Almagià, a Princeton-educated antiquities dealer, was born in New York to prominent Jewish Italian immigrant parents.  Once a high-profile dealer, between 1980 and 2006 he conducted lucrative sales to numerous museums and collectors, mingling with fallen-from-grace art-world elites like Marion True, Dietrich von Bothmer, and Michael Padgett.

Almagià first became a person of interest in 1992 during Italian investigations. Facing charges for his own crimes, notorious capozona Pietro Casasanta revealed to interrogators that he had shopped the freshly looted Triade Capitolina to Almagià for his U.S. clients.  Casasanta told Carabinieri officers that he had sent the dealer a Polaroid of the recently excavated sculpture which depicts the tutelary deities of Rome—Jupiter, flanked by an eagle, Juno, and Minerva in a Corinthian helmet—shortly after it was unearthed in Guidonia Montecelio, near Rome. 

Almagià reportedly offered to pay Casasanta a meagre $20,000 for the multi-million-dollar statue, and after a bit of drama between the pair, Casasanta declined on the offer and sold hislooted marble sculpture to the owner of Atelier Amphora, Mario Bruno, another suspect intermediary dealer operating in Lugano, who also had zero compunction about buying suspect art and selling it onward. 

1996

By 1996, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) had seized two dozen Etruscan ceramics from the New York Upper East Side gallery of Renee and Robin Beningson which had ties to Edoardo Almagià.  According to that investigation, all 24 artefacts at New York's Antiquarium Ltd., had been looted from what is now known as the Parco Archeologico di Crustumerium. This site represents an ancient city which once overlooked the Tiber between Eretum and Fidenae north of Rome.   

Later evidence would determine that following the seasonal closure of an authorised excavation at Crustumerium in July 1987,  Almagià had hired tombaroli—professional looters—to pick up where the departing archaeologists had left off. 

The dealer is then alleged to have had the goods, extracted by the looters, smuggled out of Italy, passing first through Switzerland, before ultimately travelling overseas to New York where they came into the control of the Beningsons.

2000

Almagià’s next brush with the law came when he was stopped at John F. Kennedy (JFK) International airport in Queens, New York in 2000 with two stolen Italian frescoes from the ancient city of Vulci that he had falsely declared.  

Six weeks later, one of his commercial shipments was also stopped in Newark, New Jersey.  That shipment contained five stolen Italian antiquities and was again accompanied by false documentation. 

By 2006, Almagià’s high life as a prestigious dealer cracked completely when, in April 2006, Special Agents with the US Department of Homeland Security, with intel assistance from officers with Italy's Carabinieri, obtained the legal authorisation to enter and photograph the contents of the dealer's New York apartment on 169 East 78th Street, as well as his rental storage space at Manhattan Mini-Storage, located at 420 E 62nd Street in New York.  There, officers documented dozens of antiquities and stacks of business records which coldly outlined the extreme excesses of this dealer's trafficking operations.   

Like Giacomo Medici's and Gianfranco Becchina's earlier archives, the "Almagià Archive" recovered in this law enforcement operation includes sales transaction ledgers, written in the dealer's handwriting, referred to by officers as the "Green Book" and the "Yellow Book" encompassing transactions  in 1997 and 1998.

In the "Green Book" Almagià listed, in concrete details, a total of 1,698 artefacts which he had sold out of his New York apartment. To do so, he often grouped artefacts by the tombarolo from whom he had purchased the material (identifying the supplying tombarolo by his nickname or initials).  Some entries listed in these ledgers designated both the price Almagià paid to his source, as well as the price he subsequently sold the artefact for.  On occasion, some entries even list to whom the looted artefact was sold onward to.

For example, one entry for an "Attic red fig. Lekythos w panther" shows that Almagià bought the object for $1,000 from "Mau," whom researchers identified as the tombarolo Mauro Morani).  He then asold the vessel onward to "antiq", the abbreviation for the previously mentioned New York gallery, Antiquarium, operated by Renee and Robin Beningson for $2,000.  

