On Monday, January 23, 2023, at 1 pm in Rome, a formal ceremony will be held regarding the return to Italy, from the United States, of 58 antiquities valued at nearly $19 million.  This event will be held at the Ministry of Culture's Sala Spadolini inside the Consiglio Nazionale al Collegio Romano.

The objects returned are the direct result of investigations in the United States regarding international traffickers of antiquities conducted by the Antiquities Trafficking Unit at the District Attorney's Office in New York in Manhattan, in collaboration with the Comando Carabinieri Tutela Patrimonio Culturale (TPC).  

Present for the event will be the Italy's Minister of Culture, Gennaro Sangiuliano,  the Deputy Prosecutor of the Republic at the Court of Rome, Angelantonio Racanelli; the Commander of the Carabinieri TPC, General B. Vincenzo Molinese; and New York Assistant District Attorney Col. Matthew Bogdanos. 

This event will be direct streamed via the YouTube channel of Italy's Ministry of Culture for those who wish to attend the ceremony digitally. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-RcYKNBHtk&ab_channel=MiC_Italia

Marble head of Athena, ca. 200 BCE

In discussing these returns in a press release issued by the New York County District Attorney's Office, the New York authorities stated that these artefacts had been trafficked by Giacomo Medici, Giovanni Franco Becchina, Pasquale Camera and Edoardo Almagiá.  Twenty one of the pieces had been seized from the Metropolitan Museum of Art while the other thirty-seven were recovered from a New York collector and an antiquities dealer.

When speaking of these objects homecoming to Italy, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin L. Bragg, Jr., was quoted as saying:

“These 58 pieces represent thousands of years of rich history, yet traffickers throughout Italy utilised looters to steal these items and to line their own pockets. For far too long, they have sat in museums, homes, and galleries that had no rightful claim to their ownership.”  

Discussing the recent Italian restitutions Bragg also addressed the difficulty and time needed to work these complicated cultural property crime cases stating:

“Exposing these schemes takes years of diligent and difficult investigative work, and I applaud our team of prosecutors and analysts, who in coordination with our law enforcement partners, are continuing to make unparalleled progress in returning stolen antiquities.”  

Assistant US District Attorney Col. Matthew Bogdanos, who heads up the Manhattan Office's Antiquities Trafficking Unit, and who will be present at Monday's ceremony, has often related his department's work to an axiom of jurisprudence “that justice should not only be done, but should manifestly and undoubtedly be seen to be done.” R v. Sussex Justices, ex parte McCarthy, 1 KB 256, 259 (1924).  Something this publicly streamable restitution will undoubtedly demonstrate.  

Each of these objects should be viewed as a reminder to collectors, dealers, and art institutions, that the US authorities treat stolen cultural property seriously and public prosecutors continue to pursue the rightful return of plundered goods.

Police standing watch outside Messino Denaro's residence in Campobello di Mazara

Following the arrest of fugitive mafia super boss Matteo Messina Denaro, there are some interesting avenues worth exploring regarding the diversification of mafia holdings. One of which may, or may not, strike close to home with regards to the  economic activities of 83-year-old former antiquities dealer Gianfranco Becchina in his later years.  Messina Denaro was captured yesterday after 30 years on the run.

Back in May 2022 Italy's Direzione Investigativa Antimafia, the country's anti-mafia investigation division, issued a confirmation confiscation decree on Gianfranco Becchina's property holdings, based upon a request from the Public Prosecutor's Office of Palermo.  As per that decree, the DIA's action finalised the confiscation of a significant portion of Becchina's movable, real estate and corporate assets "attributable to a well-known international trader of works of art art and artefacts of historical-archaeological value suspected of links with the mafia gangs, in particular in the province of Trapani." While the DIA's final seizure announcement didn't name Becchina as the businessman living in Castelvetrano, whose assets were seized, the regional and National newspapers did.   

But back to yesterday's arrest of the mafia crime boss

A municipality in a strategic position, Campobello di Mazara is a town of 11 thousand inhabitants closely rooted to the mafia, with some residents in these days even lamenting his arrest, saying the Trapani cosca put food on the tables. The city is also home to Alfonso Tumbarello, the physician now under investigation for having treated Andrea Bonafede, alias Matteo Messina Denaro, who is also the doctor of the real Andrea Bonafede. Tumbarello, it is reported wrote prescriptions in Bonafede's name for the cosa nostra boss.

