Operation Bogart

Jack Ellis:  This is Postal Inspector Jack Ellis, team leader.  I was in charge of the Bogart Art Fraud case.

I actually made a trip to Figueres, Spain in an effort to interview Dali and to get some signatures.  Unfortunately, when I arrived he was within a few weeks of his death, but his secretary who met with me had kept copies of things he had signed over the last couple of years of his life.  She gave me those copies which I was able to provide to the crime lab with the fakes.  They were able to determine that his signature was no way at all the ones that were appearing on the prints.

The other factor that the crime lab was able to assist us in is that these fake prints were printed on Arches Rives very high quality paper which was probably a dollar or so a piece at the time, just the paper, but they had watermarks unknown to the faker that identified the year the paper was created.  Some of the fake prints which was supposedly going back into the ‘60s and ‘70s were printed on Arches Rives paper that didn’t exist until the late ‘80s or so and obviously could not have been what was being represented as an original print.

Jack Ellis:  This is Postal Inspector Jack Ellis, team leader.  I was in charge of the Bogart Art Fraud case in New York from approximately 1985 all the way through until 1995.

In order for us to be able to infiltrate or get the evidence on the Amiels, we've developed an undercover case in which Inspector Waiman Leung and Ray Hang posing as Asian art dealers approached the Amiels because we knew that they didn’t have yet a market in Asia in that area and thought that, that might attract them and asked them if they had anything for sale.  Through a series of recorded conversations with the daughters and the wife of Leon Amiel, we were able to obtain evidence to obtain a search warrant of a warehouse in Island Park, New York, and seized over 80,000 fake prints during the seizure later determined to be worth well over $200 million.