A collection of 700 photographs seized during an FBI art crime investigation in Metro Detroit, including prints by Ansel Adams, acclaimed war photojournalist Robert Capa and the noted Depression-era photographer Marion Post Wolcott, could soon hit the auction block or be returned to their rightful owners.

The photographs are central to a criminal case that reaches its conclusion Wednesday in federal court in Ann Arbor. That is when Birmingham art gallery owner Wendy Halsted Beard, 59, will be sentenced for cheating more than 40 clients out of rare photographs collectively worth about $3.5 million shot by some of the 20th century’s most acclaimed photographers.

Prosecutors recently filed a list of photos seized by FBI agents during the investigation that offers the most comprehensive look at the scope of Beard’s wrongdoing. The list spans the globe and alphabet — from Adams to Zintsmaster — and from the streets of Detroit to the tomb of Lorenzo de’ Medici in Florence, Italy. There are photos of ballerinas and bullfighters. Broderick Tower. A University of Michigan drum major and Bocci players. A bucking bronco, big bands, and shot after shot by brand-name photographers.

“Oh my gosh, Diane Arbus! Oh my God, Michael Kenna? Every one of these is somebody,” Michigan photographer Bill Schwab said while reviewing the list. The cache includes 45 photos taken by him and seeing the pictures listed alongside hundreds of others prompted Schwab to reflect on Beard’s life and crimes.

“I want her to have a pretty miserable time from here on out. That’s how s—— a person she was,” said Schwab, who was once so close to Beard’s family that he photographed her wedding.

The art crime investigation surfaced in October 2022 when a team of FBI agents raided Beard’s $690,000 home near 14 Mile and Inkster roads in Franklin and arrested the respected art gallery owner.

Prosecutors unsealed a federal criminal case charging Beard with mail and wire fraud and accused her of orchestrating a scheme involving photographs that she received from collectors to be appraised or sold on consignment. The government alleged she sold pictures, pocketed the cash or failed to return unsold prints, according to the complaint.

Several photographers and collectors have staked claims to pictures saying they were stolen by Beard. Prosecutors have vowed to return photos to the rightful owners and likely will auction the rest.

Investigators have identified 43 victims — many elderly — and approximately 393 fine art photographs that were either consigned to Beard or sold to people who never received the prints. About 250 of those photos are missing, according to a government sentencing memorandum filed Thursday.

Victims want Beard to pay more than $3.3 million restitution, but prosecutors say Beard spent all the money she received during the scheme. The government is pushing for Beard to be sentenced Wednesday to more than 4 1/2 years in federal prison.

One of Beard’s lawyers, Steve Fishman, requested a prison sentence of less than 51 months. He argued Beard has suffered from physical and emotional health problems and has financial problems.

Though she was close to her parents, “during her childhood, her parents pushed her to be successful, and were at times overly critical, including verbal abuse from her father,” Fishman wrote.

He described Beard’s life since being charged. She earns $900 a week as a sales representative and owes a significant amount of money to creditors, including almost $500,000 in civil judgments.

Her financial situation “will obviously be difficult for her to fully compensate the victims in this case,” Fishman wrote.

“For a woman who is alleged to have obtained millions of dollars through her illegal conduct, she has minimal assets,” Fishman added. “Her home is burdened by a large mortgage as well as a lien due to a civil lawsuit.”

“Defense counsel have been baffled throughout this case by the following question: What would cause a woman in her mid-50s with a long history of working at and subsequently owning a well-respected art gallery to commit the fraud that occurred in this case?” Fishman wrote.

Beard’s arrest and criminal case sent ripples of panic and shock among collectors and prominent members of the photography community, including Matthew Adams, grandson of Ansel Adams, who runs the Ansel Adams Gallery in Yosemite, Calif.

“Holy mackerel,” Adams told The News during a phone interview as the raid unfolded. “Wow, that’s not good.”

Beard owned the Wendy Halsted Gallery and followed the career path of her late father, Tom Halsted, who opened a gallery in Birmingham in 1969. Her father, a nationally recognized gallerist, died in 2018 and his obituary noted how he had forged friendships with some of the country’s most distinguished photographers, including Ansel Adams.

A list of photographs seized during the investigation that will be forfeited as part of Wendy Beard’s conviction includes this picture of the Count Basie band at the Savoy Ballroom in Chicago in 1941.Library of Congress Tom Halsted’s reputation prompted collectors to trust his daughter, hire her to help them build collections and sell rare prints that, in some instances, cost more than $500,000.

The value of vintage prints can climb if the print is made close to the time the negative was exposed and if the print is signed by the photographer. Many of the photos seized by the FBI were signed by the original photographers, including Wolcott.

“Vintage prints often have a premium attached because they are considered the original piece of art, as it is possible to arbitrarily obtain many copies from the same negative,” according to the National Portrait Gallery.

Beard is portrayed in court filings as a devious schemer, cheating clients since at least 2019. Prosecutors said she tried to cover up the crimes by claiming she had been in two prolonged comas and by passing off cheap copies of Adams prints she bought from the famed photographer’s gift shop.

“Wendy Beard took her father’s once prosperous and highly regarded photography gallery and demolished it from within, leaving behind what amounted to little more than a Ponzi scheme and wreaking financial havoc along the way,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Ryan Particka wrote in the sentencing memo.

Beard is scheduled to be sentenced more than a year after she pleaded guilty to wire fraud, a felony that carries a maximum 20-year prison sentence. She admitted trying to lull victims into a false sense of security by offering excuses for her inability or unwillingness to return consigned photographs, according to her plea agreement with the government.

