Original subtitles

(dramatic music)

It's the most important question

in the world wide art market.

Is it genuine, or is it fake?

When a forgery is passed off as the real thing,

there are fortunes to be made and lost.

For nearly a decade two Englishmen did just that.

Between them they produced hundreds of modern masterpieces,

and plundered major art archives to fake their prominence.

Their activities literally changed art history.

It was one of the greatest frauds

the art world has ever seen.

How on Earth did they get away with it for so long?

(dramatic music)

(suspenseful music)

Fall of 1995, out of the blue,

a woman telephones Scotland Yard

with damning information about her former partner.

It wasn't the first time in my career

that one received such a call from the woman scorned.

Here was somebody who was clearly very upset

at the breakup of her relationship,

who had, in her words, a considerable amount of evidence

to show that her husband, as she referred to him,

had been involved in considerable

criminal activity in the art market,

and had been orchestrating a major fraud.

(dramatic music)

Dick Ellis and another detective

in the Yard and Antique Squad, met the woman

at her local police station on October 5, 1995.

Her name was Bat-Sheva Goudsmid.

The two of us went and interviewed her,

first of all, upstairs in the police station.

The bizarre story she told police

uncovered a fraud that had been going on for eight years.

But Goudsmid had more damning evidence

than the two detectives could've dreamt of.

And then she said,

"I've got quite a lot of exhibits for you."

She invited Jonathan and I to go around

to a street in Hampstead where, in fact, a car was parked.

And out of the boot of that car,

she then produced several bin liner full of papers.

It was like in Aladdin's cave.

Without those bin liners,

we would've had very little evidence to go on.

(gentle music)

The trash bags contained

photographs, catalogs, and bills of sale.

It wasn't certain what it all meant,

but as Scotland Yard detectives

began sifting through the material, one thing became clear.

Somewhere in these trash bags was the key

to one of the most extraordinary

and audacious scams the art world had ever seen.

And this was the man behind it,

an Englishman called John Drewe.

We very quickly formed an idea of John Drewe,

that he was an extremely intelligent

and deep thinking fraudsman.

(gentle music)

This story goes back to the late 1970s,

when London was the center of a thriving music industry.

Soho was a magnet to anyone

who thought they had the talent for writing a hit song.

One of them was a former art student

and budding composer called John Myatt.

(upbeat piano music)

Myatt was taken on by a record company

and was quite successful.

He had a hit single called, "Silly Games".

Everything seemed to be going well.

Then one day, the man who ran the business

arrived at work with a problem.

My boss at Studio Records

had been out to dinner with Marcus Sieff.

This Marcus Sieff actually owned

the whole of Marks & Spencer's.

He came back the next time time he said, "Oh, god."

"I've seen these fantastic paintings

"by this artist called Raoul Dufy."

(dramatic music)

This Marcus Sieff he's paid $90,000 for this one,

and $60,000 for the other, brilliant!"

"I wish I'd got something like that."

I just happened to hear it.

I said, "Well, I could do that, Dick.

"Why don't you just let me do them, a couple of Dufys?"

So we went out, in the art shops,

got anything with Dufy on it.

"Well, that's nice, and that's nice.

"Oh, quite like that."

He said, "Well, they've gotta be bigger

"than Marcus Sieff's."

So I said, "Well, 250 each then."

Looking back on them, I mean, they were not very good,

but they were good enough.

He paid me 500 pounds for the paintings,

and then he went out and spent 600 pounds

each on the frames, and they hung them up.

As you went in, you saw these

gigantic Dufys over the fireplace,

and, of course, when Marcus and Lady Sieff come back,

they walk in through the door.

It's like my Dufys are bigger than your Dufys,

and no one had said anything about it.

Dick was sort of excited because really, I mean,

he could've easily spent 200,000 pounds on these paintings

when in fact he got them for 500 quid, plus the frame.

(gentle music)

John Myatt had been to art school,

but this was the start of a new career.

He set himself up in business

as a legitimate forger of the modern masters.

I just thought, "I can do this.

"It's genuine fakes, it's a good idea.

"Where can I put the advert on?

"What kind of people are gonna be interested

"in this kind of thing?

I'd always vaguely sort of read "Private Eye",

and I thought, "Well, 'Private Eye's' the place."

"Private Eye" is a small circulation

satirical magazine, with a caustic sense of humor.

Myatt thought its readers might be the perfect clients.

I think all together I put out three adverts,

maybe four in, and it got a good response.

(dramatic music)

(birds chirping)

It was not long before he received

a telephone call from a man who would change his life.

The first phone call John Drewe ever made to me

was exactly the same as the first phone call

that anybody else would.

"Hello, I've seen your advert in "Private Eye",

"are you interested in a familiar

"with an artist called Matisse?"

Well, of course I was, "Yes."

"I'd be interested in a painting by Matisse."

"Who are you?"

He said, "Oh, my name is Professor Drewe."

