--:-- Sean Rameswaram: A screenwriter forgets to pay the bill for his storage facility in Los Angeles. The contents are auctioned off. Keepsakes from a life in television, a love of baseball, and 25 artworks by Jean-Michel Basquiat. But are they real? If only someone would authenticate them. Enter the Orlando Museum of Art. They dedicate an entire show to the never-before-seen Basquiats. And the FBI enters the museum and seizes every last one of them. They literally took them down off the walls of the gallery they were hanging in and hauled them away.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm Sean Rameswaram for him. The case of the fake Basquiats. Ahead on Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for Today Explained comes from BetterHelp. Let me tell you a true story. Last weekend, I got an email from a listener who wanted to discuss their problems with me. And I said, look, I don't think that this is about me personally. At least I hope it's not. Why don't you try BetterHelp.com slash Explained? Absolute truth. As the largest online therapy provider in the world, BetterHelp can provide access to mental health professionals with a diverse variety of expertise. Find the one with BetterHelp. The one is not me, guys. Our listeners get 10% off their first month at BetterHelp.com slash explain. That's BetterHelp.com slash explain.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today, today explained. Basquiat is one of the most famous and arguably one of the most significant artists to emerge from the downtown New York art scene of the 1980s. Brett Sokol is a contributing writer on art and culture for The New York Times. He's based in Miami, Florida. He's also really the poster child for art stardom. I don't want to call his success overnight, but pretty close to it.
--:-- Brett Sokol: He starts really showing his work in some prominent group shows in 1980. And by 1982, his star is really on the rise to the point where people are trying to kill each other over getting a hold of his work. And by the end of the 80s, he is a bona fide art star. Basquiat, who's credited as the first to bring street art to fine art. And his importance within the art world and also the accompanying prices for his work have only soared in the decades since.
--:-- Brett Sokol: Up until May, Basquiat held the record for an American artist at auction. Auction records shattered at Suthadie's Thursday with the $110.5 million sale of this painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat. Basquiat. He was only knocked down to number two by Andy Warhol, and they're still sort of jockeying back and forth for the pole positions there.
--:-- Brett Sokol: But another painting of Basquiat's did sell this past May for $85 million. Not an amount to scoff at. There is a lot of money at stake in the Basquiat market, and not just for his paintings. There is a mania for anything associated with Basquiat, whether it's a commercial for Tiffany's with Jay-Z in it, with a Basquiat painting behind him, and Jay-Z is dressed up to look like one of the iconic looks of Basquiat, or whether it's in the form of $29.99 t-shirts that you can get at The Gap with Basquiat's work on it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's just a huge clamoring for all things Basquiat, and it keeps growing month to month, year to year. And maybe this kind of explains why someone might want to fake a Basquiat? Yes, there is a lot of money at stake here. And certainly, we're speaking theoretically here, if you were an art forger and you were trying to forge some artwork that you could sell for a lot of money, Basquiat would be a very good candidate for that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And this brings us to Orlando. So set the scene for me. What exactly happened in Florida? So most dramatically, on Friday, June 24th, over a dozen FBI agents from the FBI's art crime team raided the Orlando Museum of Art.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They came in through the front door, showed a search warrant and went into the museum's marquee exhibition of paintings by Basquiat, or at least paintings which the museum said were by Basquiat. Is it a Basquiat or Basquiat? FBI investigators are looking into whether 25 Jean-Michel Basquiat paintings that were on display at the Orlando Museum of Art and insured at more than $82 million were forged.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The FBI agents literally took them down off the walls of the gallery they were hanging in and hauled them away back to presumably a storage warehouse. I think it's worth emphasizing this, an FBI raid of a museum show is not something that happens in art museums every day. It's quite the spectacle.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so it raises the question, how on earth did we get to that point? These are 25 paintings that were said by the museum's now former director, Aaron DeGroft, as well as the owners of these artworks, to have been done by Basquiat, to have been painted back in 1982.
--:-- Brett Sokol: They were supposedly all sold by Basquiat in 1982 directly to the late TV screenwriter Thad Mumford for about $5,000. The 25 artworks then disappeared for three decades, again according to the museum, only resurfacing in 2012 after Mumford failed to pay the bill on his Los Angeles storage unit and its contents the Basquiat paintings as well as Mumford own baseball memorabilia and TV industry ephemera
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He was a producer and a writer on MASH All of this was auctioned off and it was eventually bought by its current owners for about $15,000? They knew that they were Basquiat's and they were buying them for $15,000?
--:-- Brett Sokol: As they explained this, they spotted what they saw was a diamond in the rough. Their names are William Force, Leo Mangan, and Pierce O'Donnell. They bought these artworks in 2012.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The art went on display in the Orlando Museum of Art this past February. They feature a lot of the iconic elements that you see in much of Basquiat's work from the early 80s. There are skulls, there are crowns, there are all kinds of the iconic visual markers that are familiar to people who've looked at Basquiat's work.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But there are a lot of curators who were given pause in looking at them beyond just that they've seen those elements before. The way that they were arranged, the lack of an internal coherency, that troubled certain people who looked at them.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But there are other art world experts who were hired by the artworks owners who did believe that they were indeed by Basquiat. I think it's very telling that they have not up to this point been able to sell the artworks.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There is a silence that is deafening from certain corners of the art world over the past real decade in terms of attempts to sell these works. One of the elements that raised a lot of red flags for people initially looking at these artworks, particularly with the curators at the Orlando Museum of Art when these artworks first arrived, was the cardboard that these paintings were done on.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Again, there's 25 artworks. They're all painted on slabs of cardboard. And if you flip one of those slabs of cardboard over, it appears to have been painted on a piece of Federal Express shipping material, like the boxes that people use to put stuff in and mail something via FedEx.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And there was a very, very clear imprint that said, place FedEx shipping label here. And it just didn't appear right. First of all, back in 1982, when these paintings were said to have been done by Basquiat, Federal Express did not use the phrase FedEx.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They wrote out the full Federal Express. They didn't use the actual shorthand of FedEx until later. The curators, there were just a number of elements that seemed wrong, that seemed off, and that's why they brought this to the attention of the director and said something doesn't seem right here.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So some 10 years after these three guys stumble upon this gold mine someone finally agrees to show them in a credible museum is there a big opening night party kind of thing very much so there was a big VIP opening this past February at the museum thousands of people turned up.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It really was a celebratory moment both for the museum and I think for Orlando at large. People were really happy that this show was there in Orlando. That work that was said to be by Basquiat was being shown in Orlando and not in, say, New York or L.A. or Chicago.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It was a moment that made a lot of people there very happy. And I think a lot of those folks are particularly upset right now. They feel like they were used, like their trust was abused.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: At what point does the FBI take an interest in this art show? This is part of why a lot of people are very disturbed by how this story has unfolded. The FBI subpoenaed the museum for all of its internal records concerning these Basquiat's long before the show even opened.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Oh. Last July, the FBI subpoenaed the museum for all their records, all their communications with the artwork's owners, as well as the various art world experts who the owners had hired to try to authenticate them, as well as all the records from the board of directors.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The FBI, we now know, has been following these artworks for a long time, almost a decade. I think it's also worth noting here that in the affidavit filed by the FBI as part of getting their search warrant to seize these paintings, the FBI has revealed that they spoke with Thad Mumford.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And Thad Mumford told them that he never met Basquiat back in 1982, that he never bought paintings from Basquiat. He certainly didn't put paintings by Basquiat into his storage unit, that that part of the story, at least according to him, is false.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What happens after they're seized? The board of directors of the museum met on the Tuesday after that Friday, June 24th raid, and they decided to dismiss the director, Aaron DeGroft, from his position.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This still raises a lot of questions. The director in this case wasn't acting as some kind of rogue agent. He had the approval of the board of directors. In fact, the chairwoman of the board spoke in his public defense again and again as questions were being raised about these artworks and about this exhibition.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He had the backing of the board. And so people are saying, why did it take FBI agents raiding the museum for the board to finally really do something here?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So it doesn't sound like the director of the museum's going to face any charges for this, but what about the owners of the artwork, William Forrest, Leo Mangan, Pierce O'Donnell?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The FBI has said that they do have evidence that the owners of these artworks did appear to know that they were inauthentic and also that they were accepting money. They were selling off essentially investments, shares in these artworks for $35,000 a pop.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Criminal charges have not been filed and we'll just have to see what the FBI's next move is. This Basquiat incident in Orlando feels like almost a cinematic version of art crime, but how big a problem is art crime?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Forgery of artwork is a huge problem, not just in the United States, but around the world. And there's a huge amount of money involved in it. It's part of the reason why the FBI has an art crime team.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: When millions and millions of dollars are at stake that something to be taken very seriously I think what important to note here is that this story isn just about possible fraud It's not just about possible art crime.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's certainly a headline-grabbing aspect of it. But this is really also a story about accountability, about the accountability of art museums to the public, and also about the accountability of art museums to artists, to an artist's legacy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think if these paintings do in fact turn out to be absolutely inauthentic, it really does a grave disservice to the cultural legacy of Jean-Michel Basquiat.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That was Brett Sokol, arts reporter in Miami. When we're back, we're going to hear from a guy who knew Basquiat and then took up forging Basquiat's and went to prison for it. It's Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for today's show comes from Adio. What is Adio? Adio is an AI-native customer relationship management system built specifically for the next era of companies. They say it's extremely powerful, adapts to your unique data structures and scales with any business model.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: According to Adio, Adio takes less than a minute to set up, and within seconds you will have your email and calendars synced. You'll see all your relationships in a fully-fledged platform, they say, all enriched with that actionable data.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And they say you can build AI-powered automations and use its research agent to tackle some of your most complex processes to seize so that you can focus on what matters, building your company.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We all have moments where we could have done better, like cutting your own hair. Oh, yikes. Or forgetting sunscreen, so now you look like a tomato. Ouch. Could have done better. Same goes for where you invest. Level up and invest smarter with Schwab. Get market insights, education, and human help when you need it. Learn more at Schwab.com.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It ain't hard to tell. I'm the new Jean-Michel. Surrounded by war halls, my whole team ball. Today explained, to better understand why people forge Basquiat's, we thought there'd be no better person to ask than a former Basquiat forger.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Alfredo Martinez, notorious Basquiat forger. Allegedly. And unlike your run-of-the-mill Basquiat forgers, Alfredo actually knew Jean-Michel. That's from the scene. He was out a lot. He's hard to miss.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, the art world's rather monochromatic, and there's not a lot of black people in it. I asked Alfredo what kind of art he was making back in Basquiat's heyday.
