If you ask me, trying to sell forged Damien Hirst paintings to the rich makes you the biggest class war hero since the guy who tried to sell fake wine to the rich, not someone who deserves jail time. People who buy real Damien Hirst paintings deserve jail time.

For decades, a 75-year-old Queens man was able to con the art world into purchasing millions of dollars worth of worthless forgeries that he made in his garage using some old paint and a blow dryer.

What time is it? Time to pile on the LA Times for its fictitious Tupac shooting story! When one of the nation's top four papers (or, one that once held that position) splashes an investigative story this big that turns out to be based on forged evidence from a lifelong con man, you can expect a lot of tsk-tsking from the journalism establishment. But actually the reaction has been pretty muted. The reason: most reporters know deep down that they could be done in by fake documents just as easily. Slate's Jack Shafer has a rather gentle column today on what LAT reporter Chuck Philips could have done differently—mainly, don't trust con men, and always vet your documents. Your sympathy for Philips (those were convincing forgeries, after all) might be diminished, though, by this quote he gave in a recent web chat, defending his 2002 story that alleged that Biggie "Christopher Wallace" Smalls was involved in Tupac's murder—he sure was sensitive about forged documents back then:

The streets of Beijing are paved not with gold, or even yuan, but with a flood of fake Harry Potter books: