In the heart of Roslyn Heights, New York, between a psychic reading center and a sports rehabilitation complex sits a newly constructed pale-brick building belonging to the Chabad of Roslyn. The cube-like structure features a prominent Modernist rendering of a menorah extending above the building’s roofline. The impressive menorah is functional, lit each year to celebrate Chanukah. It’s also billed by the Chabad of Roslyn to be one of the tallest menorahs in the world (without exceeding the 30-foot height limit set forth by Jewish law). The Roslyn Chabad movement is the beneficiary of the Ely Sakhai Torah Center at that location, where the faithful may visit for a variety of services, ranging from lectures to Jewish services to adult education. The Torah Center is named for its benefactor, a Jewish émigré from Iran committed to his faith and heritage who was eager to make a mark among his people in his adopted homeland.
Ely Sakhai1 moved to the United States in 1962 at the age of ten and would go on to donate millions of dollars to Jewish charities. Prone to loud attire and flashy jewelry, the pot-bellied antiques dealer with a thin mustache and dark, receding hair became well known for his philanthropy in Long Island, where he made his home.2 And in addition to his generosity in providing money to support his fellow Jews, in 2009 Sakhai helped to right a wrong committed by the Nazis during World War II.
In 1940, Adolf Hitler’s forces invaded the previously neutral nation of Belgium. It took the Germans less than three weeks to force the Belgians to surrender, leading to more than four years of Nazi occupation. Finally, in 1944, Canadian and Allied forces liberated Belgium, but not before Nazis had looted art from many families, including one Belgian family that was forced to flee its Ohain apartment in order to seek refuge in the countryside. After the liberation they returned home to find that five oil paintings had been taken by the Nazis, the same fate as so much art throughout Europe. They were left with no other recourse but to file a claim for their missing paintings with the Belgian office for looted art, and the works were listed in the Répertoire d’oeuvres d’art dont la Belgique a été spoliée durant la guerre 1939–1945, a listing of Belgian war losses.3 Among the paintings that were taken was a portrait of their young daughter with her pet rabbit, which they had commissioned to be painted by the famed Belgian artist Anto Carte.
Carte was a leading Belgian artist who rose to prominence after the First World War. The son of a carpenter, Carte was drawn to decorating at a young age and started evening painting classes before he even reached his teenage years at the Academy of Bergen. He then attended the Royal Academy of Brussels after winning a scholarship and studied under Jean Delville and Constant Montald. While studying theater decoration in Paris, he encountered the work of the great French and Italian painters at the Louvre; he then moved to Italy to paint frescoes. The influence of Italian painters extended to the work of his contemporary, the great Amadeo Modigliani, whose portraiture greatly influenced Carte’s work.4 Carte would come to be considered among the best of what was called the Belgian “new primitive school,” and today his paintings can fetch prices up to the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Carte’s rendering of the young daughter, titled Jeune Fille a la Robe Bleue (Young Girl in the Blue Dress) and painted in 1932, depicts the blond, pig-tailed girl holding a small group of flowers and seated on a bench aside her small pet rabbit, the Belgian countryside in the distance. Sadly, the painting was seemingly lost to the world and, perhaps more importantly, to the family—yet another victim of Nazi derangement. Decades passed without as much as a whisper about the location of the precious family heirloom.
In 1990, Jeune Fille was sold at Christie’s auction in London to an American buyer. Unfortunately, it changed hands without the buyer or the auction house being made aware that the painting had emerged from the dark world of Nazi looted art. Years later, Julian Radcliffe’s London-based Art Loss Register entered the painting into its database of lost and stolen works from the database of Belgian war losses. Then, in November 2008, there was a break: Christopher A. Marinello, then of the ALR and now the director of Art Recovery International, traced the location of the Carte painting to the Long Island gallery owned by Ely Sakhai and his son Andre. Marinello is among the world’s leading experts in the recovery of lost and stolen art. An attorney by trade with decades of experience as both a litigator and recovery specialist, he had already negotiated the return of hundreds of millions of dollars worth of art by the time he took on the challenge of helping to recover Carte’s Jeune Fille. Among these were many important pieces looted by the Nazis, including an El Greco, a Picasso hanging in a Washington, D.C. museum, a Monet being sold by one billionaire to another, and a major work by the British Impressionist Alfred Sisley.
