27 antiquities seized from the Met
Investigators say $13M worth of ancient art had all been looted
NEW YORK — Investigators in New York City have seized 27 ancient artifacts valued at more than $13 million from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, asserting that the objects, acquired to showcase the glories of ancient Rome, Greece and Egypt, had all been looted.
Some of the items passed through the hands of people long suspected to have trafficked antiquities, such as Gianfranco Becchina, who ran a gallery in Switzerland for decades before being investigated for illegal dealings by the Italian government in 2001. But most of the items had entered the Met’s collection long before Becchina was publicly accused of illicit activity.
The items, seized under the terms of three separate search warrants executed during the past six months, will be returned to their countries of origin — 21 to Italy and six to Egypt — in ceremonies scheduled for next week.
The events are part of a push by law enforcement officials to hasten the pace of repatriations that in the past often dragged on for a year or more, the Manhattan district attorney’s office said.
The confiscations also highlight heightened law enforcement efforts against the illegal sale of ancient relics, whose thefts are increasingly being traced to looting gangs and dealers from South Asia to the Mediterranean.
Authorities have warned that many more objects with illicit origins remain in the hands of private collectors and museums.
Eight of the items seized from the Met — by the Manhattan
district attorney’s office working in conjunction with federal officials — were acquired directly from Becchina, the district attorney’s office said.
Becchina has been convicted of receiving stolen antiquities by Greece.
In Italy, after a decadelong investigation, a hoard of 6,300 Greco-roman artifacts was confiscated from him in 2011 when a judge determined the items had been looted dating to the early 1970s.
But the criminal charges there were dismissed on statute-of-limitation grounds.
Although the Met acquired many of the Becchina items long before he was implicated in looting, one expert on antiquities trafficking said that, once Becchina came under suspicion, the Met should have reviewed the provenance of any items purchased from his Galerie Antike Kunst Palladion in Basel, Switzerland.
The Met said in a statement that information on the Italian objects had only recently been made available to the museum by the district attorney’s investigators, that it has been fully cooperative and that its acquisition reviews have become more rigorous in the decades since the items came into its collection.