The Long Con of Ken Perenyi
Thirty-four years of forgeries the experts never caught
Image: Unsplash
For more than three decades Ken Perenyi flooded the market with 'antique' American and British paintings, passing thousands of fakes through the great auction houses. A five-year FBI investigation ended not in charges but in an expired statute of limitations.
Perenyi taught himself the craft of the old masters in reverse: how canvases crack, how varnish yellows, how a period frame lends authority. He specialized in nineteenth-century American painters — Martin Johnson Heade's hummingbirds, James Buttersworth's clipper ships — and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British marine and sporting art.
His works were consigned to Christie's and Sotheby's in New York and London and sold as genuine; a single faux Heade fetched $717,000. For decades the experts authenticated what they wished to find.
In the late 1990s the FBI opened a five-year investigation, interviewing associates and shadowing his dealings. Yet no charge ever came: by the time the case matured, the statute of limitations had run. In 2012 Perenyi published a candid memoir, 'Caveat Emptor', and reinvented himself as a legitimate maker of signed reproductions — a forger who confessed only once he could no longer be prosecuted.