The $80 Million Forgery
How a Queens Housewife Fooled the Art World

About this book:

On a quiet, tree-lined street in Queens, an unassuming immigrant housewife orchestrated the most audacious art fraud in American history. From a modest brick house on 61st Road, Glafira Rosales spun a seductive fantasy: a hidden cache of lost masterpieces by Rothko, Pollock, and de Kooning, smuggled out of the shadows by a mysterious "Mr. X." For fifteen years, the oldest gallery in America—Knoedler & Company—sold these brilliant fictions to billionaires and museums, pocketing $80 million before a single stroke of scientific analysis brought the empire crashing down.

*The $80 Million Forgery* pulls back the velvet rope on a scandal that seduced the art world’s elite, revealing how desperation for "fresh" modernism blinded experts to tea-stained canvases aged with blowtorches in a garage. With the pacing of a thriller and the precision of an investigation, this book traces the conspiracy from a painter’s kitchen table in Woodhaven to the federal courtroom where a 165-year-old institution faced its reckoning. It is a story of genius and greed, where the line between a masterpiece and a fake depends entirely on who is willing to believe.