Forger and the Con Man - The John Myatt Story - School Edit - Complete

it's the most important question in the worldwide art market is it genuine or is it fake when a forgery is passed off as the real thing there are fortunes to be made and lost for nearly a decade two englishmen did just that [Music] fall of 1995 out of the blue a woman telephoned scotland yard with information about her former partner it wasn't the first time in my career that one received such a call from the woman scorned here was somebody who was clearly very upset at the breakup of her relationship who had in her words a considerable amount of evidence to show that her husband as she referred to him had been involved in considerable criminal activity in the art market and have been orchestrating a major fraud [Music] dick ellis and another detective in the art and antique squad met the woman at her local police station on october 5th 1995. her name was bathsheba goodsmit the two of us went and interviewed her first of all upstairs in the police station the bizarre story she told police uncovered a fraud that had been going on for eight years but good smith had more damning evidence than the two detectives could have dreamt of and then she said i've got quite a lot of exhibits for you she invited jonathan and i to go round to a street uh in hampstead where in fact her car was parked and out of the boot of that car she then produced several inliner full of papers it was like an aladdin alliance cave without those bin liners we would have had very little evidence to go on the trash bags contained photographs catalogs and bills of sale it wasn't certain what it all meant but as scotland yard detectives began sifting through the material one thing became clear somewhere in these trash bags was the key to one of the most extraordinary and audacious scams the art world had ever seen and this was the man behind it an englishman called john drew we very quickly formed an idea of john drew that he was an extremely intelligent and deep thinking fraudsmen this story goes back to the late 1970s when london was the center of a thriving music industry soho was a magnet to anyone who thought they had the talent for writing a hit song one of them was a former art student and budding composer called john mayat was taken on by a record company and was quite successful he had a hit single called silly games everything seemed to be going well then one day the man who ran the business arrived at work with a problem my boss at gto records had been out to dinner with marcus seif and this marcus thief actually owned the whole mark suspenses he came back the next day he said oh god you know i've seen these fantastic paintings by this uh this artist called raul doofy this marcus sephie's paid ninety thousand for this one and sixty thousand for those so they're brilliant i wish i got something like that i just happened to hear it and i said well i could do that dick why don't you just let me do them a couple of goofies so we went out and the art shops got anything but duffy on it that's nice and that's nice quite like that he said well they've got to be bigger than marcus sees so i said well you know 250 each then looking back on them i mean they were not very good but they were good enough he paid me 500 pounds for the paintings and then he went out and spent 600 pounds each on the frames and they hung them up as you went in and you saw these gigantic doofies over the fireplace of course marcus and lady steve come back you know walking through the door and it's like my doof is bigger than you do for his and no one had said anything about it you know and dick was sort of excited because really i mean he could have easily spent 200 000 pounds on these paintings but in fact he got them for 500 quid plus the frame john maya had been to art school but this was the start of a new career he set himself up in business as a legitimate forger of the modern masters i just thought i can do this to genuine fakes it's a good idea it was not long before he received a telephone call from a man who would change his life the first phone call john drew ever made to me was exactly the same as the first phone call that anybody else would hello i've seen your advert in private eye are you interested in a familiar with an artist called matisse well of course i was yes i'd be interested in a painting by mati a few days later he drove to his local railway station and caught a train to london to deliver his fake matisse to his new client [Music] he said i'll be standing at the top of the platform whatever it would be at houston station and i said well you'll recognize me because i'll be the man carrying a painting the very first time we met we went to a little coffee shop in houston and he gave me a check and i went home [Music] at the time maya was making a living as a part-time art teacher his marriage had broken up and he was taking care of two small children you know when a thing like that's happened the mums just walked off you really do close up into a very tight unit it's just the three of you and bedtime stories romping around pillow fights and all that it was great i mean looking back on it i loved it working at home painting his genuine fakes suited the single father drew became a lucrative client and mayat grew to like him i thought he was very different from anybody else i'd met before he was something else all together he was kind of mysterious and intriguing and exciting every few weeks mayat would take the train to london to deliver another of his genuine fakes to his seemingly wealthy and influential buyer john maya was soon taking the subway out to the affluent london suburb where professor drew lived i say the fifth time i'd met him we were driving off to his house and there i'd meet his wife and then occasionally um we