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[light music]
[Ann Freedman] No one wants to be fooled.
People are fooled by art
much more than we know.
The Director at the Metropolitan Museum
was once asked,
"How many fakes do you think
could possibly be on the walls?"
To which he responded, "I have no idea."
It's embarrassing.
Worse than that,
I think, is that they don't want to own up
to admitting
that they were fooled.
I think it's, you know, very easy to see
how I was
so caught up
in the excitement over the art.
They say they are sure
she was a part of the criminal enterprise.
They say they're positive.
Either she was complicit in it,
or she was one of the stupidest people
to have ever worked at an art gallery.
I did not knowingly sell fakes.
I was convinced that they were right.
And real, and believable.
I was convinced.
[dramatic instrumental music]
♪ You've got a cold Cold heart ♪
♪ Do you feel at all? ♪
♪ You build a house of cards ♪
♪ But it's gonna fall ♪
♪ I know all your secrets ♪
♪ I know all your lies ♪
♪ Oh oh, oh oooh Oh oh, oh oooh ♪
♪ I know where you keep 'em ♪
♪ Buried deep inside ♪
♪ Oh oh, oh oooh Oh oh, oh oooh ♪
♪ No you can't hide ♪
♪ Your secrets and lies ♪
[M.H. Miller] It was very abrupt at first.
I mean, it started with the news of Knoedler closing.
And that was shocking because Knoedler was
very old-guard institution in the art world.
And nobody really knew the details of that until...
you know, news started leaking out about this forgery scandal.
$80 million dollar scandal
that has the art world up in arms tonight,
and collectors checking their most prized possessions.
This is probably the largest art fraud
that has ever been discovered
in the history of, of the United States.
[male reporter] In this case, the accused forger created
lookalikes of some of America's most prominent artists.
A con that went on for, you know,
nearly 20 years.
This was someone who had the gall to say,
Jackson Pollock, Motherwell,
let's take some of the biggest names of 20th Century art.
You've got collectors who bought something
that is worth millions and millions of dollars...
I have the opportunity to buy a Rothko?
[Luke Nikas] ...and in fact, it's worth zero.
[Blake Gopnik] People thought they were sublime masterworks.
Before they knew they were fakes,
people thought these are great works of art
and they put them up in fancy museums.
And one of the most important galleries
this country's ever seen was at the center of it.
[M. Shnayerson] The Knoedler Gallery was
New York's most venerable,
in part because of its sheer longevity.
[M.H. Miller] They had survived the Civil War,
two World Wars, the entire 20th Century.
[Dr. Flam] They started as an Old Master dealer,
and they sold to people like
J.P. Morgan, Henry Clay Frick.
They sold to the MET. They sold to the Louvre.
In the early part of the 1970s,
Armand Hammer, one of the great industrialists
and philanthropists of the American 20th Century,
acquired an interest in the Knoedler Gallery.
His grandson, Michael Hammer,
acquired an ownership interest around 2001.
[Dr. Taylor] Michael Hammer essentially assumed
control of the gallery and put Ann Freedman in charge.
[Ann Freedman] I was at Knoedler for...
it was just a touch shy of 32 years.
[Dr. Flam] Ann Freedman had a reputation for being someone
who could really sell art,
who had a good relationship with collectors.
[Ann Freedman] It was the roof that was over me.
I worked for Knoedler.
Knoedler was it. It was the institution.
[M. Shnayerson] And it was a gallery that kept up
with the times and trends.
Ironically, the only era that they kinda missed
was Abstract Expressionism in the early '50s,
which would turn out of course to be the era
that they were brought down by.
[male reporter] At the center of this scam, authorities say,
is this New York woman.
Glafira Rosales.
A self-described art dealer.
[Emily Reisbaum] I mean, Glafira Rosales comes into Knoedler
off the street with, you know,
supposed masterpieces in the trunk of her car.
Like yeah, you have a huge, you know,
multi-million dollar trove of, of previously unknown paintings.
You know?
And all of them from this same,
mysterious, Glafira Rosales.
[Perry Amsellem] It was a perfect storm,
and it was highly unusual for this amount of forged works
to be going through Knoedler and fooling so many people.
[clap]
[Ann Freedman] It was...
my recollection, 1995,
Jimmy Andrade,
he was kind of your guy Friday.
You know, he just did a lot of things that came up.
Trusted. Terribly trusted.
He told me that he had a friend,
a very special friend, who wanted to show me a Rothko.
One day, Glafira Rosales came in.
I don't think I knew her name at that point,
but it didn't matter, I'd never heard of her.
She was polite.
Well-dressed.
Very soft spoken.
[M.H. Miller] There was no reason to trust Glafira Rosales.
Nobody knew who this person was.
She didn't have a great pedigree.
She was just some lady from Long Island
who came to the gallery one day.
Rosales was the perfect part for this.
Said the right amount of information,
not too much, not too little.
Just enough to make Ann interested,
and to keep the relationship going.
She had the Rothko work on paper,
wrapped in some...
between cardboards, I think.
And I asked her, you know, could we unwrap it?
Jimmy unwrapped it. Nothing unusual there.
And I thought it was absolutely beautiful.
Absolutely beautiful.
If one can fall in love with something material,
I do fall in love with art.
I know it's not human so, you know,
there's a, there's a limit, but I got genuinely excited
about these works of art.
Signature on the back.
Dated. It looked very good.
Oh, I, it would be normal for me, and it was that way then,
to ask some questions,
"Can you tell me anything about where it comes from,
and the owner?" And she made it very clear
that she had a confidentiality,
the owner's name was not to be revealed.
Little by little, other details
came out of a sort of backstory.
"Mr. X," so went the first story,
uh, it got modified later, but...
story one centered on this "Mr. X."
[Ann Freedman] Very well-to-do family.
They came over from Europe.
They went to Mexico, not unusual after the war time.
[M. Shnayerson] He and his wife had come to New York.
They had bought paintings through
a guy named Alfonso Ossorio.
[Luke Nikas] Alfonso Ossorio lived in Long Island.
He was... maybe a patron, if you will, of Jackson Pollock.
He supposedly connected
the anonymous collector and the artists.
[Ann Freedman] They acquired a number of works,
this isn't the only one, there are others.
The Mexican guy, even though he doesn't like
abstract art, takes all these paintings back to Mexico.
How does he do this, on a wagon train?
I mean, takes all these paintings back to Mexico
and puts them, hermetically sealed, in the basement.
He had given those works to his son,
"Mr. X Junior."
And his son now wants to sell them
at cheap prices because the son doesn't care about money.
As if rich people don't care about money?
My experience is that rich people care about money
even more than poor people.
It's one of these stories
where a couple of details are true,
or tantalizingly plausible, I should say,
and someone who is gullible just then ate the whole thing.
Isn't that always the case with a con,
that, you know, there is just enough to be believable in it?
I thought, my God, this is a discovery.
[auctioneer] Start the bidding at $33, 34, 35 million dollars.
$36 million dollars the bid.
36, to Stefan?
36.
48, with Charlie now at 48?
[Charles Schmerler] Ab-Ex art, in about the year 2000,
1998, went nuts.
[auctioneer] At $57 million dollars?
And Elizabeth will now bid 57.
58.
[Charles Schmerler] What was a decent market became
a ridiculous hot market, and so things were selling
for ten times whatever they had been sold for before.
[Carter Ratcliff] The Abstract Expressionists were really
the first group of American artists
who developed an international reputation.
The group included Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko,
Barnett Newman, Lee Krasner, Robert Motherwell
and Willem de Kooning, of course.
