Lauryssens, 63, started his career in fakery during the early 1970s as Hollywood correspondent for the Flemish Panorama magazine (now P-Magazine), interviewing stars like Liz Taylor, Faye Dunaway and Marlon Brando. Only he never set foot in Hollywood, and the interviews, published under the name Steven Stanley, were fabricated from articles in more scrupulous journals.

One day he “interviewed” Salvador Dalí, probably the most famous living artist of the day, describing how the painter was working with Walt Disney on an animated pornographic film. That brought him to the attention of the American company Money Management Counselors. “They had three businesses: selling investments in land in the US, in diamonds and in fine art,” Lauryssens explains. “They thought I was a Dalí expert, and they wanted me to sell his paintings.” Only they weren’t too fussy about whether the art was real.

At the age of 26, Lauryssens was hooked by the challenge, the excitement and the money. “Panorama had been paying me 18,000 BF a month [about €450]. Now I was on 2% commission, and I was netting 200,000 BF [€5,000] a month.”

The scam worked like this: Lauryssens (pictured)would take a painting, a poster or even a page from a catalogue and put it in an expensive frame, then sell the work to an unsuspecting investor for a fortune. “I used to buy lithographs for about €150, bring them in without paying taxes, have them put in a €500 frame, and sell them on for €5,000. People thought they were getting a great deal.”

The buyers were happy to invest undeclared income in the art, though Lauryssens choice of client was crucial. “These people knew nothing about art, and they didn’t even like Dalí,” he says. “Nobody was ever going to see the painting anyway. They could hardly hang it in the living room in case it was spotted and questions were asked. And if they were ever suspicious, there was nothing they could do. If they reported it, they’d have to explain where the money came from [to buy the work]. They’d be cutting their own throats.”

In his book Dali & I, Lauryssens tells of an undertaker who paid over $100,000 in mixed currencies in a plastic bag and a butcher whose ill-gotten gains were stuffed into a Chinese vase in his living room. “I told myself it wasn’t a crime,” he says. “Because it was all black money. I felt like a kind of Robin Hood.”

The end came when Money Management Counselors was busted for selling investment products without registration. Lauryssens went to prison in Antwerp briefly before being released to await trial. Instead, he absconded to Spain and bought a house. And who should he find his new neighbour to be, high in the Catalan hills? Why, Salvador Dalí.

The story of how a fake interview led to fake paintings which led to a real acquaintance with Dalí seems too good to be true, and if something seems too good to be true, the advice goes, it probably is. So maybe it’s not 100% accurate; when talking to Lauryssens, you’re constantly aware he’s not only a convicted con-man, he’s also a successful fiction writer. Regardless, it’s a great story.

In the end, the Flemish forger served five months of a two-year sentence, most of it in Spain. “That was a prison for people picked up by Interpol, a better class of crook,” he notes. “Prison in Spain was a holiday for me.” And of course he picked up plenty of tips.

So is he now on the straight and narrow? I ask. He hesitates, refers me to his next book, then answers anyway.

“After Spain, I went to live in London for seven years. I’d lost most of my money. I used to steal newspapers from outside newsagents early in the morning. In one of them I read that the City of London was planning to decommission some public art, including the statue by Fernando Botero.”

The statue in Exchange Square, known as the “Broadgate Venus”, is a huge reclining nude with the voluptuous proportions characteristic of the Colombian artist, symbolising wealth.

“I decided I was going to sell it,” Lauryssens states. “I used a trick I’d learned in prison and faxed the article, together with an official- looking letter, to five or six wealthy Colombian dealers. I asked them to send $150,000 to an account I’d opened at the Midland Bank in New Bond Street, which also happens to be the address of Sotheby’s. And one of them went for it. That was in 1993 or 1994. I was looking over my shoulder for a couple of years, but nothing has happened.”

www.stanlauryssens.com