In Parts I and II, we recapped the details of the Nancy Wiener case so far and examined the characteristics of the art market that make it susceptible to antiquities trafficking. Part III looks at the instances of institutional failure in Wiener’s case, where the checks and balances in the system did not act to prevent her from carrying out her alleged criminal activities.

Nancy Wiener’s case reflects the inadequacy of the due diligence performed by buyers, auction houses, and museums when  ensuring genuine and legal provenance of cultural artifacts. At best, their behavior could be characterized as negligent, and at worst, complicit, in prioritizing profits and plausible deniability over the law and ethics.

The 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export, and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property and Association of Art Museum Directors mark 1970 as the internationally accepted threshold date for artifact provenance, meaning that a work must have been outside its country of probable modern discovery before 1970, or legally exported from its probable country of modern discovery after 1970. Although many museums have complied by this date, auction houses have been slower to adapt their practices. Christie’s is  to be credited for the numerous voluntary repatriations they have made over the years. However, “according to the complaint only required evidence that the objects had been on the market since 2000”, regardless of that country’s patrimony laws (unless there is an earlier bilateral agreement with the United States). As the Wiener case shows, this comes with risks.

According to the complaint, it allowed Wiener to consign her mother’s collection to Christie’s after being turned away from Sotheby’s for not being able to provide ownership history. Christie’s allegedly only requested provenance for the top 20 lots of the 380-lot sale, to which Wiener produced a document titled “Provenance and Country of Origin Details” that contained false or flimsy provenance. Examples of dubious prior ownership that Wiener listed include an unnamed member of the Diplomatic Corps, Doris Wiener herself (who had consigned them for auction then re-acquired them), and Spink & Son, another antiquities dealer which had also been entangled in a looted antiquities case. Christie’s offered all 380 lots from its New York showroom for a total sale of $12.7 million.

Commercial institutions like auction houses are not alone in facing these challenges. The National Gallery of Australia (NGA) in Canberra, and the Asian Civilizations Museum (ACM) in Singapore are two examples of museums which had also purchased stolen or looted art. Each museum purchased one of a pair of Seated Buddha statues, originating from the ancient Indian city of Mathura, from Wiener in the early 2000s, without required solid provenance. In fact, the ACM required no statement of provenance at all.

National Gallery of Australia’s Seated Buddha (Credit: Chasing Aphrodite)

The NGA only began investigating the authentication of its Seated Buddha statue in 2012 after the investigative reporter Jason Felch (of Chasing Aphrodite) began raising questions about its provenance following a tip from an anonymous source. According to Felch, the extent of the NGA’s due diligence was limited to requesting a search certificate from the Art Loss Register (ALR) stating that the sculpture was not in its database of stolen objects – a declaration which Felch notes as “largely useless” for looted antiquities since the database does not contain information on illegally exported artifacts unless they have been previously reported. The ALR itself warns that they “cannot guarantee the provenance of any Designated Item and the Client cannot solely rely on the results of any search or enquiry by the ALR.”

Similarly, the ACM stonewalled Felch when he enquired about the ownership history for the other Seated Buddha in the pair. With further investigation it was uncovered that Douglas Latchford, a Bangkok-based collector, helped Wiener fabricate the provenance papers for both of the sculptures. The provenance documentation that Wiener provided the museums was  forged, falsely identifying a British expat stationed in Hong Kong as purchasing the statues in the 1960’s. In the end, the NGA announced that it would “donate” its Seated Buddha to India, and it received a refund of $1.2 million from Wiener.

While this is merely one episode among many in the long-running saga of Nancy Wiener, this particular example reflects the important role of museums in the stewardship of antiquities. As institutions created for the education and edification of the public, museums can and must do better to increase transparency in the way they “acquire artifacts, accept donations, process loans, and publicize any doubts they may have about an object’s hazy provenance.” While industry guidelines suggest that “the best efforts be made to determine provenance, and you must not knowingly acquire any work that’s been stolen,” the lack of specific requirements leaves wiggle room for plausible deniability and “puts a premium on not knowing.”

Museums are charged with the lofty responsibility of guarding our past for the future, and they should act in accordance with the highest professional and ethical standards to live up to that duty. As the Wiener case shows, in the end, adopting these standards will also protect their own institutions.

