New York — The estranged husband of a prominent New York City art dealer said he wished his wife had died before the co-owner of a contemporary art gallery was found stabbed to death in his Brazil home, a witness testified Tuesday as a murder-for-hire trial began in Manhattan.
Angela Liriano, a retired pharmacist and the first witness in the murder-for-hire trial, said she was shocked by the way “very crazy” Daniel Sikkema talked about her estranged husband, 75-year-old art dealer Brent Sikkema, when she told him she had heard his wife was going to Brazil.
“He said, ‘Oh, well, I really hope he’s dead, that he’s dead,'” Liriano told the federal court jury in her December 2023 phone conversation with Danielle Sikkema.
A month later, Brent Sikkema was found stabbed 18 times in his home in Rio de Janeiro.
An alleged hit man has been arrested in Brazil, where he remains imprisoned. Daniel Sikkema, 55, an American and Cuban citizen living in New York, was arrested in April 2024 and held without bail on federal murder-for-hire charges alleging he orchestrated the killing.
Brent Sikkema had amassed a multimillion-dollar estate and owned a contemporary art gallery in Manhattan that became known as Sikkema Malloy Jenkins, which says on its website that it has been representing international artists such as Kara Walker, Vic Muniz and Arturo Herrera for nearly 30 years.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Nicholas Pavlis told the jury in an opening statement that the government will use witness testimony, digital and financial records and location data to show that Daniel Sikkema had frequent contact with the alleged killer before and after the killing.
Daniel Sikkema wired more than $10,000 to the man and promised more money on the way while bragging to others that he would get more money from his wife’s death than he would from the divorce, Pavlis said. The prosecutor told jurors they would see the defendant lie to the FBI in a recorded interview.
“After his husband was brutally murdered, the defendant tried to cover his tracks and get paid,” Pavlis said.
Defense attorney Florian Medel told the jury to be aware of the “assumptions, suggestions and inferences that prosecutors will ask you to draw from the circumstantial evidence.”
He said that no professional killer would testify and there was no evidence to prove his client’s guilt.
“Life is messy. The truth is not always clear,” Medel said, urging jurors to understand that people sometimes say extreme things in the midst of a contentious divorce.
Middle said his client was raising a 13-year-old son with his wife and would never take his parents away from the child he loved.
“Even though they had an ugly divorce, they shared a lot,” the lawyer said.
He also said there was no evidence that Daniel Sikkema knew before the murder that he would be better off financially with death rather than divorce.
Medel also asked jurors not to indict his client if he chose not to testify.
Liriano said she became so close to the couple through her work that she accompanied them on a trip to Cuba in 2018, when she said Daniel Sikkema accompanied her everywhere and was “always so nice.”
She said that when the couple was preparing for divorce after their 2022 separation, Daniel Sikkema complained that he was not getting enough money because he wanted $8 million instead of the $6 million he might get.