The famed art critic Robert Hughes once declared Modernist painter Marc Chagall to be “the quintessential Jewish artist of the twentieth century.”1 Born Moishe Shagal in Russia in 1887, Chagall’s Jewish heritage is evident in many of his creations. He produced a large number of works inspired by the Bible, and while he didn’t shy away from Christianity—his White Crucifixion was said to be a favorite of Pope Francis—the emphasis of his religious oeuvre was certainly the Jewish experience.2 He describes the intersection between his religion and art in his autobiography, My Life: “In short, this is painting. Every Saturday Uncle Neuch put on a talis, any talis, and read the Bible aloud. He played the violin like a cobbler. Grandfather listened to him dreamily. Rembrandt alone could have fathomed the thoughts of the old grandfather, butcher, tradesman and cantor, while his son played the violin . . .”3
While perhaps best known for his paintings, Chagall worked in a wide array of mediums, including sculptures, tapestries, and ceramics. His skill with stained glass was such that his windows adorn synagogues, a number of cathedrals, and the United Nations building in New York, where he created a window titled Peace dedicated to the memory of the late UN secretary-general Dag Hammarskjöld. After 1966, Chagall did very little painting and instead concentrated on making stained glass. He also turned to the creation of engravings on copper, but despite these efforts, this period of his career would become best known for his lithographs, a skill for which he is widely admired. Chagall learned the art of lithography at the atelier of Fernand Mourlot, a printmaker who was the key force behind the rebirth of lithographs after World War II. Charles Sorlier, who had been one of his teachers at Mourlot’s studio, would soon describe Chagall as “an absolute master of the technique,” and the artist spent years practicing his craft.4
At about this time, Chagall produced The Story of Exodus, a book consisting of 24 vividly colored lithographs measuring about 19.5 × 14.5 inches. Two hundred eighty-five signed portfolios were produced, with 250 of them numbered and printed on Velin d’Arches. Copies of The Story of Exodus are today quite valuable, with one realizing a price of $40,000 at a Christie’s auction in October 2011.5 Chagall’s publisher was Leon Amiel, a successful New York publisher with strong ties to the Modernist art community. Though he published dozens of books on art covering artists like Paul Klee, Joan Miró, and Wassily Kandinsky, as well as works on Judaism and the Holy Land, his involvement with Chagall’s The Story of Exodus was more than just that of a businessman selling a product. Like Chagall, Amiel was dedicated to his Jewish roots and published a wide array of works on Judaica, from tomes on Hebrew manuscripts to books on Jewish cuisine. The two collaborated on an illustrated Haggadah—a prayer book for the Passover service, and according to Amiel, it was during this work that he inspired Chagall to create his Exodus series of paintings.6
Leon Amiel’s connection to legendary Modernists is impressive. In addition to his close relationship with Chagall (he would later write a book titled Homage to Chagall), the New Jersey–based publisher with a mansion in Long Island was friends with a number of other well-known artists. Picasso created a work in red, green, yellow, and purple pencil titled Visage de faune (Pour Leon Amiel) in 1957. Similarly, Salvador Dalí produced his own Pour Leon Amiel, a work in black and blue and including the Surrealist’s trademark melting clock. Amiel was also a friend of the innovative and influential Joan Miró and published many volumes on the artist.
