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Sachi, have you ever bought any counterfeit products? Um, not counterfeit, but I do love a dupe, you know? Like it's not trying to be the main thing, but it basically looks like it. I do feel like counterfeits have gotten a lot better in 2023. And I'm wondering, do you think you could tell the difference between like a real purse and a fake one? I sure can't.
Well, the story I'm about to tell you is about the lengths some people go in the name of baking it and why sometimes it's just more fun to believe the lie. It's August 2010 in Freiburg, Germany. It's a medieval town in a forest at the foot of the mountains. With all the red gabled roofs and church spires, it looks something out of a storybook.
Tonight, it's pouring rain. Wolfgang and Helena Belchocki are on their way to dinner with their two children. We don't know where they're going, but it is probably somewhere fancy. They're enormously successful art dealers, and they know how to live in style. But deep down, they're hippies. Wolfgang has graying, shoulder-length blonde hair and a goatee. He's probably wearing some loud, colorful shirt and a fedora.
Helena is a beauty with blue eyes, bangs, and long blonde hair that goes almost to her waist. Think Stevie Nicks. All of a sudden, five vans with flashing lights and sirens pull up and force Wolfgang and Helena's car to stop.
German police officers surround them. Wolfgang, Helena, and their kids are being pulled out of the car at gunpoint. Wolfgang and Helena seem like gentle, artsy people, but they knew an arrest was coming. For decades, they've been leading one of the most sophisticated and lucrative counterfeit art schemes in history. From Wondery, I'm Sarah Hagee. And I'm Sachi Cole. And this is Scamfluencers. Scamfluencers.
Sachi, this is a fun one because the scam required a specific set of skills, dedication, and real artistic talent. For nearly 40 years, the Balchakis made off with tens of millions of dollars. But to them, the real scam is the art market itself.
a shady business created by the ultra wealthy for the ultra wealthy that's full of artificially inflated prices, money laundering and tax evasion. Plus, they had so much fun pulling this off. I'm calling this one The Scam Artist is Present.
Wolfgang and Helena's story is essentially one about the fallout from World War II. So we're going to start there in the summer of 1940. It's the dead of the night in the south of France, and the German painter Max Ernst is about to return home. Max is approaching 50. He's tall and thin with shocking white hair. In peacetime, he's kind of a babe. But right now, he's emaciated and terrified because he's recently escaped from a prison camp.
Max was arrested on false charges of being a spy. But that was just a pretext. It seems like he was really being persecuted because of his art. Max is one of the leaders of the surrealist movement, and the Nazis decided his work is degenerate and must have been painted by a criminal. But none of that matters to Max now. After traveling 80 brutal miles on foot, he's about to be reunited with his lover, the artist Leonora Carrington.
When he finally limps up to his ancient stone farmhouse, he's crushed to find it abandoned. Leonora left a note. It says that all the stress of Max's incarceration has caused her to have a complete psychotic break. She sold the house for a bottle of brandy, freed their pet birds, and caught a ride to Spain. She says she'll wait for him there.
Max is heartbroken, but there's still something he needs from inside the house: his paintings. So he meticulously removes some of the smaller canvases from their stretchers and rolls them up in newspaper. He takes as many as he can carry and sets back out into the night. He's heard the Museum of Modern Art is helping artists escape to America. If Max can make it out of Nazi-occupied France, he and his art just might survive the war.
He's not the only one in this desperate situation. Tons of other artists have left Europe, fleeing the Nazi purge. A lot of their art is lost, destroyed, or stolen. This chaos doesn't just create a gap in art history. For a talented scam artist, it creates a perfect opportunity. ♪
It's 1961, two decades after World War II. Max has survived the war and settled in America. Thousands of miles away, in The Hague, Wolfgang Fischer is entranced by a painting. He's 10 years old and pale and thin. He's visiting the Kunstmuseum, and he's staring at a cheerful winter landscape by the 17th century Dutch painter Hendrik Averkamp.
The painting depicts a bunch of townspeople ice skating on a frozen lake. They're all eating, drinking, and playing games. Sure, it's winter and the sky is gray, but it's kind of a party. Wolfgang is spellbound. His aunts who brought him to the museum explained that Averkamp was deaf and mute.
As Wolfgang later tells it, this is when he starts to feel like he's channeling the artist. He can hear the skater's blades on the ice as if he's hearing for Averkamp, and he grows cold like he's out on the frozen lake. The sensation is new, but art is in Wolfgang's blood.
