NEW YORK (AP) — A New York art adviser who once counted actor Leonardo DiCaprio among her wealthy patrons was sentenced Wednesday to 30 months in federal prison after admitting to cheating clients out of $6.5 million in connection with the sale of 55 works of art.
Lisa Schiff sobbed as she turned to her former friends and clients seated behind her in Manhattan federal court and apologized to them by name.
“I stand here as a criminal who hurt clients, colleagues, and friends,” the 54-year-old Manhattan resident said, calling herself a “coward” for hiding her deceit and “living lavishly” off money stolen from people who had “loved and trusted” her.
“I am a guilty person and I am prepared to face my punishment,” Schiff said tearfully. “I am scared, but I am ready.”
Schiff is to report to prison July 1.
One of Schiff's victims, Michael Barasch, told the court that his family had embraced her as one of their own, inviting her to family gatherings and holiday parties.
“Your disgraceful conduct goes well beyond stolen money,“ he said. “You broke my wife’s heart. You were her best friend, or so she thought.”
Barasch estimated that Schiff’s victims stand to lose as much as $10 million when considering the costs of lawyers and other experts they’ve hired to try to recoup some of their losses through litigation.
“We’ll be lucky to get five cents on the dollar. No victim will ever be made whole,” he said. “Shame on you.”
Judge J. Paul Oetken, in handing down the sentence, called Schiff’s crimes “quite brazen,” noting her fraud persisted for roughly five years and involved more than a dozen clients.
At the same time, he noted that Schiff comes from a “loving family,” appeared to be smart and thoughtful and was raising a 12-year-old son as a single mother.
“She has a good side to her character,” Oetken said. “How someone so talented can engage in this kind of behavior is a mystery.”
Schiff also was sentenced to two years of supervised release, ordered to pay forfeiture of nearly $6.5 million and restitution of more than $9 million. She declined to comment outside the courtroom.
Schiff pleaded guilty to wire fraud in October, admitting that she defrauded clients of her art advisory business, Schiff Fine Art.
Prosecutors say she sold artwork belonging to clients without telling them or accepted their money to buy art that she didn’t end up purchasing.
They say Schiff used her clients as her “personal piggy bank,” funding a lavish lifestyle that included a $25,000-a-month apartment, a $2 million space for her business and grand trips to Europe, complete with shopping sprees at designer boutiques and stays at luxury hotels.
On one vacation, Schiff rented a Greek villa, yacht and helicopter, according to prosecutors.
Unable to hide her mounting debts, she eventually confessed to some of her clients in May 2023.
DiCaprio had been among Schiff’s former clients as she built a decades-long career in the art world. Prosecutors say among those she swindled were 12 clients, an artist, the estate of another artist and an art gallery.
Wire fraud carries a sentence of up to 20 years in prison, but, as part of Schiff’s plea deal, prosecutors recommended a sentence of around 3 1/2 to 4 1/4 years behind bars.
In court Wednesday, Assistant U.S. Attorney Cecilia Vogel implored Oetken to remember the victims in the case, many of whom wrote emotional letters to the court ahead of Schiff’s sentencing.
“The fraud was truly extensive,” she said. “The harm here is significant.”
Vogel argued Schiff only came clean about her crimes when it was clear they were going to become public.
“She had reached a point where she couldn’t keep the fraud going any longer,“ Vogel said.
Schiff’s lawyer, Randy Zelin, maintained his client has cooperated “on every imaginable level” in the criminal investigation and efforts to recover some of the stolen funds.
“My client can’t undo what happened,” he said. “She can accept responsibility. She can be devastated about it. But the best she can do is move forward.”
Follow Philip Marcelo at twitter.com/philmarcelo.
Lisa Schiff, right, an art adviser who once counted actor Leonardo DiCaprio among her wealthy clients, walks out of Manhattan federal court after pleading guilty to wire fraud, Wednesday, March 19, 2025, in New York. (AP Photo/Phil Marcelo)
VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Leo XIV made a historic apology on Monday for the Holy See's role in legitimizing slavery and for having failed to condemn it for centuries, calling the Vatican’s record a “wound in Christian memory.”
Past popes have apologized for Christians’ involvement in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. But no pope had ever publicly acknowledged, much less apologized for, the role that past popes played in giving European sovereigns explicit authority to subjugate and enslave “infidels.”
History’s first U.S.-born pope, whose family history includes both enslaved people and slave owners, delivered the apology in his first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” (Magnificent Humanity), which was released Monday.
The sweeping manifesto is about safeguarding humanity in an era of increasing reliance on artificial intelligence. Leo raised the slave trade in relation to what he called the new forms of slavery and colonialism that the digital revolution is fueling.
Black American Catholics, activists and scholars have long called for the Holy See to atone for its role in the colonial-era trade in human beings, beyond generic apologies for the involvement of individual Christians.
“It is impossible not to feel deep sorrow when contemplating the immense suffering and humiliation endured by so many in stark contrast to their immeasurable dignity as persons infinitely loved by the Lord,” Leo wrote. “For this, in the name of the church, I sincerely ask for pardon.”
Shannen Dee Williams, historian at the University of Dayton and author of the 2022 history of American Black Catholic nuns, “Subversive Habits,” welcomed the apology as a "monumental step toward the kind of essential truth-telling and reparation that many Catholics have prayed and worked to witness.”