They didn't really ever expect
to find an audience, find collectors.
At $65 million dollars then?
Thank you! [audience applauds]
Because of the prices right now
of a lot of the Abstract Expressionist painters,
it's more tempting perhaps
to forge their works.
[Ann Freedman] I knew from the story
that the paintings were purchased
late '50s, early '60s, for very little money,
and it was believable.
The artists were starving.
They weren't just wanting to sell, they were really needy.
Pollock had to, you know, exchange his paintings
with the local grocery store or the liquor store.
So the idea that at that point in time, someone could acquire
the works very cheaply is nothing of a surprise.
And don't forget, when this unidentified
"Mr. X" was supposed to have been buying these,
these works were not expensive.
They were five, ten, ten thousand dollars.
These paintings have never been exhibited,
they have no known provenance,
they have no real paperwork.
Provenance is the key to it here.
You know, you need to know
where that painting came from.
[Dr. Sharon Flescher] Provenance.
Well, the simple definition
of provenance is the history of ownership.
It is, ideally, where you can trace the work
from the current owner
all the way back to the artist's studio.
[M. Shnayerson] At the very least, there needed to be
some paperwork showing
when this work had been created, and who it had gone to.
The sister might have some of the paperwork,
but it's probably been destroyed.
I mean, she was prepared with a story.
There's no question.
It's completely opaque.
And they should never have accepted this as provenance.
I mean, you would've thought that at least
one of those pictures might have appeared as a background shot,
showing one of the artists in his studio.
Often you can find some records
of a work's existence, but it's never perfect.
And records can be fabricated.
[Ann Freedman] You had great collectors from Walter Chrysler,
to Roy Neuberger, to Joe Hirshhorn, they all did that.
They went into artists' studios,
and they bought cheaper by the dozen,
and they paid in cash.
It was credible to me.
I believed what I was told.
There was mystery, but there's often mystery in provenance.
But I hoped to solve that mystery as time went on.
None of the works Rosales brought to the gallery
were in the catalogue raisonnés of the artists.
Catalogue raisonné is a comprehensive catalogue
of the authentic works by a particular artist.
[Dr. Sharon Flescher] Everyone accepts the fact
that there might be some legitimate works
that didn't make it into the catalogue raisonné,
they weren't known to the authors at the time,
but nonetheless, it is sort of a bible.
What do you do?
You go to the people who created the catalogue raisonnés,
and you ask them, will you look at this,
and give me your opinion?
I first saw this painting, if memory serves...
[Ann Freedman] And it happened that the expert,
David Anfam, was in town from London,
and I showed it to him.
He had an immediate take, which I knew he would have,
which is, it's beautiful.
It's a Rothko.
He had the expert eye for Rothko.
He was noted as a Rothko scholar.
Noted as an Abstract Expressionist scholar.
Hired by the National Gallery and the Rothko family
to do the catalogue raisonné,
the bible, of Rothkos.
Oh, it meant a great deal and it was right.
[clap]
[Maria Konnikova] A master con artist gives you what you want.
Good con artists are very good psychologists.
They're someone who understand human need,
who understand human desire.
Who understand how belief and how hope work.
[Luke Nikas] Rosales was on the scene to demonstrate
she was someone who could be trusted.
Someone who had a role in this art world.
[Ann Freedman] She went to auctions, to openings,
and she bought art from me.
To come to openings, you're coming to a public gathering,
so you're not hiding.
[M. Shnayerson] It was a fascinating game
of cat and mouse, because
with each additional painting that Glafira brought in,
Ann would try to get information about
"Mr. X" from her,
and Glafira would say, "Well, I'll tell you this,
he's very happy with how you're doing."
[Ronald Spencer] Don't forget this was only
one or two fakes sold by Knoedler a year.
People look back at the total number and say, oh my goodness!
They weren't brought up to Knoedler in a wheelbarrow.
It was kind of a trickle over time,
so, slow and steady was the plan here.
You know, Glafira is a small,
pretty quiet person.
She doesn't fit the profile of what you might think
would be a international art criminal.
But we know that her boyfriend has an art background.
[director] Just so I have it, so I know,
If you could tell me your name.
My name is José Carlos Bergañtinos Díaz.
[Perry Amsellem] Who is Bergañtinos?
Who is Glafira Rosales?
These people have a gallery, supposedly, in New York City.
They supposedly have a gallery in Sands Point.
They've been accused of trafficking
forgeries in Spain.
Bergañtinos was accused in a lawsuit in 2006
of having forged various documents.
[Jason Hernandez] There are red flags surrounding him.
There's indications that if there's a scheme here,
and there clearly is, that he is in on it.
[director] Ann Freedman ran the gallery.
Did you ever meet her?
[in Spanish] I never met her, never.
I didn't know the assistant either, I didn't know anyone.
Whether it was Bergañtinos
or whether it was Glafira, they did their research.
When you pick someone like Ann, you're picking someone
at a very vulnerable moment in their career
when they need something like this.
And that's one of the things that
someone like Glafira and Bergañtinos
are banking on.
A con artist isn't a good speaker.
A con artist is a good listener.
And Glafira did that so incredibly well.
[Luke Nikas] The works came in,
and the first thing Ann did was bring them to experts.
That's what dealers do.
Whether there's provenance, or no provenance.
[Luke Nikas] The National Gallery of Art
was publishing a catalogue raisonné
of Mark Rothko works on paper.
They wrote to Ann about two of the Rothkos
and said, "We've evaluated the works.
We intend to include these works in the catalogue."
She went to the leading conservator,
the conservator for the Mark Rothko estate,
and she got condition reports back
that made positive comments about the works, like,
this is a classic example of Rothko's style.
This is someone who conserved hundreds and hundreds
of paintings, and saw nothing out of line
when she looked at the physical construction
of these paintings.
Next came a Pollock,
and eventually seven Richard Diebenkorns.
[Ann Freedman] It was like discovering raw land
to develop it.
I did hire, after all, an expert, E.A. Carmean,
to be in charge of the research for this.
I trusted his eye completely.
He absolutely felt they were right,
and put it in writing.
[M.H. Miller] They wanted so badly to believe
that these things were real,
because it was better for everybody if they were real.
Here, we have this great discovery,
this trove of previously unknown paintings
by some of the most celebrated artists of the 20th Century.
And I think that if you really wanted something to be true,
you would do your best to ignore any kind of red flags.
But you know, there were a lot of them.
[Luke Nikas] The experts that she went to approved these works
in some form or another.
And when she had the experts around her
affirming what she believed,
she dove right in, head first.
[clap]
[Dr. Flam] Art, it's a kind of high-end commodity
that has a very small audience.
[Jason Hernandez] It's exclusivity. I mean,
we're talking about the world's greatest artists.
They don't have a whole lot of works.
And we're also talking about people with a lot of money,
so they might want to collect something that's ultra-rare,
that no one else, literally, can have.
And when you have those combinations of those facts
together and someone comes up with a new discovery,
it's really enticing.
[Luke Nikas] The De Soles are very smart people.
Domenico is a graduate of Harvard Law School.
He's a very sophisticated man.
And they have an impressive collection of art.
[Domenico De Sole] We visited an old friend and he said to me,
the next time you go to New York,
you really must see this very close friend of mine,
she's probably the best in the United States. Ann Freedman.
I didn't know who she was.
I didn't know anything about Knoedler at the time.
We talked about a Scully that we really liked.
Why don't we call Ann Freedman
to see if they had the Scully available.
I didn't have one at that point in time,
but I wanted to meet them.
[Eleanore De Sole] It was a very nice location.