Back home in Germany, his dad restores churches and paints reproductions of Picassos and Rembrandts as a side hustle. He sells them for cheap at open-air markets. Even though his parents never speak about the war, young Wolfgang can't help but internalize their trauma. So he escapes into fantasy. He daydreams constantly, rarely speaks, and can't stop sleepwalking. That's why his parents have sent him on this trip to visit his aunts.
They're hoping the change of scenery will help him snap out of it. This experience with the painting of the frozen lake leaves an imprint on Wolfgang. For now, art and fantasy are coping mechanisms, a way for Wolfgang to deal with the trauma of his childhood. Little does he know, it will eventually make him rich and get him into a lot of trouble.
Let's jump ahead another two decades or so to the late 1970s. Wolfgang is a young artist approaching 30 with striking blonde tresses and a devil-may-care charm. He's drifting around Europe and North Africa on a motorcycle. He spent much of the last decade traveling, smoking weed, and dropping acid with U.S. troops. Wolfgang makes a living buying and selling paintings at antique markets. It means he can travel where he wants and work only when he needs money.
Today, he's trying to sell an 18th century painting of a frozen lake. And a fellow dealer lets him in on a secret: if there were people in the painting, you could get much more money for it. So Wolfgang decides to experiment. Before reselling the painting, he paints his own pair of skaters onto the canvas. Then he presents it to potential buyers as if the skaters were always there, painted by the original artist.
Replicating the style of this unknown 18th century painter comes easily to Wolfgang. He's worked as his father's apprentice when he was younger, and when he was a teenager, he whipped out a convincing Picasso in a single afternoon. Wolfgang later claims that his father was so shocked by this accomplishment, he didn't pick up a paintbrush for two years.
Before he dropped out of art school, one of Wolfgang's teachers claimed that his work was too good to be original. The teacher accused him of forgery, and Wolfgang was forced to get his high school art teacher to vouch for him. When Wolfgang resells the painting with the ice skaters in it, he turns a decent profit — way more than he would have gotten otherwise. So he keeps buying Dutch winter landscapes, painting people into the scenes, and reselling them.
But it's a pain to find paintings from the 1700s. So he starts making new paintings from scratch, working in the style of more modern painters. People like the surrealists and expressionists are much easier to impersonate. And when Wolfgang brings these paintings to the market, they fetch way higher prices than the winter landscapes. Wolfgang is making easy money that lets him live on his own terms.
But he has no idea that his solitary hustle is about to come to an end. He's going to meet someone who will take his small time scheme to the next level.
It's February 1992 in Cologne, Germany. 34-year-old Helena Belczocki sits in an editing trailer. She works for a movie production company and she's about to meet the director of an upcoming project. Eventually, the filmmaker arrives. It's Wolfgang. He's stepped away from forgery because the art market has plummeted over the last few years. And now he's making a documentary about, and I'm not kidding here, pirates.
By now, he's made so much money as an art forger that he's even self-financing it. So far, he's bought an 80-foot sailboat and hired a five-person crew. He plans to sail the routes of his favorite pirates and film it. I don't know why every time men get money, they're like, I need a boat. Listen, if you were really into pirates and you had the money, you'd buy a boat too. I am defending Wolfgang here. I'm sure this will age well.
Well, at first, Helena is totally put off by this dude. As she later tells Vanity Fair, she thinks he's, quote, a real big mouth, a lunatic.
But after a week of working closely with Wolfgang, Helena falls for him hard. He has a big ego, but he also has vision. Plus, he's exciting and creative. And Helena is passionate about art. She promptly leaves her husband and moves in with Wolfgang. The pair bonds over more than just art.
They both grew up with chronic survivor's guilt, raised by parents who were shell-shocked and traumatized by the war. And when he tells Helena about his art scam after just three days of knowing her, she's actually into it. As she later tells the German news magazine Der Spiegel, quote, when you're really in love and know that he's the one, you just have to accept it. If he had said he was a dentist, now that would have been bad. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
I love her. I'm very charmed by her. Yeah. Okay, I'm on board. Well, the art market is starting to bounce back and Wolfgang wants in again. He offers Helena an opportunity. He wants her to be the beautiful, charming dealer selling his paintings. And she says yes. Helena quits her job at the production company and Wolfgang gives away the boat and pays his crew at a loss of about $100,000. Wow.
About a year later, Helena and Wolfgang get married. Wolfgang takes her last name and becomes Wolfgang Beltrachi. He later claims he never cared for his own name, and the name Beltrachi has a quote "artistic aura." But the change also helps him reinvent himself in this new chapter and ditch a potentially compromised name. He and Helena are ready to begin a new life of wedded bliss and massive international fraud.
