A sculptor, and his work, torn apart

In the movies, as well as real life, drug dealers ship opium and marijuana in plaster animals and kitsch statuettes. What’s to stop a serious piece of sculpture from being used for the same thing?

That’s what a young L.A. artist says he thinks must have gone through the minds of narcotics investigators when they -- or rather their dogs -- picked up a scent on a piece of his artwork being returned from a show.

Jedediah Caesar, whose work also will be part of the UCLA Hammer Museum show “Thing: New Sculpture From Los Angeles,” opening Feb. 6, is standing in the bright sun outside his studio in a warehouse-heavy area near Culver City. He’s looking at his strangely shaped sculpture “Animal Life.”

“This was supposed to be full of drugs, apparently,” he says.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department won’t say much about the matter, despite repeated calls from The Times. This is how Caesar tells the story:

Caesar, 31, a 2001 graduate of UCLA’s master of fine arts program, says he was driving to his studio Dec. 15 when a call came on his cellphone from the Whittier-based Sheriff’s Department narcotics bureau. According to Caesar, the detective asked to know what was inside “Animal Life,” which had been shipped back from the New Art Dealers Alliance fair, a satellite event of Miami’s Art Basel extravaganza, which ended Dec. 5.

“Of course,” Caesar says, “I totally think it’s a prank phone call -- and I’m pretty sure it’s my friend Nathan -- so I’m being a little bit of a smartass. Which the guy crushes pretty quickly.”

The piece had been sent to Miami by Black Dragon Society, the Chinatown gallery that represents Caesar. The detective who called didn’t seem familiar with the place, Caesar surmises. “So he started asking me all these questions, like who I am, and what is Black Dragon, and on and on.... And it ends up with: ‘There’s a hollow cube in the middle of your sculpture, and what’s in there?’ ”

Caesar says he began to panic. “If you open that cube, you annihilate the piece. So I said, ‘Nothing is at the center of the piece. This is insane, I swear I’m an artist, Black Dragon is just a gallery.’ ”

A few hours later, Caesar says, three men in street clothes, identifying themselves as representatives of the narcotics bureau, came to his studio, his crated sculpture on their flatbed truck.

They showed him the work, which was damaged. The 250-pound assemblage, which combines a wood box with foam and a chunk of salt, lacked a resin-coated Styrofoam orb; a smaller foam piece had been broken in half. Caesar says he thinks investigators broke open those parts, found nothing, then phoned him.

At the studio, Caesar says, one of the investigators, whom he identified as Sgt. Ronald Spear, gave him his card and told him, in Caesar’s words: “Let me give you an explanation of what’s going on. When certain things happen when something’s shipped, it sets off a little red flag for us. When eight things happen, that’s when we really think we’ve got something big. Everything on the list your crate set off, through a series of insane coincidences.’ ”

Caesar adds, “For three days, they thought I was the biggest drug dealer in L.A.” and that the Black Dragon people were “quote, ‘a group of Colombians.’ ”

The “insane coincidences” Caesar says, that made investigators think they’d hooked a big one included confusion over a shipping bill; police dogs barking when they sniffed the sculpture; the piece being shipped from a warehouse space (that sometimes serves as a gallery) in “a cracked-out” part of Miami; Black Dragon being locked (as many galleries are early in the week) when investigators came by; and workers at a furniture refinishing shop adjoining Caesar’s studio refusing to sign for the sculpture when detectives made an initial attempt to return it.

Caesar says detectives told him those events prompted them to put his studio and Black Dragon under surveillance. “According to them, they had vans and dogs and surveillance equipment in both locations, for days, waiting for us -- this team of drug dealers -- to slip up.”

The Times placed calls to Spear and to a sheriff’s spokesperson. The spokesperson declined to comment; the call to Spear was returned by sheriff’s Lt. Joseph Nunez.

Nunez, who was part of the investigation but did not visit the studio, would say only: “We were out there; we did have contact with the gentleman. He’s not a suspect in any way, shape or form. It’s just something that occurred, and we’re really not at liberty to discuss.”

Nunez said that Caesar’s sculpture was damaged by investigators and that Caesar “was provided at the scene with a claim form for damage.” (Before The Times could inspect it, Caesar said he had mailed in the form.)

“They were, ‘We’re really sorry, we really didn’t want to break your piece,’ ” Caesar said. But they didn’t apologize for putting him under surveillance. “They said, ‘This is just part of the job.’ ... They do this and that, and then it ends up being a false alarm.”

Parker Jones, the Black Dragon gallery director, received a call from detectives soon after the sculptor did. “I had to defend the credibility of the gallery” and of Caesar as an artist, he said. “If they’d gone on the Internet and just Googled ‘Black Dragon Society,’ they would have seen Jed’s name, his bio, with a huge list of other institutions.... I wonder how much research they did before they decided to initiate a full-on stakeout.”

Caesar said he’s not sure how his damaged artwork can be fixed, but he doesn’t consider it destroyed. On the other hand, galleries, he said, don’t like sculptures to change because they become different pieces. (Caesar would not allow The Times to photograph his damaged sculpture.) He said it’s hard to put a price on the work but estimated it at $4,500.

Galleries and museums often ship artworks, and problems are not unheard-of. In 1995, four sculptures by Colombian artist Doris Salcedo headed to the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh were destroyed by U.S. Customs Service officials searching, unsuccessfully, for narcotics.

Top-tier galleries use companies such as Gallery Services and L.A. Packing, Crating and Transport, and they take out substantial insurance. “We have a floater policy that covers any kind of transit,” says Peter Goulds, director of LA Louver in Venice. “The policy has a $4-million ceiling per single transit.”

But pieces by Caesar or Salcedo don’t travel the same way that, say, an $18-million Brancusi would. Museums use shippers as well as couriers who accompany works on every step of their journey and defend them if there’s a problem. A work receives a courier, says Robert Hollister, the Museum of Contemporary Art’s director of collections and registration, based on “a combination of fragility and value.”

Caesar says his visit from authorities left him a bit unnerved. “It makes you feel kind of cornered. They told me all these things that sounded insane and unbelievable -- but none of the guys seemed prone to, like, making jokes.” The only moment of mirth, he says, came from an investigator who said “that I’d get a bill for 50 grand to pay for the operation they just did.... I assume it was a joke. I have no proof that it wasn’t a joke.... I haven’t gotten a bill.”

Caesar says he still has questions: When did detectives realize they were after the wrong guy? What made the dogs flip out? How will the value of his busted sculpture be assessed -- and when. “What do they do? -- a background check on your career?”

According to Nunez: “It has to take its course; it has to be reviewed by various persons. And when it’s run its course, it’ll get to us, and we’ll take it from there.”

Caesar says he thinks the explanations don’t quite compute: “It seems like a strange way to go about it.” He adds, “Hopefully, I have a big red flag next to my name right now that says, ‘Do not bother this guy.’ ”