It is also home to mafia boss Francesco Luppino and loyalist Raffaele Urso, AKA Cinuzzo.  Wire interceptions confirmed that Luppino, arrested in September 2022, was in close contact with Messina Denaro for land management.  While Urso, the boss's ambassador to business in Italy's capital, was arrested in April 2018, and sentenced to 18 years and 4 months in prison for his involvement in the Trapani clan.  

Other interesting Campobello di Mazara residents include the former city councillor, Calogero Jonn Luppino, who had 6 million euros in assets seized for mafia association, including 10 companies and related business complexes, 6 parcels of land, 14 bank accounts, 1 motor vehicle, 1 racehorse, cash, and gold bars.  That Luppino was involved in mafia rackets and extortion which forced various businesses in the Trapani area to install gambling devices in their businesses or risk threatening retaliation.  

Even the city's former mayor Ciro Caravà, was indicted in 2012 for mafia association as part of the Campus Belli anti-mafia operation.  Following his arrest the Municipality was dissolved for mafia infiltration on July 27, 2012.  Strangely, after  Caravà's sentence was overturned and he was released from custody, he died by suffocation, at age 58, purportedly trying to swallow a piece of bread. 

All this to say that Campobello di Mazara is not your typical bucolic Sicilian town, making it not at all surprising that this boss was able to hide in plain site here. 

But who is Giovanni Luppino, aside from being Messina Denero's driver?  

This Luppino is not believed to be a relation to  Messina Denaro loyalist Franco Luppino.  Nor, it is claimed, is he a relation to an olive oil producer of the same name.  However, the driver, Giovanni Luppino also worked in the olive oil biz and reportedly had storage warehouses in Campobello di Mazara and Castelvetrano and worked with wholesalers buyers from the Bay of Naples as well as local growers of Nocellara del Belìce olives, a protected denomination of origin (PDO) olive varietal, consumed as table olives and used for the production of extra-virgin oil.

If this olive sounds familiar to ARCA's blog readers it is because Gianfranco Becchina also invested in this money-making olive.   Beginning in 1989, one of Becchina's companies produced his own Nocellara del Belìce olive oil, harvested from the olive trees on Tenuta Pignatelli, a one-hundred-acre expanse of olive groves and lemon trees with a historic main villa from the early 1800s on the outskirts of Castelvetrano, once owned by the Princess Pignatelli of Spain.  

Sold in upscale boutiques, Becchina's olive oil was marketed to USA-based customers for an eye-popping $36 a bottle and is known to have medalled in the New York International Olive Oil Competition over the course of three years, 2018, 2019, and 2021.  

Patrizia Messina Denaro - Sister of the Boss, and Capodonna representative of the Castelvetrano, family also had an olive-oil company belonging to her and her husband impounded.

Nocellara del Belìce olives are cultivated in a fertile area which encompasses the municipalities of Castelvetrano, Campobello di Mazara, Partanna, Poggioreale, Salaparuta and Santa Ninfa, all towns in the province subject to the heavy influence of the Trapani mandamento of the Cosa Nostra.  With some 5,000 olive growers who produce this kind of olive, the province of Trapani in the west of Sicily is a lucrative agricultural market, known for its mafia infiltration, as well as an important stop in the seasonal labor cycle, with the majority of harvesters being sub-Saharan Africans who are all too often exploited, treated as human farming tools, no different than tractors. 

Whether there is a connection between the mafia boss, his driver the olive oil merchant, or the former antiquities dealer has not been proven. But what is known is that in November 2017 Italy's Anti-Mafia Investigative Directorate, through the Court of Trapani's penal and preventive measures section, filed a seizure order for all movable assets, including real estate and corporate enterprises attributable to Gianfranco Becchina on the basis of an order issued from the District Attorney of Palermo based upon investigations conducted by Italy's anti-mafia DIA, under the coordination of the Palermo Public Prosecutor's Office.  That order resulted in the seizure of not only Becchina's cement trade business, Atlas Cements Ltd., Demetra srl., and Becchina & company srl., but also his olive oil venture, Olio Verde srl.   

