Celebrated Plantation artist Jose Luis Alvarez has earned an international reputation with colorful, modernist paintings that have been showcased in South Florida museums and galleries.
He’s always dabbled in abstract concepts involving personal and artistic identity, an exploration that began as a young man when he teamed with famed magician James “The Amazing” Randi on the world stage.
Now, there are deeper questions surrounding Alvarez and who he actually is — a mystery about the man himself, beyond his creative persona.
To federal authorities the 43-year-old Alvarez is a cipher, a man truly without any identity. They refer to him as “FNU LNU” — law enforcement acronyms for first and last names unknown.
Alvarez is now in federal custody, accused of stealing the identity of a New York man and misusing it for more than 20 years. Goateed and scholarly looking in hip eyeglasses, Alvarez — if that indeed is his name — had his first appearance Friday morning in federal court in Fort Lauderdale.
“We don’t know who this person is,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Bertha Mitrani told a magistrate, while explaining that authorities would seek to hold Alvarez without bail at a hearing next week.
Alvarez first began performing to international audiences in the late 1980s as “Carlos,” channeling the spirit of an ancient seer in contact with other worlds.
It was an elaborate hoax carried out as performance art.
Alvarez’s transformation into “Carlos” was part of Randi’s crusade to expose mystics and psychics around the world as frauds. The two men, who live together in Randi’s Plantation home, met when Alvarez was a teen, and they put on the “Carlos” performances for 15 years.
More recently, the artist’s paintings were featured this spring at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, and have graced Art Basel in Miami and galleries in New York and San Francisco.
Alvarez’s alleged alternate reality came apart Thursday morning, with the arrival at his door of an investigator from the U.S. State Department who specializes in fraudulent passports, visas and other travel documents. Alvarez initially said he was born in Venezuela, then said New York, according to court records. He was arrested on a charge of supplying false information to obtain a passport, a crime punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
The charge filed against Alvarez alleges he stole a New York man’s date of birth and Social Security number, which he used to obtain a U.S. passport in 1987. He has since renewed the passport twice.
Outside court, one of Alvarez’s attorneys said his arrest had been “totally out of the blue.”
Alvarez has lived at Randi’s home for at least two decades, has traveled the world for seminars and has established himself as an internationally renowned artist, said Susan Dmitrovsky, a defense attorney for Alvarez. She said everyone has known him as Jose Luis Alvarez for years.
Brenton N. Ver Ploeg, a long-time civil attorney for Randi, said he has known Alvarez for more than two decades and there’s never been any question about his identity. Alvarez has been in and out of the country dozens of times during that period, Ver Ploeg said.
“He hadn’t exactly been living undercover,” Ver Ploeg said. “This is totally, absolutely, positively new to me.”
Alvarez is not just an artist, but an ardent backer of Randi’s philosophy of using science to debunk the assertions of people who fraudulently claim to possess paranormal abilities, Dmitrovsky said.
“He’s trying to do good and keep people from being taken,” she said.
For now, the artist is being held in the Broward Main Jail, under the name Jose Alvarez. He will have a hearing Wednesday to determine if he can be released on bail.
A lecture he gave at the University of California in Berkeley earlier this year about his artistic pursuits was described thus: “Jose Alvarez will guide us through his own personal journey of investigation into the realms of consciousness, mysticism, spirituality, magic, shamanism, space exploration, and paranormal phenomena. Utilizing the concept in theoretical astrophysics of parallel universes and space as a continuum membrane with no beginning or end, Alvarez will place his cast of characters as a stand-in for the strong human desire for knowledge and transformation and his continued visual inquiry into the realms of the fantastic and the philosophical.”
State Department investigators got onto his trail last August, when a New Yorker named Jose Luis Alvarez applied for a passport to attend his sister’s wedding in Jamaica. His application was flagged as potentially fraudulent, because a passport had already been issued in his name.
“He’s had my identity for 20 years,” the New York Alvarez said Friday, when reached by telephone by the Sun Sentinel. “Why is he stealing my identity? Is he illegal?”
Alvarez, a teacher’s aide from the Bronx, said he has suspected for several years that someone had stolen his identity — he said he’s been dunned by the IRS for taxes he didn’t owe on income in Florida, that his bank account has periodically been frozen and that he had difficulty renewing his driver’s license.
He’s had to repeatedly prove he is who he says he is, brandishing his New York driver’s license and a birth certificate, as well as his employment record. He also missed his sister’s wedding because he could not get a passport in time.
“I was in big trouble with the IRS, and it was because of him,” the New Yorker said. “It caused me all kinds of problems.”
So it was a relief when he got a call from an FBI agent Thursday, saying the man who may have stolen his identity was in custody.
The New York Alvarez said he had never heard of his doppelganger, but a quick Google search gave him some clues.
“I did not know he was some guy like this, from fake psychic to artist,” he said. “This is crazy.”
pfranceschina@tribune.com or 954-459-2255
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