call for comment. “He was nothing,”
Stunt snaps. “He was my bitch. He was
someone I used to fucking pay to do fuck-
ing coke with. I’m not joking. I was like
The Wolf of Wall Street. Not breaking the
law, but having a laugh: ‘Fuck it—let’s do
some coke and let’s chuck some midgets
at a wall.’ ”
Soon he abruptly excuses himself,
“to go to the bathroom,” as he does
periodically throughout our conversa-
tion, returning minutes later to unleash
a fresh rant.
“Are you doing cocaine now?” I ask
him at one point.
No, he says. He has done cocaine, sure.
But his frenzy is due to ADHD, attention
decit hyperactivity disorder. Cocaine
makes him calm, which he certainly is
not at this moment.
“You’re looking at me like I’m crazy,”
he says. “Listen, I’m one of the most
sane people I know. My IQ is 18 above
Einstein’s. I have to keep talking like a
conspiracy nutter because they have
engineered this perfectly.” He loaned
the paintings to Prince Charles anony-
mously, he points out. So how could
the supposed forger, Tony Tetro, even
know that they were at Dumfries House,
“unless he was told by Bernie Ecclestone
or Viscount Rothermere?” (Rothermere,
according to a spokesperson, plays “no
role” in assigning stories at the Mail.
Ecclestone did not respond to requests
for comment.)
Besides, Stunt continues, even if a
few of the paintings were fakes—which
they absolutely, most deinitely were
not—where’s the crime? “I loaned these
because I believe in the Prince’s Founda-
tion,” he says. “I love the Prince of Wales.”
His voice rises to a shout. “I benevolently
loaned, okay? So there was no nancial
crime because I am, for free, loaning art
for them to put on display.”
Stunt grows emotional as he speaks of
the prince. In 2017 , when Stunt’s brother
died of an accidental drug overdose,
Charles “wrote a beautiful, touchingletter” to be read at his funeral. That same
year, when Stunt was going through his
divorce, the prince was “such a lovely
man” that he offered to put Stunt’s
name next to the paintings at Dumfries
House, despite all the bad publicity. (“I
said, ‘No, Your Royal Highness.’ ”) He
would never do anything to hurt Charles.
“I revere my royal family,” he says. “I
feel really uncomfortable talking about
him because it looks like I’m a horrible
name-dropper.”
Did Prince Charles call him after the
scandal over the paintings erupted? I ask.
“I am not going to talk about Prince
Charles!” he shouts. “You’ve got Prince
Charles on the brain! You keep trumping
on this stupid Tetro shit! Let’s make it
clear for the billionth time, because I’m
losing my temper towards you, it didn’t
fucking happen, okay?”
He continues for another 10 minutes
before excusing himself, once again, to
descend to his bathroom below.THE SAGA OF James Robert Frederick
Stunt begins days after his birth, in 1982 ,
when baby James gazed up from his bap-
tism bath at his godfather: the alleged
mob kingpin Terry Adams, who was later
convicted of money laundering.
James grew up in Virginia Water—the
most expensive real estate in the United
Kingdom after London—the son of a self-
made man who rose from public housing
to amass a fortune in corporate printing.
“My father wasn’t a gangster,” Stunt says.
“I’m not saying my godfather is a gang-
ster; I’m not saying he’s not.”
James received a stellar education at
the nest schools money could buy. At
15 , his father gave him a ̈at in London
and a black American Express card. “I
could spend whatever the fuck I wanted,
because he was picking up the tab,” Stunt
recalls. At 17 , he met a Libyan oil trader in
a private club. The man asked him what
he knew about oil. “What don’t I know
about oil?” James lied. He connected the
Libyan to a friend, and—just like that—a deal was done, each party giving James
a commission of 2 million pounds.
Stunt got involved in shipping and ran
“the world’s largest private armada,”
he once told Tatler magazine. An avid
gambler, he claimed to have won “the
world’s largest bet,” pocketing more
than 45 million pounds. Soon, as he puts
it, he was a “famous face,” running with
London’s rst families: the Rothschilds,
the Goldsmiths, the al-Fayeds. When
he stepped into a casino, whether in
London, Monaco, Las Vegas, or Macao,
a 5 - million-pound line of credit was
at his disposal.
One evening, at a Jay-Z and Beyoncé
party in London, he saw her: Petra Eccle-
stone, then 17 , the youngest daughter of
Formula 1 king Bernie Ecclestone. Petra
lived in a world even more rareed than
Stunt’s: ̈ying around the world on her
father’s private jet, being driven to school
in a Ferrari, waiting to receive her share
of a trust fund worth 4. 5 billion pounds.
A mutual friend set them up on a blind
date, and Stunt came roaring up to the
Ecclestone home in his Lamborghini.“You’re looking at me like I’m
crazy,” Stunt tells me.
“My IQ is 18 above Einstein’s.”
“ In the Style Of”
How the world’s greatest
living art forger imitated
four legendary paintersTHE FORGER
California artist Tony Tetro says
his four knockoffs were never meant
to be passed off as real.72 VANITY FAIR