By 1994 with Taubman's support, she was named president and chief executive officer of Sotheby's Holdings, the US$2 billion-a-year parent company.
Building on one of the prosecution's most striking disclosures -- that Taubman and Tennant held a dozen private meetings from 1993 to 1996 -- Brooks testified that shortly after the third meeting on April 30, 1993, Taubman told her about it. The two chairmen, she said, "agreed we were both killing each other over the bottom line and it was time to do something about it."
She said Taubman showed her a list of issues like pricing and interest-free loans that were discussed and wanted her and Davidge of Christie's to "work out the details." She said he told her it was Christie's turn to go first with higher prices and Sotheby's would follow. And she said, Taubman cautioned her not to talk about it with anyone.
Asked what she responded, she said, "Fine, I won't tell anyone."
She said she first met Davidge in a private dining room at the Stafford Hotel in London in November 1993 after first advising Taubman that the meeting he had long sought was about to happen. She said they agreed to stop boasting publicly about which company had a larger market share -- they were roughly equal -- and to devise a new mutual system of guaranteeing minimum returns to their auction sellers.
As for a new pricing scheme, he didn't have one, Brooks said, but he promised, "I'm going to be working on that with you."
On Feb. 8, 1995, she said, Davidge flew into Kennedy International Airport. "I met him in my car," she said, and drove to the nearest parking lot. "We moved to the back seat of the car; he had papers he wanted to show me." It was the new higher sellers' fees Christie was about to impose, she testified.
"He asked me if I had any problems with it," she went on. "I said it looked good to me."
On March 9, 1995, Christie's announced those new rates. Brooks said she promptly called Taubman, who already knew about it. "He said to me, `Congratulations,'" she testified.
Sotheby's adopted the rates, with a few changes, on April 13.
Even after the seller's fees were set between Brooks and Davidge and the two had switched lists of super-rich clients who had been promised special terms and would therefore be exempt, Brooks recalled getting a telephone call in 1996 from Davidge accusing her of breaking the agreement by offering the Shelburne Museum in Vermont overly generous terms for a sale.
To convince him that she had not reneged, Brooks then copied pages of Sotheby's contract herself and delivered them to the hotel where Davidge was staying.
On another occasion, Brooks testified, when she and Davidge exchanged lists of clients, Davidge also gave Brooks a plain, sealed envelope that he told her was extremely confidential because it contained the name of a client whose collection Christie's was trying to get for sale that had been omitted from the list.
He asked her not to open it. When she told Taubman she had gotten the Christie's list she also told him about the envelope. "He said, `Why don't you open it?'" Brooks said. She said she replied, "Because I gave my word."
But soon both she and Taubman learned what the envelope contained when Christie's reported that it was selling the jewelry belonging to the Princess Salimah Aga Khan, who was in the process of getting a divorce. (The sale, which took place in November 1994, brought US$27.6 million.) When Brooks finally did open the envelope it contained a piece of paper with the initials SAK.
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