In order to get Jeune Fille back into the hands of its rightful owners, Marinello reached out to the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement team at their New York Office of Investigations. ICE was created as part of the reorganization of law enforcement and security agencies after 9/11 and the subsequent creation of DHS. The agency then formed a dedicated unit of special agents under the umbrella of the Cultural Property, Art, and Antiquities program to coordinate investigations related to looted cultural heritage or stolen artwork. Agents assigned to this unit undergo special training to better understand the unique needs inherent to a criminal investigation involving art and cultural property. ICE even brings in the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum Conservation Institute to provide on-site training in the handling, storage, and authentication of art, antiquities, and artifacts. This training program was developed thanks to the work of Senior Special Agent Bonnie Goldblatt, an investigator who had begun her career as a customs agent in 1983 and had spent years working art theft cases for the agency. Goldblatt had experience working investigations relating to the recovery and return of art stolen from museums and individuals during World War II. Based on this experience, she would become ICE’s regional subject matter expert in the field of art and antiquities investigations, working closely with the State Department’s Office of Holocaust Issues.
Goldblatt’s work involving Nazi looted art began in 1995 when she attended a conference in New York at which the ownership rights of art stolen during World War II was debated. Soon, she would develop many of the participants into sources of her own for work in repatriation. Her first such recovery took place in 2003 and involved the Sefer Yetzira, a rare fourteenth-century kabbalistic manuscript that had been looted by the Nazis from Vienna’s Jewish library. When the manuscript was found listed in the auction catalog of Kestenbaum and Company, Goldblatt jumped into action, and ultimately the auction house voluntarily turned the item over to the authorities.5 So when it came to working to recover the Carte painting, Goldblatt and Marinello were an ideal pair for the mission.
Though Marinello had traced Jeune Fille to Sakhai’s Long Island gallery, there was a slight problem: the Belgian war losses registry that listed the painting did not, unfortunately, include a photo of Carte’s creation. So he contacted the Belgians directly, and though they couldn’t provide a photo of the painting, they did provide the art recovery specialist with a photo of the young blond girl who was depicted in the painting, seated with her rabbit. The similarity between the photo and the painting was undeniable. He provided the documentation to Goldblatt, who contacted Sakhai and informed him that the painting he had in his possession had been confiscated by the Nazis 65 years earlier and reported as an official war loss by its rightful owners. Sakhai forfeited the painting to its rightful owner—the very same girl whose portrait Carte had painted. Still frightened by the whole experience many decades later, however, the now elderly woman in the painting could not bring herself to come to the ceremony marking its return at the handover ceremony at the Jewish Museum of Belgium on December 1, 2009. Goldblatt told the Jerusalem Post, “The Holocaust left her with such a scar that she was scared if she came out with the painting it would be stolen again.”6
The recovery of Jeune Fille was far more important for its historic significance than for a big-dollar value. The return of the painting, estimated at a relatively low $15,000, marked an important closing of a sad chapter in one innocent woman’s life. But it would hardly be the last intersection between Nazi looted art and the careers of Marinello and Goldblatt. Rather, the two would continue to work steadfastly to repatriate art stolen during World War II. Marinello, through Art Recovery International, continues to work to recover looted art and is deeply involved with the huge cache of so-called “degenerate art,” including a Matisse, found in the home of the reclusive Cornelius Gerlitt in Munich. (For more on this “degenerate art,” see Chapter 1.) As for Goldblatt, Marinello called her “unlike any civil servant I have ever encountered. . . . She is extremely dedicated and passionate about her work.” And her passion was evident when she said, “Every time I return a Holocaust painting I just get teary-eyed. . . . I’d like to get it all back.”7
Clearly, art affected the tough, seasoned federal agent in a way perhaps money laundering or drug interdiction might not, inspiring intense commitment and even heroic efforts. Surely, too, the willingness of the art dealer Sakhai to turn over the painting should be ranked as, at the least, magnanimous, if not heroic. After all, he was a victim in a sense too. He had purchased a fine work of art in good faith, believing that its provenance was solid and title clear; yet he parted with his expensive possession voluntarily so that it could be returned to a woman whose life was so adversely affected by the Nazis, just like so many of Sakhai’s Jewish brethren during the Second World War.
