In his fourth-floor office at the Berlin Landeskriminalamt, Allonge removed the bubble wrap from one of the two Beltracchi forgeries that the police have held as evidence, the semi-nude Portrait of a Woman with Hat, supposedly by Kees van Dongen. He turned over the painting and showed me half a dozen counterfeit stickers from the “Flechtheim Collection” and from other prewar German galleries. Stripped of its frame and laid out on an evidence table, the work—which fetched millions of dollars at auction—seemed surprisingly pedestrian, a cheap knockoff that might be found at a street-side stall along the Seine. “Beltracchi had a good life for what he has achieved,” the investigator told me, clearly disgusted by the German media’s portrayals of the forger as a Robin Hood and a rogue genius. “He had no professional degree, he earned millions, he traveled the world—always at somebody else’s expense. It wasn’t his money. I would have found it good if he had donated a part of his money for a worthy cause. But he never did that.”

Much—if not all—of that money is now in danger of disappearing. The police seized just over $1 million from a Swiss bank account, and last spring the Beltracchis declared bankruptcy. A court-appointed administrator seized their remaining assets. Their homes in Freiburg and Marseillan will probably be auctioned off. The money will be used to settle at least four civil suits against them, including one filed by Lempertz last year in connection with the Campendonk fake Red Picture with Horses. Despite reports in Der Spiegel and other German media outlets that they had stashed millions in Andorra, the couple insists that the police “seized everything.” Yet they’re being philosophical. “It’s not so bad. It’s only money,” Helene told me. “We’ve got really great kids, and Wolfgang has so much talent.”

The Beltracchis had agreed to talk to me as part of an effort, overseen by their attorney, Reinhard Birkenstock, to turn their notoriety into a marketable commodity. Laughing, joking over plates of spaghetti and apple cake served up by Birkenstock’s chain-smoking wife, they were apparently enjoying their last months of freedom before reporting to prison in March 2012. They were shopping around an autobiography and planning a trip to their villa in Marseillan, to begin shooting what Wolfgang described as a “semi-documentary” about their lives. They were reveling in the attention of the European media, some of which celebrated the pair as iconoclasts who had carried out a long deception with panache.

Wolfgang had already begun to re-invent himself in the hope of building a new career. He’d recently launched a Web site that introduced the “Beltracchi Project”: a for-profit collaboration between Wolfgang and a friend, photographer Manfred Esser. The pair had begun producing “large-format prints, in both black-and-white and color, of the artist Wolfgang Beltracchi, painted over to make each image unique.” The paintings draw upon Beltracchi’s “dramatic experiences” at his trial and in prison. One already completed work, displayed on the site, was a huge portrait of Beltracchi, superimposed over a new version of The Horde, a phony Max Ernst that had been sold to the German billionaire Reinhold Würth, in the late 2000s, for more than $4 million. Beltracchi sold the new mixed-media piece to a German collector shortly after our first encounter for $12,500.

In mid-July, I caught up with the Beltracchis again at a huge loft in Bergisch Gladbach, the town where Helene Beltracchi had grown up. They were midway through filming a documentary project, provisionally called Beltracchi: The Art of Forgery. When I entered the studio, Wolfgang stood poised before a large canvas, putting the finishing touches on another version of The Horde. As he dabbed blue paint from an artist’s palette onto the work, a cameraman recorded his every brushstroke. At Beltracchi’s feet was what the forger called his “Max Ernst box”—a carton filled with wood, seashells, sponges, ropes, and other materials that Beltracchi uses to mimic the artist’s spatula-against-found-object technique. Standing to one side was the director Arne Birkenstock, the son of the Beltracchis’ attorney, an established documentarian who has made films on subjects ranging from Sri Lankan elephants to tango dancing. Birkenstock told me that, though the Beltracchis had agreed to give their full cooperation to the project, they would not have the right of final cut. The only promise Birkenstock had made, he said, was that “if Wolfgang mentions fakes that are not known of, and we find out that it could get him in trouble, we won’t reveal that.”