The extant pages of the "Yellow Book" document an additional 84 stolen antiquities or groups of stolen antiquities known to have been trafficked by Almagià  and/or his cousin Peter Cesare Glidewell who operates a gallery space registered in the UK and operating in Spain known as Caylus Fine Art Limited.  The level of detail in both of these ledgers ultimately created a strikingly clear blue print, which, along with seized Day Planners, invoices, and lists, has given authorities a clear map to follow which has proven critical to this complex and lengthy investigation, and to tracing where each of the suspect artefacts handled by Almagià went after he cashed in. 

Through the initial work on this US investigation, seven antiquities were quickly identified as having been looted from Italy.  But while the review was still under way, Almagià used the intervening time to shift more suspect objects and their documentation from his apartment and storage facility into a shipping container which was then placed on a ship bound for Naples.  Afterward, he fled the country.

When the ship was intercepted at the port of Naples on December 14, 2006, Italian authorities recovered 37 paintings and numerous archaeological objects as well as thousands of documents and, the now tell tale Polaroid photographs used by traffickers during this time period.   

Immediately after the 2006 seizure in Naples,  Italian prosecutor Paolo Giorgio Ferri brought charges against the dealer, Princeton University Art Museum’s then-curator Michael Padgett and Mauro Morani a tomb raider and caposquadra who provided Almagià with first dibs on looted antiquities, for knowingly committing crimes against the cultural heritage of Italy.

Acquittal, Seizures, and Restitutions

Unfortunately, Almagià's criminal case in Italy was dismissed in 2012due to the statute of limitations, though the Italian courts upheld the confiscation of all relics previously in his possession.  IN making that ruling the presiding judge stated that his activities contributed to "one of the greatest sacks of Italian cultural heritage based on the sheer amount of stolen goods."

In connection with the U.S. side of the investigation, New York’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit has diligently worked to identify over 2,000 stolen antiquities trafficked by Almagià.  To date they have recovered 221 of them, worth an estimated  $6 million. 

Of these, 150 objects were seized as part of the Michael Steinhardt investigation, with the New York billionaire having purchased a total of ten known and restituted items from the Italian. 

Arrest Warrant

Yesterday, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office obtained an arrest warrant for Edoardo Almagià based upon three charges:

1. Conspiracy in the Fourth Degree under Penal Law § 105.10(1)
2. Scheme to Defraud in the First Degree under Penal Law § 190.65(1)(b)
3. Criminal Possession of Stolen Property in the Third Degree under Penal Law § 165.50

This arrest warrant, totaling 80 pages, details the grave extent of this trafficking network and ultimately the harm he caused to Italy’s cultural heritage. As New York authorities await their day in court with this trafficker, the hope remains that dealers, collectors, and museums, with outstanding pieces purchased via this dealer or their subsequent handlers, will come forward and disclose the remaining pieces which are tied to Almagià.

In celebration of the 50th anniversary of the establishment of the Carabinieri Command for Cultural Heritage on May 3, 1969, the Palazzo del Quirinale will play host to a unique exhibition, "The Art of Saving Art: Fragments of Italian History" from today through July 14, 2019.   

This exhibition serves to highlight the work of the Carabinieri Corps in protecting and restituting works of art, as well as to emphasize the foresight of Italian authorities in their establishment of the world's first cultural heritage crime-fighting unit, one year prior to the establishment of the famous 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transport of Ownership of Cultural Property.  

As the most active cultural heritage law enforcement division in the world, the Carabinieri TPC unit has grown from an initial team of 16 officers to approximately 270 officers today, working in fifteen field offices located in Ancona, Bari, Bologna, Cagliari, Cosenza, Florence, Genoa, Monza, Naples, Palermo, Perugia, Rome, Turin, Udine, Venice, plus a subsection in Siracusa.  Divided into three working units the “Archaeological Section”, the “Antiquities Section”, and the “Contemporary Art and Anti-Counterfeiting Section” each of the triad are tasked with preventing criminal actions involving works of art.  

