From Washington Post: According to the prosecutors, Machold’s cash-flow problems went back at least to 2002. A few years later, the capital tank, too, was running dry. In 2006 the New York shop shut down. Chicago soon followed. All that was left of the Zurich shop, it appeared, was the bookkeeper’s apartment in a building otherwise occupied by an upscale bordello. In 2007, the German news magazine Der Spiegel reported that delayed payment had nearly ruined a Munich colleague.
Disastrous 2008 hit the violin trade as it hit every other.
Machold borrowed against the next big deal wherever he could find a sympathetic
lender. According to the indictment, “a considerable number of the promised
deals were purely virtual, and had little to do with reality.” When police
searched the Vienna shop, the cupboard was bare.
With “too big to fail” beyond the reach of violin dealers,
the alternative was a kind of Whac-a-Mole, the indictment says. As bills came
due, it charges, Machold wrote doctored certificates for a cheap Bohemian cello
that a co-defendant sold as an Italian old master…..
Read all about it at http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/dietmar-machold-jet-setting-violin-dealer-accused-in-a-case-of-fakes-and-fraud/2012/09/13/be7d80fc-fb85-11e1-8adc-499661afe377_story_2.html
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