Audio of interview on the Peter B. Collins show.

Last Wednesday I had the pleasure of being inteviewed by Peter B. Collins, whose radio show is syndiated to several stations in Northern California and Arizona. It's always nice to be interviewed by someone who is as familiar with the book as Peter was (I have no idea how he preps so thoroughly for all his guests while doing three hours of radio every day), and it was nice to get a little extra time to talk about the book in detail.

This is about 22 minutes long, and if you're interested, you can listen to it here.

Book review in the Waterloo Record

Another medium-sized Canadian daily newspaper has weighed in on FAKE. Despite the title, this really isn't a bad review from the Waterloo Record. The critic just didn't seem to think what I did was particularly wrong, and thought I should have defended myself more stridently in the book. This isn't the first time I've encoutered this opinion, and it won't be the last. If I'd written FAKE several years before I did, I might have taken a more defensive stance, and tried to convince readers that the consequences of my actions outweighed the harm I caused. But time has given me a different perspective, and I wouldn't have been writing honestly if I'd made excuses for what I did. I wasn't a serial killer and I didn't lure old ladies into bogus investment scams, but my art frauds were nevertheless deplorable in their own way, and I deserved to be taken down for them. For the record, the way I wrote about this in the book had nothing to do with my plea bargain.

You can read the review online here, or see what it looked like in print here.

News clip from KOMO News Radio, Seattle

Here's a short little piece that's been airing on KOMO news radio up in Seattle. It's not easy to summarize the book, and it's connection to the Pacific Northwest, in 90 seconds, and I thought the reporter did a pretty good job. I think he may have sped up my voice a bit.

Just got back from Seattle

I just got back from Seattle tonight after a whirlwind two-day trip. I flew up to do some interviews and, in the process, got to see some old friends. It was a pleasure to depart from a state that has been baking in triple-digit temperatures and visit a place where 90 degrees is a reason to complain. I love Seattle, and haven't spent any meaningful amount of time there in over a decade.

My friend Curt, an old pal from high school (and one of the Northwest's best photographers), was kind enough to let me stay at his place, and showed me around a bit. The highlight? His friend Matt's new restaurant Sitka and Spruce, a tiny place with extraordinary food, priced reasonably and served with a complete lack of pretension. If you ever find yourself within fifty miles of this restaurant, you must try to get in. And go soon, because it is only going to get harder to get a table. (It only serves 20 people at a time, and reviewers have gone nuts for it.)

On Wednesday I did six interviews (!), a new record. I started the day at Q13 Fox TV at about 7:30 A.M. Rushing to get there, I tripped on the sidewalk outside and felt flat on my face, sending my coffee cup flying. If someone had captured this on video, I'm sure it could have been a finalist for some TV show that features anonymous idiots tripping on sidewalks. To my astonishment, the lid on my coffee cup remained sealed, and, aside from a scuffed palm and a bruised ego, I was unharmed, and able to make my way inside. As I sat in the green room, I noticed on the monitor that one of the other people invited to the show that morning was the newly-crowned Miss Seafair, a local beauty queen. Alas, she had not yet arrived when I was whisked into the studio to tell morning news viewers the "Top Five Ways to Avoid eBay Fraud."

After this I met Don Riggs at the studios of KMPS to tape an interview for his weekend show Introspect Northwest, which airs on a couple of Seattle radio stations.

At this point, I was free until noon (I thought), so I stopped for coffee, chatted with Courtenay, and started driving back to Curt's place to take a break. At about 10:00 AM I got a call from the producer of a local daytime TV show called Northwest Afternoon. He wanted to know why I wasn't at the studio, which was about to start taping before a live studio audience. Stunned, I told him I thought I was taping on Thursday.

And I really did. For some reason I'd messed this up, and put them on my calendar on the wrong day. Out of all the interviews I was doing in Seattle, this was one of the most important, and I couldn't believe I'd screwed up the date.

The producer said he would shuffle the schedule a bit, and told me I might be able to make it on time if I turned around and headed to their studio immediately. And so I did. Of course, this led to several wrong turns, a few infuriating minutes of driving around in a park, lost, trying to find the 99 (before I was pointed in the right direction by a startled jogger), and a insane, 80 mile-an-hour dash through city streets. I broke several traffic laws on the way and, had the studio not been located at the base Space Needle, I might not have been able to find it. But I did, and after nearly hitting another car in the parking garage, I screeched into a handicapped space and ran for the elevator. Three minutes later I was walking onto the set and shaking hands with the show's hosts. Given the circumstances, I think it went okay, and it was in interesting twelve-minute interview, to say the least. I can't believe I came so close to messing it up.

