A Pennsylvania man pled guilty on May 29 to selling works falsely attributed to Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, and other notable artists.
According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, the man, 77-year-old Carter Reese, of Reading, was charged with one count of wire fraud and one count of mail fraud for an alleged art forgery scheme active between February 2019 and March 2021. He was accused of misrepresenting artworks as genuine creations from some of the most decorated names in modern and contemporary art, including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Roy Lichtenstein, Keith Haring, Fernand Léger, and Francis Bacon—all of whom have eight- or nine-figure auction records.
The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that the Harvard-educated Reese worked at Pottstown’s Hill School as a fine arts and history teacher and later as director of admissions. (The article added that Reese and his wife were old neighbored with Taylor Swift in Wyomissing before she moved to Nashville.) He was an avid antiques collector, with a collection that held some 17,000 toys, Oriental rugs, and furniture, among other objects. In court documents, he claimed the collection had a total value of more than $6 million.
The forgery scheme was discovered through a joint investigation by members of the FBI’s Art Crime Team working in Philadelphia and Miami, and is being prosecuted Assistant United States Attorneys Ruth Mandelbaum and Jason Grenell. Reese is set to be sentenced on September 12 and faces a potential 40-year prison term.