Jean de Sperati & the Roth series
I have to admit that philately, or stamp collecting, is not my thing so it came as a surprise to me when I became fascinated by the exploits of Jean de Sperati, an Italian master forger of philatelic specimens.
Sperati was born in 1884 into a family of stamp dealers and printers in Pistola, Italy. His real name was Giovanni Desperati. I love 'desperati', it conjures up all kinds of character possibilities for a novelist. He separated it to de Sperati, probably at the time he went to live in Aix-en-Provence in France. The French version doesn't have the same allure.
Little Giovanni learnt his trade in the family business which was then operating in Pisa. Then he started producing fake stamps. In this context fakes are genuine specimens altered to increase their value which is done by changing the colour, design or denomination so the forger's creation looks like, and hopefully passes as, a more valuable stamp. When you sell them as the real article they're forgeries and you go to jail without passing go.
In the early 1900s Sperati was hard at it and the family had a visit from the Italian police who seized numerous fakes, as well as the printing equipment that had produced them. It filled a couple of trucks so Jean had been a busy boy. It's unclear whether Sperati was passing off his fakes and selling them, but given the police were on his tail it seems likely.
However, Sperati had fled the scene and moved to Turin where he worked in a factory during the day and produced forgeries at night. In 1910 the first Sperati forgery was detected in the collection of Dr Heinrich Koeller, a leading German dealer, but the greatest controversy came in 1922 with the Grinnell Missionaries, a set of Hawaiian stamps produced in the 1850s by missionaries living in the Islands. The collection had been sold in 1919 as genuine specimens by George Grinnell to a dealer, John Klemann, for the then incredible sum of $65,000.
After court proceedings that ended in 1922, the Grinnell Missionaries were declared to be fakes. The origin of the collection was never proven and Sperati's hand was never detected, although as later events proved, he had faked Hawaiian Missionaries and sold them. There are now only 13 two cent genuine Hawaiian Missionaries known to exist. The last time I looked them up some time ago they were worth about $US600,000 each.
The Grinnells remain a mystery, but Sperati's forgery is now the stuff of legend because by the early 1950s there were so many of his fakes on the market and suspected of lying undetected in collections that the Royal Philatelic Society in London decided the only way to control the trade was to buy Sperati out. It was an extraordinary thing for them to do but given Sperati's history they may have had no choice.
Sperati had already avoided a conviction for forgery in 1942 when French customs seized a package of fakes he'd posted from France to a dealer in Lisbon. At the trial not only could the experts not tell fakes from genuine specimens, but Sperati's defence was that the stamps were 'philatelic art'.
The defence had two aspects - he'd signed each specimen lightly in pencil on the reverse and stamped some of them in yellow ink, (left). The defence worked and Sperati was acquitted.
The Society knew it had issued certificates of authenticity for Sperati fakes. One of their certificates is shown, right. They also knew the Italian's activities were causing uncertainty and disrupting the philatelic market.
In 1952 Sperati was arrested and tried again. This time he was convicted and sentenced to two years imprisonment which he didn't serve because of his age.
In 1954, when Sperati was 70, the Society offered to buy him out for 10 million francs (about $US40,000). They seized everything, specimens and equipment, and Sperati gave his word never to work again.
When the horde was catalogued it was estimated that he had made multiple copies of stamps from 100 countries - about 70,000 forgeries/fakes in all. Some of them are still undetected in collections today. Ironically Sperati fogeries are now sought by collectors and have a market value of their own.
Of course Sperati never stopped working. In 1955 the Society issued a comprehensive work of known Sperati forgeries to alert collectors to the extent of Sperati's 'activities', The Work of Jean de Sperati. It was updated with a second volume in 2001.
This is just a taste of Sperati the master forger. When I researched him I went into the techniques he used and philatelic collecting and forgery in general. It's a big subject and I when I found a true story about one collector murdering another for a two cent Hawaiian I was interested enough to use some of the material for the character of Victor Roth, the eponymous hero of the ROTH series.
Victor is a complex beast - undoubtedly a genius and an unconventional investigator, but he has a very short fuse and a need to make things.
It's all in the books now and I have to say I've loved putting it down.
Sperati was born in 1884 into a family of stamp dealers and printers in Pistola, Italy. His real name was Giovanni Desperati. I love 'desperati', it conjures up all kinds of character possibilities for a novelist. He separated it to de Sperati, probably at the time he went to live in Aix-en-Provence in France. The French version doesn't have the same allure. Little Giovanni learnt his trade in the family business which was then operating in Pisa. Then he started producing fake stamps. In this context fakes are genuine specimens altered to increase their value which is done by changing the colour, design or denomination so the forger's creation looks like, and hopefully passes as, a more valuable stamp. When you sell them as the real article they're forgeries and you go to jail without passing go.
In the early 1900s Sperati was hard at it and the family had a visit from the Italian police who seized numerous fakes, as well as the printing equipment that had produced them. It filled a couple of trucks so Jean had been a busy boy. It's unclear whether Sperati was passing off his fakes and selling them, but given the police were on his tail it seems likely.
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| Hawaiian Missionary |
After court proceedings that ended in 1922, the Grinnell Missionaries were declared to be fakes. The origin of the collection was never proven and Sperati's hand was never detected, although as later events proved, he had faked Hawaiian Missionaries and sold them. There are now only 13 two cent genuine Hawaiian Missionaries known to exist. The last time I looked them up some time ago they were worth about $US600,000 each.
The Grinnells remain a mystery, but Sperati's forgery is now the stuff of legend because by the early 1950s there were so many of his fakes on the market and suspected of lying undetected in collections that the Royal Philatelic Society in London decided the only way to control the trade was to buy Sperati out. It was an extraordinary thing for them to do but given Sperati's history they may have had no choice.
Sperati had already avoided a conviction for forgery in 1942 when French customs seized a package of fakes he'd posted from France to a dealer in Lisbon. At the trial not only could the experts not tell fakes from genuine specimens, but Sperati's defence was that the stamps were 'philatelic art'.
The defence had two aspects - he'd signed each specimen lightly in pencil on the reverse and stamped some of them in yellow ink, (left). The defence worked and Sperati was acquitted.
The Society knew it had issued certificates of authenticity for Sperati fakes. One of their certificates is shown, right. They also knew the Italian's activities were causing uncertainty and disrupting the philatelic market. In 1952 Sperati was arrested and tried again. This time he was convicted and sentenced to two years imprisonment which he didn't serve because of his age.
In 1954, when Sperati was 70, the Society offered to buy him out for 10 million francs (about $US40,000). They seized everything, specimens and equipment, and Sperati gave his word never to work again.
When the horde was catalogued it was estimated that he had made multiple copies of stamps from 100 countries - about 70,000 forgeries/fakes in all. Some of them are still undetected in collections today. Ironically Sperati fogeries are now sought by collectors and have a market value of their own.
Of course Sperati never stopped working. In 1955 the Society issued a comprehensive work of known Sperati forgeries to alert collectors to the extent of Sperati's 'activities', The Work of Jean de Sperati. It was updated with a second volume in 2001.
This is just a taste of Sperati the master forger. When I researched him I went into the techniques he used and philatelic collecting and forgery in general. It's a big subject and I when I found a true story about one collector murdering another for a two cent Hawaiian I was interested enough to use some of the material for the character of Victor Roth, the eponymous hero of the ROTH series.Victor is a complex beast - undoubtedly a genius and an unconventional investigator, but he has a very short fuse and a need to make things.
It's all in the books now and I have to say I've loved putting it down.
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