A West Hollywood man has agreed to plead guilty in a cross-country art fraud scheme where he created fake artwork and falsely attributed the paintings to artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, federal prosec…
, a Neo-expressionist painter whose success came during the 1980s, lived and worked in New York before he died in 1988 at age 27 from a drug overdose. The Orlando Museum of Art scandal came in 2022 when a federal raid ended in the seizure of 25 paintings whose authenticity had been in question for a decade.
Defendant Michael Barzman, 45, of North Hollywood, was charged Tuesday in federal court in Los Angeles with making false statements to the FBI during an interview last year, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said in a news release. He has agreed to plead guilty and faces up to five years in prison. Barzman admitted to the FBI — after repeated denials in interviews with federal agents, leading to Tuesday’s felony charge — that he made a false provenance for the paintings by claiming in a notarized document that they had been found in Mumford’s storage locker.
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