The Decibel - How an unsolved murder uncovered the world’s largest art fraud

Episode Date: September 6, 2024

Police say that it’s the biggest art fraud in world history—and it happened here in Canada. It centres around the art of the renowned Anishinaabe painter Norval Morrisseau, and there are potentially thousands of fakes out there, including in prominent institutions across Canada.The Globe’s Parliamentary reporter Kristy Kirkup tells us the details of this $100 million dollar fraud, how a homicide case blew it open, and the impact it’s had on the legacy of this trailblazing Indigenous artist.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

It all started with a call. Jason Ryback was a homicide cop until he got a phone call when he was investigating a specific murder in Thunder Bay, a cold case that had not been solved. It still hasn't been solved. That's The Globe's parliamentary reporter, Christy Kirkup. And the phone call was from the deceased teenager's mother that was at the centre of that murder investigation. And she told Ryback about a documentary that included her son's case. But that documentary wasn't really about the murder of her son, Scott Dove. It's actually about art fraud.

The documentary called There Are No Fakes and that phone call led Jason Ryback on a two-and-a-half-year investigation. It resulted in eight arrests and more than a thousand seized paintings, believed to be fraudulent pieces attributed to the renowned Anishinaabe artist Norvell Morisot. And these forgeries are everywhere.

I was having lunch with a source in December of 2023 that I've known for many years through my reporting on Indigenous issues here in Ottawa. And I learned during that discussion that there were suspected fakes that had been on display in government buildings. I ended up reporting on a particular painting that was part of a National Capital Commission collection that had been on display at places like the headquarters of Canada's Foreign Affairs Department, as well as the Senate. And then there were suspected fakes in the Ontario legislature. The Winnipeg Art Gallery, McGill University. The list goes on.

Today, Christy is here to explain the story of these forgeries, how this scheme went on for more than 20 years, and the fallout from what police say is the world's biggest art fraud. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Christy, thank you so much for joining me today. Thanks for having me, Mainika. So Christy, there is a lot going on in this case, but I think we should just start by talking about the artist at the center of all of this.

So for those who aren't familiar, who was Norval Morisot? Well, Norval Morisot is really considered to be an iconic Anishinaabe painter. He also was a residential school survivor, and he's often known as Copper Thunderbird. People also refer to him as the Picasso of the North. And he is known for giving rise to what's called the woodland style of art. He also became a member of the Order of Canada in 1978, and he was the first Indigenous artist to have a solo show at the National Gallery of Canada. And can you describe his style of art? Norval Morisseau's paintings were really characterized by the use of bold black lines, really bright, vibrant colors.

And they also depicted animals such as bears and birds, as well as representations of Ojibwe legends and traditions. And Merika, he's really celebrated in the art world. Many people all over the world perceive him as a force in the realm of Indigenous art. And First Nations leaders have said that he has been really instrumental in helping to explain their history. Yeah, yeah. So as you say, like a very significant figure here, then. When did the rumors about fake Morisot paintings though, when did they start circulating? This is one of the things I find really fascinating about this manika because there have actually been concerns about paintings falsely attributed to Morisot for a really

long time. And there's kind of a group of people who have been entrenched in trying to expose the fraud for many years. One of those people is a lawyer by the name of Jonathan Summer, who says he and other people that he's been working closely with have had concerns for more than two decades. Even prior to Morisot's 2007 death, the painter himself had concerns about a number of paintings that had his signature, but he said that they were not painted by him and he referred to them as fakes. And we also do know that the RCMP did begin to look into this matter. We don't have a lot of details about that particular investigation. We can't get those details right now because

there's some criminal proceedings that are taking place. But nothing really came of the effort by the Mounties. So like you said, Christy, like there were rumors about fake paintings even before Morisot died in 2007, which I think is quite surprising for a lot of people to have this happening even while the artist is still alive. Do we have any sense of the scale of this art fraud? Like how many paintings, how much money were people making off of it? Do we know those things? Well, police have said that there are estimated to be thousands of fake paintings, so between 4,500 and 6,000. They also say that the fraud is likely in the ballpark of about $100 million. And Ryback has said that there are still suspected fakes in far off places such as Germany and China, but that police simply don't have the resources to go and track down these suspected fakes, especially because, again, this is not even a domestic issue.

This is a global problem. So do we have a sense, like if we can talk about some of the details here, obviously we don't know all of it, but do we have a sense of how exactly this fraud was working, Christy? As you said, the scale is just enormous here. So what do police allege was happening in order to create these fake paintings? Well, Ryback says that a man named David Voss was the architect of this scheme. David Voss is also from Thunder Bay. And we learned in June when a Crown prosecutor detailed in court how Voss sketched out drawings that were meant to mimic Morisot's style of painting and then he annotated

each section with letters that indicated the ideal color and then would give these sketches to hired painters to complete. That's like a paint by number. A paint by number yeah exactly and so it was a scheme really arranged like an assembly, and it drew in millions of dollars between 1995 and the mid-2010s. And so he pleaded guilty to one count of forgery for creating hundreds of fake paintings, one count of uttering forged documents, and that's related to fraudulent documentation that he provided to authenticate the forgeries. Okay, so that's David Voss. But there's also this other man involved, Gary Lamont. And he really seems to be the link between this art fraud and the unsolved murder that led Ryback to this whole investigation in the first place. So, Christy, can you just tell me about Gary Lamont's involvement here? So, Gary Lamont is a longtime Thunder Bay resident. He's previously been convicted of sex crimes, and he remains a suspect in Scott Dove's murder investigation.

But he's never been charged in connection with that homicide. But in December of 2023, he did enter a guilty plea for the Morisot art fraud and has been sentenced to five years he pleaded guilty to one count of forgery and to one count of defrauding the public above five thousand dollars and in his agreed statement of facts he gets into some of the mechanics of how he was able to get people involved in this operation that he had going. So he admitted to doing things like trading cash and drugs for paintings. For example, he did this with Thunder Bay artist Tim Tate, who paints in the woodland style. So Tate provided Lamont with numerous woodland style paintings that were unsigned,

and this was part of Lamont's instructions to him. And in return, he was provided with marijuana. Okay, so they have this kind of way of making these paintings of getting different artists to paint these creations. How are they selling them then? Do we know how that part of the process worked? Voss is known to have consigned or sold the fakes to distributors and auction houses. And so that's how these paintings, if you will, enter the market. And that's why there are suspected fakes in many different parts of the country. I can tell you that I get text messages almost on a daily basis, if not daily, telling me

there's a suspected fake here and there. And like, I could easily write a story about a suspected fake Morisot painting every single day, because there are so many of them. And I think there's really this effort by those who really adore Morisot to try and clean up the market. So how do we know now if something is a fake Morisot or if it's the real deal? I'm going to be very careful about this and I'll tell you why. Because there are some red flags that police have identified, such as a dry brush signature on the back of a painting. That's kind of seen to be a red flag, but that doesn't necessarily mean that someone definitely has a fake Morisot painting and that authentications are actually far more complex than that. And we saw that

in the investigation where police again conducted interviews, which is how they learned about when we were describing kind of the assembly line David Voss situation, the paint by numbers, that they paired interviews that they conducted, but there was also the use of infrared technology, Manica, to kind of expose, like, what was underneath the paint for the paint by numbers. And some of those details, again, because there's still criminal proceedings that are underway, we don't know the full story of kind of how the mechanics of all of that have been used. We do know about it, again, in the case of David Voss, because, you know, this came up during, you know, the agreed

statement of facts. And again, there's people like Jonathan Summer, I mentioned him, a lawyer who's been really deeply entrenched in exposing the fraud. He and another individual by the name of John Zimanovich, they have a company called Morisot Art Consulting Inc. And they are doing authentications of paintings. And so they are now trying to help people to figure out if they do have an authentic Morisot painting. And police, they have made it very clear, they cannot be in the business of authenticating paintings. And they actually have like a boilerplate line. If you ever contact them about the story that, you know, the communications people will just say, like, we encourage people to contact a lawyer, you know, so it's not cut and dry. We'll be back in a moment.

So over the past year, we know that eight people have been charged. Gary Lamont pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five years in prison. David Voss also pleaded guilty and actually just this week was also sentenced to five years. But this fraud has been going on for more than two decades, right, Christy? So I guess what kind of impact has this had on Morisot's legacy? Well, I think that the fraud has really undermined Norval Morisot's legacy, and it's also affected the value of his authentic work. And people who have studied this fraud say that it has also, you know, undermined the representations of stories and traditions that were at the heart of Morisot's paintings. He is an acclaimed First Nations artist. He overcame

a tremendous amount during the course of his life, including abuse suffered at residential school. And then now he has been subject to having people fake his art to turn a profit. And there have been First Nations leaders who have talked about how wrong this is and the impact on Norval Morisot as an individual, as a painter, as a First Nations person, but also what it means, essentially, that this is capitalizing off someone who was the best at what he did. I think this is a really important point here, Christy, because, of course, this would be difficult for any artist, right, to have your work faked in this way. But it sounds like there's something especially significant about this being done to an Indigenous artist, someone with moreisot's life experience and his legacy. For sure. And I think, again, those who have been kind of pushing for this to be investigated and to also think about cleaning up the market, I think there's this feeling of this cannot go

unchecked. And they really felt like it went unchecked for so long. Again, I mentioned the RCMP probe that, you know, ultimately did not lead to charges. The fact that there was this huge behind the scenes effort to get the police to ultimately investigate it. So I guess if you have been fighting for something to be exposed for more than two decades, obviously, there would be a feeling of frustration, but also thinking, well, is part of the fact that this wasn't looked at more closely or addressed sooner? Did that have anything to do with the fact that, you know, Morisot was an Indigenous painter? If this was an acclaimed, another acclaimed Canadian painter, would this have gone on for so long? Those are some of the questions that I hear all the time when I talk to people who are working on this case. Yeah, I guess I wonder too, because we've mentioned this a few times now,

but it took so long to get attention here. Like, do we know why it took so long for this fraud to be exposed? Canada doesn't have a dedicated art crime unit. And the FBI, they have a multi-person team that looks into art crime manika. It was created back in 2004. They have recovered more than 20,000 items valued at more than $900 million US. Agents get specialized training. They work in cooperation with law enforcement officials. Well, up here in Canada, even if you are the lead investigator on what becomes the world's biggest art fraud, Jason Ryback's the first person to tell you that he's not an art expert. Again, he's been a homicide guy, right? And so he never was trained in this area.

But if you had a specialized unit, maybe they would go and try and track down those suspected fake paintings, right? There aren't the resources available in Canada. So that is why people like Ryback and others like Jonathan Sommer have said there needs to be a dedicated team in Canada with the expertise, with the know-how to tackle this, because there's also concern that art crime is connected to organized crime, which again, is why the FBI has a multi-person team dedicated to this. This isn't about, you know, some rich people getting ripped off. This is about concerns about being a tool to launder money. And so it's serious business. And the FBI sees it that way. Other countries see it that way, such as in Europe. And so despite, again, what's kind of come to light during the course of the Norvell-Morrisso art fraud investigation, this isn't really being talked about. And I think that's one of the big themes that I'm left with. It seems as though, again, in conversations that I've had with people, that people just don't really take art fraud seriously here or art crime generally.

And, you know, it's not like we don't have a case to exemplify why people are saying, you know, there needs to be this art crime unit. Just in our last few minutes here, Christy, I mean, you mentioned kind of, you know, how this fallout is quite wide across the country. A lot of institutions had paintings that they're looking at now. What has the response been from some of these institutions who have what they think, maybe what is real, but we don't know, like what they think is a Morisot painting? So I recently wrote about the fact that the Winnipeg Art Gallery has in its possession a now confirmed fake, because again, as a result of the David Voss agreed statement of facts, there were a number of paintings that were included in that, including one that is now being stored. It's not on display, but the gallery is aware and they have been in discussion with police. So, institutions might be thinking, okay, well, I have a painting, I haven't heard from police, there was this big investigation, it must mean that everything's

a-okay. And that's not necessarily the case. And so, there's, again, this push in the name of kind of truth and reconciliation, right, to ensure that people are looking within their own collections and figuring out if the paintings that they have that they may believe were painted by Norval more so, if they are indeed real or not, because again, it just, you know, people would argue that it undermines his legacy even more if even after this fraud has been exposed that there's still suspected fake paintings in particularly prominent institutions and I think there is this kind of misunderstanding maybe even shame on the part of some institutions right that may feel like they were duped that they should have known or maybe their curators should have known. And this is something that Ryback has told me is like, you know, this was a sophisticated fraud. And so this isn't about feeling ashamed,

even though institutions might feel that way. They didn't know they were fake, right? A lot of people didn't know they were fake until this has been, you know, brought to light. And I think this is really challenging for institutions because they're trying to wrap their head around what are the steps they should be taking, even if they were to find out they had a fake painting.

What do they do with the painting? And that's kind of one of the overarching questions. In large part, police have said that institutions that they have been in touch with have been cooperative, like the Winnipeg Art Gallery that I just mentioned. But there is something that is important, which is that according to Ryback, they can't just go and go to someone who purchased a painting and take that painting away. It's not illegal or against the criminal code to possess a suspected fake painting. And so that's a challenge, right? Someone could just decide that they wanted to hold on to a piece of artwork because they paid a lot of money for it. And maybe they say they

like the way that it looks. Ryback has said that this could even create almost like a subgroup of paintings, if you will, that, you know, there might be like a value to having a fake Morisot painting. That's one of the concerns that he's raised with me. It's very complicated, I think, for institutions to try and figure out what next steps they're going to take and to try and see if they can authenticate paintings that they thought were real. Christy, just lastly here, we've talked about so many things, but when you step back and kind of look at this whole ordeal, what are you thinking about? What stands out to you? Manika, one of the things I'm really left with is really about Scott Dove's murder case and how it helped to blow open the Morisot art fraud.

Scott Dove's family has been waiting 40 years. He died in 1984, and they have been looking for answers. And police still consider his investigation to be open and active, but no one has ever been charged in connection to suspect Gary Lamont brought Jason Ryback into the case and Ryback went on to become a lead investigator on the world's biggest art fraud while he was trying to solve how Scott was killed in Thunder Bay decades prior and so Scott's murder was able to somehow expose a really key element of this fraud, as was the documentary, to kind of push this forward and ultimately to see the investigation that took place and the resulting charges. Christy, thank you so much for being here today. Thank you. That's it for today. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms.

This episode was edited and mixed by Kevin Sexton. Our producers are Madeline White, Rachel Levy-McLaughlin, Michal Stein, and Allie Graham. David Crosby edits the show. Adrienne Chung is our senior producer, And Matt Frainer is our managing editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.