Read Part IV here.

This is a guest post by our intern Nicole Ong. Nicole is currently a student at Georgetown University, earning a degree in International Relations. If you’re interested in interning with the Antiquities Coalition, please email cultureunderthreat@theantiquitiescoalition.org

In Part I, we recapped the details of the Nancy Wiener case so far. Part II offers an overview of the legitimate and illicit art markets, and the difficulty of separating the two when it comes to the sale and purchase of antiquities.

The Nancy Wiener case exposes several of the systemic flaws plaguing the art market when it comes to antiquities trafficking. The constellation of players and networks involved in this case alone illustrates the stunning scope and reach of the illicit antiquities trade, stretching from the artifacts’ countries of origin (often war-torn or post-conflict societies) to the most prestigious institutions of the art world.  

Stolen statue of a Baphuon Shiva.

The Wiener case demonstrates the extent to which the boundary between the legitimate and illicit art markets can be blurred. Due to the nature of the antiquities trade, the antiquities market is characterized as a “grey market.” As put forward by the researcher Donna Yates, in this context, the grey market refers to the fact that the legitimate market is “empirically a mix of legality and illegality at the demand end of the supply chain.” Put simply, illegality exists in each stage of the antiquities market, from archaeological looting at the source, to cross-border trafficking in transit, to trade at the international marketplace. Illegal points of contact are invariably mixed in with the legal, above-ground trade within auction houses, collectors, and museums.

Sam Hardy compares the lack of regulatory checks and balances in the antiquities trade — even for million-dollar items —  unfavorably to the regulation imposed on low-cost commodities such as eggs. While eggs might be subject to strict supply-chain transparency standards, the antiquities market provides little public information about the source of its holdings. The environment of secrecy allows for buyers and sellers to close one eye and proceed with their business. According to Hardy, if people do not ask the right questions or keep records, anyone in the chain can say, “I had no reason to believe that this was looted.”

As Simon Mackenzie points out, there are numerous challenges to accurately estimating the scope of the illicit antiquities trade. However, the Wiener investigation provides an illuminating snapshot of its massive profitability. Wiener acquired a stolen bronze statue originating from Thailand or Cambodia depicting Buddha seated on a throne of Naga (a great cobra) for $500,000. Following restoration, the Naga Buddha statue was displayed at Wiener’s gallery, offered at  $1,500,000 — three times the price she paid for it. In another instance, Wiener bought a statue of a Baphuon Shiva from a supplier for $250,000 before consigning it to Sotheby’s, where it sold for $578,000 — again, more than twice the price she paid.

These numbers indicate another thread in the narrative of antiquities trafficking that is growing in significance: laundering. Looted antiquities often “start dirty but end clean” through the laundering process. To illustrate  Yates’ definition of the antiquities grey market, an artifact might be illegally excavated at an archaeological site before being sold to an in-country middle man, who physically moves the artifact away from its illicit origins, and  provides import/export paperwork supporting the impression of legitimacy. The artifact then passes into the market through the hands of dealers like Wiener, who give the artifact false provenance through straw purchases at auctions, false documentation in art volumes, or restoration to hide any physical signs of looting.

Returning to the example of the Naga Buddha statue, Wiener allegedly conspired with Douglas Latchford and Emma Bunker, then-recognised experts in Southeast Asian antiquities, to hide the statue’s illegal origins by falsifying its ownership history. Bunker wrote a provenance letter claiming to have seen the Naga Buddha statue in Latchford’s London flat in the early 1970s, leveraging her position as a trusted voice in the field. This example highlights the regulatory shortcomings of a market reliant on someone’s good name as the basis for verification – without doing any additional due diligence. 

Thus, it is critical to keep in mind the basic principle of “Buyer Beware” when purchasing any antiquity. Especially with the prevalence of online sales platforms and limited policing, collectors could end up buying looted antiquities, unaware of their illicit origins.

As detailed in the complaint, Wiener had utilized several criminal networks to obtain and smuggle the cultural artifacts into the United States before consigning them to major auction houses or selling them to museums and private collections. Thus, in considering the factors that allowed Wiener to successfully conduct business for so many years in the antiquities grey market, one cannot avoid the question of institutional failure on the part of these auction houses and museums, which will be explored in further detail in the next blog post.