But there was another side to Ely Sakhai, a separate portrait of a dealer who proved not so altruistic. Despite the injustice suffered by the Belgian family at the hands of the most evil anti-Semites in history, Sakhai wasn’t going to walk away from his Anto Carte empty-handed, happy simply to have righted a historic wrong. Instead, Sakhai wanted something in return, ranting about how he, too, was Jewish and suffered as well. Plus, he wanted his purchase price for the painting.8
That Sakhai would be less than generous in his art dealings is of no surprise, as this restitution affair came on the heels of an elaborate and clever confidence game he created, taking forgery to a whole new level and scamming art collectors living far from his home in Old Westbury, New York.
Sakhai entered the art market first by working at his brother’s antiques shop in Manhattan. Eventually, he would branch out on his own, opening a shop in which he sold furniture, antiques, and art. But the art Sakhai peddled was not in the league of the storied art galleries of New York, where prices could easily escalate into the tens of millions. Instead, he dabbled in relatively inexpensive items. He did, however, occasionally have an authentic Tiffany lamp for sale. Such lamps can be a rarity in antiques stores: many copies have flooded the market over the past few decades; some copies can be excellent, with the same level of exacting detail forgers put into paintings. Indeed, Tiffany lamps are considered true works of art and can fetch anywhere from a few thousand to over a million dollars. Sakhai made an intriguing observation about the authentic Tiffany lamp he had for sale in his shop—it was identical to a fake he had on a nearby shelf. He considered the two lamps and found them similar in every respect except for the presence of an authenticating label affixed to the base of the true Tiffany. Then he had a thought: if he could duplicate that label and adhere it to the base of much cheaper Tiffany copies, he could sell them as originals at a steep profit. And that he did, making hundreds of thousands of dollars off his crooked scheme.9
It would have been bad enough had he stopped there. But Ely Sakhai had grander plans. Flush with the earnings he made selling lamps, Sakhai decided to morph from a moderately successful antiques shop owner to a successful art dealer, opening a gallery he named Exclusive Art Ltd. He also began dating and eventually married an affluent Japanese woman with whom he made trips to Japan and learned the practices of art collectors there. Soon he had another brainstorm.
Sakhai had begun attending art auctions at Sotheby’s and Christie’s around 1990 looking to buy Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works. Some took note of his unusual style of dress, but few noticed him for his purchases. That’s because he focused his efforts on lesser-known, midrange value paintings by renowned artists. Among those popular nineteenth- and twentieth-century figures whose works he bought were Marc Chagall, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and the man who had so influenced Anto Carte, Amadeo Modigliani.
