A group of 17 art enthusiasts from Los Angeles donated six paintings to Pepperdine upon the opening of its Malibu campus.¹ The works, which included a piece attributed to Jacques-Louis David, were valued at more than $250,000 by appraisers.

The Graphic quoted Pepperdine president William Banowsky saying, "They heard about our new campus here and decided we needed some works of the Old Masters."²

By the time Pepperdine came to collect the paintings, however, two of them were missing and the donors' attorney Brent Carruth claimed one of them had been stolen from his office, where they were being kept. It later emerged that five of the six paintings were reproductions being passed off as originals, "valuable simply as decorative art to be used in a hotel, home or a religious institution."³ The director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Kenneth Donahue, personally inspected the paintings and proved them to be fakes. It became clear that the donation was tax fraud, and at least one of the donors lost a case in US Tax Court relating to the donation.³

In two unrelated developments, Brent Carruth, the attorney involved in arranging the donation, was disbarred by the California Supreme Court in 1996,⁴ and was sentenced to jail in 2011 for grand theft.⁵