It's the fall of 1995. Helena and Wolfgang have been married for about two years, and they now have a one-year-old daughter named Franziska. Helena is meeting with a representative from Christie's Auction House to discuss a painting called "Girl with Swan." It's by the German expressionist, Heinrich Compendank. Saci, care to describe the painting?
So it's in like a lot of like blue and red jewel tones and yellows. And it appears to be a naked woman walking through a forest and looks like she's going to kiss a big swan. Well, the Christie's rep can hardly believe what she's looking at. This painting had been considered lost for decades. And now here it is fully intact.
She has so many questions. How did it survive the war? Where was it all these years? And how did Helena get her hands on it?
Helena explains that a well-known Jewish art dealer named Alfred Flechtheim offloaded a huge portion of his art collection to her grandfather when he fled Germany during the Nazis' rise to power. It had been collecting dust in secret ever since, until Helena stumbled across it after her grandfather's death. Of course, Wolfgang made this painting. But the story does seem plausible enough if you don't know that Helena's grandfather was a Nazi and probably would have not worked with a Jewish art dealer.
The Christie's rep has a lot of questions, but she doesn't dig any deeper. She's just happy to see the painting has survived. And the rest of the art world is happy to join her in believing the lie. But eventually, they're going to have to see the truth about Wolfgang, whether they want to or not.
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Part of the reason Wolfgang's scam works so well is because his process is so complicated. He starts by looking through something called a catalog resume. It's basically a list of every work an artist has ever made, along with details like how big it was and other titles it went by, plus images if they exist.
Wolfgang scans Compendonck's list, looking for paintings that are considered lost and have no photos. He already knows that the artist had to leave hundreds of paintings behind when he fled the Nazis, like "Girl with Swan."
Then, he reads all about the life and times of Compendonque and immerses himself in the artist's world. He and Helena travel to places in Germany where Compendonque worked. They listen to the music Compendonque would have listened to in 1919, eat the food he would have eaten, and Wolfgang absorbs the mood of the places where the paintings were made. He studies the light. He and Helena also visit museums to see Compendonque's surviving paintings in person because printed reproductions never get the colors quite right.
Then, they scrounge around antique markets for paintings from around 1919. They carefully remove the paint because what they really want is the old canvas. Wolfgang always mixes his own paint to make sure his work will hold up under lab analysis. Well, nearly always.
And when he's finally ready to work, Wolfgang invents the painting, imagining a version of what he thinks Compendonque might have created. As he begins to lay paint on the canvas, he can feel Compendonque's presence over his shoulder, like he did with Avercamp as a child. Wolfgang gets so immersed in his work that not even Helena can get through to him.
He barely eats. He loses weight. And when the painting is done, Wolfgang signs the artist's name at the bottom. H. Kompendonk. The signature is the only thing Wolfgang has directly copied from Kompendonk.
Otherwise, he's painted his own original work in the style of the other artist. Finally, Wolfgang's Girl with Swan goes into a little chamber Wolfgang built. He bakes a painting in a furnace until it's dry and has an aged look of a piece from 1919. Okay, so he isn't just imitating Wolfgang.
Campendonk's old work, he's like creating entirely new ones based off of his aesthetic. Yeah. So he's trying, he's also like writing pages of history then. He's also changing like what we know about art history. He's creating a new reality that's so believable because it's lost. Dang. Impressive.
And as a finishing touch, Wolfgang and Helena design labels to supposedly prove that the paintings are from Flechtheim's collection. They're aged with coffee and tea, and they're attached to the backs of Wolfgang's paintings. Wolfgang's fakes are good. But after a while, galleries start asking for documentation of Helena's supposed collection. So the couple decides to create some evidence. They stage a photo. They arrange a room with old furniture and hang up copies of the paintings.
Helena poses in the scene cosplaying as her own grandmother. Then they capture the image on an antique box camera and expose it on pre-war photo paper. Sachi, you gotta check this out.
Well, this looks I mean, because I know it's fake, it looks ridiculous. But if you receive this as proof that somebody had a grandmother, I suppose I would buy it. This is a classic grandmother photo. This is yeah, I would not look twice at this. Yeah, she looks unhappy and she's wearing pearls. What else is there?
When you were a kid, did you ever have to do like an art project where you make like a like a note from a pirate? And you take like a tea bag. And you burn the edges. Yeah. Yeah.
