New York (New York Daily News) – A Queens Foundry owner from Guyana, who ripped off Jasper Johns and other artists, is trading in bronze sculptures for steel bars.
A Manhattan federal court judge in October sentenced Brian Ramnarine, 60, to 30 months in federal lockups for trying to sell fake sculptures said to be by Johns, Robert Indiana and Saint Clair Cemin.
He is due to start serving the sentence from next month.
“Ramnarine’s only art was as a con artist who concocted and carried out not one, but three separate schemes to peddle fake sculptures to unsuspecting buyers for millions of dollars, pretending that they had been made by well-known artists,†Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said.
Ramnarine pleaded guilty to the charges earlier this year while he was on trial for the scheme.
Prosecutors said he’d done work for Johns in 1990, when the artist gave him a mold to make a flag sculpture.
The mold was supposed to be destroyed, but Ramnarine held onto it and used it to make a counterfeit work, which he tried to sell for $11 million.
After he was arrested and placed on bail in 2012, he sold other fake sculptures, which were purportedly works by Cemin and Indiana, for $34,250.
Judge John Koeltl sentenced him to 30 months behind bars and ordered him to pay $34,250 in restitution.
He’d faced up to seven to 10 years behind bars, but Koeltl cut him some slack, in part because Ramnarine’s lawyer, Troy Smith, said his client had been having some serious health issues.
Smith said the prison time was costing his client a big opportunity.
He’d been invited to participate in the building of the world’s largest statue in India. When completed, the statute is supposed to be 2 1/2 times larger than the Statue of Liberty, the lawyer said.
In court, Ramnarine told the judge, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry to bring shame on my family.â€
