Earl Washington loves wood.

He loves maple wood from Wisconsin and boxwood from Turkey. He loves running his hands on its surface, feeling its heft and texture. But most of all he loves carving it. Thoughts about carving, he says, consume his waking moments.

“If I’m looking at your face when I’m talking to you, I’m literally looking at how I’m going to carve your eyes and carve your nose on a piece of wood,” he said in an interview.

For decades, beginning in the late 1990s, Washington, 62, created thousands of ornate woodblocks and used them to make intricate prints of all kinds of things: biblical imagery, erotica, anatomical illustrations, the stark motifs of German expressionism.

Mastery was never enough for him, though. To profitably sell woodblocks — which can be an oddity in the art market — Washington decided he also needed myth. So he created elaborate origin stories for his pieces. Some, he claimed, had been made or acquired by his great-grandfather. Others he promoted as rare creations from the 16th and 17th centuries.

Thousands of people bought them unquestioningly, but a few became suspicious and raised concerns online and to authorities. The FBI fielded some complaints, but was not aware, it said later, of the “depth and the breadth” of Washington’s scheme, so he continued to sell his creations, having mastered the craft of carving and the art of fooling others.

Until one day in 2013, when he met Douglas Arbittier.

Everything Earl Washington feels about wood, Arbittier feels about medical antiques.

Arbittier has collected roughly 3,000 medical antiques and runs his own private museum, filled with items like old knives once used for bloodletting and antique surgical sets. His curiosity was stirred in the 10th grade when his mother gave him an old medical chair. Arbittier, a self-described obsessive, quickly decided to track its origins. He rooted around in a library, found the original catalog for such chairs, located the exact model and figured out who made it and how much the chairs had sold for.

“Once the collecting gene fires on, you become obsessed,” he said in an interview.

So Arbittier, a 58-year-old doctor and executive for a New Jersey health care system, was intrigued in 2013 when he spotted one of Washington’s woodblock listings on eBay. It depicted an anatomical model of a human thorax and abdomen, and was said to have been created in the 16th century. Arbittier snatched it up.

“Oh, my God, I hit the mother lode,” he remembered thinking.

Over the next three years, Arbittier bought 130 woodblocks from “River Seine,” the alias Washington was using, for $118,810. They routinely corresponded, sometimes several times a day, becoming chummy by email.

“The museum,” Arbittier wrote in one, “is eager to have you and your family visit, as am I!”

“River Seine” later wrote back: “I get chills every time I hear how the blocks are appreciated by patrons of the museum.”

Eventually, however, Washington stopped responding, and Arbittier sensed something was off when, for years, his emails went unreturned. Eventually, all of the energy that Arbittier had aimed in other directions was pointed at tracking the identity of “River Seine.”

“Anyone in my family would tell you, I can’t let stuff go,” Arbittier said. “I cannot let something go. It has to be figured out, investigated to death.”

A True Talent for Faux Art

The art of carving wood blocks, or xylography, has been practiced for centuries, though in modern times it occupies something of a niche as an art form. It is believed to have originated in China as one of the earliest forms of printing, but it eventually found its way to Europe in the 14th and 15th centuries.

To create images, one carves the surface of a block of wood so that raised areas can be inked and printed. The recessed areas remain blank.

“In the 15th century, when it was developing, it was the go-to printmaking technique,” said Susan Dackerman, an art historian and an expert on prints and woodblocks. “But now because it’s one of many — and many of the others are digital — the labor involved in cutting is laborious, so only a limited number of artists do it now.”

Washington, who grew up in Detroit, carved for the first time in a high school art contest — on linoleum, not wood. He picked up the craft more seriously in 1987 as a 25-year-old after dropping out of college and ending up in Las Vegas, where he found work at a wood shop.

“Every now and then a person discovers something that is so in tune with everything their mind and brain is designed to do, and that was me when I discovered the woodblocks,” Washington said in an interview.

He began reading everything he could on the topic and made woodblocks on the side while trying his hand at acting and singing in Los Angeles. He created more than 200 blocks featuring images of Hollywood icons. Like some of the people he depicted, many of the creations he made had phony backstories.

