The Bouvier Affair

The Geneva Freeport, which may be the world’s most valuable storage facility, consists of seven beige warehouses and a large grain silo in La Praille, an industrial zone a short tram ride from the city’s lakeside panorama of banks and expensive hotels. One recent morning, rain was falling on the chain-link fence that runs through the property, and snow was visible on the mountains to the south. Iris scanners, magnetic locks, and a security system known as Cerberus guard the freeport’s storerooms, whose contents are said to be insured for a hundred billion dollars, but the facility retains a blue-collar feel. There were signs to the showers. Men stood around in aprons and smoked. Everything about the place tells you to look the other way.

The freeport began, in 1888, as a group of sheds near the waterfront. It was one of countless similar spaces around the world, where customs authorities allow duties and taxes to be suspended until goods reach their final destination. In time, however, the Geneva Freeport became legendary. It grew very large, and its official status—the freeport is eighty-six per cent owned by the local government—and kinship with the opaque traditions of Swiss banking made it a storage facility for the international élite. Under the freeport’s rules, objects could remain in untaxed limbo, in theory, forever. Treasures came and they did not leave. A generation ago, these goods were cars, wine, and gold. More recently, they have been works of art.

Yves Bouvier was among the first to see the potential of the freeport as an adjunct to the art market. A blond, compact man of fifty-two, Bouvier is the owner of Natural Le Coultre, a moving and storage company and the largest tenant in the complex. For more than a hundred years, the firm shipped everything from citrus fruit to industrial machinery; during the First World War, Natural Le Coultre supplied prisoners of war with Red Cross food parcels. Since 1997, however, when Bouvier took over the firm from his father, it has handled only paintings and sculpture. Bouvier refurbished the company’s premises at the freeport, which include two showrooms, and encouraged a framer to open a workshop in the building. Since 2013, Natural Le Coultre has rented more than twenty thousand square metres in storage space and has had well over a million objects in its care.

Every item passes through a single packing room, where it is unwrapped, photographed, and studied for damage. On the morning I visited, a Bob Dylan painting had arrived, along with a Picasso bronze from Greece. There were hammers hanging in order of size, and a stack of crates containing works by Léon Pourtau, a minor Impressionist. Ramon Casais, who has worked in the freeport for the past thirty years, agreed to show me a corridor of locked storeroom doors only after he had gone ahead to make sure there was absolutely nothing to see.

Specialist logistics companies, like Natural Le Coultre, are the quiet butlers of the art world. They operate deep inside it but are not quite of it. When an artist has made a sculpture out of butter, or scalpels, or half a passenger jet, it is up to a shipper to get it from Hong Kong to Miami in the same condition as when it left, and to make no fuss. To do their work, shippers must know many things. They are given records of private sales and the names of collectors, in order to navigate customs. In the course of a typical day, stopping by the homes of dealers and the back rooms of galleries, they learn who answers the door and the phone number of the assistant, and see the other pictures on the walls. The shippers’ professional indifference means that they are often in the room at moments of extreme commercial sensitivity. “Imagine that I am in Basel and I need to show a client a painting,” Thomas Seydoux, a dealer and a former chairman of Impressionist and modern art at Christie’s, told me. “Ninety-nine per cent of the time, you are going to show it with a transit agent.”

This intimacy means that, once you find your shipper, you tend to stick with him. Relationships last for decades, built on trust and a sense, usually unspoken, of absolute limits. In sixteenth-century Venice, diplomats were instructed to employ illiterate valets, who would be unable to read any secret documents they were asked to carry. A transit agent “should by default be a blind man,” Seydoux told me. “That is the very nature of his job.” Everything works fine, as long as people stay within their allotted roles. Seydoux said, “You can’t win somebody’s trust by saying you are blind and then open your eyes.”

Yves Bouvier started handling art in his late teens. He worked at Natural Le Coultre during his vacations, earning money in order to ski. When I asked him recently to describe himself as a child, he replied, “Turbulent.” He grew up in Avully, a small village on the border with France. He had a sister, who was born disabled and later died. As a boy, Bouvier was withdrawn. He spent most of his time outdoors, where he was brave—reckless, almost—when it came to physical activities. “Any kind of sport that was extreme, he liked,” Tony Reynard, a friend of Bouvier’s since he was twelve, told me. He skied like a maniac and raced go-karts on the roads at night. He dreamed of opening a bar and ski shop in the mountains.

Bouvier’s father, Jean-Jacques, started as an apprentice at Natural Le Coultre in 1953. In 1982, he was able to buy the company. Yves, having dropped out of college, joined him, and brought his appetite for risk to the unlikely domain of freight. Bouvier combines a Calvinist reserve with a delight in doing the unthinkable. “If you tell me it is not possible, I will say, O.K., I will do it,” he told me once. He took on spectacular jobs—the transport of an eighty-five-ton industrial furnace, a U.B.S. office move in Geneva—but was also drawn to what was fragile, beautiful, and expensive. Bouvier speaks an imperfect, gestural English, but he explained that becoming a shipper allowed him to immerse himself in “the feeling and the difficulty of art.” He had no formal training, just what passed through his hands. “It started with the touch,” he said. “You have all the panoply: small, huge, it’s with value, with no value. You have everything, so you learn.”

