What happens to forgers when their fraudulent activity is discovered? As can be recognized from the biographical sketches in part I of forgers over the last century, time spent in prison is often less than two years. This is a trend that holds in Europe and the United States. Some of the most notorious forgers of recent times never served prison sentences. Hebborn, Perenyi, Landis, Qian, and Blundell avoided arrest. Ken Walton dodged prison in exchange for cooperating in the conviction of his partner. Others received suspended sentences, including Edgar Mrugalla, William Toye, and Christian Parisot (whose second offense earned him four years’ house arrest). Van Meegeren died before serving his sentence, and Keating’s charges were dropped due to his ill health (after which he lived five more years). De Hory served two months in a local jail on the island of Ibiza for charges unrelated to forgery (and later committed suicide on learning he would be extradited to France for trial there).
For those forgers who do serve time sentences vary, beginning with a year or two and often involve early release. Tetro shortened what would have been a twelve-month sentence to nine months in a work-release program. Myatt served four months of his one-year sentence, and Ribes served one year of his three-year sentence. Stein served eighteen months of a three-year term in the United States and then another two years in France. One of the longer sentences—six years—was meted out to Beltracchi, but it was in work-release or “open prison” in which he left during the day to go to a job, and he was released after three years. Greenhalgh was given four years and eight months and released after serving two years. Kristine Eubanks received a seven-year sentence but factored in was that she was already on probation for credit card fraud. Guy Hain’s first offense drew four years, of which he served eighteen months, and then for his second offense he was given four more years. Other sentences at the long end include John Re (five years and then twenty-seven to eighty-four months for a second offense), Ken Fetterman (forty-six months), and the Amiel family (Kathryn, six years and six months; Joanne, three years and ten months; and Sarina, two years and nine months). While this list does not include many less notable forgers, it serves as a rough indication of the prison time art forgery draws for those caught at it.
The creators of fake art are only part of the network responsible for its widespread presence in the art world, although they are the main focus of this book. Distribution of fakes involves many more people, some who work closely with forgers as their accomplices and others who may be at arm’s length in a sales network. It is these sellers who are in greatest jeopardy of being discovered and facing prosecution since they are on the front line of a fraud operation. When convicted, their prison time can be similar to that of forgers themselves or of greater duration. Gerald Sullivan and James Mobley, who conspired with Eubanks, received sentences of forty-eight and sixty months, respectively. Helene Beltracchi was sentenced to four years and associate Otto Schulte-Kellinghaus to five years. Robert Driessen’s sales associate Lothar Senke received nine years, with seven years and four months for Herbert Schulte. Eli Sakhai’s sentence was forty-one months. Among other dealers, of whom there are many, examples include Donald Austin, who received eight years and six months for selling counterfeit prints in his galleries in Chicago, Detroit, and San Francisco,62 and fifty-seven months for David Crespo for fake prints (the amount totaling $400,000).63 Lighter sentences include three months for Glafira Rosales (time already served), who fronted for Qian’s fakes; six months for Florida pastor Kevin Sutherland for Damien Hirst forgeries he acquired on eBay unwittingly and then tried to sell as originals after finding out their true status;64 and (in Australia) three years’ “good behavior” to John O’Loughlin for selling Clifford Possum dot paintings he completed and signed after buying unfinished works from the artist when he was drunk.65
There are various reasons for these differences in sentencing. Each case is unique. One factor, however, that often limits prosecution is that fraudulent works that can be traced to a forger have passed the statute of limitations for the crime(s) being charged. Sometimes, cases are narrow in scope, or not brought at all, for this reason. In most countries limitations run from three to ten years under either criminal or civil law for the types of crimes art forgers are accused of, such as fraud and money laundering. In the United States, the time period varies somewhat from state laws to federal law, but a uniform principle is that the clock for limitations begins when a fraudulent act occurs rather than at the time it is discovered. Thus, an artwork exposed as a fake when it was put on the market long after it was purchased could not be cited for prosecution, although there is an exception under unusual circumstances in which the limitation period may be extended through a “toll.” An example is a case in Hawaii (Balog v. Center Art Gallery-Hawaii) in which a gallery sold fraudulent works of Dalí and periodically issued updated certificates of authenticity along with appraisals of increasing value. Based on this information, the buyers held the works for ten years until learning that the gallery had been involved in questionable dealings, then sent the works for independent appraisal and found they were counterfeit.66 When the buyers took legal action for breach of warranty, the defendants cited the four-year statute of limitations under the US Commercial Code.67 The court found that the breached agreement included a promise of future performance of the goods in question, and tolled the limitation period, setting the beginning of it at the time when the performance of the goods in question (their discovery as counterfeit) occurred.
Statutes of limitations exist for the purposes of practicality and fairness to society. Over time, witnesses become unavailable, and evidence is lost or ceases to exist. With crimes in the business world, the expectation is that commerce will go on without the prospect of disruption for occurrences that are long past, as various vendors will have been paid and ownership may have progressed through several parties. It has been argued that artworks are long-lasting, and the stimulus to discover falsity in them may occur only after statutes of limitations have passed, as opposed to such items as computers, kitchen appliances, and motor vehicles, where defects typically would be discovered much sooner. The implication is that an exception for artworks should be written into law that sets the clock for limitation for a longer period than is generally the case.68 However, if the law were changed in this way, concerns about difficulties in producing witnesses and evidence, and the expeditious flow of commerce, would escalate.
Forgers have used the statute of limitations to their advantage. Perenyi, having never been arrested, waited until it had expired for the fake paintings he chose to admit to and then wrote his memoir detailing a life of forgery that describes those works. He is free from prosecution for his abundant output over many years as a forger. Sakhai was investigated for several years before he was arrested and convicted in criminal court in 2004. When the owner of one of the fake paintings he sold attempted to bring a civil suit in New York for his loss, he was unsuccessful because the statute of limitations had passed.69 Beltracchi, too, benefited from the statute of limitations for his criminal offense, which in Germany was ten years for his crimes.70 The remainder of the several hundred false works he is suspected of making and has bragged about will exceed the time limit for prosecution in the early 2020s, although after his criminal trial he did face further legal action from several individuals who purchased his fakes.
Statutes of limitations are likely to prevent prosecution for many works by prolific forgers who have plied their trade for decades before being arrested. Even when there are numerous fakes that fall within the prosecutable time period, however, it is common for only a few to be included in the formal charges against the accused party. Each work cited as false must be proven so individually. A case decided in Germany in 2018 highlights the pitfalls that prosecutors face. After court proceedings lasting three and a half years, art dealers Itzhak Zarug and Moez Ben Hazaz received prison sentences of thirty-two and thirty-six months, respectively, for the fraudulent sale of paintings by Russian artists El Lissitzky, Kazimir Malevich, and Alexander Rodchenko. Many people following the lawsuit were disappointed that the sentences were not greater, as the case was hailed as one of the most important actions against art crime in Germany in decades. The two defendants were alleged to be the leaders of a cartel operating in several countries to sell fake Russian avant-garde art. More than two dozen properties were raided in Israel, Switzerland, and Germany, and fifteen hundred works were seized. At trial, the charge sheet totaled nineteen works. When the trial concluded, the prosecution had proven the fraudulent sale of only three of those works, based on the presence of an anachronistic pigment. For the rest of the paintings, science did not reveal material falsity, and determinations then rested on connoisseurial opinion. The prosecution’s leading expert was rebutted on each count by the defense’s expert of equal standing in a face-off between art historians with a long personal history and animus toward one another.71 Courts are often faced with conflicting expert opinions, with the burden of proof falling on the reputations of the various parties offering them.
