Sometimes fact can be stranger than fiction, real people can have greater imagination and gumption than fictional people. After all, those fictional people started out life in the minds of real people with a story to tell. John Drewe chose to create his story and live it. He wanted to be a member of the privileged English upper-class, a nuclear physicist doing consulting work for the Ministry of Defense developing new technologies for the military, and trading in art as a hobby. So he crafted an identity for himself using his wife's money and the fictitious masterpieces created by John Myatt. He did such a good job of creating something out of nothing that even the authorities questioned his wife's mental health when she tried to turn him in. John Myatt, for his part, was an artist with excellent technique and a passe style. He found inspiration is church steeples and country scenes that had no audience in the London Art world. Living hand to mouth with his two small children, John put an ad in a magazine offering to paint "genuine fakes" for commission. With the assistance of John Myatt, John Drewe masterminded what Scotland Yard later described as "the biggest art fraud of the 20th century." With fakes bought and sold in New York, Britain and all over Europe it became an international art scandal besting some of the most renowned art dealers in the world.