
Starting in 1990, New York art dealer Ely Sakhai created an ingenious and audacious system to sell multiple forged copies of paintings by such greats as Chagall, Renoir, Modigliani, Monet, Rembrandt and others. After unloading his forgeries on the unsuspecting Asian market for hundreds of thousands of dollars a pop, he then turned around and sold the original paintings to the savvy dealers in New York . Sakhai kept his operation invisible for a staggering fourteen years, and made himself over 10 million dollars in the process.