“The Catholic Church has never been an innocent bystander in the history of white supremacy," said Williams. “Black Catholics have waited a long time to hear the Vatican speak honestly about the church’s leading roles in the trans-Atlantic slave trade and chattel slavery--and thus by extension the enduring systems of anti-Black racism in the world today.”
The Vatican has insisted that it always upheld the dignity of all human beings as children of God. But a series of 15th-century directives from the Vatican authorized Portuguese sovereigns to conquer Africa and the Americas and enslave non-Christians.
In 1452, for example, Pope Nicholas V issued the papal bull Dum Diversas, which gave the Portuguese king and his successors the right “to invade, conquer, fight and subjugate” and take all possessions — including land — of “Saracens, and pagans, and other infidels, and enemies of the name of Christ” anywhere.
The bull also gave the Portuguese permission “to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.”
That bull and another issued three years later, Romanus Pontifex, formed the basis of the Doctrine of Discovery, the theory that legitimized the colonial-era seizure of land in Africa and the Americas.
Nicholas V’s permissions to the Portuguese were confirmed or renewed by Pope Callixtus III in 1456, Pope Sixtus IV in 1481 and Pope Leo X in 1514, according to the Rev. Christopher J. Kellerman, a Jesuit priest and author of “All Oppression Shall Cease: A History of Slavery, Abolitionism, and the Catholic Church.”
Spanish kings received the rights for the Americas.
In 2023, the Vatican formally repudiated the Doctrine of Discovery, but it never formally rescinded, abrogated or rejected the bulls themselves. The Vatican insists that a later bull, Sublimis Deus in 1537, reaffirmed that Indigenous peoples shouldn’t be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property, and weren't to be enslaved.
In his encyclical, Leo recalled that his namesake, Pope Leo XIII, was the first pope to explicitly condemn slavery in 1888, long after many countries had abolished it. Before that, in antiquity and the Middle Ages, church institutions and even popes — Gregory the Great — had slaves, Kellerman said.
In acknowledging the 15th century papal bulls, Leo wrote in his encyclical: “Already in the early modern period, the Apostolic See of Rome, responding to the requests of sovereigns, intervened several times in order to regulate and legitimize forms of subjugation, and, in certain cases, including the enslavement of ‘infidels.’”
Leo said it wasn't possible to judge the morality of the decisions with today’s standards.
“Yet neither can we deny or diminish the delay with which both society and the church came to denounce the scourge of slavery,” he said.
The pope said that the church has long affirmed the dignity of every human being as the basis of its doctrine, “even if it took eighteen centuries for its full incompatibility with slavery to be explicitly recognized.”
“This constitutes a wound in Christian memory, one from which we cannot consider ourselves detached,” he said.
Leo said that the church must firmly condemn all forms of trafficking related to the digital technological revolution “if we want to avoid the need to ask for pardon again in the future for having failed to respect the treasure of human dignity that is required by our faith.”
Anthea Butler, senior fellow at the Koch History Center, Oxford University, said Leo needed to acknowledge and atone for the church's complicity in historic slavery if he wanted to credibly “speak to the current issues of technological enslavement.”
“For descendants of enslaved persons, this is once again a much needed apology from the pope,” said Butler, who is Black.
Kellerman, the scholar, welcomed Leo’s apology but said more needs to be done to further acknowledge how the Catholic Church legitimized and expanded slavery.
“Pope Leo has strengthened the moral credibility of the church with this admission and apology today,” he told The Associated Press. “Hopefully a future document will explain in more detail the church’s involvement with slaveholding. As a scholar I have some quibbles with the wording, but this is a truly remarkable moment.”
During a 1985 visit to Cameroon, St. John Paul II asked forgiveness of Africans for the slave trade on behalf of Christians who participated in it, but not the popes. In a 1992 visit to Goree Island, Senegal, which was the largest slave-trading center in West Africa, he denounced the injustice of slavery and called it a “tragedy of a civilization that called itself Christian.”
According to genealogical research published by Henry Louis Gates Jr., 17 of Leo’s American ancestors were Black, listed in census records as mulatto, Black, Creole or a free person of color. His family tree includes slaveholders and enslaved people, Gates wrote in The New York Times.
During a visit to Angola last month, Leo prayed at a Catholic shrine at the site of an important hub of the African slave trade during Portugal’s colonial rule. While at the Sanctuary of Mama Muxima, Leo recalled the “sorrow and great suffering” Angolans endured for centuries, but he didn’t refer specifically to slavery.
Winfield reported from Middletown, Connecticut.
Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.
Pope Leo XIV speaks during the presentation of his first encyclical, "Magnifica humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence," at the Vatican, Monday, May 25, 2026. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)
Pope Leo XIV listens to Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, right, during the presentation of Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical, "Magnifica humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence," at the Vatican, Monday, May 25, 2026. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)
Pope Leo XIV, left, attends the presentation of his first encyclical, "Magnifica humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence," at the Vatican, Monday, May 25, 2026. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)
Pope Leo XIV, left, arrives with Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin for the presentation of his first encyclical, "Magnifica humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence," at the Vatican, Monday, May 25, 2026. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)
Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin, right, talks to theologian Leocadie Lushombo during the presentation of his first encyclical, "Magnifica humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence," at the Vatican, Monday, May 25, 2026. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)
Pope Leo XIV holds the pastoral staff as he celebrates the Pentecost Mass in St. Peter's Basilica, at the Vatican, Sunday, May 24, 2026. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)