Amiel, a heavyset man with large plastic-framed glasses and an even larger smile, has been described as “a major force in the art world,” hobnobbing with a veritable who’s who of artists from his period and rising to the upper echelon in the world of fine art publishing.7 By the mid-1980s, it was estimated that he was worth upward of $40 million. And a great deal of the fortune he was amassing was earned through the sale of the art prints he was producing at his publishing enterprise in Secaucus, New Jersey. Perhaps the key to his success was the modern and efficient printing presses he imported in the 1970s that utilized photography and color separation. These machines allowed him to produce thousands of lithographs per hour, while the traditional method of using lithographic stone produced just 30 in the same time.8
The creation of lithographs and serigraphs can be divided into three categories. First, lithographic and serigraphic prints are most valuable when they are produced as part of an original limited edition print. This category of prints must be created under the artist’s supervision in order to meet the standard of ethics of the art industry. These prints are then signed and numbered by the artist as proof of their acceptance of the edition, and the artist sometimes reserves a small percentage of them for his own use or for use by a publisher. Referred to as “artist’s proofs,” these are identified by the designations H.C. (hors de commerce, or “not for sale”), or E.A. (épreuve d’artiste, or “artist’s proof”) or A.P. (also meaning “artist’s proof”), usually in place of the edition number. Second, “afters” are copies of an original work made by others with the artist’s permission. These copies have only nominal value in the decorative art market. And third, there are unauthorized reproductions of an artist’s works, or works made to resemble what an artist might have created, made without the consent or involvement of the artist. If these works carry the artist’s signature, they are considered forgeries.9
While things were going well for Leon Amiel’s business, associates of his in the world of print dealing, Carol Convertine and her husband Martin Fleischman, had reason to worry. In 1986, their business, Carol Convertine Galleries, was raided by New York state authorities investigating them for using misleading sales tactics to peddle counterfeit art to investors via a telephone marketing scheme. Although Convertine Galleries boasted a Madison Avenue address that situated it near Museum Row, all of the Convertine sales were made by telephone through scripted salespeople who could reap 25 percent commissions for each sale. The script used by the print pushers made the claim to potential investors that art historically appreciated in value at a rate better than stocks, oil, diamonds, or rare stamps.10 The climate was ripe for convincing potential buyers that they could expect their investments to appreciate dramatically and quickly. Before Convertine and Fleischman would be brought to trial, Van Gogh’s Sunflowers would sell for $39.9 million—a then record auction price for a single painting. The prior high-water mark for a painting at auction was nearly $30 million less.11 This market, combined with the ever-present desire for investors to believe they have found the opportunity of a lifetime, ensured that the Convertine operation didn’t disappoint its principals, grossing $1.2 million from the sale of about 2,000 poster-quality prints that they had bought for as little as $30 and sold for up to $3,000 by falsely portraying them as original lithographs by Dalí, Chagall, and Picasso. However, the scam also ultimately brought prison sentences for Convertine and Fleischman, who were charged with securities fraud because they sold the prints as investments.12
The Convertine prosecution was unique in that it amounted to the nation’s first felony convictions against what was described as a “telephone boiler-room gallery.”13 At the heart of the case was an exploding trade in questionable fine art prints, and it would soon lead to investigations that would rock the art world.
Leon Amiel’s name would surface as a result of the Convertine case when he acknowledged that “some of” the fake lithographs had come from him. Speaking to the New York Times, Amiel explained that the Dalí lithographs he had provided were not fakes at all; rather, they were “lithographic interpretations” of Dalí’s original works.14
Provenance for Dalí’s works has been the subject of great scrutiny, and the ways in which his prints have become among the most faked in the world are as bizarre and difficult to believe as some of the surreal pieces he created. For instance, in the late 1970s, Dalí was paid $400,000 by a publisher named Lyle Stewart to produce illustrations for a series to be called Tarot Cards. When Dalí gave Stewart his completed illustrations, the publisher was unimpressed with the works and decided not to produce Tarot Cards and demanded a refund. When Dalí refused to give back the $400,000, Stewart filed a lawsuit. In an unusual resolution to the case, the judge ordered Dalí to sign 17,000 blank sheets of paper on which Tarot Cards would have been printed so that Stewart could sell the package and recover his losses. Dalí, following the judge’s orders, signed all 17,000 sheets under the watchful eye of an attorney.15 There were now thousands of sheets of printing paper bearing the signature of the artist without also including his artwork. Anything could have been printed on it.
