(wind blows) (waves crash)
(tense music)
Narrator: What happens in the mind of con artists?
What makes their brain so well equipped
for psychological trickery?
Is it greed?
A lack of empathy?
Loose morals?
Whatever it is, we are fascinated by con artists.
Male Reporter: Shaun Greenhalgh from Bolton, England
produced a large number of art forgeries
over a period of more than two decades.
Female Reporter: Aided by some members of his family,
Shaun successfully sold his forgeries to museums,
auction houses, and private buyers.
Male Reporter: The Greenhalgh family fooled experts
from all over the world -: Sold.
Narrator: by claiming they had found
or inherited extremely valuable works of art.
Female Reporter: The Greenhalgh family
lived a modest life in a Bolton council house.
Male Reporter: His work has even been admired
by some very high-profile art collectors
and was even seen by the queen.
Male Reporter: According to Scotland Yard,
the family produced more than 100 fake artworks.
It fears that a lot of their forgeries are still out there,
mislabeled as originals.
Female Reporter: He was eventually caught
and sentenced to four and a half years in prison.
(tires crunch in snow) (soft tense music)
Narrator: We've all been lied to.
We've all been offered something
that is just too good to be true, and still, we fell for it.
Although we love a good con,
we hate it when it happens to us.
To find out how to resist the manipulation,
we invited some of the greatest con artists
to our institute.
Together with a team of experts,
we are going to analyze their stories, pick their brains,
and reveal what their body language tells us.
(heels clack)
Welcome to the institute.
-: Hello, Mr. Greenhalgh. -: Hello.
-: How do you do? -: Okay, thank you.
-: Shall we?
(heels clack)
-: Hello. -: Hello.
Hi, Shaun. -: Hello.
-: Hello.
-: So let me introduce myself.
I'm Kerry Daynes,
and I'm a consultant forensic psychologist,
and I'm particularly interested in the childhoods
and social histories of people who break the law.
-: Okay. -: My name's Mark Frank.
I'm a professor of behavioral science,
and so we study people how they behave and what they do
and in particular, how the things that you do on the outside
may reveal what's going on on the inside
and try to understand as well just how you process
and think and deal with your world as best we can.
-: I'm Moran Cerf, a professor of neuroscience,
and I wanna understand how the things
that are inside affect the things that are outside.
So I'm gonna look at your brain and try to understand
how your thoughts influence your decisions
and your responses to things.
Kerry: So how do you feel about all of that?
-: A bit intimidated. -: Yeah.
-: A bit like a goldfish in a bowl, but-
-: Well look, the last thing that we want
is for you to feel like a lab rat.
But that said, we are going to ask you to take part
in a number of interviews and assessments.
-: Yeah. That's fair enough. -: Yeah?
And we're definitely not here to diagnose you.
It really is just a process of trying
to understand your psychology -: Understand, yeah,
-: better. -: Of course, of course.
-: Okay. So for now, familiarize yourself with the institute.
Shaun: Will do.
-: All right, then. -: Okay.
-: Okay, see you soon. -: Okay. See you later.
-: You will indeed. -: Okay. Bye bye.
Kerry: Bye bye.
(dramatic music)
(heels clack)
Hello. -: Hello.
-: Have you had a few moments to relax
and gather your thoughts? -: Yeah.
Some contemplative thoughts. -: Yeah? Good.
Well, this is your opportunity to tell me your story.
-: Okay. -: So when
did you sell your first out and out forgery?
-: I think it was 17 Or 18. I can't exactly remember.
I went into the library, which I frequented often,
and this lady there was taking all these fly sheets off,
and I noticed a pile of them on the table.
Some of them were watermark dated like 1850s,
so I took them, rolled the whole bundle up.
I thought, "I'd ought to try Degas," just simple ones.
So I scribbled about five or six off. I always do that.
I do five or six quickly to get the spontaneity to them
'cause if you drag it out,
the experts can see it right away.
They've gotta spontaneous.
-: Well, you can't have possibly been thinking that at 17,
could you? -: Yeah.
-: The experts would be able to
-: Yeah, yeah.
I was I'd like studied art,
and I knew about spontaneity in work
that the originals have the spontaneity.
So anyway, I needed old paper. I needed spontaneity.
I went through a list in my head
of what I'd need for a fake.
So I bashed about half a dozen.
I've looked through them with a critical eye to say,
"Well, I think that one's the best."
I took it into this art dealer,
really nervous and terrified.
Experts can tell when it's like 100 years old.
They can tell like that. It's a difficult thing to get.
So I was quite, quite nervous and frightened.
I thought he'd spot it right away.
If he goes out and rings the police,
I thought I've got a vision about jumping out the window
and running up the street away from it all.
Got it in my mind.
Anyway, he came in and had a look at it as usual,
put it up on the easel and stood back back and this and that
then eventually took it out to its frame.
The he was cutting it with his pen knife.
He said, "This has been in its frame for 1,800 years."
Anyway, in the end, he gave me a piece of paper
for receiving and ended up in a sale in London.