Shipping also introduced Bouvier to the complicated lives of the rich—their taxes and their divorces—and the other ancillary trades that help the art world go around: restorers, framers, hired experts, operators of tiny galleries in Paris clinging on from sale to sale. He realized they all had needs of their own. When he took over the running of Natural Le Coultre from his father, at the age of thirty-four, Bouvier sold off the company’s general moving business and specialized in art. Unlike other shippers, however, he never considered stopping at logistics.

Quietly, he began his own forays into the marketplace. “I was in the shadows,” he said. The first picture that Bouvier bought was a small gouache by Max Ernst from an auction house in Geneva. (He has a collection of twentieth-century furniture and design.) Alongside his work at Natural Le Coultre, he started to dabble, making himself useful to the people he knew. Bouvier financed purchases that dealers couldn’t afford on their own. He sorted out cash flow and bills. He became adept at setting up offshore companies—Diva, Blancaflor, Eagle Overseas—to enable galleries to buy specific works and mask the identity of other investors in a transaction. Bouvier is an opportunist. Pitch him and he will decide if he is in or out. “It is always a question of what I will earn on the deal,” he said.

Within a few years, Bouvier was buying and selling pictures on a serious scale, interacting almost solely with other dealers. “When you buy, it is always to sell,” he said. “You always have the buyer before you have the seller.” On August 16, 2000, he bought a Paul Gauguin landscape, “Paysage aux Trois Arbres,” from Peintures Hermès, a Swiss gallery associated with the Wildenstein family of art dealers, for $9.5 million. Two weeks later, he sold the picture to Mandarin Trading, a Bahamas-based art fund, for $11.3 million, making a profit of sixteen per cent. Mandarin Trading later sued the Wildensteins for fraud, alleging that it was the victim of a scam to inflate the value of the painting. The case was dismissed in 2011. I once asked Bouvier what drew him to particular propositions. “In the mountains, it was the same,” he replied. “I go in the place which is the most complicated, the most risky place.”

Dmitry Rybolovlev, a Russian oligarch, first met Bouvier in August, 2002, during a visit to the Geneva Freeport to pick up a painting by Marc Chagall. Rybolovlev was in his late thirties and worth nearly a billion dollars. He had moved his wife, Elena, and young daughter to Switzerland in 1995, after acquiring control of Uralkali, a state-owned potash-mining company, at the age of twenty-nine. He then went back to Russia, where he spent eleven months in custody after being accused of ordering the contract killing of a rival. (He was later cleared of all charges.)

Rybolovlev spoke no English, no French, and no German. When he and Elena arrived in Geneva, they felt isolated, but they soon befriended a Bulgarian publisher named Tania Rappo, who was the wife of Elena’s dentist. Rappo was fifteen years older than the Rybolovlevs, tall, gregarious, and fun. She was working on an encyclopedia at the time, but she quickly became the Russians’ all-around helper and confidante. She secured access to the city’s sports clubs, introduced them to friends, and helped them to buy an apartment in Paris.

The Rybolovlevs lived in Cologny, one of Geneva’s smartest neighborhoods. Their mansion had picture lights on the walls, which had been installed for the previous owner’s art collection. When the Rybolovlevs decided to buy paintings to go under the lights, Rappo brought them to Christie’s, but they asked her to look for works herself. “I said, ‘Listen, I am not very good,’ ” Rappo told me. “I knew it was quite a tricky world.” Still, after several months of work, Rappo arranged the purchase of the Chagall painting “Le Cirque,” for six million dollars. When the painting arrived at Natural Le Coultre’s facility at the freeport, Rappo went with the Rybolovlevs to see it.

Bouvier was waiting. He introduced himself as the head of Natural Le Coultre and took them to the showroom. The Russians had no idea that, as part of his other dealings, Bouvier had also been an intermediary in the Chagall deal, which had been a messy transaction, involving several middlemen. According to Bouvier, Rybolovlev arrived in a bad temper. The Chagall lacked an authenticity certificate—a document, typically signed by an art scholar, that guarantees that a work is real. Rybolovlev was afraid that he might have been ripped off.

Bouvier tried to calm him down. “I knew this painting,” he told me. “It was a good painting.” Even though he was ostensibly just in charge of the storage facility, he offered to help. “I will find the certificate for you, and I will be quiet,” he said. When the Russians left, Bouvier picked up the phone and called the previous owner of the Chagall. He got the certificate a few days later and called Rappo. He asked her to set up a proper meeting with the Rybolovlevs at their house in Cologny. This time, Bouvier told me, he offered them his services more generally. He could protect them during their adventures in the art market, he promised. And he could also find them art. “I have the information,” he said. “I can sell you paintings.”

According to Bouvier, the nature of his relationship with the Rybolovlevs was clear from the beginning. Although he had seldom worked with private clients before, he would be their dealer. He would also take care of all their art-related logistics. Building a collection involves a thousand small, complex tasks: storage, shipping, condition reports, restoration, making copies, framing, due diligence, insurance. For these services, Bouvier would charge an extra two per cent of the purchase price of any painting he sold them. Privately, he promised Rappo that, if he ever sold Rybolovlev anything, he would give her a commission, for introducing him in the first place.

He was aware that the proposal was audacious. Major buyers typically build collections through several dealers and auction houses, knowing that they will be charged the maximum the market can bear. To protect their interests, many also employ an art adviser or consultant, who works for them and is paid a retainer or a commission—in the region of five per cent—on the works that they acquire. Very rarely are all these roles performed by one person.