Some, he told people, had been created by a great-grandfather — a skilled carver born in 1862, who was apprenticed at a printing shop by the time he was 13. This relative, Washington said, had also amassed his own enormous collection of woodblocks made by others.

None of this was true, of course, but there was money in the lies.

“An artist that is dead is more desirable than an artist that is alive,” Washington said. “It was the only way to do this and with some longevity.”

In 1997, Washington acquired two printing presses, which gave him the ability to turn his carvings into prints. He had given up acting and singing and moved to Michigan, setting up a studio in an old Victorian building with exposed brick and wood floors in Monroe, less than an hour’s drive from Detroit. There, he began acquiring more presses, ranging from lightweight hand-held ones to a hulking 8-foot-tall model built in the 1830s.

From this studio, sometimes working 16 hours a day, Washington churned out block after block, print after print, a factory of craftsmanship that, law enforcement officials say, led to the sale of more than 3,000 blocks and more than 1 million prints.

The enterprise was upended, though, in 2004, when Forbes published a story titled “Catch Me If You Can.” It posed troubling questions about the authenticity of Washington’s blocks and prints: “Who created the striking woodcuts that crowd the small studio in downtown Monroe, Mich.?”

Several skeptics were quoted, including a former girlfriend of Washington’s and a lawyer, Kenneth Martens, who explained why he had created a website that warned people about Washington’s prints.

“We had people from all over the states thanking me,” Martens, a Canadian, said in a recent interview.

The article said the estate of M.C. Escher, a Dutch artist, had alerted the FBI that phony Eschers were being sold and it reported that an FBI agent in Hawaii had been collecting other complaints about Washington.

Washington said he eventually turned himself in to the bureau’s office on Oahu, where he was questioned for 45 minutes, and then let go. The FBI said it could not confirm the visit.

Scared that people were catching on, Washington largely shut down operations, sold all but one of his presses and moved to Key West, Florida. But he couldn’t stay away from carving for long.

By 2010, Washington was back online, selling blocks and prints under the name “River Seine.” Now he marketed his creations as 16th- and 17th-century artifacts that had been inherited by a relative. He carefully rubbed the blocks of old wood against gravel to erase any new saw marks. He found inspiration online and in books that featured old woodblocks, many of them focused on medical procedures. It was one of those that caught Arbittier’s eye.

A Home for Old Scalpels and Saws

By the time he encountered “River Seine,” Arbittier had been collecting medical antiques for decades. His hobby only intensified during medical school at the University of Pennsylvania and soon his collection boasted all manner of items: candlesticks owned by famous physicians, Civil War surgical sets, amputation saws, leech jars.

When he moved to York, Pennsylvania, in 2003, Arbittier’s ambitions grew to the point that, at a cost of approximately $450,000, he built an elegant two-story, private museum behind his home. It included a stained-glass skylight and dozens of glass display cases.

The Arbittier Museum of Medical History drew visits from students, neighbors and officials of other institutions. When the doctor moved recently to New Jersey, he re-created many of the displays in his new home.

“I see myself as a sort of preserver and curator of these things, and I really liked to display them with the stories behind their history,” he said.

Washington woodblocks, with their intricate details of old, often ghoulishly crude medical practices, were a natural fit for the museum, and over the years that they did business, the men exchanged hundreds of emails.

“I have to tell you honestly that I literally had palpitations as I opened the expertly packed box to find one true treasure after another,” Arbittier wrote in 2013. “I am telling you, River, that this is one of the most important days in my 30 years of collecting.”

Washington later wrote back, as Seine. “It’s a sickness Doug, we share the same symptoms of ‘acquisitive affliction’. BUT I LOVE IT!!!”

“The Arbittier,” Washington continued, referencing the museum, “will be considered the xylographic foundation in the Western World.”

But later, Washington said in a recent interview, his family life began fraying and he lost access to the email account he had been using. Arbittier, unable to reach him for an extended period, thought it was strange that a seemingly legitimate dealer would simply go dark. He began to have niggling doubts about the authenticity of the woodblocks he’d been buying.

