A classic “composite counterfeit” matches authentic components with forged ones. The distributor would take a genuine piece of paper (sometimes from a blank, pre-signed stockpile) but print a completely unauthorized, newly fabricated image onto it. Conversely, they would print a legally licensed image onto new paper and forge a Salvador Dali signature on top. Because one part of the equation was “real” (the paper or the reproduction license), the whole piece was marketed as authentic. This became the practice of Leon Amiel.
Leon Amiel was a prominent New York and New Jersey art publisher who worked directly with Salvador Dali. He was an authorized publisher of Dalí lithographs and etchings starting around the 1960s. Being a highly respected New York book seller and fine-art publisher meant he rubbed elbows directly with European modern masters. He legitimately printed and published genuine limited-edition art books, lithographs, and etchings for masters like Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, and Marc Chagall during the 1960s and 1970s. He had genuine relationships with them. As an art publisher and major distributor, Léon Amiel focused on catalogs raisonnés (comprehensive, annotated listings of an artist’s entire body of work) and deluxe exhibition portfolios. He typically partnered with European printers like Mourlot Frères and Éditions André Sauret to publish the authorized English-language versions of these catalogs for the American market.
Amiel is famous among print collectors for publishing the official English edition of Joan Miró’s definitive print catalog. He also distributed and published major volumes documenting Marc Chagall’s printmaking and complete career trajectories of painters like Pablo Picasso (by Franck Elgar, 1974), Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.
The three primary Salvador Dali portfolios that Leon Amiel was officially and legitimately authorized to publish during Dalí’s lifetime are Twelve Signs of the Zodiac (1967), Song of Songs (1970), and Our Historical Heritage (1975).
During his lifetime, Dalí legally contracted with Leon Amiel and sold him between 17,500 and 20,500 blank sheets of paper that Dalí had already signed in pencil. The paper was originally earmarked for an early 1970’s large limited-edition 78 Tarot Card release. The Major Arcana portion of the card project was eventually done in the late 70’s by another publisher due to a legal settlement. This situation gave Amiel a massive stockpile of authentic, signed blanks.
Léon Amiel obtained his inventory of high-end art paper and pre-signed Salvador Dalí material through a mix of legitimate commercial purchasing and buying direct leftovers from Dalí’s inner circle. Amiel utilized his connections to European publishers. These print houses often had leftover blank stock from old, legally expired Dalí contracts. Amiel bought up these blank paper caches and imported them to his Secaucus, New Jersey and Long Island warehouses.
By the early 1980s, Dalí’s physical health was rapidly deteriorating, and he stopped signing paper altogether. Recognizing a massive supply vacuum in the art market, Amiel began exploiting his personal business relationships and his stockpile of pre-signed blank sheets. He began to secretly shift his New Jersey carpet warehouse into a mass-production network to feed the insatiable art market.
Leon Amiel did have an authentic, historically legitimate relationship with Salvador Dalí, and he did publish fully authorized Dalí suites in the late 1960s and 1970s. However, there were no legally “grandfathered” contracts that allowed him to continue producing new art after Dalí fell ill in 1980. Amiel actively used his genuine historical relationship as a smoke screen to produce work. He turned his legitimate art publishing business, Leon Amiel Publisher Inc., into the single largest worldwide source and distribution network of bogus prints.
In 1984, when Naipes Comas Publishing eventually printed the Dali’s full Tarot deck they didn’t require Dalí to sit down and make print plates. Over a ten-year period Dalí created all 78 tarot card designs utilizing a brilliant, rapid-fire pastiche and collage method as a series of mixed-media gouache paintings on cardboard, not as print plates.
Where, Naipes Comas took Dali’s complete collection of 78 physical mixed-media collage paintings, photographed them at high resolution, scaled them down, added uniform printed borders, and mass-published them as a beautiful authentic authorized playing deck.
Leon Amiel’s Minor Arcana Tarot prints were a series of large-format, unauthorized lithographs created between 1982 and 1986 using photomechanical collages. They are infamous in the art world because they were ideally printed directly onto the 17,500 to 20,500 authentic blank sheets of paper that Salvador Dalí had legally pre-signed before his health collapsed. Because the paper and signature are chemically real, but the image was compiled without the artist’s involvement, these are classified as “composite counterfeits”. Yet these were being sold as authentic Dali’s.
Leon Amiel did not make his own original designs, nor did he print exact high-fidelity replicas of Salvador Dalí’s fully finalized Tarot paintings. Instead, he created deceptive “hybrid” or “composite” fakes using elements from Dalí’s actual project and began passing them off as multi-thousand-dollar fine-art lithographs. Instead of executing true, fine-art stone lithography, Amiel ran these modified designs through high-speed, commercial photomechanical offset printing presses. This process laid flat ink layers over Dalí’s genuine pencil signatures. To the untrained eye, it appeared to be a deluxe, limited-edition fine art suite sanctioned by the artist.