I said, "There was a painting by Matisse in my book,

"I think it was called "The Pink Room" or something,

"does that sound alright to you?

"Yes," he said, "that's good.

"It's a present for my wife."

(birds chirping)

John Myatt lives in The Midlands of England.

It didn't take him long to complete his first commission

for the mysterious Professor Drewe.

(dramatic music)

A few days later, he drove to his local railway station,

and caught a train to London,

to deliver his fake Matisse to his new client.

(dramatic music)

He said, "I'll be standing at the top of the platform,"

whatever it would be, at Euston Station,

and I said, "Well, you'll recognize me

"because I'll be the man carrying a painting."

The very first time we met,

we went to a little coffee shop in Euston,

and he gave me a check, and I went home.

(birds chirping)

(gentle music)

At the time, Myatt was making a living

as a part-time art teacher.

His marriage had broken up,

and he was taking care of two small children.

You know, when a thing like that's happened,

the mom has just walked off,

you really do close up into a very tight unit.

It's just the three of you,

and bedtime stories, romping around,

pillow fights and all that, it was great!

I mean, looking back on it, I loved it.

(gentle music)

Working at home, painting his genuine fakes

suited the single father.

Drewe became a lucrative client,

and Myatt grew to like him.

I thought he was very different

from anybody else I'd met before.

He was something else altogether.

He was kind of mysterious,

and intriguing, and exciting.

Every few weeks,

Myatt would take the train to London

to deliver another of his genuine fakes

to his seemingly wealthy and influential buyer.

John Myatt was soon taking the subway out to the affluent

London suburb where Professor Drewe lived.

By say, the fifth time I'd met him,

we were driving off to his house,

and there I'd meet his wife.

Then, occasionally, we'd drop off somewhere in Hampstead

and pick up the two children from school,

so by the sixth time I was seeing John,

I was actually meeting his family as well.

It just kind of grew slowly,

so that everybody got to know everybody else.

(gentle music)

Two years passed,

during which Drewe bought a dozen paintings from Myatt.

Then, just when Myatt thought the relationship

with his patron was finally over,

Drewe had a surprising request.

At the end of the painting number 12 or number 13,

he said to me, "Well, what would you like to do?"

(chuckles) It was unheard of for a customer do that.

So I said, "Well, I've always like Cubist paintings,

"I love Cubism.

"Maybe I'll just do something like that.

He said, "Okay, in your own time, very nice.

"Off you go, same money."

So I flipped through an art book,

and I found a drawing, a Cubist drawing.

I thought, "Well, I'll turn this into a painting,

"I know how to do this."

On the dining room table that night,

I, as they say, knocked up

a small Cubist's work by Albert Gleizes.

(ominous music)

That time I left there wasn't another commission,

and I got back on the train and I thought, "Well that's it.

"That's goodbye, Professor Drewe."

I won't be hearing from him again.

A couple of weeks later, maybe sooner the phone rang,

and he said, "John, you know that painting

"by Albert Gleizes that you did for me?"

I said, "Yes, John."

He said, "Well, I've just taken that into

"Christie's and Sotheby's

"and they think it's worth 25,000 pounds.

(dramatic music)

"Are you interested in going halves with me

"and having 12,000 pounds cash?"

That's when I made my big mistake really.

Because, I mean, I didn't even stop and think about it.

(dramatic music)

I just thought 12,000 pounds as far as I was concerned

was just the answer to so many problems.

The three of us could really do with that,

so I said, "Yeah, I'll do it, yes."

(ominous music)

I think, if we'd of stopped at that,

that would just had been an episode in my life

that I probably would just have buried and forgotten about.

But for some reason or other,

I was sort of dissatisfied with the way my life was.

You get to that stage when you're old,

I'd be about 40 then, you sort of think,

"Well is this all there is?

"Is this it?"

But in terms of what I was making with my life,

I just felt as though the whole thing had fallen flat

and was going nowhere.

(gentle dramatic music)

Like it or not, John Myatt

had allowed himself to be trapped by John Drewe.

John Myatt came over as a very likable man,

who seemed to have been suckered into this

by John Drewe at a vulnerable time in his life.

Myatt's just a mark.

Myatt was the tool.

Myatt was nothing more than a hammer.

You know, to pound the nail.

I think John Myatt was probably being groomed

from the first order that John Drewe made of him.

(gentle music)

From his country retreat,

John Myatt had now embarked on a life of crime.

Giacometti was next.

It was an obvious choice.

Giacometti had been one of John Myatt's

favorite painters since art school.

He used rapid movements of the pencil,

almost like a skeleton.

(lighthearted music)

He wrote in his book that as he worked,

the figure would sort of elongate

and get bigger, and get taller, and taller,

sort of that it would stretch out a bit more.

(lighthearted music)

People became like stick insects, really.

Very thin.

They'd usually have some kind of sense of a figure

actually standing in sort of space.

And that's largely how he drew.

And when you've got that far into it,

you're then ready to start a painting.

