Police bust art forgery ring trying to sell fake Picasso, Rembrandt works : NPR

German police say they’ve broken up an international art forgery ring that tried to sell works purportedly by Pablo Picasso, Rembrandt, Frida Kahlo and others for tens of millions of dollars to unsuspecting collectors.

The scheme was allegedly led by a 77-year-old German man from Bavaria with the help of ten accomplices, according to a press release from the Bavarian State Criminal Police Office.

Patrick Haggenmueller, head of the Art Investigation Unit of the Bavarian State Criminal Police Office (BLKA), stands next to the fake painting Mary with Child supposedly by Flemish painter Anthony van Dyck.

Matthias Balk/AFP via Getty Images

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Matthias Balk/AFP via Getty Images

Investigators say they discovered the fraud when the main suspect tried to sell two supposedly original Picasso works, including a portrait of the Spanish painter’s muse Dora Maar. (A Picasso painting of Maar entitled Bust of a Woman with a Flowered Hat sold last week for around $37 million, after having been held in a family collection since it was purchased in 1944.)

The unnamed ringleader apparently also tried to sell a copy of a world-famous painting by the Dutch painter Rembrandt van Rijn known as The Syndics, a 17th century portrait of members of Amsterdam’s cloth makers’ guild, for roughly $150 million. But the original of that painting, known in Dutch as De Staalmeesters, sits in the collection of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

Police say the fake was likely a copy from the 20th century owned by an 84-year-old Swiss woman, who is now also under investigation by German and Swiss authorities.

Authorities say the 77-year-old main suspect tried to sell a Rembrandt painting known as The Syndics. That work, known in Dutch as De Staalmeesters, is part of the collection of Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum.

Matthias Balk/AFP via Getty Images

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Matthias Balk/AFP via Getty Images

Other phony works allegedly offered for sale by the 77-year-old suspect included ceramic vases by Picasso, Study of a Head by Amadeo Modigliani, and pieces purportedly by Peter Paul Rubens, Joan Miró and Anthony van Dyck. Purchase prices ranged from about $460,000 to more than $16 million.

One accomplice in the scheme was a 74-year-old man from Rhineland-Palatinate who produced counterfeit expert reports attesting to the authenticity of the forgeries, investigators say.

A coordinated series of searches by police one morning earlier this month at more than a dozen locations in Germany, Switzerland and Lichtenstein yielded a number of suspected forgeries, which are set to be analyzed by art experts in the coming weeks.