Mailing Label Unravels Elaborate Basquiat Counterfeit Scheme

LOS ANGELES, CA — A former auctioneer from the San Fernando Valley admitted to lying to FBI agents about the provenance of fake Jean-Michel Basquiat paintings seized from a museum, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office.

Michael Barzman, 45, of North Hollywood agreed to plead guilty to making false statements to the FBI during an interview in August. As part of the plea deal, he admitted to creating the fake works of art with another man, according to a court filing.

Barzman has agreed to surrender to federal authorities for a downtown Los Angeles court appearance that has not yet been scheduled.

According to the justice department, Barzman and a second man – identified in the court documents as “J.F.” – created the fake Basquiats in 2012 in a scheme to market the bogus artwork.

“J.F. spent a maximum of 30 minutes on each image and as little as five minutes on others, and then gave them to [Barzman] to sell on eBay,” according to the plea agreement. “[Barzman] and J.F. agreed to split the money that they made from selling the Fraudulent Paintings. J.F. and [Barzman] created approximately 20-30 artworks by using various art materials to create colorful images on cardboard.”

At the time, Barzman ran an auction business focused on purchasing and reselling the contents from unpaid storage units. He admitted to prosecutors that he used his business to create a fake provenance for the fake Basquiats by claiming in a notarized document that the fraudulent paintings were found inside a storage unit that a well-known screenwriter had rented, according to the court filing.

According to the scheme, television screenwriter Thad Mumford stashed the collection he bought from Basquiat for just $5,000 in the 1980s in a storage unit until 2012 when he stopped paying for the unit, the New York Post.

For a time, the scheme seemed to be working. The bogus art was sold and made its way through the art market, forming the basis of an exhibition that opened in February 2022 at the Orlando Museum of Art called “Heroes & Monsters: Jean-Michel Basquiat.”

“Most of the featured works had, in fact, been created by [Barzman] and J.F.,” Barzman admitted in his plea agreement.

The FBI executed a search warrant at the Orlando Museum of Art in June 2022 and seized 25 pieces that Basquiat purportedly had created. Shortly after, during an August 18, 2022 interview with FBI special agents, Barzman denied making the paintings himself, prosecutors allege.

“At the time of the interview, [Barzman] knew that he and J.F. had created the paintings and that his statements to the contrary were untruthful,” Barzman admitted in his plea agreement. “His statement that he did not make the paintings or have someone make them for him were material to the activities and decisions of the FBI and were capable of influencing the agency’s decisions and activities.”

He went on to admit to the FBI in October 2022, “it was a lie” that the artwork had come from the storage locker, but he continued to deny making the fraudulent paintings – even after agents showed him the back of a painting on cardboard seized from the Orlando Museum of Art in which his name appears on a mailing label that had been painted over, according to prosecutors.

The felony crime of making false statements to a government agency carries a sentence of up to five years in federal prison.

The FBI’s Art Crime Team continues to investigate the case.

Basquiat, a New York graffiti artist who died at age 27 in 1988 has long been a favorite artist for fraudsters. He signed and dated his prints in pencil, and much of his work does not come with a certificate of authenticity, making provenance key to proving a genuine Basquiat work of art. His 1982 painting, "Untitled," sold for a record $110.5 million in 2017, becoming the second highest price for an American artwork at auction.