Andrew Crispo — Art Dealer, Murder and Sadomasochism in New York

Andrew Crispo was, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, one of the most glittering figures in New York's art world inner circle. His gallery on 57th Street sold works worth millions of dollars and drew society's elite — celebrated collectors and the leading figures of culture. But beneath the polished surface was a man driven by a destructive need for control, humiliation and violence, and in February 1985 that double life exploded in a case that would come to define an entire era's collision between wealth, decadence and criminal law.

Who was Andrew Crispo?

Crispo grew up in modest circumstances in Philadelphia and established himself as a self-taught art expert with an almost mythological ability to charm the wealthy and the celebrated. He opened the Andrew Crispo Gallery in 1973 and quickly earned recognition for his eye for American and European modernists. The gallery became a gathering point for New York's elite, and Crispo moved freely in circles that were normally closed to anyone without an aristocratic background or academic credentials.

Behind the scenes, however, Crispo was known in certain circles for a passion for sadomasochistic sexual escapades involving humiliation, dominance and, with increasing frequency, violence. He surrounded himself with younger, vulnerable men whom he bound to him through money, drugs and psychological manipulation.

The murder of Eigil Dag Vesti

On 19 February 1985, the body of 26-year-old Norwegian fashion student Eigil Dag Vesti was found in a woodland area in Rockland County, north of New York. He was wearing a leather mask, and the autopsy determined that he had been shot at close range. The mask gave the case its media name: The Mask .