Set aside, for a moment, the fact that the victims of this fraud should really have known better than to buy Re’s story that he found a trove of Pollock paintings in the basement of an Easthampton home whose owner, conveniently, was dead. At least five different buyers, who have remained anonymous, purchased at least 70 paintings from Re since March 2005: For example, one collector bought 58 paintings, for a total of $519,890 and another bought 12 for $894,500. They should have inquired more deeply and only considered buying works with a strong provenance—the documented history of an artwork that attests to its legality and authenticity. They should have checked on Mr. Re, who was arrested in 1995 on suspicion of having run a counterfeit money operation via a home printing press—he pleaded guilty to one charge of possession of a forged instrument and ended up in prison. Not the sort of person from whom you should be buying famous artworks.

The victims should likewise have been suspicious about the price. That Re earned $1.9 million by selling forged paintings may sound like a lot of money, but how did the buyers convince themselves that the works were authentic, when they were paying in the thousands for artists whose works sell for over one-hundred million? Pollock’s No. 5 is the second most-expensive artwork ever sold, at $165.4 million, and de Kooning’s Woman III is the third, at $162.4 million. It suggests a good deal of naïve wishful thinking on the part of the buyers, to think works at such relatively low prices could be authentic, and similarly to believe a story of having found some 70 unknown paintings in a random Long Island basement. One collector bought 24 paintings that he thought were Pollocks, but paid $5000 or less for each of them. The term caveat emptor, “buyer beware,” comes to mind.

The ostentatious submarine was not ultimately Re’s undoing, though his flamboyantly high profile suggests a level of hubris ill-advised for professional criminals who wish to remain under the radar (or perhaps, in this case, sonar). He was finally found out because one of the buyers sent a purported Pollock for authentication and was told that it contained materials that had not yet been invented when Pollock was painting. In criminological parlance, these are referred to as “time bombs,” or anachronisms that can give away a forgery. The buyer then sent 45 paintings—all acquired from Re and supposedly made by Pollock—and received word that not one was authentic, all containing time bombs. This may seem like a careless error on Re’s part, or a brash assumption that no one would forensically examine his forgeries. But, in the case of quite a few famous forgers, these time bombs were knowingly inserted.

The majority of the hundred-odd forgers I’ve studied share a remarkably consistent motivational profile. Most began as failed artists, whose original works were somehow dismissed by the art world. They turned to forgery to act out a sort of passive-aggressive revenge against the art community, which they perceive as a collective entity that has conspired to deny their talent, and which they will “show up” by creating works that will be praised and accepted, as their originals were not. Passing off a forgery provides a two-fold sense of artistic fulfilment. On the one hand, if a forger’s work is taken to be that of a great master (Picasso, for example, who is the most-forged artist in history), then the forger considers that they are just as good as Picasso. On the other, the forger demonstrates the fallibility or foolishness of the so-called experts, who cannot tell their forgery from an original—the implication by extension being that these experts were foolish to dismiss the forger’s original creations in the first place.