Inside Criminal Minds...Con Men, Narrated by Anthony Wilson

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Inside Criminal Minds ... Con Men
[The Cunning Genius Who Fooled The Art World: John Myatt]
Narration by Anthony Wilson
by Real Crime
Apr 5, 2022

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The first episode investigates the story of John Myatt, a painter who produced forged works of art for dealer John Drew. Lifting the lid on one of the 20th-century's biggest contemporary art frauds, it reveals that Myatt painted around 200 forgeries while Drewe managed to con esteemed experts in some of Britain's prestigious art auction establishments.

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Part 1 of 6

Transcript





[Narrator] Con men, the most devious of all criminals. Charming, cool, and calculating, they betray trust and devastate lives, yet remain a complete enigma. We are about to explore the mysterious world of these master criminals, giving an unprecedented insight into the workings of the complex minds of some of the world's most cunning con men. We will reveal the detail and the intricacies of their elaborate crimes, and uncover how they were brought dramatically to justice. In this show, we tell the startling and incredible truth behind the Twentieth century's biggest art fraud.



A struggling artist was drawn into a con, would make millions, with the artist and con man secretly working together for almost a decade, creating fake paintings that would sell as recently discovered works by master artists,



fooling the international art world, and leaving them devastated and utterly humiliated.





[Jonathan Searle, Fraud Squad, New Scotland Yard] In terms of 20th century art fraud, John Drewe and the John Myatt case, must rank right at the top.



[Peter Nahum, Art Dealer] But the problem is, we were being scammed by a very intelligent person on multi levels.





[John Myatt] Unbelievable that, uh, people would be looking at paintings painted in the same kind of stuff that you put on your walls basically, and authenticating them.

[Jonathan Searle, Fraud Squad, New Scotland Yard] If I had been a dealer, I'd have most certainly been fooled.



[Narrator] The sophistication and intricacy of this incredible scam saw forgeries of famous artists such as Ben Nicholson, and Albert Giacometti, painted in emulsion, and covered in tea, coffee, and hoover dust, audaciously passed off as original oil paintings under the art world's noses.



The con was masterminded by a cool and calculating criminal, with an IQ of One-Hundred Sixty-Five, whose name was John Drewe. He enticed struggling, cash-strapped, single-parent John Myatt into his intricate, and almost foolproof scam.

[Jonathan Searle, Fraud Squad, New Scotland Yard]John Drewe has got a huge amount of, um, for want of another word, "front."



[Peter Nahum, Art Dealer] But he's very, very dangerous, because he's a fantasist. He's quite happy to scam money out of anybody.

[Jonathan Searle, Fraud Squad, New Scotland Yard] But there must be an element of intellectual one-up-manship.



[Joel Levy, Con Expert] And putting one over on people who probably thought themselves to be very smart, and he probably thought, you know, that he'd made them look like idiots. And that made him feel great.

[Narrator] Mastermind John Drewe took the artcon to a whole new level. His master stroke was the infiltration of the British art archives. He secured access, then simply rewrote history to authenticate his bogus paintings. This shocked the art world to its core.

[Jonathan Searle, Fraud Squad, New Scotland Yard] Basically, it's art historical revisionism. So he's changing history. He's changing art history.



[Jacqui Hames, Metropolitan Police Detective] He went to enormous lengths to authenticate the pictures, and to change the authenticity of them, and the invoice that goes around with them, in order to make those paintings believable. And the idea of taking on the art world, and of all these superior intellects, and to actually get the better of them, must have been irresistible to him.

[John Myatt] How the hell we ever got away with it, I just don't know.



Sugnall, Staffordshire, England

[Narrator] The story of what has been dubbed, "The Greatest Contemporary Art Forgery of the Twentieth Century begins in the unlikeliest of places: here in leafy Stafford England back in the mid-1980s. Over Two Hundred paintings will be forged by a cash-strapped, single parent, called John Myatt.





Myatt's intentions began honorably enough: a single parent, raising his family, he decided to try to earn money to support his two young children while working at home.



He placed an advertisement in the UK magazine, "Private Eye," offering his services as an artist who reproduced copies of famous paintings.



[John Myatt] The advert said, "Genuine Fakes, Nineteenth and Twentieth Century paintings from One-Hundred Fifty pounds," the first time I put it in.



And the second time I put it in it said, "Nineteenth and Twentieth Century paintings from Two-Hundred Fifty pounds," what with prices up a bit.



I think it was about a year-and-a-half into it when I got a phone call from Mr. Drewe. And the only difference between any other customer, and Mr. Drewe, was that he just kept on coming back.





[Narrator] John Drewe, a man with a brilliant mind, and an IQ of One-Hundred-Sixty-Five, was born John Cockett.



Throughout his life, he worked in jobs he wasn't legitimately qualified for, but always convinced his employers otherwise.



[Jacqui Hames, Metropolitan Police Detective] Drewe did have all the hallmarks of a really good con man. He was utterly believable, and plausible. He could tell extremely complicated lies, and keep those lies going, remembering everything he told.



[Jonathan Searle, Fraud Squad, New Scotland Yard] He taught Physics "A" level at a school in north London, and I don't think he has -- I think he's got Physics "O" level. And the irony of this is that he actually taught it quite well.

[Jacqui Hames, Metropolitan Police Detective] John Drewe showed very clearly, from early on, that he disliked authority. He didn't like working for anybody else. He wanted to work for himself. He was clearly arrogant in that respect.



[Joel Levy, Con Expert] I mean it sounds as though, um, Drewe was so sure of himself, and so convinced of his own superiority, which was backed up, I suppose, if you like, by the fact that he was successful. For him, that was evidence that he was a cut above everyone else. That he was a few steps ahead.

[Narrator] When he contacted John Myatt, Drewe, now in his thirties, was masquerading as a professor of nuclear physics, who needed paintings to decorate his home. In reality, he was a master con man, preparing the ground to lure in the man who would be the key to the next scam he was planning.

