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Often the answer would be this. They were stolen. They were taken through real armed conflict and colonialism. If you possess valuable artifacts, where you control valuable artifacts, you have a form of power and power is not something that most people are eager to surrender.
The British Museum's silence is as loud as it goes short. Museums have begun to look more closely at their new positions. It's a little bit more wondering into the little of an traffic intersection without looking for ways. There might be disaster about having.
And some museums are returning their long held treasures to their places of origin. It's like Olympic Games for restitution. They are fighting to be the first to restitute important connections. Today on frick on trail, we begin a special series on this movement to return the world's treasures to the places where those treasures came from.
It is a complicated story. It ain't complicated. It's actually unbelievably simple. If you take morality and pompous, arrogant, holier than thou out of it and stick to the law.
Well, some people think it's complicated. The mening networks are 500 years old. They were taken 150 years ago. There is no system where they can be returned in a way that is consistent with the values of the museum structure.
Nobody ever asks when a work hard is returned to a family of Holocaust victims. Well, it's really going to be safer in their home than in the museum. But the minute museums consider returning works of art to African countries, the question is like the first two rides. We will hear from museum curators and directors, from economists and historians, from legal scholars and prosecutors.
This office has recovered almost 4,500 priceless cultural treasures. And we will hear from artists. If you never am masked, he's supposed to be buried with somebody that is dead. Why are you having any of the museum?
Along the way, some rules will be broken. I'm quite famous for nothing about tools. And we get into the trouble ourselves. Are you going to be right now?
Yes, I'm going to ask yourself, okay? What are you doing now? Are we doing this? Why wouldn't we do it?
Economics, politics and ethics of returning art. That's starting right now. This is Frigandam's radio, the podcast that explores the head and side of everything with your host Stephen Düner. Oh, okay.
We will begin our story in present day, New York City. Let's talk about the Gold Coffin. That is Matthew Bodeanos. I am an assistant district attorney here in the Manhattan District Attorney's office.
And I'm the chief of New York's Antiquities Trafficking Unit. Okay, how many units like yours exists in the world? There's one. This is it.
Bear in mind that half of my time is spent as a homicide prosecutor. And 50% of my time is devoted to antiquities trafficking. Bodeanos is well suited to run an antiquities trafficking unit. In addition to a law degree, he's got a master's degree in classics from Columbia.
And he was a colonel in the US Marine Corps during the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. When he heard that looters were taking advantage of the invasion to empty out the national museum, he put together an elite task force and rushed to Baghdad to secure the site. So when it comes to stolen antiquities, Bodeanos knows what he's talking about. Which brings us to the Gold Coffin, he mentioned.
In one of the most frustrating headlines of all time, there's a headline in People Magazine, Kim Kardashian Cracks Case, which is actually semi-true. We couldn't find that headline in People Magazine, even after painting through a few years of issues. Maybe Bodeanos was remembering a New York Post headline, which we did find. It says, Kim Kardashian's Met Gala photo helped solve a little Gold Egyptian coffin case.
The Met Gala is the annual fashion industry spectacle at Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The photograph shows Kardashian in a shimmering ornate gold dresser, Donna Telvorsachi design, posing the site as shimmering ornate golden coffin that's detailed with the face of Egyptian priest named Met Young. Extraordinary, amazing. First century BCE Gold Coffin, fully intact, brilliant.
It's a cute photo. Kim Kardashian and the long dead Egyptian priest are essentially twinning. And of course the photo in viral around the world is, you know, I guess our material does. Even to you, no, no, no, I didn't actually know who was.
Shouldn't be confessing this. I did not know who was and I had to be told, when you were more on its Kim Kardashian. The Gilded Coffin had already proved to be a blockbuster exhibition for the Met. So Metropolitan Museum purchased the Met Jump on Coffin in 2017 for approximately $3.9 million.
It's almost $1 million. That is Patty Gerson-Lift. I'm a professor of law at the Paul University College of Law. And my specialty is dealing with legal issues in the art world, and particularly cultural heritage.
Gerson-Lift tells us that the Met bought the Coffin from a French and Japanese dealer named Christophe Kuniki. And the museum had done the standard due diligence to ensure the purchase was legitimate. Their due diligence was based on the export license, which showed that it had been exported in 1971. And of course it was written in Arabic.