drop off somewhere in hampstead and pick up the two children from school so by the sixth time i was seeing john i was actually meeting his family as well two years passed during which drew bought a dozen paintings from maya then just when maya thought the relationship with his patron was finally over drew had a surprising request at the end of the painting number 12 when i was 13 he said to me well what would you like to do it was unheard of for a customer to uh you know to do that so i said well i've always liked cubist paintings i love cubism um maybe i'll just do something like that okay in your own time you know very nice off you go same money uh so i flipped through an art book and i found a drawing cubist drawing i thought well i'll turn this into a painting i know how to do this on the dining room table that night i am as they say knocked up a small cubism by albert glaze a couple of weeks later maybe sooner the phone rang and he said um john you know that painting by albert glaze that you you did for me i said yes john he said well i've just taken that into christie's and sotheby's and they think it's worth 25 000 pounds [Music] are you interested in you know going hard with me and having 12 000 pounds gosh and you know that's when i made my big mistake really because i mean i didn't even stop and think about it and i just thought you know twelve thousand pounds as far as i was concerned was just the answer to so many problems you know we could the three of us could really um do with that so um so i said yeah do it yes like it or not john maya had allowed himself to be trapped by john drew jonah came over as a very likable um man who seemed to have been suckered into this by john drew at a vulnerable time in his life mine's just a mark maya was the tool maya was nothing more than a hammer um you know to pound the nail i think john mayer was probably being groomed from the first order that john drew made of him from his country retreat john maya had now embarked on a life of crime giacometti was next it was an obvious choice giacometti had been one of john maya's favorite painters since art school he used rapid movements of a pencil almost like a skeleton he wrote in his book that as he worked the figure would sort of elongate and get bigger and get taller and taller sort of so it would stretch out a bit more the giacomettis were i would say second rate maybe even third rate fakes yet they got out there but the success of the scam depended only in part on the quality of john maya's paintings john drew had mastered a different kind of fake and one which a gullible art market found much more impressive he began changing the archives in some of london's biggest galleries and museums how he did this was brilliant in its simplicity in the museum archives he would find a catalog belonging to a gallery that had gone out of business this was the starting point for his cunning fraud well we found out that his research must have consisted on taking out catalogues from the archives and cutting and pasting and creating a collage catalogue and putting that back in to what was now a corrupted archive these doctored catalogues consisted of photographs of genuine paintings and also photographs of fake paintings so when any would-be art historian went to those archives to check out a painting new on the market lo and behold there was everything there to suggest that this was something which had been around as they were being told in the providence the painting's history or providence as it is called was now impeccable it appeared to all the world that the fake painting by maya had been part of an earlier exhibition or sale and therefore indisputably genuine but at the same time as vandalizing the tate's archive drew was presenting himself as a patron of the arts he managed to persuade the most eminent people working at the tate that he was a serious art connoisseur he was so in love with this idea of meeting all these posh and wealthy and establishment people and having one over on them that that in a way the money was the second most important thing it was the doing of it that i learned from working with john being the professor the mixing with all these people and knowing that you knew something that they didn't i think you could say a typical con man's relationship to the tate gallery to get to where he wanted to be um he needed to if you like have a certain amount of influence with the tate gallery and then to be able to bring that influence to bear in backing whatever he said about works of art to give him some credibility in the art market but drew's attempts to ingratiate himself to the tate horrified the forger john maya i've done some not very good paintings by a minor french artist from the 1950s 96 called bisiere john had taken it into his head to present them to the tape gallery so so he said would you come down as you'd love to see this he said what do you come down as a consultant art historian and you know so i kind of put my suit and tie on and went down and attended the meeting they came up from where it was they had white gloves on i mean you really had to laugh it was just so unreal this one guy i think he was a deputy head of it he said come down with me um mr martin i'll show you where we're going to hang these so we went from this lovely boardroom into the gallery itself and he said no we're going to have one this side there and you know i thought what can you say that's a very good very good choice after the only time i really got furious with john drew i really do like to thought you know do you want to get caught what are you doing the worrying thing from my point of view was that there was no oil paint on it it was all emulsion paint it was a house painting and there i was sitting in the boardroom of the bloody tape gallery with two paintings