[John Myatt] He was one of the most exciting people I'd ever met. He was so interesting. It was a bit like going to the movies, really. You're going to see him, John Drewe, every three weeks or so. As time went by, I got to know him better. I stopped meeting him in Houston Station, and I used to meet him in Golders Green Station. And then he'd take me to his house. And we'd have a meal, I'd meet his children; I'd meet his wife. And the only thing, I think, I remember him saying was -- this is a long time ago, of course, "Don't tell my wife that you painted these, will you? I'm just telling her that you're an art expert who's come to look over the paintings, and stuff." When you bear in mind that most customers were good for about two paintings, this was really quite exceptional.



And in the end, he seemed to just run out of ideas . And, uh, he said, "Well, what would you like to do next, John?" So I looked through, and found some drawings -- cubist drawings. and It struck me that I could turn these into paintings. Not just copying something, which is just stupid, you know, but actually creating something new from a drawing.



And I remember it was in a little oval thing -- about that big, maybe. I painted this -- it was by a German cubist, that very few people had heard of, called Albert Gleizes.





[Narrator] It was after this -- the ninth commission -- the painting in the style of the little known cubist artist Albert Gleizes, that John Myatt received a phone call from his best customer -- a phone call from John Drewe that would change Myatt's life forever, and turn an innocent hobby into a devious, and criminal life of dishonesty.



[John Myatt] The phone rang, and he said, "You know that Albert Gleizes painting that I bought off you? Well, I've taken it into Christie's, and they say it's a very interesting work, and they'll sell it for , pounds. So, you know, would you rather have Two-Hundred-and-Fifty, or would you like Twelve-and-a-half-thousand?" You know, with hindsight, that was where I made my mistake.

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Part 2 of 6

[Jacqui Hames, Metropolitan Police Detective] Drewe was very clever in the way that he targeted Myatt, and built up a genuine relationship of trust with him. He paid him a relatively normal sum of money for the copies that he was making, and they built up a relationship together.



It wasn't till that moment, where he offered him twelve-and-a-half-thousand-pounds for the painting, and sucked him into the con, and used Myatt's weaknesses, that the whole relationship, and the con, really started.

[Joel Levy, Con Expert] So he made him offer he couldn't refuse, effectively. And then once Myatt had done this deal with the devil, if you like, he was already implicated. And it was probably a lot harder for him to back out.

[John Myatt] I should have said, "Oh, come on. This is painted in emulsion paint. I haven't used original oil paints. None of the materials are original. Anyway, it's a crime, you know. You don't do that kind of stuff. But I don't know, um.



Something in me just sort of went, "pop", and I thought, "Yeah, that's good, that is. I like the idea of twelve-and-a-half -- I've never seen twelve-and-a-half-thousand-pounds. Well, I've never seen that kind of money. And I got all excited about having all this money. I wasn't selling it to anybody. I mean, as far as, you know, I didn't have anything to do with walking into Sotheby's or anything. I was just painting them. So I suppose, you know, it was turning a blind eye with a vengeance to what was really going on.

[Jacqui Hames, Metropolitan Police Detective] I think it's easy to feel that maybe this is a victimless crime, because art theft is, you know, a very affluent area. People can afford to lose a few paintings here and there.



But there are two areas where it really is very damaging. Firstly, on an individual who's paid a lot of money, and put a lot of trust in an expert, and believes they're getting something, you know, very valuable for their money. And secondly, the impact on the art world itself. There's been an enormous distrust now on the provenances of these paintings, and of any paintings, because of the effect of what John Drewe has done.

[Joel Levy, Con Expert] The classic artist thinks that it is a victimless crime. And they often rationalize what they've done, by saying they haven't really done a crime, and nobody's got hurt. And it's easy to think that way. Especially if you're scamming rich people, or businesses, for instance. It's quite easy to portray it as a victimless crime. Because you could say, well "Well, you know, they could afford it," or "their insurance will cover it."

[Narrator] Myatt's fateful decision was one he regrets to this day. Tempted by the prospect of accumulating vast wealth, Myatt agreed to Drewe's proposal. They were now partners-in-crime.



Little did Myatt know the enormity of the scale of the scam which was to come, and the terrible price he would eventually have to pay.



But now, he was hooked in. There was no going back.

[John Myatt] It started there. If it had stopped there, of course, I don't think, you know, I'd be talking to you now, or be talking to anybody else about it.

[Narrator] For almost ten years, con man John Drewe fooled the art world with a complex and intricate scam, passing off fake paintings as famous artist's work. It was a con of such magnitude and importance, that the art world is still reeling from the blow.

[Jacqui Hames, Metropolitan Police Detective] John Drewe was a very clever man. I mean, he'd had an IQ of One-Hundred-Sixty-Five. And he created a very elaborate scam which showed an awful lot of depth of knowledge about the subject matter he was going into, which he wouldn't have had before.

[John Myatt] He had access to the best art bookshops in the country. And if there was an artist who particularly interested him -- for whatever reason -- then he'd buy an art book, and he'd turn down the page and say, "This is interesting. Why don't you look at that?" And that kind of thing.

[Narrator] Drewe's con would never have been possible if he had not courted, and enlisted, the help of artist John Myatt. Before the scam, Myatt was making a modest living, selling honest copies of art classics, legitimately.



But when Christie's paid Drewe Twenty-Five-Thousand pounds for one of Myatt's fake paintings, believing it to be genuine, Myatt found the sum of twelve-and-a-half-thousand-pounds, just too tempting. He became part of Drewe's scam, painting new fakes of master artists for Drewe to sell as the real deal.

[John Myatt] I thought it was just exciting, and fun. It's unbelievable that people would be looking at paintings painted in the same kind of stuff that you put on your walls, basically, and authenticating them. I didn't use aged canvas. I didn't use authentic materials.



