"Oh my God, I hit the mother lode." That's what Doug Arbittier recalls thinking in 2013 when he saw an exquisitely carved antique woodblock on eBay, writes Christopher Kuo for the New York Times. The item featured an anatomical model of a human thorax and abdomen and reportedly hailed from the 16th century. It was masterful, and he had to have it. Arbittier is an obsessive collector of medical antiques—he owns some 3,000 such items—and he soon found himself collecting the woodblocks being sold by "River Seine." In the three years that followed, he purchased 130 medical-theme woodblocks for display in his private museum. The cost? Nearly $120,000. The extensive email communications he had with River Seine over those years were chummy—until they abruptly ceased.
"Anyone in my family would tell you, I can't let stuff go," Arbittier tells Kuo. "I cannot let something go. It has to be figured out, investigated to death." Indeed, it wasn't until 2020 that Arbittier discovered a phone number River Seine had provided was used in an online ad for a car being sold by "Earl." Further searching gave him the name Earl Washington, and though there were plenty of men by that name online, there was only one who had a Wikipedia page describing him as an art forger. He was crushed—"why did I spend all that money, but also it was a betrayal of the trust and relationship that we had," he says. But he didn't let it go: He compiled a 268-page file making the case that River Seine was carrying out a huge art fraud and sent it to the FBI. He was right. (Read the fascinating full story, and see images of the woodblocks, here.)
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uBlock 
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Ghostery 
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