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His Fortune’s From the Trash Business. His Basquiats Are Priceless.

In the last few years, waste-management billionaire Patrick Dovigi has become one of the biggest art collectors on the scene. But he’s still under the radar—maybe the shots fired on his home have something to do with that.

By Nate FreemanJune 26, 2026

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The undisputed king of buying Jean-Michel Basquiat’s work right now is Ken Griffin. This week, 10 works from his collection went on view at the Pérez Art Museum Miami and are open to the public for an entire year. The masterpieces from Griffin’s collection include the large painting of a skull that Yusaku Maezawa bought at Sotheby’s in 2017 for $110 million, officially cementing Basquiat in the nine-figure canon with few other artists. It turned out to be a bargain. In 2024, Maezawa sold it to Griffin for a price as high as $200 million.

But there’s another Basquiat collector, someone a lot less famous than Griffin, someone who has never appeared on the ARTnews Top 200 Collector List, who doesn’t yet sit on museum boards or get honored at galas. According to sources, he’s spent hundreds of millions on Basquiats in the past few years and owns more than a dozen major paintings. His name is Patrick Dovigi and his money is trash. Let me explain: Dovigi is a waste-management kingpin who owns a $13 billion rubbish conglomerate called Green for Life Environmental, founded in the suburbs of Toronto. According to sources, his assets total between $3.5 billion to $4 billion. But he’s not your typical billionaire: He’s a Canadian who was a semi-pro hockey player and, to this day, is referred to in headlines as the “NHL-goalie-turned-entrepreneur.”

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His line of work makes him an anomaly among art collectors—and has brought out more than a few critics. In 2020, an investment management firm recommending a short play against GFL released a report alleging that Dovigi’s company has been associated with organized crime. To be fair, mafia affiliations have long been a bogeyman of the garbage business—and yet the industry’s mobbed-up reputation can’t exactly explain away that, according to authorities, a gunman targeted Dovigi’s home. More on this in a bit.

He does have a few habits typical of your 21st-century billionaire. For instance, buying and selling properties in Aspen and Miami. He’s also started collecting art with the passion of a seasoned vet. His purchases are private—he buys mostly on the secondary market, and rarely at auction—sources within the art-adviser community and at auction houses say that he’s been on a spree acquiring Basquiats. He’s not particularly well-known among the longtime insiders, as he’s yet to exhibit a yen for gladhanding, gallerist schmoozing, or playing the game. And yet he’s built a collection that, by some estimations, ranks among the top in the country, homing in on grade-A examples of American masters—Roy Lichtenstein, Ed Ruscha, and with a particular focus on Basquiat. Since starting his collecting journey five or six years ago, he’s snapped up some incredible paintings.

And Manhattan apartments. And beach houses. And ski lodges. And…boats. In 2023, he bought Ahpo, a 378-foot yacht owned by Jamaican Canadian billionaire Michael Lee-Chin, and then renamed it Lady Jorgia. The asking price was said to be $362 million. For most, this would have sufficed for nautical recreation. Not Dovigi. Last year, the world’s first hydrogen-powered pleasure craft came on the market, commissioned by Bill Gates. At 390 feet, it’s bigger than the Lady Jorgia. It’s called Breakthrough, and Gates never stepped foot on it. Last year, Dovigi bought the boat. It was said to have an asking price of $650 million, and anything in that area would make it one of the most expensive yachts in history. This week, according to public data, Breakthrough is moored off the Costa Smeralda in northeastern Sardinia, near Porto Cervo.

Dovigi played hockey growing up, but not in a typical Canadian kid kind of way. In 1997, the Edmonton Oilers drafted him as the 41st pick in the NHL. He played a few years in the minor league, and then got traded to the Red Wings before hanging up his skates in his mid-20s. He earned a business degree, and after getting a job at a bank, he watched a transfer station that the bank owned rack up violations due to the amount of waste on the premises. The saga gave Dovigi an idea: He could streamline the environmental waste cleanup efforts in the region by buying up mom-and-pop operations and coordinating the process. In 2007, he founded Green for Life Environmental.

