by Giampiero Ambrosi
Tony Tetro is a confidence man, a convicted criminal, and an art forger. He’s also a person I could trust with my life. Whether or not I could trust him to always tell the truth is a little more complicated.
Tetro is an intriguing raconteur. He tells a story with practiced ease and delivers a punchline with well-oiled timing. I’ve heard his incredible stories so many times that I can supply a name before a he pauses to remember it.
First time I met Tony, 25 years ago at an oceanside bar in Newport Beach, he inducted me into his inner circle with disarming ease. I think naively, he thought that as a fellow Italian, I’d be a standup guy who could be trusted. Tony tells people, “it is engrained in the DNA of every Italian kid in Fulton (his hometown in upstate New York) that you never rat. Ever.” Like his hometown friends, he assumed I’d be a straight shooter who would not betray him. I am and I would not, but not because I’m like the guys in Goodfellas.
Either way, within a few months of meeting me, Tony had handed over boxes and boxes of personal material. Letters and photos, report cards and birth certificates, transcripts of the wiretap conversation that put him away along with the sensitive handwritten notes and the carefully worded denials his defense team would air at trial. He also gave me the details of his alter egos complete with a fake UK driver’s license and a passport from British Honduras.
Decades years later, when he showed me secret snapshots of James Stunt’s scheme to defraud Prince Charles with fake art, he was candid enough to tell me that he might have joined in on the caper if he hadn’t thought the plot too improbable and amateurish to succeed. Truthfully, though dollars signs flashed before his eyes, Tony had lost the appetite for a second spell in prison.
When you write a memoir, the subject has a certain amount of leeway that they might not otherwise have. They get to tell their version of subjective events and present them in the emotional light and viewpoint of their own. But that’s just the first part. While they are, as the saying goes, entitled to their own views they are not entitled to their own facts. Tony might believe that his crimes were victimless and he’d argued the point heatedly, but my job was not to make that case for him nor to write it – even in a memoir.
With time, and with crime, people can misremember things or feel shame for things that they have done. They might block things out or construct a whole new, more palatable narrative that in time morphs into reality. You have to investigate, identify, and puncture those narratives and allow the subject to, if they are willing to go there, reinterpret the feelings they have constructed in light of new information. That is what I felt my job was in writing Con/Artist. I think the result is the truest version of how Tony sees himself, reconsidered in the light of objective reality and alternative viewpoints.
Things get even more complicated when, in parallel to doing this kind of emotional and memorial fact checking, you’re investigating new, undiscovered, and emerging crimes as I and my film partner the noted director, Kief Davidson, did in our upcoming documentary, The Royal Stunt. Here, the truth is allowed to run roughshod over the subject’s self-image. The investigation goes where it goes and egos might get bruised – not only because the camera didn’t focus on one particular subject extensively or favorably enough.
In criminal investigations, you must have good instincts and feel your way through a jumble of facts and misdirection, evaluating incentives and absorbing information to explain the events before you. Of course, even the best bullshit-o-meter needs bulletproof evidence.
You must also play numerous and disparate roles, filling in emotional holes that might release a person to reveal things when they may not otherwise be moved to talk. More trickily, you must carefully judge their motivation and how they are hoping to benefit.
During our investigation, I had gained access to a senior MI6 figure, a British Foreign Intelligence operative with close ties to Prince Charles. The figure had made back channel inquiries with the palace and had come back with an eerie note. It said, that the firm – the palace – knew about the scam, that the Prince’s factotum would be blasted for taking part, and that “Giampiero would find all doors closed.” The letter also asked, “Why is Giampiero getting involved? Where is his funding coming from? What is he hoping to get out of this?” All very good questions that I, myself, would have asked. I knew that they wouldn’t be satisfied by my answers and so I knew that we would need to find our allies elsewhere.
As part of our investigation, we leaked some of our story to the Mail on Sunday. An important London newspaper with a huge circulation, we knew they would be able to hold the palace’s feet to the fire in ways that we could not. In the end, Clarence House, the official headquarters of Prince Charles acknowledged to Mail on Sunday in writing that Stunt’s fake art had indeed been passed into Dumfries House, the Prince’s stately home in Scotland. The Palace declined to press charges calling the affair, “extremely regrettable” and deigned to ignore it like a gauche joke at a genteel tea. Still, the news got out and encouraged other insider sources to come out of the woodwork.
With a culturally sensitive subject like Britain’s royal family, I found even pro-republic people surprisingly reticent to cause embarrassment. And, Britain still has a remarkably enduring class hierarchy which provides cover for influential figures. Of one larcenous art expert with honorific titles, a journalist remarked, “Oh, he’s really let himself down” as though, instead of having committed a noteworthy crime, he had been a batsman who had come up short on the cricket ground.
It took persistence over several years to overcome these obstacles. In the end, we compiled a damning and iron clad mountain of evidence. When I shared some of it with a former Scotland Yard Commander, he asked what we were really up to, because our investigation was consistent with what the nation’s top investigative force would have done. It was a vindication of our work and proof that in fact, we would not, “find all doors closed”.
Back in 2019 when we first started investigating the Stunt affair, I had to carefully weigh how willing I would be to pursue a powerful, mobbed up billionaire with a cadre of aggressive attorneys and an enormous stockpile of cash.
I had to ask Tony the same thing, although for him, moving forward also meant exposure to considerable legal jeopardy. Tony thought about it for a while then looked me in the eye and said, “I’m too old to give a fuck.” I knew then, that no matter what, he wouldn’t let me down.
He didn’t. Doesn’t mean I believe everything he told me.