Incredibly, the situation got even worse. Stewart sold the blank sheets to Peter J. “Captain” Moore, a former assistant to Dalí whose relationship with the artist had soured. Moore sold the cache of signed blank sheets to three publishers in Paris. Then, according to A. Reynolds Morse, the founder of the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, Moore realized “if he could sell 17,000 sheets, he could sell 40,000.” Soon, Moore began forging a large but untold number of signed blank sheets and selling them for $40 apiece to French publishers. The scam was finally discovered by French customs officials who nabbed a truck carrying 40,000 signed blanks. “Since that time, we have no idea how many [Dalí] sheets were forged, but it’s in the millions,” Morse said.16
Though it’s still unknown how many Dalí frauds are in circulation, it’s certain that the pieces pushed by Amiel through the ill-fated Carol Convertine Galleries were among them. Amiel further explained his dubious defense that the pieces were “lithographic interpretations” by saying, “I don’t know how these people sell to the public. What they claim and how they sell it is something I don’t get involved with.”17 In other words, his operating philosophy was that he merely produced prints; how dealers described them was up to them. And this credo would be an inspiration for generations of Amiels to come.
Though realizing outstanding profits from his business, the late 1980s would soon become a devastating period for the family of the publishing magnate. First, federal agents—apparently unimpressed by the statements Leon gave to the New York Times and spurred by numerous accounts to the Federal Trade Commission about what appeared to be an art print fraud ring—turned their attention to his operation. And second, Leon Amiel was diagnosed with liver cancer that would take his life in October 1988.
Saddened but undeterred by the death of their powerful patriarch, the Amiel family forged ahead. First, Leon’s brother Sam took over the business, but he was soon fired by Leon’s widow, Hilda, when she discovered he had been stealing paintings.18 Hilda then assumed the helm of the business herself with her daughters Kathryn and Joanne, and even her granddaughter Sarina, helping her run the business. The women met with Marc Kniebihler, Leon’s trusted chromist—the person who had actually created the fraudulent artwork since 1983.19 The Amiel women made it clear to him that they wanted to continue Leon’s business. Kniebihler told the women that he would be willing to continue his work with them, but no longer wanted to be paid with the prints that were created at the Amiel workshop. Instead, the chromist said he “wanted to be paid with prints preferably made by the artist and signed by the artist.” He told his new bosses that if they ran a “clean business” that, in time, they could be legitimately profitable. However, the Amiel women would have none of that.
Like Kniebihler, other associates wanted to discuss how work would proceed under the new Amiel leadership. One such person was art dealer Philip Coffaro, who had been dealing with Leon as far back as 1979. Though Coffaro initially believed he was obtaining legitimate art from Amiel, it took just a couple of years for him to realize that the works he was purchasing were, in his words, “no good.” The prints were too plentiful, and the color and paper just not right. But it wasn’t just connoisseurship that told Coffaro that the prints were frauds. He had witnessed Leon boldly sign and number “limited edition” works in other artists’ names at his Secaucus facility. Leon even taught Coffaro how to place fraudulent edition numbers on prints in a manner by which he could avoid detection. Nevertheless, Coffaro was pleased with the profits he was turning and continued to deal with Amiel. But now Leon was gone, and Coffaro wanted to talk to the women to discuss what he felt was a “downgrading” in the quality of the prints they produced.
Hilda assured Coffaro that the prints would be better and that they had already “taken care of most of that in Secaucus, and the material was looked at and everything that looked bad was thrown out.” She even promised letters of authenticity for future prints he bought from them. But Coffaro found that Hilda didn’t make good on her assurances, and he remained dissatisfied with the quality of the prints he was receiving. According to Coffaro, the signatures that the Amiels were putting on their prints were problematic and appeared “child like.” Since the days when Leon was running the operation, the practice was to leave the prints unsigned until the last moment in case law enforcement officers visited the facility, at which time they could simply say they were selling posters as opposed to authentic, authorized fine art prints. Coffaro eventually confronted Hilda and Kathryn about the poor quality of signatures he was receiving. Coffaro recalled that Kathryn explained, “Look, I know [they] are terrible, my mother had my uncle signing them, but Sarina will be coming home soon and they will be better.” Sarina was away at college in Boston and was the best signature-forger on the team. Her return would improve matters.