After just three years, Roark Capital made a $105 million investment in the company. Following the cash infusion, GFL went on a buying spree that culminated in a 2016 deal in which it acquired Matrec for $800 million, making it one of the largest transactions by a waste-management company in Canada’s history. US markets beckoned, and after three years in the States, the company went public in 2020, right before the pandemic. That didn’t slow anything down. Lockdown periods meant the trash still had to get picked up.

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The quick pace of acquisitions brought a new slew of waste-management figures into the GFL fold—and some speculated they weren’t exactly upstanding Canadian citizens. A 2020 report by Ben Axler, the founder of the hugely successful short-selling investment firm Spruce Point Capital Management, recommended in the strongest possible terms that investors take the short position against GFL. The reason was, as the report put it, “CEO Patrick Dovigi has obfuscated connections to what some observers have dubbed ‘organized crime’—if true, making the stock uninvestable to institutional shareholders.”

“I don’t think it’s worth anything,” Axler told the Financial Post regarding GFL’s stock.

(The paper made it clear that Axler had a short position against GFL, thus influencing his choice of words on the record.)

“With no confidence in the financial statements, I cannot give you a price target because I have no confidence in revenues, no confidence in free cash flow. I have no confidence in the amount of debt they have,” Axler went on. “I think the business is uninvestable.”

In a statement, Dovigi said, “We are not going to be distracted by this ridiculous headline seeking short sellers, and I am personally disgusted by the egregious, discriminatory, and unfounded attacks against myself and our leadership team.” Other analysts came to GFL’s defense, taking a positive view of the company’s prospects.

In July 2024, Ottawa authorities started investigating suspected arson at a construction yard used by a company partially owned by GFL, in which six dump trucks were set on fire. That September, a gunman allegedly approached Dovigi’s home in a ritzy Toronto suburb and shot at the front door. Authorities believe the incident is connected to a second shooting an hour later that targeted another GFL executive. Then this past March, shots were fired at the homes of two other GFL associates.

Authorities allege that the trigger-pullers were part of a gun-for-hire network. Ilan Philosophe, the man arrested in the incident targeting Dovigi’s home, was the founder of a rival company and had allegedly been harassing his competitors for years. He denied any involvement in the shooting but likened GFL to “bullies.” Yet in April, he was charged with discharging a firearm and conspiracy to commit an indictable offense. He’s currently out on bail. (Dovigi has disputed that it was a targeted attack and speculated it could’ve been a random attempted robbery. He did not respond to VF’s request for comment.)

The investigation brought out plenty of colorful details. For example, in a text shared with The Globe and Mail to executives at the GFL-affiliated company Green Infrastructure Partners Inc., Philosophe referenced the shootings after they happened.

“Oh ya, I own 100% of my company too … who shot ya??” Philosophe texted.

Another text made light of Dovigi using debt to finance his company.

“No financial engineering here,” Philosophe wrote in another text to GIP executives. “Just straight up gangster business, zero debt and life like a real fucking boss.”

Yet another text, this one to the founder of Baron Construction, was more direct.

“I’m coming straight for you,” Philosophe wrote in the spring of 2024. “Who the fuck you think you’re fucking with? I'm the fucking boss. I gave my life for Astro. You started a war that is child’s play, I will ruin you bitch.”

Philosophe later showed some regret about sending the messages, telling the Globe, “I have pain inside of me, so I can be rude sometimes, can get a little bit emotional. I get burned. Send messages that are rude.”

While the shootings seemed to rattle investors, GFL’s stock eventually rallied, and Dovigi went on the record to assure shareholders that he would not be intimidated.

“I’ve been in business for 20 years. Who’s going to scare me?” he said. “This is not The Sopranos.”

In addition to the billion-dollar trash business, Dovigi had a side hustle flipping houses in Aspen. A $72.5 million house became a $108 million house in 2024, thanks to a thirsty Steve Wynn. Dovigi parked some of that cash in another Aspen shingle for $48.75 million, put in a bunch of art—a Richard Prince Cowboy, Andreas Gursky’s Salinas, and George Condo’s Confrontation, which he bought at Christie’s in 2023 for $1.2 million—and ended up selling that house for $55 million.