(dark ambient music)

I was so insulated from the fact

that it was a crime going on here,

that I was kind of experimenting

with my Giacometti technique at the expense of being caught.

That was very peculiar.

The Giacomettis were, I would say, second rate,

maybe even third-rate fakes, yet, they got out there.

But the success of the scam

depending only in part on the quality

of John Myatt's paintings.

John Drewe had mastered a different kind of fake,

and one which a gullible art market

found much more impressive.

He began changing the archives in some

of London's biggest galleries and museums.

How he did this was brilliant in its simplicity.

In the museum archives, he would find a catalog

belonging to a gallery that had gone out of business.

This was the starting point for his cunning fraud.

Well, we found out that his research

must've consisted on taking out catalogs from the archives,

then cutting and pasting, and creating a collage catalog,

and putting that back into what was now a corrupted archive.

These doctored catalogs consisted

of photographs of genuine paintings,

and also photographs of fake paintings.

He had juggled them, put them back in together.

So, you would have a catalog

which was just slightly changed,

and you would then have the same references,

but different pictures.

So, when any would-be art historian

went to those archives to check out

a Myatt painting new on the market,

low and behold there was everything there to suggest

that this was something which had been around

as they were being told in the provenance.

(dramatic music)

The painting's history, or provenance,

as it is called, was now impeccable.

It appeared to all the world that the fake painting by Myatt

had been part of an earlier exhibition or sale,

and, therefore, indisputably genuine.

(suspenseful music)

Drewe targeted some of London's

most prestigious museums and galleries.

The Institute of Contemporary Art,

the Victoria and Albert Museum,

and above all, Britain's foremost gallery

of 20th century art, the Tate.

(dramatic music)

At the Tate, he must've been

left alone in the archive room,

which is a small room, on the occasional basis,

and he must've been able to razor out from the catalog,

a number of exhibition leaves or full exhibition catalogs.

(dramatic music)

He then would, say, go to the lavatory,

or if there was nobody in the room at the time,

just pocket it.

And then come back at a later date,

and reinsert and glue in the new doctored catalog.

(dramatic music)

But at the same time

as vandalizing the Tate's archive,

Drewe was presenting himself as a patron of the arts.

He managed to persuade the most eminent people

working at the Tate that he was a serious art connoisseur

He was so in love with this idea of meeting

all these posh and wealthy and establishment people,

and having one over on them.

That in a way,

the money was the second most important thing.

It was the doing of it,

that I learned from working with John,

the being the professor,

the mixing with all these people,

and knowing that you knew something that they didn't.

I think you could say a typical conman's relationship

to the Tate Gallery to get to where he wanted to be,

he needed to, if you like, have

a certain amount of influence with the Tate Gallery,

and then to be able to bring that influence

to bear in backing whatever he said about works of art,

give him some credibility in the art market.

(dramatic music)

But Drewe's attempts to ingratiate

himself to the Tate horrified the forager John Myatt.

I'd done some not very good paintings by minor

French artists from the 1950s, 1960s, called Bissiere.

John had taken it into his head to present them

to the Tate Gallery. (laughs)

So, he said, "Would you come down you'd love to see this?"

He said, "Why don't you come down

"as a consultant art historian,"

and so I kind of put my suit and tie on,

and went down and attended the meeting.

(suspenseful music)

They came up from wherever it was,

and they had white gloves on.

I mean, you really had to laugh.

It was just so unreal.

(suspenseful music)

This one guy, I think he was the deputy head of it,

he said, "Well come down with me,

"Mr. Myatt, and I'll show you

"where we're going to hang these."

So we went from this lovely boardroom

into the gallery itself.

He said, "Now, we're gonna have one this side there,

"and one on that side of the down there."

What can you say?

I said, "Very good, very good choice."

The only time I really got furious with John Drewe.

I really did, I just thought,

"Do you want to get caught?

"What are you doing?"

The worrying thing from my point of view

was that there was no oil paint on them.

"It was all emulsion paint.

"It was house paint."

There I was sitting in the boardroom

of the bloody Tate Gallery with two paintings,

which had just been painted in emulsion paint.

They were saying, "We're just going to take these down

"to conservation to have a look,"

and I thought, "Oh, Christ.

"Why does he do this?"

Drewe's tactics took great nerve,

and there was method in his madness.

You might consider this as an odd move to do

on a fraudman's side, but it's not.

It's actually quite a clever thing to do,

because if he can get the Bissiere hung up in the Tate,

it's literally 100% provenance

that you've got a genuine Bissiere,

and that's what he was trying to do.

(gentle music)

We walked along Millbank and found some pub.

That's where I had a crack at him.

It's the only time I really did have a go at him,

because I just felt you're on a different planet here.

This is just stupid.

I think it made an impression on him.

He said, "Well, what am I going to do then?"

I said, "I don't know what you're gonna do,

"but what you are gonna do is you're gonna

"get those paintings out of there."

