Crimes of Paris_ A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection - Dorothy Hoobler [156]
Decker had crossed paths with Valfierno in a number of exotic places and had developed a friendship “based upon the fact that he was one of the few I have known who never bored me.” Decker had just returned from a three-month trip to the interior of Morocco and was unaware that a month before, the police had arrested Vincenzo Perugia and recovered the Mona Lisa. The marquis spoke of him as “that simp who helped us get the Mona Lisa,” and of course Decker’s curiosity was aroused. 2
Valfierno made the journalist promise not to publish the story until he gave permission or died. It was the latter event that allowed Decker to reveal what he had been told. Valfierno began by saying that the operation had been several years in the planning. He reminded Decker that in Buenos Aires, the marquis had made a small fortune selling fake artworks that his partner, a Frenchman named Yves Chaudron, turned out. Scanning the newspapers for obituaries of wealthy men, the distinguished-looking Valfierno would approach the widow to ask if she would like to donate a painting to her church as a memorial. At the time, Chaudron specialized in painting fake Murillos — skillfully imitating the seventeenth-century Spanish painter who was famous for his religious scenes — and these were passed off to the widows as genuine.
Valfierno felt that he was performing a civic service. “A forged painting so cleverly executed as to puzzle experts is as valuable an addition to the art wealth of the world as the original,” he said. “The aesthetic impression created is the same, and it is only the picture dealer, always a creature of commerce… who is really hurt when an imitation is discovered.… If the beauty be there in the picture, why cavil at the method by which it was obtained?” 3
The duo graduated from bilking widows to selling copies of Murillos that they claimed were stolen. Buyers were fooled into thinking that a genuine Murillo, hanging in a church or gallery, was in fact a fake placed there after the original had been filched.
Eventually, “filthy with money,” Valfierno and Chaudron felt that the game was getting old, and they sailed for Paris, where, Valfierno said, “Thousands of Corots, Millets, even Titians and Murillos, were being sold in the city every year, all of them fakes, but from my [point of view] this trade seemed cheap and unworthy.” 4 He added people to his organization, including an American who was well connected socially. This time, the marquis was more selective in choosing those he wished to fleece, concentrating on wealthy Americans — by nature, more gullible than Europeans — who could pay highly for “masterpieces” that had supposedly been stolen from the Louvre.
Unlike Géry Pieret, who actually stole the Iberian heads he sold to Picasso, the marquis and his gang “never took anything from the Louvre. We didn’t have to. We sold our cleverly executed copies, and… sent [the buyers] forged documents [that] told of the mysterious disappearance from the Louvre of some gem of painting or world-envied objet d’art.… The documents always stated that in order to avoid scandal a copy had been temporarily substituted by the museum authorities.” 5
Eventually, the marquis peddled the ultimate prize: the Mona Lisa itself, in June 1910. Not the genuine article, but a Chaudron-made copy, along with forged official papers that convinced the buyer (an American millionaire) that in order to cover the theft, Louvre officials had hung a copy in the Salon Carré. The buyer, unfortunately, was a little too free in bragging about his new acquisition, and that