“Some people like to watch White Lotus, some people like to watch Love Island,” he told The Wall Street Journal in 2025. “I like looking at real estate. Listen, I’m trash by day and luxury properties by night.”

In Miami, Dovigi bought a huge waterfront spread at the top of Bal Harbour for $41.5 million in 2022, and a buyer reportedly snapped it up in 2025 for $69.5 million. He sold a 4,400-square-foot unit at the Palazzo Della Luna on Fisher Island for $20 million and bought two sprawling pads on Sunset Island III: one for $27.5 million, and the other for $15 million. He also has a pair of condos on Park Avenue, two palaces that sit in the clouds over Central Park.

He also likes to buy private jets. Last December, Bombardier had a ceremony at its Ontario assembly hangars, with the proceedings blessed by the Canadian rocker who wrote “Life Is a Highway,” to unveil the Bombardier Global 8000. The first person on earth to get the keys was Patrick Dovigi.

All of these acquisitions meant Dovigi had a lot of walls to fill. And he picked up some of the best stuff. He’s got scads of modernist furniture, including Rogan Gregory’s Tufted Fungiidae Chaises and the Double Bubble couches made by fashion designer Rick Owens. There is another George Condo, the large painting Conversations, which was bought from Sotheby’s in May 2024 for $3.1 million. There’s a Richard Prince Untitled (Cowboy), and a primo Claude Monet purchased at Sotheby’s for $960,000 in November 2024.

But his major passion was the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Sources said that for Dovigi, who’s 46—young for a mega-collector—Basquiat just resonates with his generation, and he’s been drawn to seeking out the artist’s major works involving crowns, as well as self-portraits. Dovigi began working with the London-based art advisory firm Colour Themes to source Basquiat paintings from private collectors on the secondary market, and, according to a source familiar with their relationship, now works exclusively with the adviser Philip Rebeiz. Previously, Rebeiz cofounded the gallery Hus and has worked with David Beckham, a noted collector; he now advises Dovigi.

As it happened, Rebeiz has spent the last few years researching and assembling a massive new Basquiat tome for the art-book publisher Assouline, Basquiat: The World of Jean-Michel. Retailing for $1,400 on the Assouline store website, the book clocks in at 348 pages, features interviews with Lenny Kravitz, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and the late Bruno Bischofberger—and includes over 200 photos of Basquiat’s works, some hard to find. In the process of tracking down all of these works, Rebeiz mapped out a mental treasure route, revealing where the best Basquiat paintings were hanging in collector homes. Occasionally, those owners were willing to part with their masterworks—some he placed in Griffin’s collection, but a good number of them ended up with Dovigi.

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There’s a peek at what he’s bought in a recent feature on the home he shares at 432 Park with his wife, the interior designer Fernanda Dovigi. It’s a rare double-portrait Basquiat diptych, from 1982, perhaps the key year in the artist’s career.

What’s fascinating is how Dovigi’s art purchases have flown under the radar, even though he’s openly discussed his business practices as the CEO of a publicly traded company is required to do.

He’s loaned out work from his collection rarely, most recently for a well-received show at the Louisiana Museum of Art in Denmark of Basquiat’s skulls on paper, Headstrong. As it happens, the show was organized by Anders Kold, a curator at the museum, but was inspired by a conversation with Rebeiz and his Colour Themes cofounder CJ Jones.

Images from the opening dinner show several high-profile artists. Judging from dinner guests’ Instagram posts, it appears that Cy Gavin, Alex Da Corte, Alvaro Barrington, Arthur Jafa, and even Ed Ruscha all came to the opening of this Basquiat show in a museum on the outskirts of Copenhagen. Apparently, the collector had something to do with flying them there. But Dovigi was nowhere in the photos.

Have a tip? Drop me a line at [email protected]. And make sure you subscribe to True Colors to receive Nate Freeman’s art-world dispatch in your inbox every week.

His Fortune’s From the Trash Business. His Basquiats Are Priceless.

His Fortune’s From the Trash Business. His Basquiats Are Priceless.

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