I used KY jelly, which is water-based, to actually dilute the the paint if I needed a thin glaze.

[Jonathan Searle, Fraud Squad, New Scotland Yard] But the thing is, about household emulsion, paint -- it dries very quickly.



If you varnish over it -- and he didn't always do the varnishing himself -- we believe Drewe did some of the varnishing -- if you varnish over it, it's very difficult, even for an art restorer, to know whether it's a real oil painting, or something totally different.



[John Myatt] The way the paintings actually got treated after they left me was, you know, I mean, they were walked all over, and there was hoover dust emptied all over them, and occasionally I mean I would throw coffee and tea at the painting, and just grind it into the surface of the canvas.

[Jonathan Searle, Fraud Squad, New Scotland Yard] Allegedly, we heard from John Myatt, that John Drewe would empty the contents of his hoover onto the painting, and then varnish over it. Or maybe he did that when the varnish was still wet. He would scuff the frames.

[John Myatt] And the other thing that's worth mentioning, is the difference between a fake and a forgery.



If you're doing forgery, there really has to be a lot of thought gone into the back of the painting, what a painting looks like from the back. A lot of people know what paintings look like from the front, but they're not quite so clear about what happens when you turn them the other way around. So that was another of, you know, John Drewe covered that as well. He would take the painting, and sort of disassemble it, put new stretchers on it, gallery stickers, signatures, and all this kind of thing on the back of the painting.



[Narrator] But the paintings were only one element of the con. In a master stroke of cunning, Drewe painstakingly ensured that the legitimacy of the fake paintings were never questioned.

[John Myatt] The way he wanted to take it, you have to provide the paintings with a history with what they call a "provenance," which is pretty much the same as a service history with your car. You know, stamps in the book, and all the rest of it. And he made it his job to do that.



[Peter Nahum, Art Dealer] The point about authenticating a painting is, the first and most important thing is, looking at the picture, and judging the paint, the calligraphy, the way the brushstrokes are put on, and the color balance, etc., with authenticated works by the artist. The second most important thing, which is very important if the picture has provenance, histories of previous owners, especially if it takes you back to the artist, and also exhibitions the pictures have been in.



So provenance is very important.

[Jonathan Searle, Fraud Squad, New Scotland Yard] And if you've got the provenance that's there, and the provenances were very, very professional. I've never seen anything like it. And if I had been a dealer, I'd have most certainly been fooled.

[Narrator] And to make the scam work, John Drewe presented himself as a darling of the art world.



[Jonathan Searle, Fraud Squad, New Scotland Yard] John Drewe gave a donation of twenty thousand pounds to the Tate, and as a result of that, he was naturally thought of as a supporter of the arts. And he said he was interested in looking up the old archives -- which he did -- in the Tate. And he set to work. A very busy little bee.



To my knowledge, the type of forgery of archival material, has never been done to this extent with paintings. And not on such a scale, and not so audacious.



Because this was full-penetration of the Tate archives, and the V&A archives, and a number of other archives as well.





[John Myatt] He would fabricate catalogues of exhibitions, by taking a catalogue out of an archive, inserting one of my new paintings into the catalogue, returning it to the archive, and then a researcher will say, "Oh yes, well, you know, that was obviously exhibited in in Brighton Art Gallery, or something, And that is the history which validates the painting -- however poor the quality.

[Peter Nahum, Art Dealer] In retrospect, John Myatt's painting is not good at all. But the problem was, we were being scammed by a very intelligent person on multi levels.

[John Myatt] You know, I was on a learning curve, here. I hadn't done this before, you know. Okay, some of the paintings were good, but some of them were absolutely awful. I mean, really bad quality. How the hell we ever got away with it, I just don't know.

[Mary Lisa Palmer, Director, Giacometti Association] The problem was, that people were no longer looking at the artwork.



They were looking at the provenances.

[Peter Nahum, Art Dealer] These paintings came to us with authentication certificates, from living experts, who were the number one experts on the artists.



And, authentication all the way back. So in other words, your brains are being scrambled. You're saying, "Wait a minute -- it's been authenticated." And you're looking at it through rose-tinted spectacles that you wouldn't normally be doing.

[Jonathan Searle, Fraud Squad, New Scotland Yard] Se in black and white your painting in a book -- it's almost One-Hundred Percent genuine.

[Narrator] Drewe had devised the almost perfect con.





Never before had the archives been tampered with in such a comprehensive way, that ensured even leading experts, accepted practically worthless forgeries, for the works of renowned artists, leading them to be sold for thousands of pounds each. The paintings were being sold through all the major auction houses in London, England, as well as Christie's and Sotheby's. Most paintings were sold for between ten thousand pounds and thirty thousand, whereas others fetch one hundred thousand pounds.

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Part 3 of 6

One of Myatt's Giacomettis sold at auction in New York, U.S.A., for three hundred thousand; over a hundred and fifty thousand pounds for a painting that took John Myatt just five hours.



Another of Myatt's paintings -- this time of Ben Nicholson -- is alleged to have also sold in the U.S.A. for One Hundred and Five Thousand pounds.

[John Myatt] It was pretty unbelievable, you know, when John Drewe said that he'd taken such and such a painting to a world expert, and this person had authenticated the painting. I just thought it was just absurd -- but I mean, funny almost. Yeah, I mean you have to laugh, don't you? I do find it hard to laugh sometimes, because there's such vast amounts of money involved in all this.



But, you know, some of these people just don't know what they're talking about.

[Peter Nahum, Art Dealer] If somebody wants to scam you, and take money off you, and has really worked out how to do it, the problem [is], they probably will -- whether they're a brilliant salesman, or something else.



[Narrator] The scale of the scam was unprecedented, and the art world was none the wiser for now.

[Jonathan Searle, Fraud Squad, New Scotland Yard] It covered a whole spectrum of artists, mainly modern British. But in all, we reckoned he'd done about Two Hundred.



