Things THEY Don't Want You To Know: 30 Things "The Scream" is Screaming, 19 (Is This Art?)

Hey, remember how someone bought The Scream for nearly $120,000,000?

And remember how that person was anonymous?

And remember how I was going to come up with 30 different captions for The Scream?

Yeah, I just remembered all those things, too, and I saw that the buyer of The Scream (1 of 4, he has yet to complete the set) is a guy named Leon Black.

Here is what newspapers like the LA Times and The Wall Street Journal say about Leon Black:

He is a "New York financier and head of the investment firm Apollo Global Management," and he and "his wife, Debra, are considered to be one of the world's top art collectors. Black sits on the boards of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art. His wife is a theater producer who has backed a number of Broadway productions, including "August: Osage County" and "Frost/Nixon."

But there are other things that COULD BE SAID about Leon Black, things that were not printed in that brief puffpiece about a man who just blew $120,000,000 on a crappy painting.

Let's see what The Scream has to say about Leon Black, as we finish up this series, shall we?

By "investment firm" they mean "private equity firm" that was investigated by the largest public pension in the country about suspicious payments made to a company that operated as a middleman but which was run by a former employee of Black's, ultimately paying some $40,000,000 in "placement agent" fees to the former employee's company as part of a deal to get California's pension fund to invest in Black's firm!

HMMM! It seems this painting knows an awful lot about Black's company, Apollo, although in its shriek of information, The Scream didn't manage to fit in that in the end, the former employee was charged with defrauding the Apollo Group, the fraud apparently being that the former employee said he had disclosed the outrageous placement fees to the pension fund when no such disclosures had taken place.

Then again, The Scream also didn't reveal that Black used pension funds from California and GM to invest in what Business Week called "dicey" deals that apparently worked out well for the pension funds but extremely well for Black's company.

I wonder what else The Scream will disclose about Leon Black in upcoming days? We can only wait and see...

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