to a German collector shortly after our first encounter for $12,500. I n mid-July, I caught up with the Beltracchis again at a huge loft in Bergisch Gladbach, the town where Helene Beltracchi had grown up. They were midway through filming a documentary project, provisionally called Beltracchi: The Art of Forgery. When I entered the studio, Wolfgang stood poised before a large canvas, putting the finishing touches on another version of The Horde. As he dabbed blue paint from an artist's palette onto the work, a cameraman recorded his every brushstroke. At Beltracchi's feet was what the forger called his "Max Ernst box" -- a carton filled with wood, seashells, sponges, ropes, and other materials that Beltracchi uses to mimic the artist's spatula-against-found-object technique. Standing to one side was the director Arne Birkenstock, the son of the Beltracchis' attorney, an established documentarian who has made films on subjects ranging from Sri Lankan elephants to tango dancing. Birkenstock told me that, though the Beltracchis had agreed to give their full cooperation to the project, they would not have the right of final cut. The only promise Birkenstock had made, he said, was that "if Wolfgang mentions fakes that are not known of, and we find out that it could get him in trouble, we won't reveal that." The Beltracchis were five months into their jail sentence, and had few complaints about the conditions. Both had been assigned to live in "open prisons" -- the equivalent of halfway houses in the United