His decision to sanction, support and add his signature to a plan to take half a billion euros worth of assets back from the bank that now owned them was his most ill-judged move to date.
And to add a final touch of authenticity, he had Hebborn cover the counterfeit van de Velde signature with that of Jan Brueghel, the sort of petty fakery you might expect to find on a genuinely old painting.
In the 1990s, she had the idea for the Sookie Stackhouse novels, which would take her signature protagonist, a working-class Southern woman with crime-solving abilities, and add a supernatural twist.