For an artist whose life was cut so tragically short—he died at only 36 years of age of tubercular meningitis—and therefore produced a somewhat limited body of work, Modigliani’s work has been the subject of a great deal of fraud. The famous and prolific forgers Elmyr de Hory and, later, John Myatt, made numerous counterfeit paintings attributed to him, and the problem of tracking Modiglianis is complicated by the fact that he was destitute and often resorted to trading his paintings for food. Furthermore, his mistress, Jeanne Hebuterne, committed suicide just days after his death. Thus, little information about his works remains. Perhaps most startling was the 2012 arrest of Christian Gregori Parisot, the man who headed the Archives Legales Amadeo Modigliani and was once considered one of the world’s most reliable authenticators of the artist’s works. Parisot was nabbed by Italian police after a raid of an exhibition resulted in authorities finding 22 fakes. They would go on to seize 59 fakes from Parisot and his suspected accomplice, art dealer Matteo Vignapiano. In all, it is thought that Parisot had put more than 100 bogus Modiglianis on the art market. Incredibly, Parisot was arrested a few years earlier for fakes he offered for sale as drawings made by Modigliani’s mistress, Hebuterne.10 For that crime, Parisot was convicted and sentenced to two years in jail as well as ordered to pay a fine.11
Acquiring midpriced masterworks by the likes of Modigliani was only the start of Sakhai’s plan. Just as he cunningly converted cheap copies into authentic Tiffany lamps by affixing counterfeit authentication labels to them, he would substitute copies of master paintings for originals in a heretofore untested scam. Now that he had obtained originals from reputable auction houses like Christie’s and Sotheby’s, he needed to find a way to produce exact duplicates of them. This would be much more difficult than finding a lamp that was similar to a true Tiffany, and would garner much closer inspection than that made by a casual shopper happening into his old antiques store. Now he needed artists with great skill and an equal amount of discretion to work for him.
In order to obtain talented labor at bargain prices, Sakhai turned to a group often exploited by con men: immigrants to the United States. Aware that Chinese artists receive a great amount of practice copying works as art students, he created a workforce of talented Chinese immigrants. As James Wynne, a highly regarded FBI special agent with vast expertise in the investigation of art crimes, said, “These individuals were professionally trained artists. They all received formal training in oil painting and part of that training involved copying masters.”12 Working for Sakhai was not the break these artists probably hoped for in their quest for a new life in the United States. Instead, he exploited their desperation for money by paying them paltry sums for their works. In a number of cases, Sakhai even sponsored Chinese artists to come to the United States with work visas, and then used their immigration status and economic situation as leverage over them.13 And to keep a close eye on their work and their activities, he set them up in a studio located directly above his art gallery. It was virtually a case of indentured servitude meets high art.
Sakhai’s plan was criminal genius in its simplicity. Because he was indeed the true owner of the paintings he bought, he held the actual certificates of authenticity. And because he bought them from reputable institutions, his ownership was a true part of each painting’s provenance. Therefore, he could provide a credible authenticating document to potential buyers, giving them the confidence that they were buying the original painting when, in fact, Sakhai was selling them a copy.
Assistant United States attorney Jane Levine said, “Mr. Sakhai . . . took a number of steps to make the forgeries look like they were actually created in the time period when that artist lived.”14 Committed to making sure his copies were beyond reproach, Sakhai hunted down era-appropriate canvases on which his artists could re-create his paintings, visiting antiques shops around the area to find cheap old paintings. His purchases did not go unnoticed by antiques dealers, leading them to grow suspicious of his intentions. One dealer told New York Magazine, “Everybody who was selling them to him would know what he was doing with them. He wouldn’t care what the painting was.”15 Clearly, he wasn’t buying them for any particular aesthetic appeal, nor was he making an investment. It was as if he were purchasing supplies for some illicit enterprise.
Another advantage to Sakhai’s scheme was that many of his copies were made from the actual masterwork, not from a printed image, thus resulting in a more believable painting. According to Sharon Flescher, the executive director of the International Foundation for Art Research: “What was so clever in Sakhai’s scheme was that he in fact did own the authentic work. If the fakes were based simply on photographs, you’re always likely to trip yourself up.”16 The copies had to be meticulous, including each and every mark, scar, and abrasion on the painting—and not just on the front of the canvas. He ensured that even the backs of the copies matched the backs of the authentic paintings, an important way to fool someone who has seen the authentic painting or has some expert information about it. He even had his team of artists re-create the frames holding the paintings, paying careful attention to accuracy in terms of appearance and age. As a final step, and in order to keep his copies from appearing to be freshly painted, Sakhai would have a coating applied to some of the forgeries in order to give the paintings a passable patina.
