The Talented Mr. Martin

Mystery makes a story more interesting, there's no doubt about that, which is why today's tour features two people who embody that completely.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Aaron Menkey's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild. Our world is
full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book,
all of these amazing tales are right there on display,
just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet

(00:28):
of Curiosities. In the town of Monte Fiasconi, in central Italy,
there stands a small, unassuming convent chapel. Up until it
had gone relatively unnoticed. A convent chapel in a small
town was nothing special. Inside it, however, was a secret,

(00:52):
one discovered by two Italian art dealers named Alfredo Fazzoli
and Romano Pelessi. Within the chapel was a life size
stat you of Madonna and child. It had been carved
out of wood and painted by a claimed Renaissance artist,
Giovanni Pizzano. Chiseled in the sculpture was a rarity, as
all of his known work was done in stone, not wood.

(01:13):
This piece was literally a one of a kind, and
word about its existence soon made it to Harold Parsons,
who acquired art for the Cleveland Museum of Arts in Ohio.
He was given a private viewing of the sculpture within
the chapel, and quickly offered eighteen thousand dollars for it.
One year later, the museum's curator announced its arrival to
the public and that tests were being conducted to verify

(01:34):
its authenticity. To the trained eye, there was no way
it couldn't have been made by Pizzano. The smooth curves,
the intricate details, it was all there. The museum X
rayed the sculpture and saw something odd inside. Nails had
been used to hold pieces of it together. But it
wasn't the nails themselves that upset the museum's experts. It

(01:55):
was how old they were. The nails were brand new.
The mada A sculpture. It was shipped back to Italy
deemed a fake, and in its place, the museum purchased
a statue that was considerably older. It had been carved
in the town of Magna, Grecia, settled by the ancient
Greeks around seven fifty b C. It depicted the Greek
goddess Athena, and though it cost the museum one twenty

(02:16):
thousand dollars, its historical significance was priceless. For three years,
museum visitors admired the statue, getting a firsthand look at
the incredible talent of the ancient Greek virtuoso. Then in
nineteen the art world ground to a halt. Like the
Madonna and Child before it, the Statue of Athena had

(02:36):
been found to be a fake. In fact, many statues
and sculptures in museums everywhere had been uncovered as forgeries,
and all of them had been made by one man.
His name was Alco Dosina and he had been born
in eighteen seventy eight in Cremona, Italy. He had studied
art at an Italian trade school, learning how to copy
the works of the masters even from a young age.

(02:59):
Dosina as a talented mimic, and he didn't see school
as a place to learn greatness. For that, he would
need to enter the professional world. He took apprenticeships working
for art restorers in his hometown as well as in Milan.
He traveled from church to church throughout Italy, repairing real
statues and sculptures. Then, in nineteen sixteen, Dosina joined the

(03:20):
military to fight in World War Two. Despite the fighting,
he never gave up his art. He'd even managed to
find time to make a small sculpture of Madonna and
Child out of terra cotta, which he took around Rome
with him while on leave for the holidays. It was
during this time when he met an antique dealer, Alfredo Fazzoli.
Puzzoli didn't realize the little sculpture was a fake. He

(03:41):
thought Dosana had stolen it from a church, maybe during
a raid on a small town during the war. He
wasn't even upset when he realized he'd paid twelve dollars
for a forgery. To Fazzoli, Dosana would be his meal
ticket when the war ended. He went into business with Osena,
churning out modern antiques for over a decade. But Dosana
claimed all along that he hadn't done it for the money.

(04:04):
He'd seen almost none of it, except for the price
he'd charged the dealers for each commission. While Fazzoli and
Pelessi were raking in millions of dollars, Dosina had made
a few hundred dollars per commission, enough to live on,
but hardly a fortune that he deserved. It had no
idea his works were being displayed in museums all around
the world. Either the Metropolitan Museum of Arts in New

(04:25):
York City conducted its own investigation after buying a bogus sculpture.
Its agents eventually unmasked Dosena as the forger. They visited
the artist in his studio, where he showcased his works
without fear or shame in his eyes. He wasn't imitating
the masters. He himself was a master, and he believed
his sculptures deserved to be displayed alongside those of the greats,

(04:46):
and they soon were. He held exhibitions of his work
in France and Germany from nineteen twenty nine to nineteen
thirty one. Two of his sculptures can be seen on
display at the University of Pittsburgh today. Despite his wounded reputation,
there is no doubt that Alceo Dossena was a talented imitator,
and imitation, after all, is the sincerest form of flattery.

