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Ben
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartradio. Welcome back to the show, fellow ridiculous historians. Thank you as always so much for tuning in. In. Let's hear it for the man, the myth legend, our super producer, Max the so Real Williams. The Triple M. The Triple M. Hey, Max, Noel and I had a question for you based on our earlier conversation in our two part series on potatoes. So potatoes are one of the seven things you can eat with a condition. What are the other six?
Max Williams
Frozen chicken.
Noel Brown
Frozen.
Ben
Exclusively frozen.
Max Williams
Well, I have to defrost. I can't have any meats that are aged like. So, Noel, when we were at that lovely steakhouse in the Bahamas, Marcus Samuelson's restaurant. Marcus, you got the aged one, I got the fresh one because I can't have anything aged.
Noel Brown
Oh, I got you aged steak. They don't age. Chicken, though. You can have fresh chicken, right? It doesn't have to be frozen.
Ben
All right, do the list. Do the list.
Noel Brown
Okay, give us the list. Sorry, I'm just.
Ben
Good question.
Noel Brown
I got questions.
Max Williams
So, yeah, yeah, let's see. Gluten. Gluten free bread. Rice. Pain.
Noel Brown
I can have pain.
Max Williams
Pain and sadness.
Noel Brown
Oh, I see.
Ben
Those last two don't count, I think.
Max Williams
And blueberries.
Ben
Okay, okay.
Noel Brown
Human tears.
Ben
I suspect our producer is freestyling a little bit, but we love it. Definitely can drink coffee. That is no brain.
Max Williams
Actually, coffee is. Is actually a questionable thing, but there is some standards. I cannot. I can. I. I cannot go without my caffeine.
Ben
So say we all.
Max Williams
I went off a coffee for six months at one point, actually.
Ben
Oh, gross.
Max Williams
It was horrible.
Ben
Why? So that is Noel Brown. None other. They call me Bed Bullen for tax purposes. We are thrilled to be joined with none other than Salvador Dali. Did I, Noel, did I tell you? When I was in a situation that required me to be in Spain and I found a museum for Salvador Dali and they were actually selling sketches that the man had made. They were quite expensive. I did suspect money laundering. And thank goodness my girlfriend, well, we still fight about it, she talked me off the ledge. She said, how much money do podcasters make? Do you really want to buy an original Dali?
Noel Brown
Well, you know, you got to park your money somewhere. And why not park it in a sketch? A tossed off sketch. Because as we know, our man Dali was nothing if not a capitalist.
Ben
Oh, yes. Yeah, yeah.
Noel Brown
And you know, it's funny, I actually found myself in Spain as well and went to a. I didn't go to a Dali museum or exhibit, but I went to this really lovely restaurant called Babu that was named after his pet ocelot and was very Salvador Dali coated in its decor and was delightful. And we had a lovely waiter who gave us all kinds of tips and tricks on places to go see in Barcelona, and it was fantastic. And yeah, Babu, the pet ocelot. This is an interesting man, Salvador Dali.
Ben
Oh, yes. Very interested in himself, as we will find. We are putting on our ridiculous crime hats to examine one of our favorite artists and one of our favorite stories about him. Thanks to our research associate, Maria, we have learned that for a long time at Rikers Island. Yes, that Rikers island, the jail. There was an original drawing, a piece by Salvador Dali that hung around in one of the worst places in the world for decades. People didn't appreciate it. They were throwing coffee cups at it. They stuck it next to a vending machine. But get this, fellow ridiculous historians. This piece was stolen in 2003 from inside of the walls of one of the country's most notorious correctional facilities. So as we're exploring this, our three big questions are how did it get there to start with? Who stole the painting? Who has it now? And a little bit of light foreshadowing. We know two of those answers.
Noel Brown
This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Ben, I think you know that our bags aren't quite packed yet, but our brains sure are because we've got this incredible trip planned to Baja Mar in Nassau.
Ben
We're talking incredible food. Get this, over 45 restaurants and bars, folks. Plus beach days that turn into pool afternoons and nights that don't need a plan because they just work.
Noel Brown
Yeah, you've got a massive casino, live music, a 15 acre water park.
Ben
There's excited and then there's Baja Mar. Excited.
Noel Brown
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Ben
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Noel Brown
Within probably 10 days, I'd put on £10. I was having trouble stopping the muscle growth. Listen to Superhumans on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Cheryl Strayed
Hi, everyone. I'm Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild and Tiny Beautiful Things. I'm excited to share that I have a new podcast called Mind Over Mountain. In each episode, I interview athletes, adventurers and Adrenaline seekers to discuss the inner landscapes that informed and inspired their extraordinary feats. So we too can better understand how to face our own seemingly insurmountable challenges. Listen to Mind Over Mountain every Thursday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Ben
So, Noel, can you really put us in the moment? Maybe take us back to 1965.
Noel Brown
Boy, could I ever. February 26th, to be precise. A Friday of a morning of a Friday. A morning of a Friday on a Friday, which was the name, I think.
Ben
Sounds like morning.
Noel Brown
Yeah, Radiohead used to be called on a. So this could have been where they got their inspiration for that. Probably not. Who knows? Salvador Dali woke up and he was a little snuffly, a little fluish.
Ben
Influenza.