And it seems like Wolfgang and Helena are having fun with it too. It's also paying off. Girl with Swans sells for more than $100,000 at the Christie's auction. And Sachi, it's been authenticated by an independent comp and donk expert. On paper, it's real. And with fakes this good, the potential sales are astronomical. But Wolfgang and Helena are about to learn that with sky-high prices comes sky-high scrutiny.
It's July 1996, about a year after the Christie's auction. Helena and Wolfgang have sold their house for $1.7 million and packed their two-year-old daughter, Franziska, into a pink and turquoise Winnebago. They claim the move is for Franziska's benefit, and maybe it is, but also they're dodging the law.
Wolfgang's name had come up in an art forgery investigation and the police were looking for him to testify as a material witness. And obviously the Belczockis are terrified of being publicly linked to the forgeries. So for the next few years, they maintain a base in the south of France while traveling across Europe and as far as Asia. Manuel, Wolfgang's son from a previous relationship, comes to live with them.
In 1999, the Beltracchi's finally put down roots. They buy an old farmhouse sitting on 69 acres of French wine country and start funneling money into renovations. After a while, the German police stop looking for the Beltracchi's. And it turns out, even after the family's close call, things have never been better for them. They have plenty of money and Wolfgang only needs to sell two or three paintings a year to maintain their wine country chic lifestyle.
Now, there's nothing stopping them from pushing their scheme to the highest heights of the art world. It's December 2001, and a man named Otto Schlute-Kellinghaus is taking two of Wolfgang's paintings to an expert.
Otto is tall and thin and pale and always dressed in black, which is why Wolfgang has dubbed him Count Otto. Otto used to sell forgeries for Wolfgang back in the 80s, and the two have recently started working together again. Wolfgang needs a different dealer because he's worried that Helena might be overexposed as a face of their scheme. Under the new arrangement, Otto gets to keep 20% of the painting's sale price, and the potential sales on this particular day are high.
Because the paintings Otto is carrying are by Wolfgang mimicking the style of Max Ernst. He's a surrealist painter who walked 80 miles after escaping from Nazi custody back from the beginning of our story. Up until this point, Wolfgang and Helena have been forging the work of lesser-known artists to keep a low profile. But now that the German police have stopped looking for them, they're ready to go for the big fish.
In order to get these paintings sold, they need to get them authenticated. That's why they've sent Otto to Werner Spies. Werner is 64 years old, serious, clean-shaven, and almost always dressed in a suit and tie. He's the world's foremost expert on Max Ernst. Remember how each artist has a catalog resume? Well, Werner wrote the one for Max. Werner was also friends with Max and has the authority to authenticate his work.
Otto knows that if he can get these paintings certified by Werner as originals, there is no limit to what they might sell for on the open market. He nervously watches as Werner stares at the paintings. But he breathes a sigh of relief when he sees a look of excitement spread across Werner's face.
Werner must be thinking, what are the chances that not one, but two of Ernst's paintings considered lost had actually survived the war and are in perfect condition? It feels like a miracle. Werner immediately begins a process of issuing certificates of authentication for both paintings. Soon, a collector in Geneva buys them for the equivalent of almost $900,000.
Then the forgeries start changing hands on the market for greater and greater sums. It brings Wolfgang enormous wealth, and he's about to see his paintings in one of the world's most famous and respected museums. The only problem? He can't take credit for his work.
It's the spring of 2005 in New York City. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is hosting a Max Ernst retrospective almost 30 years after his death. Let's imagine Wolfgang and Helena are in the museum, strolling through the galleries hand in hand. Life has been pretty good. The family takes vacations to places like Spain and the Caribbean. They rent 18-bedroom villas and spend their days scuba diving and sailing on their yacht, Voodoo Child.
Wolfgang named it after the Jimi Hendrix song. Now, as they cruise the Max Ernst retrospective at the Met, they linger near one painting in particular. It's called The Forest No. 2. They relish the incredible secret they share. The artist is present right here in the gallery.
Wolfgang painted the Forest II from the comfort of his French villa. Now, it hangs in one of the most important museums in the world, next to paintings Max Ernst made between stints in prison camps. And no one can tell the difference, not even the people closest to the artist. Later, the Beltrachis claim that Dorothea Tanning, an iconic painter and artist who is also Max Ernst's widow, calls the Forest II the most beautiful painting Max ever made.
It's a testament to Wolfgang's skills. But it also speaks to the way he's created a fantasy for the art world. Everyone is relieved and delighted that these works weren't destroyed in the war after all. It's all a lie. But so what? It's making people feel better. And because the experts, dealers, and middlemen of the art market benefit from more paintings by famous artists that sell for more money, the scam is making everyone rich.