I sold to a dealer.
I thought that's the end of it,
but the dealer passes it on to a collector,
and there are the injured innocent party in all of this.
I think a lot of the time they knew they were fakes,
but with the other eye,
they knew they were good enough to pass off.
-: So it seems to me
that you felt a little conflict about that.
You didn't feel you- -: Yeah,
I always felt conflicted over it.
Sometimes I think, "I shouldn't be doing this.
I think, "Well, they they're doing it to others."
I know two wrongs don't make a right. I know that.
My mum drilled that into me when I was a little boy.
"Two wrongs never make a right."
But I am a bit conflicted. I think I always have been.
-: It seems to me that he's not enjoying this con
at this stage at all.
-: There is a fear of judging him as an artist
and this angst that he's had with his life about that,
and he has also mentioned the fear
of getting away with this stuff, right?
"Are they going to believe me?" He talked about it.
"I just think they would send me out.
I'm getting ready to run. They're gonna call the police."
And then when they didn't,
and then you've got somebody who is coming in here.
He is on pretty high alert.
So his emotional system is running pretty high,
and so these expressions are popping out as he's talking
about these very critical moments,
but we'll just focus on a few. -: So it's a deeply
uncomfortable interview for him, isn't it?
-: It is.
If we go backwards,
if you look at his eyebrows here,
to pull up and together like this is what we see in fear,
and there's a little bit of a stretch
in the mouth, too, in this muscle here,
which is part of an uninhibited fear face.
And just as a general comment about the interview itself,
he's nervous.
His right hand the entire time,
and if you've been on airplanes
and people who are afraid of flying,
they have this death grip on the chair,
-: White knuckle tight. -: Yeah.
He's white knuckled on the right.
All the way throughout this, except for certain points,
when he gets engaged in something,
then that hand will come off and move.
But normally, it's down there.
-: This environment is so stressful for him though, isn't it?
At the institute, he's under such a level of scrutiny,
which, for somebody who is, he's not the gravitate
to the limelight type like we've seen.
He is very, self contained shy, introverted,
and you've got us analyzing him to this degree.
I think I'd be terrified as well.
(tense brooding music) (wind blows)
(tense music)
-: EEG is a tool to measure brain activity.
It looks like a swim cap. It has electrodes on it.
You put on your surface of the head,
and it listens to brain cells deep inside.
Perfect. Make yourself comfortable.
Does it poke to much into your skull?
-: No, it's fine. -: We run an experiment
that's known as the choice lightness experiment,
and it goes like this.
You will see two pictures of two women,
and we ask you, "Who do you find more attractive?"
-: Right one.
-: And now it ask you to think in your mind
why you chose this particular picture.
-: I thought it a prettier image.
Computer: Trial 10.
-: Again, a prettier visage, I think.
-: You make a choice, you explain it, you move on.
You did it a hundred times.
-: And again, difficult to choose between the two,
so I wasn't sure.
But there's a trick here,
and the trick makes it interesting.
The trick is that every now and then,
if he chose the card on the left,
I give him the card on the right, the card he didn't pick.
He is confronted with a choice that he did not make,
but he thinks I gave him the one he asked for.
When I asked him to explain his choice,
he either is to tell me, "This isn't my choice.
I don't know what happened here. It's a different card."
Or he has to come up on the spot with a creative answer
to a choice he didn't make that would actually assume
that it is his choice.
-: I think there's slightly a happier face on the other one,
but I may have got this the wrong way around.
-: He chose A, he gets B, and he says,
"I like B because the smile is great."
For that to happen in his brain,
first, when the choice was in front of him,
he had to use a part of the brain,
the frontal lobe, to actually make a decision.
Computer: Trial 27.
-: Serious but pleasant looking, I think.
-: And then we look at his brain and see how fast, how good,
and how unique is he in coming up with a story
that explains something he didn't make
as if it was his choice.
So in some trials, you saw two pictures,
you made a choice, and then I showed you the other one,
the one you didn't choose.
-: Occasionally, I thought, "That isn't the one I chose."
-: Why didn't you say that? -: Well, I didn't like to say,
but I think I should've done as part of the trial.
-: But whatever it is, either he's a very nice person
who didn't wanna offend me so he changed reality just
to make my life easier.
He said, "I'm not gonna upset this guy,
so I'm gonna just make up a story."
-: And yet he tends to think he's fairly inscrutable,
but yet there were lots and lots and lots of emotions
that we see with him and more so than almost anybody else.
-: Either way, he is good in coming up with stories,
and that's manipulation that, in the brain,
requires mental gymnastics to change reality,
and it does that extremely fast as well.
And then when you look at the brain itself,
you can see which areas of the brain are the ones doing that
and how fast they operate, and in that sense,
I think the results that I find were interesting
in that it takes him a lot less time than you and I.
(soft tense music)
-: How did your father become involved in your art dealings?
-: So I remember my dad retired. He hated retirement.
He asked me what I was doing.
I said, "I'm going off to London selling a painting."