(05:20):
Dead Men tell no tales. It was a common pirate
saying that meant that a dead man couldn't give away
any secrets. But one man found floating off the coast
of Spain during World War two had a wild story
to tell. It would alter the course of the war
and turn the tide against the Germans at a crucial time.
His name was Major William Martin and he was an

(05:41):
officer with the British Royal Marines. In late April of
nineteen forty three, Major Martin and his briefcase were discovered
drifting in the ocean by Spanish fishermen. The men took
the body to the nearby town of Hueva, where authorities
performed an investigation. Inside the briefcase, they found diplomatic cables
between Martin and British like Consul Francis Hasselden, who also

(06:02):
happened to reside in town, and he could identify the corpse.
After a quick autopsy, which described the cause of death
as drowning, Major Martin was buried in a local cemetery
with honors. In early May. The Spanish Navy held onto
the briefcase, though, which should have meant that it was
secure from the enemy. However, as it was being transported
to Madrid, German sympathizers got their hands on it just

(06:24):
long enough to snap a few pictures of what was inside,
including the encrypted cables. They sent the photos to a
top agent within the German intelligence agency, and that agent
passed them onto the head of his agency, who stepped
in and insisted the Spanish turnover what they had. They
agreed to give up the documents, but not before getting
to look at them. First. They extracted the damp and

(06:46):
letters from their envelopes, dried them, and then took their
own photographs. The letters were then placed in salt water
overnight and slid back into their envelopes so it didn't
look like anything had been tampered with. The Spanish sent
what information they had on to the Germans, while the
documents themselves were sent back to Hasselden. The British vice
consul had no idea The enemy knew their plans and

(07:07):
were preparing to defend themselves from an Allied invasion, an
invasion that would march through Greece into the Balkans and
overtake German forces there. That July, the Germans acted quickly.
Adolf Hitler an Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini met to
discuss next steps. Hitler insisted that his first Panzer division
defend Greece, while tens of thousands of German troops were

(07:28):
pulled out of Sicily and planted in Sardinia. On July
tenth of ninety three, Hitler's forces waited for the Allies
to arrive in Greece, and they waited and waited until
one hundred sixty thousand Allied troops finally showed up, but
not in Greece, in Sicily, over four hundred miles away.

(07:48):
The German soldiers there were now sorely outnumbered. The Allied plot,
known as Operation Mincemeat, had been a trick. There had
never been a Major William Martin nor any encrypted cables.
The man found off the coast of Spain had been
a homeless man from Wales who had sadly died from
eating rat poison, but his body would go on to

(08:09):
help win the war against the Germans in a critical way.
His preserve corps was taken aboard the h M mess Seraph,
a British sub along with a briefcase full of fabricated documents.
There were the letters, of course, which outlined the military plans,
but he also carried a photograph of a woman purported
to be his fiancee, bank documents and a receipt for

(08:30):
an engagement ring, all of which had been included to
add authenticity to the invented persona, and it had worked.
The submarine then surfaced off the coast of Spain and
lowered the body into the water, and everything played out
exactly as the British had hoped. The deceptive information leaked
its way to the Germans, who pulled troops out of Sicily,

(08:51):
leaving it wide open for attack. As a result, the
Allies retook Sicily from the Germans and Mussolini was stripped
of his power. A new Italian government took his place,
which negotiated a surrender with the Allies. An evil empire crumbled,
all thanks to one man who never existed in the
first place. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of

(09:17):
the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts,
or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast
dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Manky
in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make another award
winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series,
and television show, and you can learn all about it

(09:38):
over at the World of Lore dot com. And until
next time, stay curious.