New York and federal authorities handed
back 12 looted antiquities valued at $9 million to Lebanon on Thursday, including
three objects removed from the Metropolitan Museum of Art last year during a
flurry of multimillion-dollar
seizures there.
اضافة اعلان
Taken from the museum were twin marble
statuettes of Greek mythological figures Castor and Pollux, valued at $800,000,
and a bronze sculpture on loan to the Met from
Shelby White, an art patron and museum trustee, which depicts a nude male worshipper and is valued by
authorities at $1.2 million.
The three items were seized as part of an
investigation by the Manhattan district attorney’s office into several
international smuggling rings. The investigation last year led to the seizure
of an additional 27 ancient artifacts valued at $13 million from the Met. The
seizure of the three Met items returned Thursday had not been previously
disclosed by investigators.
In a statement, museum officials said:
“Each of these objects has unique and complex circumstances, and with all, The
Metropolitan Museum of Art has been fully supportive of the Manhattan district
attorney’s office investigations.”
The other nine items repatriated during a
ceremony in New York on Thursday were mosaics from the third through fifth
centuries, when Rome ruled the Mediterranean region that includes what is now
known as Lebanon. Investigators valued the mosaics at $7 million.
The mosaics, which depict gods, gladiators
and mythical beasts, were seized along with 15 other objects in 2021 from a New
Jersey storage unit by officials from U.S. Homeland Security Investigations and
the district attorney’s office. The unit was rented by
Georges Lotfi, 82, a
retired Lebanese-born pharmaceutical executive and sometime New York resident
who collected and dealt in art.
At the time, law enforcement officials said
Lotfi had helped them by occasionally providing information that aided
antiquities smuggling investigations over the years. For example, they said,
his information helped identify the network that stole an important Egyptian
relic, “
Nedjemankh and His Gilded Coffin,” which the Met had acquired for $4
million in 2017 but was
forced to send back to Egypt in 2019.
But by 2022, investigators said, their
relations with Lotfi had soured. They said he refused to give up ownership of
the items taken from his storage unit, insisting he had acquired and imported
them legally. In response, prosecutors in August 2022 issued an arrest warrant
charging Lotfi, who was living in Lebanon, with 24 counts of criminal
possession of stolen property.
Mr. Lotfi, in interviews and
social media postings, has ardently proclaimed his innocence. “I was fighting with them for
10 years to stop illicit trading, and they turned against me,” he told The New
York Times last year.
In the warrant, prosecutors from the
district attorney’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit said Lotfi had overstepped
when he expressly invited them in 2021 to inspect the storage unit in Jersey
City. Investigators said they suspected Lotfi was showing them the contents as
a ruse to get them to grant the objects a stamp of approval.
Investigators grew suspicious, however,
when they saw that many of Lotfi’s warehoused items were encrusted with dirt —
a sign, they said, that the objects had been illegally dug up. They added that
Lotfi had no export licenses.
Matthew Bogdanos, chief of the trafficking
unit, said Thursday that Lotfi is in Tripoli, Lebanon, and is being monitored
by Lebanese authorities. He said Lotfi’s passport was confiscated after
Interpol put out a fugitive alert, known as a
Red Notice, for his arrest in
May.
In an online posting last year, Lotfi said
all his items “were bought from licensed traders” and legally imported. He
described himself as a longtime collector who has rescued objects that might
otherwise have been destroyed during his country’s civil war.
At Thursday’s ceremony, officials painted a
different picture.
“These pieces sat in apartments, storage
units and museums when they should have been in Lebanon,” Manhattan District
Attorney Alvin Bragg said.
Lebanon’s consul general in New York, Abir
Taha Audi, said in an interview that the theft of cultural objects such as the
mosaics had been “a plague” on her nation since its
civil war years, from
1975-90.
“When you steal a nation’s cultural
heritage, you are stealing its memory, its history and its identity,” she said.
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