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.
” 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. 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. “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.
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.
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