While he was no artist himself, Sakhai’s eye for a good scam gave him the requisite attention to detail to pull off the multimillion-dollar scheme. Once he was satisfied that his replica would pass muster, he set his sights on what he believed would be the perfect place for his dupes: his wife’s homeland. On trips to Japan, Sakhai noted at the time a surge in interest in Impressionist paintings, and it was no coincidence that Sakhai had bought a number of them. So, in the Land of the Rising Sun he had a market hungry for his art. Further, selling his wares in Japan presented him with a certain level of assurance that if his counterfeit paintings were found out, no fuss would be raised because of the cultural tendency to avoid public embarrassment at all costs. And finally, he would be doing his business quite far from New York, giving him the luxury of distance from his victims. As Special Agent Wynne put it, “I think the Japanese market was a convenient and safe place for him to place these paintings, in fact it was the other side of the world.”17
While Sakhai’s scheme is thought to have involved hundreds of paintings, some of the most significant involve four Chagalls (La Nappe Mauve; Vase de Fleurs avec Coq et Lune; Les Maries au Bouquet de Fleurs; and Le Roi David Dans Le Paysage Vert), Renoir’s Jeune Femme S’Essuyant, Gauguin’s Vase de Fleurs (Lilas), Monet’s Le Mont Kolsas, and Palaste by Paul Klee. Of course, there was a Modigliani, La Blonde Aux Boucles D’Orielle. But most surprisingly, there was a Rembrandt—The Apostle James.
While Rembrandt’s paintings have very often throughout history been the subject of thievery, in the modern world of art scams, forged and faked Rembrandts are quite rare. Indeed, such illicit activity is rare when it comes to any classical painting by an Old Master. As the stories of this book illustrate, artists such as Chagall, Dalí, Picasso, Miró, and their contemporaries are far more likely to be used in a widespread, ongoing scam than the likes of Rubens, Botticelli, or Valazquez. That’s not to say that people looking to get rich quick don’t ever attempt to present a never-before-seen Da Vinci of questionable provenance; rather, when con men set their sights on running an ongoing scam while attempting to maintain an air of legitimacy, they often turn to the Impressionists or Abstract Expressionists. The reason is practical rather than aesthetic: it’s easier to paint like an Impressionist or Abstract Expressionist than like Raphael or Vermeer, because it’s a very difficult thing to render, say, the human form or a landscape using different tones and values of paint to create that form. It is far easier to dab different colors of paint on a canvas than to apply it in a smooth, seamless sort of way. Thus, Sakhai’s introduction of Rembrandt’s The Apostle James into his mix of imposter paintings is surprising and somewhat unique, at least since the exposure of Han van Meegeren as a fraud after the Second World War. (For more on van Meegeren, see the Introduction.)
The reasons are many why Sakhai’s use of a Rembrandt was risky. First, only about a dozen or so Rembrandts come up for sale every decade. As a result, offering up a Rembrandt for sale in Japan, the United States, or indeed anywhere in the world is newsworthy, and attention to a deal is anathema to a con man’s playbook. Second, Rembrandt’s paintings are extremely well known and studied, right down to every last brushstroke. The Rembrandt Research Project, a group that has been putting every work attributed to the great master under the microscope—and more—for more than 40 years works to ascertain whether a painting is, is not, or might be a Rembrandt. They can rather quickly and easily expose a fake, and that’s not the sort of nemesis the con man wants. That august group consists of the world’s best experts in the subject of Rembrandt, and that makes trying to traffic in counterfeits of his paintings especially risky if not downright fatuous. The Rembrandt Research Project—or any skilled paintings conservator or conservation scientist—could quickly determine if a Rembrandt was a fake or forgery by conducting a scientific analysis of the chemical composition and structure of the paint used in the work. Rembrandt’s paints have been analyzed in great detail, and the materials he used are well known, yet not easily replicated. While Sakhai was committed to giving his artists period-appropriate frames and canvases, he did not attempt to re-create Rembrandt’s paints. Furthermore, the craquelure, or cracking pattern, of the centuries-old paint is impossible to copy for any artist, and the appearance and paths of the fissures in the paint serves a purpose for authenticators in a way not dissimilar to how a human fingerprint helps crime investigators identify people.