Much like antiquities, olive oil is a highly lucrative and diversified, income stream making it appealing to Italy’s organised-crime syndicates

Police data shows that there is a known and profitable agromafia active in Italy related to olive cultivation.  Data also shows that all of Italy’s major crime syndicates — the Neapolitan Camorra, ’Ndrangheta, and Cosa Nostra have profited from  farming investments.  

The economic importance of agriculture for mafia organisations like Messina Denero's can be deduced from the frequency of ongoing trials and the confiscation sentences of agricultural, or agro-industrial assets, in and around the province of Trapani.  Many of which have been tied to trials and seizure orders relating to  individuals found to have been associated with Messina Denaro or his enterprises. 

With respect to olives specifically, it has long been the common view that the Neapolitans control the distribution of olives and the olive oil market in Sicily, via a price fixing of sorts, tacitly condoned, if not formally agreed upon, between the Cosa Nostra and the Camorra.  And studies have shown that members of both organised crime organisations have profited from the selling of counterfeit extra virgin olive oil, controlling farmlands, price fixing, and in some cases labor exploitation.   

How important, olive holdings are to the mechanisations of Messina Denaro's Trapani cosca has never been publicly disclosed. But we do know that this syndicate's reach extends beyond the underworld and into diversified revenue streams, like Italy’s illicit antiquities trade and the very path our food travels before reaching our supermarket trolleys and our dinner tables.  

And with margins as high as 700 percent, profits from olive oil are higher than cocaine — making it an appealing channel for money laundering. 

"Ali Aboutaam knew or must have assumed that they had been wrongfully acquired". 

Provenance:

Elias Bustros, Beruit 1950’s-1983;

By descent, 1983-1986?;

(Gawain McKinley, England, on behalf of Selim Dere and Sleiman Aboutaam, 1986)

"Ali Aboutaam, in his capacity as administrator of Phoenix Ancient Art SA, has asked art experts, or has asked employees of Phoenix Ancient Art SA to obtain from art experts: produce and/or sign false invoices; and/or produce or cause others to produce documents indicating source that are contrary to reality, sometimes contained directly in invoices; and/or provide untrue source indications for use by others."

"a pedigree aimed at dispelling suspicion of illicit provenance and/or to facilitate their customs transfer with a view to their sale on the art market through Phoenix Ancient Art SA, Tanis Antiquities LTB and Inanna Art Services SA, i.e. companies of which Ali Aboutaam has Control."

This is a timeline of the two Washe investigations.

"We are selling 2 Andy Warhol paintings from our private collection. We are parting with these pieces only because we need the money for renovations to our house. Our loss is your gain. Pieces bought from a former Martin Lawrence art dealer in California. We over paid terribly in 2007 for the art. Price paid $240,000. We have enclosed the Christie's estimates as of 2011 for the art as well.  Auction range $120,000 to $180,000. We are trying to sell on Ebay because it is much cheaper and because Christie's won't be able to auction our pieces till May 2017. The pieces are numbered and registered with the Warhol Foundation. Pieces are from 1979. Size 14 inches by 11 inches. Synthetic Polymer Paint and Silkscreen ink on canvas. Warhol Foundation # PA65.049 & PA65.032."

"Hello [redacted], Thank you for calling my wife. She said you were very kind and respectful, which is how I remembered you from our first interaction. I was going to call on Tuesday (election day) to ask about the 'shadows', but because of the time difference I was unable. I was in meetings and buildings all that day which did not allow me to have my phone. Once I saw your messages, things had already escalated to an uncomfortable level. Mr.  [redacted] is our family lawyer. He was trying to resolve the matter without unnecessary litigation. He was not going to represent me formally in any civil or criminal proceedings, but was hoping to satisfy you as a client. On Friday he did offer a full refund to your lawyer, but from your Saturday email it seemed it was too late to resolve this matter without a drawn-out court case. The information you explained to my wife is very troubling. If the photos I sent you are clearly different then the ‘Shadows' you have now, then that is a serious problem. However, regardless of the problems with the 'shadows', you have a right to a full refund according to our written agreement in section 9.3. I have no reason to believe that you would mis-represent any information. When I spoke to you last I had the impression that you were a fair and honest businessman. My wife has the same impression since your conversation yesterday. I was just surprised with how quickly things escalated. I am traveling this week, but I would like to return your $80,000 ASAP. Please send me your Bank of America information and I will send you the money. Once you receive your money please send me the 'shadows'. I need to investigate what happened on my side of this transaction. Once I have the ‘shadows' and can confirm your information, I will also refund the cost of sending [redacted] to Boston. I don't want you to suffer financially from this transaction. Especially, if the fault is on my side. Thank you again for reaching out to my wife. I will be in touch directly with you later this week. Best Brian".

one count of wire fraud, 

one count of interstate transportation for a scheme to defraud, 

one count of possession of converted goods and an unlawful monetary transaction. 