But if they had actually read or read carefully the export license, they would have seen that the data of the export license, the name of the country of Egypt, had changed in 1971. Until 1971, Egypt had been officially known as the United Arab Republic. In 1971 the official name was changed due to the Arab Republic of Egypt. And the name of the country on the export license for the date on the license was wrong.
Not the kind of mistake that I think would have been in 1971. The Metropolitan Museum of Art apparently thought it was acquiring an antiquate that had been legally and properly handled. Here's how the Met put it in a press release that is still on the museum's website, at least as of this recording. Officially exported from Egypt in 1971, the Coffin has since resided in a private collection.
All that turned out to be false, but it would take Kim Kardashian to bring the truth to light. So this to go forward around where one of the people who saw the photo was one of the people who looted the Coffin out of Egypt in about 2010 during the Arab Spring. That's right. The Coffin had been dug up only recently by feeds under the cover of Civil War and political chaos in Egypt.
This person sees this photo, looks it up and finds out that the Met had paid $4 million worth. Well, he hadn't been paid. The looter hadn't been paid. He was told that he would get the money as soon as it was sold.
Well, he's waiting for years, you know, the no-on-or-a-month thieves that's really true. So he was furious and he contacted a very good friend of his who was also a smuggler named George Laffy. And who is George Laffy? At the time, George Laffy was one of my informants.
Did he become an informant because you busted him? Yes. And he was actually a good informant. He was really valuable for us.
It was worth it to us to keep him out of jail. So he tells George Laffy, I can't believe that I haven't paid. So George puts me in touch with the looter. But Gano's interview this looter over soon.
What did he learn? The one thing, he found out the fate of Nijamak himself, the modified priest, who'd been buried in the Gilded coffin. The looter, G'dano says, had actually dumped the body, the mummy, into the Nile because it was easier to transport out of Egypt. The looter also showed G'dano's photographs.
looters tend to keep photographs of the material in the ground. And the reason they do that, even though it's evidence, is there's no saying in antiquity trafficking if it's looted, it's real. When people buy things that they either know or reasonably suspect is looted, the first question they ask is how much? And the second question they ask is, is it real?
They don't ask easily. Well, when they ask is a real, the looter says here's the photo with dirt still on it in the ground. Oakesh, okay, good. From Egypt, the coffin was apparently trafficked to Dubai, and then Germany, and finally to the French dealer, Kuni.
Somewhere along the way, it picked up the forged export license, as well as a fake provenance. The provenance is a listing of a given object origin and its previous owners. Matthew O'Bodeinos armed with all this information. Now informed the Metropolitan Museum of Art that their beautiful $4 million blockbuster of a Gilded coffin had been looted.
And they were in illegal possession of another country's historic treasure. The Met was not happy to learn this. So the Golden Caulfin, Andrea Baer is Deputy Director of Collections and Administration at the Met. As soon as we found out that our information about the history of the object had been falsified that we have received falsified documents, we immediately cooperated with the District Attorney's office.
To be clear, the Met's Museum of Art is one of the richest and most respected museums in the world. How are they so easily fooled? The Met got fooled by not probing deeply enough into the purported history that was given to us. So there were a number of names in the chain of ownership that were familiar to us, and that gave us a feeling of confidence.
We looked at this provenance and we believed the information as it was on the page. We asked a certain number of questions, but we did not ask nearly enough questions about it. Matthew O'Bodeinos is slightly less charitable toward the Met's vetting process. We get the warrant, we see some coffin from the Met.
It is an extraordinary one-of-a-kind item. It had never been on the market ever before, never photographed, ever, not once. But it was claimed to have been taken out of Egypt and sent to Germany, and in Germany it resided there for 60 years, and then from there it went to Paris to be sold at auction, and then from Paris it was sold to the Met. If you have an extraordinary object like this, a world-class object that is the centerpiece of any exhibit or display.
And it has never been photographed, never been listed in an invoice or a will or an international shipping document, and it appears on the market for the first time like a thin, full-grown from the head of Zeus, and it comes out of a country that has just had a civil war. Guess what? My kids know it's looted. Okay, where is the coffin now?