I didn't say it was a fake at the time.
-: You didn't? And this was a Samuel Peploe fake?
-: Yes, and he said, "Can I come with you?"
It's a long one, so I said, "Yeah, okay." Then we got there.
He said, "I think I know what you're up to, Shaun."
I came clean with him then in the car.
We talked for an hour.
Kerry: This conversation that you had
in the car for an hour,
-: Yeah. -: what was it?
-: He just came out with it.
He said, "Are you selling fakes?"
So I just told him. I said, "Yeah, Dad, I'm selling fakes.
What do you think about it?"
I think his response was he just smiled at me
and grinned and said,
"I thought you were up to that, you little bugger."
And my dad said, "Could I take this picture?"
He seemed to be very convincing.
-: Do you think that he understood the gravity, actually,
of what you were doing in terms of the consequences
-: Yeah. -: legally?
-: Yeah, I think he did.
-: Was there a conversation about,
"Right, this is how you do the deal
and this is how you make it convincing"?
-: The only thing I said to my dad, I said,
"Say to the dealer, 'Could you tell me what this is,
and would you be interested in buying it?'
And leave the lead with them."
Anyway, he took it,
and I always carried a little Sony recorder,
put in in my pocket.
It was recording the conversation.
I'd put it in for him just so I
could hear what the dealer was talking about.
-: Why didn't you just have one on your person?
-: It was my way of keeping a record of the deals,
just a pocket recorder, and I can like go back
and see what they were talking about.
-: Early to mid 90s, I was contacted
at Scotland yard where I set up the art squad
by an art dealer called Peter Nahum.
He had been approached by a guy
who had been driven to London by their 40 year,
40-ish-year-old son, and so they were selling the painting.
And Peter had looked at it. He thought it was a good Peploe.
At the time, the paintings were selling
for 30 to 40,000 pounds,
and he paid them roundabout 10,000 for it
and gave them part cash and wrote out a check
for the rest of the money, the lion's share of the money.
-: If something has a good provenance, then it sells.
If there's a plausible provenance,
I think the experts stop looking.
They stop looking at the real thing.
That's the only way I can describe the way some
of the stuff I'd made that
should never have got through, got through.
-: Provenance is really important in an artwork
because it's the background, the storyline that tells you
how the artwork got to where it is now.
So it's when it was painted, who painted it,
but more importantly, who's owned it and where it's been.
-: Peter contacted the Peploe expert,
who was a guy called Tom Hewlett.
Tom had laughed when he heard that Peter
had bought this painting because he, too,
had been offered this picture.
To Tom, it clearly was not by the hand of Peploe.
Tom had then checked out the gallery,
the label on the back of this painting purporting
to be from this gallery in Edinburgh,
and this is one of the ways when you see.
You always wanna look at the back of a painting,
exhibition labels, dealers' labels.
They help prove and build up a provenance of the painting,
the history of it.
And Tom had checked out the gallery
and found that, actually, the street numbers
didn't even go up as high as this was claiming,
and the art gallery had never existed.
So he was certain in his mind that this
was a fake and an attempted deception.
(soft ethereal music)
-: Shaun, thanks for being willing
to take a few of these assessments for us.
-: Okay.
-: The first test we're going to show you
are a series of videos.
They're about one minute long and they feature people
who are lying or telling the truth
about a strongly held opinion.
Your job is to watch the one-minute video when it pops up
and then circle on the form here the word truth
if you thought they were telling the truth
and lie if you think they were lying.
-: [Interviewer On Video] And what is your opinion
on this issue?
-: Should cold-blooded murderers be killed?
I believe they should be.
(muffled speaking)
-: I think I base it on eye for eye, tooth for tooth,
and I feel that it's justice.
-: [Interviewer On Video] What is your opinion?
-: They should be killed, should be executed.
I personally couldn't partake in that decision,
and I wouldn't have an active part saying, "Yes."
Man On Video: I feel that cold-blooded murderers
should be executed.
-: [Interviewer On Video] And why do you believe
what you do on this issue? -: Because they do not
have the right to take another person's life.
Mark: Okay, very good.
-: Some of them were hard to, close calls.
-: Yep, there's always be an element of that.
Now just to give you a little bit more detail,
there's often lots of subtle behaviors
that occur when people lie or tell the truth,
and some people are really good at perceiving that.
Others are not, and those who are good
at that often do a little better job navigating their worlds
or just reading people in general.
So that test is a bit of a proxy
for your ability to do that.
So we'll assess it and see what's coming up on that.
(contemplative music) (water trickles)
-: He's talented in coming up with a story,
and I think his con artistry was partially the ability
to do the sculptures and the painting and so on,
but partially, coming up with a story.
He was fast to read a story my test.
His brain manifested at the speed
by which he is able to do that
and the ease by which you can do that,
and I think that it's nice
to get the validation of the brain.
-: He's researched, hasn't he,
and refined his techniques developed his techniques,
and I think that he's been open,
but yet we've still seen a level of minimization
in terms of distancing himself from telling the lies.
