Costa Del Crime

by Wensley Clarkson

  But then Green, the most prolific forger since the notorious Tom Keating, always did love the thrill of conning the art world as much as he enjoyed the fruits of his ill-gotten gains. His masterstrokes made him king of the great Lowry-lookalike industry, and the safest place for him was always going to be the Costa del Crime. Then, one day, he mysteriously disappeared. Some people believe he may have paid the ultimate price for humiliating some of the heaviest faces in the British underworld community of southern Spain. Others reckon the old rogue has slipped the police net to set up home in the mountains behind Estepona with one of his numerous Latino girlfriends.

  But wherever he is, John Green, now in his early 70s, would have been greatly amused by a recent, much-hyped auction of Lowry paintings at Sotheby’s. ‘He’d have loved to think that one or two of his fakes were in there amongst the genuine Lowrys,’ says one old Estepona friend called Mitch.

  Many of the 30 Lowrys up for grabs at Sotheby’s went for between £250,000 and £400,000. John Green’s legendary output of forgeries never sold for those sort of prices, but he still managed to make a good living in Spain out of paintings that he saw as the ultimate humiliation of the art establishment.

  Over the years, numerous Green Lowrys found their way into London’s top auction houses. Most were eventually spotted, but at least a dozen are believed to have slipped through the net. Many of those now hang in places of honour in private houses. Most fakes only come to light after the death of their purchaser.

  Eccentric Manchester rent collector LS Lowry, whose tiny stick figures in bleak industrial townscapes made him one of the world’s most instantly recognised artists, died in 1976. But thanks to John Green and a handful of others, he is currently one of the most forged artists in the world.

  ‘I enjoy painting, so why not make a few bob out of it at the same time?’ Green asked me when I encountered him in Spain before he disappeared. ‘If people are stupid enough to think these are real Lowrys, they deserve everything they get.’

  The biggest nightmare for experts is that Lowry himself never properly recorded his output. In a working life that spanned almost three quarters of a century, the best estimate is that Lowry produced about a thousand paintings and eight to nine thousand drawings. But this is no more than a well-informed guess. ‘That’s why it’s been so easy for me to get away with forging him,’ added Green, who was at the time living in a charming little beachside urbanisation a few miles west of Estepona.

  Back in London, art dealers even begrudgingly admired the work of Green compared to other forgers. ‘Their quality ranges from quite dreadful to rather impressive,’ says one dealer. ‘Green’s efforts are actually in the top ten per cent.’

  Green’s recent disappearance from his old haunts on the Costa del Sol may have been prompted when Lowry’s rare London scene of Piccadilly Circus (virtually all his other paintings depicted the north of England) comfortably broke the previous Lowry price record when it sold for £562,500 in London in 2000. Over on the Costa del Crime, gregarious John Green rubbed his hands with glee and decided to quadruple the price of his forgeries virtually overnight. ‘That’s when things started to get pretty hairy for John,’ says his old Costa del Sol crony Mitch. ‘He got greedy and sold about half a dozen Lowrys for at least £40,000 each. God knows what those punters thought when they discovered they’d been fleeced.’

  John Green had a number of regular customers whom he met while hanging out in some of Marbella’s priciest bars and bridge clubs. ‘John thought it was a right laugh to con these people. I told him to be careful, but he’s the most reckless man I’ve ever met,’ added Mitch.

  As another of Green’s Costa del Sol acquaintances explained, ‘Some of these people were retired bank robbers and big-time drug barons. People you shouldn’t mess with.’ A few years earlier Green had proudly boasted that one of his most famous customers was Great Train robber Charlie Wilson. Wilson was murdered by a hitman in the garden of his Costa del Sol villa in 1990.

  It’s all a far cry from Brackley, Northamptonshire, where John Green ran an electrical business and took a few painting lessons at night school after his family told him he had a natural talent as an artist. Green first began copying Lowry after a bet with a friend following a visit to a Lowry exhibition in London in 1970. ‘I said I didn’t think they were any good,’ he later explained, ‘so my friend bet me that I couldn’t copy his style.’ Green took him up on the bet and was surprised at the ease with which he sold the painting in Paris for £1,500. ‘That got me thinking and I soon got hooked.’

