“When Christie’s and Sotheby’s released spring catalogues for their modern-art auctions in the early 2000’s, they were alarmed to discover that each was offering the same Gauguin painting—and each house thought it had the original.

One of the paintings, clearly, was a fake. So the auction houses flew both paintings to Sylvie Crussard, a Gauguin expert at the Wildenstein Institute in Paris. She put them side by side and in a few minutes saw that Christie’s version was, in the delicate argot of the trade, “not right.” (The auction house just barely managed to yank its catalogue back from the printers in time.) Still, it was the best Gauguin counterfeit she’d ever seen. “This was a unique case of resemblance. You never see two works which are that similar,” Crussard marvels.

Christie’s broke the news to the horrified owners at the Gallery Muse in Tokyo, who’d had no idea it was a forgery. The real painting went back to Sotheby’s, where its owner—New York dealer Ely Sakhai—successfully auctioned it off for $310,000. But when the FBI traced the history of the fake, they discovered something even more surprising: The original source was none other than Ely Sakhai, too.

According to the FBI, Sakhai had bought the real Gauguin years earlier, cranked out a duplicate, and sold the illicit copy to a Tokyo collector. Then Sakhai brazenly put the original up for auction, in an attempt to double his profits. It was a pure fluke that the unwitting owner of the Tokyo forgery decided to resell his copy at the same time. But for that coincidence, the forgery might never have been detected.

The more the FBI pulled threads, the more fake paintings it uncovered—all Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, and all traced back to Sakhai. Agents arrested him at his gallery on Broadway south of Union Square, a storefront crammed with antiques and paintings. They charged him with eight counts of wire and mail fraud. Sakhai had allegedly been running one of the most audacious forgery scams ever—a multi-million-dollar operation that has left art experts alternately amazed by his legerdemain and stunned by his shamelessness. In each case of forgery, the complaint says, Sakhai bought a little-known painting by a modern master, faked it, and then sold both the knockoff and the real one. To keep the duplicity hidden, he allegedly sold the fakes to buyers in Asia, the real ones at New York and London auctions. In total, the scheme grossed $3.5 million, according to FBI estimates.”