Tsuktiben Jamir
We all remember Angela Catherine Hamblin, who was found guilty way back in 2009 of selling fake artworks worth over $400,000 on eBay, or through other private transactions. Over the course of five months in the year 2007, Hamblin offered for sale fake works of art ascribed to British watercolorist and printmaker Joseph Mallord William Turner, American abstract expressionist painter Milton Avery, American abstract painter Franz Kline, and Spanish Cubist artist Juan Gris.
According to a press release by the United States Department of Justice, “HAMBLIN made various claims about where she acquired the paintings, including that she or her husband had inherited the paintings from relatives and that they purchased one of the paintings from a then-deceased seller. With respect to one of the paintings, HAMBLIN claimed that the artist had given it to George Balanchine, the choreographer, who had, in turn, sold it to her great-grandfather.”
Hamblin was arrested by US authorities following a sting operation, as a result of many allegations against her. She said that she used the fraudulent sales to help her pay her mortgage; then she entered a guilty plea to two charges of mail fraud and one count of wire fraud. She was convicted in 2009 and upon pleading guilty, she was looking to spend one year and one day in prison for her fraudulent crime. Hamblin was also ordered to pay a sum of $65,000 to the ACA Galleries’ owner Jeffrey Bergen in addition to serving her sentence in jail. Then, poof! She was gone.
She never showed up to report to prison. In fact, she had already passed the threshold of American soil and made her way to St. Boswells, a small village in Scotland. She had been living there all these years with her husband. However, her time in hiding would finally come to an end on the 31st of May, 2022. On her way back to Scotland following a vacation to Vienna, Hamblin was re-arrested in May of last year while changing flights at an airport in Frankfurt, Germany.
Courtesy: The Art Newspaper.
She was finally transferred to the United States on the 21st of April, 2023, after German officials filed an extradition order. Since then, she has been in the custody of the U.S. Bureau of Prisons to serve her term.
Damien Williams, United States Attorney said, “Hamblin went to great lengths to avoid accountability for her crimes, but this Office and the FBI have long memories and benefit greatly from our cooperation with international partners. Despite some 13 years on the run, Hamblin was apprehended last year as she changed flights in Germany and today returns to face justice and serve her time in prison.”
After a long 13 years on the run, Hamblin’s crimes caught up to her and justice can finally be served. This only goes on to show that no matter how far we run, we can never outrun our crimes because they will eventually catch up to us and we will have to deal with the consequences. Also, one can never outrun the law.