[Narrator] And with so many paintings to handle, Drewe had to evade suspicion by involving other people, who were none the wiser to the con.

[Jonathan Searle, Fraud Squad, New Scotland Yard] What happened was that John Drewe set up a number of runners to go to all the auction houses.

[John Myatt] There was no good him going in every time -- the same face saying, "Well, here's another painting."



He had to recruit a group of people who didn't know that these paintings were fakes at all. In the end, I think, he told them that he represented a consortium of art collectors.

[Peter Nahum, Art Dealer] The first picture I bought from Drewe's stooge, was part of a group that Christie's had sold for a lot of money. And I got it authenticated by Christie's. It cost me about five and a half thousand pounds.



That represents a total loss to me.

[Jonathan Searle, Fraud Squad, New Scotland Yard] I'm sure money always plays a huge part in all of these these cons. People wouldn't do it if there was no money involved -- most of the time.



In my experience, money is a very, very large factor.



But there must be an element of intellectual one-upmanship.

[Joel Levy, Con Expert] And I think that was probably one of his main motivating factors. It probably wasn't money. It was probably getting a thrill out of it. Getting a buzz out of successfully pulling off his cons, and putting one over on people who probably thought themselves to be very smart. And he probably thought, you know, that he'd made them look like idiots, and that made him feel great.



The classic characteristic of a con man is this need to feel that you are better than the average Joe, basically. Joe on the street. You're a step ahead. You don't have to work for a living. You, unlike all those other schmoes, you don't have to punch in and punch out. And you're not some lowly criminal either, you know. You're not using violence. You're not breaking and entering. You're not even doing real crime. You're just using your wits. And you're cleverer than the other guy. It's kind of circular logic, because they weren't able to guard themselves against it. Because they fell for it. Therefore, they had it coming. Therefore, it served them right.



And that's the kind of twisted psychology that really goes on a lot in the con artist's mind.

[John Myatt] I think he was a superb con man. I think he was able to persuade other people that he knew their area of expertise. If he was talking to a GP, he would persuade the GP that he knew something about medicine. If he was talking to a tax accountant, the tax accountant thinks, "This is a man who knows about complicated tax law." He was just very gifted, like a chameleon in a way. He'd be what you wanted him to be.



[Joel Levy, Con Expert] I mean perversely, this con obviously required all this sort of hard work, and intelligence, that would make someone a success in, you know, straight life, if you like.



In non-criminal life. And so it's kind of perverse that these characteristics, these attributes, if you like, should be put to such devious ends.

[John Myatt] John Drewe really loved it. He loved the con -- wanted to do it over and over again. It wasn't that the money wasn't important to him, because I'm sure it was. I mean obviously, it was very important to him. But there was another thing to it as well. It was looking at the important people in the art world, and just knowing something that they didn't. And so it led him into the mistake of doing it over and over and over again.



And of course, the more you do these kind of things, the more likely you are to get caught.



[Narrator] The con was fully and successfully operational. But not all of the art world was absolutely convinced.



And Myatt and Drewe's intricate scam was dramatically about to come unravelled.



Peter Nahum, an art dealer in London, England, became suspicious when he was offered a second Ben Nicholson painting.

[Peter Nahum, Art Dealer] We looked at this picture in detail. Ben Nicholson has a certain handwriting.



They were beautifully signed in pencil -- as he does -- on the back. They had these labels. They had the authentication, etcetera. And suddenly the penny dropped, that this had exactly the same labels, from a completely different source, the same gallery labels from the s as the other one.



And the chances of you looking at two Ben Nicholsons, and being offered them from completely different sources, with completely different provenances, having been in the same two exhibitions,



are very, very, unlikely. Because these weren't major exhibitions. These were minor dealers exhibitions.



Then we started analyzing the signature. And when you really looked at it, it started falling apart. It just wasn't quite right.



And at this point, suddenly, all that information came together, and I called in the head of the Antique Squad.

[Narrator] But Peter Nahum wasn't the only person who was suspicious. The cracks in Myatt and Drewe's con were beginning to show.



[Jonathan Searle, Fraud Squad, New Scotland Yard] There was another source in France: the Giacometti Institute, from Mary Lisa Palmer, who had one of the [in piedi nudos], and suspected a number of other Giacomettis as being fake.

[Narrator] Giacometti was a Swiss Italian artist who moved to Paris, France in 1922. The Giacometti Institute in Paris is responsible, among other things, for cataloguing the artist's work, as well as uncovering and stopping would-be forgers.



Mary Lisa Palmer, the director of the Giacometti Association, had been sent a catalogue by Sotheby's in the UK,



featuring a Giacometti standing nude.



She instantly questioned its authenticity.



[Mary Lisa Palmer, Director, Giacometti Association] The painting that I saw was inconsistent. Like, the head looked like a man's head on a woman's body; the background was poor; the strokes were wishy-washy. When an artist paints, there's a lot of energy that goes into the painting. When a person copies, he's copying the work of somebody else. It's not at all the same energy in the painting itself.



[John Myatt] The Giacomettis were so bad in quality that it didn't take anybody from the Giacometti Foundation to see that they were rubbish. I could see that they were rubbish, immediately!

[Mary Lisa Palmer, Director, Giacometti Association] Then it was signed, also; and the signature resembled other fake signatures, and not the real signature. When Albert Giacometti used to sign, he would sign quickly, you know. Get rid of it! He didn't like to sign paintings or drawings, so he did it quickly. The signature is very applied, you know, so copied.



So I went to London to look at the work. I looked at the front of the canvas, the back of the canvas. I asked for an X-ray. Then I told the people at Sotheby's that I thought it was a fake. And then they told me, "But, ah -- there are experts that think that it's okay, and you will find documents at the Tate gallery proving the provenance as being correct."