The legal case against Geert Jan Jansen, too, was problematic over identification of the works in his possession when he was arrested. Rudy Fuchs, director of the Municipal Museum of Amsterdam, considered many of them to be originals.72 Further, most of the purchasers of Jansen’s fakes declined to cooperate with the prosecution. One collector said he loved his painting even if it was a forgery, and dealers were reluctant to part with items that might earn a profit. In an interview, Jansen noted that there are many fakes on the market, and “art dealers know that, but they’re hypocrites—they don’t tell the buyers: if a dealer thinks he’s bought a forgery, he salts it away for a year or two and then sells it at auction.”73 When Jansen’s case reached trial after six years of preparation, most of the charges against him had been dropped, and he was sentenced to one year in prison (with five years suspended). He quotes one of the prosecutors as remarking, “Obviously you only had satisfied customers.”74
Beyond establishing in court that an artwork is inauthentic lies the question of the intent of the seller. The fact that a nonoriginal work has appeared in the guise of an original is not enough to determine guilt. The seller must be shown to have intended to defraud. Forgers when caught often claim they made their works as copies and informed buyers of that status. Tony Tetro’s steadfast defense that he was a legitimate copyist rather than a forger earned him a mistrial (after which he made a plea deal that averted a second trial), and William Blundell’s insistence that he sold his works (to a dealer) at the price of legitimate copies may have kept him from being convicted of fraud. Dealers, on the other hand, often say they believed the works they acquired to sell were originals since they were presented to them that way or there was no reason to assume they were problematic. To refute this claim, authorities sometimes are able to turn co-conspirators against one another, as with Michael Zabrin, a dealer in fake prints who was exposed in the US government’s Operation Bogart that unraveled the network of dealers involved in the Amiel operation. In exchange for lenient treatment, he not only informed on associates but also wore a recording device in meetings with them to provide further evidence.75 The cases of other dealers in false prints (mentioned previously for their sentences) demonstrate more factors that weigh against their claims of innocent ignorance. One giveaway is possessing an unreasonably large number of works. Gallerist Donald Austin, who was indicted based on testimony by Zabrin, held a voluminous inventory of prints, and when 490 items were examined, all were found to be fakes. His employees testified that he never ran out of prints and that when clients asked for a specific edition number they were never told it was unavailable. Austin had acquired some of the fake prints in quantities greater than the total number of originals in the edition.76 Another telltale sign of fraudulent prints lies with the signature, which in some cases is not applied until they reach the dealer who will sell them. For instance, a search by the FBI of David Crespo’s gallery revealed packages of Chagall prints along with practiced renderings of Chagall’s signature.77
Pleas about innocent intentions made by fraudulent art dealers differ from those of forgers because dealers are in the business of selling what someone else makes, whereas forgers are the makers. This basic distinction of roles carries through in the options that perpetrators of art fraud have available to them after they are exposed. Forgers are in a position to use what they did illegally as the basis for success in a legal way. Some among the high-profile forgers have leveraged their notoriety to show off their artistic skills and gain respect as well as financial reward. Others, however, have lapsed into their former criminal activity. Convicted dealers, too, may become recidivists, but what thrust them into the public eye does not carry the potential to be admired or to open an avenue for transfer to a legitimate enterprise.
Among the more prominent names in the annals of art forgery described in part I, several became repeat offenders. After serving sentences in the United States and France, David Stein painted under his own name but also was reported to have made fakes of Andy Warhol’s Superman, although he was not arrested. Guy Hain, following his release from prison in 1999 for flooding the market with fake bronzes, soon resumed his illegal manufacturing and attempted to conceal the operation by having each stage in the process (casting, chasing, patination) done at a different foundry. He was arrested again in 2002 and imprisoned. In Italy, Modigliani expert Christian Parisot followed up his 2010 conviction for selling fakes (of works by Modigliani’s mistress, Jeanne Hébuterne) with another conviction two years later for placing Modigliani fakes in an exhibition he organized.