He prefers to portray himself as somebody
who simply just didn't tell the truth,
but, of course, there was more to it than that.
-: A lie of omission is still a lie,
but most people don't consider them lies,
and he's the same way, just like everybody else.
"Well, I just asked them what it was.
I didn't say it was an ancient this,
that, or the other thing."
(tense music)
-: How is it going for you, Mr. Greenhalgh?
-: I've been here a couple of days,
and it's quite an eye opener, actually,
a scientist looking into my, I suppose,
psyche, would call it, (indistinct).
It's been an interesting few days,
more interesting than I expected.
I thought I was here just for a few interviews,
but there's been a bit more than that.
(waves crash in distance)
-: Tell me about your childhood. Who was in your family?
-: My mum and dad,
and I'm like the fifth of six surviving children.
-: Were other people in your family artistic?
-: Not particularly.
My mum was quite good at baking and needlework
and all that kind of stuff,
but my dad was really good at art,
but he wasn't interested in it.
He had a wonderful drawing hand,
and I think it was his showing me how to draw
and holding my hand and doing these wonderful drawings
with my childish hand that fired my enthusiasm.
A tiny little boy.
My dad picking me up and sitting me on his knee,
and he would get a piece of paper and hold my hand around
and show me how to hold the pencil, so he'd hold it,
and then away we'd go all with his stroke mind
was just like this.
He'd draw birds and fish and all kinds of nature things.
I can remember like this sense.
I was like, "Wow, they just appear in front of me."
Very realistic.
I couldn't draw myself anything like that at that age,
not until I was probably eight or nine years old,
but I can remember being really,
really impressed with the images.
How did they appear from nothing?
-: Okay, and how did it develop?
-: I just like to do my own thing,
so I never did art in class at school.
-: Oh, I'm sure people must've started
to notice that you had this ability.
Were you pushed in any particular direction?
-: No, my mum and dad didn't believe in pushing me.
My mum always hoped that I
would go on to further education, actually.
She wasn't really keen on my art.
She said she'd prefer me in some academic role.
So I think it was a bit of a disappointment to her.
-: What did you want to do? What was your dream?
-: This art obsession came into me.
Well, it was there all the time,
but it got stronger and stronger every year.
And not that I wanted to particularly be an artist.
I just interested in art and the manufacturer of art,
not so much the cerebral side of it,
more like the manufacturing side of it.
I'd look at something and say, "Well, how was that made?"
-: You also have some holidays abroad,
which really influenced you. -: Yes.
-: Can you tell us about that?
-: Well, I went to Rome with my dad.
That was a massive eye opener to me.
I went again later when I was about 15.
So I'd be about 15 when I was independently walking
around Rome and looking at art, just blown away by it.
-: Well, it's a beautiful place.
It's an amazing place. Where did you go to?
-: Oh, where did I not go? I just didn't have time.
There was just so much I wanted to see.
-: And what in particular blew you away?
-: Michelangelo's sculptures.
I believe I read somewhere that he made that
when he was 21 or 22 years old.
I couldn't believe that it was made by one man at that age.
Even at any age, it'd probably take me,
I don't know, maybe two years' work.
And even then, I'd be struggling,
probably with the team to help me
to polish it and finish it.
-: But you're comparing yourself to-
-: I know, but what I've always thought with these people,
they're a man or a woman.
They've got two eyes, two hands,
and what passes for a brain.
I think, "Well," and this has always fascinated me,
"if they could do it, why can't I or anybody else?"
-: Did you feel inspired to make something similar?
-: When I got back, I felt massively deflated
because it's like seeing all this art in books.
I'd seen it as a little boy but didn't really register
what kind of, what would you say?
I didn't reckon it being out there. I just thought, "Wow."
I thought he was a pretty good artist at the time
before I went because I could draw
and paint and sculpt better than any of my friends.
Some of them were a bit artists but not many of them.
(soft tense discordant music) (object shatters)
When I came back, I just felt like,
"I'll never achieve anything like that."
I felt depressed for quite a while and deflated.
-: He is talking about a sense of feeling deflated.
So you've just been to see.
Can you imagine a teenager of our time
that's maybe just been to see a pop star
or something in the flesh.
They've met them in the flesh.
You should be elated, shouldn't you?
And yet he feels sad.
He feels deflated. He feels inadequate.
-: I actually thought of the analogy of athlete, all right?
So you think you're a good basketball player,
and then you get a chance to play a match
with somebody who's a professional,
and you realize you're just not in the league yet.
And even yet, you thought you had all these dreams
and aspirations of being one yourself,
and you realize, "I have so much more to go."
-: Yeah, I think that's a better analogy,
but it just strikes me
how negative his thinking processes are.
I think we're learning a bit about his character,
and this was at a very young age.
(soft contemplative music) (wind blows)
I have to ask about La Bella Princesa.
-: Ah, yeah. -: La Bella Princesa.
If I got that right? -: Principessa.
-: Principessa, right? -: Yeah.