Amiel expanded this operation taking standard quality commercial photos of famous Dalí oil paintings hanging in American museums (like The Last Supper and The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus), printed them onto fine art paper, and counterfeit Dalí’s signature on the bottom. In going rogue, Amiel was producing unauthorized lithographic reproductions and “afters” of famous works, forging signatures, and flooding the global market. The Amiel network produced cheaper photomechanical copies and “interpretations” of legendary paintings and graphics, marketing them to unsuspecting galleries and collectors as rare, pencil-signed, limited-edition prints. The counterfeit prints produced by the Leon Amiel network were typically sold to everyday consumers for anywhere between $500 and $10,000 per print. The Amiel family sold the counterfeit Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, and Marc Chagall prints in bulk to crooked art distributors and galleries for a fraction of their target retail value. Unsuspecting art consumers purchased them from high-end galleries, telephone “boiler rooms,” and public auctions for thousands of dollars apiece, believing they were making a solid investment in rare, limited editions.
Federal investigators began tracking Amiel’s operations in 1986.
Suspicion intensified significantly in 1987 after a major Manhattan gallery owner was convicted of fraud for selling fake Dalí prints that had been directly supplied by Amiel. At the time, Amiel publicly defended himself in the New York Times, claiming he had legitimately purchased the prints from French publishers (Gilbert Hamon) who had valid contracts with Dalí.
Unbeknownst to him, federal agents—including the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, the Department of Justice, and the Federal Trade Commission—were building a massive case against his publishing empire. Leon Amiel died in October 1988 at the age of 67, while the federal investigation into his activities was still actively pending. Because he died before the case concluded, he never faced indictment, a trial, or prison time. Instead, his family took over the operation and kept the counterfeiting machine running. Amiel’s family members and associates continued running the business (such as Original Artworks, Ltd.).
In 1989 the Federal authorities launched an intense, 18-month undercover sting operation. This culminated in a massive July 1991 raid (Operation Bogart).
Federal investigations revealed that Amiel had started producing and hoarding unauthorized reproductions, forging artist signatures, and selling tens of thousands of fake, valueless prints under the names of Picasso, Miró, Chagall, and Dalí. Federal agencies cracked down on the operation, seizing over 77,000 to 100,000 pieces of bogus art and convicting family members for mail and wire fraud. Since Amiel legitimately published authorized reference catalogs for these artists, his family later used his original plates and access to specific paper types to print the fakes exposed in the 1990s federal bust of the counterfeit ring. The Feds calculated that the Amiel network previously had sold at least an equal number of counterfeit prints at a cost to customers of more than $11 million($60 Million in todays monies including buyers premium and transit), through more than 100 galleries. But that number is just a fraction of what art experts consider the scope of the fraud to be.
Around the same time while the Amiel family was being investigated for physical counterfeiting in the United States, Gilbert Hamon, a shrewd, Parisian commercial print merchant and graphics dealer that had maneuvered into a blitz of Dali contracts, was a direct target of investigation; faced heavy legal trouble, devastating financial loss, and permanent damage to his professional reputation due to his entanglement with Léon Amiel and the broader Salvador Dalí counterfeit art network.
Gilbert Hamon’s trouble revealed itself through the European and international crackdowns on the highly profitable, deceptive “contract print” market.
Hamon was legally caught in the crosshairs of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and European authorities during the late 1980s and early 1990s crackdowns. He was prosecuted and heavily fined for art fraud. The courts penalized him for manufacturing and selling authorized “reproductions” under deceptive premises, where Salvador Dalí actually had zero physical or artistic involvement.
From a purely legalistic standpoint, Hamon genuinely believed his operations were fully protected. He believed he had the right to market photographic slides as luxury graphic items. In his mind, he wasn’t a criminal counterfeiter; he was a legitimate businessman executing contracts he paid hard cash for. Hamon didn’t forge the Dali contracts. They were real documents, drawn up by Dalí’s own management team. Hamon acted as a middleman who brokered production rights. He was a graphics distributor who dealt in mass-marketed prints, decorative works, and commercial reproductions. He specialized in buying rights to existing artworks, hiring artisans to create plates based on photos of those artworks, and selling the resulting prints. While not strictly illegal if marketed transparently as “afters” or decorative reproductions, this model made him a controversial figure among serious art purists who viewed his inventory as cheap commercialization.
He purchased or created publishing contracts—often valued at $100,000 apiece($500,000 today)—which supposedly gave international distributors the right to take Dalí’s existing paintings and have separate, anonymous artisans convert them into hand-colored prints.
