suspicious. The Chagall committee in Paris verified that the certificate was a forgery and therefore the drawing was also a forgery. A similar thing happened with the Asger Jorn certificate. The auction house decided to withdraw all the works from sale because it could not guarantee their authenticity. Sue Cubitt decided to inform Ernst Schöller of the Stuttgart Fine Art and Antiquities squad. When Sue Cubitt and the police checked other auction catalogues, they noticed that similar works of art had been offered for sale and discovered Van den Bergen had offered these and other works for sale in auction houses around Europe. When Schöller checked the Orléans gallery address, he found that it was a fake; there was a wine bottle company at that address. The trail of false addresses companies led Schöller and the French police to a farm in La Chaux near Poitiers. Jansen - who had used the name Van den Bergen - and his associate were arrested May 6, 1994. When police investigated the farm, they found 1600 forged artworks. Forged artists included Cocteau, Dufy, , Charles Eyck, Leo Gestel, Bart van der Leck, Matisse, Miró and the most popular target of forgery, Picasso. French police had few leads and their appeal through the media brought no reports of forgery. Six years later, they checked the auction records of a Drouot gallery where Jansen had traded most of his forgeries through a number of different false names. They confiscated some suspicious paintings and threatened their buyers with complicity in the crime if they did not press charges against Jansen. Jansen went on trial in September 2000 in Orléans. By that time, the police had thousands of forgeries. During the trial Jansen's lawyer demanded that the works not to be destroyed in case there were real works among them. However, most of the charges were later dropped - two of the buyers disappeared - and only two remained. Eventually Jansen was sentenced to one year imprisonment and four additional years suspended sentence. He was exiled from France for three years. All of his works were to be destroyed. Jansen planned to appeal. It is estimated that Geert Jan Jansen made €10 million from his forgeries. References External links Museumsecurity.org - Master Forger Geert Jan Jansen on trial in France Geertjanjansen.nl - '' The official website of Geert Jan Jansen confiscated by German police 1943 births Living