An estranged husband has been convicted of hiring a truck driver to kill an American art dealer in Brazil

The estranged husband of a prominent New York City art dealer was convicted Friday of hiring a gunman to kill her in Brazil.

Daniel Sikkema55, faces a mandatory life sentence. Brent Sikkema, 75, was found he was stabbed to death in his townhouse in Rio de Janeiro in January 2024.

Daniel Sikkema, an American and Cuban citizen living in New York, was arrested in April 2024. He was convicted in federal court in Manhattan of charges including involuntary manslaughter resulting in death.

The suspect was arrested in Brazil, where he is still in custody.

“During divorce negotiations with her then-husband, Daniel Sikkema used a hotline to order the murder of her husband,” said Manhattan US Attorney Jay Clayton.

Clayton described Brent Sikkema’s killing as a “senseless, senseless killing” and said the verdict brought “a reasonable measure of justice.”

Daniel Sikkema’s lawyer, Florian Miedel, said that they are disappointed with this decision and plan to appeal this decision.

“Daniel is still strong and he is hopeful that he will succeed in the end,” said Miedel.

Daniel Sikkema was in regular contact with the suspect before and after the murder, prosecutors said.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Nicholas Pavlis told the judge in an opening statement that Daniel Sikkema paid the man more than $10,000 and promised him more money.

At the same time, Pavlis said, Daniel Sikkema bragged to others that he would get more money from his spouse’s death than he would from a divorce. She and Brent Sikkema had a twelve-year-old son.

“After the brutal murder of her husband, the defendant tried to cover her tracks with the money,” said Pavlis.

Miedel told the judge in his opening statement that the case was based on circumstantial evidence and that there was no evidence to prove his client’s guilt.

“Life is messy. The truth is not always clear,” said Medel.

“Chaos is the nature of man”

Brent Sikkema had amassed a multimillion-dollar estate and owned a Manhattan contemporary art gallery called Sikkema Malloy Jenkins, which says on its website that it has represented international artists such as Kara Walker, Vik Muniz and Arturo Herrera for nearly 30 years.

He began his career in 1971 at the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York, where he worked as an exhibition director. He opened his first gallery in 1976 in Boston.

In 2021, on a trip to the Swiss city of Zurich, Sikkema described himself on Instagram as “a chaotic type of person” and said that Brazil and Cuba were his favorite destinations.

“Brent had a bad eye and thought outside the box,” longtime friend Yancey Richardson, who owns a nearby art gallery, told The New York Times after Sikkema’s death. “He wasn’t just putting on one show after another.”

Sikkema told IdeaFix in 2022 that he still lives almost year-round in New York but called his apartment in Rio de Janeiro an urban “oasis.”