which had just been painted in emulsion paint and they were saying we've just got to take these down to conservation to have a look and i thought oh right you know why does he do this drew's tactics took great nerve and there was method in his madness you might consider this as an odd move to do on on behalf on a fraudsman's side but it's not it's actually quite a clever thing to do because if he can get the busier hung up in the tate it's literally 100 provenance that you've got a genuine vision and that's what he was trying to do we walked along the middle bank and found some public that's where i had a crack at him the only time i really did have a go at him because i just felt you know you're on a different planet here this is just stupid i think he made an impression on him he said well what am i going to do then you know what how am i i don't know what you're going to do but what you are going to do is going to get those paintings out of there john drew came up with an extraordinary way out of the predicament he would retrieve the forged paintings by giving the tate a huge donation came up with something that was a problem with the paintings so he gave him 25 000 pounds instead and he got the paintings out i got them back and i burnt them i was so relieved to go back and put them on the bonfire i'd love to have them now i must say those are the pains that nearly made it into the taste john maya and john drew continued conning the art world selling forgery after forgery into a seemingly insatiable market maya could hardly believe he was getting away with it after all mayat was only using household water-based paint mixed with petroleum jelly meanwhile john drew was cleverly doctoring maya's canvases to make them look older and more authentic he would then change the stretches at the back was the first thing he didn't usually put old stretches on then he would also use um furnish attacks which he would treat with salt and so that would um that would corrode them so they looked you know nice and rusty around the edge perhaps a bag of dust out of the hoover on the back of the thing you know that hoover it all off so there was dust in the crevices just a bit of coffee or tea on the front just just to take the you know the edge off it the technique seemed to be working and maya's paintings were selling well little did they know that someone was on to them in 1991 a painting came up for sale at sotheby's the prestigious auction house in london the picture of a standing figure was apparently by alberto giacometti one of the most influential artists of the 20th century maya had spent the previous four years trying to perfect his giacometti forgeries it might sell for three hundred thousand dollars but across the english channel in paris there were doubts about the authenticity of maya's giacometti american mary lisa palmer lives and works in the french capital she is one of the world's leading authorities on giacometti in november 1991 she received a copy of an auction catalog and her suspicions were immediately aroused it was wrong there was something wrong man he could have done but it's a head of a man so a head of a man and a female nude is sort of exchanged you know and of course the signature was a bit thick and a bit too well applied mary lisa palmer immediately flew to london she examined the picture at sotheby's and told the experts there what she thought well i told them that unfortunately that i thought that the painting was incorrect and um i asked them if they could give me an x-ray of the back and they said but miss palmer other people who know the work of giacometti think it's fine and on top of it the provenance that is given in our auction catalog you will find the proof of the pudding in the tate archives problem was that according to the sotheby's catalogue the authenticity of the giacometti was impeccable its providence was listed in detail undeterred mary lisa palmer went straight to the tate gallery as sotheby's promised she found a photograph of the dubious giacometti in the tate gallery archive but she came to a different conclusion if the painting was fake so too was the provenance what i discovered that day was that um someone was tampering with the archives this was extremely extremely dangerous for the art world among the many artists that mayat was now forging was ben nicholson a british artist producing abstract paintings after the second world war i said to john drew ben nicholson would be a good choice because from his point of view from from the providence point of view he was english so you didn't have to worry about prominencing things abroad maya set to work trying to master the seemingly simple process of producing a ben nicholson i tend to sort of stick with him from about 1950 to 1960 and during that period he was kind of playing with a limited number of shapes which were based on jugs goblets mugs and things when i was passing these off as fakes i wasn't doing them as well as i am today in fact the things i'm doing today the nicholsons are much much better i struggled quite a lot early days and it was really just a learning curve for me [Music] john maya began turning out nicholson's while john drew put the new information about the artist to good use it's very good i mean he's quite a handy carpenter that he used to make the frames in the same way that nicholson made his friend he got me to actually do the ben nicholson signature on the wooden stretch of the back of the canvas it worked maya's fakes passed the ultimate test [Music] the chilling thing i think was that that these paintings would be shown to in ben nicholson's case i mean ben nicholson's son-in-law who had been a senior figure in a very important british gallery was saying oh yes and authenticating these paintings as john maya was churning out the fakes at