In around 1990, Hilda and Kathryn approached the chromist Kniebihler again to discuss some financial problems they were experiencing. What they needed, they told Kniebihler, was an inventory of the facility in Island Park to determine the value of the pieces they had on hand. He agreed, telling the Amiels that any fake prints he discovered would be considered worthless and not part of the inventory. Soon, Kniebihler found that the Amiels had sold a set of Miró reproductions that he had made—portraying them as original, pencil-signed prints—to Flemming Hall, a major customer of theirs. His inventory also showed that all of the prints the Amiels were creating in Secaucus were fake. Kniebihler gave the Amiel women an ultimatum: they could either clean up their act right away or “forget the whole thing.”20 He also told them that Coffaro was a “crook.”21 The women responded by denying Kniebihler further access to the inventory at the Island Park facility.22
The United States Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) dates back to Benjamin Franklin, who created the position of surveyor—a title changed to special agent in 1801—to help him regulate and audit the postal system. Today, postal inspectors work to protect the integrity of the nation’s mail service by investigating those who, among other things, use it to defraud the public. Given the use of the mail to receive and distribute counterfeit fine art prints, the agency was a natural to join into the investigation of the Amiel family operation. USPIS utilized two undercover postal inspectors—Waiman Leung and Raymond Hang—to get to the bottom of the Amiel scheme.
Leung approached the Amiels, posing as an art dealer from Asia interested in purchasing genuine pieces of art, preferably by Dalí, Miró, Chagall, and Picasso—precisely the artists in which the Amiels specialized. After just one meeting, the undercover agent purchased 22 prints attributed by the Amiels to this group of artists and bearing signatures in pencil. When Leung inquired about authenticity, Kathryn Amiel informed him that she had no documentation for some of the artworks nor information about their provenance outside of what was in her father’s documents. Instead, she insisted that the sale was on an “as is” basis.
Postal Inspector Leung and his undercover partner, Raymond Hang, continued pressing Kathryn for some documentation proving provenance. Kathryn and Sarina finally relented and rewrote, on company letterhead, information from Leon’s documents and mailed it to the undercover investigators. Armed with the forged prints and the phony documentation, the feds executed a search warrant at the Island Park facility in July 1991. Postal inspectors uncovered and seized stacks of prints, the first few signed and the rest unsigned, which was consistent with the practice of the late patriarch. In all, federal agents found and confiscated 50,000 prints supposedly by Dalí; 20,000 Mirós; 2,200 Picassos; and 650 Chagalls. They also took print reproduction equipment and seized over $1.3 million in cash, $1.5 million in properties, and three cars.23
During the search investigators found a copy of a fax that had been sent to the European distributor Flemming Hall by Sarina. On the top, Sarina wrote, “I was rummaging through a drawer and came across this quote! I hope you enjoy it as much as we did!” It matched copies of the same quote that had been posted on the wall of the Island Park facility under the heading “words to live by.” It was the statement that Leon Amiel had made to the New York Times years earlier when the Carol Convertine Galleries had been closed: “I don’t know how these people sell to the public, what they claim and how they sell it is something I don’t get involved with.”
The Amiels were arrested for charges related to conspiracy to commit mail fraud, and federal trade officials estimated that customers may have been conned out of more than $11 million.24 The U.S. Justice Department filed the charges against the Amiels while the Federal Trade Commission froze their assets. Criminal charges were also announced in Denmark and Sweden against the Amiels’ European distributor Flemming Hall. The investigation, dubbed Operation Bogart for “bogus art,” led to what the FTC described as an “industry-wide investigation of art dealers,” and included the issuance of subpoenas for a number of galleries, auctioneers, and distributors in several major cities.25
In January 1993, before the Amiels’ trial could begin, Hilda succumbed to cancer. Before she died, she left a deposition in which she denied any wrongdoing. Her daughter Kathryn’s defense lawyer told the press she didn’t know what Leon’s business practices were. “I’m not denying the stuff is bad,” attorney Adrian DiLuzio said. “I don’t know whether he was getting duped himself or he was doing the duping.” But as for his wife, daughters, and granddaughter, “They were naive in the extreme.”26 However, the witnesses against the Amiel women painted a different picture. The chromist Marc Kniebihler, not a defendant, told his story, as did Philip Coffaro, who had been named as a defendant alongside the Amiels in an FTC civil complaint.
