E. M. Washington

Earl Marshawn Washington (born 1962) is an American entrepreneur, printmaker, woodcut artist and art forger.

Activities Beginning in 1998, woodcut prints from Washington began appearing on eBay and elsewhere; Washington claiming variously that the woodcuts were originals by famous artists, that they had been made by a great-grandfather whom he identified as named “Earl Mack Washington” and as having lived from 1862 until 1952, or that this alleged great-grandfather had rescued the associated blocks from a fire-bombed Manhattan print shop in the 1880s. E.M. Washington is an African American artist and reported his great-grandfather as such, which led to increased interest in the work. It was estimated by September 2004 that as many as 60,000 prints had been sold, at prices ranging from $20 to $350. pressed eBay into promising that it would forbid listing of these, and filed a complaint of criminal fraud in California, as prints were being handled there by stripper Stacy Ortiz (who would later become Washington's wife). Many of Washington's M.C. Escher forgeries are strikingly similar to the originals but are the wrong size. These include the works Lute, Man with Cuboid, Six Birds, Thirteen Flying Fish, Letter H, Letter A, Spherical Self Portrait, Retreat, Candle, Frog, Dice, Scales, Anvil, Watering Can, Devil Vignette, and Fish and Frogs.

Sentencing for mail and wire fraud conspiracy Following a plea arrangement that vacated broader charges, Washington and his wife, Zsanett Nagy, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and mail fraud (and in Nagy's case, to money laundering); after they each admitted selling inauthentic woodblocks and prints made from them, items advertised as being from the 15th to early 20th centuries, Nagy was sentenced to time served (with potential for deportation, January 2024), and Washington was sentenced to 52 months in prison, and ordered to serve 3-years of supervised release after it, and to pay more than US$ 203,000 in restitution to victims (April 2024). In one set of transactions covered by the cases, a collector paid approximately US $119,000 from 2013 to 2016 to Washington and a former girlfriend working under their alias, "River Seine", for approximately 130 woodblocks advertised as being centuries old.