"Throughout my years selling art for Park West I had several clients who spent over six figures with me in one cruise and it's an embarrassing situation when the authenticity of the art I have sold is being questioned. It's even more embarrassing when the clients are finding the true value of works purchased is 40-80% less than they paid for it. You have to remember that Park West advertise that the art they sell on board cruise ships is 20-60% cheaper than at land based galleries!

"Suddenly your clients are contacting you because they trusted in you as the Art Auctioneer and now there is a real possibility the art could be fake (Dali's) let alone overpriced.

"Obviously I had total trust in Park West and strongly believed that if a multi billion dollar cruise line is allowing Park West to trade aboard their ships, there should be nothing to worry about. I continued to inform all clients that no art has been returned to Park West through lack of authenticity in the 40 year history of the company, and often you can pay a little more for an artwork with perfect provenance than for a work with uncertain provenance. It's an embarrassing situation. I feel really bad as I was the one who sold the art and I was the one that led the client to believe in the value and authenticity of the art. Park West don't care about their reputation because they bully their auctioneers and clients but I care about my reputation, and working for them for so many years certainly had an impact when I started to look for another job within the trade. No one wants to deal with you once they know you have been associated with Park West.

"I truly hope that everyone that purchased art at sea through Park West will have the opportunity to get a refund if it can be proved the art was wrongly appraised and overpriced.

"I also believe the concept of selling art at sea is amazing and should continue but with a reputable company that offers clients good quality of art at discounted prices. Park West should no longer be permitted to sell art on cruise ships."

"I am aware that the Rip-off Report took money from Park West to take all their stories down from their site. Although I can't prove this I have been told this is the case by several people at Park West. It may or may not be true but knowing the company as well as I do and following a conversation I once had with Bill Smith I strongly believe this is the case."

"Park West recently 'let go' one their fleet managers because apparently they're cutting costs. He and his wife had previously been auctioneers before starting work in the Miami Lakes location in 2005/6.

"Again, it just shows you the attitude Scaglione has towards human beings in general. Here is a young, nice, hard working couple - he's from Australia, she's Romanian - working as auctioneers making good money. They decide they want more stability in life so apply to work in the Miami Lakes office. Park West offer them 'the American Dream', then 3-4 years later turn around and say, 'OK, we're cost cutting - you're no longer needed.' I'm sure they have mortgages to pay etc. and they're just hung out to dry by Scaglione... Park West doesn't care about anybody except for themselves.

"If this is how they treat long serving corporate staff, what is their attitude towards the cruise ship auctioneers?

"I am also aware that Park West employed a Brazilian in the Miami Lakes office without the required US work permit. To get around this they continued to pay him as an auctioneer, as if he was working outside the USA on ships. They continued to do this until the work permit arrived (at least 3 months but probably more like 6) when in fact he was working in the Miami Lakes office as a fleet manager. Not only is this an immigration issue, surely it's a tax issue too?"

"When I started with Park West our goals were about $15-20,000 per week and Park West were paying the cruise lines around 15-20% commission. Then the cruise lines started to up their commissions and Park West introduced different ways to sell the art."

"...the whole auction is one big set-up. You don't have to sell much in the auction because you bank on the mystery program. For people who could do it well it was a great way to sell. 90% of your sales are done outside the auction and not during the auction so even though the video taping started in 2005/6, people were still coming out with the same kind of lies once the camera stopped rolling. They'd take the mystery pieces and put them down in the gallery and this is where you would have your check-out and one-on-one with the client and this is where you can sit down and say, "You've got $20K credit - this is on offer...." This is when people would start to say it's a great investment and all this other stuff. The guy I trained with, that was his big thing. He would turn around and push everything as an investment. I would discuss his ethics with my friends on other ships and we would laugh about it at the time but when you look back, here are all these poor people who invested tens and tens of thousands of dollars thinking they were getting a huge investment, when the truth is if they ever tried to flip the artwork, the true value of the piece was revealed and the clients realize they have paid too much. Also, once a gallery is aware that any art is from Park West...nobody ever wants anything to do with that artwork; no gallery will buy off a collector if the art is from Park West. On the rare occasion that a gallery is interested they will only pay a fraction of what the client paid let alone the Park West appraised price.

