British dealer held over Sicily’s missing £30m art treasures
A BRITISH art dealer has been arrested after police swooped on an international ring of traffickers alleged to have smuggled thousands of stolen Sicilian archaeological treasures worth more than £30million to collectors and auction houses across Europe.
Metropolitan Police officers acting on a European arrest warrant issued by Italian magistrates yesterday arrested Thomas William Veres, 64, an art dealer, in London, a Carabinieri paramilitary police spokesman told a news conference.
Twenty Italians have also been arrested, as has one person in Spain and another in Germany, after police identified artefacts looted from Greek and Roman archaeological sites in Sicily.
Investigators, who began probing the ring four years ago, said a gang had “systematically looted Sicily’s rich archaeological heritage”, with police recovering more than 25,000 items including ancient coins, statues and pottery.
For decades, it is alleged, a gang plundered archaeological sites in the provinces of Caltanissetta and Agrigento, where the ancient Greek Valley of the Temples is located, before selling the booty via auction houses in Germany.
Europol said that key facilitators in the trafficking ring were “also acting from Barcelona and London, coordinating the supply chain and providing technical support”.
The investigation, code-named “Operation Demetra”, was continuing with a probe of two notable auction houses in Munich, Major Luigi Mancuso said.
Up to 250 officers have already been involved in the search from the Carabinieri, which leads Italy’s efforts to defend its national art treasures and has a special Command for the Protection of Cultural Heritage in Rome.
During searches carried out across Europe yesterday, officers seized metal detectors among 1,500 tools allegedly used by smuggling gangs.
Last night, a Met Police spokesman told The Daily Telegraph that officers from the Arts and Antiques Unit, in conjunction with the officers from the Extradition Unit, Operation Nexus and Italian police, executed a warrant in Stanmore yesterday.
“A 64-year-old man was arrested on a European Arrest Warrant and taken to a north London police station. A large quantity of antiquities and coins were seized,” he added.
The Sicilian smuggling operation is alleged to have been masterminded by Francesco Lucerna, 76, another of those arrested yesterday.
Mr Lucerna regularly dispatched stolen archaeological remains to northern Italy through a network of couriers where they allegedly made contact with Mr Veres’s gang, investigators believe.
The gang also set up workshops where teams of counterfeiters copied some of the archaeological remains and sold replica copies as originals, it is alleged. Much of the loot was smuggled to Germany. It had been “cleaned up” and put on the legitimate art market through the auction houses in Munich, police told reporters. Among the suspects held was a 61-year-old Italian arrested in the German town of Ehingen. Police found €30,000 (£26,000) in cash in his apartment, according to German press reports.
The arrests bring to a close an investigation that began in 2014 when police discovered an illegal archaeological dig in the town of Riesi, in the Sicilian province of Caltanissetta.
Spanish Guardia Civil agents arrested Andrea Palma, 36, an Italian alleged accomplice in Barcelona, and German police from Baden-württemberg arrested another alleged gang member in Ehingen, Germany, who was identified as another Italian, Rocco Mondello, aged 61.