Two art fraud rings in a remote Canadian city produced thousands of paintings sold in galleries as works by Norval Morrisseau, Canada’s most celebrated Indigenous artist.
Tim Tait put two and two together when he went to sell some of his paintings to a law firm in downtown Thunder Bay two decades ago. He spotted one of his other works already there — but with somebody else’s signature on it.
And not just anybody’s. It read “Copper Thunderbird,” a.k.a. the “Picasso of the North.” Real name Norval Morrisseau, Canada’s most famous Indigenous artist whose original style shattered the country’s idea of art and elbowed its way into its most important museum.
“I called the cops,” said Mr. Tait, a local artist in Thunder Bay, Ontario, who is also Indigenous. “All they did was laugh at me and ridicule me on the phone.”
“And I said, ‘When it comes out, I’ll be singing like a bird.’”
By the time it all came out — decades later — two criminal rings in Thunder Bay had knocked off thousands of bogus Norval Morrisseaus that collectively fetched millions of dollars across Canada. The fakes, which included rebranded paintings by Mr. Tait and other Indigenous artists, made it onto the walls of the country’s top galleries and universities. They were purchased by retired schoolteachers, billionaire art collectors and even a rock star.
The leaders of the Thunder Bay rings have pleaded guilty to fraud in the past year and are now imprisoned. Thunder Bay — an isolated city on Lake Superior’s north shore that drug dealers from Toronto have turned into Canada’s homicide capital — has also emerged as the epicenter of the biggest art fraud in the country’s history.
The convictions came a quarter-century after the authenticity of many Morrisseaus was first publicly questioned — and only after a series of unusual events linking the rock star; a cold-case murder of a teenager; his aging, grieving parents; and the hard-boiled homicide detectives initially skeptical of art fraud. The detectives ended up mastering the finer points of Morrisseau’s Woodlands style of art.
“None of us knew anything about art,” Det. Jason Rybak of the Thunder Bay Police Service said during a recent drive through the city, whose muted colors were further drained by fresh snow and a cloud-filled sky.
Recalling the first raid of a ringleader’s house, Detective Rybak, who led the investigation, said: “Next thing you know, we have these paintings. And we’re like, ‘Oh yeah, what now?’”
The police knew of Morrisseau, though. A member of the Ojibwe First Nation, he was born on a reserve northeast of Thunder Bay. But Morrisseau had long been a fixture on the city’s streets where he hawked his artwork.
Morrisseau became famous for creating the Woodland School of painting, a fusion of Ojibwe and European styles. His paintings touched on Indigenous beliefs, depicting people, animals and the physical and spiritual worlds in bright colors and X-ray-like motifs.
Canada’s artistic establishment had long considered works by Indigenous artists to be ethnography, not fine art. But Morrisseau’s work changed that starting in the 1960s, as it earned acclaim in Toronto, the United States and France, where he became known as the Picasso of the North.
In 2006, a year before his death at 75, the National Gallery of Canada, the country’s most important museum, held a retrospective of Morrisseau’s art — the first time a contemporary Indigenous artist was given such a spotlight. But the homage was marred by news reports of the proliferation of suspected knockoffs. Morrisseau himself had spoken out against the fraud and identified fakes with his forged signature.
The stories never led anywhere because gallery owners, auctioneers and others with a financial stake in counterfeit Morrisseaus fiercely denied the existence of widespread fraud, said Jonathan Sommer, a lawyer who represented three people who sued galleries for selling them counterfeits.
Many wealthy collectors were too embarrassed to admit they had bought fakes, Mr. Sommer said. But one client happened to be a rock star: Kevin Hearn, the keyboardist for the Barenaked Ladies, a Canadian band that has sold more than 15 million albums.
Mr. Hearn, a onetime choirboy, loved “the bold colors and the black lines” in the paintings of Morrisseau, whose work was influenced by stained-glass church windows. In 2005, he bought a painting of animals in a circle on a green canvas called, “Spirit Energy of Mother Earth,” paying 20,000 Canadian dollars, about $16,500 at the time, at a Toronto gallery that reassured him of its authenticity.
After learning a few years later that it was a fake, Mr. Hearn successfully sued the gallery even as he weathered online attacks from people at risk of losing financially by the exposing of sham Morrisseaus.
“I was scared for my family,” Mr. Hearn said in an interview. “They were posting photos of my special-needs daughter online saying that I was a bad father for pursuing this litigation.”
Mr. Hearn also backed the making of a documentary, “There Are No Fakes,” on the broader fraud involving Morrisseau.
“I feel like the relationship between an artist’s work and the people that take that work into their heart is sacred,” he said.
The documentary featured information on Gary Lamont, a Thunder Bay man convicted of sexual abuse who was also, according to the police, a small-time drug dealer and a suspect in the 1984 killing of a 17-year-old named Scott Dove.
