Mark Lugo (AP)
He stole art for art’s sake.
A compulsive fine art fan, fresh out of a California jail for similar thefts, has been charged with lifting hundreds of thousands of dollars of paintings from the Carlyle and Chambers hotels this past summer — just by taking them off the walls, stuffing them in a canvas bag, and walking out with them.
AN ASTONISHING ROGUE’S GALLERY
But restaurant worker Mark Lugo, 31, allegedly was in it for love, not money. He had as much as $700,000 in stolen art and fine wine prominently displayed in his Hoboken, NJ apartment when cops busted him, as first reported by The Post in July.
Lugo today pleaded not guilty to six of his most recent alleged thefts — including a nearly century-old, $350,000 drawing by the Cubist painter Fernand Leger that he swiped off the wall of an art gallery adjacent to the Carlyle’s lobby.
The 1917 work, “Composition with Mechanical Elements,” vanished on June 28.
Lugo is also charged with stealing a group of five works by the South Korea-born artist Mie Yim from the Chambers Hotel — works that went missing June 14 and which the hotel had purchased for $1,800 each.
As The Post reported this summer, authorities are investigating whether Lugo swiped a Picasso etching, “Sculptor and Two Heads,” worth $30,000, from the William Bennett Gallery in Soho on June 27.
The etching was among the total 19 allegedly stolen works found in Lugo’s Hoboken apartment, assistant district attorney Meghan Hast said in Manhattan Supreme Court today in asking successfully that Lugo be held without bail.
“Our best guesstimate is that he just kind of stuffed it in a shopping bag and off he went,” William Ledford, managing partner of the gallery, told The Post of the missing Picasso in July.
Lugo, who has worked as a server and a wine-jockey, or sommelier, at upscale Manhattan restaurants, had just completed a 138-day sentence for lifting a $275,000 Picasso pencil sketch off the wall of an art gallery in San Francisco. He was released Nov. 21.
“I think when the dust settles and the DA’s office calms down a little bit, we’ll find out Mr. Lugo had no commercial motive at all,” his court-appointed lawyer, James Montgomery, told reporters after court. Prosecutors may well be greatly exaggerating the paintings’ values, he said.
Lugo remains charged in New Jersey with stealing three bottles of Chateau Petrus Pomerol, valued at $6,000, from Gary’s Wine and Marketplace in Wayne, NJ back in April.