When global law enforcement launched Operation Bogart to target the Leon Amiel ring and its suppliers, these expensive publishing contracts were legally invalidated. The market for these prints completely collapsed, rendering Hamon’s massive financial investments entirely worthless. The key was Hamon didn’t sell these as “photographic posters.” He and his distribution network marketed them as original, hand-signed lithographs, drastically inflating the price to deceive everyday collectors.
Furthermore, internationally recognized fine Art Appraiser and Investigator Bernard Ewell provided crucial expert witness testimony for major agencies including the FBI, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and the U.S. Department of Justice that later proved in court that many of the prints that Hamon or Amiel’s distributed didn’t use Dalí’s actual pre-signed paper. Instead, they utilized paper featuring signatures forged by other members of Dalí’s circle, such as his former secretary Captain John Peter Moore.
So, Hamon’s operation was deeply tied to one of the biggest scandals in modern art history: The Pre-Signed Infinity Paper Scandal.
Coincidentally around the same time period to advertise Arches and BFK Rives Paper’s extreme longevity and acid-free permanence; paper manufacturer Arjomari introduced the infinity symbol (∞) in 1980 for a purely corporate, marketing reason. Arches rolled out their new longevity-branded paper mold featuring the infinity loop as a watermark. The overlap became a legendary scandal due to the perfect convergence of two independent events in 1980. The new symbol on the paper and 1980 was the exact year Dalí permanently stopped signing prints and blank sheets of paper due to severe palsy and illness.
Agents like Hamon claimed they acquired thousands of blank, white sheets of paper that Dalí had rapidly signed when his hands were still steady. Because Hamon used these pre-signed sheets to feed the Amiel and others distribution machine, federal investigators used forensic paper testing to prove that the art printed on them post-dated Dalí’s actual signing years. This destroyed the legitimacy of Hamon’s entire inventory.
Let’s be clear. It is a fact that Salvador Dalí did legally authorize the reproduction rights in those specific contracts. However, the art world and federal courts still rejected the resulting prints as deceptive because Hamon completely violated the strict boundaries of what Dalí actually authorized. The contracts explicitly authorized reproductions. However, Hamon marketed and sold them to distributors like Leon Amiel as original, investment-grade, hand-signed graphic art works supervised by the artist. Dalí gave Hamon the ‘worldwide rights’ to create photomechanical reproductions from color slides of existing Dalí oil masterpieces with a special stamp bearing his thumbprint. Hamon took these valid contracts and used them as a legal shield to run an entirely unauthorized operation. Instead of sticking to the authorized thumbprint stamp, Hamon hired teams of forgers to sign Dalí’s actual hand-signature onto the margins of the prints in pencil or ink.
To mass-produce these prints, Hamon printed them on the newly manufactured post-1980 infinity paper. When federal investigators stepped in, they proved that even if the reproduction right was authorized by a 1980 contract, the physical “hand-signed original” prints were created long after Dalí had completely lost the physical ability to sign them.
When the massive international crackdowns, Federal Trade Commission (FTC) raids, and lawsuits over these exact contracts peaked between 1985 and 1989, Hamon was already noted by leading investigators to have died. He suddenly died. He died right before the takedown.
Gilbert Hamon had completely legitimate authorized Salvador Dali contracts with “worldwide rights” to produce “lithographs or engravings” from color slides of Dalí’s master oil paintings. Because the contract legally classified these items as “lithographs,” Hamon and downstream retail galleries marketed them to consumers as ‘original’, hand-signed graphic art rather than the high-quality color photographs they actually were. Hamon’s defense in court was that the mechanics outlined in the contract—printing from a color slide—made it obvious to any art professional that they were “afters”. His inventory was permanently legally branded as unauthorized reproductions
The courts ultimately found him guilty of fraud because the authorized contracts were deliberately worded to blur the lines, allowing these mass-produced photo prints to be sold to the public as authentic, original fine art.
Gilbert Hamon bought real contracts from a corrupt entourage and used them as a legal shield. He thought he had found the ultimate loophole to print money, but the courts ultimately ruled that a valid contract does not give a dealer the right to traffic in systemic consumer fraud.
Interestingly, today, in art history databases, these specific prints are very collectible and are officially categorized as “Authorized Hamon Afters” an authentic, historical artifact not an original print touched or signed by Salvador Dalí. The Leon Amiel prints are absolutely not “authorized afters”. Amiel had no paperwork to hide behind. Amiel fundamentally abused his Dali legitimate relationship. Even if Amiel had a stash of real pre-signed paper, it was a tiny fraction of the massive, industrial-scale ocean of prints he was pumping out. Amiel started with legitimate access and genuine pre-signed paper. Then he built a massive counterfeit empire.
Ironically, Gilbert Hamon got away in the exact same manner as Leon Amiel, He died just before federal authorities could bring him to justice, escaping prison time entirely.