  Green eventually became so confident of his abilities as a forger that he also began copying the works of other artists such as French Impressionists Monet and Manet, as well as English masters like Constable. He even turned his hand to modern British artist Helen Bradley.

  After Lowry’s death in 1976, Green stepped up his output of fakes. Within two years, dozens of previously unknown pictures were advertised for sale in UK national newspapers as the property of a private collector called Mr Gilbert – aka John Green. ‘Mr Gilbert’ flogged off the paintings for way below the market value at the time. Back then, the highest price for a genuine Lowry was no more than £20,000. ‘I made a few grand each time. There’s no harm in that,’ Green told me during our interview on the Costa del Sol.

  One of Green’s early favourites was entitled Man with Walking Stick in Street and, much to the forger’s delight, his version even found its way into the Christie’s catalogue for their sale of modern pictures in the autumn of 1980. John Green had proudly recreated the drawing from a book called Drawings of LS Lowry, which was published in 1963. He had photocopied the picture in the book and then worked over the photocopy with pencil until it was what he thought was an exact replica. Christie’s hastily withdrew the sketch after one of Lowry’s oldest friends contacted them to say it couldn’t be genuine because he owned the original.

  Besides replicating certain classic Lowrys, Green was also a deft hand at constructing new pictures by copying portions of genuine Lowrys and merging them into fresh Lowry-type scenes. ‘Those are the ones I try to charge the most for because there’s a good chance no one will ever work out if they’re fake,’ Green explained to me.

  But why, I asked Green, didn’t he just stick to doing the ‘brand-new’ pictures? ‘I consider forging actual paintings to be a real skill, so the ultimate challenge for me is to recreate an exact replica of an existing painting. I just can’t resist doing them.’

  Back in 1982, Green skipped bail and headed off to sunny Spain after Scotland Yard’s art and antiques squad had arrested and charged him with three specimen offences of criminal deception totalling £11,350 following complaints from two of his victims. Then detectives traced another 14 fake Lowrys; further information indicated Green had sold at least another 28 forgeries to unsuspecting art lovers. Even Detective Sergeant Paul Fowlie, who had arrested Green, conceded he had a sneaking admiration for the runaway forger. ‘I’ve always been convinced that he started painting fakes for the thrill of it. He enjoyed taking the risks.’

  Green was immensely proud of the studio in the loft of his Spanish villa near Estepona. It was filled with canvas, paints, brushes and the most important tools of his trade – art books containing photos of the paintings he so slavishly forged. Green himself even claimed to have met Lowry in 1970, six years before the famous artist’s death. ‘If only he’d known what I’d get up to.’ He also claimed to own three genuine Lowrys. ‘They’re vital for me because they provide me with invaluable proof of Lowry’s techniques.’

  Green, who took about a week to knock out each fake, always ensured his forgeries came with battered-looking frames. So how do you know in a glance whether your Lowry is the real thing or a John Green edition? ‘One of Lowry’s trademarks was his use of a white background. But he used to “age” that for years before laying it on the canvas and starting the actual painting,’ explains one real expert. ‘So in genuine examples it isn’t white at all, but
a subtle creamy shade. Forgers haven’t the time or the patience for that.’

  However, just like the late Tom Keating, whose forgeries now fetch high prices themselves, Green relished duping dealers and the foolish rich to feed his hedonistic lifestyle on the Costa del Sol. ‘Sometimes I advertise a bunch of paintings in newspapers, claiming they’re part of an unwanted legacy,’ Green told me when we met. ‘Then I slip in one of my Lowrys amongst the rubbish that I’ve bought cheaply. Dealers came along and look through the collection and it’s great to see those mugs’ eyes pop out when they find the Lowry. Of course, they’d never tell me what they’d found and they’d pay a few thousand pounds thinking they’d just got a bargain.’