Lesser-known recidivists also have accounted for major art fraud. Vilas Likhite, a Boston physician and Harvard Medical School professor, was involved in a 1985 civil case alleging the sale of fake art, but no action was taken. In 1989, he was in court again for selling art forgeries, and sentenced to probation. Having lost his medical license for administering experimental drugs to his patients, he moved to California and continued selling fake art for tens of millions of dollars by working through brokers and avoiding major auction houses and other parties having significant expertise.78 He was arrested in 2004 for selling a fake Mary Cassatt painting for $800,000 to undercover officers and later sentenced to a one-year prison term. His claim to possess hundreds of artworks led the prosecutor to suggest aggressive action should be taken to prevent him from putting more fakes on the market.79 Also in California, Vincent Lopreto, who had been imprisoned for five years for selling art forgeries, was arrested in 2013 as a repeat offender. In return for testifying in a case against Kevin Sutherland, who had attempted to sell fake Damien Hirst paintings Lopreto had sold him, Lopreto was given a lenient sentence and released in 2015. Two weeks later he resumed selling fakes of Hirst’s work, making prints on a printer found in his possession. He was arrested in New York in 2017 for that scheme, which involved $400,000 in sales to thirty-five clients, and was sentenced to five-and-a-half to eleven years in prison.80
These examples are of recidivist acts of art fraud that occurred after the offenders were given light sentences. Whether stronger sentences would have resulted in greater deterrence can be debated. What also must be factored in is the career-criminal pattern that may accompany fraudulent behavior. Culprits may be unable to control their impulses toward socially unacceptable conduct. And for such individuals, dealing in fake art may be only part of a larger picture of criminal activity. Art fraud, then, becomes a convenient alternative on a list of nonviolent crimes of deception.
Ken Perenyi’s career as an art forger began in combination with larceny and living on the edge of the law through connections with art-loving thief and swindler Anthony Masaccio and famous and controversial attorney Roy Cohn. Perenyi’s memoir offers a lighthearted and remorseless interpretation of stealing a bathtub, twice stealing files from a clinic occupying the building where he lived, furniture and business equipment from his building, and inventory from an auction house.81 Operating in and around criminal activity became a way of life when he was barely past his teens, with his talent for forgery gradually growing into his main source of income. Other figures whose art fraud appears along with criminal activity of varied types include Kristine Eubanks, who was on probation for credit card fraud at the time of her arrest; John Re, who served a prison sentence for printing counterfeit money before being caught as an art forger; and Michael Zabrin, whose complicated role in the industry of fake prints included a connection to the Amiel enterprise, and being caught in a sting operation in 1990 at which time he turned informant and wore a wire to collect important evidence. In return, in 1994 he received a sentence of one year and one day that was served in a minimum security facility, and within a year after release returned to selling fake prints, this time acquired from European sources. In the early 2000s he expanded to selling on eBay. In 2006 he was arrested again, once more agreed to be an informant, and while cooperating with the FBI, he was caught defrauding a business partner by selling his partner’s share of a joint purchase of Chagall prints that both thought (mistakenly) were genuine. Also during the early 2000s, Zabrin was arrested on state charges as a serial shoplifter and was shielded by federal authorities counting on his collaboration to prosecute art dealers. When the secret recordings he facilitated were completed, and his use as a witness in court had been severely compromised due to his reputation for continual criminal activities, he was sentenced in 2009 to three years’ imprisonment for retail theft and in 2011 to nine years for his sales of fake art.82
Another convicted criminal who turned to selling fake art is David Henty, after he served a sentence in Britain for passport forgery and another in Spain for selling stolen cars. He developed his skill as a painter while in prison, and afterward worked unsuccessfully under his own name before resorting to faking the works of famous artists and selling them on eBay. He used age-appropriate materials and added old stamps on the back as well as words seemingly written by the artist. He posted promotional descriptions on eBay that insinuated the paintings could be genuine, although prices ranged from the hundreds to the low thousands of pounds. A typical description stated,
