Orlando Whitfield was a student when he became best friends with Inigo Philbrick, ‘the art world’s Bernie Madoff’. He talks about how their decade of hustling would lead one to a breakdown – and the other to jail

• ‘The day we tried to bag a Banksy’: read an extract from Whitfield’s explosive exposé

Orlando Whitfield is a youngish man, shy, with a reddish beard. His hands are aggressively tattooed, as if they’d been laid, backs down, on wet newspaper. The ink is a form of armour, he says, like his pranking brand of humour (for a while his iCloud hotspot was “Lord Lucan’s iPhone”). But he’s earnest, too, quick to draw on a literary quotation. Today he has arrived at lunch apologetic and soaked through, having been caught on his bike in a downpour.

We’ve met at the Academy Club – his choice – an old-timers’ haunt in Soho, London, with black oilcloths on tables and stained wainscotting. “Hogarth’s dining room,” he calls it. We’re here to discuss his former best friend Inigo Philbrick , the London-based American art dealer who swindled friends, business associates, investors and collectors out of millions of dollars before going on the run in 2019. Philbrick, 36, was jailed in 2020. In 2022 he was sentenced to seven years for wire fraud and ordered to forfeit $86m (£68m). A stunned art world is still puzzling over how he pulled off this heist. The maître d’ brings a fan heater to dry Whitfield’s jeans.

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An exclusive extract from Orlando Whitfield’s explosive book about the $80m art fraudster

• ‘The money is not real – it’s a feckless level of wealth’ – read an interview with Orlando Whitfield

To be a good art dealer you need to be both prescient and manipulative. The mere ability to spot a trend or an artist is not enough. You have to know how to get what you want from the situation, to buy early and hold your nerve. That I never had this instinct can be evidenced by the fact that when I went to the British street artist Banksy ’s Christmas pop-up, Santa’s Ghetto, in December 2004, I bought two prints for £100 each. I took them home, stuck one on my wall with drawing pins in the full glare of a south-facing window, and the other I promptly lost to the murky gods of the underbed. Today, in good condition, those prints would be worth upwards of £150,000. Each.

When I told Inigo [Philbrick] this story he almost fell off his chair laughing. The art world at the time cared little for Banksy and I suspect the feeling was mutual. Inigo, however, sensed opportunity. One afternoon in the autumn of 2007, he emailed me an image of a pair of metal doors. The email contained no text but the subject line read, “Call me when you’ve seen this.” At first I was confused. The doors looked ordinary, grubby. The photo was blurry but when I zoomed in I noticed at the bottom of the door on the left what appeared to be a Banksy rat wearing a baseball cap and holding a beatbox on its shoulder.

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Yoko Ono hung wishes from trees. Jeanne-Claude and Christo coated entire coastlines. But their work had one thing in common: it made us think about what we should cherish – and what we are losing

Last week, I took my five-year-old nephew to see the new Banksy in London. As we were walking, I told him it was a new, magical tree that had suddenly appeared overnight, put up by a masked man, and that it was up to us to solve the mystery. He came up with all sorts of theories.

When we got there, crowds of people were arriving by bike and on foot, or slowing down as they passed in their cars – people of all ages and backgrounds. Like us, they were marvelling at the new green splattered wall that, from some angles, looks like a tree in full bloom. People were conversing, asking each other their thoughts, spotting the stencilled outline of a person holding a pressure hose next to the tree, or imagining how the artist was able to construct it so secretly.

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Council says protective clear plastic cover was installed by owner of building on which mural was painted

A Banksy mural in north London has been covered with plastic sheeting and surrounded by wooden boards.

The artwork appeared on the side of a residential building in Hornsey Road, Finsbury Park, on 18 March and was splattered with white paint shortly after.

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Sardonic tribute to cheating husband ‘Roger’ on bench in Bristol prompts mention of elusive graffiti artist

The amateur sleuths, conspiracy theorists and mischief makers on the sweeping Royal York Crescent in Clifton, Bristol, all have opinions about a mysterious plaque appearing to out an adulterous husband.

The brass plate engraved with “For My Love/Husband, Father, Adulterer/Yes, Roger, I Knew” quickly attracted attention after it was attached to a wooden bench on the grand crescent’s terrace at the end of last week.

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Banksy claimed mural in Finsbury Park as his own on Monday and artwork has now been damaged

A mural of a tree painted by Banksy on a residential building in north London has been defaced with white paint two days after it first appeared.

The artwork in Finsbury Park features rough brushstrokes of green paint on a wall near a tree, giving an abstract appearance of foliage, with a stencil of a person holding a pressure hose next to it.

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City trees are an incredible green resource but are under serious assault. Banksy’s stark image shows the damage being done

Amid the excitement around Banksy’s latest art piece – a tree mural unveiled on a wall in Islington, north London – very little is being said about the tree at the centre of the story, a brutally pollarded 50-year-old cherry, and what it communicates about the way our urban trees are “managed”.

I visited it on Monday, just 10 minutes’ cycle from my house, and stood startled by the large, leafless tree, its bark darkened by pollution. It splays upwards like an agonised hand, with green paint – literal green wash – splashed up the wall behind it by a woman holding a pressure washer. But gradually I felt horrified, dismayed as the media filmed stories and crowds of people smiled, cooed and held their phones aloft for the latest Instagrammable image. People talked about whether the work could be “ stolen ” and the effect it would have on house prices and rents.

Gio Iozzi is a London-based writer and tree campaigner who set up Haringey Tree Protectors

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Work on wall in Finsbury Park area bears ‘all the hallmarks’ of world-renowned street artist, expert says

A mural that popped up in north London depicting green foliage behind a real leafless tree is prompting speculation it could be the latest work by the world-renowned street artist Banksy.

The work, which is painted on a wall that sits behind the tree as the viewer looks south-east down Hornsey Road in the Finsbury Park area, appeared over the weekend.

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