Within the year, The Forest 2 sells for $7 million. By now, Wolfgang and Helena are practically minting money, but they have no idea they've made a huge mistake. Their scam's entire facade is about to crumble. ♪
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It's October 2008, about three years after the exhibition at the Met. Rolf Jentsch is examining a Compendant painting called Red Picture with Horses. Red Picture with Horses is sold at an auction about a year earlier for almost $4 million, a record sum for any Compendant. But when the new owners ask for a certificate of authentication, they learn that the auction house didn't have one. That's where Rolf comes in.
Rolf is bald and blue-eyed. He's probably wearing a button-down and a sport coat. He's the world's only expert on Alfred Flecktheim, the 20th century art dealer who supposedly gave Helena's grandfather all that artwork. And the instant he looks at the Flecktheim label on the back of the canvas, Rolf knows it's a fake. He
He's seen the real labels, and this isn't one of them. But also, when red painting with horses gets submitted for chemical analysis, it turns up a smoking gun. The painting was supposedly created in 1914, but it contains titanium dioxide white, a pigment that didn't exist until decades later. The Flechtheim label also tests positive for aberrant glue and traces of coffee.
See, it's that pirate map technique again. Back to bite you. It's an irresistible form of creation, you know?
And Rolf quickly identifies more than a dozen other paintings with the fake Flecktheim labels, and the dominoes begin to fall. The buyer of Red Picture with Horses sues the auction house for selling them an unauthenticated painting. They win the lawsuit, and the art world starts to panic. Thankfully, the Berlin police have a robust art fraud division. Germany has long been a center for art crime, in part because of the Nazis' reign of terror.
And eventually, they track the fakes back to Helena and then to Wolfgang. By August 2010, the authorities have enough evidence to arrest Helena and Wolfgang in peak dramatic fashion. The art fraud division executes its biggest operation ever. They even stop a museum from selling one of Wolfgang's paintings for almost $6 million. They track the family down in Freiburg, where they arrest Wolfgang and Helena at gunpoint in the pouring rain.
At long last, the couple has finally been exposed. But in getting caught, Wolfgang will also get something he's been denied his whole life. Recognition for his own work.
It's the fall of 2011 and Helena and Wolfgang are in prison awaiting trial. Over the years since their arrest, they've been detained in separate facilities. It's the first time the lovers have been apart for more than a single day. Their pretrial period is especially long because the police are looking for a large ring of forgers. They can't even fathom that all of these impeccable fakes have been created by a single artist.
Wolfgang and Helena are held in solitary confinement for up to 23 hours a day. And Helena defends Wolfgang at all costs. Here she is in the documentary "Portrait of the Artist as a Con Man" for Channel 4. You're still standing by your forger. I'm still standing by my husband. For a lot of people, it's not easy to understand what it is a real love. Women gotta get more divorces.
I mean, these two spent every single day together. I get it. She still sprung on Wolfgang. Yeah, no one should do that. Make a new friend. Well, the lovers stay in touch by writing over 8,000 pages of letters during the course of their detention. It's so much that they overwhelm the prison mail censors, bringing the entire system to a standstill. They later publish selections from their correspondence in book form. Want to read one to me, Sachi?
Okay, I'm going to do it, but with malice. It says, my angel, don't be afraid. I am here. Even though you can't see me, I am in your thoughts, perhaps more beautiful than I ever was. I'm going to go on a limb and guess this reads better in German.
Yeah, and I wonder what song it's been plagiarized from. It's an undiscovered Shakespeare. You haven't heard of it yet. Well, by the time the trial finally begins on September 1st, 2011, the case has already garnered a huge amount of attention. Whenever Wolfgang and Helena appear before the media, it feels more like a red carpet appearance than a perp walk.
They hold each other lovingly, mug for the cameras, and greet their many fans. And while Helena prefers to remain on the periphery, Wolfgang is delighted to finally have his moment in the spotlight. It helps that the general public is broadly sympathetic. The Beltracchi's are talented, harmless tricksters. They've only conned a market set up by the rich for the rich. When Der Spiegel later asks Wolfgang whether he thinks the art market is corrupt, he replies, "'No more corrupt than I am.'"
It seems like the writers of the piece agree. They later write in the German newspaper, quote, the Balchocki case does paint a fairly accurate picture of the global art market and its players. Okay, so everyone's full of shit in this industry then? Basically. Great. And during the trial, Wolfgang admits that he got lazy one day and used pre-mixed paint from a tube. He checked the ingredients, of course, but says the label didn't mention titanium oxide.
