3rd Party Surfaces to Claim Artworks Recovered From Thieves : Lawsuit: Foundation joins two siblings in pursuing the collection of the late Rosita Winston. Meanwhile, appraisers cast doubt on the paintings’ value.

It was a difficult enough legal puzzle when a second claimant surfaced to assert ownership of a collection of modern artworks worth, by some accounts, $9 million, that had been stolen from a Northridge storage unit and recovered. Thursday, a third contender appeared.

FBI agents and Los Angeles police officers last August returned the artworks to Eva Smith Weisager, 86, of Van Nuys, who said she had inherited the paintings from her socialite sister.

It seemed to be a happy ending until Weisager’s brother, Daniel Greenway of Baja California, sued Weisager for $1 million in Los Angeles Superior Court in March, accusing her of stealing the paintings from their deceased sister, Rosita Winston.

It was revealed at a Superior Court hearing on Thursday however that the director of a New York nonprofit charity founded by Rosita Winston’s late husband has weighed in with a cross complaint, contending that neither Weisager nor Greenway are entitled to the paintings because they rightfully belong to the charity, formally known as the Norman and Rosita Winston Foundation.

Adding to the confusion were statements made by an attorney at the hearing that appraisers for the Sotheby’s auction house in New York now believe that six of the works were not painted by the famous modern artists to whom they were originally attributed. Thomas Cano, an attorney representing Weisager, said the paintings may be worth only $100 apiece, not the millions originally reported.

Cano said in an interview after the hearing that Weisager had turned over eight of the paintings to Sotheby’s, but appraisers have refused to authenticate six of them. She turned over a ninth painting to a Los Angeles auction house, he said.

Judges in New York and Los Angeles have issued temporary restraining orders barring all three parties from selling the artworks, originally attributed to modern masters Pablo Picasso, Edgar Degas, Marc Chagall and Eugene Delacroix.

Kenneth G. Petrulis, an attorney for the Winston foundation, said that despite her claims, Weisager did not inherit the paintings nor receive them as a gift from her sister, who was debilitated by a stroke in the late 1970s.

Petrulis contends that the paintings are part of Norman Winston’s estate and should have been passed along to his foundation upon his wife’s death. Norman Winston amassed a fortune as a real estate developer.

“We’re the owners of the paintings,” he said.

Petrulis said he has asked the Los Angeles court to transfer the case to New York, where the Winstons’ documents are and where the paintings were allegedly stolen and where most of them are now located.

Weisager contends she received the paintings as a gift from her sister and brother-in-law before they died.

“I think the allegations that the lady stole the paintings are a horrible thing to say,” said Cano, Weisager’s attorney.

Cano said the foundation has no legal claim to the paintings since the Winstons did not own them when they died.

Yet it is Weisager’s own brother, Greenway, who accuses his sister in court papers of buying a Ford LTD station wagon with the specific intent of looting their sister Rosita’s plush New York condominium of the artwork.

Greg Halif, an attorney for Greenway, maintained his client is entitled to a share of the paintings’ value because he did not know the art existed when their sister Rosita died and he settled her estate.

A hearing has been set for July 6 in Los Angeles.

In a related criminal case, three San Fernando Valley men are scheduled to stand trial later this month on criminal charges stemming from the theft of the paintings from Weisager’s storage unit. Police said that the suspects’ attempts to sell the paintings came to the attention of a person in the art world, who tipped off the FBI, leading to their arrests.