(dramatic music)

John Drewe came up with

an extraordinary way out of the predicament.

He would retrieve the forged paintings

by giving the Tate a huge donation.

He came up with something.

There was a problem with the paintings,

so he gave them 25,000 pounds instead,

and he got the paintings out.

(suspenseful music)

I got them back, and I burnt them.

I was so relieved to have got them back.

I put them in the bonfire and burnt the damn thing.

(dramatic music)

I'd love to have them now, I must say.

Those are the paintings that nearly made it into the Tate.

(birds chirping)

John Myatt and John Drewe

continued conning the art world,

selling forgery after forgery

into a seemingly insatiable market.

Myatt could hardly believe he was getting away with it.

After all, Myatt was only using household water-based paint

mixed with petroleum jelly.

Meanwhile, John Drewe was cleverly doctoring Myatt's

canvases to make them look older and more authentic.

He would then change the stretchers at the back.

That was the first thing he did usually,

put old stretchers on.

Then he would also use furniture tacks,

which he would treat with salt,

and so that would corrode them,

so they looked nice and rusty around the edge.

Perhaps a bag of dust out of the Hoover

on the back of the thing.

The Hoover would go off so there was dust in the crevices.

(vacuum humming)

Just a bit of coffee or tea on the front,

just to take the edge off it.

The technique seemed to be working,

and Myatt's paintings were selling well.

Little did they know, that someone was on to them.

In 1991, a painting came up for sale at Sotheby's,

the prestigious auction house in London.

The picture of a standing figure

was apparently by Alberto Giacometti,

one of the most influential artists of the 20th century.

Myatt had spent the previous four years

trying to perfect his Giacometti forgeries.

It might sell for $300,000.

(gentle music)

But across the English Channel, in Paris,

there were doubts about the authenticity

of Myatt's Giacometti.

American Mary Lisa Palmer lives and works

in the French capital.

She is one of the world's leading authorities on Giacometti.

In November 1991,

she received a copy of an auction catalog,

and her suspicions were immediately aroused.

My first reaction looking at the reproduction,

it was wrong, there was something wrong.

(dramatic music)

Let's say that in this painting

there were several different elements

that you can find in an authentic painting,

but, like you had a certain kind of background,

you had a little sort of a sketch of what would be

a canvas put against the wall on the side of the figure.

You have the body of a standing woman,

but the head it looks like a head

that Giacometti could have done,

but it's a head of a man.

So a head of a man on a female nude is sort of strange,

and, of course, the signature was a bit thick,

and a bit too well applied.

(gentle music)

Mary Lisa Palmer immediately flew to London.

She examined the picture at Sotheby's,

and told the experts there what she thought.

Well, I told them that, unfortunately,

that I thought that the painting was incorrect,

and I asked them if they could give me an x-ray of the back,

and they said that, "Miss Palmer, other people

"who know the work of Giacometti think it's fine,

"and on top of it, the provenance that is given

in our auction catalog, you will find the proof

"of the pudding in the Tate Archives."

(dramatic music)

Problem was, that according

to the Sotheby's catalog,

the authenticity of the Giacometti was impeccable.

Its provenance was listed in detail.

Undeterred, Mary Lisa Palmer

went straight to the Tate Gallery.

As Sotheby's promised,

she found a photograph of the dubious Giacometti

in the Tate Gallery archive,

but she came to a different conclusion.

If the painting was fake,

so too was the provenance.

What I discovered that day was that

someone was tampering with the archives.

This was extremely, extremely dangerous for the art world.

(dramatic music)

Mary Lisa Palmer's startling discovery

raised more questions than it answered.

How long had the scam been going on?

How many other fakes were there?

And by how many artists?

And how was it that some of the best experts

in the art world had been so totally duped?

Among the many artists that Myatt was now forging,

was Ben Nicholson, a British artist producing

abstract paintings after the Second World War.

I said to John Drewe,

"Ben Nicholson would be a good choice.

"Because, from his point of view,

"from the provenance point of view, he was English.

"So you didn't have to worry about

"provenancing the things abroad."

Myatt set to work trying to master

the seemingly simple process of producing a Ben Nicholson.

I tend to sort of stick with him from about 1950 to 1960,

and during that period, he was kind of playing with

a limited number of shapes which were based on

jugs, goblets, mugs and things.

When I was passing these off as fakes,

I wasn't doing them as well as I am today,

in fact, the things I'm doing today

of Ben Nicholson are much, much better.

I struggled quite a lot in early days.

It was really just a learning curve for me.

(lighthearted music)

Actually, this isn't quite nice.

I'm fed up of doing those now.

Look, this is Henry Matisse.

(lighthearted music)

(dramatic music)

To convince the experts of the authenticity

of John Myatt's Nicholson fakes,

they needed to know more about the way the artist worked.

I remember putting my best suit on

and going to some Cork Street gallery,

or other which have got a Nicholson in the window,

and saying can we have a look at that,

and a very nice, young lady came out

and showed us the paintings, and we got a result.

