A death in the family, he would say.
A medical emergency.
A business trip to America.
He claimed to be working on all manner of extraordinary military inventions. He filed for “technical patents” having to do with improvements to propulsion methods through the use of a spinning disk and a substitute for the liquids used in hydraulic machines. He was looking into remote-powered surveillance vehicles the size of insects. He claimed to have received funding from an American source and was conferring with the head of procurement for the U.S. Defense Department. No matter that this self-described avant-garde agitator, child of the father of the atom bomb, and doctor emeritus of all things had spent years in police custody. He was determined to make his mark on America. He was heading across the pond, to Langley and beyond. He had places to be, people to meet, many men to see.
Drewe’s fifteen-year disappearance from the official record from the late 1960s to the early 1980s still puzzled his erstwhile pursuers. He had come out of the blue and conducted a sophisticated nine-year-long scam, but there was no record of his earlier activities. Even after the case was closed, some police officers wondered what he might have been up to. He had managed to elude the public record: There was no evidence of prior mischief; no link to other crimes; no medical, tax, or formal employment records.
Miki Volpe managed to track down Drewe’s mysterious “sugar daddy,” John Catch, the wealthy patron at the Atomic Energy Authority whose art collection Drewe claimed he was going to inherit. Catch had never collected art, as it turned out, and Volpe discovered that all records of John Cockett, as Drewe was known then, had disappeared from the AEA. Catch, of course, was surprised to learn that he’d been at the center of an art scam—less so when he learned it had been run by his former protégé, who in the early 1990s had tried to use his name as a reference on a résumé Catch knew was filled with fabrications.
In 2000, a bizarre story appeared in the Mail on Sunday suggesting that there had been a connection between Drewe and the “secret world,” a possibility the police had never entirely discounted. The Mail reported that MI5 had played a practical joke on Drewe by using his home address as a front to register dozens of cars used for tracking foreign agents. According to the report, the intelligence services had targeted Drewe as payback for his public insistence that his crimes were committed at their behest. The story emerged after police traced a suspicious vehicle to Drewe’s address, whereupon he revealed that his family had been receiving letters addressed to the front company for years. Drewe later claimed he had unwittingly provided “business services” to MI5, and demanded payment from its director-general, Stephen Lander.
After Drewe’s release, those who had brushed up against him seemed incapable of separating fact from fiction. They believed he still had them under surveillance and that he would attempt to harm them. They advised others to keep their distance.
“Don’t give him any personal information,” warned a former friend. “Tell him lies. He can get in your head if he knows any little thing about you.”
Other acquaintances cautioned reporters to be on their toes, not to sign anything in Drewe’s presence, not to leave signed documents anywhere near him. Everyone who had ever dealt with him had taken a turn for the worse, they said. He was Hannibal Lecter with a ballpoint pen and a paintbrush.
There is no doubt that Drewe was a convincing and accomplished fabricator. Many of his interrogators, though they were not mental health professionals, considered him to fit the description of a pathological liar. Pathological liars are sometimes referred to as “folded,” emotionally “enveloped” by their imagined selves, and thus
“origamists,” from the Japanese word for folded paper birds and animals. The origamist reflects a childhood deficit, say psychologists. If he goes unnoticed by his parents—if he is neither rewarded nor loved—he can “become” someone else in order to seek the attention and praise that has been denied him.
Some psychologists believe that pathological liars cannot help themselves, that they have an uncontrollable impulse to deceive. Their lies simply tumble out. They connect ideas on the run and assemble disparate whoppers to produce a believable whole. Con artists and habitual liars, with their inconsistent stories about their education and family background, are also apt to be expert mind readers, with a special understanding of the psychological vulnerabilities of others. They are able to suppress and regulate their emotions and successfully mask their own nervousness. Many of these counterfeit personalities also possess exaggerated verbal skills and can lie without inhibition. Often, they have at least one other trait in common: They hold a grudge against the establishment.
There is some evidence that pathological lying is genetic and can be passed on from one generation to the next. In a study published in 1995 in the British Journal of Psychiatry, scientists interviewed 108 employees of a temp agency and asked them about their employment and family history. After thoroughly checking their backgrounds, the investigators discovered that 12 of the 108 interviewees had made up much of their professional and personal histories and admitted to lying habitually. After the dissembling dozen agreed to have their brains scanned, it was discovered that their prefrontal cortexes contained 25 percent more white matter than the average person’s. The white matter serves as the brain’s routing system, and according to the study, this extra measure of connective circuitry partially explains the liar’s ability to confabulate convincingly, to tell tall tales without stumbling, and to seamlessly rattle out an imaginary narrative.37
Drewe’s brain would have been a gift to any forensic pathologist. Volpe and Searle often marveled at the sheer volume of myth and confetti he’d managed to scatter behind him. For a long time, whenever they felt overwhelmed by the long evidentiary trail, they would repeat the mantra “Keep it simple,” which served as a reminder that his massive constructs were but a series of sordid criminal transgressions, cons within cons. He had left behind him a trail so long and twisted that no one would ever be able to chart every curve and cul-de-sac. It was all a charade, wasn’t it? Charlatan’s debris, random bursts of lightning intended to guide the victim’s eye away from the hand.
