Original subtitles

In this episode of American Greed, Glafira Rosales is a novice to the New

art scene, but she has all the right moves.

She really played the relationships right. She says she holds the key to a

treasure trove of never -before -seen masterpieces.

Jackson Pollock with famous drip paintings, Mark Rothko, Robert

These are paintings that go for millions of dollars each.

A tale with enough mystique to draw millionaire buyers.

Collectors are greedy for recognition and for artwork that lends

them prestige.

But before you open your wallet, you may want to look twice.

Every aspect of the story behind those paintings was a red flag.

It turns out skilled forgers know how to splash paint, too.

Glafiero Rosales was able to take 63 paintings, get $33 million out of them,

then the gallery stole them for $81 million.

And Glafiero Rosales is a modern master in the art of the con.

The experts believed it. Collectors bought it. It was auctioned off by big

auction houses.

I mean, this woman was sitting on top of the world.

Teaming with gallery, museum, and hundreds of art dealers,

New Yorkers work hard to keep their art capital booming.

So in 2011, when one of New York's most venerable art galleries suddenly closes

its doors, the art world is in shock.

Knoedler and Company has been in business since 1846.

And according to art historian Jack Flam, they've held a sterling pedigree.

Knoedler and Company had one of the largest reputations of any art gallery

the country and one of the largest reputations of any gallery in the world.

Its legacy was built by supplying art to Gilded Age tycoons like Cornelius

Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller, and J .P. Morgan.

Over the years, it evolved.

It handled old master paintings. It handled modern master paintings. And

from around 1970 or so, it handled contemporary art.

And in each one of those domains, it really handled blue -chip art.

Knoedler's closing after 165 years is surprising.

But the real kicker comes when rumors start to surface that Knoedler is

embroiled in a massive art fraud.

People who had bought paintings from Dozer were coming forward, having their

paintings forensically tested.

And soon, former federal prosecutor Jason Hernandez and U .S. investigators

prove that a supplier provided the gallery with fakes sold for millions of

dollars to some of America's wealthiest collectors.

What those paintings represented would have been one of the greatest finds.

of the Abstract American Expressionist School.

And these are paintings that go for millions of dollars each.

Knoedler, along with the gallery's director, Ann Friedman, say they've been

fleeced, just like their clients, by a persuasive swindler named Glafira

Rosales.

Glafira Rosales is an incredibly sophisticated con artist.

Maria Konnikova is the author of The Confidence Game, a book about

She became intrigued with the story when the rumors started to erupt.

What drew me to it wasn't just kind of the glamour of the art fraud

world, but how it is that incredibly smart people sometimes believe things

to an outsider seem incredibly dumb.

According to court documents, Glafira Rosales and her boyfriend, Jose Carlos

Burgantinos Diaz, arrived in the U .S. sometime in the early 1980s.

We don't know that much about what her life was like in Mexico, which was her

home country. We know that she worked in different jobs in the United States,

some in the art field.

First, they settled in Houston, where Glafira waits tables and Jose finds work

as a kitchen helper.

It takes them little over a year to earn enough money to move to the real city

of dreams, New York.

In 1986, Rosales is granted permanent residence.

She and Jose Brigantinos have a daughter and buy a small house in the suburbs.

Rosales even fulfills her childhood aspirations and opens a small gallery

business called King's Fine Art.

What Glafira Rosales told people was that she was from a family that loved

that had a lot of people come to their house for art salons. And so from a very

young age, she was fascinated by this world.

Sometime later, Rosales meets a well -liked figure in the New York art scene

happens to hold a position at Knoedler Gallery.

He offers to set up a meeting with the gallery's director.

Anne Friedman.

Anne Friedman was pretty new as the director of Knoedler.

She'd been very successful in her art career and someone who knows how to sell

things to people, which is what you need in the art world. But now she really

wanted to make a mark as the female director of this really prominent

As luck would have it, Rosales is looking to make her mark too.

