Law Enforcement Focuses on Asia Week in Inquiry of Antiquities Smuggling

By TOM MASHBERGMARCH 17, 2016

Homeland Security Investigations officers removing a piece of art on Wednesday from a gallery on East 67th Street in Manhattan. CreditTina Fineberg for The New York Times

In the seven years since its founding, Asia Week New York has grown from a small promotional effort by a few Manhattan art galleries to a splashy, 10-day event that combines museum exhibitions with art dealing. Last year, organizers say, it led to $360 million in sales.

But this year, Asia Week, which ends Saturday, has become the focal point of an aggressive and unusual law enforcement effort.

Federal officials working with the Manhattan district attorney’s office have seized on the festival to orchestrate a series of daily raids that have netted more than a half-dozen antiquities that the authorities say were looted overseas, then smuggled out for later sale by auction houses or dealers.

“For too long, those engaged in the criminal trade in antiquities have viewed the occasional seizure as simply the cost of doing business,” said Matthew Bogdanos, the assistant Manhattan district attorney who obtained search warrants for the raids.

But the seizures have upset dealers who say the sudden confiscations are a heavy-handed approach. Lark Mason, an Asian antiquities expert and dealer who is chairman of Asia Week, said gallery owners are ready to work with law enforcement when questions arise about objects.

“Why are they not approaching these galleries instead of treating them like criminals trying to do something underhanded,” he said. The items seized this week were all publicized by their vendors online and in catalogs, he said, not sneaked “in to be sold in some smoky back room.”

The seizures are part of Operation Hidden Idol, a nine-year investigation into antiquities smuggling that officials say has netted more than 2,600 items and reams of data about illicit trafficking. Typically, the authorities say, the smugglers create false paperwork to certify an object was acquired lawfully, often fooling purchasers and other dealers down the line.

The Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance, said the raids ensured that items could be confiscated and that alerting dealers beforehand might send the objects underground. Many seized items have been returned to their countries of origin, Mr. Vance added.

Late Thursday, Homeland Security Investigations agents and the district attorney’s office added to their tally of confiscations by seizing several items from the Nancy Wiener Gallery on East 74th Street, which specializes in Asian objects. Officials said they removed a limestone sculpture of Hindu deities valued at $35,000 and a bronze Buddha worth $850,000, as well as business records.

Seizures cannot be good for the Asian antiquity market. But it is not clear what impact they are having this week on sales, gallery owners said. Many collectors are savvy and familiar with widespread reports about Subhash Kapoor, a former Manhattan dealer who is accused of having run the largest antiques smuggling operation ever uncovered in the United States.

Mr. Kapoor primarily dealt in objects from South Asia — India, Pakistan and Afghanistan in particular — and those are the sorts of items that have been seized in the past week by agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations. There have been fewer reported instances of stolen antiquities from Japan, China or Korea turning up in the United States.

“Historically, Asian governments haven’t monitored their antiquities in the same way” as nations like Italy, Greece, Turkey, and Egypt, said Leila A. Amineddoleh, the former director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Cultural Heritage Preservation. “It makes them vulnerable.”

Mr. Kapoor, who is awaiting trial in India, has been the pivotal figure in Operation Hidden Idol, and the sheer volume of illicit artifacts he is said to have donated or sold — hundreds are in museums around the world — has raised questions about the level of scrutiny being practiced in both the art market and the museum world. Museums in the United States, Australia and Singapore, among others, have returned items obtained from Mr. Kapoor, many valued at well above $1 million. The Antiquities Coalition, which fights illicit antiquities trafficking, said major dealers and auction houses have the resources to conduct due diligence and should coordinate more with law enforcement and source countries.

“The burden of proof should fall on these global businesses,” said Deborah M. Lehr, the coalition’s founder, “not on the individuals and countries who are victims of the illicit trade, to validate antiquities before any sale.”

Some experts say many problems would be solved if law enforcement shared information about suspect items rather than publicized eye-grabbing confiscations. The Committee for Cultural Policy, an advocacy group for collectors, has called for a digital system under which museums and collectors could document items publicly and address foreign claims in a neutral forum.

“Instead of allowing auction houses, art dealers or collectors to research pieces beforehand, authorities wait for them to be offered for sale and then seize them with great fanfare,” said Kate Fitz Gibbon, a lawyer for the committee. “The first anyone knows that an artwork is stolen is through a Homeland Security press release.”

This week’s seizures are far from the largest set of raids conducted by federal agents tracking illicit antiquities. In 2008, hundreds of federal agents swooped down on 13 locations in California with warrants for objects at institutions like the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena.

The bulk of the items were from Southeast Asia, and the man accused of directing the smuggling ring was convicted last year of making false declarations while importing antiquities.

Cases that involve prosecution are rare, though, and penalties are often light. In one New York federal case, an antiquities dealer in 2012 admitted smuggling ancient coffins and funerary items worth $2.5 million into the United States using false documents. Though prosecutors asked that he be sentenced to at least four years in prison, the judge gave him 200 hours of community service and a fine of $200.

Mr. Bogdanos and Mr. Vance said stern justice must be meted out to antiquities smugglers and to anyone in the trade who falsifies documents that accompany items.