Or was it going to have it in some vault in a basement in some city building? Nope, the coffin has already been repatriated to sitting in a museum in Cairo and it is gorgeous. As I was listening to, Boganos, I found myself thinking a fairly obvious thought. If a museum like the Met could be so easily fooled in the 2020s, what kind of fooling and deceiving what's happening in museums in the 1920s and the 1820s?
Let's be honest, many of the world's great museums are essentially trophy cases to show off the fruits of colonization in Empire Building. Perhaps you have been to the British Museum in London and seen ancient porthonon sculptures from Greece, also known as the Elgin Marbles, named for one Lord Elgin, the British nobleman who had them removed. Today, Greece would like these sculptures returned. The British Museum is less enthusiastic.
The British Museum also owns a great many historic and religious artifacts known as the Benin bronzes, seized by Britain in a late 19th century raid in what is today Nigeria. Again, Nigeria would like these returned, and again, the British Museum would rather not. To be fair, history is not something one can simply undo. That said, many museums have begun to consider who is the most legitimate owner of the objects they display.
There are often clues to that ownership right there on Museum wall. One of my favorite things to do is to look at the museum labels and see how the museum acquired the object. That is Jim Marone, an economist at the Rand Corporation. And why do we call it a chemist?
I am the only trained economist that I know we're going to take place proper. After the break, Marone walks us through the global market for looted antiquities, and we will hear from one museum that takes programs issues very seriously. I'm Stephen Dunder. This is for Combs Radio.
We'll be right back. We'll be passing. Actually, it has hidden hope of it. It helps strengthen and protect your voice from injury, safely living differently with manual life.
Visit manual life.ca. We just met Jim Marone, an economist who studies art and antiquities. All of this work to me is interesting because it touches on this really intangible notion of culture. Who's property is that and who's identity are we talking about?
Marone especially loves to read the labels on museum walls that describe the object in the antiquities wings, which would include not just Greek and Roman Belso, Asian and African. Those labels will give some indication of when the museum purchased it and how they're not going to be the complete provenance history, but they can give some sense and museums are filled with stuff where the provenance isn't ironclad. We know this because they are now returning dozens of objects every single year. The return of art is something we'll cover in depth later in the series.
Let's take a step back to consider how antiquities fit into the overall market. The art market is really unique because value in the art market is so different from any other market because value is essentially a socially created thing in the art market. They're not commodities. It's not like you can look at the price of soybeans and say, okay, well, I'm going to trade futures.
If you want to learn about the art market, we put out a series on that couple years ago. It's called the hidden side of the art market episodes 4.4.4.5. and 4.6. The antiquities market is yet again different.
One is pretty tiny. The art market as a whole is valued in the 10 of billions of dollars. The antiquities market is probably a couple hundred million dollars annually. You're kidding.
So it's a fraction of 1% of the art market. I was in the impression the illicit antiquities market was much bigger. I've read one UNESCO citation that puts around $10 billion. Are they just wrong?
You're saying that citation is unsubstantiated, but it has been thrown out in the public sphere so many times. There's just no evidence that that market is in the billions at all even close. If we were under the impression that the illegal antiquities market is something like $10 billion and you're telling us it's just in the tens of millions, should we just say, it's not a big deal. It's not where you're about.
There's some muddlers out there. There's some rich dudes and some palace in Dubai or maybe an apartment in New York or Paris. And it's not a big problem. Should that be the appropriate response?
No. So this is me as an economist. I'm telling you, we should not be using economic figures as a defense for regulating this market. Why not?
Don't tell me that you and economists are about to say that culture is even more important than money. No, but because that argument is going to lead us to the wrong types of regulation. People saying, oh, we have to regulate this market because ISIS is making money off of antiquities. That's not a helpful argument because it's not pointing us to the right ways to regulate that are actually going to work at sale.
I say as someone who studies both counter terrorism and antiquities. The nexus between ISIS antiquities is not a good way to fight ISIS or fight against a market. Are you saying that's because that story is also wrong? The terrorist organizations like ISIS aren't making lots or maybe even the majority of the money from black market antiquities because I certainly read those articles too.
