West Palm Beach art dealer sold ’1000% fake’ Basquiats, swindling clients. He’s now in prison

A West Palm Beach art dealer tried selling a fake Basquiat painting for $12 million. Instead, he ended up in federal prison.

Daniel Bouaziz, who owned Galerie Danieli and Danieli Fine Art, was sentenced to 27 months in federal prison for laundering money from a lucrative art scheme, the United States Attorney’s Office announced Tuesday. U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon also ordered Bouaziz to pay a $15,000 fine, according to the press release. The restitution hearing is scheduled for August 16.

An FBI Art Team investigation found that Bouaziz routinely sold customers inexpensive recreations of artwork by famous artists — from Andy Warhol to Banksy — for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Bouaziz’s operation came to an abrupt end when FBI agents raided his galleries in December 2021. He was arrested in May. Last summer, he plead not guilty to an indictment charging him with mail fraud, wire fraud and money laundering.

At the time, his defense lawyer Howard Schumacher, said Boauziz had a longstanding reputation as a reputable art dealer. “This intrusion by the government has had an impact on his reputation and he wants to clear that,” Schumacher told the New York Post.

In February, Bouaziz plead guilty to money laundering. Specifically, the press release said, Bouaziz laundered money from a customer’s $200,000 down payment.

On Oct. 25, 2021, the customer gave Bouaziz the down payment for artworks, including a fake Warhol pieces. Bouaziz told the customer that works, which had price tags ranging from $75,000 to $240,000, were authentic and that Warhol signed some pieces, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said.

The customer believed him — along with several others.

Bouaziz boasted selling signed, authentic works by the biggest names in contemporary art: Banksy, Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Roy Lichtenstein, Georgia O’Keeffe and Keith Haring. In reality, the FBI said, those signatures were fabricated and the artwork were merely replicas.

One customer bought a “holy grail” of four artworks for $290,000. A group of contacts in New York told the customer that the works “looked off” and that the price was too good to be true. They were right.

Another client, who was new to art collecting, spent $125,000 on what they believed to be two original Warhol pieces, the affidavit said. Not only were the pieces inauthentic, but one of the works wasn’t even based on a real Warhol painting.

Not everyone was duped by Bouaziz’s scheme, though. Three witnesses told the FBI agents that they believed his galleries didn’t pass the smell test, according to the affidavit. One witness said many of Bouaziz’s Keith Haring artworks were clearly fake. Another said a purportedly signed Basquiat work was “1000% fake.” It didn’t make sense for Bouaziz to be selling authentic Banksy pieces for relatively low prices, that person said. Real Banksy works go for millions of dollars.

The investigation came to a head when an undercover FBI agent bought several inauthentic artworks from Bouaziz, according to court documents. In December 2021, before the FBI raided the galleries, Bouaziz sold the agent a collection of works purported to be by Basquiat, Banksy, Haring and O’Keeffe. The total was $22,000,000.

At one point in the investigation, the affidavit said, Bouaziz showed the agent a phony Roy Lichtenstein print, insisting that it was a great investment.

“You cannot lose money here,” he said.

This story was produced with financial support from The Pérez Family Foundation, in partnership with Journalism Funding Partners, as part of an independent journalism fellowship program. The Miami Herald maintains full editorial control of this work.