“If you don’t send that message, you don’t deter others,” Mr. Vance said. “Antiquities raiding is not an acceptable business model.”

Correction: March 22, 2016 

An article on Friday about seizures of antiquities by law enforcement officials during Asia Week New York, using information from the website of Leila A. Amineddoleh’s law firm, misstated the connection of Ms. Amineddoleh, who commented on Asian governments’ monitoring of antiquities, to the Lawyers’ Committee for Cultural Heritage Preservation. She is a former director, not the current one.

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Mapping the Destruction of UNESCO World Heritage Sites

Posted on Mar, 16, 2016

Contributed to WCHV by Danielle

Over the last few years the world has been watching helplessly the growth of intentional destruction of heritage sites in the Middle East, and therefore, tracking and finding ways to protect these sites is a critical goal.

The Washington, D.C.-based “Antiquities Coalition” was recently launched to create a map of Culture Under Threat in order to highlight the massive amount of deliberate destruction happening to historical sites in the Middle East and North Africa. This map include treasured sites like St. Elijah’s, Palmyra, the Mosul Museum, and the Mosque of the Prophet Younus and many more that the ISIS terrorists have intentionally left in destruction. The map only includes public data showing museums and sites designated by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The map also highlights 700 heritage sites throughout the 22 states of the Arab League, of which 230 have been destroyed. The mapping application includes a swiping tool to see the loss of heritage sites in the Middle East and North Africa since the 2011 Arab Spring. It is the goal of organization to help raise awareness about the extent of the destruction across Iraq, Syria, and the entire region.

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Addressing the illicit trafficking of cultural property at the end of the market chain

13.03.2016 – Culture Sector

On Wednesday 2 March 2016, the Permanent Missions of Jordan and Italy to the United Nations, together with UNESCO, INTERPOL, and UNODC, organized the First Meeting on Art Markets of Stolen Works of Art as part of the partnership initiative “Protecting Cultural Heritage –an Imperative for Humanity: Acting together against the destruction and trafficking of cultural property by terrorist groups and organized crime”. It was chaired by the Ambassador H.E. Dina Kawar (Jordan) and Ambassador H.E. Inigo Lambertini (DPR of Italy) with the participation of other permanent representatives of member states, Ms. Emily Rafferty, Former director of Metropolitan Museum, as well as representatives of UNESCO, INTERPOL, UNODC, Antiquities Coalition and others.

Traffickers are also masters at coming up with fake documents that purport to show that the disputed object had been long held by mysterious collectors, now conveniently deceased. Such lack of evidence often means that the authorities often choose to avoid pursuing criminal charges in return for reclaiming the objects, which results in shady dealers getting off the hook, experts say.

To Fight ISIS, Art Dealers & Archaeologists Join Forces

Catherine Chapman — Mar 11 2016

Inspired by the destruction of ancient sites, the #NEWPALMYRA project is digitally rebuilding cultural heritage like The Temple of Bel located in Palmyra, Syria. Render by CEBAS VT.

Stretching 20cm high, the exaggerated feminine curves of Halaf terracotta figurines are a symbol of fertility, dating back to Neolithic times in Syria.

Neil Brodie is an illicit trade expert who spent three months searching for these items online, now on a list of cultural objects at risk by the International Council of Museums, on eBay.co.uk. He found 60, sold by seven dealers typically based outside London, for an average price of £102. Brodie thinks the majority are fake, but the rest could be from ISIS-held areas in Syria and Iraq. At an art auction, similar figurines could be worth up to an estimated $1,500.

The value of cultural heritage has always been a contentious issue within the world of art. Things intensified in 2014, when, as a global society, we began to bear witness to the irreversible amount of cultural cleansing being performed by ISIS in places like Mosul, Raqqa, and now Palmyra. While an unknown amount of antiques and artifacts have either been lost or destroyed, in a once divided scene of archaeologists, museums, collectors and dealers, a coalition of culture is starting to fight back.

A screenshot of The Antiquities Coalition’s Map of Culture Under Threat. Photo: The Antiquities Coalition

“There’s tons of material that could be from Syria,” says Brodie, who has been searching for pieces amid reports that looting by ISIS is being fuelled by demand from established antiquity markets like the US, Europe and China. “It could have come out of Syria 20 years ago or it could have come out last week. I don’t know. There’s no way of knowing.”

Plundering culturally rich locations for objects to be sold illegally on the legitimate market has been around since the discovery of buried treasure, and is a problem not confined to ISIS alone. Despite the presence of nation-based cultural property laws, conflict areas around the world face the loss of heritage, which archaeologists like Brodie believe will not be stopped if commercial values continue to be designated to these ancient items.

Yet, the situation in Syria has given way to something else entirely. Many, including Brodie, warn of how exaggerated numbers related to how much ISIS is making from the illicit sale of antiquities—reported as the terrorist organization’s second biggest earner, anywhere between $4 million to billions—entice looting, rather than diminish it, potentially bringing further damage to monuments and archaeological resources.