  The Phillips auction house in London estimates that three in every ten supposed Lowrys brought to them are fakes. But then Phillips know all about John Green. A few years back they unknowingly sold a Green Lowry as the real thing. Glasgow-based father-and-son businessmen William and Graeme Baxter met Green at a bridge club in Marbella in the mid-1980s and agreed to take one of his Lowrys to the big London auction houses in exchange for 10 per cent commission. They had no idea it was a forgery. The auction house eventually accepted the painting and it sold for £4,800 after Green had furnished them with some ‘background history’ of the painting. He claimed the painting, of a northern industrial scene, had been bought by his late father, Dr JF Gilbert from Alderly Edge, Cheshire, and had been left to him in his will.

  Green was so pleased with the sale that he immediately sent over another Lowry. But it was quickly identified by the auctioneers as a fake. The original painting which sold was then recalled and the Baxters were forced to pay the purchaser back his £4,800.

  Graeme Baxter was so furious he flew out to Spain to confront Green, but he was nowhere to be found. His father William later explained, ‘This whole business was shattering. Green is a rogue and if I get hold of him I’d like to strangle him.’

  But while the Baxters gave up on Green, others did not. According to one of Green’s oldest cronies on the Costa del Sol, the crafty forger first did a disappearing act after a private detective turned up at his Estepona home and demanded his client’s money back ‘with menaces’.

  Around the same time, one London businessman who bought a Green Lowry for £10,000 claims he was approached by a ‘criminal type’ from the bridge-and-gin-and-tonic brigade in Marbella. ‘He asked me if I’d put some money in a pot to give Green the sort of scare that might make him pay us our money back,’ said the businessman, too embarrassed to be identified. ‘But I’m not into that sort of behaviour, although I still want my money back and he should be properly dealt with by the authorities.’

  Green’s Estepona friend Justin Ketch explained, ‘There was a price on John’s head. No doubt about it. He had to get out of here in a hurry.’ Manuel Pintes, the owner of a bar just a couple of hundred yards from Green’s Estepona villa, wasn’t surprised when Green did his midnight flit. ‘John always pushed his luck. If it wasn’t problems caused by his forgeries then it was some girlfriend or other kicking him out of the house.’

  Green openly boasted to his friends on the Costa del Sol that he believed he had the right to con the British villains he encountered to ‘give them a taste of their own medicine’. But now it seems that some of those ‘mugs’ whom John Green so obsessively hoaxed may have committed the ultimate act of revenge. ‘Either that or he’s laughing at us from some pretty little finca up in the mountains,’ said one of his old Costa del Sol friends.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  HITMAN LUIS

  An executioner’s wage pays for a comfortable home in the hills around Marbella

  HITMAN LUIS

  There is plenty of work for a good hitman on the Costa del Sol. The number of shootists on the streets of southern Spain has reached almost epidemic proportions in recent times. Twenty years ago, if you wanted someone bumped off there were only a handful of highly professional killers-for-hire available. But in 2003 there were more than a hundred acknowledged hits on the Costa del Sol – and they are just the ones the Spanish police know about. Many of these professional hits get little or no newspaper coverage. As one British journalist based in Spain says, ‘One villain knocking off another doesn’t have the same news appeal as a beautiful brunette blasting her cheating husband to death.’

  Not surprisingly, hitmen on the Costa del Crime tend to keep a low profile. Says one, ‘The less publicity the better. Luckily the papers don’t seem that interested in most hits, and that’s the way we like it.’

  But the Spanish police admit the situation has now spiralled totally out of control. One detective based in Marbella told me, ‘Drugs have brought with them many hitmen. Some of these criminals would commission a contract killer for the smallest reason. It’s a very dangerous situation.’

  The bottom line is that life is a lot cheaper in 21st-century Spain than it was when armed robbers brandishing sawn-off shotguns swaggered across pavements in south London taking pot-shots at anyone in their way. These days, there are numerous small-time hoods prepared to knock off other villains, cheating lovers or work rivals, which could eventually put the real pros out of business.

  Take ‘Luis’. He’s half-Spanish, half-English and has been in ‘the business’ for 12 years. He lives in a big pad in the hills behind Malaga, and no one other than his dear old mum, his wife and his kids knows his real identity. That’s the way he intends to keep it. ‘I do the job clean and simple, with no fucking aggro,’ explains Luis. ‘That’s why people come to me when they have a problem.’