So in 1995, when 40 -year -old Glafira Rosales breezes into Notre and Company

with a canvas, she's the epitome of a well -dressed and cultivated art dealer.

Lawyer Luke Nikas represented Anne Friedman in what's been called the art

of the century.

You have a woman who's unassuming. She's not slick. She doesn't have this well

-planned story.

a relationship with a man who inherited the painting from his father, and he

lived in Mexico, and he just wanted to get rid of this collection.

Friedman leads Rosales upstairs to a small drawing room.

The painting's warm, peachy background with two ethereal clouds of color is

immediately recognizable as the work of Mark Rothko, a leading artist of the

abstract expressionist movement.

Rothko, along with Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, and a few select

were leaders of the abstract expressionist movement that emerged in

during the 1940s.

That handful of artists are the artists that are the most valued, have the

largest reputation, and in some cases also fetch the highest prices.

People don't walk in off the street carrying a Rothko, and Anne Friedman

it.

When questioned, Rosales spins her tale of growing up in a prominent Catholic

family in Mexico, surrounded by the creme de la creme of society.

That's where Glafira came in contact with the heir to a secret art

man she refers to only as Mr. X.

To begin, she would try to sell the collection of a painter friend, someone

whose confidentiality she wanted to respect.

And so he became known as Mr. X.

Mr. X's father had been a patron of the abstract expressionist art scene.

He purchased artwork straight from the artist's studios, paying in cash.

So the assets and taxes were never declared.

According to Rosales, there's another family secret that needs to be kept.

This man is married, not a family, and he was a closet homosexual.

And in Mexico, supposedly, it was dangerous to be a homosexual at that

so the man had died, and now his son was selling the pictures, but he wanted to

do it as discreetly as possible.

But there's a bonus, and it's alluring.

This Rothko is just the tip of the iceberg.

Her secretive client has a collection of previously unknown works by Robert

Motherwell, William de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and more.

Pollock painting in 2015 went for $200 million.

Only a few years before that, a Rothko went for $86 million.

There are really big numbers involved.

This collection has been hidden in storage for decades.

But Rosales is not an expert in abstract expressionism.

and her own gallery is too small.

It doesn't seem to matter that few in the art world have heard of Rosales.

This art is some of the most valued art of the 20th century. People pay tens of

millions of dollars for it, and we haven't had anything new in it for a

The gallery's new director, Anne Friedman, is dazzled by the prospect and

profits.

Up next on American Greed, Rosales' promise of a trove of masterworks is too

good to pass up.

Can you imagine being the one to discover this previously unknown

of abstract expressionist art?

You're not just making a name for yourself, but you are becoming the name.

Up until now, Glafira Rosales has been circling the fringes of the New York art

scene.

She didn't know that much about art, to be perfectly honest, but she picked up a

lot from the people around her. Her new contact, Anne Friedman, the director of

Knoedler Gallery, has the power to launch her into the upper echelons.

Glafira was delivering a great product.

that she knew would catch the attention of the right people.

Glafira's portrayal of the unassuming novice is picture perfect.

I always think about the excitement that Anne Friedman felt, like the excitement

you might feel finding dinosaur bones.

It's this unearthed discovery.

But a slight drawback emerges.

The recorded history of ownership that proves its authenticity is called

provenance, and this one is murky.

Provenance is a really important concept in the art world.

The story was that they were purchased by a family, a collector, directly from

the artist, often purchased outside the back of the gallery in exchange for

cash, and they had been kept in storage, basically, for decades.

So if you believe that story, the lack of provenance actually makes sense.

So over the next decade, Clefiro Rosales provides Knoedler with a few new

paintings each year, all by heavy hitters.

She sells additional works to art broker Julian Weissman, another New York art

dealer.

Her anonymous collector, Mr.

X, turns out to be the gift horse that keeps on giving.

The most high -profile artists, Jackson Pollock, Rothko's, Motherwell's, I mean,

you name it, it was there.

And discretion is fundamental to the rare art market, where collectors are

tight -lipped about selling.

Secrecy is highly prized in the art world. When you're a buyer, you're not

entitled, for example, to know who the seller is.

Or if a broker comes in with a piece of art, they don't have to necessarily

disclose who their client is.

Still... Rosales' secret collector poses a vexing setback when it comes to

negotiating prices.

The more provenance you have, the more detail you have, the more likely the

is going to sell for a higher price because the backup is there.

When Anne Friedman pushes her for more details, Rosales names David Herbert, a

deceased New York art dealer, as the go -between.

She hears the name David Herbert as someone who has been associated with

artists who was also part of the gay community at the time. And so all of a

sudden, David Herbert can be someone who's connected to Mr.

X.

To help shore up the murky provenance, Knoedler shows the works to art experts

to get their opinions.

Dan Friedman and other galleries showed these paintings, including the very

first one that came in the door to some of the finest experts in the world on

Mark Rothko.

They saw these paintings, several of them, and said these are convincing.

Art historian Jack Flam recalls viewing a painting at Knoedler by Robert

Motherwell.

She showed me a Motherwell elegy that was on the floor in her office, and she

said that she had just got it.

Flam had been close friends with Motherwell until his death in 1991.

The work is credited to Motherwell's Spanish elegy series, and it catches him

surprise. In the elegies which became his signature paintings from 1948 to

when he died in 1991, he painted over 170 elegy paintings.

They're also the paintings of his that fetch the highest price on the market.

Friedman never mentions the name Glafira Rosales.

Instead, the works are generally referred to as the Herbert Collection.

And she asked me if I remember correctly, at that time, whether I'd

of someone named David Herbert.

And I said, no, I had not. And she said he was a well -known art dealer.

And, you know, at the time, I thought, well, you know, that's nice.

Jack Flam doesn't think of questioning Knoedler's rock -solid reputation.

And so, you know, you're in Knoedler, you don't think twice.

And of course there's that added boon for buyers who are willing to accept the

lack of documentation.

These are artists that are really, really difficult to get and that command

incredibly high prices. Now imagine you can get those works and at a bargain

price. So not only are you a brilliant art collector, you're also a pretty

genius businessman.

Some collectors are more wary than others.

Rosales sells this purported Jackson Pollock to Knoedler for $750 ,000.

In 2001, Knoedler turns around and sells it to Jack Levy, a co -chairman at

Goldman Sachs, for $2 million.

With one caveat.

The sale hinges on Knoedler obtaining a review verifying its authenticity from

the International Foundation for Art Research, otherwise known as IFAR.

It had a panel of experts put together to give their views about the painting,

and they wrote a report.

But IFAR won't positively attribute the work to Pollock and deems the provenance

questionable.

Knoedler discreetly cancels Levy's sale and refunds his $2 million.

But Knoedler's mission is to sell.

These works were really exciting.

And some really smart, prominent people have bought these works for their

collections. A California collector pays $3 .1 million for a painting said to be

by Jackson Pollock.

John Howard, who runs a billion -dollar equity firm...

purchases a William de Kooning for $4 million.

In 2004, Domenico del Sol, a chairman of Tom Ford and Sotheby's,

buys a purported Rothko for $8 .3 million.

Next, while Rosales and her gallery clients are celebrating their lucrative

alliance and million -dollar sales...

Eyes are on another painting that's popped up on the market.

I had certain kind of in my gut misgivings about it.

By 2006, the market for abstract expressionist art is enjoying a

Thanks in part to Glafira Rosales' collection of never -before -seen

masterpieces.

For works by major artists to come up on the market, it's extremely rare. But

for multiple works by the same artist to come out of the same collection is

very, very unusual.

The alliance between the little -known Rosales and the prestigious gallery like

Knoedler might seem strange, too.

But it appears to be kismet.

Rosales just built slowly this relationship of trust.

She would talk to Anne about her daughter's musical talent.

She would talk with her every single birthday. This is the sort of thing that

really made Anne Friedman trust Glafira Rosales.