When Scott’s parents learned he had been mentioned in the documentary, they reached out to an investigator who had been looking into the cold case: Detective Rybak, who said that Mr. Lamont was still a suspect in the murder.
Detective Rybak, 49, had spent his career on homicides and drugs. When the detective called Mr. Hearn and his lawyer, Mr. Sommer, he was focused on the cold case and showed little interest in the fake Morrisseaus, Mr. Sommer said. But that changed when the detective became aware of the potentially strong case against Mr. Lamont — for art fraud.
“Once he got it,” Mr. Sommer said, “he became like a pit bull.”
Detective Rybak and two colleagues, Det. Sean Verescak and Det. Kevin Bradley, said they carried out their investigation by reconstructing Morrisseau’s life so they could understand how and what he painted, and how he signed his works.
Morrisseau, who was sexually abused at the Roman Catholic residential school he was sent to at 6, according to biographies, battled alcoholism for most of his life and, at one point, was homeless in Vancouver.
“He had lots of demons,” Detective Rybak said.
After his international success, Morrisseau returned to Thunder Bay in the 1970s.
It was a blue-collar town where people worked at paper mills and grain elevators. Toronto was a 16-hour drive, a place children visited for the first time on eighth-grade field trips. Few in Thunder Bay were aware of Morrisseau’s accomplishments. Locals knew him simply as the Indigenous artist who milled around downtown offering his drawings outside a bank in exchange for money, food or alcohol.
During one winter storm, Peter Kantola was driving when Morrisseau appeared out of nowhere and flagged him down. The artist had his hands deep in the pockets of a flimsy jacket.
“He was half frozen, the snow was blasting his whole face,” recalled Mr. Kantola, 84, a retired high school science teacher.
Mr. Kantola gave Morrisseau a lift, and, after that, would do so whenever he ran into him. Morrisseau, Mr. Kantola said, gave him two large paintings that now grace his living room.
Morrisseau also befriended Gary Lamont, the future art-fraud ringleader, in the 1970s, according to Mr. Lamont’s guilty plea statement. During the course of their friendship, Mr. Lamont occasionally set up Morrisseau in an apartment and covered the rent.
Mr. Lamont’s longtime partner, Linda Tkachyk, would take money, food and alcohol to the artist, her niece Amanda Dalby recalled. Ms. Dalby, 40, lived with her aunt and Mr. Lamont when she was a child.
On one visit, Morrisseau gave Ms. Dalby and her sister a painting.
“He said it would be enough to pay for our schooling,” Ms. Dalby said, adding that Mr. Lamont later took it.
According to Mr. Lamont’s guilty plea, he started producing counterfeit Morrisseaus in 2002 and continued until 2015. He was sentenced last December to five years in prison.
In the house where Ms. Dalby stayed, Indigenous artists, including a nephew of Morrisseau’s, painted nonstop inside a tiny room that Mr. Lamont kept locked, she said.
According to his guilty plea, Mr. Lamont also traded money and marijuana for paintings by Mr. Tait — the local artist who vowed to sing like a bird and helped expose Mr. Lamont. Mr. Tait stopped supplying him with paintings after realizing they were being passed off as Morrisseaus.
“He took advantage of me pretty bad,” Mr. Tait said one recent evening as he painted on a large canvas, his granddaughter bounding around their apartment. “That was my biggest weakness, drugs. I’m not like that anymore — 20 years in August.”
Hundreds of paintings produced by the Indigenous artists were rebranded with Morrisseau’s signature in Cree syllabics — “Copper Thunderbird” — and sold for 2,000 to 10,000 Canadian dollars.
By the end of their investigation, the detectives had unearthed a second forgery ring in Thunder Bay. Under its leader, a housepainter named David Voss, fake Morrisseaus were made in assembly-line fashion with Mr. Voss sketching outlines that were colored in by multiple individuals, each responsible for a single hue. Mr. Voss pleaded guilty to fraud in June. The case of a third ring, based in southern Ontario, is still working its way through the courts.
According to the detectives, Mr. Lamont used drugs and alcohol to turn Indigenous artists into Morrisseau forgers.
Gil Labine, Mr. Lamont’s lawyer, said his client was not a drug dealer, though he supplied the Indigenous artists with drugs. Mr. Labine added that Mr. Lamont has denied any involvement in the 1984 murder.
The artists regularly showed up at the arts supply shop in town, the Painted Turtle, to pick up large orders for Mr. Lamont, said the owner, Lorraine Cull.
Late one December, Mr. Lamont showed up with four young men.
“He almost cleaned us out of all the canvases we had,” Ms. Cull said. “I asked him, ‘What are you doing with all this?’ And he said they were Christmas gifts for all the artists up North.”
“And it was after Christmas.”
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