The Scandal

Fasoli and Palese were earning large sums of money and living the high life, while Dossena was spending what little he had left due to his wife's illness.

A friend who had traveled to the United States warned him that he could go to jail and was selling his works as originals. Dossena explained that his business was making imitations and selling them as such. The friend showed him the catalogs of the museums he had visited during his trip, and among the exhibited pieces were his own.
Dossena was outraged by the fraud and in 1929 hired a lawyer to take Fasoli and Palese to court. They initially denied everything, but Dossena presented evidence consisting of sketches and photographs of works in progress. Unable to refute this, the swindlers tried to implicate the sculptor in the crime of financial fraud. Dossena brought out the accounting records of his workshop, detailing both his expenses for maintenance and materials, as well as the amount paid by Fasoli and Palese for each completed work.

It is unknown how much money they made from their scams, but the judge ruled that they had to pay Dossena fifty thousand euros in compensation. The sculptor was acquitted.

A list was compiled of Dossena's works that had been sold to collections and museums, which alarmed these institutions and prompted them to search their catalogs to verify their authenticity. It could not be definitively proven which works were by Dossena and which were genuine. Some museums kept the forgeries because they found them beautiful and worthy of a place in their collections.

Dossena's acquaintances and neighbors continued to dislike him because of his involvement in the scams, and he lived in solitude, subsisting on what little money he had left, until his death in 1937.