We knew what they looked like,

where the gallery stickers were,

where he'd sign them.

On the stretcher, actually.

On the top right inside of the stretcher,

and that was a vital,

an integral part of doing what we were doing,

was knowing how that worked.

(gentle music)

John Myatt began turning out Nicholsons,

while John Drewe put the new information

about the artist to good use.

He was very good.

I mean, he was quite a handy carpenter.

In that, he used to make the frames in the same way

that Nicholson made his frames.

He got me to actually do the Ben Nicholson signature

on the wooden stretcher at the back of the canvas.

It worked.

Myatt's fakes passed the ultimate test.

The chilling thing, I think,

was that these paintings would be shown to,

in Ben Nicholson's case,

I mean Ben Nicholson's son-in-law,

who had been a senior figure

at a very important British gallery,

was saying, yes, and authenticating these paintings.

(gentle music)

As John Myatt was churning out

the fakes at home, unknown to him,

John Drewe had made contact with the police.

But about something quite different and much more sinister.

We met at the Battersea Heliport,

where this character came in the helicopter,

and it was John Drewe.

He had his two children, and, of course,

the pilot and co-pilot of this helicopter

he'd hired for the day just to impress

the detectives from Scotland Yard.

He came through with this long story

of how he was a professor, or this that and the other,

and how he came across these mafioso

trying to sell stolen paintings and so forth.

From the start, Charlie Hill had his doubts

about the man who was offering himself

as a police informant on the Italian mafia,

especially when Drewe invited him to a restaurant

that Charlie Hill understood to be a hub of mafia activity.

In retrospect, what John Drewe was up to

became perfectly clear to the Scotland Yard detective.

He realized that he was about to be

revealed as a conman, and a fraudster,

and he wanted to get himself a coup as a police informant,

so he could use that as a line of defense.

There were plenty of other people

who were taken in by John Drewe,

and art experts who fell for John Myatt's fakes.

In 1994, a man called Clive Bellman walked into the gallery

of a private art dealer, Peter Nahum.

Nahum had spent years working for Sotheby's auction house.

He now had a substantial reputation

as a dealer specializing in 19th

and 20th century painting.

When Clive Bellman came to us,

we were in the middle of the deepest recessions

in the art trade, and he explained a few things.

We'd never met him before.

He'd explained that the reason

he was selling these pictures,

which belonged to his neighbor,

which was a private collection,

was that he had owned a couple of

jewelry shops, et cetera, and gone bust.

Now, we feel great sympathy for people

who have lost their businesses.

To take him on face value,

you'd of been perfectly happy with it.

I'm very sensitive to shifty people,

and Clive Bellman did not appear to be shifty to me.

The painting Bellman was trying to sell

was by Graham Sutherland,

the provenance from an Italian monastery.

I didn't like the painting at all,

I thought it was dreadful.

But, Christie's had just sold a group of these paintings,

with the same provenance, from the same monastery,

for a great deal of money.

(dramatic music)

Little did Peter Nahum know,

that the painting was a fake by John Myatt,

the provenances forged by John Drewe.

One of the Sutherland's that we got,

a beautiful Graham Sutherland crucifixion,

and John Myatt just did the same crucifixion,

but with a different color.

Instead of having yellows, there was reds.

Both of them, Graham Sutherland colors,

the specific red that Sutherland used.

Beautiful little jewel of a painting.

(dramatic music)

What Drewe had done, he had gone to a monastic order,

and he had told them that he had got,

from one of the sales of their books,

a whole load of Graham Sutherland paintings.

He then got a stamp cut with Order of Servite Mary,

which approximated to the stamp that they actually did have,

and he stamped the paintings.

Peter Nahum took the provenance

of the Sutherland at face value,

paid Clive Bellman $7,000 for the painting,

and put it in a Christie's auction.

Well, they put it an estimate of 10 to 15,000 pounds,

and it was unsold.

We still have it, or the police have it.

Peter Nahum was another victim of the scam

Drewe had launched on an unsuspecting art world.

But so too was Clive Bellman,

and he wasn't the only innocent recruited by John Drewe.

As with all con men, they use people.

They get out of them what they need,

and then they discard them.

There's no support, there's no loyalty.

They are users and abusers,

and that's exactly what John Drewe was.

He told all his friends and acquaintances

that these were perfectly genuine paintings.

That some of them he'd inherited.

He used people who weren't crooks.

He used straightforward people,

who were not involved in crime,

to present his numerous paintings

at the various auction houses.

He stayed in the background.

He would send out runners.

He couldn't be seen in too many places at once.

(gentle music)

By this time, the gloss was already beginning

to go off the criminal life for John Myatt.

He went along to the sale of some of his fakes

of Jean Dubuffet at a London auction house.

For whatever reason, he couldn't go,

and he said would I go to this auction of Jean Dubuffets.