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Part 4 of 6



[John Myatt] Because he'd been so thorough with his paperwork, and created this history for them, people thought, "Oh, well -- it must be good, because this was exhibited in 1968 or 1961, wasn't it? And here is the paperwork to prove it."

[Mary Lisa Palmer, Director, Giacometti Association] So I went to the Tate Gallery to look at these documents. I did see a photograph of this painting slipped into the Tate Gallery archives. And from that moment on, I felt that they were being tampered with.



Basically, if the painting was fake, then the provenance had to be fake.

Fake provenance is used to help authenticate a fake work of art. -- Provenances: Real, Fake, and Questionable, International Journal of Cultural Property, by Cambridge University Press

[Narrator] Mary Lisa Palmer now had to try and prove that the catalogues were bogus.



[Mary Lisa Palmer, Director, Giacometti Association] Well, I sort of had to play the detective part, because people would not believe that the provenance was fake, because they were "very well done," quote unquote. I had to try to prove that the paper was not from the 50s. So I had to look at the watermarks, and contact the paper companies.



I had to check with the libraries whether this catalogue was in their archives. I had to write to the printers, to see if they printed the catalogue. I had to check with another foundation whether they had received the same provenance material. And I found out that they had a different date for the same catalogue.



I also wrote to the post office in England to see if the stamps were used in the 50s.



I went on and on and on in this sort of detail.

[Narrator] That sort of detail resulted in Mary Lisa Palmer's success.



Experts confirmed that the paper used in the suspected fake catalogues was not from the 1950s, as they stated.



She now had evidence that the provenance was corrupt.

[Narrator] But Peter Nahum wasn't the only person who was suspicious. The cracks in Myatt and Drewe's con were beginning to show.

[Narrator] Giacometti was a Swiss Italian artist who moved to Paris, France in 1922. The Giacometti Institute in Paris is responsible, among other things, for cataloguing the artist's work, as well as uncovering and stopping would-be forgers. Mary Lisa Palmer, the director of the Giacometti Association, had been sent a catalogue by Sotheby's in the UK, featuring a Giacometti standing nude. She instantly questioned its authenticity.

[Mary Lisa Palmer, Director, Giacometti Association] The painting that I saw was inconsistent. Like, the head looked like a man's head on a woman's body; the background was poor; the strokes were wishy-washy. When an artist paints, there's a lot of energy that goes into the painting. When a person copies, he's copying the work of somebody else. It's not at all the same energy in the painting itself. Then it was signed, also; and the signature resembled other fake signatures, and not the real signature. When Albert Giacometti used to sign, he would sign quickly, you know. Get rid of it! He didn't like to sign paintings or drawings, so he did it quickly. The signature is very applied, you know, so copied. So I went to London to look at the work. I looked at the front of the canvas, the back of the canvas. I asked for an X-ray. Then I told the people at Sotheby's that I thought it was a fake. And then they told me, "But, ah -- there are experts that think that it's okay, and you will find documents at the Tate gallery proving the provenance as being correct." So I went to the Tate Gallery to look at these documents. I did see a photograph of this painting slipped into the Tate Gallery archives. And from that moment on, I felt that they were being tampered with. Basically, if the painting was fake, then the provenance had to be fake. Well, I sort of had to play the detective part, because people would not believe that the provenance was fake, because they were "very well done," quote unquote. I had to try to prove that the paper was not from the 50s. So I had to look at the watermarks, and contact the paper companies. I had to check with the libraries whether this catalogue was in their archives. I had to write to the printers, to see if they printed the catalogue. I had to check with another foundation whether they had received the same provenance material. And I found out that they had a different date for the same catalogue. I also wrote to the post office in England to see if the stamps were used in the 50s. I went on and on and on in this sort of detail.

[Narrator] That sort of detail resulted in Mary Lisa Palmer's success. Experts confirmed that the paper used in the suspected fake catalogues was not from the 1950s, as they stated. She now had evidence that the provenance was corrupt.

The Getty kouros is an over-life-sized statue in the form of a late archaic Greek kouros. The dolomitic marble sculpture was bought by the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, California, in 1985 for ten million dollars and first exhibited there in October 1986....

The kouros first appeared on the art market in 1983 when the Basel dealer Gianfranco Becchina offered the work to the Getty's curator of antiquities, Jiří Frel. Frel deposited the sculpture (then in seven pieces) at Pacific Palisades along with a number of documents purporting to attest to the statue's authenticity. These documents traced the provenance of the piece to a collection in Geneva of Dr. Jean Lauffenberger who, it was claimed, had bought it in 1930 from a Greek dealer. No find site or archaeological data was recorded. Amongst the papers was a suspect 1952 letter allegedly from Ernst Langlotz, then the preeminent scholar of Greek sculpture, remarking on the similarity of the kouros to the Anavyssos youth in Athens (NAMA 3851). Later inquiries by the Getty revealed that the postcode on the Langlotz letter did not exist until 1972, and that a bank account mentioned in a 1955 letter to an A.E. Bigenwald regarding repairs on the statue was not opened until 1963.

The documentary history of the sculpture was evidently an elaborate fake and therefore there are no reliable facts about its recent history before 1983. At the time of acquisition, the Getty Villa's board of trustees split over the authenticity of the work. Federico Zeri, founding member of board of trustees and appointed by Getty himself, left the board in 1984 after his argument that the Getty kouros was a forgery and should not be bought was rejected.

-- Getty kouros, by Wikipedia

[Jonathan Searle, Fraud Squad, New Scotland Yard] She came over to London, almost immediately, with a huge amount of documentation, and photographs, of not only the genuine ones, but the fakes, which she reckoned matched up. And we then got our heads together, and she helped the police tremendously.

[Narrator] The net was tightening around the con men. But in an unexpected twist, the unequivocal proof of the con would come from the unlikeliest of sources. And Drew and Myatt's scam was to be dramatically blown apart.

