fled the Nazis and taken refuge in the U.S. in 1938; Fischer sold as many as a dozen purported Molzahns, which fetched up to $45,000. (One was even bought by the artist's widow.) He says he insinuated three fake paintings, by three different artists, into a single auction held by art dealer Jean-Louis Picard in Paris in 1991. In the mid-1980s, Fischer also began painting phony works supposedly by Heinrich Campendonk, another German Expressionist from the Lower Rhine. Condemned by the Nazis as a "degenerate artist," he had fled into exile in the Netherlands shortly after their rise to power. During this period, Andrea Firmenich, a young German art scholar in Bonn, was assembling a comprehensive catalogue of Campendonk's art with the assistance of Campendonk's son; Beltracchi says "five or six" of his own forgeries ended up in Firmenich's catalogue raisonn. "This was really brilliant," says Ralph Jentsch, a modern-art expert who would later play a critical role in exposing the Beltracchis' fraud. "It shows the criminal potential of this guy. . . . It also shows how careless [Firmenich] was." For her part, Firmenich counters that Campendonk's output was unusually vast (more than 1,200 works), that two other authorities consulted on the catalogue, and that "no expert is immune from mistakes." She declines to go into further detail. "The damage to my person is so big that I am not able to say anything 'official,'" she wrote to me in an e-mail. "The damage for the experts of art