(cameras click)
Kerry: You say that is your work.
(wrapping rustles)
-: I'm convinced that it is.
(cameras click)
-: You're convinced or you know? Surely you must know.
-: Yeah, I do. -: Right.
-: Well, there's been so much controversy over it.
It's made me not doubt it.
I don't doubt it, but I've shied away from it
because it's upset a lot of people.
I'm just trying to be honest.
-: Some experts have said that that is by Leonardo da Vinci.
-: Hmm, and a lot of experts have said it isn't.
-: And a lot of experts have said that it's a fake
but not necessarily a fake by you.
-: Hmm, yeah. They've said that it could be by a German.
-: Well surely, -: and I (indistinct).
-: you created a picture.
You must know if that's yours or not.
-: I went to seed in Milan, see it actually in person
because I wanted to be sure.
But what absolutely convinces me of it is the back board
'cause I made that back board,
and I put those butterfly braces into it.
-: So who is she based on?
-: Well, a girl I worked at The Co-op with.
-: Right, which is a supermarket chain.
-: Yes. Yeah, she worked on the tills.
It's her profile. -: So do believe
-: A Milanese costume -: that she was-
-: of the late 15th century.
-: So I believe she was called Sally.
-: Yeah. -: So Sally
from the Co-op supermarket
is La Bella Principessa. -: Is the model, yeah.
-: Right, and, (laughs) sorry. Do you feel this is-
-: I don't think it would be controversial
if it wasn't worth 100 million pounds.
I think if it was like worth 5,000 pounds,
I don't think anyone would bat an eyelid,
and that's the trouble with art.
The money blinds everybody.
-: It's such a seemingly greedy world where things are going,
something like the Leonardo da Vinci "Salvator Mundi,"
a $450 million.
In a world where people are prepared
to spend those kinds of money,
those sorts of amounts on money on art,
I think there's absolutely a place for people
who pop up every now and then and say, "Are you sure?
Buyer beware." The art world is corrupt.
The art world is full of people who are only
in it for the money, who cheat, who lie, sell stuff off
as one thing when it's actually another thing.
It is a world, if you scratch the surface of it and go down,
it's full of corruption and darkness.
-: Do you feel that this piece of artwork has validated you
and actually achieved what it seems like you've been trying
to achieve for a lifetime,
which is being able to match with the great masters?
-: Well, with that pastoral drawing,
I don't think I have matched because the vast majority
of, I think, of Leonardo scholars
don't think it's by Leonardo.
Kerry: So it's not enough to convince one
or two or three are experts.
You have to convince them all. -: Yeah.
(soft contemplative music)
-: For this test, we're going to be looking
at your abilities to judge expressions.
-: Okay.
-: And what will happen is a face will appear,
and then in about three seconds,
that same face will make an expression,
but that expression will be on for 1/15 of a second,
and then it's back to neutral.
So your job is what expression was that that flashed at you?
After you do it, then circle the item there
that represents your judgment on this,
and then when you circle it,
go hit number two and continue through all 14 items.
The key is once that face pops up, though,
just remember, don't blink because if you blink,
you might miss it. -: Okay.
(pen scribbles)
-: When somebody feels a blast of emotion,
it's an involuntary reaction.
When somebody goes, "Boo," you jump.
You don't stop and think about it, right?
It goes on your face in a pulse,
and what happens is the outside part of the brain,
the pyramidal motor system,
is used to try to shut that down.
"I don't wanna be seen as nervous. Shut it down."
And the conflict between the two
is what causes these emotions to be very brief
'cause the person is trying to suppress them,
but they will still often leak despite your efforts
to control them.
His ability to detect deception, he scored about 60%,
which is higher than average.
The micro-expression test is actually just about average.
It was about 57%.
His ability to manage his behaviors,
all that other kind of stuff, actually on the low end,
which surprised me a little bit.
Some of it, I think, was driven down by the shyness elements
that he reported in terms of his behavior., and then-
-: What type of behavior, then?
What type of behavior does he have problems with managing?
-: Just with people looking at him,
being center of attention,
things like those sorts of things.
-: So yeah. General social anxiety then.
-: Yeah. Is anything shaking out on the brain work, Moran?
-: He's a unique character in that he's a real artist,
and I think his craft in terms of conning is unique.
He's producing something that people, in their minds,
will think is good, is real, and so and so.
So he really creates the environment
for everyone to con themselves.
(tense discordant music) (food crunches)
-: With Shaun, you just really never know.
He's cunning. He's a cunning guy.
He's a forger. Of course he's cunning.
This is the thing about him most.
You stare into his eyes. You could test his pulse.
You can wire him up with a lie detector.
I swear to you, you'll still never know exactly
if he's telling you the truth or not.
(wind blows)
-: So your mother, Olive, and your father, George.
Did they know where all of this money
had suddenly come from?
-: Well, I had to be careful of what I spent.
When I was at work at the Co-op,
I put long hours in five and a half days a week,
lots of overtime and stuff to camouflage it.