Right. They clearly are making money where they can, but there's no substantiated evidence and we have looked no substantiated evidence that they are doing it systematically at a scale that would be comparable to what they can make off of their other revenue streams. Other revenue streams being what oil, taxes, extortion, banks, seizures. Essentially everything that I thought I knew so far about the illegal antiquities market is wrong or grotesquely exaggerated.
Yes, that's a true statement so far. I think there's a lot of myths out there and there's a lot of conventional ways on that needs to be moderated. One is that collectors and auction houses are doing the due diligence to verify that an antiquity is legal for sale that it's prominent history is ironclad. That's not happening, but there's a lot of pushback from participants saying, oh, no, we're doing the best that we can.
Let's hear from someone whose job is to wrestle with this issue. Sure. My name is Victoria Riete and I am the senior trade for provenance at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. What does a curator for provenance do?
My job is to research the history of ownership of the works of art that we have in the collection as well as the works of art that we are considering bringing in as new acquisitions or as loans. What we want to make sure is that there are no broken chains of ownership in the objects past that could signal theft for leading. There are different ways in which these chains of ownership break. There's garden variety theft.
We're going to start from some time from another institution of my gallery. There may be archaeological being where antiquities is, it was a little bit from the ground, disturbing the archaeological site and then some of the cross international quarters. There was more time-leading, village, under both works rated and hazard. There were sales and transactions under duress particularly during the Nazi era and under colonial occupation.
There were so many possible forms of fraud and re-dining the mentioned outright forgery. You might think that every major museum would employ a dedicated provenance investigator, but that's not the case. For a long time, the entire world didn't ask questions about provenance. It was very gentlemanly.
Many of these transactions were sort of handshake deals and maybe you did follow up research and the problem that maybe you did. But if you're not asking questions about provenance and bringing something to the collection, it's a little bit like wandering into a little bit of traffic intersection without looking both ways. There might be a disaster about having a disaster. Like the Metropolitan Museum of Art paying $4 million for the looted coffin of Medjamaq.
So clearly, this is not just a past tense problem. Here again is the promised gym-erone. On the ground, people are looting. A lot of the attention nowadays is focused on the Middle East where, quite literally, we see from satellite images, people have died pits in ground at archaeological sites trying to find stuff.
In other areas of the world, for instance, Southeast Asia statues are being taken from temples where they have been sitting for hundreds of years. You can see evidence of this with literal chainsaw marks in the temples. Name some countries where this is happening. Cambodia is a very popular country.
There's a lot of demand for Cambodian antiquities. India and Nepal. Let's say we're talking about museum like the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Let's say we exclude everything from the 20th century onward.
What share of art and antiquities in a museum like that was essentially stolen? The reason I'm pausing is because there's a slitting opinion on what that means. Because if you talk to archaeologists, for example, unless we know the fine spot, it's been recorded in an archaeological excavation report, then the object was improperly taken from its place. Whether it was illegally removed from the country or whatever sort of question, but you've already lost scientific knowledge there.
And it's a real tragedy. I mean, that's one of the biggest reasons why I say you can't use an economic argument to regulate the street. The loss of scientific and cultural knowledge is so big. That's one of the biggest pieces of violence that the state perpetrates on the world.
But let me make a purely Philistine argument for a moment. Let's say I hear you Jim that the scientific and historical loss and cultural loss can be large. On the other hand, let's say this piece is coming from a country that's in shambles in this long civil war. Let's take Syria or something.
And I say, well, at the moment, this century at least Western Europe or the US or parts of Asia, or other places around the world, those are better places for that piece to be not only seen by people but protected by people. One interesting argument about why the art market can be so expensive is that if you put an extraordinarily high price on works of art, then that is a strong incentive for them to be more. protected into the future. So is the potentially lost scientific and historical knowledge really so great that it outweighs that potential upside of being the cyclic in a museum treasured into the next and the next century?
That's one of the more common arguments in defense of museums. The push back to that is no one is saying that those objects can't stay in New York or London, but it should be the decision of the country of origin to have them there and not the decision of England or the US. And one solution is to say we're going to rest it to this object. But we're going to sign agreement that it will say on display where it is, Italy or whatever country can pull it back and move it somewhere else if they choose to.
