New York magazine just published a feature I wrote about Ely Sakhai, an art dealer who has been accused by the FBI with running an amazing forgery scheme. Sakhai, the FBI claims, would buy Impressionist paintings, make copies of them, then sell both the copy and the original. The story is online at New York’s web site, but here’s a taste of the opening few paragraphs:

How to Make a Fake

Buy a mid-level Gauguin. Duplicate it. Slap the original papers on the copy. Sell both paintings to gullible collectors, while the art world looks the other way.

By Clive Thompson

Vase de Fleurs (Lilas) is not one of Paul Gauguin’s greatest works. It’s a “middle market” painting, which means it changes hands usually for only a few hundred thousand dollars, and without much fanfare. But in May 2000, the painting proved it could still turn heads. When Christie’s and Sotheby’s released spring catalogues for their modern-art auctions, they were alarmed to discover that each was offering the painting — and each house thought it had the original.

One of the paintings, clearly, was a fake. So the auction houses flew both paintings to Sylvie Crussard, a Gauguin expert at the Wildenstein Institute in Paris. She put them side by side and in a few minutes saw that Christie’s version was, in the delicate argot of the trade, “not right.” (The auction house just barely managed to yank its catalogue back from the printers in time.) Still, it was the best Gauguin counterfeit she’d ever seen. “This was a unique case of resemblance. You never see two works which are that similar,” Crussard marvels.

The rest of the piece is here! That picture above, by the way, is of Gauguin’s Vase de Fleurs.