It began with an ad in `Private Eye'

THE MOMENT Leslie Waddington looked at the paintings he was unhappy. It was hard to say what was wrong, the way the paint had been applied or maybe the colours the artist had used.

The Dubuffet certainly looked the part but - well - Mr Waddington had not been an art dealer for as long as he had without learning a thing or two. And Jean Dubuffet had been a friend of his.

Within days Mr Waddington phoned a contact within the Art and Antiques squad of Scotland Yard to express his concerns about the paintings he had seen up for auction.

Unknown to Mr Waddington, his call in the summer of 1995 was to help to crack one of the most ingenious art frauds of all time. It also lead to the downfall of John Drewe, a brilliant criminal who "took an intellectual delight in fooling people".

By creating provenances for his fakes, Drewe had entered a new realm in art fraud.

His plan was brilliant and effective. "He came to me to authenticate certain things. In the early days I probably did," admitted Sir Alan Bowness, a senior member of the Henry Moore Foundation. "They all had very good provenances. That is what was so clever."

Sir Alan should not feel too bad. Drewe's scam took in galleries, collectors and even some of the families of the artists he was imitating. When one dealer complained that a De Stael painting he had bought was an imitation, Drewe gave him four sketches by Graham Sutherland as compensation. These were alsofakes. The dealer kept the De Stael as a "pounds 32,500 lesson".

Drewe was born John Cockett in Tonbridge, Kent, in February 1948, and grew up in Uckfield, Sussex, where the family lived in a farmhouse called Pleasant Farm. He left Bexleyheath Grammar School, aged 16, with a handful of O-levels and took a job as a laboratory assistant with the Atomic Energy Authority. He left in 1967, having refused a request that he study for further examinations. Drewe was later to embellish his humble position in Walter Mittyesque fashion, telling people he was a nuclear physicist.

Police have no record of him from then until 1980, when he started working as a part-time teacher at Channing School in Highgate, London. He also taught at Des Pardes House, in Hampstead.

In the Spring of 1986 Drewe was reading Private Eye magazine when he came across an advert placed by an artist looking for commissions. It read: "Genuine Fakes. 19th and 20th Century painting done." Once Drewe met the artist - John Myatt - the pair formed an effective, but unequal, partnership.

Myatt later turned Queen's evidence. Cross-examined in court by Drewe - who led his own defence - Myatt said: "I was very much your creature. I found you hypnotising, charming, challenging."

Drewe charmed scores of people. Once, he recruited a Jewish neighbour, Clive Bellman, to sell paintings. Drewe told him he was selling the works to fund research to destroy the revisionist theory of the Holocaust.

Police inquiries were in their infancy when Mr Waddington called them, but Drewe was already known to them. Fourteen months earlier he had contacted the A&A squad, offering information about the Mafia selling stolen paintings.

The officers met Drewe at the Battersea heliport in London, where he arrived by helicopter. He gave police information on three paintings. When detectives checked, it transpired that two - a De Pisis and a De Chirico - were stolen.

Drewe's defence at the fraud trial was that he was recruited to sell paintings to fund secret arms deals on behalf of a number of foreign governments, including South Africa's.

In creating false provenances, Drewe altered, perhaps irretrievably, many galleries' archives, damaging records that help to show whether paintings are genuine, or, like the ones he sold, simply fakes.

Andrew Buncombe