--:-- Alfredo Martinez: This is kind of embarrassing to say. I was not interested in making artwork until after I started making Ford drinks.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: As he tells the story, back in the 80s, Alfredo was working at a gallery in New York City, a woman he knew had a fling with Basquiat, and sometime later, she came over to Alfredo's with some original Basquiat drawings rolled up in tube.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: She grabbed a tube of drawings. I looked at them, and it's like, I can sell these. But then I also realized I could start copying them. I'm in front of the real ones. You have to know exactly what the real ones look like to make fake ones.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And you have to be in the presence of the real ones. See, the photographs is not good enough. Tell me how you start making fake Basquiat's. Is it hard for you at first?
--:-- Alfredo Martinez: Well, I had to add the paper, make the paper kind of f***ed up. Because he had a messy studio. There's always a little, like, slight stain or, like, foot print even.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So you were doing these on paper? The first one's on watercolor.
--:-- Alfredo Martinez: If I made them big, it's like stealing a city bus and trying to sell it on eBay. You make small drawings and it just slips on the radar.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How do you go from making fake Basquiat's by yourself to selling them? Well, my gallery would have art openings. And I remember my boss said, oh, don't talk to that guy. He's one of the sleaziest art dealers in town.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So obviously I made a beeline for him to try to unload these Basquiat. So does this become a career for you, making fake Basquiat?
--:-- Alfredo Martinez: Intermittently when I'm broke.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How much do you sell them for? I sell them to art dealers. So I took out a persona of someone who didn't know what they were doing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So they always thought they were ripping me off. Like I had this Basquiat, I don't know how much it's worth. I'm just trying to sell it for a friend of mine.
--:-- Alfredo Martinez: And how much would you get for it? I'd get like 10 grand.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So you were doing like 10 grand at a time, 10 grand here, 10 grand there? Yeah, five, 10 grand.
--:-- Alfredo Martinez: Okay. Do you know how much money you ended up making in total off of fake Basquiat's? I do not recall. I have no memory of any of this.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But eventually you get in trouble for doing this. Well, you know, I sell two or three of these and it's enough to live on for a year. Why push it?
--:-- Alfredo Martinez: But then I wanted to get out of the art world because a friend of mine OD'd and I felt like the art world was like an Aztec cult that wanted a blood sacrifice every once in a while.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So I just wanted out. So my plan was to make a million dollars and move to the boonies like the Philippines. I was dealing with this art dealer, Leo Malka, and he knew that my baskets were fake.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So he talked me into like doing a business with him, just making fake Basquiat committee with the father specifically, who would authenticate anything he gave him if he paid him 10 percent what he thought he would sell for.
--:-- Alfredo Martinez: This is Jean-Michel's father? Yes. All right Just to reiterate here Alfredo version of the story is that this big New York collector Leo Malka was knowingly buying fake Basquiat and that Basquiat own father was in on the scam
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We reached out to Leo Malca people today and they disputed Alfredo account for what it worth
--:-- Alfredo Martinez: You ever have a sole payer like someone owes you money and they take forever to pay you? I can relate. This is like illegal business. It's like cash and carry.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And he was stalling paying me. So I'm like, I'm not working anymore. And I started selling to other people and he got upset.
--:-- Alfredo Martinez: So he ended up calling the FBI. The thing is, if you call the FBI, the first thing you do is investigate you. My lawyer said he set himself on fire to give me a slumber.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So you both got in trouble? Well, when the FBI arrested me, they wanted me to turn evidence against him. But I refused to be a rat.