home unknown to him john drew had made contact with the police but about something quite different and much more sinister we met at the battersea heliport where this character came in by helicopter and it was john drew and he had his two children and of course the pilot and co-pilot was helicopter had hired for the day just to impress the detectives from scotland yard and he came through this long story of hell he was a professor with a stat of the other and how he came across these mafioso trying to sell stolen paintings and so forth from the start charlie hill had his doubts about the man who was offering himself as a police informant on the italian mafia especially when drew invited him to a restaurant that charlie hill understood to be a hub of mafia activity in retrospect what john drew was up to became perfectly clear to the scotland yard detective he realized that he was about to be revealed as a con man and a fraudster and he wanted to get himself [Music] a coup as a police informant so he could use that as a line of defense there were plenty of other people who were taken in by john drew and art experts who fell for john maya's fakes [Music] in 1994 a man called clive bellman walked into the gallery of a private art dealer peter nahum [Music] nahum had spent years working for sotheby's auction house he now had a substantial reputation as a dealer specializing in 19th and 20th century painting when clive bellman came to us we were in the middle of the deepest recessions in the art trade and he explained a few things we had we'd never met him before he'd explain that the reason he was selling these pictures which belonged to his neighbor which was a private collection was that he had owned a couple of jewelry shops et cetera and goldbust now we feel great sympathy for people who have lost their businesses to take him on face value you'd have been perfectly happy with it i'm very sensitive to shifty people and clive bellman did not appear to be shifty to me the painting bellman was trying to sell was by graham sutherland the providence from an italian monastery i didn't like the painting at all i thought it was dreadful but christie's had just sold a group of these paintings with the same provenance from the same monastery for a great deal of money little did peter nahum know that the painting was a fake by john mayat the providence is forged by john drew one of the solvents that we got a beautiful graham southern crucifixion and john mayer just did the same crucifixion but with a different colour and instead of having yellows there was reds both of them graeme southern colours the specific red that southand used beautiful little jewel of a painting john maya finally decided he had had enough he called up one day from a telephone i said john i can't do this anymore and dan went the phone and i remember that's that that's that my fork spoon in line as the relationship between the two men deteriorated what neither john drew nor john maya knew was that their forgery scam was about to be rumbled when clive bellman paid his next visit to peter nahum he arrived at the gallery with a painting by ben nicholson it came with full provenance labels on the back a catalogue uh in which it was exhibited at the rudy scene or one of these non-existent galleries some gallery in the 1950s it came with a certificate from the ben nicholson expert who was the ex-director of the tape gallery i decided to buy it with somebody else a friend of mine this picture wasn't a great ben nicholson but it was quite colorful we thought it was absolutely genuine we did not think it was good enough to offer to our clients but we thought it was the sort of picture that clients of sothebys and christie's because it was colorful would pay good money for so we bought it as a purely commercial transaction we are now at the point where we have bought two pictures two mayats drew pictures and we believe them both to be genuine one is waiting for seven christie's one's been sold in sotheby's some while later nahum was offered a second ben nicholson by a man claiming to be raising money for a charity representing the victims of the auschwitz concentration camp my partner on the other ben dawson and i are looking at this ben nicholson beautifully signed on the back in ben nicholson's handwriting in pencil exactly as he does it has all the paperwork a catalogue with it illustrated in from the 1950s and we're looking at the picture and the scales start falling from our eyes because there are labels gallery labels on the back profiles labels and we think this ben nicholson has exactly the same provenance and gallery labels as the previous one we had now what are the chances of that and then we said this doesn't this is a bit of a worry so then we look at the signature beautifully written once you realize the handwriting starts falling apart brilliant but you realize not quite good enough i had put the whole scam together and i put all the documentation together and i called in the police the last piece of the jigsaw puzzle came with the dramatic visit to the police of john drew's estranged partner with the contents of the trash bags now under police examination the eight years of fraud and fakes was about to come to an end in the bin liners the most prevalent thing was negatives hundreds of negatives of a number of different artists [Music] the first stop for the police as they began to unravel the extent of the fraud was once again the tate gallery in paris mary lisa palmer had been waiting four years for this moment finally finally we arranged that we go to london with all our of our documents which weighed quite a few pounds within a week palmer was sitting in scotland yard telling detectives which paintings were genuine and which were not the trash bags also gave police the name of john mayat as the