  Luis reckons the hired hand who popped a French couple on a quiet street in Marbella a couple of years back didn’t put a foot wrong. The married pair were iced as part of a turf war between drug dealers and brothel owners in the area. ‘I heard it cost £20,000 each person, which is a good deal for everyone concerned.’ The couple were shot at point-blank range outside their modern detached home only a few hundred yards from the local police station. They had been telling people there was ‘a bullet out there with our names on it’ because they’d turned police informants. The drugs ring they were connected to had links to an American mafia branch in Detroit, not to mention a number of men from Medellin in Colombia. So when they finally got rubbed out on their own doorstep at 1am, there wasn’t a lot of grieving.

  The Marbella police didn’t have anyone in the frame and made it clear they weren’t that bothered about the killing. It turned out that the couple had double-crossed numerous criminal associates, ripped off call girls and hugely upset certain cocaine dealers. Some poor mug had even bought a second-hand car off them and discovered it was hot.

  Luis himself is renowned as one of the most feared shootists in southern Spain. ‘The rules of the game are changing every day. My basic price is €30,000, unless I’m being asked to take out a big-time criminal who’s got a lot of protection. I always get paid in full, in advance, in cash. How else could I handle it, take a cheque? There are other unwritten clauses that go into every hit contract. If I get arrested, the person commissioning the hit takes care of all my legal costs plus my bail if I manage to get it. He’d also make sure I was comfortable in prison, that my wife was comfortable at home, as well as do everything to try and get me out. Finally, when I finish my sentence, he would have a bundle of cash waiting for me. This is done to guarantee silence. As long as all obligations are taken care of, I’m not going to say a word to no one. I’m certainly not going to land anyone in the shit. They’d soon finish me off.’

  But Luis says it’s not the risk of being caught for his crimes that bothers him. ‘There are other so-called pros out there killing people for €5,000 each job. But you get what you pay for and these cut-price operators all get caught in the end and then they start singing to the police. Let’s face it, a grandmother in Benalmadena who wants her husband killed after thirty years of abuse is going to end up hiring an amateur or an undercover policeman. There’s too many small-time hoods making out they can carry out h
its for next to nothing. All they do is make problems for people like me.’

  But Luis thinks he knows exactly what the future holds for him. ‘I’m planning to retire soon. Buy myself a nice little villa in northern Spain and start relaxing and enjoying my life.’ He pauses and nods his head slowly. ‘If I live that long…’

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  SLIPPERY JOE

  Joe Wilkins – slippery when wanted

  SLIPPERY JOE

  Joe Wilkins was one of a dying breed of Costa del Sol criminals. He loved playing everyone off against each other: the cops, other mobsters, even poor old Joe Public. They’ve all provided an income to artful Joe Wilkins.

  When one of Scotland Yard’s most disastrous stings came crashing down leaving London’s police with a £25 million bill after a court case against a suspected money-laundering gang collapsed in the summer of 2003, guess who was being blamed? Old Joe Wilkins. He undoubtedly played a pivotal role in the operation despite being an escaped convict, sometime fraudster, Soho vice king and friend to many of Britain and Spain’s most notorious gangsters. Scotland Yard detectives had set up an operation to catch drugs and tobacco smugglers based in Spain and Gibraltar, using Joe Wilkins to introduce them to the major players. But what on earth were the Old Bill doing using a dodgepot like Wilkins as a supposedly reliable police informer?

  This bizarre tale kicked off in 1992 when Wilkins went on the run from a low-security prison in East Anglia where he was serving ten years for drugs smuggling. Like so many others, he turned up a few months later on the Costa del Crime where he got tapped by undercover detectives who wanted his help setting up the sting. Wilkins, well-connected in the British underworld community, was encouraged to introduce coppers posing as dodgy businessmen to major villains operating in Spain and Gibraltar. They were lured into investing their dirty money into a laundering scheme that was really a police front. It turned into a five-year operation that ensnared dozens of criminals who were laundering money from drugs, tobacco and vice rackets. But that sting eventually ended up causing years of legal wrangling and accusations of entrapment against the long arm of the law.