Scamfluencers - The Scam Artist is Present

Episode Date: October 9, 2023

Wolfgang and Helene Beltracchi present themselves as eccentric, free-spirited art dealers. Most alluringly, they seem to have incredible access to a trove of rare paintings that were thought to be lost or destroyed during World War II. The couple travels the world and becomes extraordinarily wealthy selling paintings from their mysterious collection – until one wrong brushstroke calls their entire operation into question.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to scam flu answers early and add free right now join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or Apple podcasts 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 length.

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 Fryberg, Germany. It's a medieval town and 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 Helinas seem like gentle artsy people, but they knew unerest was coming.

For decades, they've been leading one of the most sophisticated and lucrative counterfeit art schemes in history. of it art schemes in history. Ghosts aren't real. At least as a journalist, that's what I've always believed. Sure, odd things happened in my childhood bedroom. But ultimately, I shrugged it all off. That is, until a couple of years ago, when I discovered that every subsequent occupant of that house is convinced they've experienced something inexplicable, too. Including the most recent inhabitant who says she was visited at night by the ghost of a faceless woman.

And it gets even stranger. It just so happens that the alleged ghost haunted my childhood room might just be my wife's great grandmother. It was murdered in the house next door by two gunshots to the face. From Wondering and Pineapple Street Studios comes Ghost Story, a podcast about family secrets, overwhelming coincidence and the things that come back to haunt us. Follow Ghost Story on the Wondry app or wherever you get your podcast. You can binge all episodes ad-free right now by joining Wondry Plus. Emily, do you remember when One Direction called it a day? I think you'll find there are still many people who can't talk about it.

Well luckily, we can. A lot, because our new season of terribly famous is all about the first One Directioner to go it alone. Zayn Malik. We'll take you on Zayn's journey from Shilad from Bradford to being in the world's biggest boy band and explore why when he reached the top, he decided to walk away. Follow terribly famous wherever you get your podcasts.

From Wondery, I'm Sarah Heggie and I'm Saty Kohl. And this is Sc fun one because a 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 the solve. I'm calling this one, the scam artist is present. Gotcha. 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 a 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 then with shocking white hair. In peacetime he's kind of a babe but right now 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, Leanneau-Nora Carrington. When he finally limps up to his ancient stone farmhouse, he's crushed to find it abandoned. Leanneau-N Nora 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, free to 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 removed some of the smaller canvases broken, 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 artists lost, destroyed, or stolen.

This chaos doesn't just create a gap in art history. For talented scam artists, it creates a perfect opportunity. 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 Fisher is entranced by a painting. He's 10 years old and pale and thin. He's visiting the Coons Museum and he's staring at a cheerful winter landscape

by the 17th century Dutch painter, Hendrick Avrakomp. 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 aunt who brought him to the museum

explained that Avrakomp 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 skaters blades on the ice as if he's hearing four Avrakomp 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 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 Picasso's and Rembrandt's as a side hustle. He sells him 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 aunt's. 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 bond

stresses and a devil-made-care charm. He's drifting around Europe in North Africa on a motorcycle. He spent much of the last decade traveling, smoking weed, and dropping acid with US 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 recells 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 a 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 Belchocky 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 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 filament. I don't know why every time men get money they're like I need a boat. Listen, if you're really into pirates and you have the money you'd buy a boat to,

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 Haleena 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 survivors' guilt raised by parents who were shell-shocked and traumatized by the war. And when he tells Haleena about his art scam after just three days of knowing her, she's actually into it. As she later tells the German news magazine, Derspiegull, 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. I love her. I'm very charmed by her. Yeah. I want mine. 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. About a year later, Helena and Wolfgang get married. Wolfgang takes her last name and becomes Wolfgang Belchocky.

He later claims he never cared for his own name, and the name Belchocky 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 wetted 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 Francisco. 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 Kompendonk. Sachi, 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 gonna 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 Fleck-Time 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 and 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. to you or not. I'm Rob Briden and welcome to my podcast, Brydon and we are now in our third series. Among those still to come is some Michael Pailin, the comedy duo Egg and Robbie Williams.

