Section: NEWS
And Philip Kennicott
Of The Post-Dispatch Staff
Keith Bearden was just about the last person Ron Vince thought ever would defraud him. They had been friends for a decade; when Vince got married, he chose Bearden as his best man.
Friday morning (St. Louis time), Japanese police arrested Bearden in Tokyo. The Post-Dispatch reported in March that Bearden, 42, had operated a world-class dealership in fine musical instruments in St. Louis until he left the country in September.
In an indictment unsealed Friday in St. Louis, a federal grand jury charged Bearden with 14 counts of mail and wire fraud. He's awaiting extradition to the United States and trial in St. Louis.
Bearden is accused of swindling 21 people of more than $2.1 million in money and rare instruments.
Many of those he's accused of defrauding counted themselves among his closest friends.
"He had a good-old-boy kind of way of dealing with people," said Vince, a substitute violinist with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and a violin teacher at Washington and Webster universities.
Vince owned a 1833 Pressenda violin valued in the indictment at $225,000. He bought it in 1984 from Bearden's father, also a violin dealer. Vince never thought he'd need insurance for the violin, his principal instrument.
Bearden told Vince he could sell the violin for him. Then Bearden left the country, as it turned out, one step ahead of FBI agents.
Vince left message after message on the answering machine at Bearden's apartment in Tokyo. Bearden never returned his friend's calls.
"I always knew he was a wheeler-dealer type," said Vince, "but I had never expected anything like this to happen."
Bearden bought and sold instruments for some of the finest musicians in St. Louis, across the country and in Canada. Before he moved his business to Shrewsbury, he had a shop almost next door to the headquarters of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra on Grand Boulevard.
Four of those he's charged with swindling are musicians associated with the Symphony, including Cara Mia Antonello, the Symphony's principal second violinist.
In addition, several other Symphony musicians have filed civil fraud suits against Bearden. They include Marilyn Park, a substitute violinist.
Their cases didn't fit the requirements for criminal charges, a federal investigator said.
The 13-page grand jury indictment doesn't list the names of victims; they are identified only by their initials and the instruments they lost.
Many of them are embarrassed at being taken in by a friend, an investigator said. Some are afraid that publicity might lead to theft of the instruments they depend upon for their livelihoods.
Others are convinced that Bearden eventually will pay them or return their instruments. Nina Bodnar, a violinist and the Symphony's former concertmaster, was among those who lost money to Bearden last year, according to her husband, John Sant'Ambrogio, the Symphony's principal cellist.
Although she lost a fine bow to Bearden, she never wanted to sue, her husband has said. After the federal investigation began last October, Bodnar never returned calls from investigators, an investigator said.
Bearden knew the FBI was investigating him, officials said, and had been preparing to fly on Monday to Seoul, South Korea.
Bearden's Background
Keith Bearden came from a family of respected violin makers. His grandfather, father and uncle operated violin shops in and around St. Louis.
Bearden started working for his uncle as a string bow maker, eventually becoming one of the top 10 makers in the world. He is able to fashion a bow from raw wood and horse hair that is virtually indistinguishable from those of the finest 18th-century French masters.
A bow can take a week to make and can sell for $3,500.
The real money is in buying and selling fine instruments, and that's what Bearden decided to do. During the 1980s, he honed his skills in Los Angeles, under one of the country's most respected craftsmen.
He returned to St. Louis in the late 1980s with a national reputation. He opened a shop behind Powell Hall and became friends with many Symphony musicians.
Later, he moved his business into a white, clapboard house at 7722 Big Bend Boulevard in Shrewsbury. He had an easygoing personality and people trusted him, friends recalled.
According to the indictment, part of Bearden's scheme was to approach friends with whom he had been doing business for years and say that for a fee he could find a buyer for their instrument. In other cases, he asked friends to invest in a fine or rare instrument.
45 Instruments Taken
The indictment details 45 cases in which Bearden is accused of taking and not returning instruments.
They range in value from $900 to $225,000.
As complaints began to mount last fall, Bearden told friends he was going to Japan to make a deal that would put him back on his feet.
He never returned. When customers began to complain to the office of U.S. Attorney Edward L. Dowd Jr., the FBI assigned agent Jeffrey Jenson, who had investigated the Lieberman brothers when they fled to Chile.
Bearden continued to make deals from Japan. Assistant U.S. Attorney Donald Wilkerson said he received complaints from a musician at the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra. The musician said he sent Bearden a $175,000 Gaetano Guadagnini violin to sell, but never got the money or the instrument back.
No charges were brought in that case, Wilkerson said, because of the lack of jurisdiction in a crime that occurred in Japan.
A federal grand jury here indicted Bearden on April 10. The indictment was suppressed so that Bearden would not be alerted while the investigation continued, Wilkerson said.
"This guy is accused of hurting a lot of people," Wilkerson said. The investigation is continuing and other victims are asked to call the FBI office in St. Louis, he said.
Until Jan. 19, when Bearden was expelled, he had been national secretary of the prestigious American Federation of Violin and Bow Makers association, open only to the most qualified instrument makers.
Michael Becker, president emeritus of the group, said that a pattern of fraud this extensive was unheard-of in the musical world.
"There have been issues that involved a single instrument," he said, "but nothing like this."
In the end, Vince was luckier than others with whom Bearden did business. On March 14, Vince's missing violin was returned by a Tokyo violin dealer with whom Bearden then was working. Vince said he didn't know why his instrument was returned.
"I thought I'd never see it again," he said, "and I could never afford to replace it out of my own pocket."
Despite the mysterious return, the grand jury charged Bearden with defrauding Vince.
Vince says the affair left him somewhat shaken. "I'm much more skeptical, much more hesitant to enter business deals these days."