“It is not usual,” Bouvier said. “But it is not forbidden.” Other art dealers told me that they have heard of similar arrangements but that they don’t last long. Collectors gossip as much as anyone else, comparing commissions, double-checking prices. The Rybolovlevs, for their part, seemed impressed. According to Rappo, Rybolovlev turned to her outside the freeport after their first meeting and said, “This is the man we need.” (He denies this.) A year later, in August, 2003, the shipper sold the oligarch Vincent van Gogh’s “Paysage Avec un Olivier,” for seventeen million dollars.

The relationship between art dealer and collector is particular and charged. The dealer is mentor and salesman. He informs his client’s desires while subjecting himself to them at the same time. The collector has money, but he is also vulnerable. Relationships start, prosper, and fail for any number of reasons. It is not always obvious where power lies. Over time, each one can convince himself that he has created the other.

The first four paintings that Bouvier sold to Rybolovlev were covered by contracts drawn up by Lenz & Staehelin, one of Switzerland’s largest law firms. The contracts listed Bouvier, through a Hong Kong-based company named M.E.I. Invest, as the “Seller” and Mikhail Sazonov, who was the director of Rybolovlev’s family trusts, as the “Buyer.” Personal invoices from Bouvier, covering what he called his frais habituels—his usual costs—arrived separately.

To Rybolovlev, Bouvier personified the idea of a colorless Swiss professional. “I would not call him a great personality,” Rybolovlev told me. “But he was calm, discreet, and intelligent.” We were speaking on the phone. Rybolovlev was in Miami and his lawyer, Tetiana Bersheda, was in Monaco, translating. Rybolovlev had worked with bankers in Geneva for years, and he projected the same image onto Bouvier. He called him his predstavitel’, Russian for “representative,” in the art world, and thought of him like the other professionals—accountants, boat skippers—whom he employed. Operating through Bouvier and M.E.I. Invest offered the Russian valuable discretion in the art market. Access to the oligarch was strictly controlled. “Besides his lawyer and his hairdresser, I don’t think he sees normal people at all,” Rappo once told me. Rybolovlev assumed that the two-per-cent fee was Bouvier’s commission. He was impressed by Natural Le Coultre’s premises in the freeport, which put Bouvier in contact with the owners of expensive art works. “He had insider information,” Rybolovlev said. “He knew the collectors without intermediaries. He knew what was where.”

Bouvier needed a translator to speak with Rybolovlev, but he had a sense of his personality. “He was a person quick in the decision, I feel that,” Bouvier told me. There were artists the Russian admired, like Modigliani and Monet, and those he could not stand, like Dali. Having a buyer of his magnitude enabled Bouvier to operate at a higher level of the art market, but it did not change the way he did business. “It is not an old man in Russia drinking vodka,” Bouvier said. He set out to make as much money as possible. “For me, I will be clear,” he told me. “If I buy for two and I can sell for eleven, I will sell for eleven.”

He went after sensational paintings. In October, 2004, Bouvier acquired “Les Noces de Pierrette,” by Picasso, which, at $51.3 million, had set a record for the artist when it previously sold, in 1989. The washed-out, Blue Period masterpiece had been bought by a Japanese real-estate developer, who wanted to put it on display at a racetrack. But the developer went bust, and the painting had changed hands several times as collateral for loans, depreciating in value. Bouvier bought the work from the Manhattan art dealer William Acquavella and sold it to Rybolovlev for $43.8 million. His two-per-cent fee would have been nearly nine hundred thousand dollars. Rappo’s cut came to just under $2.5 million.

In his day job, Bouvier remained the president of Natural Le Coultre. Hidden behind company names and, often, dealers working on his behalf, he tended to disguise his role in transactions. “To be invisible is the best way to make business,” he said. Rybolovlev was a huge client, but in the early years his purchases were sporadic. Bouvier works constantly, and he becomes restless unless there is something new to occupy him. “Relaxing is the same as working,” he says.

In 2004, Bouvier launched an art fair in Moscow. The following year, fifty thousand people came, and there was a gala in the Kremlin. Tania Rappo was the fair’s vice-president. The logistics required helicopters and dawn convoys of trucks through Red Square and drew on all of Bouvier’s organizational flair. Friends noticed that he had also sharpened his image. Bouvier never used to wear suits, but now he bore the trappings of an international businessman, wearing tailor-made shirts with his initials, “Y.E.B.,” and numerals on the cuffs showing the year and the season each shirt was made.

The Moscow World Fine Art Fair never turned a profit, but it widened Bouvier’s network, and it impressed Rybolovlev. “The fair was like a brushstroke to his portrait,” the Russian said. “It demonstrated that he had connections.” It also deepened Bouvier’s relationship with Rappo. According to Rybolovlev, Rappo soon became a constant advocate for Bouvier’s services, claiming that he was the best-connected man in the art business. Rappo’s endorsement—she was the godmother of Rybolovlev’s younger daughter, Anna—helped give Bouvier extraordinary access to the family. He joined the board of Elena’s foundation and was invited to birthday parties in Hawaii and the Greek islands. Bouvier, who has a longtime partner in Geneva, usually travelled alone. He paints these occasions as grim, commercial obligations. “If there is a social party of your client, you will go,” he said. Rybolovlev thought that he was doing his staid art adviser a favor. “I thought that he had a rather boring life in Switzerland,” he told me.