And, I did.

I had the same kind of feeling, actually.

Every time I got to the sharp end of what was going on,

I really didn't like it.

I think they got about 40,000

or 50,000 all together these things.

I walked up King Street, and then up the Strand,

and then back towards Piccadilly, and I thought,

"Well, this is the point where I really should feel happy."

This is where you roll credits,

and everybody lives happily ever after.

"Why do I feel so

"fed up with everything?"

John Myatt finally decided he had enough.

He called up one day from a telephone,

and I said John, "You've just gotta (bleep) off.

"I can't do this anymore, (bleep) off."

"He said, "Did you just tell me (bleep) off?"

I said, "Yes, yeah, (bleep) off, John,"

and down went the phone.

I remember, phew, that's that.

That's that, by fork, spoon, and blood.

Done it.

(gentle music)

As the relationship between

the two men deteriorated,

what neither John Drewe nor John Myatt knew,

was that their forgery scam was about to be rumbled.

When Clive Bellman paid his next visit to Peter Nahum,

he arrived at the gallery with a painting by Ben Nicholson.

It came with full provenance, labels on the back,

a catalog in which it was exhibited at the Rue de Seine,

or one of these non existent galleries,

some gallery in the 1950s.

It came with a certificate from the Ben Nicholson expert,

who was the ex-director of the Tate Gallery.

I decided to buy it with somebody else, a friend of mine.

This picture wasn't a great Ben Nicholson,

but it was quite colorful.

We thought it was absolutely genuine.

We did not think it was good enough to offer to our clients.

But we thought it was the sort of picture

that clients of Sotheby's and Christie's,

because it was colorful, would pay good money for,

so we bought it as a purely commercial transaction.

Nahum even took the painting

to the curator at London's Tate Gallery,

who had recently mounted a Nicholson exhibition.

He privately said, "It's not a great one, but it's okay."

(dramatic music)

Nahum and his partner put the painting

into an auction at Sotheby's in New York,

and sold it at a $15,000 loss.

We are now at the point where we have bought two pictures,

two Myatts, Drewe pictures,

and we believe them both to be genuine.

One is waiting for sale in Christie's,

one been sold in Sotheby's.

Some while later,

Nahum was offered a second Ben Nicholson,

by a man claiming to be raising money

for a charity representing the victims

of the Auschwitz concentration camp.

My partner on the other Ben Nicholson,

and I, are looking at this Ben Nicholson,

beautifully signed on the back

in Ben Nicholson's handwriting,

in pencil, exactly as he does.

It has all the paperwork,

the catalog with it, illustrated in from the 1950s,

and we're looking at the picture,

and the scales start falling from our eyes.

because there are labels,

gallery labels on the back, provenance labels,

and we think, this Ben Nicholson has exactly the same

provenance and gallery labels as the previous one we had.

Now, what are the chances of that?

Not great.

Then we said, "Well, this is a bit of a worry."

So then we look at the signature, beautifully written.

Once you realize, the handwriting starts falling apart.

Brilliant, but you realize not quite good enough.

(dramatic music)

I had put the whole scam together,

and I put all the documentation together,

and I called in the police.

(dramatic music)

He believed that these were probably

two sources that were linked.

He showed me letters that he'd received,

and from his professional viewpoint,

having looked at the paintings further,

he considered they were probably by the same hand.

We were looking at a sort of well versed fraud,

with a forger working behind it.

(dramatic music)

Peter Nahum had worked out

that the Sutherland also was a fake,

but he did have a name for us,

and that name came back to Drewe.

Within days, John Drewe's name came up again.

The next piece of the jigsaw actually

sort of fell into place very quickly.

Dick Ellis got a call at Scotland Yard

from the man who ran the Tate Gallery.

He was concerned that he'd been talking

to people within their archives,

that they had a problem within the archive,

that somebody who had donated

a large sum of money to them, 20,000 pounds,

and as a result had sort of being given the key at the door

could have now caused some damage to the archives,

actually been utilizing them to mastermind a fraud.

Of course, the name John Drewe was thrown in again.

(suspenseful music)

The last piece of the jigsaw puzzle

came with a dramatic visit to the police

of John Drewe's estranged partner.

With the contents of the trash bags

now under police examination,

the eight years of fraud and fakes

was about to come to an end.

In the bin liners,

the most prevalent thing was negatives,

hundreds of negatives of a number of different artists.

We had Giacomettis.

We had de Staels.

We had Bissieres.

We had Jawlenskys, Aveclunes, Dubuffets.

It covered at least 30 to 40 artists.

You name it, 20th century modernists were there.

It became pretty clear that there was

all the indications of not just a large scale fraud,

I think we'd all seen that before,

but there was evidence there that archives,

and not just from the Tate Gallery,

but from other galleries had been cut up, had been copied,

and clearly this was of great concern to the art world that

where they go for their historic records

have now been contaminated in this way.