While Rosales is the supplier, Anne Friedman is the face that makes the

Meredith Savona was formerly with the FBI's Art Crimes Unit.

She offers an analogy of Knoedler's prestige.

If I buy a diamond from Tiffany, I'm not going to then take it to find out if

it's authentic. I bought it from Tiffany.

If I buy a painting from Knoedler Gallery, I have to assume it's an

painting. It had that same kind of reputation.

Often there'll be experts who...

in their heart of hearts, think that a painting is fake, but they'll never

express it. And part of that is due to the politeness of the art business, but

really it's also driven by the fear of being sued.

So in January 2007,

art historian Jack Flam is at odds when a Robert Motherwell painting popped up

at Julian Weissman's, another New York art broker.

We had no record of it, and this is always very exciting to see a new

The Spanish elegy reminds him of the mother well he saw in Friedman's office

before.

But there's something strange in the details.

I had certain kind of in my gut misgivings about it and was by then 50

or more.

And although it was warped, the front of it, the paint was not warped or

cracked, which looked odd.

He holds his tongue despite his misgivings.

You're always advised not to police the market. It's not your job.

But nonetheless, you want to protect your artist's legacy.

As it happens, Flam is also president of the Daedalus Foundation, founded by

Robert Motherwell.

Daedalus is in the midst of compiling a catalog raisonne on Motherwell.

A catalog raisonne is a gathering of all the work by an artist, by...

common usage, it becomes the standard for establishing what are the authentic

works by the artist and what is their authentic history.

During the process, researchers track down every known work by Motherwell.

They enter it into their database and assign it an ID number.

Can you see the difference in the late 50s?

They still kept that sense of spontaneity.

While studying seven paintings attributed to Motherwell's Spanish elegy

they notice a striking anomaly.

My team showed me digital images of the fronts and the backs of the Spanish

elegies, and there were six from 1953, and this new one was 1955.

When we saw the back of this one, we saw that it was signed very much

the way the others.

were, for example, Robert Motherwell and then underneath it the date 1955.

And then on a painting that was supposed to have been done three years earlier

in 1953, once again, Spanish elegy in quotation marks and full caps on the

top. It was exactly the same printing and the date in the same place.

But Motherwell's signature is known to be inconsistent.

Motherwell in particular signed pictures in different ways in different months.

So this was a real tell.

This really made us suspicious.

Another tell has to do with the two words Spanish elegy.

Now this is something that Motherwell himself often said, like Spanish elegy

paintings, or that's a Spanish elegy. But he did not put that on the backs of

the paintings. And this is especially significant because...

Those paintings that we're beginning to suspect were fakes had the title Spanish

Elegy on them.

Another tell, and perhaps the most damning in Flam's mind, has to do with

technique. If you look at the crispness and the intensity with which the real

paint is painted, and you look at this, which is all kind of muffled and soft

around the edges, Motherwell was very proud of and very careful about is the

in which...

He used variations of edge. So you get very sharp edges, very soft

edges. So that kind of variation was something very important to him.

But something that the forger misses entirely.

Their findings leave no doubt to Flam that the elegies are fake.

For Daedalus, it just begs the question, where did these pictures come from?

And going through the database, we found that none of these pictures had a

provenance that went back before 1999.

First owner for four of them, Anne Friedman Knoedler Gallery.

Other three, Julian Weissman.

This is more than bizarre.

You've got seven paintings.

Four of them come from one gallery, and they're almost like one from one gallery

the next year, one from the other.

one from one, one from the other.

Up next, more questions arise about Rosales' elusive collector, Mr. X.

I come to suspect that Mr. X did not exist.

Every aspect of the story behind those paintings was a red flag.

The art market can be secretive.

Sometimes super -rich buyers and sellers opt for discretion.

Sellers like Glafira Rosales.

Glafira wasn't ostentatious.

She didn't have flashy clothes. She didn't have an

extraordinary mansion that $30 million can buy.

She had a nice home.

On Long Island, she had a nice, authentic collection of art.

And she lived a good life.

