A prolific art forger meets his match in an intrepid FBI investigator, but the con is only just beginning.

The art dealer wanted his certificates, or the game was up.

Two Basquiat drawings sat on the desk of Lio Malca, a smartly dressed Colombian who’d built an empire from his plush, Chelsea office. Malca wanted them, but their accompanying documents didn’t look right.

“I don’t care what you’re doing,” he told the seller sitting across from him. “If this transaction is to go on, I must have the original certificate.”

Alfredo Martinez, over six feet tall and almost as wide, with unkempt hair and a straggly, black beard, barely missed a beat. Art by Jean-Michel Basquiat, the famed neo-Expressionist, had skyrocketed in price since the artist’s death over a decade before, and Alfredo was determined to pocket a hefty sum for the two works.

Not a problem, Alfredo told Malca. He knew where the certificates were, he just needed some time to go get them. He got up and left the office.

Outside, Alfredo fretted. He thought the certificates he’d forged and presented to Malca were, like the drawings, good enough to fool anyone. Now he had to get his hands on the genuine articles — and quickly enough to avoid suspicion. The clock was ticking on the biggest payday of his life.

He raced across town and, hoodwinking a friend who owned the original drawings, returned to Chelsea in just a few hours. He was getting sloppy, desperate — and Malca, a connected international figure with a history of drug related crimes, was not a man to double-cross.

Malca ran his fingers over the raised seal of the certificate and, happy with it, shook hands on the deal. Alfredo breathed a sigh of relief.

Little did he know that the sale had dropped him clean in the crosshairs of America’s greatest art detective.

When the first artists sketched the outlines of animals 50,000 years ago, somebody probably forged their work shortly after. Michelangelo copied Roman sculptors in the late 1400s, while Dutch citizens voted 20th century forger Han van Meegeren as their second-most popular compatriot in 1947, second only to the prime minister. An estimated 20% of all paintings held in British public museums aren’t the real deal. “Originality,” wrote Benjamin Franklin, “is the art of concealing your sources.”

For decades before his deal with Lio Malca, Alfredo had perfected that art — and this time, at least, he’d pulled off a Hail Mary. Having examined the certificate’s seals, and the signatures of Gerard Basquiat, executor of his late son’s estate, Malca cut Alfredo a check for $38,500.

For Alfredo, selling his counterfeit works carried more than financial gain. Back when he was a teenager orbiting the East Village art scene, he had rubbed shoulders with industry royalty and quickly grew disillusioned. After one typically bacchanal gallery opening, Basquiat ran away with the girlfriend of Alfredo’s best friend for a brief affair that spiraled his friend into depression and drugs.

Alfredo still believed in the graffiti superstar’s genius, but the episode soured his regard for Basquiat the man. And it wasn’t an exception. Pop Art idol Keith Haring made unwanted passes at Alfredo and patronized him in front of friends. The poet and critic Rene Ricard, part of Andy Warhol’s circle, was rude and condescending.

Alfredo never touched drugs, but everybody in the scene was drunk or high. They made millions, hanging works at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the art scene’s opulent lodestar, while pretending to be street. Forgery was an iconoclastic way for Alfredo to undermine art’s ego — and get rich doing it.

But his satisfaction selling Malca the two drawings was short-lived. Days after Alfredo left, Malca saw a picture of one of the true Basquiats online. It didn’t match the one he’d just paid a messy, overweight man five figures for. The certificates were real. The artwork was forged. His heart dropped.

“I started to turn all different colors, because I realized that…I had been taken,” Malca would later tell the court. Raging, he summoned Alfredo back to Chelsea.

When Alfredo arrived, Malca pointed at the drawing hanging behind his desk. In it, a horse stood next to the words “glue,” and “horse food, horse food, horse food.” “This is a fake!” he yelled. Alfredo, backed into a corner and improvised. He explained that the artworks’ real owner, a photographer named Tom Warren, had the collector’s money.

Malca’s assistant called a cab, and the three men sped to Warren’s apartment in Queens. When they entered, Alfredo told Warren to take a seat. “Tom,” he said, “give Lio his money back.”

Warren was stunned and a little nervous. He had known Alfredo for years and lent him the legitimate Basquiats for what his friend claimed was an art show. He hadn’t even suspected Alfredo’s deceit when he returned to Warren’s apartment days later, frantically requesting their credentials. Now he had no idea what Alfredo meant or why Malca and his assistant were towering over him, fuming, in his living room.