While most in the world can remember the fracturing of politics in the United States on January 6, 2021 following the defeat of then-U.S. President Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election, this week made way for a grim copycat incident, equally violent in nature in the Capital of Brazil this week. 

During the more than three hour long incident on Sunday, supporters of Jair Bolsonaro, protesting the October 30, 2022 runoff vote for the 2022 Brazilian general election which replaced the former president with Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, swarmed over the Praça dos Três Poderes (Square of the Three Powers).  Protesters then invaded and damaged the Palácio do Planalto (Presidential Palace), which is the seat of government, where the President of the Republic meets with advisors and visitors.  

The riots quickly spread to the seat of the Supremo Tribunal Federal, Brazil's Supreme Court and the highest authority of the judicial power as well as to the buildings of the Congresso Nacional do Brasil, Brazil's Congress which houses the legislative body of Brazil's federal government.  There some protesters attempted to set the carpet on fire, which flooded rooms in the building when the fire suppression systems activated.  

Protesters swarming the Congresso Nacional do Brasil

Video provided by Twitter account @ALendaDePassos documents extensive damages to the Great Hall of the Superior Federal Court (STF). A largely ceremonial room, it was decorated with furniture from the 19th century, and housed works of art over 100 years old, as well as gifts given to the Brazilian Government by more than 20 countries. 

In another area, Paulo Pimenta, chief minister of the Social Communication Secretariat of the Presidency of the Republic, walked reporters through the destruction caused by the insurrection to his office where videos recorded vandalism to the tables, chairs, documents, printers, computers, televisions and artwork.  Later, on his Twitter account Pimenta called the invasion a coup, and urged Brazilians to unite against domestic terrorism. 

As depicted in the photo below, the Sala de Armas do GSI at the Palácio do Planalto was also ransacked, with protesters even attempting to burn chairs in the outer control room.  In a second video released by Pimenta he shows empty weapon boxes which which could point to theft of arms the GSI's usually uses to maintain building security. 

More images of damages have been uploaded to Brazilian news site Globo.

The total historic assets damaged in Sunday's riot are yet to be documented and ARCA will update this blog post as further details emerge. 

For the first time, the United States of America has handed over a rare artefact that was smuggled from the ruins of the Com in Hebron into the United States.  Carved from ivory, this object dates to circa 800-700 BCE and features an engraving of a winged creature.

This artefact is one of the 180 seized antiquities, valued at $70 Million purchased by Michael Steinhardt which were trafficked by a total of 12 different criminal smuggling networks. 

As the result of the District Attorney of New York - Manhattan investigations compelling evidence demonstrated that this, and other pieces were stolen from their country of origin, none of which had any specific provenance that could be verified by the collector or the DA's investigative team.

According to an invoice, Steinhardt purchased this ancient artefact on 21 January 2003 with no prior provenance for $6,000 from (then) licensed Israeli dealer Gil Chaya. While Chaya had listed his dealer’s license on his invoice to Steinhardt, the artefact was never registered (as required by Israeli law) with the Israeli Antuities authorities. 

Evidence as to its origins is documented in an email sent to Michael Steinhardt’s then-Collection Manager by Gil Chaya's then-wife Lisa, which stated:

“Cosmetic Spoon is from the Hebron area, a place called El Kom, this is the area of the richest Iron age Jewish tombs (many royal).” 

Map of the Hebron district

If Chaya's statement is to be believed, this artefact may come from Khirbet el-Qom, (خربة الكوم), an archaeological site in the village of al-Kum, between Lachish and Hebron.  The Hebron district (al-Khalil) itself is located 30 km south of Jerusalem where Chaya sold pieces he sourced illegally. Hebron is the largest governorate in the Palestinian territories, not only in terms of size and population (PCBS, 2009: 55-60), but also in its richness of cultural and natural heritage and is noted for being one of the oldest continuously inhabited areas in the world, sacred to the three monotheistic religions.

