Reese Palley

In 1957 he opened a gallery outside the Marlborough-Blenheim Hotel, selling Edward Marshall Boehm's porcelain figures of animals. From 1959 to 1979, he owned and operated Objet d'Art Galleries. In San Francisco, Palley restored the V.C. Morris Gift Shop at 140 Maiden Lane, the only example of a completed Frank Lloyd Wright building in San Francisco.[2]

In 1976, Palley and a partner purchased the Marlborough-Blenheim for $6 million.[3] They later rented it to Bally Manufacturing.[3][4]

In 1983, Palley was suspended as chairman of the New Jersey Lottery commission by Governor Thomas Kean after he was charged with falsifying documents in an attempt thwart an ethics investigation into his conflict of interest. The ethics committee found that Palley sought money from a company bidding on a contract for the Lottery Commission. He pled guilty to a single charge of conspiracy to fabricate evidence in 1985.[5][6][7][8]

He once purchased a painting for $2,600 that turned out to be one of the five lost paintings by Raphael, this one of Lorenzo de Medici.[9] Believing the work to be a replica, Palley sold the artwork for $6,000 in 1964.[9] After Palley sold the item, it was later authenticated as an original and auctioned at Christie's by a subsequent owner for $37.27 million in 2007.[10]

Palley with his wife, Marilyn Arnold Palley, created the Palley Index of Danish Furniture, 1900–2000 (now called the Furnatureindex), a compilation of over 12,000 works of Danish furniture of the 20th and 21st centuries.[11]

In his book Unlikely Passages, he made claims to many alleged[12] feats, including starting an airline company, starting a mushroom farm in caves, opening a sewing machine needle factory in Russia, smuggling a sought-after Torah out of Odessa, escaping Ethiopian gunboats on the Red Sea, and discussing ideas to run an island government with Tristan Jones.