Another art dealer, former New York City police officer Thomas Wallace—who the Amiels alleged was deeply involved in organized crime—testified against the family. Like his father-in-law Coffaro, Wallace had met with the Amiel women to discuss operations in the post-Leon era and had been in the practice of purchasing pieces he knew to be counterfeit from their operation. The Amiels told him they would continue to sell him prints, but according to Joanne, they would not provide certificates of authenticity and would sell only on an “as is” basis. Wallace also assisted the Amiels in an inventory of their facility, and he testified that he saw large quantities of prints, some signed and some not. Again, each stack consisted of just one or two pencil-signed copies at the top with the rest unsigned, just as Leon had preferred. Wallace also purchased 20 pieces from the Amiels. When two were found to be unsigned, he returned them to Sarina, apparently the team’s best forger, who took care of it for him.
Yet another art dealer was called to the stand to testify to the Amiels’ illicit operation. Lawrence Groeger had begun purchasing prints from Leon in 1988 and knew they were fraudulent based on the number available. During his meeting with the women in early 1989, he informed them that he was having a problem with galleries in California. “[A]lot of the galleries were aware of the fact that there were multiple copies of Miró prints available for sale.” This, he said, “created a lot of suspicion regarding the authenticity of the prints.” Though the Amiels told Groeger that they would protect him in the California market, his largest customer, the Upstairs Gallery, was raided by the Los Angeles Police Department later that year, with many of the prints that were seized having come through him from the Amiels. Groeger met again with the Amiels seeking documentation for the works, and though Joanne promised to help, it never came. Soon thereafter, Groeger himself was raided by police who confiscated 60 pieces of inventory and a set of prints that he had intended to return to the Amiels. All of it was found to be counterfeit.
The evidence presented at trial was overwhelming, and all of the Amiel women were found guilty by the jury. Kathryn, Joanne, and Sarina Amiel were given sentences of 78, 46, and 33 months in prison, respectively. And Operation Bogart continued with gusto, having placed Leon Amiel at the center of the large-scale international scheme that authorities believed resulted in more than $500 million in counterfeit art sales.
Operation Bogart netted another crooked dealer in 1993, putting Chicago art dealer Donald Austin behind the defendant’s table in federal court. At his high point, Austin, a former barber, had opened nearly 30 art galleries in Chicago, Michigan, and California. By the 1980s, his chain was bringing in about $34 million per year in sales of art priced from the hundreds to a few thousand dollars.27 But during a raid of Austin’s headquarters by the FTC in 1988, they found questionable works attributed to Dalí, Picasso, Chagall, and Miró—the hallmarks of the Amiels’ involvement. Austin had once allegedly said, “One day we’ll all be sitting in jail because of Leon Amiel.”28 And he was correct: he was convicted of fraud charges and sentenced to 102 months in a federal prison.