You went up the stairs.
There was an office where we were seated.
Couple of works of art on easels that were covered.
And they said, "What's that over there
with the white cover on it?"
And I said, "Well actually, it's a Rothko."
"Oh, we love Rothko!
Let's have a look."
[Eleanore De Sole] These two works of art were unveiled,
and one appeared to be a Rothko,
and one appeared to be a Jackson Pollock.
We were like, wow, look at those.
Well, it takes your breath away.
Which, you know, is not something
that comes to you every single day.
Of course, we inquired about them.
They were hoodwinked in a sense,
but they were all sophisticated people.
Sophisticated in business, sophisticated in their,
in their professional lives, and yet
they all succumbed
to the charm of this art.
I think the mindset that led De Soles
to sort of be in love with this,
what he believed to be a Rothko,
is a frequent mindset of the collector
who has bought a forgery.
Falling in love really describes this process
of ignoring and forgiving flaws as somebody
who is smitten with their new love
is going to ignore their flaws.
This is something that's
an ego boost for you.
This is something where,
when you have people come to your house,
you want them to see it.
Well, if suddenly the exact kind of Rothko
that you want comes on the market,
are you gonna ask too many questions,
or are you gonna buy it?
I just want to make clear,
I don't have a trained eye. I'm not an expert.
The paintings did look very good, and in fact,
the person that we used as our advisor,
he's very sophisticated,
he thought the paint looked very, very good.
The price of eight million dollars
sounds like a lot, but that said,
that's kind of low for a Rothko.
Good Rothkos of the period,
actually go for much more than that.
They didn't seem to have many questions.
They were just totally enthralled with the painting.
Domenico was insistent,
besides an invoice with the price,
he wanted a warranty of authenticity,
and Freedman supplied a multi-page document
listing every "expert"
who had seen the painting, authenticated the painting.
I was listed as an expert on De Sole's painting,
which is how I, it's one of the reasons
I got sucked into this.
I am not an expert on Rothko.
I have no memory of having seen that painting.
[Ronald Spencer] De Sole knew that there was no provenance.
De Sole knew that it was an unidentified owner, seller.
In fact, they all knew that.
[Ann Freedman] The De Sole piece went to the Beyeler,
so it was unbelievably exhibited
in a context of what was called,
"The Rothko Rooms." I love to talk about it.
Ernst Beyeler was one of the most important
art dealers who devoted an entire exhibition
to the works of Mark Rothko.
The De Sole Rothko was on its own wall.
So you walked into the Beyeler,
and there it was.
Ernst Beyeler was alive then,
he didn't question it,
you know, he accepted it.
That's all more reason for us to think
we really had this jewel.
You should be asking yourself,
why am I getting this?
Why have I gotten such a good deal?
[clap]
[Charles Schmerler] What many of the experts did agree on
at the outset was that it was highly unlikely,
if not impossible, that one person would be able to master
the styles of so many artists.
It was extraordinary,
and it was entirely unexpected by anyone
who reviewed those works.
Time now for our favorite person of the day,
when we pick one person who grabbed our attention,
and not for the right reasons.
Today, it is a 75-year-old artist
who went from selling his paintings
for a couple hundred dollars,
to selling them for millions.
[Luke Nikas] What we know about Pei-Shen is that
when he lived in China, he was an accomplished painter.
And then he came to the States, and he couldn't make it
in the art world in the way he did in China.
He was really, really frustrated
because they come here with big name created in China.
Here, nobody knows... "Who are you?"
So he was trained at the Art Student League.
The Art Student League is a school in Manhattan
where greats like Alexander Calder, and Pollock
received some of their training.
The fellow was, quite clearly,
A, a genius,
B, had studied these techniques of
seven, eight different Ab-Ex painters.
And he'd studied them really hard.
The Chinese have had a tradition
for a thousand years or more of
correctly copying,
being dead accurate copying,
being the greatest tribute you could pay
to a previous artist, and to be a test of your own skill.
[Carter Ratcliffe] And this goes back centuries,
millennia really.
Originality was not a virtue.
Nothing from your heart.
It's only copy others' technique.
They not only copy art, they copy iPhone,
they copy so many high tech.
You have to wonder if you're, if you're
that Chinese artist, turning out these pieces
that almost no one could tell apart
from true masterpieces.
He's good. He has some talent.
But not really like Picasso, Matisse kind of talent.
His Mark Rothko is a very bad copy.
Brilliant.
Brilliant fakes.
[Jason Hernandez] Glafira and Bergañtinos, they interviewed,
or you know, looked for a bunch of people to do this,
and settled on Pei-Shen
because he was the best they found,
and he was able to do multiple artists.
When Pei-Shen created the paintings
they're fresh, they're new, I mean,
they're brand-new, they're not
from the '50s and '60s, as they should be.
So Pei-Shen makes the painting, and then it goes to Bergañtinos,
and he does things to the painting
to make it look credibly old.
The surface might have cracking.
There's gonna be dust.
The frame has to be the right age.
Even the canvas has to be the right age.
So, Bergañtinos would get some materials, raw supplies,
an old canvas, the right kind of frame.
So, they worked hand in glove.
They needed Pei-Shen's artistry, but then Bergañtinos had to put
the finishing touches on it to give it the appearance
of age and credibility.
If you look at my bank account,
you'll see there was no income.
I'm still a poor artist.
You think I could be involved with this?
[Luke Nikas] He was paid very little at the beginning.
As time went on, he was at the
67th Street Armory Art Fair,
and saw one of his works in the Knoedler Gallery booth.
That's the point where he went back to Rosales and said,
"I need to be paid more money."
[director] Carlos, how did you meet Pei-Shen Qian?
[in Spanish] So, I bought art from him and
when he was on the street painting things,
sometimes I needed money,
and I bought them and I sold, like everyone else.
[Luke Nikas] And Rosales was the one, I'm sure, with some help
from the boyfriend, creating the story surrounding the works.
It was really well executed.
[Dr. Flam] You also have to remember that Glafira Rosales
had tried to sell those paintings herself.
Even if she had access to the collectors or galleries
that Ann Freedman sold to,
they would have laughed at her.
We all see something into context.
You go to the Museum of Modern Art, you go to the MET,
and you see a painting up there,
even an expert is not going to think,
"Well there's something not right with that painting."
You rely on the museum and the whole, kind of, infrastructure
that would have vetted that painting.
I mean, Knoedler had such a prominent reputation,
and I think people just never suspected.
Increasingly, more and more people
liked the work.
When I say, liked it, wanted it.
In front of it you could see eyes light up.
There was depth to the desire for these paintings.
[light classical music]
[Dr. Taylor] Anyone who works in
what we call the secondary art market
where you're buying up a work from one party
and reselling it to another, those deals,
if you make a hundred percent markup, is generally normal.
But those profit margins were more like anywhere
from 200, to like, 800 percent.
That happens about once every ten years.
And any secondary market dealer would know that
if they're repeatedly getting profit margins of that scale,
there's some cause for concern here.
[Ann Freedman] I wasn't alone in believing in these works of art.
It wasn't Ann Freedman against the world.
Everyone was willing.
The art world was willing.
They weren't hidden.
They weren't downplayed.
They were totally exposed around the world,
and published.
[M. Shnayerson] She wanted, so wanted,
these works of art to be real
because if they were, she would be a leading figure
in the world of art dealers.
She would be atop them all.
And she let that lead her over the cliff.
[clap]
[Luke Nikas] Jack Levy went to the gallery,
and was interested in buying a Jackson Pollock.
What he said was, "I'll buy this work.
But I want you to subject it
to an evaluation by IFAR."
[Dr. Sharon Flescher] The International Foundation
of Art Research was founded to deal
with the complicated issues
of attribution and authenticity.
We're one of the only places
that even does such a thing.
Mr. Levy negotiated that if we didn't accept it as a Pollock,
he could get his money back.
The whole issue of authenticity
is very, very troubled now in the art world.
[Jason Hernandez] One thing that really works
for the forgers' favor is that
if you have a negative opinion,
if you're not sure, you tend to keep it to yourself.
There have been experts that have been critical of paintings,
and they got sued.
[Dr. Flescher] Authentication research
is usually three-pronged.
It's scholarly research, which includes provenance,
and then it's also bringing specialists together
to look at the work.
Specialists who are really knowledgeable about the artist,
to see whether it's consistent with the artist's style.
And then it's also what we call the material properties.
Despite some positive comments about the work
that looked superficially good,
we had too many negative comments.
Materially, one of the things we noticed,
there was new paint on old canvas.
We compared it physically to an actual Pollock painting
of the same year, and the masonite
had aged completely differently.
This was very suspicious to us.
Stylistically, there were many concerns
about the way the paint was applied,
about that greenish-brown wash.
No one had ever seen, even the people who liked the work
questioned that.
And then the provenance, we attached 16 pages of documents
showing why that provenance was inconceivable.
Pollock is a very well-documented artist.
He was famous in his lifetime, for heaven's sakes!
The lack of documentation for a painting
at the height of Pollock's career,
this was when Life Magazine was asking whether
he was the most famous artist in America,
that was particularly astonishing.
That combination of information
made us write in the report
that we could not accept the work
as a work by Jackson Pollock.
It was inconclusive.
Which, in the art community,
is generally understood as it is a fake,
but we just stepped short of saying that,
and we said it multiple times.
The fact is they hid the report, they never mentioned the report,
and bad-mouthed us over the years.
The gallery later tried to say
that we didn't come up with an opinion.
I certainly felt that she was not wanting
to listen to everything I wanted to tell her.
It was an opinion to say,
"We cannot accept it as a work by Pollock."
[M. Shnayerson] At that point, Jack Levy
went back to Ann Freedman and Knoedler and said,
"I want my money back.
That was our deal.
You owe me, you know, two million dollars."
I recall saying to him,
"Jack, if there's a problem,
we'll undo it."
And I would've said that to anybody.
And Knoedler refunded one hundred percent
of his purchase price.
[Perry Amsellem] You would think that Ann Freedman and Knoedler
would go ahead and make sure
to do serious investigation at that point.
And in fact, that work went back on sale
at the Knoedler Gallery.
The price went from two million dollars
to I think, 11 million.
I certainly felt as time went on,
and it's a fact,
Pollock's market went up,
so one could ask more for it, sure.
[director] Did it ever sell?
No.
I went right to Glafira to let her know
that there was a suspicion about the works,
and I got a little more information.
I found out that within three weeks,
miraculously, the work had a new provenance.
[M. Shnayerson] Story number two changed.
Now "Mr. X" was gay,
and he had come to New York,
and begun buying works through a guy
named David Herbert, who was gay.
[Luke Nikas] David Herbert was a real art dealer.
Worked in the 1950s.
He was employed at the Sidney Janis Gallery,
who represented a lot of the Abstract Expressionist artists,
by the Betty Parsons Gallery,
also represented a number of
Abstract Expressionist artists.
So, he was a real dealer with positions
at prominent galleries.
"Mr. X" had been drawn
into this whole demi-monde of gay art lovers,
and dealers, and collectors.
However, he had a wife and children
back in Switzerland,
so he couldn't take these works back with him.
It would've been opening up his gay life to his family.
[Dr. Flescher] Which was just as concocted,
and just as refutable with research.
[Dr. Flam] I mean, the story kept morphing.
Alfonso Ossorio is involved. Then he's not involved.
They pivoted to you know, conveniently,
to David Herbert,
who also, conveniently, was dead.
And as pieces fell out,
or there are holes in the stories,
suddenly they were plugged by some other information.
But you can see how a somewhat gullible
and ambitious dealer like Ann Freedman
might take a morsel like that.
You know, David Herbert did exist, there he was,
and swallow all that Glafira was telling her along with it.
[Ann Freedman] Well, she came out with more.
It wasn't-- she didn't change her story,
it wasn't something that she retracted.
Her story was evolving.
I don't recall any time in which
I thought she was not telling me the truth.
And it would've alarmed me
if she had said one thing one day,
and then changed it another day.
That did not happen.
Ugh.
[Dr. Flam] The Dedalus Foundation was founded
by Robert Motherwell in 1981.
[Dr. Flam] Motherwell was one of the leading
Abstract Expressionist artists
and in many ways the spokesman for the movement.
In early 2007, Julian Weissman,
a private dealer whom I knew,
told us he had
a Motherwell painting
that had been recently discovered.
In my gut it looked kind of weird.
It was warped.
There was too much oil in the paint,
or too many drip marks,
but it looked just like the stuff that was in the database.
So, we figured okay, well, it's a discovery,
we're discovering new things,
and it turns out that Motherwell
made more paintings in 1953 than we thought.
He asked us for a letter of authentication,
and he used the letter to sell the painting.
It's my fault. It was a mistake. Live and learn.
Later that year, Ann Freedman told us
that she had yet another Elegy,
and it really looked wrong.
I had affirmation on the Motherwell
that I personally owned.
Helen Frankenthaler, Motherwell's wife for 13 years,
she looked at that "Elegy" and she pointed her finger,
yup, that's Bob.
I could not have asked for more affirmation.
[Dr. Flam] The signature looked kind of okay if you saw it once
because everybody's signature varies a little bit,
but this signature looked like it came from a template.
[Perry Amsalem] Something was off with these paintings.
They went back to Knoedler and Freedman, confronting them.
[Dr. Flam] We thought we were doing her an enormous favor.
We thought she was gonna say, oh my God,
thank goodness you've told me about this,
because I've been dealing with these people
thinking these paintings were real.
And she had told us that there were not only Motherwells
in this collection, but there were Rothkos and Pollocks,
and de Koonings.
The level of resistance that,
that Knoedler was pushing back on
didn't make any sense.
Her reaction, started arguing with us.
She brings up the David Herbert story,
and how David Herbert was close to Motherwell.
We, by the way, did some research right after
she said that, and we found that
he didn't exist on Motherwell's radar,
except perhaps as some shadowy figure somewhere.
And Ann was making it seem as if they were close,
these paintings were real,
and she said to us,
experts on the other artists have said
these paintings are real.
So, I was stunned.
He forgot to mention that he initially
thought the works were right.
Also, I should say that in 2006,
I'd actually seen one of these "Elegies."
It was on the floor in her office.
I think he made it up
that he quickly looked at this,
quote, unquote "Motherwell on the floor."
It looked kind of like, I mean, it looked like an Elegy.
I didn't show paintings on the floor,
I put them on an easel.
That was my way.
So it looked enough like a--
a Motherwell that you see on the floor casually.
You're not asked to give an opinion.
I've never known Jack
to look at something quickly.
He feels that his opinion and his judgment matters,
and he would look at a work in a way
of considering how good it is.
I didn't even say, "Sure, it looked fine."
I just-- didn't say, "Wow, that looks like a fake."
All I asked,
please let me prove these work right.
I believe them. I believe E.A. Carmean,
who knew Motherwell better than Jack Flam.
Nobody knew Motherwell like E.A. Carmean.