-: Okay, and that bit of money that you had
from the sale of the fake Degas,
you went traveling with a girlfriend, didn't you?
-: I did, yeah. We went to Florence drunk as a skunk.
So that's a great memory, actually.
That's what I got into liking about my fakes.
I could make one, it would only take me a few weeks,
sell it for compared to my friends,
maybe several years salary, and I could go traveling.
I'd seen all these works of art,
but I wanted to see them 'cause I don't think you
can appreciate them until you see them in real life.
That money gave me the opportunity to do that.
Kerry: And you did this with a girl called Janie?
-: Yes. -: Can you tell me about Janie?
-: Well, that's a bit difficult.
I met her in the university library, Ryland Library,
Manchester University (indistinct).
Prettiest thing I'd seen. (laughs)
I was hooked, yeah, definitely.
-: And did that money that you had, did that enable you to,
use an old fashioned term, court her?
-: I've never really been a flash person.
When I've traveled,
I've always stayed like in relatively basic hotels.
I don't really like to stay in anywhere flashy,
but it gave me the opportunity to ask her
to come away on holiday with me in the summer break,
which we did.
-: And you went to some beautiful places
and had some good memories, as you say.
-: Yeah, absolutely, yeah. -: What happened to Janie?
-: Well, we went only a few times, and she like graduated,
and she was taken a post-degree course.
And well, first of all, she started with headaches,
but she was working very hard and into the night,
and she had a couple of jobs,
bar jobs and stuff to make ends meet.
So anyway, she went to see the doctor.
He put it down to, what should we say?
Headaches over work and what have you.
She started to get these headaches more and more,
and one day, she had a seizure.
One of my brothers has epileptic seizures,
so I knew exactly what it was,
and that's what I, well, what I thought it was.
So anyway, long story short,
she was diagnosed with a brain tumor,
I think, excuse me, February '81,
and she was dead by September.
-: Wow. -: Quite quickly.
From no sign of it at all to, yeah.
-: And how old was she?
-: She was two years older than me. She was 23 at the time.
Kerry: Right. That's terribly tragic.
-: Yeah. -: That's very sad.
How did that affect you?
-: Ah, it blew me for a few years, as you can understand.
That's what such things do, don't they?
-: Of course, of course. -: Yeah.
-: So you were grieving. -: Yeah.
Had you ever during your time with Janie thought
to yourself, "Hang on a minute.
I'm making money here through illegal means"?
-: Yes. -: Tell me about that.
-: I don't really know what to say about it.
I did confess to her, and she said that I shouldn't be.
She was dead set against it,
and I did pack it in for awhile.
While I was in a relationship with her,
I didn't do any fakes.
I did art and tried to sell it.
I put some stuff into The Octagon Theatre in my own name,
sold for paltry amounts.
So I did some of the those,
and that didn't bring really big prices.
Well, after she died, I felt, what would I feel?
I felt bitter as if I'd been robbed,
and so I went back into art like full steam ahead
and fakery, just fakery then, and I really got into it then.
I met this Bolton antiques dealer.
He introduced me to a guy in Manchester
and then another guy in London called Tom.
He had a big gallery in the West End,
and he was absolutely corrupt, importing stolen antiquities,
fake silver, having hallmarks made and rubbed out all,
every scam in the book he was into.
And I went along with it 'cause I didn't
wanna do anything else.
(waves crash in distance)
-: We're going to the next test.
-: Okay.
-: So I'm gonna now show you on this screen a set of images,
and I'm gonna show you the pictures.
I'm gonna ask you to do is just give me a number
that goes from one to 10,
where one is extremely negative and 10
would be the most positive experience you can imagine.
Okay, we're starting.
Here's the first one. -: One.
(contemplative music)
Three.
Seven.
Eight.
10.
Five.
One.
Eight. (muffled speaking)
-: This one is an injured cat. You gave it an eight.
-: Yeah.
-: This one normally gets a low score.
Do you have a sense why you gave it a high score?
-: Well, I felt sorry for it in its terrible state.
-: But eight is a high score, is a positive one.
-: Oh yeah, I-
-: Did you mean to give it a low score?
-: I meant to give it a high score, like for sympathy wise,
-: I see. Okay. -: I felt sorry for it.
-: Okay. This helps me.
-: On terrible looks, I should've given it a one,
but my emotions came into it, and I felt sorry for it.
-: So when you gave it an eight,
it's because it's like your score your empathy means?
-: Yeah.
-: I made a note while you were talking then
because it interested me that you said that you felt bitter.
You felt robbed. Were you talking about robbed of Janie?
-: Yeah.
-: Were you talking about robbed because
of the way the art dealers had treated you?
-: No, no. I think with art deals, it's dog eat dog.
I just took it on the chin.
A lot of times, I never got big prices,
but when I said I felt robbed,
I felt robbed of what my life should've been.
-: How would -: A lot of people-
-: you see being different?
-: Yeah, I think it would've been, yeah.
-: In what way? -: Well, when I was with Janie,
from when I met her, I didn't have the urge to do art.