Warren didn’t want to put up a fight. He led the three men to his bedroom, where he showed them the real Basquiats and their certificates of authenticity. Malca — assuming Warren was in on the scheme to rip him off — snatched the documentation, told Alfredo to stay in the apartment, and stormed out.

Warren was livid. He had trusted Alfredo, hoping the Basquiats would help bump his own art world status. Instead, he’d been used.

For Alfredo, the deceptions had finally caught up with him. Basquiat’s famed style had been the cash cow of his forging career for years. Now it would prove his undoing. A bomb went off in Alfredo’s mind. He was in deep, deep trouble — and it was about to get worse.

By 2002, when Alfredo’s deal with Lio Malca was falling apart, FBI agent Robert “Bob” Wittman was a bureau sensation. Since the 1980s he’d become its go-to man for art theft, fraud and forgery, combining his antique-dealer father’s love for art with a passion for law he sharpened during childhood on primetime G-man TV shows featuring daring crime investigators.

High profile cases vaulted Bob up the FBI ladder, from recovering Civil War guns, Nazi diaries and a copy of the Bill of Rights, to busting some of the world’s most notorious museum heists. “Art thieves steal more than beautiful objects,” Bob wrote in his 2010 memoir Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World’s Stolen Treasures. “They steal memories and identities. They steal history.”

But Bob never took credit for his work. Undercover stings meant he hung back at press conferences, a nameless suit shadowed from his own limelight. And he often struggled to convince Quantico graybeards that art crime wasn’t victimless. Even when the FBI inaugurated Bob’s National Art Crime team, Bob was its only member.

In the aftermath of Alfredo’s fallout with Malca and Warren, somebody tipped off the FBI’s New York office about his fakes. Bob trained his sights on the forger. He had just busted Brazilian mob bosses who stole seven Norman Rockwell paintings from a Minneapolis museum. Even as he polished his undercover alias to go after Alfredo, Bob was playing another fake art dealer — this time in chase of a $65 million dollar art heist masterminded by one of Spain’s deadliest mafias. Each new identity brought fresh challenges and chances to slip up. The risk of Bob getting caught — or worse — was growing.

Under the FBI’s undercover rules, investigators are only supposed to work one case at a time. Bob, a one-man band, didn’t follow them. Throughout the late 90s, as art’s value soared and violent cartels looked to get in on the action, his jobs grew more and more dangerous. And there were more of them: Centuries-old art took a virtuoso’s skill to reproduce faithfully. Modern pieces were easier, and a Rothko might even have better margins than a Rembrandt. “Talk about an unregulated market,” said the New York art critic Carlo McCormick. “What a beautiful opportunity to launder cash and move shit around.”

Alfredo’s fraudulent footprint was all over the art world. Before long, Bob mapped a web of buyers worried they’d been ripped off. One of them gave him Alfredo’s email address and orchestrated an introduction.

It was time for Bob to slip into character and catch his man.

In the wake of his disastrous deal with Malca for the two Basquiats, Alfredo was shaken. As he saw it, there were only two ways out of his mess: scam enough cash to skip the country or wind up in jail. 

Then an art dealer he had never dealt with sent him an email. The man’s name was Bob. 

Alfredo replied claiming to have five Basquiat drawings for sale. The dealer prodded Alfredo to admit that the drawings were fake. “My clients are just rich people,” he told Alfredo. “They don’t have any idea about fakes.” 

Alfredo sent a picture of each one, created himself using a technique polished for years, racking up one count of wire fraud even before money changed hands. And it was a lot of money: Bob offered $145,000, almost four times the Malca windfall. But to close the deal, Alfredo would need to meet him in person. 

On a cool summer evening in 2002, the two men sat on twin beds in the shabby room of a Times Square hotel. Bob had cropped hair, and wore a cheap, taxman’s suit. Alfredo was his opposite, dressed in all black with the tousled hair of an Old West gunslinger. Alfredo pulled the Basquiats from a bag, and laid them, one by one, on the bed sheets. 

Bob agreed to the deal. His trap was set.

Alfredo’s first forgery stumbled into his life by chance. He was a teenager, struggling to break into an art industry he barely understood. Despite Alfredo’s contempt for its hypocrisy, it felt like a calling to him. Moreover, it was a license to print money: He just hadn’t found the right press. 

Alfredo took a job doing handiwork at a well-known SoHo gallery. When a thin, greasy-haired man walked in and tried to sell what he claimed was a genuine Keith Haring mask sculpture, the owner threw him out. The mask was cracked. Besides, the gallery owner explained to Alfredo: people often exchanged sex for artists’ work, and there was an unwritten rule for insiders never to pay for those pieces. 