(gentle music)

The first stop for the police

as they began to unravel the extent of the fraud,

was once again the Tate Gallery.

Told the Tate that we had

an interest in Giacomettis,

because we've got a large amount of Giacomettis.

We worked out, in fact, in the end there were between

20 and 30 Giacomettis which had been done.

We wanted to know the Giacometti expert,

and we were put onto Mary Lisa Palmer.

(gentle music)

In Paris, Mary Lisa Palmer

had been waiting four years for this moment.

Finally, finally.

We arranged that we'd go to London

with all of our documents,

which weighed quite a few pounds.

(bright music)

Within a week,

Palmer was sitting in Scotland Yard

telling detectives which paintings were genuine,

and which were not.

The trash bags also gave police

the name of John Myatt as the forger.

(dramatic music)

Early in September 1995, they raided his home.

It was six o'clock in the morning

when Jonathan Searle and a team of officers

from Scotland Yard arrive at John Myatt's home

deep in the English countryside.

I was in bed.

I opened the bedroom window,

and looked down at the path and there they all were.

I think he was half expecting a call from police.

He knew it would come down the line someday or another.

When they said, "This is Scotland Yard

"Arts and Antiques squad,

"we have a search warrant for these premises,"

yep, I just sort of went, click, that's it.

Everything else is in the past now.

This is a whole new thing from now on.

Awful, terrible.

He put his hands at once,

and he wanted to come alongside.

They came in, and I remember saying,

"Well, you know, have a look around,"

and funnily enough, there was a drawing of Sam on the wall.

As soon as I walked into the kitchen,

I saw a drawing on by the fridge,

which had got telephone numbers written on it,

and I knew, "Ah, this man can draw.

"If he can draw, he's probably a good enough artist."

Then I looked up the stairs, and I saw a Giacometti.

We were there.

(suspenseful music)

And I showed them all over the house.

They took paintings, and they took books,

I got a Giacometti up on the wall, they took that.

Sam came downstairs and said,

"Dad, who are all these people?"

I said, "Oh, don't worry son,

"they're building inspectors.

"The house is freezing cold.

"They're gonna put a central heating in or something."

I said, "You just get on and do what you do,

"I'm gonna stand outside and wait for the school bus."

So I got Sam on the bus and came in,

and they didn't make too much mess.

They took filing cabinets and all the rest of it.

Said, "Well, you'll have to come up

"across to the police station in Stafford."

All the time I'm thinking, "Damn this."

I'm sort of cross and also frightened.

I've never dealt with police in my life really.

(tense music)

We took all the paintings that we found,

and there were a number of other bits and pieces,

and we took them back to Stafford police station,

and we did an interview at a caution there.

"Yes, I do know John Drewe.

"Yes I have painted some paintings for him."

John Myatt knew the game was up,

especially when confronted with a particularly

incriminating piece of evidence.

They'd confiscated my briefcase,

and in this briefcase they got this letter,

and this was a letter I'd written to John Drewe

saying I think it's best that we stop doing what we're doing

because I'm fed up with it, and da da da da.

And he said, "What's this letter?

"You don't want to work with John Drewe anymore?

"What do you mean you don't want to work with him?

And I said, "Well."

I was kind of spluttering, and thinking, "God,"

and they're saying all these things

it's being taped all the time.

So, they went on and they started telling me

what they thought Mr. Drewe had been up to,

and what they thought I'd been up to.

It became pretty clear

that they knew more about me than I did,

and more about him than he did.

They knew everything, pretty much.

(dramatic music)

As soon as we had an interview with John Myatt,

we knew exactly where we were going.

We knew the depth of the problem.

We knew we had, for example, approximately 200 fakes

covering a large miscellany of artists.

Myatt may have confessed,

but it would still take time to nail John Drewe.

John Drewe was a much harder nut to crack on this.

As the police honed in on Drewe,

the focus of their inquiry moved across the Atlantic.

(dramatic music)

A reputable New York art dealer

named Armond Bartos had a Giacometti.

"Standing Nude" 1955, that he wanted to sell.

A year earlier, he had approached Mary Lisa Palmer,

asking her to authenticate the painting.

For me, it was simple in a sense.

For me, the painting was fake.

Therefore, everything was fake,

but then I had to prove it to people

who didn't want to believe it.

Palmer warned Bartos

to be extremely cautious about the painting.

She had, after all, already exposed one fake Giacometti.

She played for time, while she did more research.

Meanwhile, Armond Bartos had decided to get his

own confirmation of the provenance of his Giacometti.

He hired a company called Art Research Associates

to investigate the authenticity of the provenance.

Little did he know, that the man he was paying

from Art Research Associates was none other than John Drewe,

the man who had forged the provenances in the first place.

(gentle music)

Armond Bartos flew to London,

and met Drewe at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Mary Lisa Palmer heard about the Bartos visit,

and tipped off the police, who monitored the encounter.

