I did not read about this spectacular fraud but this excellent documentary enlightened me. Even at the end some questions could still be asked about exactly how much the main protagonists knew of the fraud and the extent to which they, and indeed the collector ‘victims’ really knew and to what extent they closed their eyes to evidence.
The prime emotion that many of those involved felt, in the end, was embarrassment I think and it is the accepting of that which was perhaps the hardest thing for the protagonists to accept - if in fact they have at all. The other thing of course, with the sort of rarified and remarkably wealthy world in which this all took place is the self-awareness necessary to accept that one has made a mistake/ been fooled and it was many of the participants utter unwillingness to accept this which was one of the most fascinating aspects of the film. they are/were the sort of people, it seemed to me, who had never really had to admit that they had made a mistake or had been gulled.
It was pretty simply filmed - largely talking heads with no melodramatic flashiness which nowadays can mar otherwise gripping accounts of events. But the amounts of money spent really were grotesque…