Years after the case the detectives would come across bits of data that still didn’t compute, and they would file these away, along with the other irritants and intangibles that had lodged in their memories. They would express both annoyance and admiration, for Drewe had been able to juggle a dozen outrageous constructs at the same time, all the while staying several steps ahead of them. He had damaged the reputations of a good number of upstanding citizens (many of whom should have known better), and he had left dozens of victims in his wake, some of whom would try, and fail, to make sense of it all. The case of one possible victim—the young Hungarian woman who perished in the boardinghouse fire—remains open. Unless there is new evidence, it is unlikely that it will ever be “closed,” especially to the satisfaction of police detective Higgs.
Questions also remained about a possible second forger. Myatt repeatedly told police he had nothing to do with Rene Gimpel’s 1938 “Nicholson” watercolor and at least three other paintings. How many forgers and fakes were still in the wind?
A decade after Drewe’s trial, the Art and Antiques Squad was reduced in size once more. Faced with the prospect of being shut down entirely, a new squad leader came up with a new idea—to recruit curators and art historians who would serve as “special constables” and have the power to make arrests. The Yard promised that officers from this newly formed division, dubbed Art Beat, would be ready to patrol London’s art scene by 2007.
The new squad leader did not give up. He carried on with his plan by recruiting volunteer Art Beat constables from the V&A and the British Museum and giving them four weeks’ training in police procedure. He had special uniforms made up and put the new constables to work patrolling the antiques markets in Bermondsey and the gallery areas of Kensington Church Street, Bond Street, and Camden Passage
.
Art crime continued to rise. The Art Loss Register, a comprehensive international database, reported that art forgery was costing the market some £200 million annually in the United Kingdom alone, the world’s second-largest art market. Hundreds of collectors remained oblivious to the fact that their “masterpieces” were worthless fakes. The ALR had retrieved several thousand forgeries, but because British police were forbidden to destroy them, unlike their counterparts in France and Belgium, known fakes often reentered the market.
At the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Art Squad put together an exhibition on art forgery. The show featured Drewe and Myatt’s tools and products, including forged paintings, typewriters, and phony rubber stamps. Drewe’s equipment was bequeathed to Scotland Yard’s infamous Crime Museum, where it was awarded a spot not far from Jack the Ripper’s display and the hangman’s noose.
Mary Lisa Palmer, the director of the Giacometti Association, spent the years after Drewe’s trial in bitter legal skirmishes with French officials to have Annette Giacometti’s will respected and the association transformed into a foundation. In 2001, the French courts ordered that the catalogue raisonné documents in the association’s hands be taken away, and then had the association’s bank accounts blocked. Nevertheless, Palmer and her husband, François Chaussende, whom Annette had appointed assistant director in 1990, continued to work without pay for the next eighteen months.
In December 2003, the government formed its own Giacometti Foundation, and inherited all the works in Annette’s estate. The foundation filed multiple court proceedings in an attempt to dissolve the association, and tried without success to seize the Cour de Rohan building, which Annette had designated as the headquarters for the foundation she had desired. Palmer and the association successfully fought off every attempt by the foundation to shut it down, and is suing France in the European Court of Human Rights.
The foundation was seen by some as a commercial enterprise rather than an entity devoted to protecting and promoting the artist’s work. In 2006, the foundation hired the prominent Gagosian Gallery in New York to sell posthumously created sculptures and prints. Critics said the sales would cheapen Giacometti’s work and provide forgers ample room to ply their trade.
Meanwhile Palmer and her husband continued with the work of the association by authenticating Giacometti paintings and sculptures, tracking forgeries, and working on the decisive catalogue raisonné.
In retrospect, she believes that if Sotheby’s had been able to send the Footless Woman to Paris after it was pulled from auction in 1991, it could have been seized by police, an investigation launched, and Drewe’s scheme possibly derailed.
Batsheva Goudsmid’s troubles did not end with Drewe’s conviction. She fought both him and the government in court over the proceeds of the sale of the house on Rotherwick Road. She spent months proving that even though Drewe had been coregistered on the mortgage, she alone had bought and largely maintained the house, which could therefore not be confiscated as part of Drewe’s assets. The Crown finally agreed that Goudsmid owned the house and withdrew from the case, but Drewe continued to fight her, asserting that she had forged his signature and had used phony documents to present her case. The judge threw out his claim, saying that Drewe was “not someone on whose uncorroborated evidence I could place any reliance,” and remarking on the irony and gall of a convicted “master forger” protesting that his signature had been counterfeited. Several months later Goudsmid was hit with a lawsuit from Drewe’s mother, who said she had loaned Goudsmid money and was never paid back. This suit too was thrown out.