The income from his dealing enabled Bouvier to expand his storage facilities. For several years, he had been looking to build a freeport outside Europe similar to the one in Geneva. In 2005, he settled on Singapore. In 2008, Bouvier decided to base himself in the country as well. The Singapore Freeport, which required new legislation to be passed by the national parliament, opened in 2010. Bouvier put Tony Reynard, his childhood friend, in charge. The freeport, which abuts the city’s international airport, is an over-engineered hybrid of vault and temple. It cost Bouvier a hundred million dollars to build. At first, no bank would finance it. “They thought we were loonies,” Reynard said.

A freeport offers few tax advantages and scarcely any security features that a standard bonded warehouse cannot provide. But Bouvier’s development in Singapore carried within it two ideas. The first is that freeports will become hubs in the sixty-billion-dollar international art market, destinations in themselves—places for scholars, restorers, insurers, art-finance specialists, consultants, and dealers. The second idea is that the ultra-rich don’t want just another warehouse. “If you buy a painting for a hundred million, what do you want? You want to feel well,” Bouvier said. “Why else do people travel in first class?”

In Singapore, Bouvier specified each component, from the fire-resistant walls, coiled through with steel, to the height of the doors: three metres, to admit the largest contemporary installations. “I chose everything,” he said. “The door handles. I’m obsessive about that.” He used a lighting artist named Johanna Grawunder, whose work he collects, and commissioned an enormous sculpture, “La Cage sans Frontières,” by the Israeli artist and designer Ron Arad, to stand in the atrium.

The opening of the Singapore Freeport, and its immediate success—Christie’s took a space—brought Bouvier international attention. The facilities tapped into a fascination with the tastes and financial shenanigans of the one per cent. Bouvier opened a second, slightly smaller freeport in Luxembourg, in September, 2014, and The Economist noted his role in the development of “Über warehouses for the ultra-rich.” He made plans to replicate the model in Dubai and to act as a consultant for a vast new project in Beijing.

Bouvier’s rivals in the art-logistics trade watched, fascinated and somewhat bemused. Art shippers are unshowy folk. They didn’t understand why Bouvier and Natural Le Coultre were making such a fuss over their warehouses. One rival, who visited the Singapore Freeport and saw the Arad in the atrium, told me, “If a client of mine walked into my office and saw a five-million-dollar sculpture, he would assume I was charging him too much.” Others couldn’t work out where Bouvier was getting the money. Natural Le Coultre’s profits had historically been a few million dollars a year. “Of course, we wondered,” one told me. “We are not billionaires. And to build freeports you need to be a billionaire.”

Rybolovlev was the billionaire whose money was building the freeports. From 2008 onward, his life and finances became increasingly unsettled, but the net result was that his spending on art dramatically increased. That year, he and Elena separated. According to Bouvier, Elena had always been conservative. With her out of the way, Rybolovlev seemed to have fewer inhibitions. Through a network of trusts, he bought Donald Trump’s mansion in Palm Beach, Sanford Weill’s apartment on Central Park West, and the island of Skorpios, in Greece, which used to belong to Aristotle Onassis. And he pressed forward with his art collection.

Rybolovlev had other reasons to spread his money around. In late October, 2008, the oligarch was summoned to Moscow, where he was told that a government investigation into an accident at his potash company, Uralkali, was being reopened. Uralkali had previously been cleared of any liability after an incident, in 2006, in which a mine in the Ural Mountains flooded with brine and a huge sinkhole opened in the ground. The fresh investigation caused Uralkali’s stock to plummet. The company paid two hundred and fifty million dollars in compensation, and the inquiry recalled the authorities’ pursuit of other state-owned assets that had been questionably acquired in the nineteen-nineties.

The pressure persuaded Rybolovlev that his assets were no longer safe in Russia. In June, 2010, he sold his controlling stake in Uralkali for an estimated five billion dollars. This sudden influx of cash brought its own complications, however. By this time, every one of Rybolovlev’s financial maneuvers was being scrutinized by his estranged wife and her lawyers. The oligarch instructed Bouvier to find him “mobile assets.”

He went to work. Between 2003 and 2007, Bouvier had sold the Russian six art works. Between 2008 and 2013, he sold him twenty-eight. He summoned every hunch, every contested inheritance, every paid informant, every whispered tax problem gathered from two decades operating inside an art market that had never paid him much attention. “If nobody knows you, you take all the information,” he told me. “It is to be like an octopus.”

Rybolovlev had a taste for Modigliani nudes, for example. Bouvier knew that Steve Cohen, the New York hedge-fund manager, had one of the finest, “Nu Couché au Coussin Bleu,” but also that he had no plans to sell. In November, 2011, however, Bouvier learned through an informant that Cohen had just bought four Matisse bronzes from Sotheby’s in a private sale for more than a hundred million dollars. Approaching Cohen through Lionel Pissarro, a dealer in Paris, Bouvier managed to buy the Modigliani, for $93.5 million.

In 2013, he secured a Gustav Klimt masterpiece, “Wasserschlangen II,” that had been seized by the Nazis. The day after lawyers concluded a lengthy dispute over its ownership, Bouvier sold it to Rybolovlev for a hundred and eighty-three million dollars. He bought a Gauguin that had not been sold since the Second World War and a lost Leonardo da Vinci, “Salvator Mundi,” that had been sensationally rediscovered. On its display at the National Gallery in London, the da Vinci became one of the most talked-about pictures in the world. According to Rappo, Rybolovlev wanted it for the wall of his study. Bouvier brought the painting to the Russian’s apartment in New York, where, Rybolovlev told me, he experienced a profound emotional reaction—“a vibration”—in its presence. He bought the picture for $127.5 million.