But brokering art for her anonymous client, Mr. X, has put plenty of money

her pocket.

The most lucrative sale comes in November 2007 when hedge fund

Pierre Lagrange buys a Jackson Pollock painting from Knoedler for $17 million.

So over the course of 15 years, Golfiero Rosales was able to take 63 paintings,

get $33 million out of them, and then the gallery sold them for $81 million.

At this point, Jack Flam and researchers from the Daedalus Foundation appear to

be the only skeptics.

In fact, Flam finds the story of Mr. X astounding.

And, you know, this sounds like a classic, you know, these paintings are

to my aunt by her lover, and, you know, nobody was supposed to know about the

lover, and now the lover's dead and she wants to sell the paintings. I mean,

this is a classic story for confronting fake paintings.

He lays out his suspicions to Ann Friedman, the director of Knoedler

My expectation was that she would be grateful.

Because we're alerting her to a possible fraud, and therefore she could take

action. She could go back to the person she was getting them from and say, hey,

what's the story?

And instead she started arguing with us.

While Anne Friedman declined to speak with American Greed, lawyer Luke Nickus

defended her in later civil cases.

Anne Friedman believed in these works.

She spent the...

better part of 14 years doing diligence in them, hiring experts to research

them, and she really believed in them.

So this was very disturbing. We had no doubt that the paintings were wrong,

Anne was being hoodwinked by someone.

In December 2008, Daedalus refuses to enter the newly discovered works in

catalog raisonne.

The vast majority of people who own works by an artist, they want it to be

the catalog resume because this is a sign of authenticity.

To mitigate their concerns, Knoedler agrees to submit the Spanish elegy to

forensic testing.

They run an arsenal of tests, including infrared spectroscopy, to help determine

whether or not certain materials are present in a painting.

The results?

Paint that was found that didn't exist at the time of some of these artists.

In particular, the presence of acrylic polymer emulsion paints.

But Robert Motherwell did not begin using this kind of paint until the

Based on the findings, the Daedalus Foundation refuses to stand by any of

seven Motherwell elegies.

As rumors ripple to the art scene, more collectors are eyeing their paintings.

Everyone who knew this body of work, whether they thought the paintings were

real or whether they thought the paintings were fakes, all said the same

If one of them is fake, they're all fake.

Flam makes the decision to quietly contact the FBI.

Jack Flam is probably the hero of this story because the FBI was involved early

on. But he kept it very quiet, and other people who knew what was going on kept

it very quiet, which is the way that we can do our investigation.

Next on American Greed, what will it take to stop a fraud?

From the time the painting was created to where it walked through Knoller,

was nothing but gap.

There was no paperwork.

There was no trail.

There was no record.

By 2009, Glafira Rosales is enjoying a long and lucrative run as the supplier

coveted masterpieces.

The market got hotter and hotter, and it was something that Glafira Rosales was

able to take advantage of.

She's the biggest blessing the art market has seen in decades.

But the gravy train is about to derail.

So it turned out that I was not the only person.

who thought the paintings that were coming through Knoedler and Julian

were fake.

But people weren't talking to each other.

British billionaire Pierre Lagrange, who bought a $17 million Jackson Pollock

from Knoedler in 2007, is ready to let it go.

But suddenly he's having trouble unloading it.

He tried to sell it at one of the big auction houses, and they refused to sell

it. And because of Jack Flam's tip, The FBI Art Crimes Unit is now curious about

the slew of paintings attributed to the same elusive provenance.

We had to go down every avenue to find the negative, to find that Mr. X did not

exist, to find that the client did not exist.

When former Assistant U .S. Attorney Jason Hernandez joins the case, his

objective is clear.

To get a criminal prosecution for fraud, you have to prove beyond a reasonable

doubt that someone intended to commit a fraud, and that's the highest burden in

our law.

Rosales may be the likeliest suspect, but it's not that simple.

You want to try and figure out some link to an artist, to a manufacturing

facility, to purchases that are suspicious, anything that would give us

as to who's making the paintings and where they're coming from.