That doesn't mean that I couldn't accept
I might be wrong,
but how do you go about
figuring that out?
I then said, "Okay,
I'd like you to have those two paintings
in your control forensically tested."
The best person for that period in the United States,
probably in the world, is Jamie Martin at Orion Analytical.
[Ann Freedman] I didn't trust his methods.
It was a huge question for me
that Jamie Martin was one of one.
He had no associates, no assistants, no lab technicians,
nothing, just him.
Knoedler and Ann Freedman sat on that report.
Didn't turn it over to us until January of 2009,
and when she turned it over,
they omitted the last four pages,
which were the most important pages.
They eliminated a lot of
so-called confidential information.
[Ann Freedman] It was full of questions and errors,
and it was difficult to believe
that they were fair-minded.
It was clear from the report
that the paintings were fakes.
There were all sorts of anomalies.
The ground was an acrylic- polymer emulsion ground.
Motherwell did not start using acrylic-polymer emulsion paints
until 1961 or 62.
There had been a painting under the paintings
that had been sanded down with an electric sander,
which is absolutely contrary
to Motherwell's practice.
Ann argued E.A. Carmean said a couple of things
that I thought were rather fatuous.
For example, there were pigments on the Motherwell paintings
that had not been invented until much later.
Carmean said, "Well maybe they were brushed against them
in the collector's home."
The collector wasn't a painter.
So at that point, I thought about what our options were,
and I realized there was a massive fraud
being carried on,
and I decided to go to the FBI.
[Ann Freedman] It was
so war-like,
behind my back,
to take me to the FBI.
It seemed to me so clear that she knew,
or should've known that these paintings were fakes,
that by my saying I'm gonna go to the FBI,
what good was it gonna do?
Jack could have had a sit-down with me
to talk about his concerns about the art.
[director] Did he not?
Not really.
He confronted me in front of others.
That's not sitting down and talking about his concern.
And concern for me.
Ann, this is trouble.
I don't want to see you in trouble.
My God, I thought these were right, initially.
I think I was wrong.
I think you're wrong.
And you mean well, I know that, because I know you.
Because I've known you for years.
I mean, there is a way this could have been
humanly discussed.
But that didn't happen.
This was an attack.
They did
get to the correct... [clears throat]
excuse me... answer.
But how they did it,
and how they tried to destroy
my reputation,
that's another matter.
[light piano music]
[Jason Hernandez] I knew this was gonna be big because
either the paintings are all real, or they're all fake,
so we're either talking here about
$80.7 million dollars worth of fake paintings,
which is gonna be one of the largest art frauds
in U.S. history, if not the biggest,
or we're dealing with an amazing collection
that the world should see,
and they should be displayed.
Once I figured out conclusively that the paintings were fake,
I knew that we were sitting on an enormous case.
[Ann Freedman] She said they've made a mistake.
They-- they're mistaken, that it's not right.
So, I pushed to let her know
that we needed to do everything possible
to prove that they were right.
If you are the victim of a con
that you've truly believed in,
as evidence comes in against you,
you are much more likely to double-down.
This is actually the moment
where instead of doubting and saying,
wow, I was wrong,
you say, no, I'm so right.
It's a psychological process
that's born out of cognitive dissonance,
which means that your perception of the world
and the evidence are no longer matching.
My feeling was
to not do any more business,
because of the accusation,
but it didn't mean that I thought
that the accusation was correct.
She was confident in the art
until she couldn't be any longer.
I mean, she held out as long as she could.
[Jason Hernandez] The target is gonna be Glafira Rosales.
And you're always trying to find out
who else is criminally responsible,
but she's the person bringing
the paintings into the gallery.
Now, you don't know whether she herself has been duped,
but until you can clear her,
she's gonna be your first suspect.
[Dr. Flam] When Ann Freedman gave me the name
of Glafira Rosales,
one of the first things we did was we hired
a private investigating firm
to investigate her,
and within a week or two,
they found that she lived with
José Carlos Bergañtinos Díaz.
And he had been accused of
trafficking in stolen paintings
in 1999.
[Perry Amsellem] You would think that if a not-for-profit
could retain a private investigator
and find this out, that Ann Freedman and Knoedler,
they would've done something similar.
[Jason Hernandez] Well, the gallery's important because,
you know, they help facilitate the transaction.
The part that I'm not sure about is, well, are they in on this,
or were they duped themselves?
Was Glafira lying to them?
Or, you know, is it somewhere in between?
There was nothing on the public radar
about the Knoedler Gallery case,
about any disputes regarding authenticity
of works Knoedler had sold.
The sole story that you could look up and read about,
and that I did see,
was that Knoedler Gallery and Ann Freedman
had parted ways.
Obviously, there had been questions about these paintings.
At that point there had been a grand jury subpoena,
so it was clear from the beginning
that the FBI, the U.S. Attorney, was investigating.
It was clear that they wanted to know what Ann had, had done.
[Ann Freedman] I was asked to leave.
I didn't want to leave.
And I begged to stay even if they took away my title
as Director, my title as President,
even if they took away my salary.
I was, by surprise, called up to a meeting,
and I was told I was going to be given,
immediately, a leave of absence.
Not being fired,
'cause there would've been consequences there,
a leave of absence.
[director] Did he give you a reason?
Things were difficult.
Thought it would be best.
And I'll never forget Michael saying,
"And maybe you'll come back,
and that'll be fine, and maybe you won't."
I responded, "Michael,
how is this going to be explained?
What-- what should I say?"
And he said, "Well,
just say you've had a recurrence of lung cancer."
I said, excuse me?
Yeah, you know, that-- that's come back,
and you need time off.
I just, I mean, I didn't cry,
I didn't lose my temper or anything,
I just said, "Okay."
I was walked down the stairs,
and they said you can take your pocketbook,
and I think it's going to rain,
so you can take this umbrella.
I said goodbye.
And I found myself saying... thank you.
[laughs] I was just like, the manners kicked in.
That was the day.
A couple of other things happened that day
that were unusual but, um...
and it didn't rain.
After Ann Freedman made a decision
to leave the gallery,
obviously it created a void
because Ann had been extraordinarily successful in--
in what she had done, and was quite a known
and respected figure in the art world,
certainly in the community of collectors.
[Ann Freedman] Didn't know what exactly had happened
to make Michael Hammer go against me,
but it was clear that that was happening.
He was fed from the powers of Hammer Gallery,
that maybe Ann was going to have some problems with this.
And so, steer away, and let her take the fall.
[Ann Freedman] Pierre Lagrange.
"The Silver Pollock."
That was the first lawsuit.
Pierre Lagrange was getting a divorce,
and a very, very dramatic one.
Couples who are getting divorced, they seem to be able
to split up the homes and the kids, and the yachts.
[laughs] Not the art.
Lagrange had tried to sell the painting at auction.
Sotheby's would not resell those paintings,
because questions had come up about the provenance.
[M. Shnayerson] And so, Pierre Lagrange had gotten a
distinguished art expert to analyze the pigment
of his painting,
and he found that a yellow paint hadn't been
available commercially until 1970.
Well, the people in the art world know
Jackson Pollock died in a car crash in 1956.
That was it. Game over.
[Ann Freedman] What happened was, Pierre Lagrange
marches into Knoedler, and they put up a wall.
We don't have to talk to you.
Statute of limitations.
Nothing to do with it. Go away.
If ever you want to get sued, that's what you do.
[laughs] You tell people, go away.
He insisted on meeting with Ann at the Carlyle.
Oh, my goodness.
[laughs]
I was there early, of course.
