By now you may have read Rachel Corbett’s feature, published earlier this week, that revisits the riveting story of Andrew Crispo, the 1980s art dealer with tastes for kink and coke who was connected to a particularly grisly murder in 1985. Crispo’s associate Bernard LeGeros was convicted of the killing that year and paroled in 2019; Crispo himself skated on those charges, although he eventually did a few years for other offenses, including tax evasion and drugs, before he died in 2024. Corbett’s reporting draws partly on unseen material Crispo had stashed in his storage units as well as long conversations with LeGeros. It also invokes this magazine’s June 24, 1985, cover story about the case, for which Anthony Haden-Guest, supreme chronicler of that era’s demimonde, did a whole lot of reporting among Crispo and the people who observed him up close. It, too, is a wild reading experience, more than 9,000 words that leave you wondering just how Crispo avoided a trial. We’ve now put it online for the first time as an accompaniment not only to Corbett’s story but the rest of our “Yesteryear” issue devoted to the art world.
—Christopher Bonanos, city editor, New York
