ali aboutaam,Belgium,Carabinieri Tutela Patrimonio Culturale,giacomo medici,Gianfranco Becchina,Giuseppe Evangelisti,Hicham Aboutaam,Italy,Phoenix Ancient Art,Robert Hecht,Robin Symes
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The Aboutaam Brothers, Phoenix Ancient Art, and the Hidden Routes of Italy’s Lost Antiquities
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| Phoenix Ancient Art - BRAFA 2019 |
Some of the artefacts identified in this operation coincide with business record documentation police obtained during a lengthy group pf investigations into the illicit dealings of ancient art dealers Robert Hecht, Giacomo Medici, Gianfranco Becchina and Robin Symes, as well as a large dossier of material recovered from the prolific tomb raider Giuseppe Evangelisti.
While this blog has dedicated ample articles on the problematic art dealers mentioned above, we have never covered Evangelisti in the past. His involvement in the illicit trade was first identified during Operation Geryon just before Christmas in 2003, when officers overheard a conversation during wire taps which referred to someone nicknamed “Peppino il taglialegna”—Peppino the woodcutter, a name derived from the individual's “day job”, providing firewood to two villages. At night however, Evangelisti moonlighted as a tombarolo, scavenging the hillsides for Attic and bucchero ceramics, bronze statues and various terracotta finds primarily used in funerary contexts.
Luckily for investigators, when they raided Peppino's home near Lake Balsena they found not just the fruit of his recent clandestine labours but a batch of books on a shelf (nine books of agendas and seven albums) which documented the extent of his looting from 1997 to 2002. A virtual goldmine for investigators, the albums contained photographs of every object he had ever looted, even going so far as to record the depth underground of the objects he illegally excavated. In her review of these journals and albums, former Villa Giulia employee Daniela Rizzo stated that in her twenty-six years of experience, Evangelisti was the only person, aside from Giacomino (Medici), who recorded such detailed records of his activities.
Through it all Phoenix Ancient Art, long considered one of the most prominent galleries dealing in classical antiquities, once again finds itself at the center of controversy. While the Aboutaam brothers have not been charged in connection with the Italian-Belgian operation, their business history is inseparable from the problematic story of the antiquities trade.
In January 2023 at the Geneva police court, Ali Aboutaam was sentenced by the Swiss authorities following a complex and multi-year criminal and procedural investigation by officers and analysts with Switzerland's customs and anti-fraud divisions, working with the Geneva Public Prosecutor's Office. The Swiss-based merchant had earlier been found guilty of forgery of titles. In that case the courts also confirmed the seizure of 42 artefacts, confiscated due to their illicit origin.
For Italian authorities, the current case is less about one gallery than about dismantling a system that has long allowed cultural property to vanish from archaeological landscapes and reappear behind glass cases thousands of kilometres away. The artefacts now bound for Rome belong, by law, to the Italian state’s “unavailable assets,” meaning they can neither be privately owned nor sold and their repatriation signals both a practical and symbolic victory for Italy’s Carabinieri TPC, which has spent decades tracking stolen heritage across the world’s galleries, auction houses and art fairs.
The anticipated return of these objects does more than close a legal chapter, it again underscores how the same names, archives, and networks continue to bear fruit in terms of recoveries, even twenty years after the Medici conviction and the scandals that rocked museums in the 1990s and early 2000s. The discovery in Brussels suggests that, despite improved international cooperation, large caches of looted antiquities remain hidden in private storage and corporate collections.