Every transaction at the top end of the private art market involves a chain, a cast of characters that stretches from the buyer to the seller: finders, agents, lawyers, lenders. It is rare for the principals to know everyone involved, and it can be improper to ask. Bouvier was a master at making chains—short, long, simple, or twisted, depending on the deal. If he knew that a seller would prefer an approach from an auction house, he would send someone, usually from Sotheby’s. Otherwise, Bouvier would send an intermediary. Often this was a Corsican named Jean-Marc Peretti, who was investigated for running an illegal gambling circle in Paris in 2009. Bouvier is attracted to outsiders in the art world. “The best people are just good businesspeople—they are butchers,” he said. Bouvier helped Peretti open a gallery in the freeport in Geneva and trusted him to carry out the most sensitive transactions. (Peretti declined to speak with me.)

When a deal with the seller was in sight, Bouvier would then agree on his own price with Rybolovlev, which was often tens of millions of dollars higher. He conducted these negotiations via e-mail, in French, with Mikhail Sazonov, Rybolovlev’s adviser. Over the years, these e-mails became increasingly familiar, but Bouvier always maintained a crucial legerdemain—suggesting that he was acting on the Russian’s behalf to secure the best deal possible from the seller, rather than that he was the one selling to Rybolovlev. “I just got a super and last price of 14 million euros, because the seller had an opportunity to invest,” he wrote of a Toulouse-Lautrec that he obtained in February, 2013. “It’s done at 25,” he wrote of a late Picasso, “Joueur de Flûte et Femme Nue,” which he bought in Paris in October of 2010.

Bouvier told me that such blurring of who exactly owns what, and when a transaction occurred, is commonplace in the art market. When you walk into a gallery, you never know what the dealer is selling on consignment, what he owns outright, or how prices have been arrived at. “It is not lying,” he said. “There is always a part of the story which is true.” But Bouvier was ruthless in exploiting what was left unsaid. “Joueur de Flûte et Femme Nue,” which Bouvier sold to Rybolovlev for twenty-five million euros, he had bought the day before for just three and a half million. He made a sixty-million-dollar profit on the Klimt.

Bouvier did not explain to me how he handled the cash flow for his transactions, but dealers often grant clients a few months to settle large invoices. As soon as a sale was agreed with Rybolovlev, an invoice would usually go out from M.E.I. Invest to one of two Rybolovlev family trusts, Accent Delight or Xitrans Finance, both based in the British Virgin Islands. The Russian paid fast. Bouvier insisted that he always bore the financial risk for all his transactions, if only for a short time. “If I can switch it in one minute,” he said, “I am the happiest man in the world.”

He believed that he was building a magnificent collection. Great dealers are judged on the quality and the personality of the works that they acquire. In 2011, as a surprise for Rybolovlev, Bouvier commissioned Joachim Pissarro, a leading scholar of Impressionism and twentieth-century art, and the brother of Lionel, the Paris dealer, to write a catalogue of the collection.

And there were moments of exultation. For years, Bouvier had dreamed of buying Mark Rothko’s “No. 6 (Violet, Green and Red),” an abstract column that the artist painted in 1951, while working at Brooklyn College. The painting was on the cover of the catalogue raisonné, an official inventory of Rothko’s work, and had been owned by the Moueix family, a French wine-producing dynasty, for decades. One day, Rybolovlev saw the image on the catalogue and told Bouvier that he would do anything to acquire the painting. Through Peretti, Bouvier had been quietly cultivating the Moueix family for years, buying their wine and lesser works from their collection, in the hope of one day securing the Rothko.

In early 2014, Bouvier learned that they might be willing to sell. Years earlier, he had flown to the family’s château, in Bordeaux, to view the painting, which was kept in a little-used living room, where the light was blocked out by heavy curtains. In the early nineteen-fifties, Rothko began experimenting with powdered pigments, solvents, and egg to lend extra force to the colors in his canvases. He wanted viewers of his pictures to feel as if they were inside them. When Bouvier drew back the curtains, the painting seemed to explode in front of his eyes.

The Rothko arrived at the Geneva Freeport in June. Bouvier went to see it on his own. He had the painting placed next to a window, to enjoy the natural light. “It is impossible for people to imagine this kind of deal,” he told me. Bouvier had every reason to feel euphoric. The Moueix family had agreed to sell “No. 6 (Violet, Green and Red)” for eighty million dollars. He had sold it Rybolovlev for a hundred and eighty-nine million. There was Peretti’s cut to worry about—some five million—and the usual commission for Rappo, but Bouvier was about to earn a hundred million dollars on a single sale.

Barely anyone knew about Bouvier’s dealings: a handful of gallery owners across Europe, his lawyer, and Sotheby’s private-sales department. His staff at Natural Le Coultre noticed the art works stored on his account but insist that they were never told more. Their boss was rarely in the office; Bouvier travelled constantly, investing. He controls more than forty companies, which cover a bewildering range of interests, from R4, a new complex of galleries on the site of an old Renault factory in Paris, to Smartcopter, an idea for developing a low-cost helicopter. His manner discouraged conversation. Reynard told me that he never inquired where the money for the Singapore Freeport was coming from. “It is a question you don’t ask,” he told me. “Because you know that he will not answer.”