"Put yourself in this situation...You're on a ship and you're told it's 40-60% less...and you've got to remember that back in 2004-2006 the Internet wasn't that good on cruise ships and many ships didn't have Internet, and the way the auctions are set up people can't go and research, so what would often happen is they'd buy something and go and research it when they got home, then suddenly find out it wasn't 40-60% better than on land; in fact they probably paid 40-60% more.

"Investments became the forbidden fruit: suddenly you weren't allowed to mention investment but auctioneers still did. That was the big thing for everybody and when I was on my training, one of the first things that Jack Sweetman said to us was, "Why is someone going to buy art on a cruise ship?" and the first answer was, "As an investment." He said, "Absolutely, you've got to push it as an investment. This is your big sales tool." Nobody would spend $60,000 on a Picasso and not think it's an investment - of course it's an investment.

"Then Park West got in all this trouble, when Carnival was considering pulling the plug because everyone was pushing it as an investment, then suddenly you weren't allowed to say it was an investment, but off camera everyone was still turning around and saying the art was an investment. Park West was just going through the motions - what the cruise lines, mainly Carnival at the time, were asking for. There is no way an auctioneer could sell $100,000 per cruise, week in week out, without pushing the art as an investment.

"The goals were relatively low when I started. Once Carnival took over Princess they gave Princess Art a couple of the Carnival ships - took them from Park West. Carnival then put the commissions up on the newer Carnival ships for Park West, basically they bullied Park West into paying them more money."

"Literally overnight the Peter Maxes, Picassos, etc., doubled in price and appraised value. The Dalis went from being anywhere between $2,750 to $3,500 hammer price, straight up to $6,500 to $9,500 for the Divine Comedies. They just doubled in price overnight. Same with the Peter Maxes. We got new Point of Sale (POS) data on the computer. The Peter Maxes had gone up 50-60%.

"It was obvious because we did the accounting for the cruise line at the end of every week, so we knew what commissions we were paying to the cruise lines, and suddenly the commissions to the cruise lines went up quite a bit as well. So obviously what Park West did, because the cruise lines were demanding more money and because people were selling more, Park West upped the price of all their artwork to recover those costs and they upped the goals by huge amounts of money and people's goals went from being $20-25K per week to being $65-70K and many of the ships were having $100K per week goals which was not unheard of for an auctioneer. If you were out there and running the program, you've got the pressure of hitting $100K every week before you're going to make your commission of 15%, so this is when the auctioneers were coming out with all this false information that they were feeding to the clients, saying it's a good investment and so on, and that's basically what was happening.

"Oh, and I forgot to mention. Because the cruise lines knew Park West over-priced the art works they made all auctioneers stop using the words 'appraised price', it was now to be called the 'Park West Price'. What a joke..."

"Most of the auctioneers don't know much about art, nor do they have any interest in it.

"Park West would rather employ someone who sells insurance or automobiles than someone who knows about art because they've got all the sales techniques down to a T and they'll teach them all they need to know about art (Park West art that is). Also the more you know about art the more you start to suspect what Park West is selling. That's a big danger for them.

"I went back to advanced training many times because as they were improving their training facility and training program in Detroit they were getting you to go back at the end of every contract to go through more training which was sometimes worthwhile and other times just a waste of time, because you'd sit there for a week and they'd try to feed you all this BS about new sales techniques and it was never to do with learning about the art, it was always new sales techniques. Sell Sell Sell..."

"When I started out, Albert wasn't religious. It was a big joke among auctioneers that he had ripped so many people off throughout his career, he's now scared he's going to Hell! We would joke about Albert finding the Lord to try to BS his way out of going to Hell.... At one of the conferences he had the pastor from the church there and they brought lots of kids down from some rescue centre and then appeared all these animals for the children! It was very strange to say the least considering it was an auctioneer conference.

"Another time we were in a conference and some guy walked in...Albert is on stage, and he started F-ing and blinding [swearing at] him in front of the other auctioneers and told him to leave the room and 'Don't come back until you get a nice suit.' He said, 'I F-ing pay you six figures a year and you've got the audacity to walk into this conference with such a cheap, nasty suit on. Get out of this room. Don't come back unless you have a nice suit on. If you're going to sell my art you better wear a nice suit....' etc., etc. Needless to say, this occurred before Albert found the Lord."

"I'm an auctioneer and I make a new client, they spend $50K with me, they like me, they totally trust me, we chat afterwards, we stay in contact, and so on. Many times when I was an auctioneer a client would email me and ask, "What ship are you going to be on in August? We're going to come and cruise with you."

"I would say, 'Hopefully I'll be on this ship, can't guarantee it, come along.' And they would come on the cruise and buy art from me again. Park West now invite anyone who spends a significant amount of money on a cruise ship onto a VIP cruise. Park West will pay for them to go on a special VIP cruise with 30 or 40 people that have all spent a large amount of money with them at a regular cruise ship auctions. They pay for the airfare, hotel, cruise, tours - you name it, it's covered by Park West. Park West will then ship a special VIP art collection on board the chosen ship hosting the VIP's. Park West then set a target to sell say $1 million of art on board one of these cruises to the VIPs, they will also host special events for them.

"All they're doing is stealing clients away from the auctioneers because now when the VIP clients go on to a normal ship for a vacation they don't buy anything because they're waiting to be invited to a VIP cruise. They know that they've got a better collection of art to choose from on a VIP cruise.

"One of the big reasons PW host the VIP cruises is they are trying to flex their muscles to the cruise lines to say, 'You need us because we can take all these big spending clients, we've got our database, we can do these auctions in Michigan or in hotels.' Do they really want to be giving the cruise lines 40-50-60% of a $1 million cruise? They do it because they don't want to lose the cruise line.

"I believe people like Royal Caribbean keep them on there because they're making so much money from them."

"At the end of your POS (Point Of Sales) data...when you check someone out, let's say you buy a Thomas Kinkade print from me - they're just offset lithographs, nothing more than posters - and if you buy that it comes unframed for $250 for example. Say you want it framed, framing and shipping on that piece might be an additional $350. Well, technically if that's $350 extra, $300 is for the framing, and $50 is for the shipping. The way the POS data (the Park West supplied computer program) works it out is you'll be paying $50 for the frame, and $300 for the shipping on that piece. The reason for that is that Park West pays the cruise lines a percentage of the framing cost. Anything they do framing on, let's say you do $10K worth of framing at the end of the cruise, Park West pays the cruise lines a percentage of that. But Park West doesn't pay the cruise lines any commission on shipping. So let's say your framing and shipping combined at the end of the cruise was $15,000 it would only show that you'd done about $3-4,000 of framing, and because they only pay commission on that, they're walking away with $10-11-12,000 of so-called 'shipping' money free of charge because they're not going to pay any commission on that.

"That's built into the system. When you print an invoice out for somebody and you say, 'Here's your invoice,' and they say 'Well, why am I paying so much on shipping?' and you just say, 'This is how the computer splits it up'. We were actually told once to say to the client, 'There's a bug in the system and it's got the framing and the shipping the wrong way around.' That was at one of the training sessions, probably by Jack Sweetman. This was in my early days. At some point I just started telling them the truth and explaining that Park West don't pay commission on shipping so they're just manipulating this so they don't have to pay so much commission to the cruise lines and people used to laugh. I was just fed up with making up lies for them."

"All the auctioneers - on camera they don't say it, but off-camera it's 'museum quality framing'. Park West framing is the worst framing in the world. You can't get a piece of art framed worse than Park West frames it. It's just plexi in the front but the auctioneers will sell it as UV glass in the front and acid free tape and double matting and all this. It's the worst framing. I've been in the framing facility in Miami and they just do it in house in the Miami Lakes facility but it's the worst framing ever. They double tape things up. Sometimes we'd have to take things out of the frame to send it back to them and it would take half an hour to get it out of the frame and by the time it was done you'd ripped half the back of the artwork off because of the way they'd taped it all in there and the way they'd stapled the canvas in there - they're ruthless. The worst framing ever."

"The artists produce so much work that they run out of ideas as well. At the conference in October 2006, Tomasz Rut, who Park West pitch to be one of the five most important artists today - total nonsense as well - asked the auctioneers in his focus group, 'Have you got any ideas of what people are asking for? What do people like?'

"I left soon after that. That was one of my final straws. There was this artist that I've been talking up for the last five years and there he sat asking a load of guys, 'What can I paint next? What's going to sell on the ships?' It wasn't, 'This is what inspires me; this is why I paint.' He basically said, 'What sells well on the ship? What sells better than others?' Some suggested he include more males because gay men are often put off because of the females in the images. I couldn't believe my ears."

"This was really embarrassing situation to be in when you've been selling these pieces. Someone needs to look back at the early Tomasz Ruts, the first giclées they did, back in 2003, they're all green now, and they have lost the color. Every single one of the prints I have seen has turned green.

"Same with Benfields on canvas. I had a client email me asking is there any reason for my lovely Benfield turning green after a year on the wall? Again what could I say? Park West was now printing giclées when you purchased this work and they didn't quite get it right?

"How many people must have bought these Benfield's on canvas and these Ruts on canvas and they're left with green artwork on their walls because they just lost their colors over a period of several months?

"It's even worse when a client emails you and says, 'How come paintings can hang in Italy for 500 years with only minor restoration and I've had this on my wall for two years and it's gone green and I can't see any other colors there?' But they defended their giclées by saying artists like Tomasz Rut cannot use any other media because of the way he paints - there's no other medium for him to offer reproductions and for him to offer limited edition works."

"I stopped selling Dalís. If someone really, really came up to buy a Dali then I would sell it. But earlier I used to sell a lot of Dalis because he was one of my favorite artists. I just stopped. They seemed to have an endless supply of all their Dalis. Every single one, there's just an endless supply of them. I always questioned the signatures, something didn't look right on the signatures, and there was not enough information about these works. My biggest problem with them was they were overpriced. We were selling Dalis for $7-8000 on the ship and I knew that you could go and buy the same ones on land for $750, $600, even $250 in some galleries.

"I had to stop selling them. The more I researched his work, auction records and gallery prices the more I realized we had been overcharging by up to 500%. Amazing, I know, but that is the truth of the situation."

"There is a real arrogance with Park West from Albert down. Chris Lindsay is probably the most arrogant person you'll ever meet in your life after Albert Scaglione. This person is responsible for training the young generation of auctioneers out there. I've seen him put men in tears just by how nasty he was to people. How any company in this day and age can get away with treating human beings the way that he was treating people through the training (not advanced auctioneers but the newbies) he would just be rude and arrogant. It was disgusting to see. He really believed that he was the Simon Cowell, the Mr. Nasty of the whole Park West operation and it's just disgusting to see. He became so out of control and downright rude Park West started to video his training sessions in an attempt to calm him down a little. The guy is a self-obsessed dreamer that isn't liked by any of the auctioneers - they all suck up to him but he isn't liked and he has an ego the size of Texas. Why? Will Albert stick by him now things are going bad? Now he has run out of ideas? It will be interesting to see..."

"My friends and I recently took a Carnival cruise and noticed the art being displayed at the auction was mainly the same art I was selling 3 years ago, I got a real sense of déjà vu. How come three years later not much had changed? The same editions available and even editions that were supposedly sold out 3 years ago were still available? Doesn't make sense.

"The garbage coming out of the auctioneer's mouth was the same old garbage that people have been saying all along. They all compare Albert Scaglione to Vollard. Chris Lindsay, Vanessa, Morris, they all compare him to Vollard. They're all obviously so far up his backside and they love to stroke his ego. I actually think in his own mind he sees himself as the modern day Vollard. That is a big insult to Vollard. Vollard is the man who gave Picasso to the world. Albert gave us Marcus Glenn!

"And no one sees that 90% of what they're throwing out there is not worth the paper it's printed on. The only reason they're getting away with it is because they're on a cruise ship in the middle of the sea. Park West is a brand and within their brand they have their branded artists.

"I have no loyalty to Park West. They've screwed many of my friends over. They screwed me over every month. I can show you pay checks where my start commission was $30,000 for the month and I took home $8,000 because they were charging you 1% credit card fee, 1% this fee, the fines, fee for the associate, a fee for this, a fee for that. They used to charge $250 per laptop which you had to hire from them. They used to screw everyone week in week out."

"I want to really see justice for all these people. I know for a fact that I've had people buy art from me who were telling me they were taking the money from their kids' college funds, all on the hope that one day they were going to flip it for much more money than it's worth.

