Stolen Treasures—And the Lucrative Black Market That Spans the Globe
Unearthed in conflict zones like Ukraine, ancient objects vanish into an illicit network of crime syndicates, shady art dealers, and sometimes, the richest museums on earth.
Early in 2022, Russian troops poured into the southern Ukrainian city of Melitopol and raided the local history museum, a modest, neoclassical building on a tree-lined street. Soldiers abducted the museum’s director Leila Ibrahimova and curator Galina Andriivna Kucher at gunpoint. They were looking for the museum’s famed trove of Scythian gold jewelry. But under interrogation, both women refused to reveal where their team had hidden the treasure.
At this point, researcher Samuel Hardy had been monitoring the online chatter on Russian and Ukrainian looters’ message boards for weeks. Just days into the invasion, looters—among them border guards and soldiers—were posting pictures of ancient art they had looted from Ukrainian museums.
While the Russian soldiers‘ pursuit of the Melitopol Scythian gold was part of a targeted, politically motivated attempt to remove objects significant to Ukraine’s national identity from its territory, most looters’ participation in the black market for ancient objects is animated by more prosaic, financial motives.
Trench warfare in eastern Ukraine has meant the surfacing of many antique artifacts, the Ukrainian archaeologist Serhii Telizhenko told me, holding up to a laptop camera a medieval funerary bowl, recently found in a grave blown open by artillery shelling near Luhansk.
Russian and Ukrainian units dig up ancient objects while fortifying their positions, and Telizhenko, who is based in Kyiv, said he has regularly received artifacts sent back by Ukrainian soldiers.
But it’s been impossible for him and his colleagues to tell how many objects vanish, only to show up on online message boards or flea markets in Eastern Ukraine and Russia, where they sell for a few rubles and are forever lost to archaeology. Ukrainian officials struggle to track the objects they do see online, as they cannot access Russian websites, even via VPN.
As Telizhenko’s contacts in Russia and the occupied Donbas regions confirmed, Russian soldiers were supplementing their pay, selling not only looted fridges, electronics and military medals, but also pictures, statuettes, mosaics, coins, vases, gems, and busts taken from archaeological excavation sites and private property.
The goods populating the looters’ message boards were generally small sale, but the field they’ve entered is a lucrative one. Experts believe that, after drugs and weapons, looted art ranks third among the most lucrative black-market fields on earth.
The Network
A high demand for classically antique artifacts has traditionally made the Mediterranean region the center of the looted antiquities market. But wherever in the world conflicts flare up, networks of looters, smugglers and traders soon prosper.
During its reign of terror, the Khmer Rouge financed itself by looting Angkor Wat and selling the artifacts to Western traders. Following the Gulf Wars and especially since 2015, the antiquities market was flooded with Mesopotamian art from Iraq and Syria—mosaics and bas-reliefs from Palmyra, Mosul, Homs.
That latest wave of product is likely yet to crest, as many objects end up in the showrooms of London and New York auction houses only after delays on the order of ten years. And since the artifacts looted in Syria are freshly excavated, they are exceptionally difficult to track. In 2015, when U.S. special forces killed the Islamic State’s finance minister, Abu Sayyaf, at his estate, they confiscated dozens of hard drives and USB sticks containing hundreds of terabytes of data. An analysis provided one of the few reliable figures that exist about the antiquities black market—20 percent: the tax rate the Islamic State levied on art exports.
Syrian and Mesopotamian artifacts were mostly smuggled across the Turkish border to Gaziantep or Lebanon. From there, they were shipped in containers to Italy or Spain—a relatively risk-free operation, as only a tiny percentage of containers ever get opened in customs inspections. Once on the European continent, the looted art quickly disappeared into the warehouses of traders and middlemen, where provenance often gets falsified.
Buyers—museums and collectors, for example—generally avoid legal liability by purchasing the objects “in good faith,” a requirement satisfied with a superficial scan of an international art loss register, or even by their trust in the dealer.