Alfredo sniffed an opportunity. He hurried after the crestfallen, would-be seller and offered him fifty bucks: twenty upfront, and the rest in installments. 

Haring’s brand of daring Pop Art had just gone global, and his works were among the most recognizable anywhere. Haring was rich. Alfredo was poor. He spent his days hauling multi-million dollar art around a galley for drug addicts and slept in an East Village squat. The art world was unfair. 

The mask represented something unattainable. At first, Alfredo took it home and enjoyed it, thrilled at owning an original Haring. It wasn’t worth much; the damage indicated it was something the artist had thrown out. But he soon hatched a plan to make serious money for the first time in his life. 

Alfredo bought 10 plain ceramic masks from an art supplies store in Chinatown and then loitered outside Haring’s apartment building, regularly going through his garbage to see if he’d thrown any other artwork in the trash. Within days he had the original art, the inspiration, and the supplies to become an art forger. Alfredo was ready to win payback against an industry he increasingly viewed as a moral junkyard. 

It didn’t take long for Alfredo to mimic the bold, simple style Haring had applied to the discarded mask. But he had no idea how to sell one. An old acquaintance suggested a gallerist in London notorious for accepting looted or forged art. On a whirlwind trip to the British capital, Alfredo and his pal accepted $32,000 — not bad for a kid born in Brooklyn to Puerto Rican parents who had spent his childhood scavenging scrap metal for his father’s Sunset Park junkyard. 

Alfredo’s life changed overnight. Gone were the squats he’d hung out at since the age of 16, when his good looks and mohawk were passports to Manhattan’s thriving punk scene. He rented an East Village apartment and devoted it to his painting, and to debaucherous parties that were the talk of the art scene. 

“I was cock of the walk, man,” says Alfredo. “I was arrogant.” So was New York. Greed was good, and Wall Street cash propelled the art market to new financial heights. Basquiat, dubbed his era’s “radiant child,” died from a heroin overdose in August 1988 aged just 27. Prices for his work soared.

Alfredo, who had settled into a pattern of selling Haring forgeries whenever he needed cash, adapted to art’s newest martyr. He would prepare weak tea and pour it over paper, brushing it carefully to make sure it was even. As it dried, he gathered his source materials. 

Alfredo had built up a library of Basquiat photocopies he had made at a printing store. He would cut up the copies — an eye here, an ear there — to construct composite Basquiats that looked like the real thing. After assembling the drawing template, he traced the image onto his prepared paper using a thick magic marker. Once his pen hit the paper, he would move swiftly to mimic the spontaneity of Basquiat’s work. 

When he first started forging, Alfredo climbed a ladder onto the roof of his squat and drew in the morning sun, alone and undisturbed. The result was a careful forgery of an imagined work, featuring Basquiat’s signature parts — the skulls, the limbs, the random pieces of text — lovingly recreated with the steady hand of a fellow artist. 

The art world’s unscrupulousness meant that selling the pieces was easy. But it soon bit back. In 1999, one of Alfredo’s close friends died from a drug overdose. Distraught, Alfredo claimed the art world had “demanded a blood sacrifice.” Alfredo’s list of confidantes was perilously short. Work dried up, and financial backers left him. 

Alfredo began working out of a shared studio space in SoHo and persuaded the owner to let him live there. He let his hair grow wild and his stubble became a beard. His weight ballooned to over 300 pounds. Friends suspected he was stealing. 

By the time he strode into the hotel room to meet Bob, he was strung out. The art world was draining his soul, and he needed a way to fight back.

Bob tapped the mic under his shirt, signaling to an arrest team lined up outside the door. His latest busts had taken him deeper into art’s underworld, and he feared Alfredo’s hulking size. The cops burst into the room, tackled the forger to the floor and handcuffed him. 

He didn’t resist at all. When Bob’s partner, Johanna Loonie, asked Alfredo if he went by any aliases, he reeled off Marx Brothers comedy characters: Otis B Driftwood, Rufus T. Firefly. Bob ripped up Loonie’s notepad and turned to Alfredo. “Fucking take this more seriously,” he growled. 

As Alfredo was escorted out the room, Bob eyed the pictures. They had the scrawling, chaotic style that had made Basquiat a superstar. But on closer inspection, the hairsplitting detail that Bob loved about Basquiat’s work was absent from the images — it was as if the heart had been left out. 

To Bob, the job was done. It was the end of the road for one of America’s most notorious art forgers. 

But something wasn’t quite right. When cops threw Alfredo in a Manhattan jail cell soon after, he napped — an unusual behavior for somebody whose world had just come crashing down. 