Over the last year, as museums were forced to grapple with the question of how to to handle illicit antiquities in their collections, this year we see some of the more interesting pieces beginning to make their way home.  One of which is the 500 kilogram Late Period (747-332 BCE) "green sarcophagus" of a priest named Ankhenmaat, which was received by the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities in a formal handover ceremony in Cairo on January 2nd.  

Acquired by the Houston Museum of Natural Science in Texas in 2013, the artefact was looted, likely from a shaft tomb, at the Memphis necropolis at Abusir Al Malaq in Egypt, an archaeological locality on the western bank of the Nile River, approximately 25 kilometers southwest of Cairo.  Investigations overseen by the New York District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan determined that the sarcophagus had been illicitly exported out of Egypt and subsequently smuggled into Germany before eventually passing onward to the United States in 2008. 

January 2, 2023 ceremony at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs hosted handing over the "green sarcophagus" to the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities after it was recovered in the United States.

2023 may also be the year where some of the same museums which grappled with their illicit antiquities in 2022 also begin, this year, come to terms with their acquisition of Nazi-stolen art or art sold by members of the Jewish community under Nazi duress.

In the last week of 2022 Judith Silver, her sister Deborah Silver, and seven other individuals from Los Angeles, Seattle and Israel, named in a lawsuit as the surviving heirs of Jewish collector Hedwig Stern, filed a claim in the Northern District of California District Court, against the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Athens-based Basil & Elise Goulandris Foundation.  

Their lawsuit, surrounding the museum's deaccessioning of Van Gogh's "Olive Picking, 1889, contends that the Met's (then) chief curator Theodore Rousseau, “knew or consciously disregarded that the painting had been looted from Hedwig Stern by the Nazis” but still approved the Van Gogh painting's purchase and its later deaccessioning and sale. 

The painting's World War II era owner, Hedwig Stern, escaped Germany in December 1936 leaving behind a collection of artworks, which a Nazi-appointed trustee then sold onward.  The painting named in the lawsuit was deaccessioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1972 and after a series of transactions is now part of the collection of the Goulandris Museum of Contemporary Art, an Athens museum run by the family foundation of the late Greek shipping magnate Basil Goulandris and his wife, Elise Goulandris.   The lawsuit further contends that the Foundation continues to hold the painting despite its known provenance problems. 

Not counting this deaccessioned work, the Metropolitan Museum of Art reported that it has identified 53 works in its collection as having been seized or sold under duress during the Nazi era, excluding Picasso's painting “The Actor.”

Elsewhere, Timothy Reif and David Fraenkel, heirs of another collector persecuted during the Nazi regime, Fritz Grünbaum, have also filed lawsuits against the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in California seeking to recover a 1912 painting and 1915 pencil drawing, by Egon Schiele, each of which depict a woman. Grünbaum's art collection was looted by Nazis before he died on January 14, 1941 while held at Dachau Concentration Camp.

On the side of building capacity and advancing knowledge, later this month on January 18, 2023, at 5:00 pm, London time The Institute of Art and Law will host its next instalment of The Restitution Dialogues conference series.  This event will take place in the form of an online seminar investigating the Vatican Archives and its holdings of Indigenous items, including questions of returning items to communities of origin.

"The panel will discuss items such as the broader impact of the contemporary ‘restitution revolution’, the nature and provenance of Indigenous material in the Vatican collection, institutional best practices in restitution and repatriation, and the cultural impact of return and renewal."

The webinar is free for to anyone who registers.

January also marks the month when the Association for Research into Crimes against Art will accept general applications for admission to its 2023 Postgraduate Certificate program in Art Crime and Cultural Heritage Protection.  Back in 2009, ARCA started the very first interdisciplinary program designed to study art crimes holistically, in a structured and academically diverse format which includes eleven interconnected courses focusing on important theoretical and practical elements related to identifying, combatting, and studying art and heritage crime. 

Taught in Italy, over the course of one summer, the General Applications Period runs through 30 January 2023.  Late applications will be considered after, subject to remaining census availability. 

ARCA will also post information later this month regarding its annual Amelia Conference (and its call for presenters).  This event will be held the weekend of June 23- 25, 2023 in the beautiful town of Amelia, Italy, the seat of ARCA’s summer-long PG Cert program.