Austin’s involvement with prints obtained through Amiel was described in court from the witness stand by an art wholesaler from Northbrook, Illinois, named Michael Zabrin. Zabrin’s involvement in art fraud first emerged in 1989, not as a con man, but as a victim, when the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office charged self-described art “emulator” Tony Tetro with 45 felony counts for fabricating and distributing watercolors and lithographs. In addition to Miró and Chagall, Tetro—described at the time as “one of the largest art forgers on the West Coast”—forged 29 watercolors by Hiro Yamagata. Tetro and his accomplice, art dealer Mark Sawicki, defrauded four gallery owners including Zabrin.29
But Zabrin was anything but a victim when it came to peddling counterfeit art. A college graduate from a middle-class background, he turned an affinity for collecting prints into a lucrative career selling and consigning them. Eager to ensure a constant flow of art, he found a reliable source in none other than Philip Coffaro, the Long Island art dealer who had become a pipeline for Leon Amiel’s operation. Short and curly haired with a bushy mustache, Zabrin was eager to meet the legendary publisher, and when he discovered that a close friend was a distant relative of Amiel’s, an audience was granted. Soon, Zabrin had access to the Amiel mother lode of counterfeit art. He was no innocent dupe. He later recounted that when he would choose prints that bore no signature for purchase, Amiel’s daughter “taught me to leave the room.” Upon his return, the prints would all bear the autographs of the artists.30
Postal Inspector Jack Ellis would later recall that Zabrin “seemed like the cog” in the Amiel operation. Together with another postal inspector, James Tendick, and David Spiegel of the FTC, Ellis formed a plan to squeeze Zabrin for information. Using an art dealer as a cooperating witness and an undercover postal inspector as her assistant, the feds purchased two Miró prints for which Zabrin provided signed certificates of authenticity. The prints were fakes. When the undercover officer later visited Zabrin’s home, she took notice of a large number of Miró, Picasso, and Andy Warhol prints. In October 1990, federal agents raided Zabrin’s business and seized his records. Then came the squeeze: the feds told Zabrin that he could face 20 years in prison for his crimes or he could cooperate with the authorities in hope of being granted some leniency. He quickly opted for the latter.31
Zabrin immediately became a key figure in the successful prosecution of the Amiels. Postal inspectors were able to gather damning evidence against Philip Coffaro thanks to Zabrin’s work and then turned him into a government witness against the Amiel women as well as Groeger, Austin, and Ted Robertson of California, who had been identified as an active member of the counterfeit Dalí ring by Jack Ellis’s predecessor, Postal Inspector Robert DeMuro. Robertson was not only dealing Dalís; he had broadened his counterfeiting horizons to include Erté, Picasso, Miró, and Chagall. To demonstrate his bona fides, Robertson even gave one prospective buyer a copy of a videotape showing him at Erté’s birthday party. Unaware of the raids that had been carried out and of Coffaro’s status as a government cooperator, Robertson approached Coffaro’s business with a number of fake Picasso prints and Erté gouaches. He was ultimately arrested in his apartment in France in March 1992.32 He pleaded guilty to two counts of fraud in federal court in New York.
For his efforts assisting the federal investigation into the enormous counterfeit lithograph ring, prosecutors recommended that the court be lenient toward Zabrin and the judge complied, sentencing him to just one year and a day in prison, which the con man served at a low-security prison camp just hours from his home in Illinois. Except for the separation from his wife and two young daughters, his time in prison didn’t provide the sort of punishment that was perhaps necessary to scare him straight. Zabrin told Chicago magazine, “I had no idea what to expect, but after I got acclimated and realized I could get along with everybody, it actually turned out to be fun. It was like a camp for bad boys.”33
After his release from federal prison, Zabrin returned to what he knew best: selling fine art prints. His time away was brief enough—only ten months at the camp and a short stint at a halfway house—to ensure that some of his connections were still active. Zabrin would soon form a new network, bringing on a business associate who could handle internet sales for him, a venture that would bring him hundreds of thousands of dollars. And though his prior pipeline of counterfeit prints were now serving long prison sentences, Zabrin found new sources to funnel fraudulent fine art to him. These included Jerome Bengis and an Italian national named Elio Bonfiglioli, whose counterfeit prints were considered to be of high quality. There was also James Kennedy, a man described as “a virtual caricature of the dealer con artist” who was fond of partying, alcohol, and drugs.34
There was one other individual who provided prints to Zabrin, and the name was all too familiar: Leon Amiel Jr. Despite his name, he was actually Leon’s grandson, and he had access to a cache of his grandfather’s prints that had not been seized by federal agents years earlier in the raids that resulted in the arrest of his grandmother, mother, aunts, and sister. Leon Jr. was eager to follow in the footsteps of his famous namesake and jumped feetfirst into the world of trafficking in counterfeit prints, using the online auction site eBay and other means to sell his illicit goods.35 Meanwhile, his coconspirator Kennedy would forge the signatures of artists such as Alexander Calder, Chagall, Miró, and Picasso on the prints he received from Leon Jr. Eventually, however, eBay caught on to the scheme used by Leon Jr., which included a system of placing bids for his own items in order to artificially inflate their prices. The massive auction site suspended Leon Jr.’s account and his activities, as well as those of Zabrin, Kennedy, and others who came to the attention—once again—of federal investigators.