“It encourages Syrians who are without jobs or other resources to become looters and treasure hunters in their own backyard,” says Kate Fitz Gibbon, an art and cultural heritage lawyer based in the US. “The US State Department and archaeological extremists have hijacked the Syrian crisis to claim that cultural losses are due to a multi-billion-dollar market in illicit antiquities backed by ISIS, which does not and never has existed,” she tells The Creators Project over email.

Archaeologists and antiquity collectors and dealers share a passion for the past and its preservation, a mutual devotion that has, historically, never been communicated. While most archaeologists insist that cultural artifacts should remain in their local contexts, campaigners for the trade take an international view that artifacts should be shared, especially when some countries, like Syria, do not have the appropriate infrastructures to protect their own heritage.

Before: Palmyra Mausoleum of Mohammad Bin Ali. Photo from militant social media account, courtesy The Antiquities Coalition.

After: Palmyra Mausoleum of Mohammad Bin Ali. Photo from militant social media account, courtesy The Antiquities Coalition

Although museums may be heavily dependent on donations by these antiquity collectors, however against the sale of looted material the legitimate market is, public examples of stolen artefacts in auction house catalogs have made the industry difficult to trust. And in spite of a lack of concrete evidence of so-called “blood antiquities” flooding the showrooms of New York or London, the prospect of terrorism being funded by the legitimate trade has called for the complete shutdown of the sale of Syrian antiquities, both by the UN and the US’ Protect and Preserve International Cultural Property Act (H.R. 1493). The bill, currently before Senate, will stop the import of antiquities into the United States that were illegally removed from Syria as of March 15, 2011, legislation similar to restrictions placed on cultural objects taken from Iraq after 1990.

However, since most looted items typically go underground for a period of five to ten years, according to US Homeland Security, establishing whether a piece has been stolen at this stage is on the borderline of impossible, making any policy seem reactive, rather than preventative.

“If you shut down the antiquities trade in the market countries, looting is still going to continue,” says James E. McAndrew, an international art theft expert and former member of the State Department’s Cultural Property Task Force. “The pieces are going to find a home and a buyer because it’s not always US-driven.”

McAndrew’s firsthand experience in dealing with investigations into the illicit trafficking of cultural heritage items globally, is that the most sought after pieces are likely to remain in neighboring countries—in Syria’s case, oil-rich destinations like Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE.

While Saddam Hussein-era objects did make their way onto US shores—having since been returned to Iraq—McAndrew explains that previous claims of Gulf War antiquities showing up in US markets have yet to yield any results, and that the State Department’s $5 million award for any information pertaining to ISIS-financed cultural heritage items is unlikely to produce any returns either.

McAndrew and others feel that more needs to be done in source countries, efforts that international bodies and the 1970 UNESCO Convention, aimed at preventing the illicit trade of cultural heritage, have failed to address proactively. Time and time again, improvements to this problem have been obstructed by various art world agendas, but in the abomination that is ISIS, a new period has begun.

“Different entities, the archaeological community, collectors, auction houses and museums, are trying to reach across the table to come up with some solutions,” says McAndrew. “That’s finally the right thing to do.”

In September 2015, the State Department partnered with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in order to bring together a range of experts, all affected by the ISIS threat to culture and those objects yielding a bountiful information about our shared human civilization. Whether trader or excavator, all are solution-driven.

A digitally recreated Temple of Bel located in Palmyra, Syria, an example of digital recreation from the #NEWPALMYRA project. Render by Areebonary.

“What I think we can all agree on is that this is a major global crime,” says Deborah Lehr, Chairman of the Antiquities Coalition. “There are many players and it’s very complicated to determine what the tract is. It’s no different to what happens in the gun or sex trade.

Lehr is working with the University of Chicago and a team of archaeologists, economists and sociologists to produce an accurate estimate on how much money is being made off the sale of looted antiquities in the areas of Iraq and Syria.

“The biggest challenge in this field is that there’s no real information or statistics on the size of this illegal trade,” says Lehr, a statement that even the trade itself might agree with.

On the other side of the Atlantic, differences are also being put aside to find a way to tackle the illegal trade of cultural heritage, endeavors that may be too late for Syria, but will aim to prevent this happening in whichever country that next finds themselves amidst war and terror.

“In Britain, we have open dialogue with the trade to try to come together with some kind of pragmatic compromise between the interest of all groups,” says Brodie. “We could sit around for another 20 years doing nothing, or we could try to sit down and try to get some kind of agreement in place, which would probably be far from ideal, but would be better than nothing.”

PDF of article here 

Ancient Religious Sites Destroyed by Extremists

ISIS and other terror groups have found a new weapon: the mass destruction and looting of invaluable cultural and religious sites. Referred to as cultural cleansing, this type of terrorism acts as propaganda, even as a recruitment tool. And, a little-known fact, the looted goods are sometimes sold on the black market — sometimes for millions of dollars — lining the pockets of violent extremists. One group trying to protect these treasures is The Antiquities Coalition. They just released a new weapon of their own: the interactive Culture Under Threat Map. 

Deborah Lehr, Founder and Chair of The Antiquities Coalition
Katie A. Paul, anthropologist and Chief of Staff of The Antiquities Coalition

Listen to the full radio interview here

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Syrie, un drame total

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