Glafira Rosales and the $80 Million Art Fraud Scheme

Glafira Rosales is the Long Island art dealer behind one of the largest art fraud schemes in United States history, a 15-year operation that funneled more than 60 counterfeit Abstract Expressionist paintings through two Manhattan galleries for roughly $80 million in total sales. She pleaded guilty to federal fraud, money laundering, and tax charges in 2013, and in 2017 she was sentenced to three months in prison, time she had already served, after cooperating with investigators and presenting evidence that her longtime partner had coerced her into the scheme.¹

What She Did

The scheme began in 1994, when Rosales walked into Knoedler & Company with a previously unknown canvas she attributed to Mark Rothko.² Over the next decade and a half she supplied more than 60 works she said were by the biggest names in postwar American art: Jackson Pollock, Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, Barnett Newman, and Clyfford Still.³ None were real.

Two galleries bought from her: Knoedler & Company and Julian Weissman Fine Art.⁴⁵⁶ The fallout eventually shut Knoedler, a 165-year-old institution, for good.⁷

The Fake Backstory That Held It Together

Rosales kept the fraud alive by inventing an owner. For most of the paintings, she said she represented an anonymous client with ties to Switzerland who had inherited the works and wanted to stay unnamed. Federal prosecutors later called this figure the “Purported Swiss Client” and concluded the person never existed. For a smaller group, she said she was acting on behalf of a Spanish collector. That person was real but had never owned any of the paintings.⁸ Inside the art world the source became known simply as “Mr. X.”

The cover held because wealthy collectors routinely sell through intermediaries to protect their privacy, so a demand for anonymity did not immediately raise alarms. Knoedler’s own prestige did the rest of the work. Buyers and experts assumed a gallery with that pedigree had already verified what it was offering.

Who Actually Painted the Fakes

The paintings were produced by Pei-Shen Qian, a Chinese immigrant artist who had been well known in China before coming to the United States. Rosales’s partner, Jose Carlos Bergantiños Diaz, found Qian painting on a Manhattan street corner in the early 1990s and recruited him.⁹¹⁰¹¹

Qian was paid between $5,000 and $8,000 per painting, a fraction of what the works later sold for.⁹ He later said he had believed he was producing copies, not works to be sold as originals.¹⁰ He was indicted in the United States for fraud and for lying to the FBI, but by then he had returned to China, which has no extradition treaty with the United States.

How the Scheme Fell Apart

Doubts surfaced long before the collapse. As early as 2002, the International Foundation for Art Research could not verify the provenance of a Pollock that Knoedler had sold.⁶ In 2008, forensic analyst James Martin found that at least two supposed Motherwell paintings contained materials inconsistent with the dates they were said to have been made, and he warned the gallery to “exercise caution.” Knoedler kept selling. Martin later concluded that all of the Rosales works were “deliberate fakes.”¹²

The end came in 2011, when hedge fund manager Pierre Lagrange sued after discovering that a Pollock he had bought could not be authenticated. Knoedler closed its doors on November 30, 2011, calling it a “business decision” after 165 years of operation.⁷ From there the civil suits and the federal criminal investigation picked up speed.

What proved the fraud definitively was forensic science. Analysis of pigments and other materials showed paints that had not been commercially available during the periods the works were supposedly created.¹² The scholarly judgments that had supported the paintings for years, from figures including E.A. Carmean and Ernst Beyeler, could not survive that evidence.¹³

Her Guilty Plea and Sentence

Rosales was arrested on May 21, 2013. A federal grand jury returned an indictment on July 17, 2013, charging her with wire fraud, money laundering, filing false tax returns, and failing to report foreign bank accounts.⁸ On September 16, 2013, she pleaded guilty before Judge Katherine Polk Failla in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York to a nine-count superseding indictment that added conspiracy charges. The counts carried a combined maximum sentence of 99 years.¹⁴

Under her plea agreement, Rosales agreed to forfeit $33.2 million, including her home in Sands Point, New York, and to pay restitution of up to $81 million to victims.¹⁴

Sentencing did not come for more than three years, during which Rosales cooperated with federal investigators. Prosecutors said she provided “valuable information for tracking bank accounts in Spain and formulating the indictment against her alleged co-conspirators.”¹

On January 31, 2017, Judge Failla sentenced her to time served, three months in custody, plus nine months of house arrest and three years of probation.¹ Two things drove the leniency. Her defense attorney presented evidence that Bergantiños Diaz had subjected her to years of abuse and used threats, including threats to take their daughter to Spain, to force her participation.¹⁵ And the government did not oppose a light sentence given her cooperation. Judge Failla told her that “no purpose would be served by putting you back in jail.”

On July 5, 2017, the court formally ordered Rosales to pay $81 million in restitution. The victims’ identities and the amounts owed to each were kept in a sealed document to protect their privacy.¹⁵

Who Else Was Punished

Rosales did not act alone, and the outcomes for the others look nothing like hers.

Jose Carlos Bergantiños Diaz, her partner of 25 years, was described by prosecutors and by Rosales’s own defense as the mastermind. He ran two business entities with her, King’s Fine Arts and Glafira Rosales Fine Arts, and directed the production of the forgeries alongside his brother Jesús Ángel Bergantiños Diaz. On March 31, 2014, a federal grand jury returned a 12-count indictment against both brothers and Qian, charging wire fraud, conspiracy, money laundering, tax fraud, and false statements.¹⁶ Both brothers had already fled to Spain, and U.S. attempts to extradite them failed.¹

Qian is in China and beyond U.S. extradition reach. Ann Freedman, Knoedler’s president and the person who sold most of the paintings to collectors, was never criminally charged, though she was named in multiple civil suits and settled the most prominent one, brought by Domenico and Eleanore De Sole over an $8.3 million fake Rothko, in February 2016, two days before she was scheduled to testify.¹⁷¹⁸ Freedman has consistently maintained she believed the works were authentic and the provenance stories true.¹³

Rosales remains the only person to have served jail time in connection with the $80 million fraud.¹⁸

1
The Art Newspaper. No Further Jail Time for Glafira Rosales
2
Observer. Interview: Barry Avrich on The Devil Wears Rothko
3
Artnet. The Knoedler Mess
4
BBC News. Dealer Pleads Guilty to Selling Abstract Expressionist Fakes
5
The Art Newspaper. Dealer Pleads Guilty to Selling Abstract Expressionist Fakes
6
The Conversation. The Rise and Fall of the Knoedler
7
The New York Times. Knoedler Art Gallery Closes After 165 Years
8
U.S. Department of Justice. Long Island Art Dealer Indicted in Massive Art Fraud
9
ABC News. Accused Master Art Forger Tracked to Shanghai
10
Artnet. Knoedler Forger Claims Innocence
11
Artnet. Final Knoedler Forgery Lawsuit Settled
12
Center for Art Law. Knoedler Trial Uncut: Week 2
13
The New York Times. Knoedler Gallery Director’s Lawyer Says Other Experts Were Duped by Fake Rothko
14
U.S. Department of Justice. Art Dealer Pleads Guilty in Manhattan Federal Court to $80 Million Fake Art Scam
15
Artnet. Glafira Rosales Knoedler Art Fraud
16
Courthouse News Service. $33 Million Art Forgery Indictment Unsealed
17
The Art Newspaper. Why Would the De Soles Settle Their Claim Against Knoedler and Freedman
18
The Art Newspaper. Knoedler Gallery Book Review