A Pennsylvania man accused of passing off forgeries as authentic works by well-known artists—together with Francis Bacon, Keith Haring, Jean Cocteau, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Pablo Picasso and Jean-Michel Basquiat, amongst others—has pleaded responsible to at least one rely of wire fraud and one rely of mail fraud.
Carter Reese of Studying, a metropolis northwest of Philadelphia, admitted to deceptive clients concerning the provenance and authenticity of artwork that he bought or tried to promote between February 2019 and March 2021. Reese, who’s 77, faces as much as 40 years in jail. His sentencing is ready for 12 September, in line with the US Legal professional’s Workplace for the Jap District of Pennsylvania.
Reese, a prolific antiques collector and former next-door neighbor of famous person musician Taylor Swift, was beforehand an worker of the celebrated Hill College in close by Pottstown, first as a wonderful arts and historical past instructor and later as director of admissions, in line with the Philadelphia Inquirer. He and his spouse co-founded after which bought a global firm that helped college students acquire entry to elite boarding colleges and faculties. In court docket paperwork, Reese described his assortment of toys, furnishings, rugs and mannequin trains as being price $6m.
Reese claimed that the forgeries he bought had been sourced both from the artists themselves or from different artwork collectors, one in every of whom had died in 2013 and one in every of whom was purportedly named Ken James. In actual fact, “Ken James” was an alias for Reese’s provider, a Chicago-based man who had been convicted of promoting greater than $1m of counterfeit artwork, generally by shopping for copies on eBay and doctoring them to look real. That provider, recognized solely as “Affiliate 1” within the district legal professional’s case towards Reese, died round November 2021.
Reese lured clients with false affidavits and signatures to masks the inauthenticity of the works he was providing. His lawyer, Jason Hernandez, advised the Inquirer that his consumer “intends to make a full restitution to the victims”, which might quantity to a forfeiture of greater than $186,000.
Reese has additionally been a supposed sufferer of counterfeit grifting in his time as a collector. Based on the Inquirer, he filed for chapter in 2019 after claiming he had been ripped off as he tried to dump a few of his antiques. He accused the public sale home Pook & Pook of deliberately miserable the worth of his gadgets by purposeful mishandling, shabby presentation and highlighting a counterfeit toy Reese had purchased for $20,000, believing it was real.