Zabrin didn’t confine his criminal activities to just art scams. In 2001, Zabrin was arrested and convicted for shoplifting a handbag off a display rack at Neiman Marcus. Four years later he would also be arrested for shoplifting a crystal figurine from Saks Fifth Avenue. But it wasn’t until May 6, 2006, when postal inspectors and FBI agents executed a search warrant at Zabrin’s home, that he was again facing serious prison time. This time, agents discovered a number of counterfeit prints and records regarding the sale of other pieces via art galleries and the internet. In one instance, investigators discovered that a customer returned a piece that was found to be counterfeit and was issued a refund by Zabrin, who in turn resold the same piece as authentic. The investigators also determined that Zabrin was receiving the bad prints from Bonfiglioli, Bengis, Kennedy, and Amiel’s grandson.
Zabrin knew the routine and quickly agreed to again enter into what was perhaps his second-best role after con man—government informant. Zabrin wore a wire and made a number of recordings for the feds that helped them to bring criminal fraud charges, still apparently pending, against the other members of the ring. According to assistant U.S. attorneys Nancy DePodesta and Stephen Heinze, “[Zabrin], unlike many criminal defendants, readily admitted the scope of his criminal conduct and was forthcoming when asked questions regarding other subjects and aspects of the investigation.”36 However, all was not well with Zabrin’s performance: federal investigators discovered that Zabrin’s addiction to pulling off scams was so strong that he had perpetrated a new one even while being handled as a federal informant.
Agents running the investigation orchestrated calls from Zabrin to a particular target. In an astonishingly risky and bold scheme, Zabrin made additional calls to the target unbeknownst to his federal agent handlers. In these unauthorized calls, Zabrin negotiated two separate purchases for a total of eight Chagall lithographs that would be financed by his business partner. However, Zabrin told his partner that he had only purchased six, with the intent to sell the remaining two for his own profit behind his partner’s back.
Federal agents and prosecutors were irate, as they realized that this sort of unscrupulous behavior seriously jeopardized Zabrin’s usefulness as a cooperator and eventual witness at trial. Zabrin’s ploy proved self-destructive. This time, prosecutors made no pleas to the sentencing judge for leniency. Instead, the assistant U.S. attorneys assigned to the case were harsh in their recommendation to federal judge Robert Dow. Dismissing the defense attorney’s excuses of mental illness for his behavior, they described Zabrin as “a very cunning individual who is able to effectively lie and manipulate others for personal gain.” Zabrin, they argued, “poses a serious risk of recidivism”; they added that his crimes “constitute a thoroughly planned-out scheme to defraud hundreds of people over a period of several years.”37
Despite his cooperation and assistance, Judge Dow agreed with prosecutors and dealt with Zabrin severely, sentencing him to nine years in federal prison. Meanwhile, the grandson of the man who reigned over this enormous counterfeit lithograph scam like a mafia don also pleaded guilty in federal court for his role in feeding fraudulent fine art to unsuspecting buyers. On June 15, 2011, U.S. District Court judge Joan Gottschall heard Leon Amiel Jr. ask for mercy, choking up as he told her “my children are my life.” Judge Gottschall, who could have sent Leon Jr. away for nine years in prison, was sympathetic to his request and sentenced him to only two. She cited his commitment to his family, his mental problems, and a family history of emotional and physical abuse in her ruling. “He (was) being raised by criminals,” she said.38