But the transactions that Bouvier was orchestrating were the source of furious gossip in the art world. Rybolovlev had become known as a top buyer, despite his efforts to keep a low profile. Who was helping him, though, was a mystery. Seydoux, the Geneva dealer, met Rybolovlev once but never managed to forge a relationship. “We tried desperately,” he said. “Nobody knew who really had access to him.”

On March 9, 2014, the Times published a piece of industry gossip about the sale of da Vinci’s “Salvator Mundi” the previous year. Quoting Anthony Crichton-Stuart, a London-based dealer, the article reported that the painting had sold privately for between seventy-five and eighty million dollars. Crichton-Stuart was merely repeating rumors that he had heard, but the article unwittingly revealed the scale of Bouvier’s profit margins: he had sold the da Vinci to Rybolovlev for almost fifty million more.

Bouvier read the article the day that it appeared. No one called from Rybolovlev’s office. He remembered the oligarch’s delighted reaction to the painting, and that he had been willing to pay even more. Bouvier also had other things on his mind. The Luxembourg Freeport was nearing completion, and he was attempting to close the deal on the Rothko. For the first time, Rybolovlev was proving a somewhat awkward client. He paid the first twenty million dollars in cash but wanted to sell other works from his collection to fund the rest of the purchase. The decision dismayed Bouvier. Selling works at the top end of the art market is just as delicate as buying them. He pleaded for patience. During the summer, Rybolovlev fell seriously ill. He was treated for cancer, and suffered post-surgery complications. “I was at a near-unconscious state,” he told me. Bouvier agreed to take a Modigliani sculpture, “Tête,” and to knock sixty million dollars off the price of the Rothko. But it still left him far short of the figure they had agreed on.

Rybolovlev recovered, and, a few months later, on November 22, 2014, he turned forty-eight. He invited Bouvier, as usual, to celebrate his birthday, and during the afternoon, at his penthouse in Monaco, the two men discussed his collection. The price of the da Vinci came up. Rybolovlev asked whether he had paid too much. He didn’t ask about Bouvier’s profit, just whether he had overpaid. Bouvier told me that he offered to ask an expert to appraise the painting’s value. He was confident that it was worth more than a hundred million dollars. Rybolovlev promised to settle up on the Rothko by the end of the year, but he didn’t understand why his middleman seemed unwilling, or unable, to sell works as easily as he bought them. “This made me wonder if everything had been clean,” he said.

That night, Rybolovlev threw a party at the Yacht Club de Monaco. Since 2011, the Russian has been the owner of A.S. Monaco, the local soccer team, and the party began after that evening’s match, a 2–2 draw with Caen. Bouvier was stuck at a table far from the host, who chatted with the Prince. There was bad striptease. (Rybolovlev denies this.) Bouvier stepped out onto the terrace. Rappo was there, and she thought that he seemed upset. Rybolovlev came out as well, and she asked him what had happened. “Tell him not to worry,” the Russian said, indicating Bouvier. “We’re still friends.”

The end of the year came. Bouvier was still waiting for his money. Rybolovlev was on vacation in St. Barts, in the Caribbean. On December 30th, he was at a lunch for around ten people at Eden Rock, a beachside hotel. A mutual friend had invited Sandy Heller, a New York art consultant who was vacationing on the island. Heller’s best-known client is Steve Cohen, the hedge-fund manager and collector. Heller had never met Rybolovlev, but there were rumors that Cohen’s Modigliani nude, which he had sold in 2011, had been bought by the Russian.

By way of conversation—and speaking through Rybolovlev’s girlfriend, who translated—Heller mentioned the purchase. “We miss it to this day,” he said. Rybolovlev was startled to encounter someone on the other end of one of his art transactions. He asked, in front of the table, “How much did you sell it for?”

The question was unusual. Private sales are bound by confidentiality agreements. But Heller seemed moved by the Russian’s unease. A guest at the lunch told me that Rybolovlev was “like a baby standing in traffic” during the conversation. Heller sent a message to Cohen, asking permission to tell Rybolovlev the sale price—$93.5 million—and he relayed it to the Russian the following day. Rybolovlev had bought the painting from Bouvier for a hundred and eighteen million dollars.

Rybolovlev didn’t speak at first. For twelve years, he told me, he had believed that Bouvier was his agent, acting on his behalf in the art market and paid well for his services. Bouvier’s two-per-cent charge on the roughly two billion dollars that Rybolovlev had spent on art since 2003 came to forty million. The idea that Bouvier might be making a huge margin on each and every painting struck him as a breathtaking con. Rybolovlev thought about calling Tania Rappo, but he hesitated, wondering how much she knew. On January 9, 2015, Bersheda, Rybolovlev’s lawyer, filed a criminal complaint in Monaco against Bouvier and “all participants,” accusing the dealer of fraud. The complaint included extracts from Bouvier’s e-mails and cited the sales of the da Vinci and the Modigliani, on which Bouvier was accused of making around seventy million dollars in “undue” profits.

Unaware, Bouvier carried on as before, tracking paintings, trying to close the gap on the Rothko. Joachim Pissarro’s catalogue, prepared in secret, was almost ready. The Russian began to move his collection out of Natural Le Coultre’s storerooms in Singapore and Geneva. Bouvier assumed that this was because of the divorce. On February 21st, he sent Sazonov, Rybolovlev’s adviser, an eight-page e-mail outlining potential sales from the collection, but he demanded full payment for the Rothko by the end of the month. Adopting his habitual language, Bouvier warned that the “seller would be suicidal” if Rybolovlev didn’t pay soon, even though he had settled his own affairs with the Moueix family months earlier. That evening, Rybolovlev and Rappo met at his apartment in Monaco. According to Rappo, he asked for her opinion on what he should do. Bersheda secretly recorded the conversation. A meeting with Bouvier was arranged for the twenty-fifth.

