John Drewe

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John Drewe (born 1948) is a British purveyor of art forgeries who commissioned artist John Myatt to paint them. Drewe earned about £1.8 million executing these art crimes.

Early life

Drewe was born John Cockett in 1948 in

, having initially convinced his superiors that he had a Ph.D. in physics. He resigned two years later, after this was found to be false. After that, there is a 15-year gap in official records about him — no employment or tax records.

According to Drewe himself, he joined the student protests in

. None of those educational institutions have his name on their records.

In 1970 Drewe, claiming a PhD in physics, worked for a year as head of the Physics Department of Bexhill Grammar School in East Sussex.

In 1980, Drewe met wealthy Israeli

private school in Highgate until he was apparently pressured to leave in 1985.

Career as a forger

Also in 1985, Drewe met John Myatt, who was in dire need of money. First Drewe presented himself as a nuclear physicist who wanted art copies for his own home and hinted at links to British intelligence. Eventually he persuaded Myatt to paint forgeries for him. He used mud and vacuum cleaner dust to "age" them. Drewe contacted auction houses like Christie's and Sotheby's through intermediaries and sold about 200 of Myatt's paintings for £1.8 million.^[1] In the course of their many year relationship he gave Myatt a total of only £100,000 while he lived lavishly off the proceeds.

Drewe did not try to sell paintings in a vacuum but created false backgrounds for them. He forged certificates of authenticity and even invoices of previous sales to establish false

for the paintings. He wrote to relatives of the artist to fool them into authenticating the forgeries. He tricked a small Catholic religious order in a village to sign a contract which would verify some of the paintings.

He also forged documents about previous owners so that the painting did not just suddenly seem to appear from nowhere. For this he used records of dead people, some of them his old acquaintances. He also convinced some of his living friends to sign documents as though they were previous owners of the paintings — most of them were broke or otherwise in trouble and accepted the money he offered them. To an old childhood friend, Daniel Stokes, he concocted a story about a drinking wife and needy children and convinced him to pretend to be an owner of a fake

. When he could not find anyone to bribe, he just invented nonexistent people.

In 1989, Drewe gained access to the letter archives of the

he needed a false reference — he provided one himself.

Drewe used the opportunity to introduce false records to the archives. He replaced old pages and inserted numerous new ones into old art catalogues to include Myatt's forgeries. The institutions have said that it will take years to purge the archives of all the false information. Through a middleman, Drewe also created a company called Art Research Associates and again used himself as a reference.

In 1995, Drewe left Goudsmid to marry Helen Sussman, a doctor. Goudsmid studied papers that Drewe had left behind and found a number of incriminating letters. She decided to tell the police and the Tate Gallery.

1995 arrest

In September 1995, Scotland Yard quietly arrested Myatt. He had fallen out with Drewe and agreed to cooperate. On 16 April 1996 police raided Drewe's house in Reigate, Surrey, and found materials he had used to forge certificates of authenticity. They also found two catalogues Drewe had stolen from the Victoria and Albert Museum. Police also found evidence that another artist in addition to Myatt might have supplied some of the forgeries.

During the interrogation, Drewe continuously protested his innocence against all evidence. He was released on bail and disappeared. Two months later police found him by following his mother.

This time, Drewe had concocted a conspiracy theory of frame-up. He claimed that he was an arms dealer and a fall guy for a conspiracy including British law enforcement and governments of seven countries and that there had been a total of 4,000 forgeries that had been used to finance arms deals between the UK arms industry and Iran, Iraq and Sierra Leone. He also claimed that he was a British intelligence agent, that Myatt was a neo-Nazi operative and that Robert Harris, a name mentioned in many forged certificates, was a South African arms dealer. He could not prove any of these stories.

If he had intended to scare police to drop the case, he failed. The prosecution declared his story pure fantasy and charged him.

The trial against Drewe and Myatt began in September 1998. Drewe fired his lawyer because he refused to use Drewe's story as a defence and decided to defend himself. Again he failed; Myatt called him a liar to his face and the jury declared him guilty in six hours.

On 13 February 1999 Drewe was sentenced to six years for

Later criminal activity

In March 2012 at

References

External links

• "A 20th Century Master Scam", The New York Times, 18 July 1999
• "'Extraordinary' art fraud trial nears end", News, UK: BBC, 12 February 1999.
• Honigsbaum, Mark (12 December 2005), "The master forger", The Guardian, UK.