Hardy, a cultural property criminologist at Rey Juan Carlos University and the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research, has for years investigated the illegal trade in looted ancient art from conflict zones like Cyprus and Kosovo. It’s a relatively novel line of work. The illegal antiquities trade might be—as a colleague of Hardy’s once put it— “the second oldest profession in the world,“ but the black market has only in the past three decades faced serious public scrutiny.
It started with a traffic accident in 1995. Pasquale Camera, one of Italy’s most prominent antiquities smugglers, had eaten a big lunch ahead of his drive from Naples to Rome. A large man, Camera had fallen asleep at the wheel of his car and crashed to his death off a mountainous road near Monte Cassino north of Naples. He hadn’t worn his seat belt; it didn’t fit around his waist. In the glove compartment, Italian law enforcement, which had for months been tapping Camera’s car and phones, found photographs of looted antiquities.
These photographs led them to his apartment. As Camera’s bereaved mother stood by, the police cased the place, and found the so-called “organigram“—a hand-written spreadsheet naming Camera’s major accomplices: a network of smugglers, traders, collectors and often-celebrated museum curators, spanning the globe.
Athens
Christos Tsirogiannis, a forensic archaeologist, became involved with the ensuing, sprawling legal case more than ten years later. Tall, with streaks of gray tinging his brown beard, he spoke with me from his office in Aarhus, Denmark last June, remembering the eve of the opening ceremony of the Athens Summer Olympics on August 12, 2004.
Ventilation fans sifted hot air through a government office in the back of the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, which at that time had been embroiled in a dispute with the British Museum over a loan of the Elgin Marbles to celebrate the Games. Part of the original Parthenon, the marbles were taken from the Acropolis in 1801—even some contemporaries called it “theft“—and had been displayed in London since 1816. The British Museum had refused to loan them back for the duration of the Olympic Games, to the chagrin of many Greek archaeologists, and politicians.
Tsirogiannis was one of the few employees still in the office at this hour and half out the door, when the phone rang. An officer from the Greek police’s so-called Art Squad was calling. The police were looking for an archaeological expert for an assignment that same evening. They had had trouble finding someone willing to accompany them. No ministry employees had come forward for the voluntary and unpaid assignment.
Tsirogiannis was intrigued however, and a few hours later, he watched from the back of a squad car as officers surrounded a Greek orthodox monastery in Megara, northwest of Athens, and escorted the handcuffed abbot off the compound. The head of the Art Squad gave Tsirogiannis a tour: Storage rooms full of ancient Roman amphorae, figurines, pottery, oil lamps and elaborately painted drinking bowls. These artifacts had been taken from the graves of Roman patricians and looted all over Greece. Tsirogiannis was stunned.
The officers of the Art Squad pieced together what had probably happened: During building work on the monastery grounds a few years ago, construction workers had come across the remains of an ancient Roman cemetery in the excavation pit. The monks broke into the graves, looted the contents, and displayed them in the newly built premises of the monastery. The abbot, who had caught collector’s fever, had then sent out his monks all over Greece looking for more ancient artifacts for the collection. Shortly thereafter, two of the monks were caught by police trying to break an ancient fresco from a Byzantine chapel ruin on Lesbos and were arrested. They testified that they were from the Megara monastery, alerting the Art Squad to the collection.
The Art Squad of the Greek police at that time consisted of about 18 officers. They pursued tomb robbers, smugglers, dealers, and buyers of looted art in Greece and abroad, with the goal of bringing stolen and illegally trafficked artifacts back into state possession. Despite the chronically understaffed team’s efforts—many officers had to double as security details of Greek politicians—a consistent flow of artifacts left the world’s foremost origin country of antique art every day, a tide that was almost impossible to stem.