The exhibit, curated by Francesco Buranelli, is open every Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday from 10:00 until 16:00.  On display are some of the most important and story-worthy recoveries made by the squad during the last half-century including: 

The Madonna of Senigallia, a painting by the Italian Renaissance master Piero della Francesca which was stolen in February 1975 from the Ducal Palace in Urbino when thieves scaled the Palazzo's walls with the help of scaffolding and broke in through a window.   This artwork was later recovered after a year-long multi-country investigation which eventually lead the Carabinieri officers from Urbino to Rome and lastly to a hotel in Locarno, Switzerland.  As a result of their investigation, four individuals from Italy, Germany, and Switzerland were arrested and ultimately charged.

The Euphronios krater - This attic pottery masterpiece was trafficked out of Cerveteri and sold by Giacomo Medici and Robert Hecht Jr. to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for one million dollars in 1972.  Once defined by Thomas Hoving as “one of the ten greatest creations of the Western civilizations.” This  Greek vessel, which dates back to 515 B.C.E, was repatriated to Italy following a landmark agreement in February 2006 between the Italian Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Two years after the agreement was penned, the krater finally came home to Italy on January 15, 2008.

A Fourth-century BC sculptural group of two griffins attacking a fallen doe Pictured at left in a seized Polaroid photograph recovered by law enforcement authorities in a Geneva raid, this photograph depicts the now-disgraced antiquities dealer Giacomo Medici standing alongside this important antiquity.   Plundered from a tomb near Ascoli Satriano, in Foggia, and photographed, freshly plundered, in the boot of a tombarolo's car, the sculpture was purchased by Giacomo Medici.  He in turn sold the griffins on to fellow antiquities dealers known to launder illicit art Robin Symes and Christos Michaelides.  Symes and Michaelides then sold the artwork on to one of their many US clients, Maurice Tempelsman, who eventually negotiated a sale with the John P. Getty Museum.

Le Jardinier by Vincent Van Gogh, stolen on May 19, 1998, from Rome's prestigious Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna during an armed robbery just after the 10 pm closing time. This painting was recovered several months later, on July 5, 1998 at an apartment in the periphery of Rome.   Eight individuals were eventually charged and sentenced for their involvement in the museum's theft.

The Capitoline Triad, pictured at the top of this article, is a group of three deities who were worshipped in ancient Roman religion.  This famous triad was found by a well-known tombarolo from Anguillara Sabazia named Pietro Casasanta who heavily worked, along with a squad of paid subordinates, (paying off locals to keep quiet) in the area of L'Inviolata from 1970 onward.

Through informants, who were involved in the clandestine excavation, it was later determined that the Capitoline Triad was excavated in 1992 by Casasanta and two other accomplices, Moreno De Angelis and Carlo Alberto Chiozzi.  The trio had been digging in a pit near L'Inviolata alongside an ancient Roman wall belonging to either a temple or a patrician villa.  Casasanta then tried to shop the object to Edoardo Almagià, who passed on its purchase.

Casasanta then brokered a deal via the now deceased Lugano dealer Mario Bruno who was to then act as the intermediary dealer to a then-unnamed buyer who would eventually sell the object onward.  The piece was subsequently shipped to Switzerland in an anonymous van transported by two smugglers on Casasanta's payroll, Ermenegildo Foroni and Sergio Rossi.  Prior to that it had been hidden away in a warehouse for a furniture moving company called "Speedy International Transport".

Moreno De Angelis, unhappy with his cut, went to the Carabinieri of Castel di Guido and told the Station Commander about the find which is where Carabinieri Officer Roberto Lai's investigation got its starting point. De Angelis was later stopped near L'Inviolata with fragments in his car, that were matched with the triad. The carabinieri kept these details hidden during their investigation as they were concerned that the intermediaries might try and file down the sections of the triad if they knew there were known matching pieces of the triad which could tie them into the criminal conspiracy.

This video records a series of self-serving interviews given by Casasanta where he actually points out the location of the find spot.


This exhibition includes many other works of art not highlighted in this blog post for the sake of brevity, each with their own fabulous story to tell.  They include works of art stolen from churches, museums, archaeological areas, libraries, and archives.  So if you are in Rome this summer be sure to take some time to stop in.

By:  Lynda Albertson