Arbittier said he shared his concerns with a German collector, Tilo Hofmann, whom he had introduced to the beauty of River Seine’s woodblocks. Both men found it hard to believe the blocks, each so different and exquisitely carved, could be fake.

But in 2020 Arbittier found a phone number that “River Seine” had given him featured in an online ad for a car being sold by a man named “Earl.” He subscribed to a public records search engine and found the same number came back to an Earl Washington who had lived in Hawaii, Las Vegas and Key West — all places River Seine had lived. And though there were lots of Earl Washingtons online, he discovered that one was the focus of an entire Wikipedia page. It described him as a forger.

“The world comes crashing down at that point,” Arbittier said in an interview. “It was gut wrenching because, oh, my God, why did I spend all that money, but also it was a betrayal of the trust and relationship that we had.”

Now, for Arbittier, the real work began.

He culled incriminating content from his years of correspondence with Washington. He gathered his conversations with other collectors. He found and retraced the trail created by others who had suspected Washington earlier than he had. He detailed the steps that had led him to conclude that River Seine was a fraud and sent the whole package to an agent on the FBI’s Art Crime Team.

The attachment was 286 pages long.

“Without this victim coming forward and presenting that initial credible information about his interactions with this individual, we would not have had the opportunity to move to open up an investigation,” Special Agent Jake Archer said. “This victim helped jump-start this investigation, there’s no doubt.”

Hofmann, Arbittier’s collecting colleague, commissioned a carbon-dating analysis of Washington woodblocks that indicated they were not centuries old. Still, it would take years for a team led by Archer and an assistant U.S. Attorney, Ravi Romel Sharma, to develop enough evidence to bring charges. They did their own carbon study. They tracked others tricked by Washington, at home and abroad. They enlisted German and French authorities to assist. And they arranged for the search of a storage locker in Las Vegas. Inside, investigators found carving tools, blank wood blocks, books on carving and others with images that had served as his source material.

Finally, Washington said, an agent, posing as a buyer, arranged to meet him at a Hawaii hotel. When Washington arrived, Archer approached and flashed his badge. “Take a look,” Archer said he told Washington. “This is real.”

Last summer, Washington and his wife at the time were convicted of conspiracy to commit mail fraud and other charges in connection with the sale of fraudulent artwork to Arbittier, to a collector in Pennsylvania and to two collectors in France. Investigators say their work is ongoing: They are contacting cultural institutions to see if Washington sold them phony woodblocks.

Even the agents who caught Washington still marvel at what he could do with a piece of wood and a sharp tool.

“At one point, he bragged that he was the best in the world at this,” Archer said. “And you know, based on all of our training experience, we had no reason to doubt it.”

After he was charged, Washington continued to email Arbittier. In one note, he offered to carve 100 blocks as restitution.

“I also propose,” he wrote, “to volunteer my xylographic knowledge and services to The Arbittier, bibliographically and otherwise as a docent (volunteer) and contributor to speak at symposiums on behalf of The Arbittier and stage printing sessions to create valuable, unique hand-signed woodblock print keepsakes for Arbittier patrons.”

Arbittier described the offer as beyond belief. “That just showed naivete or a bizarre behavioral problem or something,” he said. “I’m like, ‘What the hell, man, you defrauded me. Are you kidding me?’”

Washington pleaded guilty and is serving a 52-month sentence at a federal prison in Florida. Though he admits his duplicity, Washington does not think he took complete advantage of people. In a series of telephone conversations from prison, he described himself as a successor to the great carvers of old. He believes that, although his clients did not receive antique woodblocks, his work is art with its own intrinsic value.

Either way, he knows he won’t be making any more carvings for a while, though he said he did find a small piece of wood the other day while walking outside. He tucked it away like treasure.

“I shouldn’t even say this: It’s considered contraband,” he said. “It’s under my bed. I just run my hands over the grain.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

© 2024 The New York Times Company