The Greek Art Squad went quietly about its business (unlike their Italian counterparts, who, once they had managed to bring an object back home, would often pose at festive press conferences in their parade uniforms, with the artifacts neatly laid out on a velvet cloth).
Back at the monastery, the police loaded the ancient objects into vans and transported them back to Athens. Tsirogiannis rode with the head of the squad, whose cell phone rang the whole way home: local officials calling to demand the abbot’s release.
The monks were under the protection of the Orthodox Church. Strangely though, the head of the Art Squad didn’t relent. “The officers of the Art Squad were incorruptible,” Tsirogiannis said. ”At that moment, I decided to work with them.“
Until 11 p.m., the officers and Tsirogiannis remained at the station, filling out the paperwork for the antique objects before they were transferred to the Ministry of Culture. An officer pulled out from his desk drawer a bottle of whiskey. The team toasted the mission, as cigarette smoke collected against the ceiling.
For the next four and a half years, Tsirogiannis worked every day from 7:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. at the Ministry of Culture, before heading to the Art Squad office. There he labored into night time identifying looted art and preparing to testify as an expert witness at trials, a role few archaeologists dared take on given the threat of retaliations by the criminal groups that profit from the smuggling trade.
During his time with the Art Squad, Tsirogiannis handled 140 cases. One of these would help expose a global network of profiteering—and involve the then world’s richest museum, and its curator.
Marion True
The cottage stood on the coast of the Cyclades island of Paros, looking out at the bay. Cypresses blew gently in the wind, and small white sugar cube houses pocked the barren landscape.
Marion True, longtime chief curator of the Getty Museum’s collection of antiquities, couldn’t resist. The previous occupant, a Swedish actress known from Ingmar Bergman films, was willing to sell the house. But the $400,000 purchase price outstripped the curator’s modest salary, even though by this summer of 1994, True had for nearly a decade been one of the leading antiquities curators in the U.S.
Jiri Frel, her scandal-plagued predecessor, had brought True to the Getty in 1982. When oil tycoon and art collector Jean Paul Getty had died a few years earlier, he bequeathed much of his fortune to his charitable foundation. The jewel of this fortune was the museum at his Pacific Palisades mansion.
Derided in the U.S. as kitsch, modeled after the Italian Villa dei Papiri preserved in Vesuvian ashes, the Getty Museum had initially enjoyed the dubious reputation of a private collection lacking not in financial resources but in taste and curatorial expertise.
As chief curator, Frel had grown frustrated at the Getty Foundation’s inflexible structures—the board had to approve every new exhibit acquisition—and had set out to forge a new reputation for the institution. He developed a network of wealthy donors, who would buy artifacts from friendly dealers and donate them to the Getty collection.
The benefits for these donors went beyond mere prestige, however. Through restoration and display at the mansion, a pile of broken pieces that a donor had bought for a few thousand dollars became an antique vase whose value—at least on the donor’s tax return—could run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
As the journalists Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino would go on to report in their book Chasing Aphrodite, Frel’s friends and acquaintances acted as “experts,” and inflated the value estimates of these objects. Frel, they reported, had secretaries falsify invoices and provenance papers, and his wife allegedly smuggled artifacts through U.S. customs in her purse.
The reporters also found that the Getty foundation CEO and the museum director had ignored the warnings of their antiquities chief Arthur Houghton, who resigned in protest. When the IRS launched an investigation into the Getty, Frel quickly left for a sabbatical in Paris, and museum management appointed True, who had worked under Frel for four years, to be his successor.
A small woman with big, probing blue eyes and a puffed-up hairdo, True had studied classical archaeology, but preferred the air-conditioned museum world to the sweat and grime of excavation sites. She was known for her eye for detail—and a dissolute lifestyle she couldn‘t personally afford. Her tenure at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston established her among a network of wealthy East Coast collectors; she moved freely among this upper crust, without ever actually having the means to do so.
Under Frel, the museum had for a combined $14 million acquired its two most spectacular exhibits—both of dubious origin. The first was the so-called Getty bronze, a sculpture of a victorious athlete pulled from the Adriatic Sea by Italian fishermen in 1964. The exact location and thus the question of whether the bronze belonged to the Italian state had been argued in an Italian court case for years.
The other was the Getty kouros, an archaic sculpture whose authenticity had been repeatedly questioned by experts. The sign at the base of the statue said “Greek, ca. 530 B.C. or modern fake.“
Such was the institutional sensibility when True took over the Getty antiquities collection. But she belonged to a new generation of curators. At conferences of the Council of American Museums, she vigorously called to reform the ethical guidelines for acquiring ancient art. At the time the U.S., out of fear it would hamper its museums‘ ability to acquire objects of international importance, was yet to sign even the legally non-binding UNESCO Declaration to Stop Illicit Trafficking in Cultural Property, which treated antiquities exported from their country of origin after 1970 without state approval as contraband. Assailing the “don’t ask, don’t tell“ attitude of many museums, True appealed to colleagues to put provenance research at the forefront of their acquisition policies.
Her calls for reform grated on many museum directors, such as Philippe de Montebello, of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and an ardent critic of True’s proposals. But despite her supposed idealism, True couldn’t defy the laws of the museum market. She urgently needed to present a significant exhibit, lest the Getty fall behind the Met in the race for significance.
In 1987, a few years before her visit to Paros, the British art dealer Robin Symes had called True. He invited her to view a Sicilian cult statue of a Venus in his London showroom. Over two meters high, shaped from white marble, it was a magnificent piece. Its price? $20 million, which would rank it among the most expensive works of ancient art ever put on the market.
Several visible fractures ran through the white stone, however. Tools used by looters had obviously damaged the statue. Still, according to Felch and Frammolino, True overlooked the marks, and said she was interested.
Back in California, another red flag emerged: It was a phone call from an antiquities dealer to the former Met director Thomas Hoving, claiming that years ago an infamous Sicilian smuggler had offered the statue to him. Hoving in turn called the Getty board.
Scrambling to clear up the piece’s provenance and satisfy the Italian state’s demands for documentation prior to a sale, True contacted the British archaeologist Malcolm Bell, who was leading excavations in Morgantina, the Venus’s supposed origin.
Bell investigated and heard that in 1978, as he had been on home leave, rumors of illegal excavations at a temple site had made the rounds and grave robbers had left behind a large pedestal, on which Bell suspected a large statue of a goddess would have stood. But since he and his Italian colleagues were unable to unequivocally prove that the “Venus” originated from Morgantina, the Getty was able to legally acquire the statue. After the renovation of the Getty mansion, the statue was to welcome visitors directly in front of the elevators.
Despite the controversial purchase, True revised the Getty’s acquisition’s guidelines, forcing suppliers to provide an extensive paper trail testifying to the provenance of each object, pushing the policy through against the board’s opposition and making the Getty’s set of guidelines arguably the strictest in the U.S.
Meanwhile, she leveraged her influence in the New York art scene to expand the museum’s collection. The collector couple Lawrence and Barbara Fleischman, close friends of True, had fallen out with the Met and its director de Montebello. True proposed to honor them with an exhibition of their massive private collection, at the Getty’s expense. The Fleischmans accepted—a coup for True.
No sooner had the couple seen their collection in the rooms of the villa than True was able to convince them to sell it outright to the Getty. The museum bought the objects, which had impeccable provenance, for over $30 million. The collectors donated the rest.
As for the vacation home, True faced some challenges. No Greek bank would lend True the money for the purchase and no American bank would loan her the funds for a home outside the U.S. Finally Christo Michaelides, a scion of a Greek shipping dynasty, whose family estate was two islands away, referred her to an accountant who channeled True’s loan via a Panamanian shell company, as True confirmed to The New Yorker in 2007.
