One of Mark Rothko Painting sold for $50k
Correspondent Brian Ross tracks down the man at the center of it all for our series Nightline investigates on the streets of New York the business of fakes and knockoffs is thriving selling for $200 ray-ban sunglasses for $30.
What are art critics thinking, are they getting a cut to make a dark depressing work famous.
Let's say I need $50K for this panting above could I demand $50 Grand?
$2,000 Louis Vuitton handbags for $75 fake $10,000 Rolex watches for $80 most of the customers know they're getting fakes and it's rare for anyone to be arrested but our story tonight is about a series of fakes that sold for tens of millions of dollars to people who didn't know they were buying fakes.
All created by an elderly Chinese immigrant and part-time construction worker who once could be found here in Times Square doing drawings of tourists for about $10 each but as we found in our ABC News investigation the artist is now l000s of miles away from Times Square and our efforts to unravel the mystery of this massive scheme took us from New York's elite art world to billionaire collectors in London to accused fake art dealers in Spain all the way to China.
The hiding place for the little known artist who has turned the art world upside down with his masterful things in this case the accused forger created look-alikes of some of America's most prominent artists including the late Mark Rothko
To Blog post and artists website owner Bernie Habicht's footnote:
when I was 8 years I experienced painting squares as well but no one paid me millions of $
whose iconic blocks of colors sell for millions of dollars this real Rothko sold for fifty-six million dollars in May a perfect time to turn out the fakes here are images of a real Rothko and a fake Rothko created by the accused Time Square forger the real one on the right sold for 3 million dollars the fake on the left actually sold for more 8 million dollars.