But every lead fizzles.

He decides to dig at it from another angle, the Internal Revenue Service.

I had never worked with the IRS before, and I thought, oh, man, now this is

going to take forever.

And it didn't.

Enter IRS Special Agent Eric Yonke to follow the money.

It's hard to walk away from bank statement while your transfer's in

Between 2006 and 2011, Rosales asked the galleries to deposit her payments to

two Spanish bank accounts, BBVA and Caja Madrid.

During the three years of the investigation that we took into

received over $14 million from prominent New York City galleries for the works

of art that she was selling.

And central to Rosales' story is that she's an art broker for her Spanish

client. If that's true...

She would pay 90 % to her mysterious client and collect a standard fee of

She says she's representing somebody. Well, it's obviously got to go back to

somebody.

And if it's not going back to the person she claims to be representing, then

there is nobody she's representing.

The biggest red flag was her sending the money directly overseas after selling

the pieces of artwork.

The nail in the coffin was that she wasn't paying any clients.

In particular, Glafira Rosales' mysterious client, Mr. X.

What that told us was that her story was false. There is no family in Europe

that owns these paintings.

These are paintings that are almost certainly fake, and that she's pulling

scam and keeping the money in foreign bank accounts.

The bank accounts linked to two new suspects.

Her longtime boyfriend, Carlos Burgantinos Diaz, and his brother,

While it strengthens the fraud case, it also breaks another case wide open.

Tax evasion.

During 2006 -2008, we saw her receive a ton of money, and the majority of it

sent overseas.

So we were able to look at that and see how much she reported on her tax

returns. She was reporting...

just over $2 million received for those three years, when, in fact, she was

receiving over $14 million.

She was reporting peanuts in her tax returns.

So from there, she's understating her income, lying on her tax returns, and

she's also hiding the Spanish bank accounts overseas.

In May 2013,

Glafira Rosales is charged and held for tax fraud and money laundering.

If convicted on all counts, she's looking at up to 34 years in prison.

In the ensuing weeks, Pierre Legrand sends Knoedler an expert's report that

Jackson Pollock painting he purchased for $17 million is yet another fake.

One day later, the long -esteemed gallery closes its doors.

Over 60 of these paintings spanning multiple artists, but it was really only

toward the end of the scene that the full picture was really brought to bear.

Up next.

Glafiero Rosales reveals the shocking source behind the scheme that duped the

art world for millions.

I was very surprised when I found it was one man who had done all of those

paintings.

In 2013,

Glafiro Rosales' astonishing 15 -year art scam appears to be over.

She got so enamored of what she was doing and thought that she was so good

that she would absolutely never get caught.

But now, if Rosales is convicted on tax and wire fraud charges, she faces more

than three decades behind bars.

The magistrate judge denied her bail, and her being detained, held without

probably caused her to think real hard about what her options were in this

Clefero Rosales admits to passing off fake paintings as real with the help of

her boyfriend, Jose Carlos Bergantinos Diaz, and his brother, Jesus.

One of the things that makes the fraud like this successful is a good false

provenance. And the Bergantinos Diaz brothers were adept at that. They would

conduct research in the historical record, in books, anything they could

that... When the paintings were passed off, it was believable.

Glafira also names the artist Forger, an elderly Chinese immigrant in Queens

named Pai Shan Qian.

For 15 years, Pai Shan Qian became Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell,

Franz Klein, Mark Rothko, and any number of artists.

In the 1970s, Cheon used to paint portraits of Chairman Mao for schools

factories before immigrating to the United States.

He didn't have much luck as a serious artist in the U .S. and resorted to

hustling portraits on the sidewalks of Manhattan.

This is someone who Jose Burgantinos Diaz and Glafiero Rosales found just

painting in New York City one day, and they challenged him.

They explained to Qian how buyers are simply looking for works in the manner

abstract expressionist masters.

They asked him to paint in the style of Rothko or Pollock to see if he could do

it. And not only could he do it, he could do it well.