Noel Brown
Yeah, he wasn't feeling. He wasn't feeling. He was feeling out of sorts. He was supposed to spend the afternoon hanging out with prisoners at Rikers island, like you do if you're a famous artist. Department of Corrections Commissioner Anna Moskowitz Cross believed that part of rehabilitating prisoners should include art, which I fully support, and I think that's great. And theater, which I also fully support. There's that incredible film, Sing Sing, that came out recently about programs in prisons to incorporate the arts into the daily lives of inmates. And really, really an interesting history that goes farther back than one might think of the arts having a place in the prison system. So Dali found himself on her schedule to paint, to have a little painting sesh with the inmates, ultimately of a publicity campaign for the Art in Prison program. Dali was super into it because it would be a day of himself, it would be Dali Day at Rikers. And he was all about that whenever he could get a chance to be the center of attention.
Ben
Yeah, I'm just. I'm oohing because, as you know, guys, I have the dubious honor of being related to a. A sculptor and artist of note regionally, like the kind of guy who hangs out with U.S. presidents. And he was exactly a Dali. So this feels very familiar. You know, there are so many people in the world where you say, hey, do you want to talk about something? And they say, yeah, if it's me, we can hang out all day.
Noel Brown
Yeah. As the son of a relatively well known opera singer, very, very, very diva, hard same, always loves court, as they say. So Sally was no exception in the world of somewhat megalomaniacal artists.
Ben
Yeah, we can only imagine, without having met Sally ourselves, we can only imagine that he probably said, look, I have a thing where I can talk about Myself, I'm going to be cheered and celebrated. Kind of like Johnny Cash playing Folsom county or Folsom Prison Blues in a jail. So he thinks he's going to arrive at the island by boat with his wife and as you said, his pet ocelot Babu, his sweet babu, his sweet baboo. But unfortunately, despite the great appeal to his ego, our buddy Salvador has to cancel because he is influenzaed. And in place of the actual appearance, he sends along as an apology or as a door prize, a huge drawing. It is 4ft by 5ft, and it is a drawing of Jesus Christ being crucified.
Noel Brown
Yeah. And, you know, Dali had a pretty cool period. Maybe it was throughout his career. But if you look up religious iconography, Salvador Dali, he does some very interesting spins on some very famous religious imagery. Some might argue border on the sacrilegious. I mean, you could even say that like, for example, the Gaudi church in Barcelona. The Sagrada Familia is so weird looking in its depiction of religious iconography that when you walk through it, you almost like, are like, geez Louise, what does the Pope think of this? It's like, it's a lot. It's almost like, you know, Jesus filtered through the lens of like the fifth element or something like that, as it was very sci fi. Yeah, yeah, I'm sure the Pope knows. They finally finished the Sagrada Familia. I believe I was able to tour that place as well. And it really is like walking through some sort of HR Giger Church. Very, very unusual, but similar to the way Dali approached religious iconography. So he did send this painting through after, I believe, just kind of dashing it off from his hotel room in New York City.
Ben
Yeah. And it's India ink on paper. It's got a small bit of other mediums on it. And people will call it untitled. Other people will call it the Crucifixion of Christ. Some will call it Christ on the Cross. But the important thing is that this is a distinct painting. It is far different from his 1951 painting, Christ of St. John on the Cross. And technically, it's a drawing. This one we're talking about, you can obviously see Christ of St. John of the Cross anywhere you find yourself on the Internet. Our buddy Dolly, he has a personal rep, an agent, you could think of it that way, named Nico. And Nico takes this drawing, this mixed media work to the prison to Rikers island, and shares the following message from Salvador to the inmates. We'll read it in full. You are artist, don't think your life is finished for you. With art, you have to always feel free. And he had signed it himself for the dining room of the prisoners. Rikers Island, South Dakota. He misspelled dining.
Noel Brown
Oh, dear. You know what? He's an artist. Maybe he just was reinventing the word.
Ben
I'm sure it was great for him, Noel. I'm sure it was. For about 20 years, this painting hung, or this mixed media art piece, if we're being technical, hung in the cafeteria in the Mess hall in 1981, as we mentioned at the top, an inmate threw a coffee cup at it. It broke the stained glass. And now it's even more mixed media because now we have coffee stains on the drawing. They move it away from the cafeteria. Same year, a warden named Alexander Jenkins, a new guy, new warden, he arrives at Rikers and he says, I don't know if this is a real Salvador Dali drawing or if it's a fake.
Noel Brown
Yeah, it's true. Cause there weren't any records on the painting. And for all I know, he said it could have been an inmate's copy of Adali. And then it was subsequently sent out for authentication and appraisal. It came back with an appraisal of around $100,000. But the painting's last known appraisal in 1985 put its value a little closer to 180k.
Ben
Pretty good money, right? Pretty good money. And the next thing our buddy Alexander Jenkins, the new warden, does is approve the Dali piece to be shipped off to a Virginia gallery. It's on temporary display in art exhibit centered around prison art. It does return to Rikers. It's boxed up in a storage crate. And get this, they hide it in the basement and forget about it. It is not until years and years later that a prison guard sees this in a trash can one day and says, hey, that's kind of a cool drawing. I should take this out of the trash.
Noel Brown
For sure. It's probably a good idea. Ben, I want to take a little moment to just talk about how Dolly is an early example of the kind of insane overinflation and kind of influencer nature of the art market. This personality driven kind of pop art.