Wolfgang and Helena are sentenced to six and four years respectively, but they're assigned to an open prison where they have days free to work together and they only report to prison at night.
By 2015, they've both been released early for good behavior. Werner Spies, the Max Ernst expert, seems to be the one with the biggest regrets. He lost a lawsuit over his role in authenticating Wolfgang's paintings. And while the judgment was eventually overturned, he was so mortified by the whole fiasco that he says he contemplated suicide.
He tells Vanity Fair, quote, But as an authenticator, Werner earned substantial fees, about half a million dollars deposited into offshore accounts by the Beltracchis. As Helena later puts it, I don't know if he was really convinced by the picture or was only pretending to be.
Wolfgang and Helena have been out of prison for a while now. They have to pay back about 35 million euros, and they lost their luxury homes. But they're capitalizing on their notoriety, which has driven interest in Wolfgang's work. In fact, Wolfgang now makes a living by selling paintings under his own name. Check out his work, Sachi. This is terrifying. It looks like a portrait of a man on fire screaming,
hovering over an audience of, I think, Nazis, Nazi supporters. Yeah, I don't know what it's trying to say. It's a cluttered message in here.
Well, Wolfgang and Helena aren't making millions off a single painting anymore, but they fetch a price in the five figures for his expert reproductions. And they've recently expanded into NFTs. While there are only 14 paintings named in the trial, it's estimated that the Beltracchi sold over 300 forged works in the style of as many as 100 different artists.
Wolfgang claims that much of his work remains in permanent museum collections, making him, quote, one of the most exhibited painters in museums in the world. To this day, Wolfgang and Helena maintain they regret nothing. Wolfgang tells Der Spiegel, In my heart, I don't see myself as a criminal. I didn't injure anyone, nor did I steal from or rob anyone. Sachi, I think by this point of knowing about these kind of specific fraud-type scammers...
It does seem like as long as you're willing to really, really take the time to forge art, it kind of works. Yeah, no one is taking away from any of these people that they are very talented and making shit up. I mean, my issue isn't even like with tricking art people. I actually kind of always think that's funny. I think the issue is more with like
They're tweaking history, right, by making some of these things because it's tied in with like Nazism and like robbing marginalized groups of their history and their wealth. That's more objectionable to me than like they tricked all these idiots into thinking they had something real. Yeah, I mean, it does definitely change history, especially when it's like framed within these people fleeing Nazi Germany, right?
But, you know, throughout this whole episode, I was kind of thinking, like...
Okay, something looks exactly like how you picture it by this artist you're very familiar with. And you see it and it makes you happy and everyone believes it's real. But then the second you realize it's not, it suddenly has no meaning. Even though it looks exactly like what the real thing would look like. Yeah. Maybe the lesson for today is that we just don't know anything about art. And that's okay. Yeah.
That's okay. I don't belittle it. I don't think it's beneath me. I don't know anything about it the way a lot of people don't know anything about the Real Housewives. You couldn't fake having been a Real Housewife, I'll tell you that. That's impossible. That is impossible. I would know. We would know.
This is The Scam Artist is Present. I'm Sarah Hagee. And I'm Saatchi Cole. We use many sources in our research. A few that were particularly helpful were the Vanity Fair article, The Greatest Fake Art Scam in History by Joshua Hammer, and the documentary Beltracchi, The Art of Forgery directed by Arne Birkenstock. And the Der Spiegel article, Confessions of a Genius Art Forger by Lothar Goris and Sven Robl.
Christiane Hedke wrote this episode. Our senior producer is Jen Swan. Our producer is John Reed. Our associate producers are Charlotte Miller and Lexi Peary. Our story editor and producer is Sarah Enni. Our story editor is Eric Thurm. Sound design is by Ryan Potesta. Fact-checking by Will Tavlin. Additional audio assistance provided by Adrian Tapia. Our music supervisor is Scott Velasquez for Freesound Sync.
Our senior managing producer is Ryan Moore. Our managing producer is Matt Gant. Our coordinating producer is Desi Blaylock. Kate Young and Olivia Richard are our series producers. Our senior story editor is Rachel B. Doyle. Our senior producer is Ginny Bloom. Our executive producers are Janine Cornelow, Stephanie Jens, Jenny Lauer Beckman, and Marshall Louis for Wondery. Wondery.
If you like Scamfluencers, you can listen to every episode early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey.