True Crime Campfire - Faking It: Art's Greatest Forger

Episode Date: February 28, 2025

Art is a mysterious thing. It’s hard to pin down why one thing moves us and another does not. Similarly, it can be hard to identify that special spark, that unique creativity that an artist can have that lifts their work into something magical. If you don’t have that, all the technical skill and carefully won knowledge in the world won’t get you to that special place. Unless, of course, you just steal it from someone else. This is “Faking It: Art’s Greatest Forger.”This is a fun one, y'all. Opulent settings. Drama even a fan of telenovelas might find over the top. International intrigue...and salmon throwing?Sources:Fake! by Clifford IrvingNew York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/1983/04/08/obituaries/fernand-legros-dealer-in-art.htmlJoin Katie and Whitney, plus the hosts of Last Podcast on the Left, Sinisterhood, and Scared to Death, on the very first CRIMEWAVE true crime cruise! Get your fan code now--tickets on sale now, and payment plans are available: CrimeWaveatSea.com/CAMPFIRE Follow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfirehttps://www.truecrimecampfirepod.com/Facebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/truecrimecampfire/?hl=enTwitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail]! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.comBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello, campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. Art is a mysterious thing. It's hard to pin down why one thing moves us and another does not. Similarly, it can be hard to identify. that special spark, that unique creativity that an artist can have that lifts their work into something magical. If you don't have that, all the technical skill and carefully one knowledge

in the world won't get you to that special place. Unless, of course, you just steal it from someone else. This is Faken It, Arts Greatest Forger. So, campers, for this one, we're on the beautiful Spanish island of Ibiza in the early months of 1967. Nowadays, Ibiza is most famous for its club scene, but in the 60s it was a quieter place, home to the locals in a colony of mostly bohemian foreigners, artists and hippies alongside a few millionaire retirees from Britain. Among the first category was a middle-aged Hungarian gentleman named Elmere Dory Bhutan, and when we say gentlemen, we mean he had blood as blue as a sapphire. At least, that was what most people on the island assumed.

The rumor was that Elmere was a sion of the Hungarian monarchy, which had been officially abolished in 1946 after Soviet occupation. Elmere, a dapper chap who wore Kashmir sweaters and a monocle on a gold chain, neither confirmed nor denied those rumors, but he was less shy about his connections to the rich and famous. He liked to drop names so heavy they'd crush your toe if you didn't move fast enough. The stories were all the same shape. He'd be walking in some faraway city and be spotted by some old friend, Salvador Dali, maybe, or Tennessee Williams, or Jaja Gabor, and they'd go, Elmere, and rush joyfully into his arms. Elmere was a slightly shy but charming fellow who threw

excellent parties and was popular in the expat community. Nobody ever saw him lift a finger work-wise. People assumed he came from old money and lots of it. He lived in a beautiful new cliff-top villa with seven bedrooms in a swimming pool, the kind of place Tony Stark might live in. Elmere told people he was an art collector, which is not a career so much as a hobby for the ridiculously rich. A couple of times, people spotted Elmere by the port doing watercolor sketches of the fishermen. Just another hobby, they assumed. A Russian artist happened to see an ink drawing on Elmere's desk once, an unsigned nude. You did that, the artist asked. Elmere nodded.

But that's not bad at all. Are you joking? Did somebody else? Yes, of course. Someone else. I'm joking, Elmere said and practically dragged the guy away from the desk. Elmere apparently had an extremely fine collection of French impressionist and post-impressionist art, hidden and then smuggled out of Hungary by his family, under the noses of the Germans first and then the Russians. A couple of Parisian art dealers sometimes sold these for him and occasionally visited him on Ibiza. These were Fernand Legros and Real Legris. Fernand was a twitchy, fast-talking dude in his mid-30s. The kind of guy you meet and immediately think might be kind of shady.

And spoiler alert, you would not be wrong. Real Lecard was 10 years younger, a relaxed, smiling French-Canadian that everybody liked and not too many people took seriously. When this story hit the news in the 60s, the papers in the euphemisms of the time described Realis Fernand's traveling companion and personal secretary. Oh my God, they were roommates. They were hardly the only gay couple on Ibiza and nobody cared much, the island being simultaneously really nosy about everybody's business and really accepting about whatever they found out. Fernand and Real were highly successful at their trade and were much more.

more willing than Elmere was to get flashy with their wealth. They gave him a gift of a bright red corvette stingray, which Elmere in his monocle and cashmere sweaters like to tool around the little island in. But then rumors started to filter down from Paris. Fernand and Real were being investigated for selling forged works of art to businessmen in Texas. Then it wasn't just Texas. The Japanese National Museum of Western Art had been taken in too. All across the world, collectors and museums who had bought from Fernand Legros rushed to check the authenticity of their art, and they didn't like what they found. There were at least 50 fakes. No, a hundred. No, hundreds.

On Abisa, no one thought sweet, amiable Elmere could have anything to do with this, and if he had, he must have been tricked into it by that greasy Fernand Legros, who nobody on the island liked. Lagros, it was rumored, must have an underground workshop of foragers somewhere to crank out so many paintings, maybe in the south of France, maybe right here on a visa. But that wasn't true. There was just Elmere, who had painted and drawn hundreds, maybe thousands of forgeries good enough to fool experts all over the world for decades. And before we really get into Elmere's story, we should point out that a lot of this comes from what Elmere told Clifford Irving

for the book, Fake. As Irving himself acknowledges, Elmere didn't always walk hand in hand, the truth. I think you'll probably agree that Elmere wasn't really a classic con artist, but he was a guy who thought most stories could be improved by dialing them up a couple of notches. So his version of events is probably in the right ballpark, but won't necessarily have the correct score every time. You never let facts get in the way of a good story, right? Right. Elmere DeHorei was born in 1906 to a wealthy family with estates and vineyards near Lake Balaton in Central Hungary. Maybe. This is the part of Elmere's life story that's most likely to be fabricated.

And later evidence suggests that his real origin story was very much middle class. But here's Elmere's possibly glammed up version. It was a luxurious life. They had horses, carriages, and servants. ate off china plates with silver utensils. It was also, as was common among the rich, a fairly chilly and distant childhood. Elmere was mostly raised in the Kinderzimmer,

a separate part of the house by a whole series of governesses from France, Germany, and England. One of his earliest memories was waking up from a nightmare and going to find his mother who was still up and entertaining guests. He ran to her and she picked him up,

but when he tried to kiss her, She got angry and said, You'll kiss my powder away. His father traveled overseas a lot, and Elmere didn't see him much. Yikes. Yeah. By the time he was 16, a couple of things were clear. Elmere had a real artistic talent, and he was gay.

Gay sex was still illegal across Europe, but those laws were applied less strictly the more money or blue blood you had. A gay aristocrat would shock very few people, and a gay aristocratic artist even fewer. Art, being a proper pursuit for a young gentleman, his mother sent Elmere to art school in Budapest, but he bugged his parents till they let him move at 18 to study in Munich. It's hard to imagine, given what would happen in just a few years,

but pre-Nazi Germany was a swinging, free-spirited place. I mean, you've seen cabaret, right? Oh, yeah. Elmere went out drinking with his buds till the early hours, almost every night. But he was also serious and diligent about his work, staying in school from nine to five, and sometimes working for weeks to perfect one of his drawings. Munich was fun, but there was only one place to study and work if he were really serious about being an artist. And when he was 20, Elmere moved to Paris. The same year, he had a

landscape accepted to be shown at the famous salon d'Aton, where the likes of Cézanne, Matisse, and Gogon had been shown. This would be the greatest success. Elmere's own work would ever have, but obviously he didn't know that at the time. He lived and worked in Paris for years, and though he would later exaggerate how well he knew them, he crossed paths with Matisse and Picasso and met Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway. He went to readings by James Joyce and had a reaction that lots of freshman English students would probably recognize. I hadn't the faintest idea what he was talking about, but I listened with great curiosity. I never like James Joyce's stuff much, I have to admit, except for his letters

to his wife, Nora, which are hilarious. Okay, if you've never seen these, look them up sometime, you'll thank me later. I won't go into too much detail here, but let's just say Mr. Joyce and Nora both need to spend a little bit of time in the kinkshaming corner, okay? The Nora letters, to my mind, are much more of a classic than Ulysses could ever be, okay? Unlike the other young artists in Paris, Elmere got regular checks from his rich Hungarian family, and there was always more if he needed it. If he wanted to take a new boyfriend down to the beaches of Saint-Ropé, he just sent a telegraph home, and the funds would be waiting on the South Coast when he got there.

Dang, must be nice. This, as well as his fundamental personality, was why he never fully committed to art as a career. It was just an entertainment. If a friend liked a piece of his art, Elmere just said, take it. He was a familiar type in Europe in the 20s, a spoiled, rich dilettante who found the idea of working for a living almost unthinkable. Ew. It was a lifestyle that would come crashing down in flames all across the continent in the next decade. By 1938, everyone in Paris was understandably nervous given what was happening over the border in Germany.

Elmere headed back to Budapest, but while he'd been away, the country had drifted into far-right lunacy and was now essentially a client state of Nazi Germany. for elmere who was both gay and jewish this was obviously a perilous place to be and it didn't help when he had an affair with an english journalist who turned out to be a spy elmere was sent to a camp for political prisoners in the transylvanian mountains can you think of a creepier place to be on earth it was a rough freezing cold existence but things can always get worse soon after his release elmere was arrested again and this time they sent him to a concentration camp in Germany. There, he was beaten so badly by the Gestapo that they broke one of his legs, and he wound up in a hospital just outside Berlin. The famous Nazi efficiency was mostly a myth. There were no guards, and the doors and gates were left wide open at the hospital, so El Mier hobbled out into Berlin on his crutches. He had friends in the city from before the war who helped him hide and eventually get back to Budapest. The Nazis had killed his parents and stolen everything of value his family had owned. Now the Soviet Red Army was

marching through Hungary and obviously wealthy landowners would no longer be a thing under the inevitable communist regime. With some small diamonds sewn into the lining of his coat, all that remained of the family fortune, Elmere fled. The diamonds bought him passage across borders, and in 1945 he was back in newly liberated Paris, except this time he was poor. riches to rags. He scratched out a living painting portraits for generous friends until April of 1946 when he accidentally began a brand new career as a forger. He was friends with Dolly Whittle, who was still known as Lady Malcolm Campbell after her famous ex-husband, who had held the world's speed records on both land and water, and whom Dolly described as quite unfitted for the role of

husband and family man. That's a nice way of putting it. Very genteel way of putting it. So, I'm guessing he didn't only move fast when he was behind a steering wheel. Dolly was visiting Elmere's little studio and saw a drawing on his wall, an unsigned and unframed sketch of a girl's head. That's a Picasso, isn't it? she said. It wasn't. It was an Elmere DeHori, but he was curious why she thought it was Picasso. Dolly knew Elmere had known Picasso. Elmere had told her so, at least, and she knew Picasso didn't sign all his drawings.

Before Elmere could come clean, Dolly offered a bar. the drawing for 40 pounds. Elmere could live on that for two months. The drawing had taken him barely 10 minutes. After some wrestling with his conscience, he agreed, but he did feel guilty about tricking his friend. The guilt evaporated next time he saw Dolly three months later when she admitted that a gallery owner in London had offered her 150 pounds for the drawing, which she thought was too much to turn down. Elmere was out of money. He went home and poured through old art catalogs and then for an hour or so practiced ink drawings in the style of Picasso around 1925. Around dinnertime, a friend, a young American woman, dropped by for a drink.

Would you mind taking off your clothes and sitting in that wicker chair? Elmer asked her politely, which is a sentence that would hit real differently from anyone except your gay artist friend. But Elmere was her gay artist friend, so she was like, sure. She stripped and sat and Elmere drew her in the style of Picasso. I'm just curious. Like, I love that story, but why'd you need to be naked for that? I mean, I love Picasso, but it's hardly, you know, photorealism. He's just going to turn your tities into, like, a pair of isosceles triangles or some shit. The next day, nervous and half convinced he was going to get arrested. Elmere took his nude sketch and two others he'd done of his friend's face and went to an art gallery on the left bank. He said he'd known Picasso before the war and the drawings had been a gift.

Now, Elmira said, he was destitute and needed to sell them. This was a common story in the mess of Europe after World War II. The dealer looked at the drawings for five minutes while Elmere wandered around the gallery, then said, but yeah, he bought all three for the equivalent of 400 American dollars, about seven grand in today's money. Elmere told himself this was just a one-time deal, buying himself time to work on his own art.

But nobody bought his own art. and by August he was broke again. Elmere was never discreet and told a friend Jacques Chamberlain about the fake Picasso. Chamberlain's father had a fine art collection in Bordeaux, which Nazi officers had stolen and shipped back to Berlin, where it had apparently been destroyed when Berlin was bombed. Chamberlain had a plan. They would travel around Europe,

and he would sell Elmere's fakes to galleries, saying they were all that was left of his father's collection. Elmere toured galleries to study Picasso's work, and found some pre-war paper stock to use. In one week, he drew a dozen Picasso's. He, Chamberlain, and Chamberlain's English girlfriend, had a grand old time for a few months touring Europe and staying in fancy hotels. Every one of Elmere's Picasso sold with no suspicion.

But he had suspicions of his own when he saw one of the drawings on sale in a London gallery at an eye-watering price and realized Chamberlain was keeping more than the 50-50 split they'd agreed upon. That bastard, how dare he be so dishon-oh, yeah, shit. No honor among thieves. They fought and Elmere set sail alone for Scandinavia. There, accurately playing the role of a refugee Hungarian aristocrat, he sold some of his Picasso's to a Swedish gallery for $6,000.

Wow. Poor paranoid Elmere convinced the police would be on his tail any second. He was on a ship for Rio de Janeiro as soon as the check cleared. This is a theme for Elmere's life. He's always convinced. He always feels like somebody's immediately going to be on his tail. He figured this was the furthest he could run and still be in the civilized world. As would become normal for him whenever he made a moment.

big change in his life, he vowed he was done with forgery. From now on, he would go straight and make money with his own art. Sure, Jan. Let me know how that works out. As he usually did wherever he traveled, Elmere quickly made friends with the hoity-toity crowd in Rio and made some money painting portraits for local notables, including a future president. But soon he got bored and decided to visit New York. He liked the states a lot. His visa was for three months, but he ended up staying for 11 years. Old friends from Paris introduced him around, and when he rented an apartment on East 78th Street, the guest list for his housewarming party included the likes of the Gabor sisters, Ava and Jaja, and actress Lana Turner. Wow. As was often the case, other people

remembered events somewhat differently than Elmere. He said Jaja Gabor commissioned him to paint a nude portrait of her, and then, according to Elmere, she complained that one of the tits was too much in the center. I was paid for it, but very poorly. But Jaja said, I remember him well, but he never painted my portrait. In 1949, he came to visit me at the plaza and sold me two doofies. He said they were duffies for $5,000. They were fakes, and now I want my money back. I wish I could do a convincing Jaja impression, but I'd probably just completely biff it. Elmere was living high on the money from Sweden, but he wasn't earning anything, and the cash was dwindling fast. He parlayed his social success in New York to a one-man show at a 57th Street gallery.

The show was packed with the wealthy and famous, and Elmere sold one portrait. He didn't even make enough to cover the cost of the catalog. There's a reason that starving artist is such a common phrase. Most people in the biz don't make much money at it, if any. If Elmere seriously wanted to pursue a career as a working artist, he'd have to seriously downscale, live in a tiny little loft without hard. hot water and develop a taste for baked beans. This was unacceptable. The only time in his life Elmere had ever been uncomfortable was when fascists had thrown him into prison camps. He was fundamentally

a soft, spoiled aristocrat. He was also 42 years old and long past the time when poverty might seem kind of romantic and boho. So Elmere drew a couple more Picasso's at his coffee table to test whether the American market was as easy to fool as the European one. And to, and to absolutely no one surprise, it was, and with some fresh cash in his pocket, he headed for California. Getting bored with Picasso, he added Renoir and Matisse to his repertoire, and toured galleries up and down the West Coast, playing the mostly true role of the refugee aristocrat forced to sell the family art. He never asked for much, and that was a big part of why he was so successful. Getting so little for a piece wouldn't be worth a forger's time,

people thought. Nobody could conceive of how quickly Elmere was able to to turn these things out. This dude was an art-making machine. He could shift into another frickin' time dimension. I don't know how he did it and did it so well. And of course, it appealed to the dealer's greed. Here was this little European rub who had no idea of the real value of his art. The dealers thought they were fleecing him. Con artists being conned. It's turtles all the way down. after a while elmere headed to texas he said i'd gone to some western movies and i wanted to see the cowboys and that is one of the gayest things i've ever heard and i love it so much i want to marry it so i'd gone to some western movies and i wanted to see the cowboys it's so very gay i love

oh elmere oh elmere we love you elmere we love you elmire he was probably being a little disingenuous, though. The wealth of the Texas oil boom was just starting to seep into the public consciousness and new money meant a new market for fancy art. He liked how easygoing and generous people in Texas were, but he couldn't make any money with his honest art. The trouble in Dallas, he said, was that any portrait that didn't look like a county fair photograph they didn't like. Throw in shade. Back in Los Angeles and the New York, Elmere started working with oil rather than just in drawings. He was easily bored, and oils were much more of a challenge, and they sold for more, too. In the 60s, another famous forger, David Stein, who got caught

almost immediately, told the press that if he was painting Chagall, he became Chagall. If he was painting Matisse, he became Matisse. Elmere and I rolled his eyes at this. What he did was study and practice. If, say, he wanted to paint a Shagall, gall, he'd just go to every gallery he could to see his work, get every art book and photograph he could find and practice till he was able to duplicate the correct kinds of brushstrokes and the thickness and color of the paint, in addition to the artist's style. Almost all of his forgeries passed even expert appraisal at first glance. Just amazing. Elmere wandered the Midwest for a while, selling to galleries. With his visa expired and having been unable to renew the fraudulent French

passport he'd traveled on, he was essentially stateless. And he was paranoid that the FBI might be after him. He just like me for real. I am always, I literally always feel like I'm about to be caught anytime I do anything slightly wrong. Like immediately. He always thought they were coming for him. And they never were. Never. He was the perfect criminal. He was so good at what he did. Everyone was just like, yeah, it looks like a Picasso. Dope. And he was like, they're on to me. He was smart about it too. me he moved around a lot like he really i think was a very smart criminal this is the first criminal that we're like he's he's a good guy i can't help it i like

he's the first guy we've ever been because he also like genuinely like he was only conning people that would would also be conning him right like he was like he was going after people that that were trying to con him so who that gives a fuck no none of his experience experiences with government cops had ever been good, obviously, and the thought of being repatriated back to communist Hungary was terrifying. So he liked to keep moving. But as most of us would, he eventually got tired of it. In 1952, he moved back to Los Angeles and once again tried to make a living on his own art. He got a cheap apartment and worked for six months, and then tried to sell to local galleries. None of them bought anything. One gallery owner looked at Elmere, 45 years old,

impeccably put together in his suit and tie and monocle and sniffed, You don't look like an artist? Which had to suck, but my dude, if you want to look like an artiste, you really can't show up dressed like the Monopoly Man. Okay, the little monocle, I love it so much. It's just not going to work. You look like the guy on the Pringles can. It's not going to work.

The Spondent, Elmere tried to sell some of his simpler pieces, landscapes and seascapes to furniture stores and interior decorators. And with this, he had some success. This put him ahead of most working artists. He was making a modest, if unglamorous, living. He even traded three still lifes for an old Chevy. This was fine with Elmere. He always enjoyed his comforts, but he'd never been obsessed with acquiring stuff. But then, he met a young ex-Marine called Jimmy Damien, and he was smitten. Jimmy soon moved in with him. Jimmy sounds like a pretty easygoing dude, and it's not like he tried to push Elmere into anything,

but Elmere's relationships would soon follow a pattern. He'd get a handsome young boyfriend and want to spoil and impress him. When the rent on their new apartment was due, Elmere took out his old tools and in just a few minutes had a small Modigliani self-portrait. He sold it within the hour for $200. A month later, it sold to a Chicago collection. for $4,000. Elmere was both furious and intrigued by the possibilities. For the first time in his life, he firmly committed to a career as a forger. He and Jimmy drove east, selling art to museums

and dealers all along the way, and settled in a Miami Beach apartment. Elmere was committed to his new career, but he was sick of moving around. A life of working in the mornings and then going swimming with Jimmy in the afternoons was much more appealing, so he essentially set up a mail-order forgery business. Galleries and museums across the country would receive letters like this. Dear sir, I'm in possession of a Matisse drawing, Penn and Inc. from period 1920 to 1925, representing a woman seated at a table with a bouquet of flowers, and for personal reasons, I would like to dispose of it. If you would be interested, I will gladly send you a photograph. They were always interested.

When they got in touch, Elmere would send a photograph of his forged piece, and they'd agree on a price pending examination of the piece. Because he'd heard you could get in big trouble by using U.S. mail in any criminal activity, Elmere always sent the art by Railway Express Delivery Company. It wasn't quick. Museums would sometimes keep a piece for weeks to have it assessed, but ultimately Elmere had a near 100% sales record. Everything he offered, somebody bought. He sold around 70 drawings and paintings and made around 160,000.

nearly two million in today's money. But soon it all came crashing down. A Chicago gallery owner named Joseph Faulkner had bought a couple of Matisse drawings from Elmere. After experts from the Art Institute assured him they were genuine, he bought more. Renoirs, Modigliani's, more matisces. Again, the Art Institute said they were the real deal. But when he sent several drawings to New York for an exhibition, they were spotted as fake. Falkner called Elmere and asked for certificates of authenticity. Elmere vaguely said, sure, sure, I'll look for him, but not right now. I have a friend visiting from Europe. He hung up the phone and got the hell out of Florida immediately. Faulkner reimbursed his clients who had bought the paintings and then he called the feds.

FBI agents visited the Miami Beach apartment where Jimmy played dumb, but by that time Elmere was already on his way to Mexico City. As always, Elmere was a hit with the Hoyty and the Toity and even had a gallery show there, but he couldn't make any money. There were plenty of wealthy collectors in Mexico City, but they flew to New York or Paris to buy anything. Elmere was already thinking of leaving when events made up his mind for certain. The Mexico City police hauled him in for questioning. Elmere despaired certain that the long arm of the FBI had reached south of the border. But no, the police wanted to question him about a murder. Turns out, a wealthy gay Englishman had retired to a palatial villa in one of the Mexico City

suburbs. He'd been found dead in his bed, strangled. He'd been known to cruise the city's gay bars, and the police already had a suspect in custody, a young man named Carlos. Elmere had no idea what this had to do with him. He'd never even met this Englishman. And the boy, Carlos, the police asked. I never met him either, Elmere said. But the police had found a little notebook of Carlos with the names and phone numbers of several older gay men, including both the murdered man and Elmere. He remembered then. He'd met Carlos at a cocktail party once, flirted with him a little and gave him his phone number. When Elmere explained this to the police, they believed him, but they also said they'd gone to a lot of trouble chasing down this lead. Maybe a thousand pesos

worth a trouble if Elmere was interested in going home quickly. He argued. He argued, They argued them down to 500, and they drove him home and wished him a pleasant good night. They picked him up again a week later for another 500 pesos. Being gay and apparently wealthy meant the cops could keep milking him forever against the threat of jail time. After the third time, Elmere went to a lawyer. When the lawyer called to say everything was taken care of, Elmere then got a bill for $1,000. He was furious. He could have paid off the cops 20 more times for that.

Elmere paid the lawyer off with a fake Renoir and headed back to the U.S., looking over his shoulder for the FBI, was better than this. Just imagine that, y'all, you get extorted by the cops, so you hire a lawyer to, like, go to bat for you, and then the lawyer extorts you, too. Wamp, womp, that would not be fun. Elmere's forged works were beginning to have lives of their own. One of his Matisse paintings sold for more than $60,000. Back in New York, Elmere visited. visited Brantano's bookstore and looked through a recent book on Modigliani drawings. Three of his fakes were in there, one of them described as a masterpiece.

It seemed like every art book published after 1957 contained some of his work. Elmere had a second fancy New York housewarming, and a doctor friend had the nerve to bring along an unsuitable companion. Elmere said he hadn't shaved in at least two or three days. He had a long, narrow nose, thin black hair, a short. suit and shirt that wasn't just swanier, but looked like he'd slept in it for three days in Washington Square. He looked like a bowery bum, and I gave him my usual stare that I reserve for such types. Bitchy, gosh. We love, we love Elmere. I just can't help it. I'm sorry.

This was Fernand de la Gros, half Greek, half French, former cabaret dancer who had just run away to the States after an unhappy love affair. Elmere disliked him on site. Elmere had a run of bad luck that left him nearly broke and in fear of the FBI once more. He made a semi-serious attempt to end his own life with sleeping pills. His doctor friend helped him recover, then suggested that Fernand Legros drive Elmere back to Miami Beach and looked after him there. Elmere's boyfriend Jimmy was long gone. He'd hit the road while Elmere was in Mexico. That horror, Elmere said, but let himself be talked into it. There was never anything romantic or physical between Elmere and Fernand,

but they became an odd pair of roommates, actual roommates this time. Elmere found Fernand almost acceptable once he had a bath and a haircut, and at least he was intelligent company, if a little bitchy and unpredictable. In a few weeks, Elmere was stronger, but almost out of money. How are we going to live now? Fernand complained. We, Elmere said, go out and get a job. But Fernand wasn't into that.

The only job he'd ever had was an airline ticket agent for a few weeks in New York. It didn't suit me, he told Elmere. I think maybe they didn't like each other because they had too much in common. He knew about Elmere's past. Why don't you just do one little drawing, he said. It won't take you more than a day, and we could live for a month on what you get for it. It would only take me half an hour, Elmere pointed out. But he was wary.

Museums and galleries across America had come to be cautious about buying anything from a rich Hungarian. Elmere had sold under quite a few aliases, but he was distinctive, memorable. The Monopoly Man. But Fernand had a solution. He would do the selling. All Elmere had to do was draw and paint. This was appealing. Elmere had always hated selling his art.

Fernand was shrewd and forceful. He'd be way better at it. He agreed. Not long after, Elmere was strolling along the beach and got to chatting with a good-looking Canadian 19-year-old called Rial Assard, who had been lying in the sand. Young Rial was kind of an uncarved block. Not dumb at all, just kind of simple. He'd grown up in a tiny Quebecois village just across the border from Vermont, and he'd hitchhiked down to Florida because he wanted to sit in the sun.

And that was what he'd spent his days doing, just sitting in the sun. Elmere invited him to dinner, but irritatingly, Fernand made the bigger impression, and soon he and Real were sharing a hotel room. What the hell, Fernand, you're sponging off Elmere's art sales. Now you're going to mac on his new boy toy? that has got to be against the roommate code. Jeez. Elmere and Fernand went to Chicago where Fernand, with careful instructions from Elmere on what to say, sold two Matisse's, a Picasso, and a Brock.

The new partnership was off to a flying start, but when they got back to Miami Beach, Rial told them an FBI agent had been looking for Almear. Damn it. Time to hit the road. Elmere had thought he'd left this life behind, and traveling from city to city selling his art, but here he was again. At least all he had to do was paint this time. To give him privacy to work, wherever they were, Elmere stayed in one hotel and Fernand

and Real in another. The deal was that Elmere would get 60% of whatever they made and Fernand 40, but Elmere only had Fernand's word on how much they made, and soon he noticed that the other two were staying in nicer places than he could afford. But he was scared of arrest. He needed Fernand, so he didn't make waves. In California, Fernand fell ill with hepatitis and was bedridden for a month. Rial, who'd been the pair's chauffeur and general helper, was by his bed day and night.

When he started to feel better, Riall went out for a walk, then decided to see a movie. He didn't get back till 10 p.m. By which time Fernand had worked himself up into a jealous rage that was one hell of a thing to behold. I mean, this man curked the hell out. He threw plates, he smashed windows, he screamed and yelled, he turned. tore the sheets. He fell on the floor and thrashed around like you needed a damn exorcist or something. Drama! Elmere had been with him in Real for six months, and at this point he decided he'd had enough, not only of them, but of living nervously in the U.S. He wanted to go to Europe.

Fernand and Real did, too. They assumed they'd continue the business, but Elmere planned on ditching him as soon as possible. For $2,000, they got a Canadian passport for Elmere in the name of Joseph Bhutan. Bhutan was a real person, an unassuming Ontario insurance clerk with a wife and kids. Fernand was certain the guy would hardly ever leave his hometown, never mind want to travel abroad. Elmere left the United States as the most prolific and successful forger in history. He didn't keep records and had no idea how many pieces he'd actually made. Hundreds, for sure. Even when experts in the U.S. had started to catch on to him, they had no idea of how prolific he had been. One gallery owner said,

DeHorey had some talent, but the outstanding forger of our time was Raynaul. He was a magnificent forger, a true genius. This is hilarious because Raynaul was one of Elmere DeHore's aliases. I love it. After 13 years, Elmere was back in Paris. It hadn't changed much. He felt like he'd come home. His pleasant reunion with the city was upset, though,

when Fernand and Real showed up, staying in the same hotel as him, with Frennan pressing him to get back to work. But Elmere, once again, was determined to try and make a living on his own art. Once again, that lasted until his bank account had dwindled almost to zero. He'd moved to Rome and started forging again, then drove around Europe to sell his pieces, but whatever money he made, he couldn't hold on to. He'd always been awful with money.

Despondent, he searched for somewhere quiet and out of the way where he lived cheaply in work. He settled on Ibiza. Soon after settling in there, he went to Paris to try and sell a couple of his Matisse drawings and ran into Fernand and Real almost immediately. Fernand, he thought, looked much better put together than usual. In fact, he looked wealthy. What Elmere didn't know was that Fernand had sold some of Elmere's pieces, including a valuable fake Cézanne that Elmere thought was hidden in New York.

With the money from that, and with the connections he'd made, Fernand was now a reasonably successful and mostly legitimate art dealer. When Elmere showed him in Riala portfolio of his own watercolors from Ibiza, Fernand exclaimed over them and bought them all for $50 each. Elmere was flattered and impressed with the ease with which Fernand threw money around. He'd probably have been less impressed if he knew Fernand owed him thousands of dollars for his cut of the Cézanne, but Elmere wouldn't find out about that for years. The truth was, Fernand was essentially a conman and Elmere was essentially a mark.

What did I say? con men all the way down. Fernand knew a combination of flattery and forceful persuasion could convince Elmere to do what he wanted. When Fernand found out that Elmere had been selling his own fakes, he visited his hotel room and scolded him for taking such risks. You are a master now, he said. You shouldn't expose yourself that way. Real and I are getting to be known in the art world. We'll take all the risks, and you can live quietly on this little island you talk about. You'll have security. We'll send you a few hundred dollars every month. He wanted Elmere to get started right away.

He'd send him $400 a month, which was more than enough to be comfortable in Ibiza. Every time Fernand made a big sale, Elmere would get a bonus. Fernand gave him a list of what he needed. First, some Duffy and some Doreen. Elmere was wary about getting in trouble in Spain, upsetting his idyllic island life. He lived in Ibiza and painted his own work there. But for his fakes, he always flew to Morocco or Portugal. to work intensely for weeks at a time.

The watercolors, Elmere could roll up in mail, but for oils, Rial flew down to collect them. By now, he was a full partner with Fernand, and knew at least as much as his partner did about the art business. When Elmere asked him how he and Fernand were getting on, Rial would just shrug glumly and say, the same, meaning Fernand was still insanely jealous and sometimes violent. Rial acted as a liaison between Fernand and Elmere. often bought Elmere art books to help his work. He also helped in small ways with the painting itself, applying a special restorers varnish which dried the surface of oils and produced the cracks

that truly old paintings have. Elmere was completely separated from the selling side of the operation. Fernand sold the first doofies for $8,000 each. Elmere got a $1,200 bonus, and Fernand moved into a fancy new apartment. He was able to charge more for works that had an attached expertise, a certificate of authenticity for works by dead artists provided by experts recognized by the French government. In return for this service, the experts received a nominal fee. Fernand, in his direct way, saw that the nominal fee part was where the weakness lie. I wasn't trying to bribe anyone, he said later. I just dropped $1,000 on the table. If the man didn't pick it up, I dropped a second thousand. I found that people preferred round

numbers. One expert certified Elmer's doofy so often that when two genuine works came to him, he refused to certify them, because to him, Elmere's paintings were the standard. Oh my God, that is hysterical. Not all the old painters were dead. Keyes von Dongen was 90 years old and living with his wife near Monte Carlo. Rial went to visit him with one of Elmere's fakes, hoping to get the old artist to certify that it was his. Although it was based on Van Dangen's 1908 woman with hat, it was an original piece. Von Dangen, who had been quite the ladies' man in his day, stared at the painting, smiled,

then told Real that, of course, he had painted it. Then he gleefully told him how many times he'd had to stop painting to make love to his model. His signature on the certification was shaky, but genuine. Oh, you dirty old turtle. Elmere's works were soon selling for tens of thousands of dollars. Fernand was well on his way to becoming a million, His new apartment had crystal chandeliers and gold leaf ceilings, red velvet wallpaper, and gold

faucets in the bathrooms. And despite his poisonous jealousy over Real, it also had what was more or less a harem of half-naked young men who were always lounging around the place. On one trip to Japan, Fernando and Real made $250,000, which would be worth ten times that today. Elmere's bonus from all this was a six-inch portable Japanese TV set. It was all quite deliberate. Rial said later, we had to keep him poor or he would quit. Oh, you mother, I hate this guy. Elmere didn't share their interest in being rich.

He just wanted an easy life. Fernand had become a pretty cool customer, except when it came to Rial. If Fernand ever saw his boyfriend so much as glance at a pretty boy or girl, he'd either flounce off or throw his drink in Rial's face. even if they were right in the middle of talking to a prospective client. If Fernand had to be out of town alone, he'd hire a private detective to follow Real around while he was gone.

But you've got a condo full of half-naked dudes. Hypocrite? Much? One time when he hadn't liked the detective's report, Fernand flung Raoul's clothes out the window. Rial bought a brand-new alpha-rameo convertible, which he loved. One time, he and Fernand were driving down the Chancesil, arguing when Fernand ground out a cigarette on the passenger side carpet. Stop that, Rial yelled.

Fernand started deliberately burning holes in the shiny new red leather interior with his lighter while Rial yelled at him. So Rial pulled up beside a cop and said, Officer, this man sitting next to me has not only made me an improper proposition, but he was trying to molest me sexually in my own car. They were both taken into the police station and released a few hours later once they'd cooled down, and Rael decided not to press charges. Toxic. Elmere couldn't understand why they were still together,

but then he had no idea how much money the two of them were making. Still, it was clear that Fernand and Rial's dramatic relationship was in stormy waters, even by their standards. Whenever either of them was alone with El Mier, they complained about the other, and Fernando and Rial had always complained about El Mier, too. Each of the three had a secret, bitchy little nickname that the other two. who used behind their back. The always dramatic Fernand was Cleopatra.

Rial was the peasant, and poor old Elmere was Grandma. Oof. That's the worst one. When they next visited Grandma on Ibiza, he was in a bad mood. The hotel across from his apartment was adding a second floor, which was going to block his view of the sea. Fernand's solution was simple. They would buy some land and build a house, beautiful house.

They wanted Elmere to be comfortable, after all. Buy it with what, said Elmere, who still had no clue how much his work was selling for? Fernand said he would build it, and own it, of course. Elmere was living under a false identity. It wasn't wise for him to be on any official documentation. The house, La Falez, got bigger and grander through every stage of the design. When it was finished, it was the most luxurious property on the island. Its construction finally made Elmere suspicious about how much money Fernand was making,

but he didn't follow this thinking through to the next logical step, that Fernand was ultimately building this palace for himself, not Elmere. Cleopatra and The Peasant, meanwhile, were on the outs, with their fights, Fernand's side anyway, getting ever more dramatic. Then Real met a pretty French girl and fell in love. In January of 1966, they got engaged. Fernand had a predictable meltdown. He hired some Marseille mafia types to rough up Real.

But dialing up the antagonism with Real was not such a smart move. Like we said when we introduced him, Real was not at all dumb. And he wasn't a son worshipping teenager anymore. He'd been at Fernand's side through every step of their art business and he'd handled the money. Fernand was too chaotic and too bored by it. He'd made the deals with clients, but it was real. Rial, who'd taken the checks and handled all the bank transfers. And while Fernand was burning through his income with gold faucets and private detectives,

Rial had been investing his share in Canadian real estate. What's more, over the years, he'd collected $92,000 of IOUs from Fernand. Now, he said Fernand had to either give him the cash or sell him that ostentatious apartment. Never, Fernand shrieked. So Rial took his IOUs to the authority. and asked for a rid of seizure on the property. Ooh, girl. But they were still in business together,

and a couple days later, before a trip to New York, they had a fancy dinner at the apartment. The French legal system moved quicker than Rial had expected. Midway through the meal, Fernand's butler led in a process server who announced he was seizing the apartment in Rial's name. Rial fled as Fernand screamed and threw, in this order, a salmon, some silver cutlery,

and a lit candelabra at him, the red velvet laws briefly caught on fire. Oh, my God. What is this a telenovela? If somebody's evil twin going to step out from behind the curtains? I want to know if the salmon is raw, cooked, sauced. Details, details, people, details. They fought over Elmere, each pressuring him to paint their own preferred works. And they weren't the only cause of stress for Elmere. Remember, his passport, his whole legal identity was taken. taken from a Canadian insurance clerk named Joseph Bhutan, chosen specifically because his life was so boring. The passport was expiring, so Rial in Rotterdam, took it to the Canadian consulate to try and get it renewed. As he waited, the clerk checked his files and started frowning.

It turned out that boring Joseph Bhutan had been hunted by the Mounties for years on charges of possession of stolen goods and bigamy. Oh my God. Where is this man? The clerk demanded. Rehal just turned and ran. Once again, Elmere had no passport and no official identity. Elmere didn't do well under pressure. His work suffered badly. One time, Fernand had to remind him with gritted teeth to add the E onto Matisse's signature. Oh, man. The work might have been poorer, but Fernand kept selling it anyway, including 56 works to Texas oil tycoon Algir Hurtle Meadows.

38 of them were forgeries, and when they were revealed as such, Meadows found unwanted fame as the man with the world's largest and best collection of fake paintings. A lot of victims of fraud don't come forward out of embarrassment at being taken for dupes, but Meadows was beyond that. He was furious, and he wanted blood, demanding that authorities in both France and the U.S. take actions against Fernand. He caused such a stir that everyone who had ever bought from Fernand took a closer look at what they had bought. Some of the works were genuine.

Fernand did deal in genuine art as well as fakes, but almost all of them were from the brush and pen of Elmere De Hori. Fernand was in a panic. He burned all his records and packed nine suitcases full of clothes and jewelry, then headed south with his new American boyfriend acting as a chauffeur. From Barcelona, they took a boat to Abiza. Elmere was away at a theater opening in Madrid, so they just broke into La Falaise through the kitchen door. The next day, they changed the locks. Fernand insisted he was innocent.

It's a plot on the part of jealous American art dealers, he declared. The next day, he might say, it's a conspiracy on the part of those jealous art dealers in Paris. He told everyone he could that Elmere was a madman. wanted for murder in Mexico. Elmere tried to force Fernand out, but it was Renan's house. Elmere left his island sanctuary and was once again a refugee, wandering the capitals of Europe and staying with friends. Fernand, meanwhile, was making himself thoroughly unpopular with his neighbors with raucous parties. Then, while he was in London on business, Fernand learned that the

charges instigated by Algar Hurdle Meadows were about to drop. He fled to Cairo where he'd been born, hoping to avoid extradition back to France. And that might have worked, but in February of 1968, a young man was arrested in Switzerland for trying to pass $12,000 of bad checks. Rial Lassard had been unable to get his hands on his saved money.

I guess once he became wanted, the French authorities froze his accounts. Fernand Lagros was certainly an odd duck. He might have tried to brain Rial with a smoked salmon, but Rial was still the person, other than himself, that he cared most about in the world. So in April, a man in hippie-like clothes with long, blonde hair and dark glasses showed up in Geneva. His British passport identified him as Fernand MacDonald.

He spent all day on the phone trying to arrange Rayal's release. He was sufficiently suspicious that the hotel tipped off the police. When they tried to detain him in the hotel bar, he ran for it, and in the resulting scuffle his blonde wig and dark glasses fell off, and police had Fernand Legrosse in their clutch. catches. Cleopatra and the peasant were headed for the slammer. A friend had gotten in touch with Elmere once Fernand had fled, and he came back to Ibiza. La Feles looked like a wild, month-long party had just wound up, windows were smashed, clothes were everywhere, cigarette holes were burned into the

up. Elmere and his maid cleaned everything up. Within a few weeks, he had picked up his old, peaceful life, but he fully expected the boot of justice to fall on him soon, although possibly not too hard. A Spanish lawyer told him that if he hadn't personally sold any fake paintings in Spain, hadn't painted them in Spain, and hadn't copied any Spanish masters, then he hadn't actually broken Spanish laws, and it was highly unlikely he'd be extradited to the U.S. or France, which actually does make sense if you think about it. Ultimately, Elmere was arrested, not for his forgeries, but under laws against vagrants and social undesirables. He was charged on the basis of his homosexuality, and for consorting with known criminals, Fernand Lagros.

Jeez, Louise. He was given two months in the relatively pleasant Ibiza jail. This was still prison, but he was allowed to bring his own bed, books, clothes, and stereo, as well as his sleeping pills and anxiety meds. The cells opened onto his shared patio. Most of Elmere's fellow inmates were young, long-haired British hippies, arrested on charges ranging from public nudity to weed possession. Elmere hired one of them as his valet.

He cleaned Elmere's cell, washed his dishes, and set up his deck chair on the patio. God. Oh my God, so funny. Elmere had been distraught at his conviction, but his two months actually passed quite pleasantly. In Switzerland, Fernand Lagros got a three-month suspended sentence for entering the country on a forged passport,

but they resisted extraditing him to France. The rumors among gossipy Parisian art dealers, not necessarily the most reliable of sources, were that two French cabinet ministers had enjoyed a particular type of party with Fernand and his harem of half-naked young men and didn't really try too hard to bring him home. Oh my. After his release, and as this story broke internationally, Elmere became something of a minor celebrity. He signed a deal for the Clifford Irving book and a couple years later for an Orson-Wells documentary. He tried to parlay this attention into success for his own work, but people still weren't interested.

The fakes were what counted. Joseph Faulkner, the Chicago art dealer, offered to refund one of Elmere's Modigliani's to the Minneapolis collector who'd bought it. Are you serious? the collector said. He wanted Faulkner to come up and write on the back of the drawing. I, Joseph Faulkner, certify that this is an original and genuine Modigliani fake by Elmere DeHore. I love it. Elmere's peaceful time on Abiza would not be eternal. In 1976, he learned that Spain had agreed to extradite him to face charges in France.

He deliberately overdosed on sleeping pills and died before he could be taken to the hospital. Oh, man, I hate that that's how that ends. I just hate it. As for Fernand Legros, if he'd stayed in Switzerland, maybe he would have been okay. But in 1973, he was arrested in Rio de Janeiro and eventually extraded. United to France. He was convicted of fraud and fined $3,000 and sentenced to two years in prison, most of which was suspended on psychiatric advice. He died of throat cancer in rural France in 1983. After serving a short prison sentence, Real LeSard kept out of the spotlight and studied to become an artist, with some modest success. I think he's still alive today in his 80s and apparently

keeping a low profile. I doubt he would have ever admitted it, but I think Elmere DeHore probably felt at least some degree of shame about what he did. You don't get to be so good at his job without a deep love of art and a respect for what the people he copied had achieved. Whenever he got the chance, he always turned back to his own art, trying to get

people to notice it and value it. They never did. It certainly was not for a lack of technical skill. Elmere could match any painter on the planet brushstroke for brush stroke, often quite literally. But that special magic great artists have, what they see

what they want to show, what they want to say, Elmere just didn't have it, although he could recognize it in the works of others. I can hardly imagine how frustrating that must be to know you have every tool needed to make that magic but be incapable of doing it. I think that frustration is what led to his strange wandering life. Maybe he'd be happy to know that his pieces, retitled as homages, are still selling. There are even people out there trying to sell fake to Horries. so that was a wild one right campers you know we'll have another one for you next week but for now lock your doors light your lights and stay safe until we get together again around the true crime campfire and as always we want to send a grateful shout out to a few of our lovely patrons thank you so much to suzanne chrystal gale dathan and zaya no name what a cool username we appreciate y'all to the moon and back and if you're not yet a patron you're missing out patrons of our show get every episode ad-free at least a day early, sometimes even two, plus tons of extra content, like patrons-only episodes and hilarious post-show discussions. And once you hit the $5 and up categories, you get even more

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