Trail of deceit paints bleak picture for dealer's clients Practised in the black arts: Ronald Coles at court on Thursday and the much-sold Norman Lindsay painting Holding Court. For nearly a decade flamboyant Sydney art dealer Ronald Morris Coles carried out the criminal equivalent of the circus clown plate-spinning act. At any one time the silver-haired, Bentley-driving entrepreneur was running multiple, interconnecting scams in which he sold and resold paintings belonging to hapless investors who never saw a cent of the proceeds. The fraud was brazen and haphazard and inevitably it ended with the many spinning deals crashing to the ground. On Thursday the jig was finally up for Coles, 65, who admitted to 15 counts of fraud and larceny in the Parramatta District Court, along with an additional 18 acts of theft and deception to be taken into account on sentencing. His formal guilty pleas paved the way for the details of his crimes to be released for the first time. An agreed statement of facts signed by Coles sets out an almost comical modus operandi in which Coles would sell investors a painting with promises of high returns, and then re-sell it without telling them or sharing the proceeds. He would often re-sell it again without either owner's knowledge, pocketing the cash and leaving them with nothing. In many cases the paintings themselves - which included works by artists such as Arthur Boyd, Norman Lindsay and Brett Whiteley - never left the suburbs around Kenthurst in north-west Sydney where Coles' largest gallery was based. When police finally pounced on January 21, 2009, they found 413 paintings valued at more than $6 million stashed in cars and houses owned by Coles and his two stepchildren. The brazen nature of Coles' scam can be seen in his sale and re-sale of Norman Lindsay's Holding Court. In April 2001 he sold the voluptuous watercolour to investor Matthew Doherty for $45,000, agreeing to hold it in his gallery for safe keeping. But five years later he quietly swapped it for two paintings owned by another investor, Di Allen. In 2007 he on-sold the painting for $55,000 to Kylie Coxon. Another year on he sold the painting to Charleston's Fine Art Auctions, which wanted to sell it at auction, only for Coles to decide he wanted to buy it back. It was months before Coles coughed up a cheque to the auction house. It bounced. Central to Coles' scams was the fact that, under Australian law, art purchased with superannuation funds must be kept separate from the owner's personal assets. This is why most of Coles' clients left the art with him to store or sell for a profit. They never saw it again. At the same time he relentlessly promoted the "financial gains" to be made from art investment to small investors. Radio commentators Ray Hadley and Alan Jones regularly spruiked Coles' business on their 2GB shows, although there is no suggestion they knew what he was up to. Hadley, rugby league legend Brad Fittler and former Parramatta Eels chief executive Denis Fitzgerald were among Sydneysiders who bought and sold art from Coles. While many of the art works were auctioned to help repay investors, much of the money has disappeared. More about these millions may be learnt when Coles returns to court for sentencing on October 16. But some have suggested a significant proportion may have been funnelled into the fraudster's other passion, horse racing.