It was a very sweet sting,

because not only had he sold through intermediaries,

Armond Bartos, a Giacometti new debut,

but now he was showing him his forgeries,

to bolster up his claim that this was a genuine.

This shows that an honest dealer

like Armond Bartos can easily

be taken in by the fact these are cast iron provenances,

and the provenances were very, very good.

After the meeting,

police broke the news to Bartos

that he had been duped by Drewe.

The poor man was not very happy.

He was, I believe, quite angry at the time.

In fact, furious, understandably.

Police decided it was time

to pull in John Drewe.

Within days, they raided his house

in a wealthy town 20 miles from London.

John Drewe was very polite, courteous.

The surprising thing to me was the amount of evidence

that he had still got in his possession,

incriminating evidence in terms of

the seals which we had seen on various documents

he'd created, we found the seals.

Typewriters that he used.

Even on the table in the living room

were sets of documents that he was

in the process of actually preparing.

A huge amount of documentary evidence,

material objects had been preserved.

Drewe was taken to the local police station

where he denied everything.

He came across

as somebody who could quite convincingly

call black, white, and white, black.

He accepted and took on board all the exhibits at once,

but then proceeded to tell us that they were all genuine.

At the end of it he invited us all out for a drink,

on the grounds of how nice we'd been and pleasant.

The four month trial ended in London

in February 1999.

Drewe conducted his own defense.

It had its moments of sheer farce when,

I mean, I would turn around to him and say,

"What the hell are you doing, John?

"I mean, I know you're guilty.

"You know you're guilty.

"They know you're guilty.

"Everybody knows you're guilty.

"So why don't you just plead,"

and the judge would say, "Mr. Myatt,

"would you please answer Mr. Drewe's question?"

I couldn't see the point.

We were gonna get found guilty,

and we were guilty.

We were probably gonna go to prison.

The best thing to do was just straighten up your shoulders,

get your thumbs in line with the seam of your trouser,

and just take it on the chin, there was nothing else to do.

John Myatt pleaded guilty,

and was sentenced to one year in prison.

(dramatic music)

John Drewe maintained his innocence throughout,

but he was convicted,

and sentenced to six years in prison.

(gentle music)

Five years after leaving jail,

John Myatt had an exhibition in London's Mayfair,

the home of the art establishment,

where his fakes had deceived so many for so long.

I've got a show in Central London,

the heart of enemy territory.

What am I going to do.

We had a dealer walking around here earlier on,

and he was obviously a dealer the pinstriped suit,

and almost, not quite the dicky-bird,

but everything, the cashmere coat and so forth.

He walked around with his hands behind his back.

He just went out.

He looked at the little Matisse down there,

and he said, "Jolly good Matisse", and off he went.

Very nice.

Even the police responsible

for his demise wanted a genuine Myatt.

Jonathan Searle asked him to paint a family portrait.

He said, "Yes, yes, I'll do that for you,"

and commissioned it for a grand.

And Charlie Hill has a Myatt too.

He sent this to me last week.

"To Charlie Hill, from John Myatt.

"Very best wishes for 2006 and beyond,"

and he has signed it as John Myatt rather than Magritte.

It's amusing and it's well done,

and I like the man a great deal.

(gentle music)

The exhibition was a sellout,

and John Myatt thinks he knows why.

Most people will come in the right kind of spirit,

which is that it's a bit of fun.

It's a bit of a laugh.

Looking at a fake painting is a liberating experience.

You don't have to pretend to like a fake painting,

because it says, "Hello, I'm a fake painting."

You say, "Oh, you might not go with the curtains,"

or, "My wife might not like that

"kind of little red blob in the corner."

You can't say that to a Van Gogh or a Monet,

because they're worth 25 or 30 million pounds.

So it kind of liberates you to make your own judgment,

trust your own judgment.

(gentle music)

But how much damage was done by Myatt and Drewe

in their years of fraud and forgery?

The most damaging aspect is that John Drewe

literally created and changed art history

by literally planting fake provenances in the archives.

So he changed the body of work of Giacometti,

and the other artists that Myatt faked,

and really damaging the sense of history and legacy.

(gentle music)

Of the 200 or so Myatt fakes,

only 72 have ever been found.

Two dozen Graham Sutherland crucifixes,

the 20 to 30 Giacomettis,

a number of Ben Nicholsons, about two dozens,

a number of Chagalls.

We recovered a Clay, a small drawing,

quite a pretty little drawing.

Five Dubuffets.

And so on.

John Myatt though,

has no intention of letting on now,

which paintings are genuine, and which are Myatt fakes.

They're out there,

and they will blossom and flourish as leaves on a tree.

Why not?

If anybody came back to me with one that I'd done,

and after 20 years I honestly wouldn't know for certain,

but I thought, I had, I would always say,

"No, I haven't seen this.

You know, if you come to me with one and say,

"Did you paint this 20 years ago," and I said, "Yes,"

all that's happened is that you've lost a fortune.

So, what's the point?

What is the point?

(upbeat music)