Contrast this with the number and frequency with which more contemporary artists have seen their works counterfeited. The works of Jackson Pollock—or those attributed to him—have consistently been the subject of attempts to scam buyers out of millions of dollars. Art such as that produced by Pollock is more difficult to quickly dismiss as a fake or forgery. For one, the materials he used are far more readily available on the market, usually manufactured rather than created in his workshop, as was the case with the Old Masters. Additionally, aged only over decades as opposed to centuries, there is less chance that his works would show a craquelure, as is the case with many classical works such as those by Rembrandt. And of course, it is much easier to replicate a seemingly random series of splatters than the hand skills of a master painter whose brush-stroke technique has mesmerized art historians and connoisseurs for hundreds of years. Said one successful recent forger, a self-taught amateur artist: “I love Monet. The Impressionists are quite easy to do.”18 One would be hard-pressed to find a forger who would say the same about Rembrandt.
Take for instance the controversy surrounding the so-called Matter paintings. In 2005, filmmaker Alex Matter, whose parents knew Jackson Pollock, unveiled 32 works he claimed were painted by the famous Abstract Expressionist. Though Matter could show that his paintings were authenticated by a Pollock art historian, contrarian views on the authenticity were raised just as suddenly as the works appeared. And in another case, a truck driver by the name of Teri Horton bought a painting for five dollars at a flea market that she believes to be a lost Pollock work. To this day, the debate still rages unresolved regarding whether any of these paintings are Pollocks or cheap knockoffs.
None of this is to say that Rembrandts are easy to identify. The aforementioned Rembrandt Research Project has labeled a number of works attributed to him as only possibly done by the master himself, with the group unable to come to a consensus. Since many famous Old Masters taught talented students, paintings exist that were executed by understudies and followers that are quite similar in terms of age, technique, materials, and subject matter. Confusing the matter further is the fact that it was not altogether unusual for the master to put just the finishing touches on a picture painted in almost its entirety by an apprentice.
Still, and without question, attempting to pass off a counterfeit Rembrandt was an incredibly brazen move on Sakhai’s part. But brazen he was, and he did have a certain advantage in his scheme: the legitimate ownership of the authentic painting that he had his artists copy. The authenticity of his Rembrandt, The Apostle James, was not questioned. Nor was the fact that it was purchased by Ely Sakhai from a reputable source. So when he would offer what he purported to be the painting for sale, it didn’t raise questions about authenticity, if only because those interested in the painting perhaps failed to imagine the nefarious scheme of the seller. Thanks in large measure to his travels in the Far East with his wife, Sakhai made it his mission to establish a steady clientele in Tokyo and Taiwan too. And in June 1997, he sold his Rembrandt to the Japanese businessman and art collector Yoichi Takeuchi.
Takeuchi had been a customer of Sakhai’s since 1992, when he started buying art from him in a complicated deal involving a third party who would later allegedly renege on their part in the purchase of the artwork, leaving Takeuchi with paintings he didn’t want. When Takeuchi accused Sakhai of a “fraudulent plot” against him, Sakhai replied that he, too, was the victim and had filed suit against the third party. Of course, he had not. The summons he showed Takeuchi was bogus.19 With a loan balance still due to Takeuchi, Sakhai made him an offer: he’d sell him The Apostle James for forgiveness of the loan plus $350,000. Takeuchi believed that the painting was authentic, and he would go on to say that he was influenced in his decision to purchase the painting at a dinner in New York with a person who claimed to be a branch manager for Citibank. The Citibank representative, said Takeuchi, certified that the Rembrandt was exhibited in the Metropolitan Museum. So the businessman accepted Sakhai’s offer and made the deal for the Rembrandt.20
It stands as a testament to an art lover’s desire to believe that he has made a great find and executed a great deal that Takeuchi purchased The Apostle James from Sakhai. In 1992, near the beginning of their business relationship, Takeuchi was furious with Sakhai over another major purchase. Writing in November of that year, he said, “You have delivered about 500 paintings to us with the condition you provide a provenance and certificate for each painting. . . . We feel we cannot do business in trust with you anymore. . . . This case will become a court case in Japan soon. But we feel very sorry that our trust and friendship will end this way. We also point out that you have to provide provenances and certificates regardless of the situation. If you break your promises, you will be prosecuted as an international criminal.”21 Given this inauspicious start to the relationship, it is surprising that Takeuchi would continue to conduct business with a person he so described. Nevertheless, he would go on to make the Rembrandt purchase.