[Joel Levy, Con Expert] And that's one of the sad aspects of a con man's life.



He can't afford to trust anyone.

[Narrator] For eight years, John Myatt and John Drewe colluded to achieve what has been dubbed "The Greatest Art Fraud of the 20th Century." The duo had no idea that suspicions were being roused within the art world. But forger John Myatt was becoming less and less comfortable with his partner-in-crime, John Drewe, and their joint deception.

[John Myatt, Forger] I was certain that it was going to end in, you know, tears. It was just a matter of, you know, when.

[Jacqui Hames, Metropolitan Police Detective] As the con went on, the web of lies was obviously very complicated. But John Drewe had to sort of really fantasize, and put himself in the reality of it.



And to him it was real. These paintings were genuine paintings.

[John Myatt, Forger] I remember, on one occasion, in an Italian restaurant, he was going on about a painting.



And I said, "Come on, John. Just shut up for a minute. I painted these paintings. They're fakes."



"Aaaahhh". And off he goes.



He said, "No, no, no, no. You're wrong. These are not fake.



I believe these are original paintings." And that was what he did! I guess that's the secret of being a success in that, you know, conning department.



It's part of you has to sell to yourself, you know, across the sort of left side to the right side of the brain, or something. You have to persuade yourself that these are authentic paintings. And then you can be credible.

[Joel Levy, Con Expert] The way that Drewe talked about, um, how "these weren't fakes -- they were real artworks," is maybe indicative that he was an example of what psychologists call, "fantasy prone personality." Now "fantasy prone personality" is someone who has trouble differentiating between fact and fantasy. And that he literally was not very good at telling the difference between his lies and the truth, and therefore, came to believe that his lies were the truth. Which of course would have made him a much more effective con man.

[John Myatt, Forger] I became more and more convinced we were going to get caught. So I backed off in the end. And I had a period of, uh, about a year. It was a lovely year. It was 1994 to 1995. So I remember it, rightly. And, um, it was like when you've been washed out to sea,



and you turn around and you swim. And [makes huffing noises],...



you suddenly put your feet down, and there's the sand. And you can actually walk back to the shore again. And you think, "Right. Now that's that now!



That's all behind me. This is the rest of my life ahead of me." And I thought, "No one will ever -- this is -- I've got away with it! No one will ever know. It's done." But in London, things were happening that I didn't know anything about. Things were going on. Police were asking questions,



and dealers were saying, "I'm not so sure about this painting," and so forth.

[Narrator] By 1995, John Myatt had fully removed himself from the con, and stopped working with John Drewe. But the art world, and the police, were gathering evidence, and getting closer to catching the con artists who had created an estimated 200 paintings, and doctored the UK's leading archives to make them seem legitimate. In a dramatic, and blind side twist, Myatt's and Drew's fates were sealed by an extraordinary blow from an unexpected source. John Drewe's common law wife, Bathsheba Gadsmith[?].

[John Myatt] Bathsheba was falling out with John big-time. And in the end, he was leaving home. And he left all the paperwork behind him. And she just crates it all up in a big plastic bag, gets in the back of her Mercedes, and chucks it out on the desk in some police station in ____, and says, "Now, you lot, I know that there's something dodgy going on here."

[Joel Levy, Con Expert] It's interesting that the way that he finally got rumbled was because his common-law wife shocked him.



Because one of the first rules of being a con man is, "Don't get detached." The more other people are involved in your con, the more chances are that something will go wrong. And that's one of the sad aspects of a con man's life. He can't afford to trust anyone. And therefore, if he's going to be successful, he needs to go through life as a kind of a loner. But of course, what proved to be this guy's achilles' heel was his love interest.

[Jonathan Searle, Fraud Squad, New Scotland Yard] And she gave us a dustbin liner full of provenances, small negatives, photographs -- an enormous quantity of paper, and xerox sheets of paintings.



This was a huge jigsaw puzzle which I sorted out at the Organized Crime Squad in the following weeks.

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[Narrator] The raft of evidence presented by Drewe's ex-partner, alongside the information provided by the likes of art experts Peter Nahum and Mary Lisa Palmer, created a chain reaction that unearthed further damning evidence when the police finally made their move one autumn morning in Stafford England.

[Jonathan Searle, Fraud Squad, New Scotland Yard] The paperwork pointed to John Myatt as being the perpetrator. So a team went up to Stafford to turn him over.



[John Myatt] I'm lying in bed, about six o'clock. And there's a big bang on the door. And when I opened the bedroom window, and looked down, there's about people standing in the path.



And a guy holds up this thing, and he says, "My name is Jonathan Searle. I'm from the Scotland Yard Arts and Antique Squad."

[Jonathan Searle, Fraud Squad, New Scotland Yard] When I went into his house, I saw a beautiful little drawing that he had done of his son, with telephone numbers, and the rest of it scribbled over it. I knew at once that we got somebody who could draw beautifully. If you can draw well, you can paint.



And then I looked up the stairs and I saw a Giacometti hanging on the wall. So, we were in. We knew exactly that this was our man.



[John Myatt] And I knew then, just then knew, foof, you know that part of my life, those months where I've been, you know, living in cloud. Cuckoo land, really. It really was cuckoo land. And this was reality coming to bite me up the back side with a vengeance.

[Jonathan Searle, Fraud Squad, New Scotland Yard] He was very, very reasonable, and obviously a bit shocked.

[John Myatt] It was horrible. I hated it. Um, but you could tell from the questions that they were asking, that they knew -- they knew more about me than I did. And they -- well, perhaps that's not true. They knew more about John Drewe than I did. Obviously.

[Narrator] The evidence was piling up.



But the real gift came from Myatt's own hand.

[John Myatt] They were interviewing me in the interview room at Stafford Police Station. And somebody came in with this briefcase, and put this letter on the table, and said, "You know, what's this, then?" And it was one of those letters I'd written to John Drewe about three years previously when I was just getting ready to part company with him, really. And it said, "Dear John. I don't like what we're doing. You can carry on doing it if you want to, but for me, that's the end of it.