But True needed an American loan to repay the Greek one. Just days after the Getty bought the Fleischmans’ collection, Larry Fleischman gave True the required cash. Whether True ever paid back a single installment remains unclear. Not even the lawsuit, at the center of which True found herself a few years later, would determine that.
Tsirogiannis entered True’s vacation home on Paros more than a decade later, in the spring of 2006. He found parts of ancient architecture embedded in the walls and floors, and tried to avoid stepping on them as he escorted the Art Squad police officers through the rooms. Law enforcement confiscated 33 antique objects that day, Tsirogiannis remembers, 17 of which were later deemed of dubious origin. True claimed most were already in the house when she bought it.
In True’s study, the police found a notebook with addresses and telephone numbers—including contacts of U.S. art dealer Robert Hecht, Christo Michaelides and Robin Symes, who was at the center of the sprawling investigation that had led Greek police to True’s home.
Christo Michaelides, who had helped True acquire the initial loan for her home, had suffered a fatal accident in 1999, when he fell down a flight of stairs on holiday in an Italian villa. He and Symes had been running a gallery and living together at a shared residence in London. For years they’d claimed to be merely good friends, and denied any romantic relationship. But when Michaelides’s family tried to claim his half of the gallery in inheritance, Symes changed his story, presenting himself as Michaelides’s boyfriend and next of kin.
As journalists Peter Watson and Cecilia Todeschini document in The Medici Conspiracy, Michaelides’s family sued and, after years of litigation, Symes had to disclose his financial books. Law enforcement found evidence that Symes hid significant personal holdings in warehouses in Geneva, near those of the Italian art dealer Giacomo Medici, a regular business partner of his and Robert Hecht’s.
Medici
The name of Medici, an eccentric dealer with a taste for expensive leather jackets and fast cars, had been among those on the “organigram“ found in the apartment of the antique smuggler, Camera, following his car crash death north of Naples.
Medici had sold many objects to Symes. He also sold to Hecht, who had frequently done business with True and the Getty via his New York gallery, Atlantis Antiquities, The New Yorker reported.
After years of negotiations between the Italian and the Swiss governments, police descended on Medici‘s Geneva warehouses. They found hundreds of priceless looted objects. They also found a Polaroid archive, in which Medici had documented the finding, restoration, and sale of all his objects.
The journalist Peter Watson obtained documents from a disgruntled Sotheby’s employee, showing that Medici “laundered” his objects by selling them to a shell company he himself founded—before putting them up for sale at Sotheby’s, sometimes buying them back at inflated prices just to hike up their value.
This “false provenance” made sales of these objects appear legal. But the Polaroid collection revealed Medici’s duplicity. One picture, for example, showed an elaborate sculpture of two griffins attacking a doe, smeared with dirt and soil in the trunk of a car. Medici claimed the sculpture had been in a private collection since before 1970—the judicial cut-off in the UNESCO declaration. But the Polaroid film on which the image was taken had only been around since 1972.
Among the objects thus identified as looted art, were the Euphronios krater, a spectacular piece sold to the Metropolitan Museum in 1972 for the then-record price of $1 million. The list also included several pieces in the Getty collection, which had been sold via Hecht’s New York and Symes’s London galleries. Among these was the Morgantina Venus.
Medici had also kept copies of his correspondence with Symes and Hecht, and with True, which confirmed the Italian prosecutor’s suspicion that Hecht had operated as a front for Medici.
True may have known of the connection between Medici and Hecht. In some cases, Hecht had offered objects to the Getty, sent them to L.A. for inspection only to have them subsequently turned down. As Watson’s The Medici Conspiracy documents, the objects were returned not to Hecht, but directly to Medici.
Hecht died in 2012, Medici did not respond to a request for comment, and efforts to reach True for comment were unsuccessful.
