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Of the dozen or so runners who had helped Drewe’s scheme bear fruit, Stoakes was the only one charged. The police had found several letters of ownership he’d written to dealers and experts.

During the trial, the two old friends spoke just once. Drewe leaned over to him and said quietly, “I want you to know how sorry I am about this.”

Stoakes had been warned. “Upon advice I will not speak to you,” he said, and then he turned away.

For the next six months they sat side by side in court and never spoke to or looked at each other again.

As the trial was coming to an end, Drewe made a single reference to his former friend. “Daniel’s been brought into a maelstrom not of his own making,” he said.

Stoakes was moved, and for a brief moment thought it was a sign of sympathy, but he knew where he stood with Drewe. “I was like a ripe plum ready to be picked from the tree,” as he put it.

The trial, which had been expected to last three months, had taken nearly six. In his closing argument Bevan argued that Drewe’s scam had undermined art history and Britain’s cultural patrimony. While his main motive had been money, the effort he put into it suggested “an intellectual delight in fooling people, and contempt for experts.” Drewe was an unscrupulous user of people, “a consummate and expert operator in his chosen field,” “a Walter Mitty with a brass neck and criminal backbone [and] an ego the size of the Millennium Dome.” The whole operation “was a waste of a clever, astute, hugely retentive brain,” Bevan said. “He has wasted himself on a lifestyle which has left a trail of victims in its wake.”

Toward the end of the trial Judge Rivlin advised the “long-suffering” jury to stay focused on the evidence. “You are not on a mission to clean up the art world,” he said.

The jury reached a verdict in just five hours: Drewe was found guilty of conspiracy to defraud, forgery, theft, and using a false instrument with intent. He was sentenced to six years in prison.

According to one observer, Drewe muffled a parting comment that sounded as if the “professor” couldn’t believe the jury did not see him as the victim. “The whole art world is corrupt,” he said. “Why pick on me?”

Myatt was convicted of conspiracy to defraud and sentenced to a year.

Daniel Stoakes was acquitted. He told friends that the jury had tempered justice with mercy, that they had measured his humanity in terms of their own experience rather than by the complex arguments presented by the prosecution.

When it was time for Judge Rivlin to sum up the case, Drewe showed little emotion. He leaned slightly forward, his head to one side, and listened quietly.

“You have an extraordinary and alarming talent for manipulating people,” Rivlin told him. “You were able to live very well indeed, and make a donation of £20,000 to the Tate, which I have no doubt was not seen by the Tate as a bribe but it was seen by you as one.” Drewe had “spun gold” from the “expert forgeries and endless lies,” the judge continued. He had targeted the vulnerable, conning his associates and runners.

“Some of these people have also been, to an extent, the victims of your fraud. When they finally turned away from you, you did not hesitate to threaten them.”

Rivlin was easier on Myatt. “You were gradually sucked into the conspiracy when I accept you were vulnerable,” he said.

With that, he congratulated the jury for their “extraordinary attention.” As a reward for their patience, he excused them from jury service for life.

EPILOGUE

The press covered the scam and subsequent trial with unreserved enthusiasm—“The Greatest Art Forgery of the Century!” “A Mix of Kafka and Lewis Carroll!”—and Drewe was already famous by the time he was transported from the courtroom to Pentonville in the back of a sweatbox van in February 1999. Built in North London in 1842, the city’s busiest prison held twelve hundred inmates and several thousand cockroaches. Reform advocates suggested that Pentonville would have been more at home on Hogarth’s Gin Lane