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.

Beautiful, as well as extremely rare, the journey of their recovery began in January 2012, when rumours began to circulate regarding the extraordinary discovery of two bronze statues representing pubescent male atheletes.  The sore spot being, the finders of the bronzes apparently had no intention of turning the ancient artefacts over to Spain's cultural authorities, as is required by law.  Instead, their handlers  were shopping the statues around, looking for potential buyers, preferably someone with deep pockets. 

Over the following months, officers in Spain assigned to the Jaén Provincial Judicial Police Brigade, the Policía Nacional, and the Guardia Civil, worked to trace the statues' handlers.  In an operation investigators code named Operación Bronce, law enforcement agents sifted through dead ends and leads, and were eventually able to trace the handler's occupation to that of a transporter.  That in turn lead to finding where he lived in the country.

Through tapped phones detectives were next able to identify and geolocate several other Spanish intermediaries, men who resided in Jaén and Lora del Rio, who spoke with the possessors and who had the contacts necessary to fence material farther up the ancient art supply chain.  Officers learned of a plot to sell the statues for €3million a piece, to an Italian buyer who was believed to have the money, the means, and the black market network necessary to launder illicit antiquities, both big and small, through upscale channels within the lucrative ancient art market.  

When the Italian began preparing to come to Spain, the police knew they needed to act quickly.  When enough evidence of a crime had been established, agents made a requests to the ruling judge to search three properties, two, a home in Cordoba and a home in Pedro Abad for evidence, and a third, where they suspected the bronze statues were likely stored.  

On March 21, 2012 agents from the Specialised and Violent Crime Unit ( UDEV ) of the Jaén Provincial Judicial Police Brigade conducted  a strategically arranged raid on a property located on the El Palancar farm, located in the municipality of Pedro Abad (Córdoba).  There, the Apollonian and the Dionysian ephebes were located, stored in a bodega, carelessly wrapped, like Egyptian mummies in simple white paper.  

But the two ancient boys had seen much better days.  Unwrapped by police, the ephebe were a torturous mess of mangled and missing body parts.  One had his head and genitals lopped off, and both had violently suffered amputated arms and broken hands.  Like victims of some terrible accident, in addition to the decapitation, when spread out on the ground, officers could see a gaping gash on one of the statue's legs and a deep and penetrating wound to one of the boy's abdomen.  

But even in their wreaked and plundered state, still caked in soil and encrustations, it was easy to see that the bronzes were important, depicting beautiful sculpted nudes which reflected idealised body proportions and athleticism.  Based on their decorative characteristics and postures, the bronzes appeared to be "silent servants," or what Homer and Lucretius called golden boys, decorative statues designed by their creators to be a representation of an actual servant, whose primary purpose was to carry lamps or trays on their outstretched arms.  Symbolic as well as decorative, statues such as these have been found in triclinium, the banquet rooms of important Roman villas.  

Functional as well as beautiful, these types of bronzes are thought to have provided ancient diners with fanciful attendants who tended to their needs, but who never tired.  For Spain, the recovered pair have incalculable historical, archaeological and artistic value.  Aside from these two, there is only one other known ephebe recorded as having been found in Spain.  All three originate in Andalusia in the southernmost tip of the country.  And all three come from sites located within a radius of about 100 kilometres" from one another (he third being found in Antequera).  Each ephebe comes from archaeological sites which dot the Roman Bética route in ancient Hispania. 

How rare is rare?

In total, the number of bronze statues representing ephebe which have survived through history, can be counted on less than ten fingers. To understand their rarity, it's enough to consider were some of the other bronze "servants" are housed.  The Apollo of Lillebonne is located in the Musée du Louvre, while the Young Man of Magdalensberg resides in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna and the Statue of an ephebe from the Bay of Marathon is at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens.  

The Idolino is on display at the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Firenze and farther south in Italy, another bronze of this type was recovered during excavations at the House of the Citharist in Pompeii.  That one became part of the collection of the Museo Nazionale Archeologico in Naples and seventy-five years after his discovery, in 1925, Amedeo Maiuri excavated another, less than two blocks away on the Via dell’Abbondanza.

But what happened to the would-be smugglers?

On 19 September 2018 at the Juzgado de Primera Instancia nº 1, the Court of First Instance, in Córdoba, the defence and the prosecution reached an agreement resulting in the two brothers from Pedro Abad first charged with the alleged commission of an attempted smuggling, pleading guilty to the misappropriation of historical heritage assets.  The pair received a a lighter prison sentence of six months, instead of the potential two years and two months requested earlier by the prosecutors, had their case gone to trial.  By pleading out to the lessor charge, the pair also avoided potentially high fines, in the millions. 

And the statues?

After their recovery, the Apolíneo and Dionisíaco ephebes were carefully studied. Archaeologists determined that the Roman bronze sculptures were ascribable to the High Imperial era (1st-2nd century CE), and were copies of Greek originals from the 5th century BC or works inspired by these.  In May 2019 the ephebes were each approved to register in the General Catalog of Andalusian Historical Heritage (CGPHA) as an Asset of Cultural Interest (BIC), declared BIC by the Governing Council.  Humorously, they are listed in the category of Furniture. 

Following information obtained from the investigation, it was determined that the statues were found together, which is unique in and of itself, near a bend in the Guadalquivir river (the ancient Baetis).  There they would have been part of the decoration of a Roman villa located near the ancient Roman city of Sacili Martialium, identified within the zone of Alcurrucén near the Via Augusta in the municipality of Pedro Abad. 

Due to their extensive damage, the Ephebes of Pedro Abad underwent two and a half years of delicate and lengthy conservation at the Andalusian Institute of Historical Heritage (IAPH) to ensure their formal integrity.  

Gammographic studies were carried out which provided information about the condition of the statues allowing conservators to understand and observe key aspects that are not visible in direct observation, without the need to manipulate or take samples. This played an important role in pre-intervention studies as it made it  possible to detect cracks, fissures, welds, and reinforcement plates.  Afterwards, the bronzes were fitted with internal structures and the bases needed to allow them to be displayed as they were always meant to be seen, vertically. 

Given the amount of work involved ARCA would like to congratulate everyone who have made this reality possible: from the detectives, to the conservators, to the archaeologists, to the curators, and the careful transporters.  Without them, these pieces might never have been returned to the people of Spain.  

The Ephebes of Pedro Abad will remain on exhibition at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía through March 4, 2024 within the framework of the official program of the Picasso Celebration 1973-2023.   Go see them for yourself if you get the chance.