The list goes on. So do sit back and enjoy. Brighten and on Amazon Music, Wondery Plus or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, I'm Hannah and I'm Seruti and we are the hosts of A Redhanded, a weekly true crime podcast. Every week on Redhanded we get stuck into the I'm Seruti. And we are the hosts of a Red Handed, a weekly true crime podcast. Every week on Red Handed, we get stuck into the most talked about cases. But we also dig into those you might not have heard of,

like the Nephiles Royal Massacre and the Nithory Child Sacrifices. Whatever the case, we want to know what pushes people to the extremes of human behavior. Find, download, and binge Red Handed, wherever you listen to your podcasts. 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's scans, compendons 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 Compton Donk and immerses himself in the artist's world.

He and Helena travel to places in Germany where Compton Donk worked. They listen to the music Compton Donk 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 Compton Donk surviving paintings in person, because printed reproductions never get the colors quite right. Then, they scround 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 Compendonc might have created. As he begins to lay paint on the canvas, he can feel Compendonc's presence over his shoulder, like he did with Over Comp 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. Compendonk. The signature is the only thing Wolfgang has directly copied from Compendonk. 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 a aged look of a piece from 1919. Okay, so he isn't just imitating Compendon'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 Flectime'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, gallery start asking for documentation of Helena's supposed collection, so the couple decides to create some evidence. They stage a photo.

The arrange room with old furniture and hang up copies of the paintings. Helena poses in the scene, cause playing 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 three-mages and like yeah yeah. And it seems like Wolfgang and Helena are having fun with it too.

It's also paying off. Girl with Swan sells for more than $100,000 at the Christie's auction. And Sachi, it's been authenticated by an independent Compendonk expert. On paper, it's real. And with fakes, this could, the potential sales are astronomical. But Wolfgang and Helena are about to learn that with sky high prices come 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, Francisco, into a pink intercoise when a bigo. They claim the move is for Francisco'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 Belchockies 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 Belchockies finally put down roots. They buy an old farmhouse sitting on 69 acres

a French wine country and start funneling money into renovations. After a while, the German police stop looking for the Belchockies. 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 Schlutkelinghouse 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, Auto gets to keep 20% of the painting's sale price, and the potential sales on this particular day are high because the paintings auto 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 painting sold, they need to get them authenticated.

That's why they've sent Otto to Werner Schfeeze. 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 resonant? 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 Erne's paintings considered lost had actually survived the war and earned perfect condition. It feels like a miracle. Verner 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 Helinar in the museum strolling through the gallery's hand and 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 day scuba diving and sailing on their yacht, Voodoo

Child. Wolfgang named it after the Jimmy Hendrix song. Now as they cruise the max earns retrospective at the Met, they linger near one painting in particular. It's called The Forest, number two. They relish the incredible secret they share. The artist is present right here in the gallery. Wolfgang painted the forest too 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 Stins and Prison Camps and no one can tell the difference. Not even the people close as to the artist. Later the Belchockis claim that Dorothea Tanning, an iconic painter and artist who is also Max Ernst Widow, calls the forest to 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 too 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. Bosh Legacy returns, now streaming.

Maddie's been taken. Oh God. His daughter. He's in the hands of a madman. What are the police have been looking for me? But nothing can stop a father. We want to find her just as much as you do. I doubt that very much.

From doing what the law can't. And we have to do this about way. You have to. I can't. And we have to do this the very way. You have to. I don't. Bosch Legacy watched the new season now streaming exclusively on FreeV. I feel like I like it. It's October 2008, about three years after the exhibition at the Met. Roll Fienge is examining a Compendong 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 Compendong. But when the new owners ask for a certificate of authentication, they learned 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 Fleck time, the 20th century art dealer who supposedly gave Helena's grandfather all that artwork. In the instant he looks at the fleck time label on the back of the canvas, Rolf knows it's a fake.

