In a memoir, bidding for vindication

A. Alfred Taubman, ignoring all of his instincts, stayed silent during the price-fixing trial that would end with a prison sentence for the former owner of Sotheby’s auction house.

It was a decision that the luxury mall developer and philanthropist sees as a critical mistake as he reflects on a career in retailing that began with a job as a discount store salesman and eventually put him at the center of an art world scandal.

“I should have gotten on the stand,” the 83-year-old billionaire said in a recent interview in his office at the suburban Detroit company he founded in 1950.

In 2001, a federal jury in New York convicted Taubman of plotting with his counterpart at the auction giant Christie’s to fix the commissions paid by sellers of fine art, jewelry, rugs and furniture. He served nine and a half months in prison before being released in May 2003.

In a memoir set to be released on Tuesday by HarperCollins titled “Threshold Resistance: The Extraordinary Career of a Luxury Retailing Pioneer,” Taubman takes aim at the former executives at both auction houses. He blames them, as well as federal prosecutors and the judge who oversaw his case, for the scandal that cast a shadow over his accomplishments.

“I had lost a chunk of my life, my good name and around 27 pounds,” he writes of his time at the low-security Federal Medical Center in Rochester, Minn. “I had served my time for others; people going about their lives ... who had initiated, executed and lied about a serious crime for which they would receive little or no punishment.”

Taubman says in the book that he even took a polygraph to prove his innocence and passed.

The memoir, he says, was written for his nine grandchildren, who range in age from 3 to 27. He wanted the explanation of his career and the Sotheby’s scandal in his own voice, told from his own perspective.

As a developer, Taubman helped make the enclosed mall a staple of American life. His sons now run the Bloomfield Hills, Mich.-based Taubman Centers Inc., but Taubman remains active with his philanthropic efforts.

Taubman has long been involved in the Detroit Institute of Arts -- both as a donor and a leader of its building committee, key in the museum’s six-year renovation and expansion. His knowledge of how shoppers negotiate malls was tapped to help reconfigure the flow of the museum.