As I left the building, I noticed Miss Seafair arriving, adorned in full beauty queen regalia (tiara and sash and such). We were apparently on a similar media tour.

Afterwards I was interviewed by a reporter named Saint Bryan for a piece on KING5 TV's Evening Magazine. This was taped in a really cool art studio, and I'm looking forward to seeing how it turns out.

After this, I returned to the building beneath the Space Needle for an interview with KOMO news radio, and later in the afternoon did a half-hour telephone interview on the Peter B. Collins show, which is broadcast on several radio stations in California and Arizona.

I'll try to get some clips of this stuff up on the site as they become available.

I really should do this sort of thing more often.

Taking the heartland by storm.

Kidding. I just like using the world "heartland," and I cannot claim to be taking it by storm. But yet another midwestern weekly entertainment newspaper has given a brief nod to my book FAKE, and, as always, I'm very appreciative, and hopeful that it signals some sort of trend. This time it was the Omaha City Weekly, Nebraska's hippest tabloid. Check out the article here. (It's way down at the bottom of the page, which negates any notion of taking-by-storm.)

Sigh. It is way too hot this week. 111 degrees the other day (a new record), and it's not letting up. That was not a typo: One-hundred-eleven degrees. You should all go beat the heat by seeing Al Gore's new movie.

Video of news clip on KSBW TV 8 - Monterey

On Thursday morning, the day of my book signing down in Capitola (more on this later), as I was lying in bed trying to decide whether I should get up, I got a phone call from a television reporter in Santa Cruz. He wanted me to come down as soon as possible so he could interview me for a spot for that night's news. Although my original plan was to meet Courtenay in San Francisco and drive down from there, I instead threw some things into a suitcase and hit the road (Courtenay met me down there later). The result was the following:

On the radio tomorrow in Monterey / Santa Cruz

If you're in the Monterey Bay area, tune to KSCO AM 1080 tomorrow morning at about 8:40, where I'll be doing a short appearance on the show Good Morning Monterey Bay. This is a prelude to my bookstore appearance in Capitola on Thursday night, to which I hope you're all coming.

Review in Santa Cruz Sentinel

FAKE was reviewed in today's Santa Cruz Sentinel, the largest newspaper in one of my favorite towns on the entire west coast. The review was timed well, as I'll be reading from and signing copies of the book this coming Thursday at Capitola Book Cafe, just down the road from Santa Cruz. I hope some people see the article and decide to come, since I don't have many friends down in that part of the state.

Article about FAKE in Seattle Post-Intelligencer

An article about FAKE appears in tomorrow's (Thursday's) Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and addresses an interesting twist to the story that wasn't covered in my book.

Back in the 90s, before Fetterman moved to California, he got his start in the art business up in Seattle. I mention this in the book. What I didn't mention was the fact that he was driven out of town by an art scandal that I discovered only recently.

In 1992, at age 24, Fetterman convinced a Seattle Times art critic that he'd unearthed an authenticated an original oil painting by the Italian Renaissance painter Raphael. Its value? $20 million, he claimed. He said he was representing an un-named owner and, after having conducted extensive scientific research to ensure its authenticity, was marketing the piece quietly. The Times ran a fawning story about this miraculous find, and even printed an accompanying story about art forgery, citing Fetterman as an expert at detecting it.

He claimed to be a prodigy, having gotten his start in the art business as a teenager, and said he'd retired to the Northwest at age 22 after having earned "well into the seven figures."

The following day, the Post-Intelligencer, the Times' rival daily newspaper, revealed Fetterman's claims to be untrue. He'd apparently been showing the painting around town for months, and museum and university experts had been telling him it wasn't real. A local auctioneer claimed he'd sold Fetterman the painting for less than $5,000.

Several weeks later, more of the truth came out in a lengthy investigative report published by the Times. Details of Fetterman's sketchy past, including the time he spent in military prison for possession of LSD, were revealed. The reporter found numerous people around Seattle that Fetterman had ripped off in shady art deals. Most telling were the classified ads Fetterman had placed in Seattle newspapers offering high-dollar art at bargain prices - a stark foreshadowing of the much bigger scams he orchestrated on eBay years later.