I wanted to do something proper,
(slow somber cello music)
and not criminal, so.
-: She made you want
to be better? -: Yeah.
I'm absolutely certain that my life would've gone
in a completely different direction.
I'm certain of that.
Not just thinking. I'm absolute certain, yeah.
-: So do you think that that feeling of bitterness then
maybe accelerated your rise in the art forgery world?
-: Yeah, probably, looking back on it.
I didn't see it at that time as that,
but with perspective now of many years, yeah, probably.
(soft music) (drink pours)
-: Hi, Shaun. Mind if I have a seat?
-: No, take a seat.
(tense cello music)
-: So it's been nice seeing you around here
and having a chance to- -: Yeah,
it's been great these last few days, hasn't it?
-: Yeah, get to know you
a little bit, yeah. -: Interesting.
-: And the question I wanted to ask
and so I could hear from you directly
was just curious, like how you did it.
-: Sometimes, I don't know I did it myself, really.
One of the things led to it was I'd look in books
and magazines when I was like into my 20s
when I was looking to do proper fakes rather
than just rough copies and small prices,
and I would see like location unknown of a work of art.
Probably disappeared World War II
or even earlier than that, and that would fire me up.
So I thought I'd start to research it,
go to the libraries in the old days before the internet.
I'd have to go to the libraries and gradually work on it
to build a provenance around it
and find proof of its existence.
-: And how did you learn that?
How did you learn that that was like the essential part?
-: Ah, well, I think it was the people I got on with.
Like from about 18, I met provincial art dealers
and then bigger art dealers in Manchester and in London,
and I made stuff for those people,
and that's what they were actually doing.
-: I was fascinated by the fact that you
would leave little clues, like the old "Batman" TV series.
The master criminals left little clues,
but what motivated you to do that?
-: Well, I think I became like, what's the word?
Dissatisfied with the situation of what I was in.
I thought these people are being paid
as experts and lauding themselves as experts,
and so I thought I'd start putting little bits in
to see if they would notice some things
that were quite wrong.
It was subtler in the beginning, and by the end,
it ended up with glaring mistakes,
and then when they still didn't pick it up,
but I think the provenance has blinded them.
-: And just curious, too.
Reading up a little bit about skills
and vision in an artist.
-: Yeah, well, I've lacked in original vision.
That's what I think that's
why I never cracked it as an artist.
-: I think the trouble with most artists
is that they have an over-exaggerated sense
of their own creativity.
It's the opposite of Shaun.
There are far too many artists in the world
who think they're brilliant and who think they're original
and who think that everything they make is really great
and that they're forgotten geniuses, and,
"Why the hell isn't my stuff on the show
at the Wright Museum or the Tate or National Gallery?"
There's loads of those people out there.
The perverse thing about Shaun
is that he actually has got it here in the fingertips.
He can make things that no one else can make,
and what they can't do, he can.
-: What would you prefer, if you did the perfect Leonardo
and everyone thought it was Leonardo,
or a great Leonardo, but they said, "It was Shaun's"?
Which would make you happier?
-: I think the great Leonardo that would've put down to me
to prove that I could equal him, but I can't.
It's just a fantasy.
(wind blows) (contemplative music)
-: Tell me about the Amarna Princess.
-: My dad had seen something in the paper
about some Egyptian antiquity bringing
in a large amount of money, so it caught my interest.
And I looked at these statuettes. I thought, "I wonder if I
could make an alabaster Amarna Princess,"
because the bodily features are very exaggerated
and very abstract, very beautiful to my eye.
Anyway, I carved in the winter of 1990,
before the millennium, a few weeks before, aged it.
I put it in a cupboard, and it was in the airing cupboard
in late 2000, and that's where it stayed till,
I think, mid 2002, about 18 months.
I went to my dad's once.
He said, "Shaun," he says, "that alabaster."
He said, "What I think we should do
is we should contact the Bolton Museum,"
'cause we all knew that they had a great collection,
the Egyptologist- -: They've got a great
Egyptology section.
Yeah, I've been there. -: The great Egyptology.
And the lady who came to see it at my mum and dad's,
she was a very, very knowledgeable lady, Egyptologist.
And as soon as you came in, she said, "That's Amarna."
Anyway, one thing led to another.
She said, "Can I take it away
to have a further examination?"
She came back three months later
and said, "Can we buy it?
We'd like to make an offer of a quarter million,"
and a few seconds later, "No, let's say half a million.
I think we could raise that."
Half a million is a great incentive to anybody.
-: How much was it sold for in the end?
-: I think half a million.
I think we paid our taxes on it. I think we've got 440,000.
-: Which is a huge life-changing sum of money.
-: Didn't change my life.
-: And was there celebration in the house?
-: No, none at all. None whatsoever.
-: When the Greenhalgh family were finally arrested
by my successors at Scotland yard,
I was not surprised that this was a family enterprise,
and clearly, it was a family enterprise.
I was somewhat surprised, however,
at the lack of splashing the cash.
