A sepia photograph shows a woman in a 1920s room with a modernist masterpiece on the wall behind her. Experts authenticate the painting, an auction house sells it for millions, and everyone is happy, except the painting was made a few years earlier, the photo paper was baked to look old, and the woman is the forger’s wife in vintage costume. This episode dissects how Wolfgang Beltracchi built one of the most audacious art scams in modern history, netting an estimated profit north of $100 million.

We start with his upbringing as the son of an art restorer, his teenage Picasso copy, his bohemian drifting, and the crucial insight that he should forge missing works rather than copy existing ones. We break down the mechanics: flea-market canvases scraped clean, hand-ground pigments, oven-baked craquelure, vacuum-cleaner dust, tea-stained Flechtheim gallery labels and the fabricated Werner Jaegers Collection built with his wife Helene. We follow the single lazy mistake, a tube of zinc white containing titanium white, that unraveled everything through Raman spectroscopy, the 2011 plea deal covering 14 paintings worth about $45 million, the open-prison sentences, Steve Martin’s unlucky purchase, the lawsuits against experts like Werner Spies, and Beltracchi’s post-prison reinvention as a celebrity artist in Switzerland.

• Why forging a lost Beatles album beats covering Hey Jude: filling gaps in old exhibition catalogs
• How a 1920s box camera and shallow depth of field made a staged provenance photo convincing
• The glaring timeline problem experts ignored: a teenage Nazi buying avant-garde art from a persecuted dealer
• You can forge a feeling and a style but not a molecule: the titanium white that ended it all
• What the scandal changed about authentication and the looming threat of AI-generated provenance