--:-- Alfredo Martinez: Also, when they arrest you, they don't want to arrest you by yourself. they want to arrest you and anyone you knew even slightly. And I wasn't going to do that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I was trying to make fake documentation. So I had people helping me make that. And I conveniently forgot who they were.
--:-- Alfredo Martinez: I remember this one FBI agent. She starts asking me my aliases. And I tell them Rufus T. Firefly, Otis P. Driswood. These are like the character names from Router Mark.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Because if I got a trial, what would happen? They would go Alfredo Martinez, alias Otis P. Smithwood. It's like being hilarious.
--:-- Alfredo Martinez: Did you go to trial? Yes. What were you charged with? Mail fraud.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Mail fraud? Yeah. Not Basquiat fraud? Well, that involves costly investigation to prove. They could prove the mail fraud, so that's what they got me for.
--:-- Alfredo Martinez: Oh, because you were lying about having Basquiat's in the mail. Yeah. The nice thing is a cop friend of mine had warned me that I was under investigation. So I wasn't really super surprised I was arrested.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Like a week earlier, I had gone to a lawyer. I told him what I was doing and I asked him how much time I would do. And he estimated, well, it's your first offense being arrested for anything. It's like not a violent crime.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it's the feds. I probably get one to three years and I got 21 months right in the middle there. And I was 36 at the time. And I had been making 4G since I was 18 years old.
--:-- Alfredo Martinez: So it's like I've been doing this half my natural life at this point. You know, Alfredo, when I look at a Basquiat, I see something striking, original, complex. And it makes me wonder why forge a Basquiat? Why not forge like a Rothko or a Mondrian, which would in theory be a lot easier?
--:-- Alfredo Martinez: Well, people have done that. But most people forge work, they forge their contemporaries because it's easier to get the material. Otherwise, you have to artificially age things.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I remember I was trying to fake a Jackson Pollock and the paint he uses, they don't make anymore. Huh. Like he used industrial machinery paint.
--:-- Alfredo Martinez: Back in the 40s, when you paint machinery, you want not to rust. And also they would color coat things in factories, color coat different machinery.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So if you wanted to paint a boiler or a milling machine, it would be this industrial blue, industrial red. You ever see that kind of super enamel, hardest titanium paint that they paint this stuff on?
--:-- Alfredo Martinez: Like it laughs at anything that like would try to sustain it just like you just wipe it off a wet rag and it's fine so this is the kind of paint that pollock used in his paintings because he this cheap paint you could buy it by the gallon at the hardware store
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What kind of materials does Basquiat use that makes his stuff easier to forge you can buy them at the art supply store that's why they still make all that stuff i mean the stupidest thing is making these basquiats on cardboard with any kind of markings at all that can be traced.
--:-- Alfredo Martinez: It's so stupid. It's like, if I was making large fake basquets, I'd go to flea markets, dig around for old materials to paint on. I wouldn't use stuff from now. It's just stupid.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Did you know that art crime has become the third highest grossing criminal trade in the world? It doesn't surprise me because our crime is also used to launder money.
--:-- Alfredo Martinez: I could right now take three real Basquiat's, put them in a nice portfolio case, get on a plane to Zurich, Switzerland. Customs here wouldn't give me any problem for leaving the country with three real Basquiat's.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The drawings would just be 30 by 20 would be worth like 100 grand each at least, maybe half a million each. It's basically like carrying bear bonds just to look cuter on your wall.
--:-- Alfredo Martinez: Right now, I could take a million dollars in literally blood-stained money and go to any gallery and ask, can I buy some artwork with this money? They give me a discount for buying things in cash.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can't do that with diamonds. You can't do that with cars or houses. There's a paper trail. It's really kind of funny.
--:-- Alfredo Martinez: I realized after I got arrested that it was kind of like an open secret what I was doing. It's just people were just thought it was funny and they liked who I was doing it to.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Like there was this one big art dealer I showed my boss to, not to sell it to him, just to tell him, oh, what did he thought? And he thought, it's a good one. Who are you selling it to? Oh, I'm selling it to the Omanca. Oh, good.
--:-- Alfredo Martinez: And he just smiled at me. And when he talked with the FBI, he just said, I am shocked, shocked, afraid I was involved in any kind of forgery. And this is a big art dealer and curator. It's like, now I repay him the favor by staying at least 500 feet away from him.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Alfredo Martinez, former Basquiat forger, allegedly. Now he's just a regular artist. He even has a piece in MoMA's collection in New York City, where he also lives.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Our episode today was produced by Avishai Artsy, fact-checked by Victoria Dominguez, engineered by Paul Mounsey, and edited by Sean Ramos-Furham. This is Today Explained.
