Confessions of Art Fraud King Michael Zabrin
Hen Ricki Zabrin looks back on her life in the eighties, she remembers how her Northbrook neighbors used to wonder about her husband. Unlike the button-down breadwinners on the block who set off for the office each day in pinstriped suits with attaché cases in hand, Michael worked from home. He was a birdlike little man with a carefully trimmed mustache and styled curlicues of black hair that cascaded to his shoulders. When he did dart out of the house, he was in full plumage, which could mean a fire-engine-red suit and a purple tie with a belt and boots made of matching alligator skin. His wheels were equally flashy: a sleek Porsche Carrera. “Of course,” Ricki laughs, “everyone thought he was a drug dealer.”Her husband was indeed a dealer, but what he dealt could not have been more different from dope, and that’s what she found so funny. Zabrin sold art, and not just any art—primarily limited edition prints from the 20th-century masters Joan Miró, Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso, and Salvador Dali. A consummate salesman with a whimsical sense of humor, he plied the best-known gallery owners in Chicago and across the country, wielding a portfolio case as big as he was. According to Ricki, his clients were always eager to meet with him—“sometimes,” she says, “just to see what he was wearing.”