Oil painting on canvas. Initialled w.s.c. Plaque on the front bears his name. Never been out of the frame, offered in original condition. One of two. . . . I have tried to provenance them. . . . there is no record of them. So reluctantly I am selling as after Winston Churchill.83
Henty was investigated by reporters from the Telegraph, who interviewed him and drew out an admission presented in a 2014 article that he had sold more than one hundred paintings under similar descriptions.84 He said an attorney-friend had advised him on how to stay just within the realm of legality. Although he was not arrested, eBay closed down the several accounts he had set up, after which he persisted by using a different Internet address. The Telegraph exposed him again in 2015 for his continuing activities.85 The publicity generated by those articles provided Henty with a forum to launch himself as a legitimate copyist. He thanked the newspaper, saying,
Since you did those stories, I have had quite a few new commissions. People read about . . . and send me letters requesting I do copies for them of masterpieces. As a result, I decided to go straight and business is brilliant. I can’t thank The Telegraph enough.86
Henty has sold his legitimate works through several British galleries as well as on his own website, with prices reaching up to ten thousand pounds for his renditions of L. S. Lowry, Picasso, Van Gogh, and other artists.87
Henty’s success in converting from art forgery to a legitimate enterprise based on his artistic ability represents the opposite end of the spectrum from forgers who continue their illegal activity after being caught. Celebrity forgers in particular are inclined to make the move successfully. Media portrayals of them as skilled artists who fooled many people have built reputations that make them not only recognizable but also sought-after for their talent. Stein capitalized on major news stories featuring his ability as a forger, including a 60 Minutes television program that generated interest among collectors.88 He had an exhibition of his works in New York that sold forty paintings in a single day before being shut down by the state attorney general (who feared the works would be resold as originals).89 De Hory was in demand after he was unmasked as a forger, which earned him several exhibitions in Madrid and London in the 1970s.90 Twenty years later, well after his death, prices for “Elmyrs” ranged into the tens of thousands of dollars,91 and fake “Elmyrs” proliferated as it was established that there was market demand for the works of a famous forger. Other former forgers have met with various levels of commercial appeal for their artistic skills. Jansen and Myatt, among others, have sold their works through gallery representation and exhibitions.
The demand in such cases is for the kinds of works that made the forgers well known. Collectors look for works that are representative of a given artist, so typically they want what a forger is remembered for but without a false signature. Works in forgers’ own styles, if in fact they make them, are less common and may be difficult to sell. Malskat in the mid-twentieth century tried to capitalize on the publicity brought about from his fake cathedral murals by selling Expressionist paintings, but his effort was ill-fated. Jansen today produces works in his own style, and Myatt has done so at times while also copying famous masters (see Figure 3.3), as Hebborn did on occasion. Landis accepts commissions through his website to create drawings and paintings from photographs clients provide, although he states that he may take a bit of artistic license for interpretation. Perenyi sells through a gallery in St. Petersburg, Florida, where he lives, as well as through his own gallery and his website, where a substantial inventory of paintings is available that imitate the masters he is known for forging. Tetro today paints replicas and stylistic renderings of masters from the Renaissance through the twentieth century.
Figure 3.3. John Myatt in his studio with his version of Van Gogh’s Starry Night. Courtesy of John Myatt
Media representations that account for the fame accrued by certain forgers, and the impetus for their legitimate sales, begin with news stories when they are caught and continue (with the exceptions of those not prosecuted) when they face trial and sentencing. Those stories are often followed up by a television documentary. Celebrity forgers who have been the subject of documentaries include Beltracchi, Ribes, Greenhalgh, De Hory, Hebborn, Tetro, Jansen, and Landis.92 Interviewers bring out their personalities, and they have the opportunity to be charming and benefit from the humanizing effect as well as to discuss and demonstrate their artistic techniques. Going further on television, Keating made a series of BBC episodes in which he shows how to paint like famous artists (Tom Keating on Painters), and Myatt, who as a young man was an art teacher, has hosted two British television series (The Forger’s Masterclass and Fame in the Frame), in which he presents art history, interpretation, and technique.
Beyond broadcast media presentations are books that offer biographical and autobiographical accounts. Memoirs allow the subjects to control the narrative to include or exclude, emphasize or deemphasize, what they please, although personalities still emerge, and biographies range from friendly to exposés. The memoirs of Hebborn and Perenyi are notable for their hubris and disdain for society’s norms. Keating’s memoir, cowritten with the journalist who exposed him and her writer-husband, conveys a lively tone and believable exploits while downplaying troubled aspects of the forger’s personal life. De Hory, when chronicled by his first biographer (Clifford Irving) through extensive interviews, recounted the same false identity he had lived with for many years. His second biographer (Mark Forgy) also presents De Hory’s version of his past but adds a candid explanation debunking his subject’s claim to aristocratic heritage and upbringing by citing the revelations of twenty-first-century researchers. A biography of the Myatt-Drewe team (Provenance: How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art) presents a sympathetic picture of Myatt, while showing Drewe (who continued to maintain his innocence despite Myatt’s admission of their scheme and other overwhelming evidence) to be an emotionally disturbed con man. The most written about of all forgers, Van Meegeren, died prematurely without composing a memoir, so writers telling his story have relied on evidence collected for his trial and on research they conducted. Based on his appearance in court and on journalistic pieces at the time, Van Meegeren was held in high regard by the public for swindling Nazi leader Hermann Göring and fooling important people among the Dutch art intelligentsia. Held back or explained away as malicious gossip was information that the forger’s weak health was due to a wildly dissolute lifestyle and that he had Nazi connections that were sympathetic as well as exploitative. Recent biographers have reestablished these factors.93
The various figures mentioned here who have been caught and adjudicated—forgers and fraudulent dealers—along with numerous others who have met a similar fate, are responsible for putting an immense volume of fake works into the art world. Sometimes during the process of arrest, a large cache of fakes is seized (hundreds to thousands), although typically only a few are submitted as evidence in a formal indictment. And prosecutors may borrow or subpoena works exposed as fakes that are held by collectors. What happens to the many fraudulent artworks that law enforcement accumulates? As with the vastly differing treatments that befall the makers and sellers of forgeries, the forgeries themselves face divergent outcomes that range from destruction to being put up for sale. Factors influencing the administration of confiscated art include details of the particular cases they are a part of as well as the nature of the legal system in the venues where those cases are tried.
In France and other countries that give strong recognition to the moral rights of artists, the destruction of false art is a more likely outcome than it is in countries like the United States, where property law takes precedence. Knowing this, owners seeking authentication for artworks are sometimes advised not to send them to France for this purpose because an assessment of inauthenticity by experts there may result in a court order for the works to be destroyed. And beyond the general tendency to destroy false works is an effect of French law that transfers the artist’s moral rights to designated heirs, often family members, who then hold the government-endorsed privilege of authenticating items bearing the artist’s name and petitioning the court to destroy fakes they discover. Maurice Utrillo’s widow is known to have made a bonfire of a large number of fakes bearing her husband’s name that had been seized on her authority.94 Among numerous other examples are two cases in 2013 in which a seized watercolor and drawing done in Miró’s name—one submitted for authorization by a collector and the other by an auction house—were declared by the Miró authentication board to be forgeries and assigned for destruction. In each case an appeal to the Court of Appeal was unsuccessful against the winning argument that only destruction would ensure that the artworks would not reach the market again in the guise of originals.95 In another case (2018), the Chagall Committee, consisting of experts and two of the artist’s granddaughters, declared a painting sent to them by a British owner not to be an original Chagall and recommended that it be destroyed. The owner, who had paid $100,000 for the artwork, accepted that there would be no reprieve.96
