Sherry Chandler » Foxy Grandpa
Foxy Grandpa
A reader, who loves weird news, sends a link to this article from The Guardian:
Further fooling of the international art market by a brilliant fraudster was revealed yesterday at a court hearing to sentence his 84-year-old father, nicknamed the Artful Codger, who acted as an equally crafty and imaginative fence
As a judge deferred prison for George Greenhalgh until a “humane” jail capable of taking a wheelchair-bound pensioner could be guaranteed, a fake Gauguin sculpture which bamboozled the Chicago Institute of Art was added to the Lancashire family’s tally of 120 hoax antiques.
…
Wearing slippers, thick gold-rimmed spectacles and a shawl over his legs, the partially deaf Greenhalgh Snr told the judge, who politely checked if he could hear the proceedings: “I got two bullets in my head in the war in Italy, and one in my back and it still hurts.”
Greenhalgh has admitted making more than £850,000 from a conspiracy to defraud art institutions and money laundering between June 1989 and March last year. His 83-year-old wife, Olive, was given a suspended 12-month sentence for the same offences in November, and Shaun is serving four years and eight months, with the certainty of lucrative bona fide commissions when he comes out.
The “Gauguin” was sold to Chicago’s Art Institute 10 years ago for £60,000. Wonder what Gauguin himself would have done with that much money.
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