After the Geneva warehouse raids, the Italian and Greek governments quickly demanded the immediate return of the artifacts in the Getty which could be traced back to Medici, including the Morgantina Venus that welcomed visitors to the newly renovated California museum. Officials in both countries charged Marion True and Robert Hecht with receiving stolen antiquities and conspiring to trade in them.
The Italian prosector negotiated with the Getty Museum for more than two years. During this time, True resigned as curator and left the U.S. for Paris, while the Getty Foundation continued to pay her legal fees, according to the reporters Felch and Frammolino, who now run a blog that reports on the field of forensic archaeology.
After several appeals Medici was sentenced to 10 years in prison, and ordered to pay €10 million in compensation to the state. Symes spent three months in prison, connected to his legal battle with Michaelides‘s family.
The Greek cases against True and Hecht, which Tsirogiannis helped prepare, drew on for years before officials dropped them, and in 2010, the statute of limitations expired on the Italian case against True without a conviction. The publicity-shy True afterwards presented herself as a scapegoat sacrificed by the American antiquities community. (The Italian prosecutor, Paolo Ferri, echoed this sentiment.) The Getty returned the bronze, the Kouros and the Morgantina Venus, plus more than 70 objects from the collection to Italy.
Dirty Market
Tsirogiannis was four years old when, in 1977, his parents showed him the first black and white photographs of the interior of the newly discovered tomb of Philip II of Macedon, the father of Alexander the Great.
From then on, he knew he wanted to be an archaeologist. “I want to do right by our ancestors,” he said. “These tomb robbers disturb their peace. And everyone buying the loot is complicit in the destruction of our cultural heritage.“ Tsirogianns thinks the people complicit in the illegal trade need to end up in prison to deter similar bad actors. “If you don’t punish the perpetrators, the trade doesn’t stop. But if you do, the objects come home anyway. It’s not either or.”
Art dealers like Hecht, who was indicted in 2005 but never convicted, often distinguish between a “black market” full of illicit art and a white, clean market. Tsirogiannis shook his head. “Dealers buy with a dirty hand and sell with a clean one,” he said. “There is only one market. And it’s not even gray. It’s black, because it’s run by the same people.“
The illicit antiquities trade can appear victimless at the individual level. Discussions tend to center less on links to terrorist regimes or criminal organizations than on the moral imperatives for museums to return objects looted during colonial rule. But rooting out criminal networks like the one surrounding Medici, Hecht, Symes and True, is imperative in fighting the illicit removal of significant antiquities from their countries of origin.
The Russian attack on Ukraine’s archaeological museums—in a war where stories around cultural heritage serve as the pretext for politically motivated violence—shows the power historical artifacts can have in shaping a cultural identity. And antiquities aren’t the only expressions of cultural heritage under attack. Reporters have chronicled the destruction of paintings by Ukrainian folk artist Maria Prymachenko, and the confiscation and transport of entire art collections from the Donbas region to Russia. “Maybe culture is the enemy for them,“ the former Melitopol museum director Ibrahimova, told The New York Times. ”They said that Ukraine has no state, no history. They just want to destroy our country. I hope they will not succeed.”
The Scythes, who once possessed the gold sought by Russian soldiers invading Melitopol, were a nomadic people, populating the regions north of the Black Sea from the 7th to 4th century BC. Like the Roman Empire to Italy or the Celtics to France, the group animates a modern-day sense of national pride and historical identity for Ukrainians—a connection to the land.
In a conflict in which Russia is trying to undermine the Ukrainian state’s right to exist, erasing or assimilating evidence of this cultural heritage is of primary importance. After the invasion, Russian authorities swiftly installed Evgeny Gorlachev as new the Melitopol museum director, who announced, that the Scythian gold was of “great cultural value to the entire former Soviet Union.“
Ibrahimova, the Melitopol museum director, was released shortly after her interrogation; Russian troops had discovered the Scythian gold. The whereabouts and fate of Kucher, who was abducted a second time afterwards, remain, at least to the public, unknown. ▩