They'd made a lot of money out of this.
Now, generally, that is the purpose
of creating fakes and forgeries.
It's personal gain, and when generally criminals succeed
and they're in the cash, they splash it.
They'll spend it.
That's the sort of thing that criminals are expected to do.
As it was explained to me,
Shaun had bought himself a new pair of socks.
-: What did you do with the money?
-: I left it in the bank and it was there two
and a half years later when the police came knocking.
-: So what- -: I hadn't spent any of it.
-: What was the point of this?
-: I really don't know, some kind of madness.
I can't explain it to myself.
(tense clapping music)
Got up one morning and there's knock
on the door from Scotland Yard.
They burst in. My mum and dad were still in bed.
They were very, very hostile.
Kerry: And they went through your home
and your parents' home with a fine tooth comb, didn't they?
-: They did, yeah.
And I'm not trying to have a go at them,
but I was just, by the end of the day,
I was astonished at the lack of knowledge.
They were policemen,
but they were the art and antique squad,
which I've always held in some esteem,
and I was genuine.
I'm not being nasty.
I was genuinely surprised at the lack of knowledge
of them when they went to the garden shed.
-: And I understand that there was a chicken.
-: I put a chicken in the oven.
This chicken, they got the chicken out of the oven raw.
I don't know what they expected to find,
and they unwrapped this chicken through the breast bone.
They were looking into it.
Kerry: What were they hoping to find?
-: I don't know. I was like-
-: Maybe hoping to find day a fake Degas in there somewhere.
-: Yeah, maybe, a Faberge egg or something.
-: And this guy, this wonderfully interesting man
who managed to prove that the British Museum
doesn't really know everything it's talking about,
that the Chicago Art Institute can be fooled,
who took experts on and proved that they weren't as good
at being experts as they thought they were,
this man gets four and a half years.
There's something not right about that
in terms of just the balance of justice,
and in the end, I think it was grossly unfair,
and I think he was absolutely made a scapegoat
for show trial to prove that people shouldn't do this.
(soft dramatic music)
-: He has really approached this whole process, hasn't he,
in the most honest and forthright way
that I think we've seen.
-: Yeah, and the transparency, as you say,
and the forthrightness,
as he talks about any emotional thing,
boom, there it is on his face.
-: I would say on emotions, I had some strange experience,
which I think was just a flaw of the interaction between us,
which I ran the study where I showed him pictures
and had him rank them that a picture
that I would clearly put on the very low end
as a negative picture, he gave it eight.
-: Is that because he's looking at that picture
with an artistic eye? -: I asked.
Normally, I would remain very controlled
and I would say, "Thank you,"
and then at some point, I said,
"I've gotta ask because it's so off the charts behaviorally
that I wanna know what's going on."
And his answer was a clear answer
that made me see things differently,
even though it doesn't help my study.
He says, "I was actually answering something along the lines
of what it makes me feel, and it makes me feel empathy."
He was alarmed
I think in all the tests I saw that he's concerned.
He's concerned about what's gonna come up,
what we're gonna figure out,
so he was nervous about the test.
(contemplative music) (footsteps shuffle)
-: Hello. -: Hi, Shaun.
-: Pleased to see you again.
-: Good to see you. -: Yeah.
-: Have a seat. Have a perch.
-: What were you afraid that we were going
to say or find or- -: No, it wasn't that, Mark.
You've all come across quite pleasant,
but I think it's like, how can I say?
It's like probing into my mind I've never had done before.
-: I think that's what got me really excited
about your particular story is that
in order to perform a forgery,
you basically have to get into someone else's mind.
-: But I think that's might have, what you've talked about
might've stifled my originality maybe,
trying to think about these people,
how they would do it and whatever.
So it stifled my originality,
so that's why I don't really have any.
-: So you were talking about all these emotions
that you were wrangling with internally,
but you were showing them externally as well.
As far as the deception,
which is a more complicated social judgment,
you are above average, not like extraordinary,
but better than the average person.
-: For me, what was particularly important
was the lack of belief you have in your own abilities.
-: Yeah.
(soft contemplative music)
But I think there's nothing more self defeating
than somebody with your abilities making forgeries
because you know yourself, as we said in the interview,
if you're forging somebody else's work,
if you are trying to channel somebody else's ideas-
-: Like what I said, yeah. -: Yeah.
Then you can never really be proud of that.
-: No, it stifles originality, I think.
-: Yeah. You can never really feel an ownership of that.
-: Sadly, this is goodbye. -: Okay.
-: Insightful. -: We really enjoyed the time.
(soft dramatic music)
-: With myself, I was rather intimidating,
maybe, in a nice way.
-: Okay, Mark. It's been great. -: It's been a pleasure.
-: Yeah. Thank you, Kerry. -: Thank you
for sharing your story.
-: Right, thank you very much. -: Thank you.
-: It's been insightful. -: Take care.
Safe journey. -: Okay, bye bye.
-: Bye bye. -: Thank you.
(dramatic music)
(bright ethereal music)