How art world crime is held to a much lower standard then the rest of us.

Gallery gal to spend 16 weekends in jail in Salander art scam

By LAURA ITALIANO

Gallery big Leigh Morse will serve weekends in jail for four months for conspiring with her notorious boss, Lawrence Salander, to scam art owners out of $120 million, a Manhattan judge ruled today.

Morse, who now runs her own gallery on East 80th Street, had served as Salander's director at his Salander-O'Reilly Gallery.

She had faced anywhere from zero to four years prison after her April conviction; Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Michael Obus said that in cutting her a break, he took into account Morse's supporting, rather than starring, role in Salander's scam.

"She had no intention of getting involved in criminal conduct such as this," the judge noted.

Still, Morse enabled Salander by repeatedly stonewalling his furious customers, the judge said.

"This is not a failure to be heroic -- this is about a betrayal of trust," the judge said.

Also factoring into the lenient sentence was the frail health of her husband, Sigmund, the judge said. Morse is her husband's primary financial supporter following his injury in a car accident, she said.

In addition to serving her weekends in jail, Morse must pay $1.65 million in restitution to her victims, with the bulk of it, $1 million, going to the estate of late artist Stuart Davis. Salander had stole more than 90 of the important artist's paintings.

It may be unlikely that victims of the scam will see any money anytime soon; Morse has claimed an income of just $67,000 a year from her gaSllery work.

Salander, too, has yet to pay back a cent. He is serving six years prison as the mastermind of the scheme, in which he soaked more than two dozen friends and investors by selling their consigned works without telling them and convincing them to invest in shares of paintings he'd no right to offer.

Morse had been acquitted of a more serious charge, grand larceny, after jurors decided they had insufficient proof that she'd intended to permanently deprive Robert De Niro of $77,000 in sale proceeds of two works by noted abstract painter Robert De Niro, Sr., the actor's late father.