No hard feelings. I'm not going to say anything. Yours sincerely, John Myatt." The letter was really a gift to the police,



because it was just saying, "I'm guilty."

[Jonathan Searle, Fraud Squad, New Scotland Yard] It was a very important letter. In fact, it gave us the state, the psychological state, of John Myatt. And it just showed he had been suckered into this. It made us, as police officers, realize who was doing what behind the forgery. So it was quite helpful.



And also, in John Myatt's house, we found a whole library of art books, all of which, when you look through them,



they had the pages turned over on



the type of painting that John Drewe wanted him to do.

[John Myatt] But, I mean, looking back on it, there were so many slip-shod things that the police were able to pick up on. There was me using. I mean for goodness sake, using emulsion paint. You know it's just so stupid, isn't it? I mean, it is like, stupid. But there's that. There's John's kind of, you know, hundreds of little silly things he was doing in the provenances. And using the wrong typewriter.



I think he signed a work in biro, two years before biro had been invented, you know.

Birosign provides a signature verification service for frequent signers. Our technology dynamically captures a digital copy of the signature, this handwritten gesture is unique to the signer, cannot be stolen, forged, or forgotten. The visual difference between a legit and a forged signature can be immaterial to the untrained eye. Birosign’s proprietary algorithm analyzes the dynamic character traits of the signature and authenticates the signer. -- Birosign, by birosign.com

Something like that. It's amazing that it was as successful as it was. It was kind of an amateur-hour kind of criminal operation. But it was just successful for a long time. I don't believe it. I don't believe it now. I think it was one of the daftest things that ever happened.

[Narrator] With so much evidence already gathered, John Myatt decided to cooperate with the police.



[John Myatt] I said, "right," you know, "hands up."



Pffff. It was just a better thing to do. I felt better with it, and in, you know, in a way, you were helping to undo some of the harm, you know, that had been done.

[Narrator] The game was up. With Myatt's honesty, the case strengthened further. After passing off over 200 fake paintings, and repeated corruption of the archives at the Tate, and the V&A [Victoria and Albert] in London, England, the police finally arrested John Drewe.



[Jonathan Searle, Fraud Squad, New Scotland Yard] We found him to be very charming, affable, intelligent, highly intelligent man, with a very high IQ, a very, very good memory, and we found difficulty in believing virtually anything he said.



We found a number of forged provenances. And he denied the whole lot. Well, he said they were genuine. And he went through court saying the whole lot were genuine.



And in fact, he said the whole lot, were not only were they genuine despite the forensic evidence, despite the evidence of all the witnesses, not only that, he said it was an MI5 plot, which is real boy's own stuff. Absolute nonsense.

[Narrator] With Drewe and Myatt charged, the courtroom beckoned. But Drewe didn't seem ready for his day in the dock.

[John Myatt] We went through the whole palaver, going to Magistrates' court. And John would come into Magistrates' court. And as soon as he got there, he would pretend to have a heart attack.



And then they'd have to adjourn the case. And you know, six months later we'd be back in Magistrates' court, and he'd have another heart attack in the foyer. You know, "haaah haaah haaah haaah." And off he'd go.



So he took three Magistrates' court hearings before the Magistrate said, "Look, if he has to come in in a stretcher, get him in!"

[Narrator] So after several false starts, Myatt and Drewe headed to the Crown Court.

[John Myatt] And eventually got to Southwark Crown Court, and I knew what I was going to do. I was going to plead guilty. And that was that. And it was the best thing to do. I was guilty. So I couldn't see much point in trying to, you know, get my way out of it.



[Narrator] Despite Myatt's guilty plea, Drewe pleaded, "not guilty." And two days into the trial, John Drewe sacked his legal representation, and opted to defend himself in court, with no legal counsel.

[Joel Levy, Con Expert] I think the fact that Drewe elected to represent himself does tell us a lot about his psychology. Because it seems to me like a classic instance of the sociopathic con man who thinks that he is cleverer than everybody else. Who thinks that he's better than everybody else. Who thinks he doesn't need to bother with all the sort of apparatus of the state.

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He doesn't need a solicitor, or a court-appointed lawyer, or anything like that. That he can do a better job than any of them. It's a classic example of how deluded he was, I suppose.

[Jonathan Searle, Fraud Squad, New Scotland Yard] He defended himself very ably. And as I say, he had a, he has a very, very good mind. A very retentive memory. But in court he gave his qualifications as being a professor. Well, we tried very, very hard to find out exactly where he had got his qualifications from.



The last thing we were told, it was in Germany somewhere. And so I don't know how much of it is true, how much of it is not true.

[Jacqui Hames, Metropolitan Police Detective] The fact that he represented himself in court shows, again, a complete arrogance and disdain for authority. He didn't feel that anybody else was capable of representing him.



[Narrator] In a brazen show of arrogance, John Drewe cross-examined representatives of the art world that he himself had attempted to con.

[Mary Lisa Palmer, Director, Giacometti Association] I was asked to be a witness in court. And as Mr. Drewe esteemed that he didn't need a lawyer, he did the questioning. And it was quite funny.



At one point, he was asking me a certain question about a certain work, and he was mixing up his works. And I had to correct him on that.

[Joel Levy, Con Expert] Part of the reason that he was able to pull off the scam, or even attempt it in the first place, is because he thought he was cleverer than everybody else. But of course, that in itself, was the seed of his downfall, if you like. Because he's always cleverer than everyone else. He stopped being careful enough, and allowed himself to get tripped up.



