Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, April 13, 1994 TAG: 9404130089
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By BARRY MEIER THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Soon after their marriage, the Links settled in South Salem, N.Y., and built a home and a darkroom. Though no longer active as a photographer, O. Winston Link still printed his own work.
Conchita Link, who had previously sold real estate and burglar alarms, began managing his business, a task for which he had little patience.
``She was very efficient,'' said Robert Burge, a photography dealer. ``When you were dealing with Winston, he liked you to come down to his studio, shake his hand and have a cup of coffee, which was fine except when you needed the work quickly.''
But even from the outset there were signs that Conchita Link might abuse her husband's name. Apparently miffed at a Roanoke museum's policy against selling exhibited work, she called the museum and said Link did not want a particular curator to attend his opening.
``The day after the opening I saw Winston, and he said he had a wonderful evening,'' said the curator, Ann Masters. ``But it was clear that he had no idea the call had been made.''
Some of Link's friends also found that their letters and calls were going unanswered. ``I wrote to him every few months, invited him to my wedding and sent birth announcements,'' said Laurie O'Gara, a retired welder. ``But I never heard back, which was really strange because he was an avid writer.'' Link said he had been unaware of such efforts to reach him.
In the early years of his marriage, he remained protective of his wife. In the mid-'80s, he attested to a police complaint she filed that accused her nephew of harassing the couple with a gun. But the nephew was in California that day, and Conchita Link was ordered to pay him $1,000 for malicious prosecution, court records indicate.
The marriage was initially happy, but it deteriorated quickly. In late 1990, Link hired Hayes, who owned Rome Locomotive Works in Rome, N.Y., to restore his engine. But he grew to suspect that his wife and Hayes had become lovers, a relationship they denied in court papers.
``He would call her at 7 in the morning and 7 at night, and she would take the telephone into the bathroom,'' said Link. ``Then when I picked up the extension, he'd stop talking.''
What's more, he said, his wife stopped giving him the money from work sold by galleries. She testified that he would frequently rage irrationally at her. And they accused each other of removing photographs and negatives from the South Salem house, where more than 2,000 prints might be stored at one time.
The next summer, Conchita Link began contacting Alzheimer's support groups. She soon sent notes to dealers telling them the photographer was ill and instructing them to send payments to a postal box rather than the couple's home. She also began shifting their money between bank accounts, court records indicate.
Link, a man given to practical jokes and salty language, first used humor as a shield. ``She thinks I am nuts and says I have Alzheimer's disease,'' he wrote to Frish Brandt, co-owner of the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco. ``I give her plenty of material, like numbering bananas from one to seven and eat them in this order.''
But Link's defenses quickly frayed. Robert Mann, an art dealer, took him to meet with an attorney in November, and the photographer removed about 120 prints and all his railroad negatives from the house.
The timing may have proved wise. In December 1991, Conchita Link filed the first of several complaints accusing him of physical abuse. And unbeknown to him, court records indicate, she rented a storage unit in nearby Port Chester, N.Y. By then, Link, who is hobbled by arthritis, had developed sciatic nerve problems, and his wife was apparently withdrawing from him.
``I see people on TV, Frank Sinatra, I look at him,'' testified Conchita Link. ``He is the same age as Winston. The big one is Mike Wallace. `My God,' I said, `I want to meet him.' I said, `Gee, I would love to, he is like so brilliant.' He is the same age as Winston.''
The prospect of worsening legal entanglements evidently threw Conchita Link into a frenzy of activity. In early 1992, she wrote to Link's sister and others, accusing the photographer's friends of encouraging him to spread stories that she planned to murder him; the letters also implied that he was homosexual and harassed children, court papers indicate.
In January 1992, Link, who was then living in the basement of his home, awoke to find his wallet missing. Conchita Link told the police he flew into a rage and tried to choke her. He said he only shook her shoulders.
When Link returned home the next day, he was arrested for violating a protective order he says he never knew his wife had obtained. The matter was later dropped.