He's seen the real labels, and this isn't one of them. But also, when red painting with horses get 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 Flectime label also tests positive for aberrant glue and traces of coffee. See, it's that pirate map technique again, back to bite ya.

It's an irresistible form of creation, you know. And Ralph quickly identifies more than a dozen other paintings with a fake, fleck time labels and the dominoes begin to fall. The buyer of red picture with horses sews 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, and 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 Dumpoint 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 from more than a single day. Their pre-trial period is especially long because the police are looking for a large ring of fordurs. They can't even fathom that all of these impeccable fakes have been created by 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 still stand by my husband. For a lot of people it's not easy to understand what it is real love. Ah, women gotta get more divorces. I mean, these two spend every single day together. I get it. She's 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 male censors bringing the entire system to a stand

still. They later published selections from their correspondence in book form. Wanna read one to Misaji? Okay, I'm going to do it 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 1, 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 in a purplock. They hold each other lovingly, mug for the cameras,

and greet their many fans. 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 Belchakis are talented, harmless tricksters. They've only conned a market set up by the rich for the rich. When Derspiegel 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 peace agree. They later write in the German newspaper, quote, the Balchalki case does paint a fairly accurate picture of the global art market and its players. Okay, so everyone's foolish and 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 the only report to prison at night. By 2015, they've both been released early for good behavior. Vernor Schbys, 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, how could I bear the knowledge that I was taken in? The loss of my reputation, it made me think that I should say goodbye to this world. But as an authenticator, Verner earned substantial fees, about half a million dollars to pause it into offshore accounts by the Bel Trockeys. 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?

Nazis of porters? 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 Bel Trokey sold over 300 forge 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 the regret nothing. Wolfgang tells her, speakl, in my heart, I don't see myself as a criminal. I didn't injure anyone, nor did I steal from or rob anyone. nor did I steal from or rob anyone. Sochi, 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 in 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 my issue is more with like,

their tweaking history, right? By making some of these things because it's tied in 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. 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... That's okay. That's okay. I don't be little, 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 housewife 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

Hey, prime members you can listen to scam influencers add free on Amazon music Download the Amazon Music app today. Or you can listen ad free with Wondery Plus and Apple podcasts. Before you go, tell us about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey. This is The Scam Artist is Present. I'm Sarah Haggy, and I'm Sachi Cole. We use many sources in our research,

a few that were particularly helpful were the Vanity Fair article, The Greatest Fake Arts Game in History by Joshua Hammer, and the documentary, Bel Trocci, The Art of Forgery, directed by Aaron Burkensdok, and The Jerspiegel article, Confessions of a Genius Art Forger, by Lothar Gores and Sven Robel. Christian Hagi 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 N.E. Our story editor is Eric Thurm. Sound design is by Ryan Potesta. Fact checking by Will Tadlin. Additional audio assistance provided by Adrian Tapia.

Our music supervisor is Scott Velasquez for Freesson Sync. Our senior managing producer is Ryan Moore. Our managing producer is Matt Gantt. Our coordinating producer is Desi Blaylock. Kate Young and Olivia Rashard 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 Gens, Jenny Lauer Beckman, and Marshall Louis for

Wundery. Richies, be honest with us. How many times have you dreamed of being a king or a queen? I mean, I can't answer for the Richies, but in my heart, they're all kings and queens. But Richies, what if we told you that there's a darker side to royalty? And more often than not, life as a prince or princess is anything but a fairy tale. Eretia and I are so excited to tell you about our brand new podcast called Even the Royals, where we'll be pulling back the curtain on royal families past and present from all over the

world. You do love to pull back curtains. Over on Even the Royals, we'll cover everything from stories you thought you knew, like Marie Antoinette, who was actually a victim of a vulgar propaganda campaign, which started a wild chain of events that led to her eventual beheading. Or Catherine Dibidiqi, who was assumed to be responsible for one of the most devastating massacres in French history. But in reality, she was a mother holding on to her dying dynasty.

Follow Even The Royals on the Wendry app, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Even The Royals exclusively in ad-free right now by joining Wendry Plus. you