Ben
He's like how he jumped out of the second story window to land in the bushes to get attention.
Noel Brown
Well, yeah, exactly. He was as much a media personality as he was a painter and artist. Much like Andy Warhol and his Factory art studio during the second half of the 20th century. So the fact that there's all this speculation around what is ultimately Kind of a dashed off piece of work is fascinating to me. And then, of course, we carry that on into the modern day with stuff like Banksy and the wildly speculative nature of art as stores of wealth.
Ben
Check out our Freeport episode. Check out our money laundering episodes. Both available on stuff they don't want you to know. All right, so this guy, our anonymous hero of the story, this prison guard saves a priceless drawing from the trash. They rehang it, they frame it, they place it under plexiglass, which is much more difficult to break with a coffee
Noel Brown
cup and needed a splash guard. Right?
Ben
It's so weird. They put it next to a vending machine in the lobby of the Eric M. Taylor Detention Center. That is one of the jails in the overall Rikers complex. And I gotta ask you guys this. Max, hop in on this as well. Noel, Max, we would obviously, all three of us, love to have something named after us. You know, we'd love to have a library, a wing of an Ivy League institution. How would you feel about the Noel C. Brown Detention Center?
Noel Brown
Love it. My legacy solidified.
Ben
Let's do it.
Max Williams
So there's this place in South Carolina where you get off the highway. It's like one of these places where it's efficient to get off and go get gas. And it's a bridge, and it's just like, you know, there's like three signs. And there's like. The first guy is, like, named after the road. Second guy is a smaller sign, is named after the bridge. And there's a third guy with an even smaller sign that's like. Like, Noel C. Brown sidewalk.
Noel Brown
Noel C. Brown Scenic Overlook. That's what I'm hoping for.
Ben
I love the idea as well of you, Max, having a sign that we could just hang up around interstates that says, max Williams presents.
Noel Brown
Exactly. You know what? I take it back. Not Scenic Overlook. I would like the Noel C. Brown rest area.
Ben
There we go.
Noel Brown
And bench.
Ben
There we go. Please note that at this point, the picture of Dali is accompanied by a plaque. And the plaque says, this is an original painting or an original work by the actual facts. Salvador Dali shout out Lauren Vogelbaum. This is worth US$1 million.
Noel Brown
Wait a minute. When did that happen?
Ben
That's just what they said, man. It's art. It's money laundering.
Noel Brown
Of course, it's whatever you believe.
Ben
It's whatever you think is worth paying. Also, we have to mention that this drawing was originally intended as a gift to the unfortunate inmates of Rikers. But because it is in the lobby of this Detention center, the prisoners can no longer see it.
Noel Brown
You know, it's so funny too, not to harp on the whole, like, art market thing, but that's so interesting. Cause it is ultimately, you know, the materials are of very little value. It is all about the name. And for something like this, it's not even a matter of, like, well, it took this many hours to make. It's all about the name of the individual and how famous they were and the cachet surrounding their kind of cult of personality and what someone's willing to pay for it. Because I've been kind of getting into, like, watches and stuff lately and just fascinated by that market, which can also be wildly speculative. But certain watches are made of precious materials that themselves hold value. Not the case for a painting like this or a drawing like this. More the case with maybe like say, a sculpture made of gold or made of some sort of precious material. But this is literally just kind of like a very lo fi, you know, afternoon.
Ben
I mean, come the f on one afternoon at your hotel because you have the flu and you don't want to show up to your career day.
Noel Brown
That's what happened. Exactly. I love that.
Ben
Guys. We live in the beautiful southeastern part of the United States. And every time spring comes, we get a lot of pollen, we get a lot of flowers, we get a lot of bugs.
Noel Brown
We do. And it gets a little hot and humid out there. And so you do end up having bugs kind of seeking cooler climbs and then often involves climbing under your door. In my case, it was an ants at a picnic situation. But thankfully, I was able to knock those ants out of the frame using pesti.
Ben
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Noel Brown
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Ben
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Ben
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Ben
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Ben
Okay folks, there's regular excited and then there's vacation excited. We all know the difference and we are vacation excited right now.
Noel Brown
Oh my gosh, it's true. Because we've got this incredible trip planned to Baha Mar in Nassau. And to be honest, we're already there mentally checked in. Ready to go. Oh yeah.
Ben
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Noel Brown
And then, you know, there's everything else that's on offer there. One of the Caribbean's largest and most luxurious casinos, not to mention Ben over 45 restaurants, bars and lounges.
Ben
And then at night, you've still got so many ways to keep things going, like the Jon Batiste Jazz Club. We're huge fans of this guy, so we can't wait to see it live.
Noel Brown
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Ben
There's a group of prison employees. For anybody who hasn't been in America's infamous incarceration system, there is a hierarchy of inmates. So if you are a good boy, if you're behaving, you will have the opportunity, in theory, to Acquire more responsibilities. Right. A little bit more agency. You can become an attendee. You can become a guy who works in the kitchen or a guy who helps out with the admin of the place. Shout out. Shawshank Redemption. These prison employees conspire to take this work by Dolly during an unscheduled fire drill. They conducted it inside the Eric M. Taylor Detention center against unscheduled.
Noel Brown
In quotes, by the way.
Ben
Yeah. Thank you, Maria. Those are very snarky quotes and they are earned. They did a heist inside a prison. It's 1am them. It's March 1st. It's 2003. It's a BS Malarkey fire drill. And it is helpful because it clears out anybody who's not in on the heist. They have to leave the lobby. We've been in fire drills. Like when the three of us went into the office every day to record or to do our jobs, we always knew there was something conspiratorial about the fire drill. Did you ever get that sneaky message a few minutes before?
Noel Brown
What, like the inside scoop?
Ben
Yeah.
Noel Brown
I don't know. I wasn't on that. I wasn't on that email thread. Now I do remember, though, when we used to work in Buckhead at the old how stuff works office, we had a fire drill once. We all went outside and everyone was, like, given ice cream. It felt very middle school coded. It was great.
Ben
It was a field trip, basically. Yeah. So these guys do this heist, this field trip. 2000 inmates get locked down, and one of the co conspirators is a lookout. Another is monitoring the fire drills. So we really have two lookouts. And while they're looking out, the main
Noel Brown
lookout and then the fire marshal.
Ben
Yeah, right, right.
Noel Brown
The safety monitor. Yes, exactly.
Ben
Our main takeaway. But. But no. This third person, this third individual, this is our hitter. This is our heavy mover. This is our operator. This third person removes the drawing and replaces it with the help of a fourth conspirator. They've taken the original drawing by Salvador Dali and they have replaced it with a very TEMU coded replica.
Noel Brown
Yeah, I'm trying to get a look at it. We haven't really described. We did a little bit. We described the text on it, but boy, oh, boy, when we say dashed off, we mean dashed off. You know, it's like he splattered India ink on it. It's kind of cool, actually. Now I'm sort of taking it back because there is a semblance of the shape of Christ in these sort of Ralph Steadman esque ink splatters. And then in the center there is a crown of thorns. And the Gauche, I believe, which is the other material that is used, sort of creates this smudge in the shape of Jesus head. And the cross is more just sort of like negative space that's created by more gauche framing the edges of the cross.
Ben
And he's drawing clearly, it's inked out like the sketch of a cross. It's like seeing a comic book penciler's work before colorists get in.
Noel Brown
So I could see how one might think it's one of those things where you hear people say, oh, my kid could have done that. And if you look at the other Christ depiction that we mentioned from dali, Christ of St. John on the cross, it is much more in the style of a classical painting. The dude could paint. But he also was one of these fascinating sort of more like, I guess, proto pop artists that while he had the training, he also kind of got off on doing some more bombastic things that he could get away with a lot and call it a piece of art. And this is one of those examples.
Ben
So I imagine it reminds me of Picasso, actually, because Picasso's a hyper realistic artist in his earlier days. And then like Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse now, he just went off the deep end.
Noel Brown
Funny you should say that, Ben. I was just in New York City a week or two ago and I went to an exhibit at the MoMA of the work of Marcel Duchamp, who many of us probably know from like art class or like, you know, humanities in college. He was the guy that wrote he signed a toilet seat as our mutt. And then that was sort of like the first example of like found object sort of super, super out there outre kind of modern art. But this exhibit was super cool because it traced his whole trajectory from his earliest into the more outlandish kind of like, okay, now I'm just hanging snow shovels from the ceiling by a piece of rope. His early stuff was like mega expressionistic kind of landscapes and much more classically trained looking pieces. So Dali was much from that same tradition. So you could see how the inmates or the folks that were pulling off this heist might have looked at this original work and said, ah, we could do that, I could do that. But they kind of couldn't. Cause they tried to replace it with a replica. And even folks on the crew were like, this isn't it it, guys.
Ben
This is not on it. This is not on. Yeah, it was. It was not the best Replica or the best forgery. And again, these folks are working with limited materials. So just a few hours after they complete the heist, there's a guard who is off duty and is, you know, pretty much on his way home. He's walking through the lobby of this Taylor detention center. He looks at the dolly as he does every shift because he likes art. And he notices, hey, this is different. Here's where they screwed up. So the replica is not the same size as the original. It's a lot smaller. It is made with oil paint. It is on canvas. It is not in a frame. And they had literally painted, like an impression of a brown frame around this drawing, which seemed to this guy childlike. It was not mounted. It couldn't be hung correctly. So they stole this plexiglass framed, mounted piece by Salvador Dali. And they literally get this, folks. They stapled up the replica.
Noel Brown
Click, click, click, click, click, click.
Ben
They just needed enough time to get away. Rose.
Noel Brown
Gil Hearn, the commissioner of the Department of Investigation, said of the theft, who knew? Who knew that it might have been safer left in the cafeteria.
Ben
Right, because that's a more difficult area to heist because more inmates.
Noel Brown
It's a town square.
Ben
Right, right, right.
Noel Brown
Yeah.
Ben
It's the common ground. No one initially suspected that the inmates were involved because, again, the inmates cannot access the lobby. So Rikers contacts the New York Police Department, and they start investigating the theft. Originally, they're looking at the COs, they're looking at the officials. They might even be staring askance at the warden. They're asking themselves, who has access to the key to the plexiglass box that protects this painting. They do have surveillance cameras, because again, this is a modern day. The surveillance camera, pointing directly at the work of art is connected to a recorder in the warden's office. Yet mysteriously, that video feed had cut. It had stopped working overnight.
Noel Brown
Shadows of Epstein, Classic Mission Impossible stuff. Cut the feed also. Epstein vary oceans 11.
Ben
Like, we can cut the feed. You'll have two minutes to get past the lasers.
Noel Brown
Exactly. Lower down from the ceiling and all that. So we've got some suspects in our little game of Clue here. Benny Nutso, who was the assistant deputy warden, age 49 at the time. Mitchell Huckhouser. Great name. All these are great names, actually. Assistant deputy warden agent 40 Timothy Pina, I believe, or Pina, officer age 44. And Gregory Sokol, officer, age 38. So we started to see some interrogations going down.
Ben
Yeah. So we talk.
Noel Brown
Careful. We're gonna get sued.
Ben
It's okay. I made sure to do it off key. We're speaking with Officer Timothy Peanut. Right. He is a CEO. He's been employed at Rikers for 16 years. So he's put his time in. At the night of the theft, he is working a graveyard shift. He returns home, and he is so panicked that he considers ending his own life. At least that's what he tells investigators later. He said, I felt so desperate, I actually pointed my firearm to my head instead. I have decided for you, nypd, that I will confess to this crime. I will name all my co conspirators. Benny, Mitchell, Gregory, everybody. And he says, look, four months before the theft, Benny and Mitchell came up to me and they had a plan to steal this droid. And they said, hey, you know, hey, you know, nobody's going to notice a fake in its place. Weeks, months, maybe even never. We're going to get away with this. And, Noel, to your point, Benny Nuzzo would joke often about this Salvador Dali painting in exactly the way you did earlier. You'd say, my kid could draw better than that.
Noel Brown
It looks easier than it actually is. You gotta have style, you gotta have flair. You gotta have that artistic panache. And your kid may or may not have that, but it would seem that these conspirators did not have that. So when these other employees approached, P thought that they were just having a bit of a Josh around.
Ben
Yeah, having a laugh.
Noel Brown
Mm. He thought so. Until he began to notice that Nuzzo and Hockhauser were spending a lot of time casing the joint over there in the Taylor Center's lobby where the dolly was hanging and also where Pina himself was stationed. He was the inside guy, right? He was the inside man at the front entrance's security desk. He was promised that his cut would be 50 grand and that Benny and Mitchell would split the rest.
Ben
Yeah, which sounds like, you know, sounds like a deal, I guess, depending on where you are at in life. And so, Noel, as we're saying, Pena, does make this statement to the authorities, and he says, yeah, I agreed to it, but, you guys, I feel like I was being bullied. And there's some sand to that, because Benny, one of the only bad Bens I've encountered was his manager, Old Bad Benny Nutso. You'll mess with that case.
Noel Brown
Old Bad Benny Nutso. He was. Exactly. He was his superior officer and was known for bullying behavior and threats of violence and actual acts of violence in order to get what he wanted. So it was decided by the trio they needed one more member of their crew to look out and watch the lobby and the small room that was connected to it. That's when we see Gregory Sokol, a Rikers officer who'd worked with Pina for about a decade, entering the heist team. The men both lived in Staten island and they would often carpool to work.
Ben
Okay. And it's also helpful for investigators as they unravel the conspiracy of the heist. Greg Sokol, let's meet him. Him, he is also long toothed in the game. He's been working at Rikers for 14 years. He is in charge of the phone comms at the Taylor center control room. And so he is, you know, he's already very financially motivated, we could say, because he has another side gig where he sells real estate on Staten Island. And this is nuts because. Okay. Our pattern of investigation escalates. Pina confesses to the authorities, and then they say, okay, man, act like nothing is weird. We need you to go meet your buddy Greg at the Java Den on Staten Island. Yeah. And we need you to wear a wire and we need you to talk him into confessing.
Noel Brown
Scary stuff.
Ben
Don't wear a wire.
Noel Brown
No, I mean, you know, snitches, I
Ben
mean, have a cell phone already for sure.
Noel Brown
Snitches end up in stitches to get him there. Pina had told Sokol that he felt like the police were already closing in on them and he felt like he was going out of his mind. Sokol, it turned out, felt the exact same way. So here's how the meeting went down. The men agreed that they'd wish they'd never gotten involved in this scheme to begin with and promised that they would. That each wouldn't rat on the other. Right. Yeah, of course. We'll see how quickly that lasts once they're separated and, you know, the screws are put to them, as they say. And Maria, our amazing research associate on this one, pointed out that at some point, she felt that they all said this exact same thing to each other. The only one to rat you out is you, man. So they chatted it out for hours. Pina confided Sokol that he felt like they were brothers. You know I would never betray you. There's the Sokal confession.
Ben
Oh, yes. Sokal gets into his vehicle just before 10pm and investigators are waiting to swoop in because they know they found the weakest link or the second weakest link. He immediately caves just like Pina, and he says, look, I'll talk to you. And Greg says, I only learned of this big scheme to Steal the work of art by Salvador Dali. A few weeks before, stuff went down, and Pina had given him a broad rundown of the plan, literally as they were carpooling to work from Staten Island. And the plan was, look, we stage a fire drill. We swap the Dali with a fake. Don't worry, Benny's kid can paint it. Essentially, they would get US$50,000 each, which was an even bigger deal then than it is now. Sokol also starts crying. Bully. He says, I was afraid that Nuzo and Hochauser will retaliate against me if I don't go along with the plan. I'm afraid that they will retaliate against my family if I cooperate with investigators. But, yeah, I'll hang out. I'll wear a wire. So they send a second guy in with a wire, and he records again, one of the only few Bad Bens in history. Benny Nuzzo, discussing the crime. He has all four people talking about the theft on tape.
Noel Brown
Yeah. Seems like a bit of an open and shut case. Which we're about to get to whether or not it's open and shut. Tbd. Three men were held at least partially responsible for the heist. The fourth, considered the mastermind, not at all. Hmm. Okay. Pretty weird, right? Pina was sentenced in Bronx Supreme Court to five years of probation. And he resigned from his job at the Department of Corrections as part of of a plea deal on the third degree grand larceny charges. Now we have Gregory Sokol.
Ben
And real quick, before we get to Greg, this is something that has always been on my mind. I didn't really know what larceny is. Larceny is technically a crime involving theft or unlawful taking of personal property of another individual or a business. So what is grand larceny, Noel?
Noel Brown
It's probably over a certain amount. I bet you're right. Grand theft, grand larceny, et cetera. I always. It is a little vague, though, what the difference between the theft.
Ben
It's a fun word.
Noel Brown
Larceny is. Yeah, it is funny. Are you a. Are you a. If you're a person, are you a larcenist?
Ben
Can we call Larson larcenist?
Noel Brown
I don't know.
Ben
So Sokal is also. Gregory Sokal is also charged with larceny, second degree grand larceny. He testifies, he sings for a plea bargain, and he says, look, that guy Tim Peanut is the one who opened the locks on this plexiglass case, and he did it because Benny Nuzzo told him to do so. And then Nuzzo told Greg and Tim to remove the original art. But they were anxious, Right. They had a small time window with this fire drill. So they managed to get it free. They handed it to Benny Nuzo, he left the building, he ghosted, and then he returned with this replica. They also did, I mean, credit where it's due. They also did try to replicate the signature and the tagline. So they. They were smart enough, cognizant enough to misspell dining. Otherwise, they screwed up. They really just fumbled the bag. It's like a horrible replica. It's like that. Remember that lady who tried to fix that painting of the Mona Lisa?
Noel Brown
What, by putting a mustache on it? That's also a Marcel Duchamp thing. No, it's not the Mona Lisa. It was like one of those.
Ben
What are you talking about, though?
Noel Brown
It was one of those religious fresco things. Yeah, it was an older lady.
Ben
She was trying to repair it.
Noel Brown
Right. She was trying to repair it and she made it look really, really goofy.
Ben
So it's like that level.
Noel Brown
It is that level. Yeah. No, it's real, real bad. Having a hard time finding an image of the forgery. But I think the description, you know, we can use our imaginations.
Ben
Just picture something that looks bad.
Noel Brown
Yeah. Based on something that already, you know, arguably wasn't Dolly's best work.
Ben
Yeah. And they do get the conspiracy exposed. Our two ringleaders are Benny Nuzzo and Mitchell Hochauser. And they said to the assistant district attorney at the time, Wanda Perez Maldonado, that they thought they could maybe get US$500,000 for the painting, but the. The ADA believes they were trying to sell it for 1 million. So maybe they changed, like what the plaque said. Right. Maybe they tried to change their story to lower the number in an attempt to get in less trouble. But Mitchell also gets convicted. He pleads guilty to one count of second degree attempted grand larceny. He is sentenced to three years in state prison. And just so you know, again, folks, we hope you never get jammed up. But you must realize that for cos or former prison carceral system employees, actually going to prison yourself is very dangerous.
Noel Brown
Kind of a death sentence in many cases.
Ben
Yeah. And part of his job during the heist, Mitchell's, is to make certain that other guards who are not in on the conspiracy stay out of the way, making sure they are not in the lobby. Hochhauser. Mitchell Hochhauser sings against Benny Nuzzo. And he says, look, Nuzzo orchestrated this whole thing. He told me that he thought it would be a laugh, it would be funny. The guy said he's the guy who came up with the idea to use the fire drill as a diversion and to swap out the scheduling for the lobby guards to make sure that Tim and Greg are on duty that night. He took a Polaroid of the Dali drawing. That's how someone attempted to replicate it. Yeah.
Noel Brown
They may as well have just been doing it from memory, though, to be honest.
Ben
I mean, we're still looking for a picture of the replica and, you know, it's funny that you're bringing that up, though, because at the. At this point in history, I bet the replica itself is a collector's item.
Noel Brown
Oh, absolutely. Sort of like the shredded Banksy.
Ben
Yeah, just so. Just so, the night of this theft, these four co conspirators, they hide the original Dali painting in an attic in Brooklyn. They take it to Benny's mom's house, which doesn't sound super well thought out.
Noel Brown
Yeah, and the next day, he told his co conspirators that he destroyed the painting. He'd torn it to pieces. Whether that's true or not, no one knows. But it hasn't been seen since.
Ben
Okay, that's super sketchy because obviously these four guys don't trust each other, and obviously this is a bad Ben. I apologize to everyone. Hulkhouser says he thinks Benny was lying. He thinks Ben had the drawing and decided not to give it up because then he can cut his other thieves out of the grift. It's such a new. It's classic newso, dude.
Noel Brown
Yeah, Real bully. He was the last person seen with the dolly. This is true. Nuzo's lawyer, Joseph Tacopina, focused on minimizing two big things in his defense. Sokal's secret recording in the locker room and the actual value of. Of the drawing itself. An acoustics expert testified that the garbled nature of the recording and the unintelligibility of the voices from the locker room conversation. Locker room talk made it difficult to identify who was speaking exactly, in some sections, placing doubt about Nuzo's involvement or level of involvement.
Ben
Interesting. Okay, so they're playing the tape because we had these guys, we had Greg wearing a wire, right? So they're playing the tape of the four people talking, and it's difficult to discern who is saying what. They also. To your point, Noel, they also argue in this trial that the Dali may not be worth that much. So Tacopina calls the publisher and chairman emeritus of the Salvador Dali Research center, which is very much a thing. It's a guy named Alex Rosenberg. He Goes to the stand, and he says, all right, here's how much I think this is worth. Prosecutors are not claiming it's worth a million dollars. They're saying $250,000. And it's an interesting threshold here, because under the laws of New York State, anybody convicted of selling property between $50,000 to a million dollars can go to prison for 15 years. But less than $50,000 means a maximum of seven years in prison. So if you divvy up the pie between these four people, right, you can say that at the top of the trial, each of these people is facing 15 years in the huscow. None of them got that sentence. Because Rosenberg says, again, this is the guy from the Salvador Dali Research Center. He says, look, this is not a painting. It's a drawing. It's in bad condition, too. It's got water damage, coffee stains. Someone threw coffee at it. It's all scraped up. He says, look, this is maybe I love the guy I work for, the Dali Research Center. This one is at best $20,000 thousand dollars at best.
Noel Brown
Rosenberg added, the Dolly would have had quite a laugh about it all. And I was gonna say, man, if he was still living at this time, he would.
Ben
Oh, my God.
Noel Brown
Field day with.
Ben
He would have gotten involved in the front row.
Noel Brown
Oh, my gosh. This is exactly the 15 minutes of fame kind of, you know, fiasco that. That Warhol was talking about. And Dolly would have appreciated it the same way.
Ben
I can see, because, you know, you and I are both related to people this level of renown, and I can 100% see my grandfather or your father or Salvador Dali at a trial like this, sitting front row and continually trying to get on the witness stand.
Noel Brown
Well, Ben, I don't know if you know this, but Salvador Dali was, in fact, my father.
Ben
It's making sense. Yeah.
Noel Brown
Yeah. Now you can see why I wear my mustache this way. It just comes this way. It's genetic.
Ben
Okay. All right. Well, congratulations on slipping past the Adolf mustache.
Noel Brown
Oh, dear, that's.
Ben
So here is a Shyamalan plot twist. Ooh, another one, another one. Twist upon twist. On June 4, 2004, Benny Nuzzo gets away. He is acquitted by a Bronx jury, and he looks just as stunned as everybody else when the verdict is handed down. It's like that. That climactic moment in Law and Order propaganda episodes where the jury says, not guilty, and he looks around like, really? Lottery?
Noel Brown
Yeah, but I'm so guilty. Yeah.
Ben
He's like, oh, wow, I definitely did it, though. He offers theories to explain what happened what happened and how he got into the predicament. And he said, look, I've been used. Used as a scapegoat. I'm as much of a victim as Salvador Dali.
Noel Brown
He wriggled his way out of another one.
Ben
Yeah, Little weaselly guy, little slippery fella. His narrative is that the top brass at Rikers forced the other three co conspirators to make him look guilty. He also says, I don't know where the Dali is. He says someone else probably stole the original way before we did our heist in 2003. Maybe it's in storage. Maybe the one that they thought they stole. Because he's not saying we thought we stole. Maybe the one they thought they stole had been a forgery the entire time. So maybe we're replacing forgeries with forgeries. Maybe. Here we take a second to talk about the art loss register.
Noel Brown
Wow, Ben read my mind. I didn't know about this. It's so cool. Go to artloss.com it is a database, the leading database due diligence provider, as they call it, for the art market, maintaining the world's largest private database of stolen art, antiques and collectibles, currently boasting around 700,000 plus art items. Pretty cool. I didn't know this existed. I want to do a little bit of rabbit holing on this site.
Ben
We should do an episode on it because it is tremendously important to human civilization, especially considering that.
Noel Brown
Oh, things that get looted and horrible.
Ben
So many priceless works of art have been. I'm thinking in particular of the Holocaust. But we know that there are private collectors out there right now who have stolen priceless works of art and they just keep it on their estates. We also know that the officials in New York, the authorities still have not recovered this original drawing. Our research associate does want to take a long shot from the hip, out in the dark for anyone with information. If you know where this drawing is, you can contact the Department of Corrections Inspector General at 212-266-1900.
Noel Brown
For sure. And to wrap it up, a little bit of where are they Now? Timothy Pina became a children's book author. We love to see that. Glad he was able to get his life back on track. He wrote a fictional book about a young Benjamin Franklin's encounter with bullies. He must have been inspired by his relationship with old Nudso. Gregory Sokol maintains a real estate license. And Mitchell Hochhauser was released from prison in 2005 and seems to work in property management now. What happened with old Denny Newts though.
Ben
Oh my gosh. Well, Benny, classic newso. He has not spoken with his former friends Pena Sokol or Hocuser since they were arrested. This is the story. This is an active case. So please, if you have come into possession, like I almost did, of a sketchy Salvador Dali sketch, let us know the numbers. 212266-1900.
Noel Brown
And if you're looking for a movie to watch this weekend, check out the Mastermind. Just a Kelly Reichart film about a. I think it's in the 60s, a like bedraggled kind of. What's the word? Woodworker who had aspirations to be an artist. He went to art school but kind of failed as an artist. And he gets a gang of sort of like Massachusetts old buddies from the old neighborhood together to pull off an incredibly bumbling art heist. And it's a little bit of a slow burn, but I really loved it. It seemed like it was a little divisive, some people found it boring, but I really think it's great and quite a special movie. So do check it out and if
Ben
you want would like to learn more about the work of the legendary surrealist painter Salvador Dali while you're on the Internet, folks, check out Destino. It's an animated short film that was released finally in some version in 2003, but it started in 1945, a collaboration between Walt Disney and Dallas Ali himself. It's a heck of a ride. Just like this story. We cannot thank you enough for tuning in, but here it goes. Thank you. Big thanks to our research associate, Maria. Big thanks to Our super producer, Mr. Max Williams, and also our composer. This slap and bop you're hearing is courtesy of Alex Williams, who I bet is a Dolly guy. I bet Alex loves Dolly.
Noel Brown
Oh yeah. No, I mean, what's not to love? Also it's funny, if you've ever been to the moma like I was talking about in New York, they have the most famous iconic Dali painting which is the melting clocks, which is actually like the size of a mouse pad. It is incredibly tiny, but it's a really cool thing to see in person. So if you ever make it out there, do check it out. Yeah, huge thanks to Alex Williams again who composed this theme. Max Williams, our long suffering producer and research associate, of course, Maria, our research associate on this episode.
Ben
Big, big thanks of course to the rude dudes at ridiculous Crime. If you dig us, you'll love them. AJ, Bahamas, Jacobs, Dr. Rachel Big Spinach Lance, the world's foremost authority on underwater explosions. And of course, big thanks to all the bends who are better than Benny Nuzzo.
Noel Brown
Yeah, we'll see you next time, folks. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.
iHeartPodcasts | Hosts: Ben Bowlin & Noel Brown | Release Date: May 5, 2026
In this episode, Ben and Noel unravel the bizarre true story of a Salvador Dalí artwork that defied all odds: gifted to Rikers Island prison, neglected and abused for decades, and ultimately stolen in an inside-job heist straight out of a bumbling true-crime caper. The hosts tackle three central questions: How did this artwork land in Rikers to begin with? Who stole it? And, most elusively, where is it now? Through their trademark irreverent banter and a meticulous breakdown of the facts, Ben and Noel highlight the ridiculous intersections between art, crime, and the excesses of human ego.
Time Travel to 1965 [06:52–08:25]
"You are artist, don't think your life is finished for you. With art, you have to always feel free." (Read at [11:10])
Artistic Irony and Dalí’s Ego
“They put it next to a vending machine in the lobby of the Eric M. Taylor Detention Center.” [16:41]
[24:03–46:54]
The Plot: Four Rikers employees conspire to steal the Dalí during an “unscheduled” 1 AM fire drill, replacing it with a poor replica.
Execution:
“They literally get this, folks. They stapled up the replica.” (Ben, [31:19])
Investigation:
"That video feed had cut. It had stopped working overnight." (Ben, [32:37])
"I felt so desperate, I actually pointed my firearm to my head... I will confess to this crime." (Reported by Ben, [33:25])
Dalí’s message to Rikers inmates: [11:10]
“You are artist, don’t think your life is finished for you. With art, you have to always feel free.”
On the value of art and forgery:
"It's not even a matter of, like, well, it took this many hours to make. It's all about the name of the individual and how famous they were and the cachet surrounding their kind of cult of personality." (Noel, [18:57])
On the charade of the heist:
"They literally get this, folks. They stapled up the replica." (Ben, [31:19])
On police interrogations:
"I mean, snitches end up in stitches..." (Noel, [37:54])
On the legal climax:
“Here is a Shyamalan plot twist... On June 4, 2004, Benny Nuzzo gets away. He is acquitted by a Bronx jury, and he looks just as stunned as everybody else when the verdict is handed down.” (Ben, [50:44])
On the art-loss register and the larger problem of stolen art:
“Go to artloss.com—it is a database, the leading database... maintaining the world’s largest private database of stolen art...” (Noel, [52:37])
In line with “Ridiculous History’s” signature style, Ben and Noel keep the storytelling engaging and slightly irreverent, balancing historical facts with dry wit and playful asides. The episode weaves pop culture references and personal anecdotes (including family connections to artistic divas) with a healthy skepticism toward both criminal and artistic pretensions.
This story, at once comic and tragic, exposes the absurdities of both the prison system and the art market. The Dalí gift meant to inspire rehabilitation instead becomes a pawn in a heist fueled by mediocrity and mismanagement. Its fate remains a mystery—lost, destroyed, or hiding in some attic, itself a symbol of art’s often ridiculous journey through human hands. As the hosts note, somewhere, Salvador Dalí is surely laughing.
If you have information about the missing artwork, contact the Department of Corrections Inspector General: 212-266-1900.