Craters And Freighters Franchise Company Fraud and deceptive advertising: Artist's life's work destroyed when "art specialist" failed to crate sculpture, subcontracted moving to freight hauler Greensboro North Carolina...
To move a collection of paintings and sculpture by my late husband, a highly repected artist, from North Carolina to Washington state, I chose the company his gallery believed to be the safest for handling it. Craters and Freighters advertises that it specializes in packing and moving delicate and valuable objects.
The Greensboro representative of this company contracted with me to custom-build wooden crates for the nearly 300 works of figurative sculpture. These works were of plaster and terra cotta and therefore fragile. He assured me that each object would be carefully packed and padded in these crates at a local Craters and Freighters "workshop" before being loaded onto a Craters and Freighters van which was described as having advanced hydraulic suspension and loading systems. This truck was to move the crated art the entire 3,000 miles to my new location. (The shipment required an entire large van.)
At the artist's studio, the bubble-wrapped sculptures were placed in single-ply cardbord cartons to be taken (in small loads on a small truck) just the two miles to the worksite at which the crates were to be built. The agreed-on crating was never done.
Instead, except for two works that were packed in solid wooden containers, as expected, all the sculpture arrived in the flimsy temporary boxes. These boxes had only been taped shut.in some cases, the flaps of the cardboard box were pulled up and taped over the heads of plaster figures taller than the box.
The boxes were not labeled "fragile, " and their correct orientation was not indicated. They had been stacked to the ceiling of the truck. Many had fallen, the lower ones were crushed, almost all had split open. Some of their contents, such as plaster heads, were rolling loose on the floor of the truck.
As I had been told, the same truck had carried the shipment from North Carolina (its door was sealed). However, it was not a Craters and Freighters truck. It belonged to a hauler of common freight, Roadway, and it had no springs, no liftgate, and no ramp. The Roadway driver had not known that he was carrying art, since the bill of lading fraudulently identified the contents only as "dry goods."
Three pieces of sculpture were never delivered (probably lost amid the styrofoam debris on the truck). The destruction of the rest is heartbreaking. Some of the most beautiful plaster casts were pulverized, and the others cannot be restored to anything like their original state.
It has been eight months since I notified Craters and Freighters of the misrepresentations by their franchisee and the losses I sustained as a result, but I am not likely to receive anything from them, not even an apology. They deny any wrongdoing, and their insurance company argues that the art had no value because it had not been purchased.
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