A Thief Among Thieves

A. Alfred Taubman, an art collector and shopping-mall tycoon who sold Renoirs and root beer with equal panache and turned a sleepy Sotheby’s auction house into a global power of art sales, but went to prison in a commission-fixing scandal involving its archrival Christie’s, died on Friday at his home in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. He was 91.

In 2001 Mr. Taubman, the chairman of Sotheby’s, was convicted in Federal District Court in New York of colluding with Sir Anthony Tennant, his counterpart at Christie’s, to raise sellers’ fees and cut buyers’ incentives.

The scandal exposed the seamy underside of a $4 billion-a-year business that traded on upper-class images and English roots dating to the founding of Sotheby’s in 1744 and Christie’s in 1766. And it spelled disgrace for Mr. Taubman, who owned an archipelago of upscale malls and department stores and had created university research centers, libraries and health care facilities with his philanthropies.

"He also was the largest donor to the University of Michigan in the institution's history, giving more than $142 million. The U-M Taubman Medical Research Institute has been a leader in stem cell research that has shown promise in the fight against debilitating diseases, including ALS or Lou Gehrig's Disease.
Al Taubman: A scrappy kid from Pontiac who never let up
U-M's college of architecture and urban planning and various buildings at its medical school bear his name, as does Lawrence Tech's student center building, the Taubman Center for Design Education at the College for Creative Studies, and buildings at Harvard and Brown universities. And Taubman gave $3 million to help establish the Damon J. Keith Center for Civil Rights on the Wayne State University campus.

On Wednesday, Taubman was at U-M at the ground-breaking for a new wing at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. He said he hoped to be there in two years to see the finished wing, which also will bear his name, the university said in a Saturday e-mail."

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