Troubled Pacific Heights art dealers still in business
By Matt Smith
published: January 07, 2009
February 2007 was a tough month for Nancy Wandlass, an international art dealer known for her Louis Vuitton handbags, $30,000 Escada wardrobe, and constant presence at the Marina District’s tony Rose Cafe. Two months earlier she’d been arrested with her husband, Thomas, on charges of fraud, grand theft, and conspiracy for allegedly stealing two 19th-century French paintings valued at $300,000. 
Adding further stress, Wandlass was attempting to crawl out from under millions of dollars’ worth of past-due bills in bankruptcy court. The Wandlasses had run Pacific Heights Gallery from a condominium they owned on Jackson Street, but it was now buried in liens and heading irreversibly toward bankruptcy sale.
Perhaps worst of all, her long-held reputation as the stylish rogue of the tight-knit, handshake-based S.F. art world was wearing parchment-thin. More and more dealers had come to view her as a cheat. “None of us would ever deal with her. We knew she was a gonif — that’s Yiddish for thief,” said Ed Russell, who for 35 years ran the Graystone gallery on Geary Boulevard downtown, and now sells paintings by appointment.
But Wandlass had escaped tight spots before, and as she awaited trial for allegedly stealing the 19th-century French artworks, she told a bankruptcy judge that she was about to hit a home run that would make things right 
again. “With the additional paintings I am negotiating on to have for resale, the commissions from those paintings will pay off the remaining balance due to the secured creditors and also payoff the unsecured creditors,” she wrote.
A Los Angeles lawsuit and a New York federal forfeiture case suggest that Wandlass really did bat one over the fence. In early 2007 she was serving as middleman for the sale of two modern paintings — “Hannibal” by Jean-Michel Basquiat, valued at $8 million, and “Modern Painting with Yellow Interweave” by Roy Lichtenstein, appraised at $3.5 million.
But, as seems to sometimes be the case with the Wandlasses, their business dealings were accompanied by a troubling backstory: The Basquiat and Lichtenstein paintings were contraband. They’d been smuggled into the U.S. with the help of falsified Customs documents after disappearing from the collection of a Brazilian banker convicted of fraud. The U.S. is now seeking to repatriate the paintings on behalf of the Brazilian government.