forger early in september 1995 they raided his home it was six o'clock in the morning when jonathan searle and a team of officers from scotland yard arrive at john maya's home deep in the english countryside i was in bed i opened the bedroom window and looked down at the path and there they all were i think he was half expecting a call from police he knew it would come down the line some day or another and when they said this is scotland yard arts and antique squad we have a search warrant for these premises yep i just sort of went click that's it you know everything else is in the past now this is a whole new thing from now on awful terrible he put up his hands at once and he wanted to uh come alongside and they came in and uh i remember saying well you know have a look around and funnily enough there was a drawing of sam on the wall as soon as i walked into the kitchen i saw a drawing on the um by the fridge which you've got telephone numbers written on it i knew ah this this man can draw if he can draw he's probably a good enough artist then i looked up the stairs and i saw a giant over there and i showed them all over the house they took paintings and they took books and they took i got a giacometti up on the wall they took that sam came downstairs and said dad there were all these people i said oh don't worry they're building inspectors you know the house is freezing cold and they're going to put a central heating in or something um so i said you just get on and do what you do i've got to stand outside and wait for the school bus so i got sam on the bus and came in and they didn't make too much mess they took filing cabinets and all the rest of it and they said well you have to come off across the police station stafford we took all the paintings that we found and there were a number of other bits and pieces and we took them back to stafford police station and we did an interview in the caution there yes i do know john drew and yes i have painted some paintings for him john maya knew the game was up especially when confronted with a particularly incriminating piece of evidence they confiscated my briefcase and in this briefcase they got this letter and this was a letter i'd written to john drew saying uh i think it's best that we stop doing what we're doing because you know fed up with it and he said what's this letter you're you're fed you don't want to work with john drew anymore what's this what do you mean you don't want to work and i said well um i was kind of spluttering and thinking god are they saying all these things be you know it's being taped all the time so they went on and they started telling me what they thought mr drew had been up to and and what they thought i'd been up to and it became pretty clear that they knew more about me than i did or and more about him than he did they knew everything pretty much police decided it was time to pull in john drew within days they raided his house in a wealthy town 20 miles from london john true was very polite courteous the surprising thing to me was the amount of evidence that um he had still got in his possession incriminating evidence in terms of the seals which we had seen on various documents he'd created we found the seals typewriters that he used even on the table in the living room were sets of documents that he was in the process of actually preparing a huge amount of documentary evidence material objects had been preserved drew was taken to the local police station where he denied everything at the end of it he invited us all out for a drink on the grounds of how nice we'd been and pleasant the four-month trial ended in london in february 1999. drew conducted his own defense it had its moments of sheer fast when i i mean i would turn around to him and say i know you're guilty you know you're guilty they know you're guilty everybody knows you're guilty so why don't you just plead and the judge would say mr maya would you please answer mr drew's question i couldn't see the point we were going to get found guilty all right and um we were guilty we were probably going to go to prison um the best thing to do was just you know straighten up your shoulders get your thumbs in line with the seam of your trousers and just take it on the chin there's nothing else to do john maya pleaded guilty and was sentenced to one year in prison john drew maintained his innocence throughout but he was convicted and sentenced to six years in prison years after leaving jail john maya had an exhibition in london's mayfair the home of the art establishment where his fakes had deceived so many for so long i've got a show in central london the heart of enemy territory what am i going to do we had a dealer walking around here earlier on and he was obviously a dealer you know the pinstripe suit and almost not quite the tiki bow but everything that cashmere coat and so forth and he walked around with his hands behind his back you know he just went out and he looked at the little matisse down there he said jolly good mates very nice of the 200 or so maya fakes only 72 have ever been found john maya though has no intention of letting on now which paintings are genuine and which are my fakes they're out there and um they will blossom and flourishes leaves on a tree um why not if anybody came back to me with one that i'd done and after 20 years i honestly wouldn't know for certain but i thought i had i would always say no i haven't seen this you know if you come to me with one and say did you paint this 20 years ago and i said yes all that's happened is that you've lost a fortune so what's the point what is the point [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Mr. Art Teacher

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Length: 35min 9sec (2109 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 15 2021