Goudsmid never returned to work. After Drewe won initial custody of the children, she could hardly work and fight him in court at the same time. The protracted battle had left its mark. Though she tried not to think about the past, she kept boxes filled with legal transcripts and documents from the Drewe wars. She’d been through horrendous years with this man and she had lost a great deal. At least she emerged with one thing intact: Neither the police nor anyone else could ever say she’d done anything but tell the truth.
Daniel Stoakes felt similarly. He often recalled how Drewe tried to reach out to him toward the end of the trial and how he had turned away from his old friend because he felt used and heartbroken. Several years later, after it was all over, he picked up the phone and heard Drewe on the other end. He shuddered and pulled the receiver away from his ear, as if a caterpillar had crawled out of it. Then he hung up.
Miki Volpe was transferred to the Intelligence division—“Now isn’t that ironic?” he said—and moved to a quiet village outside London, where he set up house with a female officer from the homicide squad. Bumblebees gathered around the roses in their backyard, where he planted a creeping vine and set up an old Chinese wrought-iron stove that kept a section of the garden warm after sunset. He spent his autumn evenings there, reading and smoking his calabash pipe. When his retirement came through, he watched the civilians walking to the train station and thought, “Poor sods!” He later moved to Spain.
Jonathan Searle retired from the force and moved as far away from London as he could without entirely vanishing. Now he spends much of his time restoring works of art. He loves the smell of paint and varnish and cedar, and can’t think of a worse topic to talk about than John Drewe.
After the con was exposed, an intense process of reverse screening took place on both sides of the Atlantic. Librarians went through their stacks, archivists scoured databases, curators lined up their collections to examine and cross-reference provenances. Drewe had left his mark on the system, a visible hairline crack. Skeptics said the damaged archives would never regain their original pristine state, and that the records had been forever altered.
The Tate pulled its socks up and opened a brand-new research room with state-of-the-art technology and tighter restrictions. Staffers were trained to examine everything that went in and out. Librarians kept watch over the researchers as surveillance cameras scanned the room. The Hanover Gallery archives now included a prominent warning from the police department directed at future researchers: “This documentation may have been compromised.”
John Myatt too was famous when he arrived at Brixton Prison after the trial. In the reception area, which smelled of carbolic soap and soiled clothes, he was strip-searched, measured, weighed, and photographed. Prisoners in flip-flops, vests, and baggy trousers loitered at the top of the stairs with their towels slung over their shoulders. In the hexagonal administration block at the heart of the jail, the clock had stopped.
Myatt had been warned about the filth and monotony of prison life. The director-general of the prison service himself had referred to Brixton as a “hellhole.” Inmates sometimes spent twenty-two hours a day in their cells, and three quarters of the eight-hundred-strong population had reading and writing skills below those of the average eleven-year-old.
Myatt’s blockmates nicknamed him “Picasso,” and soon he was doing portraits of them in exchange for phone cards. He painted a picture of a notorious rapist who had been “chemically castrated,” and another of one of the prison wings, which he had to sketch on the sly to avoid the security cameras. Another showed the inside of an inmate’s cell with a lewd portrait on the wall.
In his own cell, behind the coils of razor wire and the blackened brickwork of the drab Victorian building, Myatt’s belief in the power of prayer flourished. He felt a constant and comforting link to his church and his community. He knew that back in Sugnall his reputation remained intact, and that the townsfolk held church vigils for him and prayed for his well-being and swift return. As a homecoming surprise, they had begun to refurbish his kitchen. Early mornings in his cell, before he opened his eyes, he imagined himself back on the farm.
In June 1999, after serving just four months of his one-year sentence—a stint his fellow prisoners called “a shit and a shave”—Myatt was sprung for good behavior. As he left he swore that he would never paint again, and that if he ever made any money, h
e’d give it to his church.
The day after he got out he received a cheerful and unexpected call from Searle, who wanted to know about his future plans. Myatt told him that he was putting his paints away for good.
“Big mistake,” said the detective. “You have a God-given talent. You know, you could still make a living off it.” He asked whether Myatt would be willing to paint a portrait of his family. Myatt said he’d think about it.
Myatt was nearly broke. Most of the £100,000 he’d earned from Drewe had already been spent on the kids, who were in boarding school, and he’d given a good deal to the church and the Salvation Army. The £18,000 he had when he was caught had been handed over to the police. Over the next few days he reapplied for his old teaching job and began conducting the church choir. He joined a small, dedicated chorale that specialized in medieval music, and every so often he played piano for them. He was ill at ease without a paintbrush in his hand, but he reminded himself that he’d been given a second chance and had vowed never to return to his old ways.
Then, Searle called again. “I’ll pay you five thousand pounds for the portrait,” he offered.
The thought of making money legally by painting appealed to Myatt. It was also a relief: Giving up painting was a promise he knew would be difficult to keep, like a smoker who claims he’s going to quit for good.
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