Beard also created fake employee identities to try and give victims a false sense of security, Particka wrote.

“The victims consigned photographs of significant value, relying on Beard’s family name and purported expertise in hopes that they could turn a profit; more than one hoped to retire off the proceeds of the anticipated sales,” the prosecutor wrote Thursday.

The list of approximately 700 photos seized by investigators does not specify where the photos were found. But FBI agents were photographed seizing pictures from Beard’s home in Franklin during a raid in October 2022 and the criminal case says Beard abandoned dozens of photos at a Florida art space, including “Human Pin Cushion” by Diane Arbus.

The list of prints seized during the investigation includes “Human Pin Cushion” by Diane Arbus. The print was valued at $8,500.Brooklyn Museum The list filed in court includes “Moon and Half Dome,” an Ansel Adams photo shot in Yosemite National Park and a signed 1923 portrait by the late American photographer Edward Weston.

Toronto collector Jed MacKay’s company, Indelible Inc., owns both prints, which are worth a combined $63,000.

In January 2019, the prints and 42 other photographs were consigned to Beard’s gallery, according to a federal lawsuit filed Friday.

Beard eventually ghosted MacKay, according to the lawsuit. He sent emails that went unreturned; Beard failed to answer phone calls. On Oct. 12, 2022, he sent a friend to the gallery and found it shuttered. So he sent the friend to Beard’s home.

They were told the prints were inside. The friend alerted MacKay, who contacted the FBI. An FBI official “advised MacKay to wait to retrieve the photographs,” according to the lawsuit.

FBI agents raided the home two days later.

Investigators recovered 23 of the 44 photos owned by MacKay’s company, including the signed Weston portrait worth an estimated $18,000. MacKay’s insurer paid $284,500 for the missing photographs and sued Beard on Friday to recover that money.

Several victims have written letters to U.S. District Judge Judith Levy ahead of next week’s sentencing, describing the impact of having cherished, valuable photographs stolen from them.

San Francisco collector Amy McCombs says 126 of her photos were stolen, including what she called “very rare” pictures.

McCombs, 78, a retired media executive and former president/CEO of WDIV-TV (Channel 4) in the 1980s, filed a claim to recover 18 photographs seized during the investigation.

The seized photos include pictures by Wolcott and Dorothea Lange, both of whom documented the impact of the Great Depression on American life while working for the Farm Security Administration.

One of the photos recovered by the FBI is a signed Lange print of a broken windmill in Texas from 1937.

McCombs was a close friend of Beard’s father and has known Beard since Beard was a young woman.

“How could I have been so deceived?” McCombs wrote in a letter to the judge.

Tom Halsted helped McCombs and her late husband build a photography collection that McCombs said included 118 rare, historic “and irreplaceable” photos shot in China and Japan in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

That included 10 photos by influential Japanese photographer Teiko Shiotani. McCombs has been told her Shiotani collection was the largest outside of Japan.

McCombs said those 10 photos were stolen.

Also stolen was a collection of 80 photos by John Thomson, a pioneering Scottish photojournalist whose travels in the Far East in the late 1800s produced a series of pictures titled Foochow and the River Min. Only six copies of the printed album reportedly exist.

“I owned photographs from one of these albums,” McCombs told the judge.

A different Thomson photo started McCombs’s interest in collecting photography years ago. Beard’s father took McCombs and her husband to a photography show in New York City and the first photo on display was “Island Pagoda” by Thomson.

“It is not just a photograph, it is a work of art,” McCombs wrote. “It is a ‘stopper,’ it inspires an emotional reaction, it takes your breath away, it is an epiphany that slows time and transports you.”

Halsted helped her acquire “Island Pagoda” and other Thomson photos.

McCombs, who has given photographs to the University of Michigan and served on the national board of the Smithsonian, turned to Beard to offer guidance on donating pieces of the collection.

Beard asked to take the 126 photographs to Michigan for review, McCombs said.

“I never questioned releasing the photographs to her,” McCombs wrote the victim impact statement. “I trusted her…”

McCombs learned about Beard’s arrest and criminal charges months after the FBI raid.

“My heart broke,” she wrote. “It was a collector’s reaction in addition to a financial loss reaction. It was not only the potential loss of the photography and its financial value, but it was also stolen memories and experiences that I had shared with my husband as we talked about photography, traveled to museum shows and gallery openings, considered purchases, continued our own photographic education, and surrounded ourselves with memorable images.”

Beard knew how McCombs felt about “Island Pagoda” and the broader collection, McCombs said.

“Island Pagoda” is not listed among photos recovered by federal agents.

“If they are missing, she stole them along with my memories and the goals I had for a collection that had both financial and historic value,” McCombs wrote. “A stimulating journey that began in the 1980’s ended with mournful melancholy.”

Schwab, the Michigan photographer, also had a trusting personal and professional relationship with Tom Halsted that did not continue with Beard. She told him sales of his photography had fallen through, that there was no money and that his prints, and others, had been stolen during a robbery.

He was surprised FBI investigators recovered so many of his photos. He speculated some prints were purchased by collectors, some had returned to Beard on consignment and some belonged to him.

“It would be nice to get them back,” he said. “The impact on me has been weirdly devastating. It’s not a financial thing. This was 30 years of my life. I knew (Beard) well. I was at birthdays and weddings, and then for her to do this.”