Read Part III here.

This is a guest post by our intern Nicole Ong. Nicole is currently a student at Georgetown University, earning a degree in International Relations. If you’re interested in interning with the Antiquities Coalition, please email cultureunderthreat@theantiquitiescoalition.org

The Antiquities Coalition’s Executive Director, Tess Davis, presented at Boston University Center for the Study of Asia’s seminar and forum, Contested Heritage: Monuments, Politics, and Memory in Asia, last Friday. Joined by three other experts, Davis focused on Cambodian “blood antiquities” and the intersection of cultural heritage, cultural diplomacy, and cultural nationalism.

Davis employed the infamous Koh Ker Warrior to exemplify the global battle over the illicit “blood antiquities” trade that continues today, perpetrated by groups such as Daesh (ISIS). Davis discussed how the Koh Ker Warrior, after being looted during Cambodia’s civil war and sold to Belgian royalty in 1975, eventually landed in the hands of Sotheby’s auction house, which subsequently tried to sell the artifact.

A picture of the Koh Ker Warrior in Sotheby’s catalog from March 24, 2011.

In February 2012, after a New York Times expose, the United States sued for repatriation of the Koh Ker Warrior in the case of U.S. v. Cambodian Sculpture. The auction house settled in 2013 just as the case was headed to trial. After the settlement, Cambodia provided a hero’s welcome to the warrior in June 2014.

According to Davis, this fight for the Koh Ker warrior blew the lid off the inner workings of the illicit “blood antiquities” trade. It led to a sea of change, not only in how those in the market and museum community view Cambodian antiquities, but in how the Cambodian government and people do themselves. Davis also concluded that “the overall message from the Sotheby’s case is that looting and trafficking of antiquities is a crime and it will no longer be tolerated: not by governments, not by law enforcement, and increasingly not by the art world’s own norms and values.” To learn more about the US market in Cambodian cultural property, read our blog here.

In one of the art world’s most high-profile antiquities trafficking cases to date, the prominent antiquities dealer Nancy Wiener was arrested in December 2016 on the charges of illegally obtaining stolen cultural property via international smuggling networks and selling it on the art market by creating false provenance to hide their origins. Wiener returns to court on April 3rd to stand trial, hopefully closing a decades-long saga of looting, conspiracy, and smuggling.  

However, until then, Wiener’s arrest continues to send reverberations throughout the art world, throwing yet another spotlight onto the ongoing issue of fighting the illegal antiquities trade in the international art market. A criminal complaint filed in the Manhattan Criminal Court against Wiener reveals the surprising backstory behind the legendary New York dealer, and details Wiener’s exploits in building her trade in South and Southeast Asian art.

These include allegedly using criminal networks to transport looted cultural property across intermediary countries and hide their countries of origin; laundering artifacts through restoration and straw purchases at auctions; and in one instance, conspiring with authorities in Southeast Asian art like a prominent collector and academic to create false provenance for a stolen bronze statue of a Naga Buddha.  

Photograph of Nancy Wiener. Credit to Chasing Aphrodite

Part of the Wiener case’s impact comes from her own high profile within the industry, as she and her mother, Doris Wiener, have been credited for helping kickstart the market for South and Southeast Asian art. Works from Wiener’s eponymous Upper East Side gallery are found in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and several national museums abroad. The Wiener duo’s clients included high-profile figures such as John D. Rockefeller III, Igor Stravinsky, and Jacqueline Kennedy, adding another sheen of glamour and celebrity power to their brand.  

The Wieners were also blue-chip consigners with major auction houses such as Sotheby’s and Christie’s, and Nancy Wiener even consigned her mother’s art collection to Christie’s in 2012 upon her death. In a reflection of the Wieners’ stature in the art world, a press release on the sale mentions how Doris Wiener, “placed important works in top collections and institutions throughout the world,” and characterizes her as one of the “most distinguished tastemakers in this collecting category.”

