In time the owners of the shop where Zobel’s work was displayed came to realize that collectors of rare documents were traveling long distances, some from as far away as New York, Boston, and Chicago, to buy up everything that Zobel created, as fast as he could produce it. When the shop raised its prices for Zobel’s works, while the profits rose, the result was the same. Their inventory of his work was gone almost before it could be hung. Tony decorating salons in Georgetown and Manhattan began to call, asking if they could commission specific items. If the shop could have cloned Zobel, they would have made a fortune.
The problem was, there was a built-in economic ceiling for his work. The moment the prices started approaching the cost of an original, demand disappeared. It didn’t take long before it dawned on them that if people with money in New York and Boston were decorating the walls of their studies and libraries with Zobel’s elegant copies, how much more would they pay if they thought the article was real?
They didn’t have to argue long to convince Zobel. He had been working up calluses on his fingers, was running out of turkey quills, and had less than twelve hundred dollars to show for eighteen documents, all of which were sold nearly before they were written. Zobel was having visions of dying like van Gogh, broke, only to have collectors trading his works for millions years later, as pieces of art.
The first item they crafted was an original letter from Washington to one of his aides, an obscure two paragraphs about military stores for his troops. For provenance the shop owners claimed that the item was found pasted to the back of a drawer in an eighteenth-century dining set that came into their shop. The piece sold at auction in New York for eighteen thousand dollars. They did it again, a different letter, a different author, and this time they used a party not connected with the shop who said she found the item behind an old photo, a family heirloom. They netted twenty-three thousand dollars at auction.
Now they were in business. They kept the documents sufficiently obscure, with only one notable signature, so the price would stay in the realm of reason and the buyer would not be induced to have experts examine the paper and ink. In fourteen months they’d sold seventeen pieces, netting nearly half a million dollars. It was that last piece, the seventeenth item that brought the roof down. It seems they’d gone to the well once too often. One of the auction houses in New York got suspicious. Unless someone had found a chest of forgotten letters, a mother lode of historic grocery lists penned by the pantheon of American founders, there were simply too many new finds coming from one region all at one time. A quick check of the ink and paper and it didn’t take long for the FBI to trace everything back to the little shop in Fredericksburg.
It is from the statement of facts in the circuit court’s opinion that Harry gleaned all these details of Zobel’s early life.
Edgar Zobel did six and a half years in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta for interstate fraud, wire and mail fraud, and lost his house, paying a fine of a quarter of a million dollars. He sat in prison while his lawyers filed an appeal that was ultimately denied by the federal Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Virginia, an opinion written by the Honorable John R. Logan, circuit judge. It took Harry a few minutes longer to find the names of the other two judges on the three-judge panel: the Honorable Rufus James and Arthur J. Ginnis, both concurring. That was twenty-six years ago.
Immediately I called Quinn and told him. I gave him the citation so he could find the case.
He told me that it was interesting, he would look at it, but that it was outside the record of the trial and could not be given to the jury.
I told him I knew that, but that it was the first solid piece of evidence we had that the Jefferson Letter, more than likely, was a fraud.
It took Herman a little longer than Harry-and some shoe leather-to discover that Zobel was still alive and to find him. In nearly a quarter of a century, he hadn’t ventured far. Zobel was living in a small house that unless you looked closely you might swear was a barn, along a dried-up creek among scrub oaks twelve miles outside Charlottesville, Virginia. The inside walls of his house were literally pasted with historic documents, some of them framed, some not.
Since getting out of prison twenty years earlier, Zobel had gone back to his roots. For a price he would sell you a replicated piece of history, anything you wanted, signed by a historic figure. Most of his business was done over the Internet and via e-mail.
Replicated documents or whimsical originals were sent out by UPS ground shipment, unless the buyer wanted to spring for overnight delivery.
According to what Zobel told Herman, he almost never saw the people who commissioned his work. He imposed only two requirements on his customers. First, they were required to sign and mail in a disclaimer, the form that was on Zobel’s Web site, verifying that they were commissioning the work and that there was no intent on their part to use the document for any fraudulent or unlawful purpose. Second, they had to agree that the document, when completed, would bear a discreet notation in indelible ink printed on the reverse side that the item was “a hand-replicated copy, and not an original.” That and payment, either by credit card to his site on the Internet or by check with return of the disclaimer, was all Zobel required.
When Herman showed Zobel a copy of the Jefferson Letter, the man nearly collapsed behind the counter. He had been waiting for the FBI to arrive for three weeks. When he saw the copy, he assumed that Herman was there to arrest him. Herman assured him that what he wanted was information and nothing more.
Zobel told him that from the start it was an unusual transaction, but that he’d done everything by the book. It had been ordered not over the Internet, but by phone. A price had been quoted, and a few days later an envelope arrived with typed memoranda of the contents to be penned in the letter, along with the signed disclaimer form, apparently printed off Zobel’s Web site. There were also fifteen crisp one-hundred-dollar bills, the price quoted.
All this made Zobel nervous. He was no longer on parole, but he didn’t want to go back to prison, so he did the right thing. He called his lawyer.
The lawyer assured him that as long as he had the signed disclaimer and he printed the notation on the back of the replicated document, he was in the clear. So he did it. According to Zobel’s records, the “original” of the J letter, written on four custom-made quarto-size sheets, was picked up by a private courier service two weeks later. Zobel didn’t note or write down the name of the courier service. When he pulled the disclaimer form from the file that included a copy of his work and the original envelope containing the money, the return address on the envelope read “T. Scarborough,” with Scarborough’s Georgetown address. And the disclaimer form bore the signature “T. Scarborough.” Herman used a subpoena to get the envelope and the original of the disclaimer form, leaving the subpoena and a copy of the form in Zobel’s files.
Back in the office, Harry, Herman, and I labor over the signature. While none of us are handwriting experts, Scarborough’s signature was somewhat unique. It would be difficult to copy. The signature at the bottom of Zobel’s disclaimer form appeared to be an original in blue ink, and from everything we can see-all the little nooks and crannies, right down to the tailored wisps of ink from his favored fountain pen-it appeared to be authentic.