Art Dealer Files for Bankruptcy, Delaying Suits Against Him

Lawrence B. Salander, the embattled Manhattan fine art trader whose gallery was ordered locked by a State Supreme Court justness last month, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Friday.

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Mr. Salander and his Salander-O’Reilly Galleries — which operated from a town house on East 71st Street, around the corner from the — had been facing a outpouring of lawsuits alleging that clients or concern spouses had been defrauded. Some people or their estates also said they consigned plant to Salander-O’Reilly that the gallery sold without their permission.

Lawyers involved in the lawsuits said the bankruptcy filing would detain the other lawsuits while the bankruptcy tribunal trades with which creditors are owed what, and how much each is to be paid.

Mr. Salander, who filed for bankruptcy in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., listed his wife, Julie, as a joint debtor. The filing was reported on yesterday. Lawyers familiar with the Salanders’ concern traffic state it was separate from a request to coerce the gallery into involuntary bankruptcy that was filed last hebdomad by three other creditors in federal tribunal in Manhattan.

John W. Moscow, a lawyer representing the Salanders in the Chapter 11 legal proceeding , said, “They’re doing everything they can to do certain that the people with valid claims acquire fully paid.” .

Documents filed with the Chapter 11 request state the Salanders themselves had no more than than 49 creditors. The Salanders said they owed money to at least two Banks and to William O’Reilly, World Health Organization started Salander-O’Reilly Galleries with Mr. Salander in the 1970s. They parted ways in the 1990s.

The Salanders said they also owed money to everyone from a former landlord to the lawn tennis star , who said he gave Salander-O’Reilly $162,500 to purchase and resell fine art at a profit. In a lawsuit in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, he said the gallery had not paid him the $325,000 it had promised. A lawyer representing Salander-O’Reilly inch that lawsuit said last calendar month that the gallery had paid Mr. McEnroe $200,000.

With the Chapter 11 filing, the Salanders filed a listing of the creditors with the 20 biggest unbarred claims. All the claims were marked “disputed.” Among them was $2.9 million to Earl Davis, the boy of the creative person Gilbert Stuart Davis, whom the gallery represented. Earl Davys filed lawsuit against Salander-O’Reilly inch federal tribunal in Manhattan in June.

Another creditor the Salanders listed in their bankruptcy filing was Sotheby’s. Its fiscal arm lent Mr. Salander more than $800,000 over the summer, using as collateral more than 20 plant of fine art that he said he owned. Sotheby’s filed lawsuit against Mr. Salander last month, claiming that its traffic with Mr. Salander should not be subject to the opinion by State Supreme Court Justice Richard B. Lowe three blocking the sale of pictures and sculpture inside the Salander-O’Reilly town house.

Houston Law Firm Sues Kerik for $200,000 in Legal Fees

, the former police force commissioner of New House Of York who pleaded guilty last twelvemonth to state misdemeanour complaints and will probably confront federal bill of indictment this month, was sued last hebdomad by his former lawyers for more than than $200,000.

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The lawsuit was filed on Oct. Twenty-Two in State Supreme Court in Manhattan by the Houston-based law house of William Fulbright & Jaworski L.L.P., which until April represented Mr. Kerik. It impeaches him of failing to pay $202,384.04 in legal fees.

Mr. Kerik was appointed to the police force station by , the former city manager and Republican presidential candidate. Mr. Giuliani later backed Mr. Kerik’s failed nomination to be secretary of the federal . Mr. Kerik have been under probe by state or federal government since his nomination collapsed a hebdomad after it was announced in 2004 amid accusals of financial, ethical and personal improprieties.

In 2006, he pleaded guilty to two misdemeanour charges, admitting that he accepted $165,000 in redevelopments to his The Bronx flat in 1999 and 2000 from a company suspected of neckties to organized law-breaking that was seeking a metropolis license. Mr. Kerik, who was commissioner of the city’s Department of Correction when the work was done, also admitted speech production to metropolis functionaries on behalf of the company, the Interstate Industrial Corporation, or its subsidiaries. Interstate have denied neckties to organized crime.

The lawsuit, which was reported yesterday on a Web site, , said that a spouse at William Fulbright & Jaworski, Kenneth M. Breen, began representing Mr. Kerik in 2005. But Mr. Breen left the house in April, and Mr. Kerik chose to remain with him. Mr. Breen goes on to stand for him in connexion with what the lawsuit phone calls “a pending indictment,” and Mr. Kerik have got got ended his human relationship with the William William Fulbright firm.

The house began sending measures to Mr. Kerik in April and made repeated demands for payment, according to the suit.

A lawyer who is representing Mr. Kerik in the lawsuit, Chad D. Seigel, declined to discourse it yesterday except to state that it was without virtue and “the consequence of an obvious miscommunication, which we are seeking to address.”

Mr. Seigel, in an e-mail message on Oct. Twenty-One to Glen Banks, the Fulbright lawyer who filed the lawsuit the adjacent day, said that the firm’s bill “appears to be inflated” and suggested that the law house had billed Mr. Kerik for work he had not, and never would have, authorized.

The e-mail message was attached as an exhibit to the lawsuit.

A legal defence trust for Mr. Kerik have been established to assist defray the costs he have incurred as a consequence of the investigations, associates have said.