At the end of February, Link, who by this time had moved out of his home, fired his wife as his business manager and filed suit against her and Hayes, alleging fraud and mental cruelty. Link's nephew, Robert B. Zider, joined him in the action.
Conchita Link and Hayes denied the allegations, and she in turn filed for divorce a few days later, charging physical abuse. She also complained to bar association officials that Link's lawyers, Tennyson Schad and J. Edward Meyer, were manipulating him for their own profit.
Meanwhile, her efforts to control her husband's work tightened. In March 1992, she told several gallery owners Link was ``deteriorating.'' She claimed to own all his pictures and demanded ``loyalty'' from dealers who wanted to sell them, court papers indicate. ``I am the owner of all the work and all the rights thereto,'' she maintained.
But she apparently made a big mistake. The dealers Brandt and Burge later testified that Conchita Link, who claimed her husband was giving photographs away, told them separately that she had taken prints from the South Salem house and stored them in a secure building. She denied having made the statements.
Events worsened that June. With a friend, Link went to his home to try to recover his Model A Ford. But the wheels were gone, and Conchita Link and Hayes arrived unexpectedly. A melee ensued. Link, who said he was pushed from behind by Hayes, knocked his wife to the ground. She suffered a concussion, and Link and his friend were arrested for assault. They were acquitted in January 1993.
A few months earlier, Conchita Link had returned some 3,000 photographs, mostly family snapshots. As a result, Danielle Mazur, an attorney for Link, began reviewing Conchita's telephone records and, after hundreds of cold calls, finally stumbled on the Port Chester storage facility.
When lawyers inspected it last January, however, they were too late. Hayes, for his part, testified that Conchita Link had rented the space for him and that he had vacated it the previous July. He used it to store valuable railroad books, he insisted, even though Port Chester is a five-hour drive from his home in upstate New York.
The trial of Link's civil suit and a related divorce action began last September in the state Supreme Court in White Plains, N.Y. Over a two-week period, his lawyers put on a parade of witnesses. They also uncovered a document showing that Conchita Link had lost her real-estate license in the 1970s for keeping a client's money, a charge she had denied before the trial.
Claiming that they could not afford lawyers, Conchita Link and Hayes represented themselves. They denied any wrongdoing, and Conchita Link suggested in a written statement that her husband had hidden the photographs in question.
A lawyer might have helped. The judge, Gordon W. Burrows, granted Link an uncontested divorce and awarded him and Zider some $5 million in damages. He also ruled that Conchita Link had misled court officials by failing to disclose that a picture of her with blackened eyes, attached to a complaint of abuse against Link, had been taken after cosmetic surgery.
In addition, Burrows held Conchita Link in contempt of court for failing to return Link's photographs and other assets and sentenced her to six months in prison. She served two months in the Westchester County Jail and was released. Her precise whereabouts are unknown.
Link's court triumph may prove a Pyrrhic victory. There appear to be few leads to the locations of prints and little likelihood of recovering much of the court award.
His lawyers must now decide whether to attempt to press criminal charges against his ex-wife. Link said he expects to sell the South Salem house to pay legal bills, and his engine sits deteriorating at the site of Hayes' former company.
Asked why he endured such a troubled relationship for so long, Link said he was terrified of going through a second divorce at his age. His friends are still shocked at the outcome.
``In two years, I watched him age 20 years,'' said one of them, O'Gara. ``And the saddest part of it is that he loved her, and he never believed she would do anything to hurt the work.''
For now, Link said, he simply wants to recover and get back to the darkroom, so he can resume printing his pictures himself. ``Other people have been doing my photographs, and they don't look right,'' he explained. ``I have to show them how to make them look silvery, how they can look without too much contrast.''
O'Gara shares his hope. ``If he isn't able to say that the sky has to be a little darker and that train smoke should be a little lighter,'' she said, ``he'll die of a broken heart.''
by CNB