Shortly after the transaction was made, Takeuchi turned to two experts to examine his prized Rembrandt for the sake of appraising its value. The pair inspected The Apostle James and came to a clear conclusion: the painting was not what it was promised to be. Takeuchi contacted Sakhai to inform him of the news, but the con man remained steadfast: the experts were mistaken, he told his client. As he had done in 1992, Takeuchi wrote to Sakhai accusing him of selling a “forged Rembrandt piece” to him, threatening to contact the authorities and to file a lawsuit against the dealer. “As it was exactly like before,” Takeuchi wrote, “I was tricked again by your performance. . . . Prof. Tanaka has looked closely to examine the painting, and he concluded this painting is totally different from the one . . . Citibank certified.” Takeuchi added that he had “gotten the report of examination by IR [infrared] and X-ray from the world famous restoration authority, Prof. Kuroe. The result . . . also conflicts from what you said.”22
Perhaps banking on the possibility that Takeuchi was bluffing and would not want to suffer the stigma of being played for a fool, Sakhai did not back down. Instead, he continued to deny that the painting was a fake. As Takeuchi would later describe, Sakhai “remained unruffled.”23 Remarkably, Sakhai played his dupe perfectly. Swayed by Sakhai’s stubborn denial of both Takeuchi’s accusations and the experts’ findings, and the fact that other well-known Japanese buyers had done business with the dealer, he backed down and held on to the Rembrandt. Takeuchi was also buttressed by the fact that Tanaka told him the painting was nonetheless worth about $4.75 million—a curiously high figure for a copy. After all, in 1997, Tanaka wrote to Sakhai, stating that the painting he had sold to Takeuchi was not the authentic The Apostle James and that “the differences between the two” were “easily” detected.24 So despite being exposed by experts and confronted by a powerful buyer, Sakhai was able to walk away from his sale of a copy unscathed. Tanaka’s unusually high valuation of the painting, perhaps a gesture intended to save his client any further embarrassment, also spared Sakhai an earlier comeuppance. But he was far from done, duping an untold number of buyers in Asia and elsewhere. Federal prosecutor Jane Levine would later write that “Sakhai interjected hundreds of forgeries into the international art market.”25
Call it karma or serendipity, but Sakhai would be undone by circumstances as simple as his scheme was complex. Not content to simply make enormous profits on the fakes he sold to unsuspecting buyers, Sakhai’s greed led him to sell the original authentic works too. When a few years had passed after he sold his fraudulent works, Sakhai would move to sell the real painting. Because he had used the original certificate of authenticity to sell the copies, he would need to have a new certificate issued. Armed with the real painting and clear title and provenance to support him, obtaining authenticating documents was relatively easy.
One of the originals he decided to sell was Paul Gauguin’s Vase de Fleurs (Lilas). In order to do so he approached Sotheby’s in New York, which promptly listed the painting in their catalog for their spring auction in May 2000. Sotheby’s main competitor, Christie’s, also had a Gauguin for sale in their spring auction catalog: an identical Vase de Fleurs (Lilas). It wasn’t long before the two auction houses communicated with each other and agreed to submit the paintings to an expert to determine whose was the fake. For authentication they turned to Sylvie Crussard of the Wildenstein Institute in Paris.
Crussard is the coauthor of Gauguin: A Savage in the Making: Catalogue Raisonne of the Paintings (1873–1888) and one of the world’s leading experts on the works of the great French Post-Impressionist. The painting created by Sakhai’s Chinese copyist was considered by the expert to be “so similar in the detail of brush strokes that one would not notice any differences from photographs if one did not suspect the existence of two versions,” and said it would be “impossible to tell which version should be catalogued” from photographs.26 However, Crussard knew that Gauguin would never have copied one of his paintings without making changes, and when the two actual works were put side by side, “all doubts were quickly removed.” Crussard examined not only the brush strokes, but the sides and reverses of the paintings and easily found that despite Sakhai’s best attempts to artificially age the copy, they were vastly different. “One looked old and the other new,” she said. “And no one hesitated” in identifying the authentic painting from the fake.27 The Christie’s version was pulled from its catalog and Sotheby’s sold Sakhai’s original at auction. Unlike the better-known works by Gauguin, which can sell for tens of millions of dollars, Vase de Fleurs brought Sakhai more than $300,000.
FBI agent James Wynne worked to find the provenance of the fake, which had been sold to a Japanese collector before making its way to Gallery Muse in Tokyo.28 Based on his decades-long experience in investigating art crimes, he was able to determine that the ownership of both the fake and the authentic paintings intersected at one person: Ely Sakhai. Later, more such cases would become known to the bureau. One buyer who purchased a work by the Swiss painter Paul Klee later found that the identical painting was being offered by Sotheby’s. Alarmed, the collector alerted investigators, who tracked those paintings back to Sakhai as well. Soon, thanks to the dogged efforts of Agent Wynne, feds were able to track a dozen such incidents involving Sakhai, beginning 14 years earlier when he bought Marc Chagall’s La Nappe Mauve at Christie’s in London for about $300,000. He fraudulently sold a copy of the painting three years later for nearly a half-million dollars; five years after that, he sold the authentic work for over $30,000 more than he paid for it.29
Wynne’s work on the case was nothing short of painstaking. In addition to the intense provenance research he completed, he also set about doing stakeouts of Sakhai’s establishment to find who was painting the copies. Said prosecutor Jane Levine, “Jim Wynne was able to identify, locate, and speak to many of the artists that had actually created the forgeries.”30 Once he had interrogated the Chinese artists, Wynne was able to convince them to provide evidence of Sakhai’s scheme. The artists gave Wynne photographs documenting the copies they had made. Said Wynne, “To me this was the most significant event in the history of the case, because we now had Mr. Sakhai commissioning, ordering, orchestrating the entire scheme.”31
On March 9, 2004, Ely Sakhai was arrested in his gallery in New York on federal mail and wire fraud charges by James Wynne and a number of his fellow FBI agents. Three months later, a Southern District of New York grand jury indicted Sakhai on those charges as well as the related conspiracy. A September 2004 statement to stockholders of another of Sakhai’s business ventures, Australian-Canadian Oil Royalties, declared that Sakhai had been indicted but that he, as the company’s president and director, “vigorously” denied the charges.32 That vigorous denial didn’t last long. As happens with so many art fraud con men, Sakhai realized the government’s case against him was rock solid and pleaded guilty on November 29, 2004, to the conspiracy and mail fraud charges. He also agreed to an enormous restitution agreement that would require him to repay $12.5 million to his victims in addition to the forfeiture of 11 paintings.
At his sentencing, Judge Loretta A. Preska sentenced Sakhai to 41 months in a federal penitentiary. Yoichi Takeuchi attempted to sue Sakhai in a New York federal court for damages related to the sale of the phony Rembrandt painting, but he was unsuccessful due to the statute of limitations on his case. He is not alone in his loss. As Sakhai’s prosecutor Jane Levine has written, despite a six-year intensive investigation into Sakhai’s wide-ranging fraud, “we do not know and may never know the full scope of the crime and the damage caused.” She added that the damage done by Sakhai “will reverberate in the art world for many years to come,” because Sakhai’s copyists made hundreds of copies for him that are still out there in the hands of unsuspecting dupes, all wanting to believe they have the real thing.33