Are there any kind of licensing or profit sharing agreements? Let's say I'm the British Museum and I've got a piece that was stolen from your country. And I say, well, we're going to keep it here, but we'll pay you X dollars a year and maybe we'll even arrange for one plane per month to fly from your country full of your citizens and show them a great time, we'll see this work and then we'll send some more money back to you and some sort of profit sharing. As anyone pursue that kind of compromise.
I have not heard anything like that. Would you like a solution like that? Do you think there's a path to fairness? I'm not sure that that would be the sort of harms that we're trying to fix.
A lot of these are symbolic harms at this point. And so really it's about writing what is essentially a harm done by colonialism. That's not about profit. So it's more like this antiquity is a symbol of the brutality of your colonialism.
So it's not just that we want to be reimbursed. We want that symbol to actually be reversed so that you are not showing off still after these hundreds of years how successful you were at colonizing us. The fact that this antiquity is where it is is a symbol of the power that this country or the power inequalities that the system created at the time or still perpetrates really. And so reversing ownership is a way to undo some of that inequality.
You can see how quickly this issue of ownership is complicated, especially for antiquities. But it's complicated even for art that was still in more recently like during World War II and the Nazis looted hundreds of thousands of artworks from a variety of countries. Artworks were looted by the Nazis. For two different purposes depending on the type of work.
That again is the legal scholar Patty Gerstinblith. Artworks that the Nazi leadership that Hitler and Gerring liked. And those things were kept by them either in their personal collections or intended for a museum that Hitler was going to build. Then there were the things that they considered to generate impressionist or by Jewish artists anything 20 cents or pretty much.
Those things were taken and sold onto the international market. In 2019, Germany had to return to the Fizzi Gallery in Italy a Dutch old master painting that German soldiers looted from a small Italian town where the Fizzi had sent it for safety. A year later, the Fizzi had returned to Germany a sculpture that had been sold under duress by a Jewish art dealer in Germany was later owned by Herman Gerring and somehow wound up in the Fizzi after the war. Again, it can be complicated.
Here is Jimarone. The identification of stolen Nazi artworks shows the same problem as in the Antichwees world which is that it takes an incredible deal of research on a case by case basis to identify single paintings or single statues, prove that they were stolen or make the ethical case that it really shouldn't be where it is and it needs to be sent back. It's just an incredible amount of work. But I guess there are two fundamental differences there.
One it was not that long ago. So more likely that there will be records as opposed to a 2,000 year old Cambodian sculpture, I guess. But also we're talking about Nazis stealing are often from private homes where the issue of ownership is more clearly delineated than often in this case with antiquities, right? Yeah, to a point, I mean the private homes thing is what makes my keeping some stars.
The proverbial I found is an agramasatic. That is sort of like the joke people say about antiquities. I found this tattoo and my grandma that might be true. It also might be completely false or it could be that your grandma was a smuggler.
Right. Who knows. It's the same with if grandma had a Monet and it was stolen by the Nazis was that Monet ever documented or did she buy it direct from a dealer back in the 1890s. So it could be cloudy in both cases.
Coming up after the break, there's one thing that isn't cloudy, at least in the US. If it is stolen, it is always stolen. But in other countries, yes, more clouds. I'm Stephen Davener.
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See how they live differently with any life. Is it man like dossier slash hell? Remember what the Agramas Jimerone told us earlier about the cultural aspect of antiquities trafficking versus the legal. Whether it was illegal to live in the country as part of a separate question.
The international consortium of investigative journalists just published report arguing that over a thousand artifacts in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York are linked to alleged looting and trafficking figures. A recent report by Independent Newsroom ProPublica found that many objects in the Met's Native American collection lack clear ownership histories and may well be stolen or fake. Stolen artifacts from people whose land was also stolen. Yes, there can be layers of ugly history to wade through when it comes to antiquities.
In any case, Matthew O'Boganos, the former Marine Colonel and current antiquities trafficking prosecutor has become the public face of the effort to call out stolen artwork in New York. We do not, under any circumstances, want to denude New York of its cultural treasures. I simply want us to respect the rule of law and honor the laws of the countries whose cultural patchimony has been pillaged for millennia. It's just that simple.
If it's legal great, we should keep it. We should display it. People can buy it. They can sell it.
