nine months in a work-furlough program,
where he su ered the indignity of paint-
ing murals promoting trac safety.
Once he was released, Tetro came up
with a new way to employ his skill as an
artistic copycat. For around $ 20 , 000 , he
would bang out a replica painting—done
“in the style of” a famous artist—for
wealthy clients seeking to impress their
friends on the cheap.
Now, one evening in 2014 , Tetro’s
phone rang at his home in Newport
Beach, California. It was Stunt. By that
point, the gold trader and his wife seemed
to be growing apart. Stunt liked to go out
and shower his friends with $ 200 , 000
worth of Cristal; Petra, who considered
it a “huge e ort to get dressed up,” was
usually in bed by eight. Stunt found him-
self alone in his sprawling manor, awake
at all hours of the night. Before long, he
grew addicted to the prescriptions for
morphine and Valium he was popping
“like Smarties” for his insomnia. His
weight ballooned until he became “the
fattest fuck alive. I could have eaten
Jabba the Hutt.”
“I talked to him on the phone for
hours,” Tetro recalls. “He’s up all night
long, and he didn’t have anybody to talk
to. Because at three in the morning, who
could he call? He could call me.”
Thus began a series of midnight con-
versations about art and the art business.
“He wanted me to do a Picasso matador
for him,” Tetro recalls. On his computer,
Tetro found a Picasso of a woman and
a matador and used Microsoft Paint—
“a poor man’s Photoshop”—to eliminate
the woman. Then, using co ee and tea,
he articially “aged” the painting, as
well as the wooden stretcher bars on
the back of the canvas, to produce an
authentic-looking “patina.” The work,
he says, could never fool an expert. The
pigments alone would be a dead give-
away, and for a while he was required
by the court to sign his real name on the
back of his work. But to an amateur eye,
the imitation was good enough to pass
as a real Picasso.
When the painting was done, Tetro
drove up to Los Angeles to deliver it to
Stunt Manor. “He greeted me at the
door,” the forger says. “We went into
his den, and he’s giving me a tour of his
paintings: his Constables, his Joshua
Reynolds, and the other British old mas-
ters.” Impressed with the fake Picasso,
Stunt commissioned 10 more copies of
masterpieces: a Rembrandt, a Van Gogh,
more Picassos. “He said, ‘I want them to
look real,’ ” Tetro says. “I knew exactly
what that meant: He wanted them for
decoration to impress his friends.”
Stunt insists he never tried to conceal
the provenance of his Tetro knocko s. “I
know Tony Tetro,” he tells me. “I’ve open-
ly admitted that. I used to say, ‘Everyone,
look at this painting. It’s a Rembrandt, but
it’s not. It’s by Tony Tetro.’ I do have art
from him, because he was my friend.”
“Where is that art?” I ask.
“In the cupboards! Fucking gathering
dust!”
Working for Stunt wasn’t always pleas-
ant. “He’s volatile—he goes up and down
like an escalator,” Tetro says. “On the
phone sometimes, he would yell at me
because I was taking too much time.
I’d go, ‘I’m not your bitch. Why are you
yelling at me?’ But in person, he never
raised his voice at me. I like James.
Everybody knows he’s got his demons,
but he is very generous.”
When Tetro was done with the repli-
cas, Stunt paid him with a genuine paint-
ing by Sir Joshua Reynolds, which Tetro
sold at Christie’s for $ 175 , 000. “I was
owed around $ 200 , 000 ,” he recalls. “But
I was happy with the 175 .”
The last time Tetro saw Stunt was in
London, in September 2017. He arrived
at Stunt’s town house in Belgravia to
¢ind him living alone, in the midst of
what would be called Britain’s biggest
divorce. Two months earlier, the police
had been called after Petra locked her-
self in the bathroom at the couple’s
home in London; her father testied in
court that Stunt had once threatened
to “blow her head o .” Clad in a bath-
robe, Stunt took to Instagram for the
rst time to denounce the “horric alle-
gations” being made against him—all
of which had been “perpetrated by an
evil dwarf named Bernie Ecclestone...
a lthy second-hand car dealer.” Stunt
lost everything in the divorce, including
custody of his three children.Petra declined to comment for this
story. But in November, she posted a
response to Stunt’s attacks on Instagram.
“Firstly, let’s shatter the James Stunt
myth,” she said. “The man is not a bil-
lionaire and never was. Naively I funded
his life for our entire marriage and paid
for his cars, his watches, his art (the few
real ones), even his failed company.”
James, she said, spent most of his days
in bed, high on prescription drugs. “In
some respects, I blame myself for helping
create the monster he has now become.
I gave him the access to money and the
more he had the worse he became.”
Petra, who took down the post after two
days, also said she had met Tony Tetro
“at our house in L.A. during the time that
James was commissioning the paintings
to be made. It is therefore somewhat
ba¦ing to me to hear James say that the
paintings are real.”
During his visit in London, Tetro
didn’t see much of Stunt, who spent his
days sleeping. One night, Stunt hosted
a dinner for Tetro with his godfather, the
alleged crime boss Terry Adams, and
Adams’s wife, Ruth, who prepared a tra-
ditional British dinner of chicken, York-
shire pudding, and beans. Stunt also gave
him a tour of his oce, where he kept a
golden throne—“he said it was from King
Tut’s tomb”—along with several framed
letters from Prince Charles. He even
showed Tetro a photograph of him and
the prince, both in tuxedos.
“His elbow was touching Prince
Charles, and that was a big deal for him,”
Tetro recalls. “He said, ‘Look, I’m touch-
ing him.’ He was very proud of the fact that
he was associated with Prince Charles.”IT WAS STUNT’S pride that ultimately
led to his undoing. In March 2018 , he
gave an explosive interview to Tatler. In
addition to blasting his ex-wife for turning
into “a girl who’s had a lobotomy and gone
to Jonestown,” he revealed that he had
loaned a collection of paintings to Dum-
fries House.Stunt showed o a photo of
him and Prince Charles. “Look,”
he said, “I’m touching him.”
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