Man avoids jail for forged Cycladic figures scheme at Sotheby's
Forensic analysis of his fabricated 1976 invoices revealed a typeface that did not exist until 2001.
Law and Crime
British man Andrew Crowley was sentenced last month to two years' imprisonment, suspended for two years, after trying to sell three forged Cycladic figures through Sotheby's with fabricated provenance documents.
Crowley, who was sentenced on May 22 at Southwark Crown Court, had pleaded guilty to fraud by false representation there on February 27. Had the sale gone through, the figures could have fetched as much as £500,000, the Metropolitan Police said in a statement.
Crowley, 45, approached Sotheby's in October 2022 and asked the auction house to sell three stone figures, each roughly 30 centimeters tall and weighing about a kilogram.
Police said he represented them as carvings from the Cyclades islands of present-day Greece, dating to the Bronze Age at least 3,000 years ago and worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.
He said he inherited the figures from his grandfather, a man he described as having built a fortune in the United States before retiring to England. The invoices he submitted purported to show the grandfather buying the pieces from an antiques dealer in 1976.
But the scheme fell apart on a single anachronism. Detectives with the Met's Art and Antiques Unit traced the typeface on the invoices Crowley presented as 1976 records to a designer in the United States.
With the FBI's help, investigators established that the font itself dated only to 2001, some 25 years after the documents were purportedly drawn up.
The dealer's embossed logo, convincing at a glance, had been applied by hand with a pen or an artist's tool rather than pressed with a stamp, police said.
A Sotheby's spokesperson said the concerns surfaced during routine checks.
"In the course of our normal due diligence processes, concerns were identified and shared promptly with the Metropolitan Police," the spokesperson said.
Crowley was arrested on July 27, 2023, outside Sotheby's on New Bond Street in Mayfair, where he had arrived for a meeting with the auction house's experts. Police seized the figures, which they believe are modern replicas.
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