They can do whatever they want. It's illegal that it should go back to the country of origin. I would think that the very great line about legal versus illegal only because if something was obtained, quote, leadly, let's say 100 hundred few years ago, under current standards, it might be a repugnant way that was acquired. I think of the Union Ronses in the British Museum that was called the punitive expedition.
It was an armed raid with a shot of the palace and took everything. So how do you define legality? Sure, I define the gallery by the law. That's actually one of the more pervasive myths surrounding what we do.
It's actually not that complicated. The law is the law. Countries have laws of patchimony. The laws of patchimony of all foreign nations.
If someone stole something from Egypt in 1900, that might be a moral question. It is not a legal question. The legal question is, was it looted after 1983 Egypt law of patchimony in Italy, it's 1909. It ain't complicated.
It's actually unbelievably simple. If you take morality and compass, I reckon, holier than thou out of it and stick to the law. The law will never lead you astray. There are also international laws to protect cultural artifacts.
After the widespread destruction of art and antiquities during World War II, the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the event of armed conflict was put in place. In 1970, UNESCO created the convention on the means of prohibiting and preventing the illicit import, export and transfer ownership of cultural property. Here again, is the economist Jimerone. The UNESCO convention is essentially what the market uses as a benchmark for determining if something's provenance is good enough to enter a museum collection.
The convention basically says 1970 is the data which an object has to have a left, it's country of origin in order to sort of be a way to worry about those things. So they're trying to establish kind of a fresh start. Like everything that happened before then, it's too long to get a hard to figure, but from now on we're really going to pay attention. There are national laws that can supersede that, but those are country by country.
So 1970 is sort of the matter. That UNESCO convention has been ratified by 143 countries, the US sign in 1983. But like Morone said, national laws often carry more weight than international law and US law is stricter than most. Here's Matthew Bo Benosian.
Bear in mind, a few central tenants of US criminal law. Number one, if it is stolen, it is always stolen. We do not do what most European countries do. And that is have this good faith exception.
If you purchase a lunaticity and it's been properly longer. It's got good quality paper, you know, fake, but quality history of ownership. Well, if you buy that item in France or Belgium or Germany or Switzerland, it's yours period. That's outrageous.
All you're doing is rewarding a good laundering process. We don't reward launderers, whether it's money laundering or in tippity's wandering. We don't do that. What's it actually stolen?
Did somebody break into a villa? Did someone break into a museum? Did someone tie people up put a shotgun to their head and steal price or centigrade. If that happened, it's stolen.
Whether that happens in 1910 or 1940 or 1978 is stolen. Let's say someone walked into your great grandfather's house. They tied your great grandfather up and they stole his property. And then that property appears on the market 75 years later.
Are you going to say, oh, well, it's 75 years ago. It didn't belong to my grandfather. Of course not. You're going to say, wait a second.
That was stolen. We do the exact same thing. Again, going to repeat this. It ain't complicated.
When you personally walk into an antiquity gallery or museum in New York, what kind of welcome do you get? Well, it has become increasingly difficult to walk into an auction house or a museum or a gallery as a civilian. There have been multiple occasions where I've been approached and oh, Colonel, I'm sorry. Did you need anything?
No, I feel like I like your museum. I like your gallery. I like your exhibit. Can I just see it?
On the other hand, there have been times when I have walked into a museum and I have looked at the curatorial card on the side and sent to myself. Are you kidding me? And then yeah, we have then begun investigation. Listen, most of the art, most of the antiquities on the market are clean.
Our legitimate are legal. Don't worry about it. There's a handful of names that are radioactive. If you have an antiquity that has passed through the hands of one of about a dozen well known traffickers, half of them have been convicted by us and the other half of them we have a rest warrants out for around the world.
Chances are pretty good. It's stolen. If there's a piece of interviews in our gallery and the first name on the provenance is George Luffy or Simon Simonean or Sirrop, Simonean or Gil Chia or Shubash Kapoor. I'm telling you it was probably looted and we're probably going to find it and we're probably going to seize it.
In the United States, the hardest thing about an antiquity is getting it into US customs. That again is pay-gursing bliss from DePaul. Once you get it through US customs, you're pretty much hungry. And where else do antiquities traffickers move their product?
