Thomas Doyle, a man who was once described by a federal judge as a “career criminal,” pleaded guilty Friday to wire fraud in a scheme involving a Gustave Courbet painting that eventually ended up in the collection of Jon Landau, Bruce Springsteen’s longtime manager.
According to the New York Times, Doyle persuaded London dealer Patrick Matthiesen to send him Courbet’s Mother and Child on a Hammock, painted around 1848, after promising to broker its sale. Matthiesen trusted Doyle to find a buyer and handle the transaction on his behalf.
Doyle later told the dealer he had sold the painting for $550,000 in August 2024. Prosecutors say that never happened.
Instead, authorities say Doyle quietly consigned the work through a business partner to a Manhattan gallery at a far lower asking price. Just a few months later, the gallery sold it for $125,000 to Landau, a prominent collector of 19th-century French painting. Doyle allegedly pocketed most of the proceeds while feeding Matthiesen a string of false explanations about why payment had never arrived.
“Thomas Doyle defrauded the owner of a valuable painting by telling a series of brazen lies to get the painting and then sell it so he could keep the profits for himself,” US Attorney Jay Clayton said in a statement announcing the guilty plea.
Doyle pleaded guilty in federal court in Manhattan to one count of wire fraud, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. As part of the plea agreement, he will forfeit the proceeds from the sale. He is scheduled to be sentenced in November.
Attorneys for Doyle and Landau did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Matthiesen, who previously sued Doyle and others over the painting, could not be reached.
The case was investigated by the FBI’s Art Crime Team, which arrested Doyle in November 2025. Court papers say Doyle used a different first name while dealing with Matthiesen and continued to invent excuses after the painting had been sold, even falsely claiming the buyer had failed to pay him despite already receiving the money.
It is far from Doyle’s first conviction for art fraud.
In 2007, he was convicted of fraud involving a stolen Edgar Degas sculpture that he sold to a gallery. Less than a year after his release from prison, prosecutors say he orchestrated another scheme, convincing a Japanese investor to wire $880,000 toward the purchase of a Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot painting.
Doyle bought the work for $775,000, spent part of the remaining money on a Ferrari, then claimed the painting had vanished after a middleman lost track of it following a drunken night out. Authorities eventually recovered the painting from a bush outside an Upper East Side apartment building.
When Doyle was sentenced in that case in 2011, US District Judge Colleen McMahon summed up his record in unusually direct terms.
“You are a career criminal by any definition of the term,” she said.
