Park West Gallery's wake of victims includes its own sales recruits

by Fine Art Registry®

Park West is so evil, it has to be stopped!!!  The reason why they don't hire people with an art degree is that these people would immediately start asking questions about the so called "art" they have to sell which is not art. It is garbage! --Park West ex-auctioneer trainee

Over the last couple of months, Fine Art Registry has received an enormous surge in the number of complaints concerning Park West Gallery and its deceptive and unfair trade practices (some more egregious than others), including a startling report from a recent Park West Gallery “auctioneer” recruit who attended a Park West Gallery auctioneer training session in Miami Lakes, Florida at the end of 2011. The person in charge of the training was Park West Gallery’s star snake-oil salesman, the infamous, Stoney Goldstein, who we have reported on in the past and who has obviously taken over for another equally oily Park West Gallery auctioneer trainer named, Chris Lindsay (more on Lindsay below).

The ever slick Stoney Goldstein

It is important to note here that Park West Gallery salesmen are not licensed auctioneers. They are nothing more than sales reps for Park West Gallery who are trained to conduct pseudo auctions or sales events that are intended to resemble an art auction, but are far from the standard or legitimate norm. Not a single one of their salesmen we have encountered is licensed to conduct art auctions in the U.S., and few, if any, have any substantive art experience and this is by design. No experience in art is necessary when signing on for the Park West Gallery training sessions. Generally, most of the recruits are young and single. There are few requirements and the bar to admission is set low. At a minimum, one must have a pulse (it helps to have an accent) and you have to be willing to sell the Park West Gallery way. In fact, the more educated you are about art the industry as a whole, the less likely you will succeed with Park West Gallery as is evidenced by the complaint set forth below. Park West Gallery has often used Craig’s List as a resource to recruit their sales people. The recent complaint we received from a Park West Gallery auctioneer recruit (whose identity we will withhold, in order to protect the individual from harassment and threats by Park West Gallery) reported to us, in part, the following:

Dear Fine Art Registry…

Could you please publish this?

Park West is so evil, it has to be stopped!!!

The reason why they don't hire people with an art degree is that these people would immediately start asking questions about the so called "art" they have to sell which is not art. It is garbage! It probably costs $20-30 dollars to produce. It is a very clever technique to take ignorant people and train them on art, however to keep them ignorant and not educate them so that they are not able to dispute what they are doing is a very cunning tactic. This guarantees that the trainees never question the methods that Park West are using to sell art. These trainees are so motivated by the all mighty dollar that they do not stop to think about what they are doing and how they are ripping people off.

During the "sale presentation" of Mr. [Stoney] Goldstein (Vice President of Sales), he made rude and insulting comments like…calling one of our trainees a Gypsy in a front of the group because she was traveling the world, etc. Mr. Goldstein belittles and humiliates the trainees in front of the class for personal gain. He attempts to make himself look better by belittling others. They (Mr. Goldstein and another sales trainer Paul Bielby) humiliated one girl in a front of the class so badly that her parents had to drive 16 hours from Texas to get her out of this horrific environment. Shame on you "trainers"!

On the art portion of the training  Mr. Goldstein was comparing art work of Damien Hirst (installations) to Tarkay (paintings) lol, or comparing art work made from rabbit poop to again Tarkay (poor guy) and some other very odd things.  This is a very clever tactic by the trainer to compare artworks that are not in the same genre or league to belittle the more successful artists and brainwash the trainees into believing that they are selling work that is better and more valued. There is no way to compare a Hirst to an unknown Park West artist.

I feel so sorry for these young kids who just want to travel the world and make some money. I feel so sorry for innocent cruise passengers who have never been exposed to real art and thought that they are buying something special.

I really don't know how Mr. Scaglione and Mr. Shapiro and the rest of the Park West team can sleep at night. I guess they go to the church every morning and beg for the forgiveness but I don't believe that they will be ever forgiven….

Fine Art Registry has since provided the individual’s full story and contact information to federal law enforcement.

Chris Lindsay in action in New Zealand

The former Park West Gallery auctioneer trainer, Chris Lindsay, is cut from the exact same cloth as Stoney Goldstein. Former Park West Gallery recruits, Penny Tyler and Jill Carr, testified at length about Lindsay at the 2010 Michigan Federal Court trial where Fine Art Registry won a unanimous jury verdict and an award of $500,000.