[Peter Nahum, Art Dealer] I was a witness at his trial, which was rather surreal. Since Drewe didn't have a lawyer, he was defending himself, and being cross-questioned by the man who I had put there, or was one of the people who was put there. It was quite a strange experience. He did ask me some questions about -- I think he was trying to show that I wasn't a very good expert, and I didn't know what I was doing. But when I got down from the witness box I heard the Crown Prosecution lawyer say, "Oh well, Drewe didn't get anywhere with that witness then."



[Narrator] After a four million pound court case lasting almost six months, the jury was adjourned to decide the verdict on the case dubbed, "The Greatest Art Fraud of the 20th Century." For eight years John Myatt and John Drewe duped the art world out of an extortionate amount of money, selling fake paintings as rediscovered classics. In 1998, the law had finally caught up with them. And the media described their scam as, "The Biggest Art Fraud of the Century."

[Jonathan Searle, Fraud Squad, New Scotland Yard] To my knowledge, it was by far the largest art fraud of the 20th century, in ambition, and scope, and in expertise. Not just covering the amount of artists, but the whole way it was perpetrated.



[Peter Nahum, Art Dealer] So yesterday produced a scam which was taken to a further degree than the other fakers. In other words, giving the Tate Gallery a lot of money, becoming a patron, becoming a darling of the archives, the Tate, going in there and nicking stuff, nicking stuff out of the Victoria & Albert Museum, creating fakes -- of course he did a brilliant, elaborate scam.

[Jonathan Searle, Fraud Squad, New Scotland Yard] This con was very unique, insofar as that the forgeries themselves were well done. The actual painting was well done. The backup system for everything on the provenancing was brilliant. And the infiltration into the Archives was very, very professional. John Drewe has got a huge amount of -- for want of another word -- front.

[Narrator] After almost six months in court, the verdict was imminent for the con artists who had fooled the art world.

[John Myatt] Well, I was strolling around in Southwark Crown Court, and people were sort of outside taking bets on how long, you know, I was going to get. And someone said, "Well, you'll get six years. This is too big. You'll get seven years for this."



And I thought, "God, what am I gonna do with my children? What a fool I've been. And, you know, you're beating yourself up, and all that. Anyway, I got a year.

[Narrator] Forger-turned-prosecution-witness Myatt had done himself a favor, and received 12 months for his role in the scam. Mastermind John Drewe, however, was sentenced to six years in prison.

[Jonathan Searle, Fraud Squad, New Scotland Yard] In terms of finance, we've never fully recovered the amount of money that John Drewe must have made out of this. I don't know whether there are other artists involved. I don't know, um, from John Myatt's side of things, 200 paintings, most of them at the lower end. The maths of it are up for conjecture. John Myatt himself -- we do know how much money he made. And it wasn't, uh, at the end of the day, all that much.

[John Myatt, Forger] As far as making money was concerned, the amount of money I made, I made early on. As the thing progressed, I made less and less money out of it. Um, if I'd stayed in teaching over the six-year period, I think I was getting around about 12,000 pounds a year as a teacher at that point. 12 and a half maybe. I would have made roughly the same amount of money as a supply teacher as I did as a criminal. But he made one and a half million pounds! So yeah.



[Narrator] The money John Drewe made from the scam remains a mystery. The press speculated that John Drewe has pocketed between one and two million pounds. John Drewe has secured a position as one of Britain's most audacious and notorious con men. He served two years of his six-year sentence, and has yet to reoffend. John Myatt served two months of his sentence, and is now back to painting fakes.



Only these days, John Myatt fakes are openly hanging in galleries up and down the UK.



Having gone straight, Myatt is now selling his paintings legitimately,



in his own exhibitions.





[John Myatt, Forger] The main difference between the paintings here, and the ones I did for John Drewe, is what's on the back of them.



And that is my name,



and "Genuine Fakes."



It feels good to have my signature on these paintings. It feels honorable, honest. And the paintings are exactly what they say they are.



[Narrator] And now, legitimate John Myatt, has found customers in the unlikeliest of places.



[John Myatt] My first ever customer, really, was the man who arrested me. And then the barristers who ran the case, also, became customers. And about six months ago, the foreman of the jury turned up. And he said he'd like a painting as well.



That's very nice. I like that. I'm so pleased that I've left all that horrible criminal stuff behind. And I'm lucky enough to have had a second chance. That's what it comes down to. And if you do get a second chance, then the best thing is not to screw up again.

[Narrator] The investigation may now be closed. But the repercussions of this art con can still be felt today.



[Jonathan Searle, Fraud Squad, New Scotland Yard] The problem with this entire case is that it puts in question a number of archives.



[Mary Lisa Palmer, Director, Giacometti Association] But the problem is that now, uh, archives have been infiltrated and polluted.

[Joel Levy, Con Expert] It seems to me that John Drewe has most of the traits of the classic con man. He seems like an absolutely archetypal classic con man. Because he's obviously quite a, sort of, smooth operator. He's obviously very convincing. He's obviously quite happy to move in high society, for many years, without fear of being detected. He kept pulling this scam, which is an audacious scam, without any fear of being detected. And he's obviously adaptable and resourceful. You know, he's clever when he needs to be.



He can even do some hard work when he needs to do it. So this guy obviously is, really, a very good con man.

[Peter Nahum, Art Dealer] John Drewe is a very intelligent man. As far as we can see, he's dangerous because he lives in a dreamland. And therefore, it's very hard to discipline people like that. People who know they've done wrong might, or might not, do it in the future. Somebody who lives in la la land, we have a problem with. But he's a very intelligent man.

[Jonathan Searle, Fraud Squad, New Scotland Yard] We recovered 73 out of 200 of John Myatt. I don't know how many others, if there were any, that John Drewe did. I have no idea at all.



[Mary Lisa Palmer, Director, Giacometti Association] They can be anywhere. They can be in Japan, the United States, in Europe. Just anywhere.

[Narrator] No one knows which walls the unrecovered fakes by these astounding con artists hang on today, completely undetected. Who knows? Maybe even yours.