Detroit Area Art Swindler Sentenced To Prison In $1.45M Scheme

A Metro Detroit art dealer who created a fictitious world and multiple aliases in a scheme to pass off dozens of forged artworks as masterpieces was sentenced Thursday in federal court in New York to 41 months in prison, the Justice Department said. Eric Ian Hornak Spoutz, 33, of Mount Clemens, was arrested in February 2016 in Los Angeles on wire fraud charges.

“Eric Spoutz made a lucrative ‘career’ selling forged art as originals from American masters like De Kooning, Kline and Mitchell,” U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara of New York’s Southern District of U.S. District Court said in a statement. “From creating fake documents to assuming new identities, Spoutz used the full palette of deception to complete his decade-long work of fraud.”

Spoutz swindled art collectors out of more than $1.45 million, the government said. As part of the sentence handed down by U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, Spoutz must forfeit all money derived from the sale of art and make restitution in the amount of $154,100.

In the end, a type font was the art dealer’s undoing. At the time of his arrest, the Justice Department said Spoutz tripped up when he consistently used a single, distinctive type font on documents intended to convince his victims of the authenticity of their purchases, including receipts, bills of sale and letters from dead attorneys and others that claimed Spoutz had inherited or purchased the artworks.

For years, though, Spoutz’s alleged scheme worked. He used aliases such as “Robert Chad Smith,” “John Goodman” and “James Sinclair” during the course of the scheme, from 2010 to March 2015.

• See Also: How A Type Font Snared Accused Michigan Art Swindler

According to the allegations contained in the criminal complaint and information and other documents in the public record, and statements made in court, Spoutz operated his criminal enterprise since at least 2006. He sold dozens of fraudulent works of art – which he attributed to, among others, Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and Joan Mitchell – through various channels, including auction houses and on eBay.

Publicly accused of selling forged works of art as early as 2005, Spoutz then began brokering them under his various aliases, the government said.

One of the documents that finally exposed him — in which he claimed to have inherited a priceless art collection — contained inconsistencies and errors, according to court documents. Some of the alleged transactions took place before he was born, and the forged letters included non-existent addresses for both the purported seller and other parties in the transactions.

Investigators located the original letter Spoutz used as a model for one of his forgeries in a collection at a private university, which holds a collection of letters from the individual whose identity Spoutz used to create a false story of inheritance, the government said.

In a 2012 interview with The Macomb Daily, Spoutz discussed his quick rise as a nationally prominent art dealer and “uncanny knack for the appreciation of art.” He claimed he would be flying to Washington, D.C., to attend President Obama’s inauguration and co-curate an exhibition for the Federal Reserve building.

“It's a feeling I can't describe; I knew I was going to be an art dealer,” Spoutz, a Cardinal Mooney High School graduate who was born and raised in Mount Clemens, told the newspaper. “It was almost impossible for me to imagine pursuing a career nationally rather than regionally.”

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