legend of "Luc Sonnet."

Three weeks later, the Potomac News ran a toned-down profile. While it made no mention of Picasso, France or Kate Moss, it included questionable Sonnet claims.

Like his athletic prowess.

"I can still throw a 50-yard pass through the eye of a needle," he was quoted as saying.

The paper took something else on faith.

"Sonnet [said] that the Archdiocese of Philadelphia wanted to do a solo show based on the 2005 piece, 'Angels in Flight,' but it didn't happen because of a lack of time," the story said.

This was news to archdiocese spokesman Matthew Gambino, who could locate no evidence of such a plan.

How Sonnet had landed in Dumfries, the story did not say. Nor did it mention his new muse, in whose house he was holding forth.

An artist's life

Sandy Birdsong did not respond to phone or e-mail messages left by The Inquirer at the FBI Academy. An e-mail sent to her home elicited this: "Thank you very much for your concern, but I am respectfully requesting that you please stop contacting me."

The FBI does not forbid employees from living with convicted felons, said Bill Carter, a spokesman. But roommates who are not immediate family members or FBI colleagues must be reported to the bureau for a background check.

The FBI would not say if that was done when Grossman moved in with Birdsong. "I can't release information on any FBI employee that works here," Quantico spokesman Kurt Crawford wrote on Nov. 15 in response to a list of e-mailed questions.

A few days later, however, Grossman was gone from Birdsong's house.

In the cell-phone interview Tuesday, he confirmed he had moved, but would not disclose where.

"I'm just going to be living my life as an artist," he said, "and I'm not going to mislead anyone anymore."

Asked why he had left Virginia, he said, "Because I was ashamed."

Of what?

"Of my past," he said. "You made it so."

In an hour-long discourse ranging from anger to denial to woe, Grossman said he had suffered enough for his lies.

"Can't you leave me alone and let me live my life?" he said.

Grossman downplayed any harm done by his bogus resume - after all, a Sonnet print is a Sonnet print, international repute or not.

"They still have the same value," he said. "They still are fine art that I created and that I spent endless, endless hours and endless, endless days working on."

As for the signed prints bearing dates within his prison stay, Grossman said he hand-drew the images behind bars. "If it wasn't for drawing and painting, I don't think I could have survived," he said.

When he got out, he "refined them" by computer, he explained, and signed them with the dates they were conceived.

Asked about his well-traveled, unfinished canvases, Grossman fell silent.

"Why are you asking?" he said. "They are in progress."

Not that it, or anything he does, is anyone's business, he added.

"People make mistakes, and they're allowed to have a second chance. . . .

"I made another mistake. Big deal."