It seems like DePaul has become a pretty major transit point. Several things from Egypt, from Libya and elsewhere have gone through DePaul in the last ten, twelve years. If you go back to the 90s, it was Switzerland. Switzerland was the well west.
And why did they change? Well, there was a huge scandal in which the Swiss authorities finally raided a warehouse of an Italian dealer named Giacomo Medici, a huge warehouse of about 3,000 documents and objects documenting the objects being cleaned and repaired. Clearly they were fresh out of the ground. So the warehouse was in 1995.
By 2005, the little while the Swiss had turned over this evidence to the Italian authorities, the Italian authorities, and when after US museums, including the Getty curator, Mary and True, there was a statue that had been purchased by the Getty for about $18 million, I think about 1990 in the art world. It's not a huge amount of money, but an antiquities world. It was a lot. Museums had to return, and in fact voluntarily returned all our number of objects.
And the Swiss decided partly based on that embarrassment. But also in the year 2003, the US led the invasion of Iraq, the museum there was looting, and it created in fact a lot of world attention to the issue. And at that point, Switzerland and a bunch of other European countries actually ratified a 1970 conventional cultural property. And that led to this was changing a lot of their rules.
And so as a result, the transit point moves. The morning here you talk, I can imagine that if I am a board member, a donor, or an executive of a big global collecting museum like the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, you are just a nightmare to have around. That's my goal. So the story that I'm hearing from you is one of, I don't know, ostrich behavior, right?
I mean, nobody who's in this world on museums side or on the auction house side doesn't know what's going on. Do they? I think they know, but there's something called willful ignorance. Maybe that's the same as an ostrich.
That illegal concept? Yes. And it was used in a prosecution of very prominent New York dealer named Fred Schultz, where to criminally prosecute somebody you need to show an edition to the crime that's committed. You need to show a level of knowledge during 10th on their parts.
And the way the jury found that Fred Schultz knew, and now I have air quotes around the word new, was I used this concept of willful ignorance, where if somebody intentionally was learning the truth, because if they learned the truth, they would know that it was illegal. Not paraphrase. Then the jury conclude that in fact a new. And that was on the basis of these acts of jury instruction given to convict Mr.
Schultz. Museums, of course, are not the only buyers of antiquities. They're also plenty of private collectors. So they are creating economic incentive to loot because the money works its way backwards through the system.
And while not necessarily all archaeological looting is done for the purpose of supplying the market, much of it is. And so these buyers in the West are creating the demands. If they weren't that demand, there would be less incentive to loot in the first place. And how hard do collectors think about the history of the pieces of their buying buyers who don't necessarily care that much of their own provenance, or who think that they are saving the object.
And I'm putting air quotes around the word saving. They think they're being altruistic. They're doing a good thing. A lot of people have used the rhetoric of saving or called the rescue narrative, which has history going back over 200 years.
I mean going back to when Alvin took apart the models or going back to when the British and the Germans and the French looted in Africa that the current inhabitants are not sufficiently capable of taking care of their own heritage. Therefore we have the right to take it and save it Napoleon. So the 1790s we took stuff from what today's Italy. So that concept is that several collectors have written themselves and they statements that what they're doing is right because they are saving the object without taking consideration and all of the negative consequences of what they're doing.
One negative consequence for the collectors is that they get busted. In late 2022 Matthew Bogano's team seized nearly two dozen antiquities from Shelby White, a collector who was also a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This was on top of several dozen pieces. She had to surrender earlier.
The hedge fund manager Michael Steinhardt had 70 million dollars worth of antiquities from his home and office and has been barred for life from acquiring any other relics. Steve Green, the president of the retail chain Hobby Lobby, was caught buying 5500 looted artifacts from Iraq. He forfeited the items and he paid a 3 million dollar fine. The United States is in some sense as unique in that we collect from everywhere.
We are the largest art market in the world by a good bit. The second and third of the UK and China. In China, they tend to buy antiquities from Chinese origin in the Gulf States. They're interested in some material for which the market in the United States is somewhat less.
So you might think that cracking down on collectors would diminish the incentives for looters and traffickers. I would have said the same thing that you just said 15 years ago. Matthew Bogano's again. I would have said if you cut off the hedge then the tail will die.