It was 5:00-- 5:30.
Then I knew what Pierre looked like from photographs, I guess.
So I stood up and I went over to shake his hand, and I said,
"Pierre Lagrange, I'm Ann Freedman,
and I am happy to meet you."
And with his accent, "Don't be so sure!"
[laughs] He was really fired up.
Ann, uh, tried to sort of
keep everything nice and bright.
And then he started screaming
at the top of his lungs, "I am going to set you on fire!
Do you understand that?
I'm going to set you on fire, and you will have no life.
It will be over.
And it will hit the press.
And you will be done."
And Ann Freedman's reaction,
according to Lagrange, was to say, well,
listen don't, don't get upset Pierre,
let's see if I can find another buyer for that painting.
[director] Is it myth or true that you said,
"I'll find another buyer?"
I don't think I said that sentence.
To which Lagrange said, "Wait a minute,
so I get off the hook, and get the money back
in order for some other collector to be duped?"
I very well could've said,
I believe in the painting,
and I know you want me to sell it,
and let me see what I can do.
It's important to remember that Ann Freedman
was still saying that the paintings were real.
My opinion is that she knew that they were fakes,
or surely should've known,
and this, among other things,
would've been a strategy to cover that up.
[Luke Nikas] She believed that we needed our own expert
to do an assessment of the pigments.
And she certainly wasn't gonna draw the conclusion
that Lagrange had correctly identified this
as a forgery based on a single scientific analysis.
In response to Lagrange threatening Knoedler Gallery
with a lawsuit, Knoedler Gallery closes its doors.
[Ann Freedman] So, it obviously looked like,
lawsuit, close the gallery.
[Dr. Jeffrey Taylor] Michael Hammer, we can believe,
had a lot of money, and so it's reasonable to believe
that he knew he carried a lot of
the legal and financial peril,
and began to move assets, and protect assets.
And he understood what potentially lay here.
[Charles Schmerler] It was not a decision that was made at all
in reaction to the Glafira Rosales scheme.
It was a business decision based on
how the revenues of the gallery had been going,
and it had been under consideration for over a year.
[Dr. Flescher] December 1st, 2:11,
I remember the day exactly,
I opened the New York Times.
That morning I went to exercise,
and I go into our bedroom,
and I saw Eleanore,
I think you were crying
-and really shaken... -I was shaking.
[Domenico De Sole] We pretty quickly understood
that this was really, really bad news.
[Patricia Cohen] I had gotten a tip
that there was an investigation,
an FBI investigation going on.
Well, that's a shock.
I was shocked by it.
I was not shocked.
Oh my God, how many years
was this going on for?
I think people couldn't
look away from it.
I-- you know, it was a real kind of horror show.
At that moment, I knew we had a fake.
There was no question about it.
[Ann Freedman] I didn't go under the covers, so to speak.
It was sort of a blur of just speaking to people
who had questions.
I answered as best I could.
I didn't know it was coming.
[light violin music]
[Domenico De Sole] She continues to lie.
And she said that absolutely the painting was the right painting.
Give me a few days, and I will disclose the name
of the Swiss... seller.
And I say, okay, just-- you better call me right away.
And she never called me back.
I wanted to do everything I could,
no stone unturned,
to have the paintings investigated the right way.
And so, I told my lawyers that I wanted to pursue that.
[clap]
[Jason Hernandez] The only person who was reliably
in the U.S. was Glafira Rosales.
We made the arrest.
She was arrested in her home in Long Island,
and we said she was a flight risk,
and the judge agreed, and denied her bail.
In conducting the investigation,
I was pursuing this as a head-on art fraud case.
And really, I'm coming up with some decent evidence,
but not the kind of evidence that I would need to convict
if this was put in front of a jury.
So, I looked at it in a slightly different way.
The money goes from the galleries in New York
to bank accounts in Spain.
It should then go 90% to the family
that she says owns the paintings,
and she should be keeping 10% as the broker.
Very quickly, I was able to figure out
that she's keeping all of the money.
That tells me two things.
Number one, there is no family.
And secondly, that's also income to her.
Millions and millions of dollars of income, so we investigated
whether she reported her foreign bank account,
we investigated whether she reported it as income,
and she didn't.
So we were able to file federal tax charges,
and those tax charges gave us great leverage,
'cause not only did she commit a tax crime,
the fact that she's keeping all of the money,
that's evidence that she knows
there's something wrong with the paintings.
She's been in custody for months.
She's facing potentially years in prison on tax charges.
I think she just reached her breaking point.
She knew that she wasn't going to hold the bag for everybody,
and that she could be very helpful to our investigation by,
you know, among other things, telling us
who created the paintings.
And that's what she did.
[male reporter] His name is Pei-Shen Qian.
He disappeared from his home in Queens, New York,
when news reports first surfaced
about the massive forgery scheme.
It surprised me that the paintings
were being made in Queens by a math professor.
We were able to find lots and lots of evidence.
I mean, we found an envelope marked, "Mark Rothko nails."
We found books on all the different subjects.
We found paints, and all the different things
that matched exactly the fakes
that he was producing for Glafira.
If you didn't know any better, you'd just say, wow,
this is someone who's really passionate about painting.
And he was very passionate about painting.
[reporter] Qian has admitted he forged the signatures
of the painters he copied, yet he insisted
he was stunned that so many people in the art world
would be fooled by his fake Rothkos and Pollocks.
Qian was indicted a few months after this interview
for forging the signatures of the artists he copied,
and lying to federal agents.
Whether he got word that we were coming,
or not, 'cause remember he, he would've known
that Glafira was arrested. That was very public.
So my guess is that he probably didn't stick around too long,
and once he's in China, there's really nothing we can do,
'cause China's not gonna extradite
a Chinese national to the U.S.
I got a phone call... it was lunch time,
to say Glafira just confessed
to the fact
that the paintings were-- are all fake.
[Luke Nikas] She'd devoted almost 20 years of her career
researching, thinking about,
exhibiting, selling these works,
and in a moment, in an instant,
the rug came out from underneath her.
Imagine devoting that much of your career,
that much of your time to something
that turned out to be a massive fraud.
[deep sigh]
Awful.
All those years of build-up, of believing.
[Maria Konnikova] To me, that would be kind of the moment
where my life up to this point crumbles.
Everything that I've been saying,
and my entire world is just being shattered.
I think she had a lot of days,
but that could've been one of the worst.
But I had to catch my breath.
And, what to do legally.
[low dramatic music]
I'm 75 years old,
I'd dealt with a lot of people all over the world
in a very tough business situation.
These are the worst people I ever dealt with in my life.
The De Soles wanted their money back.
They did not get an offer
of their money back before the trial.
What they were offering was absurd,
simply absurd.
I said, fine, we'll fight it out.
[clap]
[M. Shnayerson] Domenico De Sole sued the gallery,
defunct as it was now,
and Michael Hammer, who owned the gallery still,
and Ann Freedman herself.
[M.H. Miller] The De Soles,
more than just getting their money back,
really wanted the story out there because they were pissed,
and they believed that
Ann Freedman was not an innocent victim,
that she was actively defrauding them.
[Dr. Taylor] Of course it had a lot to do with
Mr. De Soles' role with Sotheby's and like,
who are you to be messing with me?
You got a sense this was vindictive justice.
He didn't want anything but to go to war.
[dramatic violin music]
[Luke Nikas] The courtroom was the ceremonial courtroom
in the Southern District, so a very big courtroom.
It was a packed house.
[M.H. Miller] Domenico was viscerally angry.