It was a Wednesday. Bouvier flew by private jet from Geneva. The meeting, at the Belle Époque, an apartment block overlooking the water, was at 10 a.m.Bouvier arrived early. It was a beautiful morning, and he walked around the marina, looking at the boats. (Bouvier owns a thirty-five-metre motor yacht, which he sails around the Mediterranean.) When he walked into the lobby of the Belle Époque, there were eight figures dressed in black. One of them showed a Monaco police I.D. and asked if he was Yves Bouvier. When he nodded, another officer put him in handcuffs and led him back outside, into an unmarked car. No one spoke.

Bouvier’s first thought was that he had been caught up in a larger raid on Rybolovlev. He was taken to Monaco’s main police station; he assumed he would be out by lunchtime. At 1:13 p.m., he was led into an interview room for the first time and asked to name his profession. “Businessman,” he replied.

He learned that he was under investigation for fraud and money laundering. In the weeks after Rybolovlev’s complaint, H.S.B.C. had revealed to prosecutors in Monaco that Bouvier and Tania Rappo had a joint bank account in the principality. According to the police, this suggested a possible conspiracy to launder the proceeds of the art sales. Over the years, Rappo’s commissions had amounted to more than a hundred million dollars. H.S.B.C. later admitted that this was a mistake: the name on the account was Jacques Rappo, Tania’s husband, but Tania was drawn into the investigation. She was arrested in her apartment. Two policewomen walked in while she was having a massage.

Rappo saw the name of Rybolovlev’s daughter and trust beneficiary Ekaterina on the warrant. “I had an interior calm,” she told me. A year earlier, almost to the day, Elena Rybolovleva had been arrested in Cyprus for allegedly stealing a diamond ring that Rybolovlev said belonged to him. The charges were dropped, but Rappo had interpreted the incident as an act of intimidation to hasten the completion of the couples’ divorce. (It was settled in October, for an undisclosed sum.) “I don’t know for what reason,” she said. “I just knew he was making some sort of blackmail.”

Bouvier and Rappo were questioned for three days. When Bouvier was confronted by the apparent duplicity in his e-mails, he replied that they were “just a commercial game.” But he began to comprehend the scale of the accusations against him. Based on the margins that they knew about, and a valuation of the collection, Rybolovlev’s lawyers claimed that their client had been ripped off to the tune of $1,049,465,009. That Friday, in a form of confrontation that is standard under French police procedure, Bouvier and Rybolovlev, with their lawyers and translators, came face to face. Rybolovlev repeated his assertion that Bouvier had always presented himself as his agent. He claimed that, when they first met, Bouvier had asked him to invest a few million euros in his businesses. “How could he then buy a painting for twenty million euros?” the Russian asked.

According to Bouvier, Rybolovlev avoided eye contact for the entire conversation, except at one moment. “But, Yves, these markups are worth a Boeing,” he said. Later, Bouvier reflected on this. “I think in his head the problem was not that Bouvier made money—it was that he made too much money,” he told me. He said that, at the end of the confrontation, with the room still crowded, he offered to buy the Modigliani. “I am ready to pay,” he said. “I am still ready to deal.” Rybolovlev walked out.

Bouvier was released on a ten-million-euro bond the following day. He went to a hotel and ordered a bottle of Cos d’Estournel, an expensive Bordeaux. He was convinced that the Russian had not expected him to make bail. Because Monaco is so small, and the risk of flight is so high, suspects in criminal cases are often detained for weeks at a time. Bouvier understood his arrest as a kind of shakedown. “The strategy was to make a trap,” he said, “and then he comes three months later and says, Give me fifty or a hundred million and I do it, to get out.” Like Rappo, he remembered what happened to Rybolovlev’s ex-wife in Cyprus.

Instead, the Russian broadened his legal assault. On March 12th, he sued Bouvier in Singapore, demanding a worldwide freeze on the dealer’s assets, as well as on Rappo’s. The court granted the injunction, and ordered Bouvier to hand over the Rothko. He was hit by a similar suit in Hong Kong. A month later, allegations surfaced in Paris that two Picasso portraits that Bouvier had sold to Rybolovlev in 2013 had been stolen from their previous owner, Catherine Hutin-Blay, the artist’s stepdaughter. Bouvier was hauled to court for that as well. Rybolovlev has since handed the paintings to the French police. Bouvier denies any wrongdoing.

Around this time, I spent a day at the Luxembourg Freeport. The building is made of sixty-five hundred tons of concrete. Heavy doors are locked with six-digit codes. David Arendt, the manager, put a brave face on the trouble massing around his main investor. The chairman of the freeport, an associate of Bouvier’s in Paris named Olivier Thomas, had been questioned a few days earlier about the Picassos. I asked Arendt when he had learned that Bouvier was an art dealer. He replied, “On February 26th, when I read it in the Daily Telegraph.” Alain Mestat, an art-finance specialist based in the freeport, sat stunned in a showroom. “It’s like the black swan,” he told me. “Not expected.” In the bowels of the building, I glanced into one of Natural Le Coultre’s storerooms and saw a heap of crates marked “Fragile” and bound for Singapore. A man inside saw me and closed the door.

