Brian Ramnarine tried to sell fake Jasper Johns sculpture for $11 million.
By The American Bazaar Staff
NEW YORK: An Indian American foundry owner based in Queens, Brian Ramnarine, 60, whose attorney claims that he has been invited to build the largest statue in the world coming up in India – of Sardar Vallabhai Patel; a pet project of prime minister Narendra Modi – has been sentenced to 30 months in federal jail for trying to sell fake sculptures said to be by Jasper Johns, Robert Indiana and Saint Clair Cemin.
Ramnarine pleaded guilty to the charges earlier this year while he was on trial for the scheme. Prosecutors said he’d done work for Johns in 1990, when the artist gave him a mold to make a flag sculpture, reported the Daily News.
“Brian Ramnarine’s only art was as a con artist who concocted and carried out not one, but three separate schemes to peddle fake sculptures to unsuspecting buyers for millions of dollars, pretending they had been made by well-known artists,” Preet Bharara, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement.
The mold was supposed to be destroyed, but Ramnarine held onto it and used it to make a counterfeit work, which he tried to sell for $11 million. After he was arrested and out on bail in 2012, he sold other fake sculptures, which were purportedly works by Cemin and Indiana, for $34,250.
Judge John Koeltl sentenced him to 30 months behind bars and ordered him to pay $34,250 in restitution, said the News treport.
He’d faced up to seven to 10 years behind bars, but Koeltl cut him some slack, in part because Ramnarine’s lawyer, Troy Smith, said his client had been having some serious health issues.
Smith said the prison time was costing his client a big opportunity. He’d been invited to participate in the building of the world’s largest statue in his native India, which is the Sardar Patel statue.
When completed, the statute is supposed to be 2 1/2 times larger than the Statue of Liberty, the lawyer said.
According to a report in The Washington Post, the statue with a budget of more around $415 million, would stand almost 600 feet tall, with a museum, research center and even an underwater aquarium. Designed as a tribute to Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, one of the founding fathers of modern India, the project has been dubbed the “Statue of Unity” and a chance to “immortalize [India’s] history.”
During Thursday’s sentencing, Ramnarine said to United States District Judge John G. Koeltl, according to the Post: “I’m sorry. I’m sorry to bring shame on my family.”