When he would sit with his lawyers,
he would constantly gesture back to the audience like,
you know, can you believe this shit?
And I looked at Ann Freedman the whole time
with daggers in my eyes.
[M.H. Miller] Eleanore got very emotional on the stand,
talking about the sense of betrayal
that they felt from somebody
that they thought they could trust.
She testified that she was angry, heartbroken, sad.
I'm a very emotional person.
I cry in happy situations, and sad situations.
But this was opening the wounds,
and hopefully the jury recognized that I was sincere.
I think it was an act,
but it was a good act.
It's not like Ann Freedman was this close friend.
They went to Knoedler one time.
I had raw emotions,
and I was gonna expose them because they were real.
[Dr. Taylor] There were even some really funny moments,
like the one "not Rothko" was in the courtroom the whole time,
and people were debating whether the smaller block
should be on the bottom
or the larger block should be on the bottom,
because that's how Rothko did it.
And of course, the absurdity of the fact
that we all knew Rothko didn't do this painting,
but we're debating whether it's right side up or upside down.
It was one of those really funny modern art moments,
where, is this painting upside down?
Is this fake painting upside down?
[Ronald Spencer] The overwhelming fact was
that fakes were sold,
and they were sold not by some little old lady on the street,
but by a sophisticated gallery.
When you start there,
you're already underwater.
I did multiple focus groups to understand,
how do people think about this?
They spent a fortune on their defense.
I'm-- not the first time I hear that they did all sorts of,
you know, mock juries testing, testing, testing.
I think they had somebody playing me.
We did none of that.
[Luke Nikas] The focus groups tell us this is a horse race.
When we listen to one side, it's incredibly damaging,
we're gonna go that way.
And they listen to my side, and they say,
there's another side to this story.
We thought the odds were significantly better.
We knew that the facts, and the law, were on our side.
According to what my lawyer said and clearly felt,
we could win this.
[Eleanore De Sole] Reaching for straws.
I mean, they truly did not have a case at all.
And the lawyers would try to get Domenico on the fact
that he was a lawyer at one time.
And they'd say, well, Mr. De Sole, you should have known,
I mean, you're a lawyer.
And he turns to them and he goes, I'm not a lawyer,
I sell handbags.
You know, the experts who paraded
into the witness box
were in a very embarrassing position.
[Ronald Spencer] Christopher Rothko was asked to come up
to Knoedler and look at a piece supposedly by his father.
He spent a half hour looking at it, back and front,
and then pronounced it beautiful.
It's hard to imagine somebody thinking a
painting is a fake, and saying it's beautiful at the same time.
[Ronald Spencer] He knew Knoedler was in the business
of selling art, so what does he think he was there for?
It was beautiful, right.
That doesn't mean it was authentic.
They-- the paintings were good, they fooled a lot of people.
And Ann Freedman knows this, a remark that a painting
is beautiful is not an authentication.
[Ronald Spencer] Another expert said, "Well,
I didn't say this piece was authentic,"
but it came out in the trial that he'd asked for the piece
to show it in an exhibition he was putting on.
So that we'll hear in court, "Well, do you usually ask
for things you think are fakes?" And he said, "Of course not."
They were just backtracking.
You could practically hear the beep, beep, beep
of the trucks backing up.
Some denied saying things that they wrote
in emails, and when shown the email, would deny
that the email said what the email said.
It was very difficult to sit there
and listen to bold lying.
[Luke Nikas] So Ann looks at the stack of documents
that she relied on saying,
I have no reason to doubt the authenticity of this work,
or that work, and she asks herself,
where are you when I need you?
And I am, I am surprised though that,
that nobody
has acknowledged that they, they made an error,
aside from, from Ann.
[Domenico De Sole] So obviously, the email was the wow moment
when Mr. Anfam under oath said that
he had never seen the painting. [laughs]
Which was really extraordinary.
He'd never physically seen the painting,
he was sent a picture by Ann Freedman.
[M.H. Miller] The last person who had testified
was the gallery's accountant.
She basically walked the court through the books.
And of course, what those books revealed is that
if it hadn't been for selling these, you know,
$80 million worth of fake paintings,
Knoedler would've been millions of dollars in debt.
[Emily Reisbaum] So for the last decades,
their business really was selling fakes.
That was where a question
of criminal culpability emerged.
Ann Freedman and Michael Hammer
had personally profited off of the sale
of these fake paintings.
[Ann Freedman] I wasn't in charge of the overhead.
I did not spend much time up in what,
what we call the accounting floor.
[Domenico De Sole] But yes, I thought that was very damaging.
It was clearly came out that
Hammer was using the gallery
as his own, you know, pocket.
[M.H. Miller] He was using a company credit card
to take his wife on trips to Paris,
to purchase a $500,000 Mercedes,
which I don't think many people knew that
there was a $500,000 Mercedes that you could buy.
Michael was always
very enthusiastic and excited about
my discovery of, you know, these works.
[M.H. Miller] It would just be astonishing to think
that these people at Knoedler were operating
without any knowledge of this.
Our view is that it was,
you know, from the top.
That is categorically false.
And to suggest otherwise
is utterly unreasonable
and untrue.
And is in fact,
an insult to the legacy of the family,
and the work that they have done.
[Eleanore De Sole] We've had all these witnesses
and now it was both Ann Freedman,
and Michael Hammer's opportunity to testify.
Ann is there as her usual self,
dressed in gray with her head down.
Michael Hammer walks into the courtroom,
he's got on a velvet
royal blue jacket,
tan pants,
a dark, dark tan
and flowing whitish-gold hair.
And this is February in New York City.
The courtroom was packed,
you couldn't get a seat.
We knew that that day, that this thing
was coming to a head, and it was gonna be particularly ugly.
I don't think that there was really any hope
of Ann Freedman and Knoedler ever winning.
And I think Ann Freedman did not want this to go to trial,
and she certainly didn't want to testify because,
the trial was settled just about
an hour before Michael Hammer
was supposed to take the stand.
The court reporter, or somebody comes in,
and announces that the trial is over.
Period.
Ann Freedman and Michael Hammer knew
that they could make the situation even worse.
They could face criminal peril,
legal peril, if they testified,
and so they decided to cut their losses.
I think I made my case
very loud and clear,
so I'd done my duty.
And I exposed the fraud and,
and I think at that point it made sense for us to settle.
It seemed to me
that on the day I'm supposed to take the stand,
that that day they settle?
They didn't want the defense to go.
I'm not even going to say they didn't want Ann Freedman
to take the stand, but I-- I think that is
what people were waiting for.
I feel very strongly I would've loved to
have heard the word guilty.
I'm, I'm emotional about it.
And you know, perhaps there would've been more repercussions
for Ann Freedman and Michael Hammer, and the galleries,
if a guilty verdict had been reached.
They had their, their mind set
on what they thought was a fair deal,
and once they got what they thought was a fair deal,
they settled the case.
[news reporter] How's your client holding up?
[Rosales' lawyer] Excuse me, please.
[Luke Nikas] Rosales was the only one
who faced a criminal sentence.
And she was ultimately sentenced to time served,
which was a few months.
[Jason Hernandez] There were some people that were
disappointed with Glafira's sentence,
but you got to think about the context
of what we were able to accomplish in the case.
And I think this is what, you know, the judge's logic
ultimately was, we're not gonna make this one person,
who really just because of,
the luck of the draw so to speak,
is the only one who's gonna face justice, and the only person
who has confessed and cooperated.
It says something about Glafira as well
that she didn't implicate Ann.
When you're trying to deflect blame,
when you're trying to get an easier sentence,
the more people you can bring down with you,
the better it is for you.