Art shippers whom I spoke with for this article were staggered by what Bouvier had done. The idea of using the information they have soaked up over the years, their tactile knowledge, to trade works themselves was anathema. They seemed to enjoy their unthought-of role in the art world, and to be happy to stay there. But they admitted that there was very little to stop Bouvier. In an unregulated market, the only forces holding people back are cultural norms and long-term commercial reason: if I am not trusted by my peers and customers to behave in the way they expect me to, my business will fail. Bouvier’s calculation was different: in a market powered by insider information, the man who knows everything is king. He opened his eyes and saw.

Dealers, in general, have been angrier, and awestruck. The top end of the private art market is a small place, yet Bouvier was almost unknown. When I showed Daniel Katz, a major London dealer, the list of works that Bouvier had sold to Rybolovlev and the prices he got for them, Katz nearly fell off his chair. “The Russian has been tucked up to the eyeballs,” he said. Dealers tend to have two problems with Bouvier. One, he was a shipper, and shippers don’t deal. “I’d consider it a terrible conflict of interest,” Larry Gagosian told the Times in September. A Swiss dealer told me, “I would never, ever show a work at Natural Le Coultre, because I would say, That information is being recorded. How is that going to be used?”

More troubling, Bouvier has also traduced the idea of what an art dealer should be. He exploited every ambiguity of what is supposed to be a gentlemanly trade. Whether his conduct amounts to fraud will likely turn on the opaque phrasing of e-mails and the doubtful credulity of an oligarch, but the damage to the art market lies in Bouvier’s effrontery, the crassness of his gains. One evening in Geneva, I met Marc Blondeau, who used to run Sotheby’s in Paris and helped to build the collection of François Pinault, the luxury-goods magnate. We sat in his office—an early Renoir on an easel behind me—and he told stories of the paintings he had bought and sold. “When you sell to a collection,” he said, “it is like you place your child in a nursery.” Blondeau told me that great dealers leave their mark: they shape taste, influence markets, sell to museums. Bouvier didn’t do that. He didn’t have a gallery. He worked mostly on his BlackBerry. “You cannot call him an art dealer,” Blondeau said. “You call him a trader.”

I went to see Bouvier the following day. We met at the offices of Natural Le Coultre. A painting commissioned for the firm’s hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary, “Transport Through the Ages,” hung above the reception desk. Bouvier insists that he never used confidential information from his logistics business to buy and sell paintings. None of the thirty-five works that he sold Rybolovlev were in storage with Natural Le Coultre. “I have the information not because I am a shipper,” he said. “It is because I am clever.”

I asked if he was upset by the rest of the art market’s disavowal of him since his arrest. “All these people think they are the best one,” he said. “Now they know the small Bouvier is better than them.” With his mastery of hundred-million-dollar private sales, his knowledge of logistics, and his network of freeports, Bouvier sees himself as a truthteller, able to say what others cannot. “I know everything that is good and everything that is bad in the art business, everything that should change,” he told me. “When Mr. Gagosian said there was a conflict—first, I never go inside the safe. And Mr. Gagosian, when he produces an artist, he is an insider like me. The price goes up. It is bullshit. It is a market with no rules. Don’t say that it is Mr. Bouvier with no rules.”

We spent all day talking. Bouvier believes that the lawsuits are beginning to turn his way. Last August, the Court of Appeal in Singapore unfroze his assets, including the Rothko. A court in Hong Kong did the same. The civil suits continue, as does the criminal inquiry in Monaco, but Bouvier is preparing to seek damages for the injury done to his business by Rybolovlev. Rappo has launched suits of her own in Monaco, alleging improprieties in the police investigation. As he spoke, Bouvier kept four Nokias and a BlackBerry within reach at all times. When one of them rang, he would turn it over, to see which realm of his dealings the inquiry was coming from. He reminded me, in a not entirely unlikable way, of an animal busy in carrion, like a jackal.

We went out for lunch. Bouvier put on dark glasses. We ate in a private room at the Hotel Kempinski, one of the fanciest hotels in Geneva. Bouvier ordered a Coke Zero and a dish of grilled venison called “The Hunting Product.” He spoke of Rybolovlev’s paranoia, with its roots in the chaos of post-Soviet Russia, and how he could never have deceived a man like that for more than a decade. “If I tricked him,” he said, “I’m not only the best art dealer in the world, I’m also a genius. I’m Einstein.”

When we got back to the office, someone had brought in folio-size proofs of Joachim Pissarro’s catalogue of the Rybolovlev collection. The chapters were bound in gray boards and tied with black ribbons. It is uncertain that the book will ever be published now, and less likely that Rybolovlev’s masterpieces will ever be shown together. Rybolovlev told me that he feels “a complicated energy” when he thinks about his paintings. He laughed when I asked him where they were.

The catalogue lay on the table. It was going to be the proof of Bouvier’s capacities as an art dealer: his greatest project, realized tirelessly and in the dark, and suddenly presented to the world. Instead, his skill has been revealed at the moment of his undoing. I told Bouvier I had a feeling that he might win his legal battle with Rybolovlev but never recover his good name. He looked at me. “That will be my next challenge,” he said, and he kept staring at me—his eyes are a mixture of blue and dark green—until I dropped my gaze.