In May, Carter Reese, a 77-year-old resident of Reading, Pennsylvania, pled guilty to wire fraud and mail fraud in connection with selling artworks falsely attributed to major artists like Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, and Joan Miró. On Friday, Reese was sentenced.
Judge Jeffrey L. Schmehl of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania handed down a sentence of 60 days in prison, two years of supervised release with four months on home detention, a $50,000 fine, and restitution of $186,125, the US Attorney’s Office said in a press release.
In federal court in May, Reese admitted that from 2019 to 2021, he had sold or attempted to sell forgeries by major artists. When approaching buyers, he claimed he had purchased the pieces from collectors, as well as someone named “Ken James.” That name was a pseudonym for Reese’s actual supplier, who had been convicted in Chicago years earlier for selling $1 million worth of counterfeit art. According to prosecutors, Reese used false affidavits and signatures to convince buyers of the works’ authenticity, and when some potential buyers pointed out the works were fake, he insisted otherwise.
Reese was not exactly a nobody—at least in Reading, a small city 60 miles northwest of Philadelphia, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported earlier this year. He worked at the Hill School, a prestigious private prep school in Pottstown, as a fine arts and history teacher, and later as director of admissions. Educated at Harvard, he and his wife founded a company to help students gain admission to elite boarding schools and universities.
He was also an antiquities collector, with more than 17,000 items in a collection he estimated in court documents to be worth over $6 million.
And, curiously, he was once Taylor Swift’s neighbor in the small town of Wyomissing, Pennsylvania, before her move to Nashville to record her first album. In 2011, he told Inside Edition that Swift “worked very hard at” writing music.
All in all, the sentence is not too bad a result for Reese. Prior to his guilty plea, prosecutors were seeking up to 40 years in prison.