There is a butt there. What we have found time and time again is that the middle man, that necessary person who is in contact with the looter or sometimes once removed from the looter and the museum or collected those people, they have stockpiles. When we raided, we did 17 separate search warrants on shoebox before storage facilities around the country. The poor is one of the dealers Bogano's referred to earlier as radioactive.
He has sold antiquities looted from India, Pakistan, Cambodia, Thailand and elsewhere. And Indian court recently sent sent to 10 years in prison. When we did these raids, we found material that had been stolen 20 years earlier. That pattern has actually been repeated often.
So with a little sophistication and tweaking, it's fair to say that eventually you might cut off the looting if you start cutting off the collectors but not right away because they will stockpile material. It's the same with Iraq. After you rock me, he was looting in 2003. Everyone said, okay, just start monitoring the markets because you're going to see Iraq and take me to market.
No, you're not. No one's putting in a rocket in the market for at least a decade or more. Syrian antiquities are same deal. No one's putting Syrian antiquities on the market right after the Syrian way.
It's not going to happen. This stuff goes to ground for decades. The second argument, which I didn't even anticipate and that is if you cut off the market in New York, illegal market, the market simply goes elsewhere. So many of the antiquities looted from the Middle East, Libya, Lebanon, Egypt, the West Bank, Israel.
We have seen so many of those antiquities don't come to the normal New York London Paris anymore. We're the going to Gulf States. The number one emerging antiquities collecting market in the world are the Gulf States and when they go there, they never come out. The reality is there is a hubris.
There is an arrogance. That's not criminal to be arrogant. You know, I mean a lot of trouble. And maybe you do by wasting no offense.
These aren't crimes, but you have to understand these are people who have grown accustomed to getting their way in everything they do. I see it. I want it. That's actually a quote.
If I see something I want, I just buy it. I've heard it so many times. I've had people in my office who have right to my face said you're never going to get to me. And then that conversation has often ended with, please, stand up, turn around, put your hands behind your back.
Do your ones asked what we put an end to illicit collecting. And you said that a good start would be put in jail some 65 year old person who never seen inside of jail. But do we believe that six five year old person has at least several million maybe a billion dollars. Has that happened?
Yeah. It's a collector been present. No, not for more than a day or two and think about why though, right. We had a man had days off across the prosecutor in the US doesn't do the sentencing.
We do the sentencing recommendation. The judge does the sentencing. Reality is in today's climate alternatives to incarceration are always heavily considered heavily favored. My biggest frustration, you dance with a devil.
You make deals that sometimes you have to take a deep breath, grit your teeth and say, yes, let's say I have a collector or I have a high end gallery owner here in New York. And that high end gallery owner, I've got them dead to rights, straightforward conviction, sees all their property, shut down the gallery and then I can make my pitch to the judge judge. These are serious felonies. I'm asking for time.
I can do that. I would get a great headline. And everyone would say, oh, yes, he's finally carrying through on his promise. He's putting all these rich people in jail.
Okay, I can do that. What if that person comes to me and says I can get you 500 other looted antiquities from my source. What do you do? Do you take a cheap headline, easy out and do the little, you know, celebration dance in the end zone.
And you go out and have a drink and say, hey, great job guys. Well, 500 antiquities have now gone elsewhere or do you suck it up? Yeah. You sound like a kind of guy who sucks it up.
I assume you make that decision every day. Every time you make that decision it takes a little bit out of you. So we've made that deal. We have made that deal with the devil.
And as a result to this office has recovered almost 4,500 priceless cultural treasures from 30 countries around the world valued at more than $200 million. Okay, that's amazing. Big question. What happens to it next?
Great question. So every country is, you know, it's like I have four kids and each kid is special. Every country is special. They really are every country treats these differently.
How differently we will try to answer that question. And anymore in our next episode, we'll also get on a plane to visit the museum at the center of this controversy over a turning art, which museum stop you for this one before. Why are the great pyramids in Egypt? Because they were too big to fit into the British Museum.
So, for the next time on the show, until then, take care of yourself and if you can, someone else do. And also, you know, keep the integrity of the investigation. So ask me that question in about another 36 hours.