Yesterday I saw a phrase I hadn't registered before, the Swingler archive (which caught my attention on Professor Gill's blog Looting Matters), so I asked about Swingler to Dr. Christos Tsirogiannis -- who found the information with a simple search on the Internet -- and this was his answer via email:

'When U.S. Customs agents caught up with David Holland Swingler in the early 1990s, they found that he had 230 Apulian and Etruscan vases stashed in his home in Laguna Hills, Calif. The cache was worth about $300,000. Bondioli-Osio said the vases were illegally shipped to Swingler by his Italian partner and fellow food importer, Licio DiLuzio. 

"Parts of this case are rather comical," said Bondioli-Osio. "It seems that DiLuzio's wife, Sandra Scarabelli, had a [falling-out] with her husband. She told police, '[My] husband kicked me out, but he has a load of antiquities in his cellar.' Swingler was actually advertising the sale of these pieces by slipping brochures on car windshields in his neighborhood." DiLuzio was arrested for violating Italy's 1939 law that forbids the digging up and trafficking of antiquities. His case is still in court. Swingler was not charged by U.S. authorities. In 1996, Italian courts sentenced him in absentia to four years in prison and $6,000 in fines. U.S. customs began returning the artifacts to Italy on June 30 this year.' 

From: http://www.museum-security.org/00/129.html 

Also, p. 15: http://traffickingculture.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/CWC-7.pdf

As noted first on Paul Barford's blog, Portable Antiquity Collecting and Heritage Issues, the three items at Christie's identified last week by Dr. Christos Tsirogiannis as suspected looted objects have been withdrawn from this month's sale in New York City.

"Paul Barford notified me," Dr. Tsirogiannis wrote in an email to the ARCA blog, "I then verified it from Christie's website."

Dr. Tsirogiannis, a forensic archaeologist, identified images in the Christie's sales catalogue that matched images from the Symes-Michaelides and the Swingler archive (Professor David Gill provides more specific information here on his blog Looting Matters).

I asked Dr. Tsiogiannis who contacts the art market when researchers identify objects suspected to have been stolen? This is his response:

By Lynda Albertson

Following the successful identification and the subsequent withdrawal of the Sardinian idol, Dr. Christos Tsirogiannis, a forensic archaeologist and Research Assistant with the Trafficking Culture Project has forwarded ARCA four additional images of antiquities that match photos from the Symes-Michaelides archive.  

Tsirogiannis and Italian heritage professionals have been working diligently for years to make sense of a lengthy catalog photo and forensic documentation, that paint a vivid picture of the complexity of the network of dealers, middlemen, and tombaroli involved in the looting and smuggling of antiquities.

These four identified objects match auction items that are to be included in two December sales events; one held by Christie's New York scheduled for December 11, 2014 and another with Sotheby's New York to be held the following day.

Christies LOT 51: AN EGYPTIAN ALABASTER FIGURAL JUG, estimated at $150,000 -$250,000


 




The object appears in the same condition in the Symes-Michaelides archive. The dealers are not mentioned in the collecting history supplied by the auction house.









Christies LOT 95: AN ATTIC RED-FIGURED COLUMN KRATER, estimated at $60,000 -$90,000

The object is depicted in the same condition in the images that have been confiscated by the American authorities from the antiquities dealer David Swingler, among hundreds of antiquities which were repatriated to Italy after it was found that they were smuggled. Swingler's name is not included in the collecting history supplied by the auction house.

Christies LOT 139: A ROMAN MARBLE COLUMN CAPITAL, estimated at $80,000 - $120,000 

The object appears in the auction catalog with its surface cleaned, unlike its appearance in the Symes-Michaelides archive. The dealers are not mentioned in the collecting history supplied by auction house.






Sotheby's: LOT 6: An Egyptian Diorite Figure of a Priest of the Temple of Mut, late 25th/early 26th Dynasty, circa 670-610 B.C., estimated at $400,000 - 600,000






The object appears in the same condition in the Symes-Michaelides archive.  The dealers are not mentioned in the collecting history supplied by the auction house.








Note: These suspect objects have been brought to the attention of authorities in the United States, Italy and Egypt.

More than  four decades have passed since the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property. Despite greater public awareness of the problems posed by looting, suspect antiquities are still finding their way into auction houses through methods embedded within the licit antiquities trade.  By whitening a tainted object's illicit background through legitimate or contrived collection histories, laundered objects, be they from Italy, Egypt, Iraq or Syria, will continue to find their way into the glassy catalogs of licit objects being sold on the art market.

Unless tighter sanctions are imposed by governments or unless the art market itself voluntarily polices itself better, at the behest of culturally aware collectors or the general public, the problem will continue.  Predatory and subsistence looters will continue to supply the demand for materials needed and by proxy encourage the parasitical relationship between them, the middlemen suppliers and the auction houses.