I'm no expert, there are similarities. But who know. Utterly love that hippo though!!

Id buy it! But pretty much only if its not Haring. Maybe out of range a little if it is :-)

Unless you can find photo documentation of whatever the piece was before being taken apart, you should treat it as NOT a Haring.

You can put some money into one of the few Haring experts for an opinion, but even with that it will be an opinion. Tricky business authenticating Haring, Warhol and Basquiat these days after the foundations screwed up so royally they were all forced to stop authenticating art.

Just as a fan on first glance Id say it has some strong similarities but I have my doubts.

Whoever it's by I love it and would have it hanging on my wall. Good buy, enjoy it

I guess the trouble is it could very well be a tribute piece, given to them.

With the hippo being outside of his more well known iconography, it could either be good or bad. If you're going to outright fake a Haring you wouldn't pick your own animal you would stick with the classics.

On the other hand the line work looks a little jittery from what I could see on the outlines, dashes and accent marks. And that heart seems a bit crowded.

Interesting piece but with the value of it if real being at least very high 5 figures to maybe even 6 figures, experts aren't going to stick their necks out for a piece without very strong provenance.

But you never know? It's too bad there is no further info from the club that owned it. That would be the place to start. Keep bugging them. Maybe someone still knows something

Yeah, if you are serious then you NEED to get on touch with multiple people at the club and try to track down some info about it. They should have some accession notes if it was ever in their collection. If it was not ever formally in their collection, that would be very bad news

The high value is actually a problem to getting the unusual authenticated.

I'm no expert but I would guess, as I said earlier, high 5 and into possibly 6 figures if it were proven without a doubt to be real. But the reality of that happening based on what you're saying is pretty slim. All that could change with documentation from the source.

I think I'm going to have to rip this apart to make sure I'm missing nothing under the matting etc.  thing is nailed and glued together solid.

After researching a bit it seems that whenever Keith wrote the word New York on his art it usually had some sort of movement to it - it was more animated and cartoonish than this artists hand writing.  Keith mostly referred to New York as NYC or N.Y.C.  He rarely used the R with a circle around it and preferred a C with a circe around it.  Below is an example of how Keith wrote the words New York.
 

I'm not an expert, just a fan. I'm not sure why people think this would be by Haring. Haring's style is maybe the most emulated of any street artist. There are some elements that look like the pics were done by a fan or emulator  but it doesn't look like anything I've ever seen by haring. If I was able to bet on if this was a Haring, I'd bet the house against it. Would never would have crossed my mind that it might be. 

Except one should not be so quick to judge.... Everyone knows the classic Haring images, but that is not by far all that he has done.

Looking at some of the elements of this out of context many would tihink this was a copy...

I don't hold out much hope that it will be authenticated, but I wouldn't be so brash as to claim I was an authority that could say either way