For the next 15 years in his modest studio in Queens, Pei -Shun Qian creates

dozens of lookalikes.

This is a painting created by Pei -Shun Qian, the forger.

It's a painting that's supposed to look like Mark Rothko. It had the right color

scheme. It had the right style for Mark Rothko. You can see if you get close,

you can see some of the brush strokes, all consistent with the way Rothko

painted. But it takes more than technique to fool savvy dealers.

According to Rosales, that's where Jose stepped in to add his expertise.

You need an older canvas for a painting that's supposed to be 60 years old.

So they would go to flea markets and look for paintings that were the right

and frames that were of the right age.

Once Pai Shun finished a painting, Burgantino's added another touch of age.

He would do things like empty the vacuum cleaner dustbin into the painting so

that dust and dirt would get into the crevices of the painting as you would

expect to find in an older painting.

And he would stain the canvases with tea bags and do other things to them to

give them the appearance of age.

Lastly, Bergantinos forges a signature.

You can see it's white paint that he used to paint the actual words. But when

you get close, you can see a brown tint to it. And it looks old to the naked

eye. But when you actually test it, the brown is not... From

grime or age, it's like a varnish on top to make the white not so brilliant.

But in some cases, the red flags were remarkably apparent.

Like if anyone had bothered to look closer at this pollock that hung on Anne

Friedman's wall for decades.

The signature for this work is down here in the lower.

Right corner, you can see the forger didn't spell Pollock correctly.

It appears that he left out a C.

Investigators aren't sure whether Pei Shunchen is onto the scam from the

beginning, but it's clear he eventually caught on.

As a matter of fact, there came a time where he learned how much the paintings

were being sold for, and he negotiated a raise.

IRS agent Eric Yonke determines that Pei Shun -Chien gets paid a few thousand

dollars each for his imitations of top abstract expressionists.

Mr. Burgantinos was paying him $3 ,000 to $8 ,000 per painting, which is

compared to what Ms. Rosales was initially selling them for. She's

for hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars.

In September 2013...

Glafiro Rosales pleads guilty in court to wire fraud, money laundering, and tax

evasion.

By the time Glafiro confesses, Pei Shanqian has fled back to China.

If fame and fortune was what he was hoping for, then perhaps he is a

His works were in prominent museums. They sold for tens of millions of

in the aggregate.

He was a famous artist, but not for who he was, but who he was pretending to be.

Jose Carlos Burgantinos Diaz and his brother have taken refuge in Spain.

In 2016, Spanish courts ruled against extraditing 60 -year -old Diaz. He and

brother still face charges in the U .S.

Here in the States, Glefino Rosales is left holding the bag.

She got nine months of home detention, and she got some supervised release

and she got restitution and forfeiture to the tune of

about $81 million.

In her defense, attorneys argued that LaFerre's boyfriend put her up to the

scheme. He was the one who had found the art forger, who then supplied Glyphura

Rosales with the paintings.

A string of civil cases have been filed against Knoedler and Company, art

dealers Ann Friedman and Julian Weissman, and others taken in by

No criminal charges were filed against them.

This is so egregious that there are people who will... go to their grave

Anne Friedman knew, the Knoedler Gallery knew, Julian Weissman knew. How could

they not know? Because they themselves have never been on that end, and they

don't realize what it means to be the victim of a con artist.

Glyphira Rosales really embedded herself in the art world in a careful way

that allowed Knoedler Gallery to look at the situation and say, this is

convincing to us.

Julian Weissman declined to comment for American Greed.

To date, most of the lawsuits have been settled out of court. The defendants

have denied any wrongdoing.

Art and jewelry are the last sort of fashions of unregulated business.

If you're a collector, if you're in this art world, it truly is buyer beware.

This was the discovery of dinosaur bones that turned out not to be dinosaur

bones.

Glafira Rosales perpetrated the most important, most significant art fraud in

this century.

Repair and Synchronization by Easy Subtitles Synchronizer 1.0.0.0