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It was the art of the scam.
A fancy Florida art dealer has pleaded guilty to selling cheap counterfeit copies of paintings by famed artists including Andy Warhol, Banksy and Roy Lichtenstein, as originals worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Daniel Elie Bouaziz, who ran Danieli Fine Art and Galerie Danieli on Palm Beach’s ritzy Worth Avenue, admitted buying knockoffs of paintings by famed artists online for as little as $100 and then selling them on to unsuspecting art collectors for as much as $240,000.
Federal prosecutors say Bouaziz, a French national hailing from Algeria, was busted in a sting last year after trying to sell an undercover FBI agent a group of paintings that included multiple fakes for $22 million, including a copy of a work by Jean-Michel Basquiat for $12 million.
“Provenance is [the] father of Basquiat so there is not really a conversation about it,” Bouaziz told the agent, according to court filings.
Experts in Basquiat’s work later determined the painting was fake.
The FBI launched the undercover operation after law-enforcement officials received numerous reports from customers saying Bouaziz had sold them fake paintings and had ceased all communication after they complained, prosecutors said.
Several prospective buyers said they had gone to Bouaziz’s store and been shown paintings purportedly by the English street artist Banksy that would be worth millions if they were real but were being offered for $85,000. Others said that a Lichtenstein painting being sold didn’t match the dimensions of the original and that paintings purportedly by the Brooklyn-born Basquiat looked “1,000% fake,” according to court documents.
From the archives (February 2020): Banksy gave his Bristol hometown this Valentine’s Day gift
The Margin (December 2019): Banksy is the latest artist drawing attention to homelessness this holiday season
Prosecutors say that Bouaziz often produced phony provenance documents and that numerous paintings had forged artists’ signatures with a mechanical pen. Other phony works Bouaziz allegedly offered for sale included pieces by Keith Haring and Georgia O’Keefe, according to court filings.
Bouaziz’s attorney, Howard Schumacher, said his client was “looking forward to putting this behind him,” and that he was committed to making his customers whole.
“He intends to make full restitution to any of his clientele who were dissatisfied with any items that they purchased from him,” Schumacher said.
Bouaziz faces up to 10 years in prison when he is sentenced on May 30.
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