A local entered a guilty plea before Pennsylvania District Court Judge Jeffrey L. Schmehl on May 29 and admitted to selling falsely attributed works of Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, and other prominent artists.
77-year-old Carter Reese, a resident of Reading, was found guilty of one count of wire fraud and one count of mail fraud for an art forgery trail active between February 2019 and March 2021. The forger misrepresented works of some of the most celebrated modern and contemporary painters, mostly who have an eight or nine-figure auction record. The painters who were on the list of Reese include Francis Bacon, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jean Cocteau, Keith Haring, Fernand Léger, Roy Lichtenstein, Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, and others. As per the Department of Justice, “Reese knew that the pieces were fake and had not been created by those artists.”
More information, reported by the Philadelphia Inquirer, about the miscreant discloses that he was a Harvard graduate who worked at Pottstown’s Hill School as a fine arts and History teacher and later was promoted to the director of admissions. The report even mentions that Reese and his wife shared the neighborhood with Taylor Swift in Wyomissing before she moved to Nashville. He was an avid collector of toys, Oriental rugs, and furniture, among other objects and the total value of this collection stands at $6 Million as per the court documents.
Carter Reese is scheduled to be sentenced on September 12 and can face a maximum possible term of 40 years in prison. The case was investigated by the FBI’s Art Crime Team assigned to the Philadelphia and Miami field officers and is being prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorneys Ruth Mandelbaum and Jason Grenell.
Featured Image: Pennsylvania District Court; Jeffrey M. Vinocur, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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