According to someone I talked to in Seattle, the Times was very embarrassed about the first article it had printed, and the reporter who wrote it was forced into early retirement.

I didn't know about any of this when I got involved with Fetterman's art dealing. He'd mentioned a Raphael that was in storage up in Seattle, and once placed a recording of himself on talk radio bragging about it (before the truth was revealed), but never told me he'd been taken down by the press.

So it is in the context of all of this that today's Post-Intelligencer article was written. Fetterman has a bit of history in the Seattle art world.

eBay spokesman Hani Durzy made an interesting comment about me in the piece, in response to my opinion that fraud on eBay is worse now than ever. He apparently thinks my opinion on the subject is without value, since I was once involved in committing eBay fraud. He, I suppose, as a paid corporate spokesman, is more capable of giving an accurate, unbiased account of how much fraud occurs on the site.

UK Version of FAKE coming soon

OK, this is something I'm getting really excited about. The UK edition of FAKE is about to be released by an imprint of Orion Group, one of Britain's biggest publishing houses. The official release date is August 3, but there is supposed to be a small box of advance copies somewhere over the Atlantic right now, working its way to California.

As you can see, they've completely changed the cover. Someone asked me if it was supposed to be toothpaste, but to me, it looked like a tube of paint at first glance. I like it, and I hope the British reading public agrees.

I was wondering if they would Anglicize my American spellings, perhaps replace "favor" with "favour" and such. When I read a Nick Hornby novel published in the US, his spellings have been changed for our benefit. But no. Aside from a few omissions made for legal reasons, my manuscript remains virtually unchanged. Apparently British readers are accustomed to, and not offended by, our little spelling quirks.

We're supposed to be getting some good advance buzz and, if all goes well, I'll be interviewed soon by The Guardian, one of the biggest (and, in my humble opinion, one of the best) national newspapers. As with all printed publicity, I will not assume this is going to appear until it goes to press, but if it does, it will be a nice way to launch the book.

This version is in trade paperback. You may pre-order one on Amazon.co.uk.

A letter from Toodles Pelkington

When you're a young lawyer who does something astonishingly stupid, like auction a forged Richard Diebenkorn painting on eBay for $136,000, get exposed on the front page of the New York Times., and get indicted by the federal government, strange people come out of the woodwork.

For instance, I started hearing from a lot of oddballs who thought I might take their cases when no one else would. One guy wanted to sue a woman's-only tattoo parlor for sexual discrimination after they refused to ink him up.

I also got a few anonymous -- mostly just strange, but in a couple of cases threatening -- phone calls.

But by far, the strangest of these strangers was Toodles Pelkington, who sent a letter to my law office. I just stumbled across this letter today, and thought I would share it with you. It is, in hindsight, bizarre and hilarious, perhaps bordering on genius. At this time, I found it very disturbing, as I was still afraid I might actually have to go to prison for what I'd done on eBay, and Toodles' satirical characterization of federal prison didn't soothe my nerves.

It's best if you just click the letter below and read it. One of the best parts is the "You brought COLOR to my life" stamp at the bottom.

It appears to have been hand-typed, as well. Imagine the effort that went into it.

FAKE reviewed in this month's Bookviews

Bookviews, a syndicated book review column, had this to say . . .

With the end of the trial of Enron’s top executives who will be spending years behind bars, we are reminded that the dark side of business can make for interesting reading as well. Ken Walton has written Fake: Forgery, Lies, and eBay ($21.95, Simon and Schuster), the true story of how art trading, speculation, and forgery collided with cyberspace to set in motion an international scandal that rocked the art world, made headlines, and led to a federal felony conviction. As always, truth outdoes fiction. Walton was a lawyer until he became an eBay art trader in December 1998. Over time, his online sales tactics became increasingly fraudulent, culminating in the $135,858 sale of a forged painting in May 2000. He went from online art-trading hobbyists to a partnership with Ken Fetterman, described as a surprisingly effective con man. Together, they took in thousands of dollars by selling forged paintings while bidding on their own auctions to drive up the prices. Both were brought to justice. All of which makes for some very interesting reading!