"What was happening...and this comes from Chris Lindsay...this was his defense when we had the get-togethers and the question would come up, why have the Dalis doubled? And again we got pushed the whole supply and demand, supply and demand, all this crap, and he said the great thing is that when people would come on board cruise ships two or three years ago we were telling them that the Maxes were going to appreciate 15-20% every year and they hadn't...they were coming on two years later and they were the same price, so obviously we had to appreciate those and make those artworks more expensive, because people were coming on board and when they can see they're more expensive it instills more trust. They've created this false sense of security for people because someone purchased a Peter Max mixed media, say, in 2002 and they paid $2,500-3000 for it, they then took a cruise in 2006 and see that same piece is on there for $6-7000 they think 'Wow, I've made $4000 on my piece' and the auctioneer says, 'Well, if you make that next step and you invest $10,000, imagine how much money you're going to make in 4 or 5 years off that $10,000.' That's how they do It. That's how they train you to sell. Deception at it purest."

"Also with this Park West card there should have been a cooling off period. There's no way you can turn around when someone has been drinking champagne all day, take six basic pieces of information from them, their social security number, address, telephone number and so on and come back 20 minutes later with $20,000 worth of credit to spend. It's just ridiculous. There was no regulation on this, it was all done on line, and they got the approval back within 10 seconds of putting their information in. Surely there must be some kind of regulation that when someone's been approved for that amount of credit, they have some kind of cooling off period to think about their purchase.

"When I was on there the first thing I would do was push the Collector's Card because unless you knew you had 10-15 people approved for that, you wouldn't come close to your sales target. You needed people to be approved for that for you to come close, and it would be a big part of every auction to get people to apply for that and you could offer them anything you liked to get them to apply. When we went on our cruise recently we went to the auction and noticed they didn't mention it once there. I said to the auctioneer there, "Why didn't you mention the credit card?" and he said, "No one gets approved any more so we just don't bother."

"At the end of every cruise, Park West raffles a $500 bid credit... To encourage people to spend money throughout the cruise, for every $100 you spend you get one red raffle ticket and at the end of the cruise before the final auction all the raffle tickets get drawn out and someone wins a $500 bid credit. That's something they're actively promoting to all the cruise line passengers, and they're saying, 'This is how it works - this is what we do,' and every single auctioneer on every single ship including myself - I'll be the first to admit that - everyone fixes the raffle and they give it to whoever they want to give it to, which again I feel bad for doing it but it was the way we were taught to do things. It would always go to the person who was umming and ahhhing about the Picasso or the Max or something else, the credit would always go to that person no matter how much they'd spent previously. Park West encouraged this, they always knew this was going on and it all comes down to their business practices.

"This is where the integrity is with the company. Every single week on 65 cruise ships you've got auctioneers out there that people truly believe, cheating on the raffles."

"I made very good money when I worked for Park West. I was never their number one sales person, I never wanted to be, I just chomped along on nice sized cruise ships and was consistent with my sales and always made my targets and my goals, so I always made good money. I'm not bitter towards them because I made good money and I walked away with savings and left on my own terms. I was screwed over every month but the money I was making, I was able to brush it off at the time. I used to call it Park West tax!

"They are now desperate for good sales people as many have left them and would never return. In fact, a large majority of ex Park West auctioneers are now working on cruise ships as Port Shopping Guides selling diamonds and watches! That tells me the people PW employed rarely had a passion for art but were just aggressive sales people looking to make a quick buck. Once they realize it's hard to make a consistent amount of money they jump ship and look for the next high earning sales position within the cruise industry.

"They treated people so badly over the years that filling ships with honest sales people with a good knowledge of the art trade will become harder and harder for them. Park West now has such a terrible name within the cruise industry.

"When I decided to leave Park West I always wanted 60 Minutes or someone to investigate them, because I was so disgusted with the rubbish they were selling and how they were exaggerating the prices. I'm signed up to all the auction reports so I would see a signed Suite Vollard Picasso go through Sotheby's at $6-7000 and I'd see one exactly the same on my ship for $60,000.

"The sooner Park West is removed from all cruise ships the better. That's in my opinion of course, as we were always taught to say!"