The 380-lot sale raked in a total of $12.7 million dollars, a success by any other account. However, it has come to light that a significant portion of that profit came from suspected stolen cultural property, such as a silver-inlaid gilt bronze figure of Avalokiteshvara, which exceeded its pre-sale estimates of $250,000-$350,000 to sell for $812,500. According to the criminal complaint, at least another 20 lots in the sale had the dubious, non-existent, or plain false provenance indicative of looted antiquities.

Similarly, Wiener consigned a stolen statue of a Baphuon Shiva to Sotheby’s in 2011. Even though an employee had noted that it had “cracks and joins dressed up as paint splatters to maskrepairs,” likely from damage inflicted during its illegal excavation, Sotheby’s went ahead with the sale, citing a ‘Private English Collection’ as the source of the statue. The statue sold for $578,500.

It is likely that Wiener could have continued with these activities unnoticed by the authorities, if not for

Stolen statue of a Baphuon Shiva.

several key developments. The first hints of what was to come surfaced in 2015, when a Seated Buddha statue sold by Wiener to the National Gallery of Australia was declared likely to be stolen. Wiener had to refund the NGA the price of purchase, and the statue was returned to India along with other looted antiquities bought from the disgraced art dealer Subhash Kapoor, collectively worth more than $2 million. 

As it turned out, the wider federal investigation into Subhash Kapoor (termed Operation Hidden Idol) in 2015 proved instrumental in providing the evidence to bring down Wiener a year later. (Kapoor was charged in New York with possessing stolen items worth $107.6 million, and is currently awaiting trial in India). Pursuant to a search warrant carried out in New York, federal authorities obtained evidence of Wiener’s connections to Kapoor. They carried out a raid on Wiener’s gallery in March 2016, seizing 3 items worth nearly $1 million, eventually arresting her in December later the same year on the charges mentioned in the beginning of the post.

In all, the above mentioned details of this case raise many questions about how someone like Nancy Wiener could obtain and sell dubious South and Southeast Asian antiquities with impunity for so many years. The next few parts of this blog series aim to examine the players and factors that continue to facilitate the illicit antiquities trade — a transnational black market worth billions that spans continents and people from all walks of life.

Read part two here.

This is a guest post by our intern Nicole Ong. Nicole is currently a student at Georgetown University, earning a degree in International Relations. If you’re interested in interning with the Antiquities Coalition, please email cultureunderthreat@theantiquitiescoalition.org

The Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center (TracCCC) at George Mason University received the State Department Bureau of Counterterrorism Grant for Research and Training on Illicit Markets for Iraqi and Syrian Art and Antiquities. To launch their new Countering Looting of Antiquities from Syria and Iraq (CLASI) project, TraCCC has assembled a diverse team of experts united in the goal of understanding the illicit trade of antiquities and offering practical solutions to law enforcement. We are here with Dr. Louise Shelley, Founder and Director of TraCCC to learn more about this project.

Dr. Shelley, first of all, congratulations on receiving this grant. This must be a very exciting time for you and your team. How did you first get interested in the connection between antiquities trafficking and terrorist financing?

I have been interested in this problem for over a decade. When I was still at American University over a decade ago, I had an Iraqi Fulbright graduate student write on this for his master’s degree. He is now a member of our team. Then I wrote on this as a problem in my 2014 book, Dirty Entanglements: Corruption, Crime, and Terrorism. There I wrote on seeing recently smuggled high-end antiquities from Afghanistan for sale at the Maastrict Art Fair with the dirt still on them.

That addressed my engagement with the smuggling issue, but you should ask how long I have been interested in archaeology from the region. As a teenager, I used to subscribe to the youth archaeology lecture series at the Metropolitan Museum. I wanted to be an archaeologist but I was allergic to dust and mold, therefore this did not seem to be a good career trajectory for me. Through a series of circumstances, I became a specialist on Soviet crime when it was very hard to do research in the closed society. It also was not the most relevant intellectual problem. I would joke that it was as obscure as Mesopotamian archaeology when Saddam ruled Iraq and the country was also not very accessible to researchers.

In the late 1980s, I was chair of my Department of Justice, Law and Society and invented a new course entitled Western Legal Tradition that became a core course in the university curriculum. I received a grant from the American Bar Association to prepare myself and other teachers on the topic and we invited Dr. Ira Spar, now one of the advisors to our project, to teach us about Hammurabi’s Code and ancient legal traditions.