In fact, while Alfredo had reached the end of his forging rope, he already saw an opportunity for something different. Now that the faker was behind bars, he was about to pull the biggest scam of all. 

Alfredo’s arrest sent shockwaves through the art world, as did the evident scope of his forging operation. He had produced so many phony works, wrote the San Francisco Examiner, that “nearly every Basquiat is suspect.” 

His trial began that November. At first Alfredo pleaded not-guilty, a puzzling decision given he’d been caught selling forged artworks to an undercover FBI agent. Some of Alfredo’s friends, led by Josh Harris, an enigmatic Web entrepreneur, organized a rally outside the courthouse, protesting the targeting of an underdog from the block. Newspapers covered the show of solidarity: if anything, it was good publicity.

When Tom Warren took the stand and told the court what had happened with his Basquiat drawings, Alfredo gave up and switched his plea to guilty. The judge sentenced him to two years in custody, which he would serve at a Sunset Park prison, just yards from his childhood home. He wasn’t in the pantheon of mobbed-up crooks Bob would make his name putting behind bars, and the detective held out some sympathy. “Alfredo was a starving artist, and he just came up with a scheme to make a few bucks,” says Bob. 

But there was more to Alfredo than the world’s greatest art detective knew. As the judge handed down his sentence, Alfredo’s face curled into the faint hint of a smirk — as if he alone knew the punchline to an unspoken joke. “Con is his art form,” Harris later told a reporter. “The FBI and jail are just logical extensions.” 

Long before anybody betrayed Alfredo to Bob, the forger had visited a lawyer. He asked what kind of time he’d serve if he got caught. The lawyer told him a figure. It was low enough to give Alfredo thoughts of an alternative future. As his bitterness grew and his forgeries ramped up into overdrive, Alfredo’s cynicism shaped into a plan. 

If there’s one thing Alfredo had learned, it’s that the art world loved a great story. Prison inmates gave him makeshift art supplies, and he created portraits and bespoke greetings cards. In lieu of proper paint, Alfredo mixed orange juice with drink powder for sanguine reds, markers for bold lines, and he constructed canvases out of papier mache. When criminals weren’t sitting for him, Alfredo sketched guns, and lots of them: detailed schematics, or garish, fantasy designs which intentionally spooked prison staff. He sent some of the images to art friends on the outside. When guards caught on, they threw him in solitary confinement and confiscated his supplies. 

Perfect. That fit the narrative. 

Outside the prison’s walls, another movement was budding. James Fuentes, a Manhattan curator, loved Alfredo’s prison art. “The way I received these manila envelopes, these packages with these drawings all folded up, it was a very romantic, storybook, poetic enterprise,” he says. Fuentes had no doubt Alfredo wanted notoriety from his jail time. But there was genuine artistry in his latest drawings too. 

To continue his newfound popularity, however, Alfredo would face one final, grueling hurdle to cement his reputation. When authorities refused to let him draw, Alfredo went on hunger strike for over a month, dropping to 185 pounds and turning his hair brittle like dry grass. In April 2003, with Alfredo at death’s door, guards strapped him upright to a gurney, his gaunt, bearded cheeks stuck between two yellow foam restraints and his wrists zip-tied, and force-fed him from a tube. 

The agony repeated for another six days. The picture Alfredo would eventually produce of the ordeal, which showed his eyes sunken and wide with fear, was the centerpiece of a 36-work show in Chelsea, staged by Fuentes and called The United States of America vs. Alfredo Martinez. The collection was valued at $150,000, its most expensive item a giant robot collage on sale for $16,000. The media lapped it up. Two pieces sold before the doors even opened. 

When the show began, a constellation of folks who’d known Alfredo, including many people he’d screwed over, mingled over his work. At first he’d turned art into crime. Now he was turning his crime into art. Prison was “the best residency Alfredo could have dreamed of,” says Fuentes. 

The art world ate it up. 

A year later, Alfredo stepped out of prison onto a Sunset Park street having served 21 months, at least half of them in solitary confinement. This extreme piece of performance art, this final swindle, had earned him the ultimate prize: recognition. 

Across town, visitors marveled at a new addition to the Museum of Modern Art’s collection: a gun schematic, drawn roughly on stained-white paper, titled Prison Drawing (gun). 

It bore the name of its creator in a large scrawl across the bottom, the clearest sign imaginable that Alfredo Martinez had finally made it.

PETER WARD is a journalist and author based in the United Kingdom. His second book, The Price of Immortality, will be published in Spring 2022.

SEAN WILLIAMS is a writer and journalist living in Berlin, Germany.