An NYC nightclub doorman unwittingly threw away hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of art

wass stevens

(Getty Images/Jamie McCarthy) "I could be living [on] those little drawings," Stevens told Page Six.

Wass Stevens is what you call New York-famous.

He's the city's best-known nightclub doorman and a sometimes actor who once battered a man with the "business-end of a velvet rope."

Now that you have an idea of who we're dealing with, here's the latest news from Wass: He recently revealed to Page Six that he threw away a bunch of drawings given to him by the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat.

"Every time I would see him, he would draw me a little picture on a napkin or a VIP ticket, which I, of course, threw away, thinking it wouldn’t be of any worth," said Stevens.

Apparently, back when Stevens was working the door at Palladium — a haunt of artists like Andy Warhol and Keith Haring — he'd blocked Basquiat from entering the VIP room.

"I told him he was a crackhead and to get the hell away from me," he recalled. But, at the behest of Warhol, he changed his mind and let Basquiat through. Stevens assumes the drawings were a kind of thank-you.

Though we don't know exactly what this type of casual napkin drawings would be worth today, seven lots of Basquiat's drawings on paper recently sold for prices ranging from $25,000 to $125,000.

Talk about an expensive mistake.

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