Now, ironically both Russian crime is an amazingly relevant problem to our current political environment and the smuggling of Mesopotamian antiquities has significant political consequences. This teaches us that one should pursue what is meaningful to ourselves and the need may come for specialization in what was once perceived to be an obscure and not very relevant discipline. When we had our first event at TraCCC on antiquities smuggling, we had to move the room for the talk as 115 people came. They were people who came to the event with very different interests but many shared a common passion for the topic.

Could you talk a little bit about what you have planned with your new initiative?

The CLASI project’s goals are to:

1.  Analyze the illicit trade in looted cultural property from Iraq and Syria with a particular emphasis on links to terrorist finance;

2. Develop information aimed at enabling law enforcement to investigate, interdict, and designate organizations and individuals involved in the trafficking; and

3. Use this information to develop training materials for law enforcement in partner nations.

At the present time, we are at the analysis stage using our multi-disciplinary and multi-lingual team to help us do the study. We are also supported by a group of data analyst specialists who have significant experience in the Middle East.

What do you think is the most important step in fighting the illicit trade?

Governments who fight the illicit trade tend to work in a stove piped fashion and concentrate on specific criminal acts. But the criminal and terrorist networks involved in this trade are generalists. They are in it for the money and often involved in many different sectors. One of our researchers earlier in his career, found antiquities traveling along with WMD (weapons of mass destruction) materials in his home country. So it is important to look beyond the looters and traders on the ground, and focus on the high-level facilitators and traffickers and the corruption that makes it all possible.

If policymakers could do one thing to address the current crisis, what would it be? What short term and long term changes need to take place?

The instability, lawlessness, and massive human suffering in the Middle East will provide fertile soil for antiquities looting for a long time to come. We are clearly not going to find a silver bullet there. Conflicts are increasingly being funded by illicit trade.  The recognition of this problem is a needed first step in addressing it. The UN Security Council in December 2014 recognized the link between smuggling of artifacts and terrorist financing in Resolution 2195, giving a strong incentive for the international community to act against this problem.

We also need to look at the demand side. We need to track the supply chain from beginning to end and then look for the best places to disrupt it. And some of those places may be in western countries among the facilitators who organize the final sales of the object. There also needs to be disincentives for buyers. Furthermore, we need online marketplaces like eBay to be more vigilant in monitoring the products they are selling in their online platforms.

We have been very impressed by the number of museum and scholarly experts who have approached us and asked to work pro-bono on our team. As we often say that it “takes a network to fight a network” and this is the case in antiquities looting as well.

What advice would you give to students who are interested in working in this growing field?

As we do our research, we are finding that new technologies that analyze big data, scrape the Internet, explore the Dark Net and track social media are providing important insights and giving us new research directions. Network analysis is also critical. So I would encourage all students who are interested in working in this area to learn to use these tools effectively.

The looting and trafficking of cultural property is a threat in countries the world over, and particularly in nations facing crisis and conflict. With the U.S. serving as the world’s largest market for art and antiquities, many illicit artifacts are destined for this burgeoning market. But the United States can help mitigate this threat by enacting bilateral cultural agreements to stop illicit artifacts from making their way onto American shores.

Bilateral agreements, or memoranda of understanding (MOUs), between demand (“market”) countries and supply (“source”) countries are an effective tool in discouraging the illicit trade in antiquities. This is especially important for countries whose cultural heritage is at risk (or may soon be at risk) from armed conflict or violent extremist organizations.

Since the Arab Spring in 2011, cultural heritage across the Middle East and North Africa has been plagued by rampant industrialized looting, conflict, and trafficking by extremist groups. The United States has taken the important step of enacting emergency restrictions on imports of cultural property, and signing MOUs with these countries in crisis. In November 2016, Egypt became the first Arab nation to sign a bilateral cultural agreement with the United States. Just over a year later, in February 2018, Libya became the second.

This interactive map provides an overview of the 17 cultural MOUs currently in effect, along with two existing emergency actions in Syria and Iraq. Each highlighted country reveals information on when MOUs began and what archaeological and ethnological material is covered. Play around, interact, and scroll across the map to learn more about what is protected.

To learn more visit our page on bilateral cultural agreements.