Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard ceremoniously handed out checks at his office on Pryor Street Thursday while artists and their lawyers watched, concluding an investigation into the world of a prominent art dealer with a gallery a few miles uptown on Miami Circle in Buckhead.

The case began when an artist from New York noticed his paintings were selling from his Atlanta gallery but he wasn't getting paid. He took his complaint to the Atlanta Police Department, where fraud investigators eventually uncovered a 10-year-pattern of shortchanging artists, Howard said in a news release.

In the end, 63-year-old William Lowe of the Bill Lowe Gallery paid a half-million dollars to 10 artists from across the country and one from Germany.