Destruction of fakes is unusual under the US approach to law, although it occurs on occasion, as in various other countries. Tens of thousands of fake prints confiscated from the Amiel family during Operation Bogart were slated for incineration by the US Postal Service, the agency that prosecuted the family for mail fraud.97 The intent, as with the cases in France, was to remove forgeries that could end up being sold again as originals. In Australia in 2010, the Supreme Court ordered the destruction of fake drawings bearing the names of two of the country’s most highly regarded artists, Robert Dickerson and Charles Blackman. The decision was hailed not only as supporting the public’s right to be protected from fraud but also as providing a precedent for increased backing for artists who suffer from having forgeries of their works placed on the market.98
On the other side of the issue from the advantages of destroying fake art lie key problems. The act of destruction carries an irreversible finality. There is a story in Rembrandt lore about a painting owned by a collector who learned that it was a fake because it was made on a mahogany panel, a type of wood thought not to have been used by artists in Rembrandt’s time. The collector burned the painting. Later, it was found that seventeenth-century artists sometimes did paint on mahogany.99 The art world lost what may have been an important historical artwork due to its mistakenly reduced status. While reversals regarding authenticity are usually demotions, occasionally promotions occur, and confusion caused by disagreements among experts may signal uncertainty. In one instance, two hosts on the BBC television show Fake or Fortune (2014) succeeded in convincing an authentication committee that an Édouard Vuillard painting it had rejected twice was indeed genuine,100 and in another episode of the show in 2012 three fake J. M. W. Turner paintings, in the collection of the National Museum of Wales and classified as fakes, were reclassified as authentic.101 In still other situations, such as with Jansen, there is uncertainty about the illegitimacy of works designated for destruction. As a dealer he mixed legitimate pieces with the fakes he made, which confused experts consulted in his court case and resulted in the works confiscated from him not being destroyed.
Working against the act of destroying fake art is the understanding that genuine works that have been misattributed can be lost, including the monetary value they hold. However, the potential loss extends further. Forgeries, too, have worth even after they are exposed. When that happens, their status plummets, but not to zero. They still possess monetary value in some amount. They are property, and on this basis, authorities often prefer not to destroy them but instead to return them to their owners. This occurred with Van Meegeren’s forgeries that had been bought for large sums: they were turned back to their legal owners, and the four pieces that were unsold were returned to the Van Meegeren estate for consideration in bankruptcy proceedings.102 A similar scenario often plays out after other forgers’ trials with works that were confiscated, subpoenaed, or borrowed. They are returned to owners who may choose to display or sell them as copies of well-known artists. On some occasions, if the forgers achieved fame, that factor becomes the sales pitch, as with a collection of drawings by Hebborn that were sold individually at an auction in 2014 for a total of $75,000. The auction house that handled the sale said interest was five times what would have been expected were it not for Heb-born’s reputation.103
When confiscated fakes are remitted to their owners, sometimes they are given a marking that will be noticeable to potential buyers. It might be an indelible stamp on the back or the forger’s own signature, as in 1993 with Wolfgang Lämmle, who was allowed to sign the fake paintings and drawing that put him in court and then sell them to pay the fine he was assessed in sentencing.104 A further move may be to issue a certificate of inauthenticity with each artwork returned to its owner. Here is a compromise action between destroying forgeries and returning them fully intact to be mistaken for originals. This strategy has met with criticism from skeptics who note that ways may be devised to mask indelible markings. And it has not dissuaded dealers who see an opportunity to capitalize on public interest in notable pseudo-originals that carries the possibility of mass marketing. Jack Ellis, the Postal Service inspector who led the investigation in the Amiel case of tens of thousands of fake prints, stated that art dealers had approached him to buy them: “I had lots of offers from dealers. . . . Some offered up to a million dollars to buy these prints so they could sell them as ‘the famous fakes.’”105 He also spoke against the trial judge’s surprise decision that besides incinerating many prints, eleven thousand were to be held back and auctioned off to defray the Postal Service’s legal expenses in bringing the case. The sale earned $350,000. Ellis warned that, “cover the back of the print with a mat, lose the certificate that says it’s false, and someone is back in business selling counterfeit art.”106