The pressure on somebody like that
to give up others,
and in order to give them up, invent or embellish,
is tremendous.
Did she get off easily?
I don't know. She doesn't have any money left.
She was in prison.
I actually was in court the day that she appeared
with chains on her feet.
In a way, she was at the center of it,
but she also was a sort of a pawn in this whole thing.
[male reporter] New York art dealer, Glafira Rosales
was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Katherine Polk Failla
to nine months of home detention.
Failla cited defense arguments that Rosales' behaviour stemmed
from abuse she suffered from her boyfriend,
the mastermind behind the scheme.
[in Spanish] I sometimes raised my hand to her.
We had arguments, but...
I understand her and forgive her,
knowing she would use that testimony to defend herself.
[Luke Nikas] She's now, as I understand it, in Long Island.
She's had to forfeit her assets under a restitution order.
And as far as I know, not in the art business.
What I really wanted to know was,
could I prove to 12 people,
beyond a reasonable doubt,
that the gallery, whoever was running it,
whoever was selling them, knew that the paintings were fake.
She did not know she was selling fakes.
I'm firmly convinced of that.
I sat in an office with her,
I dealt with her, and she lied to us.
She's the guilty party.
Ann Freedman is not a victim. She's a dealer.
[Marjorie Cohn] Well, she's guilty of the standard
biblical sins of, of pride and avarice, I suppose.
Either she was in on it
with Glafira Rosales,
or she was just so stupid.
Put yourself in her shoes one step at a time.
It's easier to look back and say, let me show you
the red flags that popped up across the 14 years.
How could you have
a fake Jackson Pollock hanging in your house
with the name spelled wrong for ten years,
or however long Ann Freedman had it hanging in her house?
The question in Ann's case was,
what did she know at the time?
All of this stuff that came out afterwards
has no bearing on that.
The decision was made that,
that we couldn't prove a case beyond a reasonable doubt.
They were fair, and they looked at the bottom line,
and they didn't indict her.
The fact that they did not prosecute this
for me is really shocking.
I, I don't know. I, I...
I'm surprised that, that, I'm surprised
by the whole, the... I am very surprised.
It's a-- it's a mystery,
and it's extremely frustrating.
[playful music]
[male reporter] José Bergañtinos Díaz
was arrested in Spain on the U.S. charges, and freed
while he awaits extradition to the United States.
He has denied any wrongdoing, and told local reporters
he's not worried about the case.
They, yeah, they're untouchable,
because they're Spanish nationals,
and we have to go through an extradition process in Spain,
and Spain has decided that they would not be extradited,
which is disappointing.
[instrumental music]
[director] Carlos, your decision to, to go back to Spain?
[in Spanish] Well, I always had
my home in Spain and...
my roots were always in Spain.
[director] Nothing to do with what happened?
No.
[Charles Schmerler] Efforts have been made to have Bergañtinos
brought back to the United States and stand trial.
So far, those efforts have been unsuccessful.
[in Spanish] Eh, Mr. Bergañtinos is innocent
until proven otherwise.
He doesn't need a trial to prove his innocence.
[director] Just so I'm clear legally over here,
your position is everything that happened
with the Knoedler Gallery,
everything that happened is Glafira?
[in Spanish] Well, let me say this...
[lawyer] No, no, no.
[director] Okay, he doesn't like that question, alright.
[Díaz in Spanish] I was never very ambitious,
Glafira was more ambitious than I was.
I forgive her and she is the mother of my daughter
and I wish her the best.
I know she is doing better than I am.
Pay me what you can, it's real.
[director] Of course!
Eh?
[in English] This is off the record.
[interpreter in Chinese] Hello, anyone home?
[interviewer] Hi, hello. Hello.
[interpreter in Chinese] Hi, we're shooting a documentary.
Do you know an old man who lives here named Qian Pei-Shen?
[in Chinese] You can go upstairs and check.
[interviewer] Okay.
[in Chinese] Hello, ma'am.
We'd like to know whether you know an old man
named Qian Pei-Shen?
[in Chinese] Qian Pei-Shen? I am Qian Pei-Shen.
[interpreter] What? You are Qian Pei-Shen?
Hello. We're shooting a documentary
about a Shanghainese artist.
May we ask you some questions?
[in Chinese] Shanghainese artist...
Have you contacted anyone? Do you have an appointment?
[interpreter] We'd like to talk to Mr. Qian.
Who told you about this address?
He's old now.
He doesn't want to be interviewed.
He is painting for himself
and not selling his art anymore.
[Pei Shen Qian] My intent wasn't for my fake paintings
to be sold as the real thing.
They were just copies to be put up in your home if you like it.
[Jason Hernandez] Pei-Shen knew where his paintings were going.
First of all, he's signing them in the names of the artists.
In our field, that's the legal
definition of intention to deceive,
when you put a signature on a painting.
[Perry Amsellem] I'm surprised that, frankly,
that that the Chinese painter was able to leave the country.
That immigration hadn't been alerted.
Um, they knew who he was, et cetera.
[light violin music]
[Jason Hernandez] Pei-Shen is probably
never gonna come back to the United States.
He'd be foolish to do so.
It's a-- a real shame, because now Pei-Shen has the fame
from having done this, but none of the consequences.
[Patricia Cohen] You know, it's very hard to put yourself
in someone's mind.
You know, nobody but Ann Freedman herself knows
what she believed, or didn't believe.
[M.H. Miller] Not only was Ann Freedman not charged,
she's still in business.
She's still running a gallery.
[Dr. Taylor] I'm just thinking, really?
You wouldn't want to take up a new career after this?
I mean, it's remarkable to me
that she's out there selling and has a gallery,
and that people are actually, you know,
still willing to, to deal with her.
[director] Would you buy a painting from her?
No.
[director] So you don't see yourself buying a piece of art
from Ann Freedman in the near future?
No.
[Eleanore De Sole] The only time I relive the moment
and get upset is when I walk down Madison Avenue
and see Ann Freedman sitting at a table in a coffee shop.
[Patricia Cohen] On the one hand,
it's an extraordinary case,
and you say, this is just so unlike anything.
But on the other hand, it also makes you wonder,
well, how extraordinary is this?
How many other things are out there
that we just don't know about?
[soft piano music]
[Dr. Flam] I think the Knoedler episode has cast a shadow.
How long the shadow will last? I don't know.
[Jason Hernandez] As long as people are selling art
for a lot of money,
we're gonna see really large-scale frauds.
As prices rise, and there are new artists,
and new excitement, and new treasures
that are found, there's gonna be new cases like it.
[Stanley Brand] I think it's opened up the art world
to a new perception and new scrutiny
about well-- how does one
actually authenticate any of these artworks?
And is the art world really doing
what it should do to find that out?
[Luke Nikas] It's a story about art history.
It's a story about how we should think about art.
Ten years ago, that painting behind me
would be worth five million dollars.
It was coveted by some of the most important collectors
in the world, and right now it's sitting in my office.
I can touch it, it's worth nothing.
And you think about whether the experience of the art,
whether any of that changes based on the knowledge
it's not what it purports to be.
[Maria Konnikova] I think the only vindication would be
if the whole world believes she was completely innocent.
And I think that's now her life's goal.
[Ann Freedman] I think I'll be judged for what I've done.
Of course I've made mistakes,
and I'm willing to keep on doing what I need to do
to earn people's trust.
Well, ask the people who spent
$80.7 million on their paintings
whether they think it's good enough.
[Ann Freedman] All I know how to do is
to keep going.
[soft piano music]