In early 2011, Chris Lindsay apparently left Park West Gallery to move on to new and greener “art peddling” pastures in Christchurch, New Zealand, where he has apparently settled in and set up shop with another former Park West Gallery auctioneer named, Toby McAlister. Since leopards rarely change their spots, there is little doubt that Lindsay is (or was) practicing what he knows best, what he knows works, and what he has taught countless other Park West Gallery recruits to do—the Park West Gallery way of hawking artwork. That is, until he was caught red-handed on February 21, 2011, and a formal complaint was registered against him with the Auctioneers Association of New Zealand, Inc. It was soon after being caught that Lindsay decided it might be prudent to comply with New Zealand laws and apply for an auctioneer's license. However, given his background with Park West Gallery, his application for licensing was vigorously challenged by the Auctioneers Association of New Zealand, so much so that the The New Zealand Sunday Morning Herald, published an article on February 20, 2011, about Lindsay’s unregistered and unlicensed status and his long-time association with Park West Gallery. We reported on this in the FAR® Forum.

It is important to note that Fine Art Registry has heard from many Park West Gallery auctioneers over the last five years who claimed to have been verbally and psychologically abused, humiliated, left stranded, and/or altogether cheated out of pay, among other abuses, by Park West Gallery and its sham off shore company in the Turks and Caicos Islands, known as Plymouth Auctioneering. Basically, Park West Gallery set up Plymouth Auctioneering so that it could lease employees from its shell or sham company (Plymouth Auctioneering) to Park West Gallery, and thus escape liability for its salesmen and who knows what else.

Another ex-auctioneer who worked for Park West Gallery at one time aboard Royal Caribbean cruise ships, Rick Barnes, who was unfortunate enough to cross paths with Chris Lindsay, had the following to say: 

He [Lindsay] was a genuine asshole and crook! His reputation of being a bastard preceded him as I had been told of him several times by others before our meeting. I was assigned to a one day class he was conducting at the Miami Lakes [Park West Gallery] facility and I was not allowed to get out of it. I tried!

Other former Park West Gallery auctioneers/salesmen have been threatened with lawsuits if they ever contemplated leaving Park West Gallery and procured another position with a different company in the art industry. (Park West Gallery has threatened to sue the galleries and art auction companies that its ex-auctioneer/salesmen have gone to work for). We have reported on this extensively over the last several years. There are many more recruits that have contacted us to report strange and bizarre training and interviewing tactics (like sleep deprivation during training sessions, for example) and bizarre interviewing procedures used by Selena Kim, who is employed by Park West Gallery to recruit unsuspecting individuals who respond to cheesy Craig’s List ads posted by Park West Gallery with promises of fortunes to be made while traveling the world. We have reported on Selena Kim in the past here on Fine Art Registry.

The complaint lodged against Chris Lindsay in New Zealand is quite serious. It is clear that New Zealanders aren’t going to allow the same shenanigans Lindsay practiced with Park West Gallery here in the U.S., to occur in New Zealand. Good for them. If the authorities here in the U.S. would take unlicensed auctioneers (or those who claim to be auctioneers) more seriously and actively police the art industry, we would have far fewer victims as result. As we have already stated, in our nearly five years of investigation into Park West Gallery’s business practices, we don’t know of a single so-called Park West salesman who is properly licensed to conduct art auctions. But then again, that’s the problem, isn’t it? The Park West Gallery dog and pony shows mostly occur on board cruise ships and at "invitation only" VIP events (a closed forum—not open to the general public). The hearing on Lindsay's application is on hold until a court hearing in Christchurch in February or early March of this year. We will keep our readers updated.

Needless to state (but we will anyway), Park West Gallery hasn’t changed its sales training model since we started investigating their business practices nearly a half decade ago. According to the recent report above, Park West is still actively abusing recruits and teaching and instructing them how to deceive buyers.

For more on Park West Gallery and their salesmen see our video library on YouTube. Here is an example of just one of our videos (May 22, 2010) on Park West Gallery salesmen, filmed after our big win against Park West Gallery on April 21, 2010: