Finally, in light of recent events in both this country [USA] and abroad, it is important to restate that the AJA maintains its commitment to protecting archaeological heritage. In keeping with the 2004 policy of the AIA [Archaeological Institute of America], the AJA will not accept any article that serves as the primary publication of any object or archaeological material in a private or public collection acquired after 30 December 1973 unless its existence is documented before that date or it was legally exported from the country of origin. 

In addition, given the recent and continuing threats to the archaeological sites and material culture of countries such as Syria, Iraq, Egypt, and Libya, the Editor-in-chief and members of the Advisory Board condemn in the strongest possible terms the recent sale of Egyptian artifacts and the scheduled sale of Mesoamerican artifacts by the AIA St. Louis Society through the auction house Bonhams. While technically not illegal, the sale of the Egyptian antiquities certainly violated the spirit if not the letter of the agreement that brought the objects to St. Louis in the first place. The selling off of archaeological artifacts in the society's possession not only contravenes the ethical standards current in archaeology but also reinforces the commodification of archaeological material and in effect condones the traffic in antiquities, which is in opposition to the AIA's principal missions of research and education. As stewards of the past, no one associated with the AIA should be incentivizing the illicit trade in antiquities, which is a global criminal activity. High-profile sales such as these can have the unintended consequence of putting further at risk the archaeological heritage that the AIA has vowed to protect. 

SHEILA DILLON, Editor-in-Chief, American Journal of Archaeology

Press Conference at FBI building in Westwood, CA

Hello, my name is Bill Lewis, the Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles Field Office.   I’m joined here today by…. 

On August 23^rd, 2008, the LAPD initiated an investigation into a residential theft of nine pieces of artwork that are valued at up to $12 million, though that number may change when experts further evaluate the paintings.  At that time, the company which insured the paintings had offered a $200,000 reward for information leading to the recovery of the stolen artwork.   This past September, that reward offer generated a lead overseas.  From that point, the FBI’s Art Crime Team members here in Los Angeles worked jointly with the LAPD. 

Raul Espinoza

An undercover investigation led to an individual believed to be a fence conducting the sale of the artwork.   On October 23, 2014, a meeting was arranged in West Los Angeles with undercover agents posing as potential buyers and an individual believed to be in possession of the stolen artwork, now identified as Raul Espinoza.   By the end of the meeting, nine pieces of artwork were recovered and Espinoza was taken into custody. On October 27, 2014, a felony complaint was filed by the District Attorney in Los Angeles charging Espinoza with receiving stolen property.   

Art theft is multi-billion dollar industry and something the Bureau takes seriously to protect America’s culture and national treasures.  The Art Crime Team has also recovered art and cultural artifacts from other nations when it’s found or fenced through the United States.  If you’ll notice, much of the art on display was painted in the 20s and 30s so the rich history recovered here cannot be overstated. 

Investigators believe that others are associated with this crime and know that someone has valuable information.  We are offering a reward of up to $25,000 in exchange for information leading to the arrest and conviction of individuals responsible for this crime. 

I’d like to point out that this is still very much an ongoing investigation and, because we still have work to do, we aren’t able to go into detail on much of this, nor speculate on theories.  We wanted to give you an opportunity to see the paintings while they’re in our possession as evidence, and we hope that the publicity will turn into solid leads.  I’d like to turn this over to ... 

LAPD's Hrycyk at podium with FBI's Rivas (right)

FBI Agent Elizabeth Robert speaks to Spanish-speaking press

FBI Agent Elizabeth Rivas stands next to recovered painting by Lyonel Feininger

Painting by Marc Chagall

Painting by Chaim Soutine

Painting by Arshile Gorky

Painting by Diego Rivera

Painting by Chaim Soutine

Painting by Kees van Dongan

Painting by Emile Nolde

Painting by Hans Hofmann

FBI's Elizabeth Rivas at podium

The antiquities department of Bonhams planned to offer a Roman herm for auction on October 2, 2014 (lot 41). The herm was estimated to be sold for £10,000 to £15,000. It seems to be a Roman copy of the Hermes Propylaios set up next to the late 5th century BC monumental gateway, the Propylaia, at the entrance to the Athenian acropolis. The statue was observed there by the second century AD travel-writer Pausanias (I.22.8). The herm is known from a copy found at Pergamon in November 1903 (CS 1904) and now in Istanbul (Boardman 1985: 212, fi g. 189). The inscription on the stela reads in Greek: “You will recognise the fine state statue by Alkamenes, the Hermes before the Gates. Pergamios gave it. Know thyself” (trans. Boardman).

The display of such a statue in this royal city was unsurprising given the deliberate allusions to the city of Athens, and in particular to the Athenian acropolis, by the Attalids in the design. Andrew Stewart has suggested that a second type of herm is represented by an inscribed copy found in the Gymnasium of Vedius at Ephesus (Stewart 2003a; 003b). 

On 2 October 2014, the day of the Bonhams sale, Dr Christos Tsirogiannis was able to identify the Bonhams herm from the photographs and paperwork seized from the Italian dealer Gianfranco Becchina in Basle, Switzerland in May 2002 (Gill 2009, 78-79). The images were found in a fi le relating to Becchina’s associations with a Greek individual by the name of Zenebisis. The envelope containing the images were sent by Georgios Papadakis from Herakleion in Crete; the envelope is franked with the date 29 May 1987. The letter arrived in Basel (and was franked) on 1 June 1987. Someone has written on the envelope the name of Costas Gaitanis. Is Georgios Papadakis a genuine or a cover name? Why should Gaitanis be sending images to Becchina? Did Gaitanis have the herm in Greece? The evidence from the Becchina dossier suggests that the herm was being offered on the market in May 1987. 

Yet there is a problem. The herm offered at Bonhams was given a precise collecting history: “Nicolas Koutoulakis Collection, Geneva, acquired circa 1965, thence by descent”. This placed the herm in the period prior to the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property. But how could the herm apparently be on the Greek market in 1987, but at the same time have already been acquired by Koutoulakis in 1965 and then passed down as part of his collection by descent?

The purpose of this paper is to define the existence of crime against cultural heritage and determine whether this type of criminality is on the rise around the world. By carrying out guided interviews with experts in this field, the authors wished to define guidelines for the fight against this type of criminality. By studying the available literature, the authors found that crime against cultural heritage is on the rise. Economically and socially less-developed countries, from which most antiquities originate, are most susceptible to this type of criminality. Such countries of origin include particularly the countries of South America and the Middle East, while the Western part of the globe is mainly market-oriented and represents the final destination of smuggled antiquities. This paper also aims to determine the adequacy and appropriateness of legal acts governing the protection of cultural heritage and the fight against this type of criminality. Problems are mainly related to the implementation and enforcement of such legal provisions and related sanctions in practice.

Adam Worth was a career criminal who lived over one hundred years ago, and is best known for his theft of Gainsborough’s portrait of the Duchess of Devonshire. The context in which Worth plied his trade—the era of technology and change—facilitated much of his success. A critical review of his extensive career, including a number of uniquely famous thefts, will be viewed through the lens of four criminological theories: Strain Theory, Differential Association Theory, Rational Choice Theory, and Routine Activity Theory, to not only explain his motivation and behaviour, but also to explore the causality of criminality in general. This critical analysis supports the contention that no one theory of criminology, no matter how broad, can adequately explain such a complicated individual whose criminal career spanned four decades. Rather, an integrated theory of criminology, one that is both flexible and fluid, is essential in order to explain the life of such a multifaceted and unique individual as Adam Worth.

Investigations in the cultural sector are very peculiar and often connected to larger criminal issues. In fact, art crimes are specific in term of legislations, the expedient used to remove or obscure the illegal provenance of a cultural good, and because the persons involved are much the same. Trafficking in cultural goods is also a phenomenon which often involves transnational organized groups, and these sort of offences seems forcing—at least in the most complex cases—a quite new concept of co-management of investigation and prosecution: the so-called prolonged coordination of law enforcements, the only ones able to entirely dismantle a criminal organization.

In 1998 the St Louis Art Museum (SLAM) purchased an Egyptian 19 Dynasty mummy mask from Phoenix Ancient Art for USD$499,000. In December 2005 it was suggested on the internet that the mask had been removed from the archaeological store at Saqqara and this led to an extended legal tussle between the museum and the Egyptian authorities. The acquisition of the mask was explored by Laura E. Young in an unpublished study that includes some of the documentation key to this discussion (Young 2007). The case has also appeared in a wider discussion of archaeological ethics (Gill 2009b, 95). It is appropriate to review the case now as the two parallel legal cases relating to the mask were terminated in 2014.

On 26 March 2014, Hungary announced its purchase of seven pieces of Late Roman silverware, part of the so-called Sevso Treasure (Hungary 2014). The Treasure had been the object of conflicting ownership claims since its existence was first made public in 1990, and until the Hungarian purchase had been considered unsalable because of the suspicious circumstances of its discovery and early trading history. In his 2012 paper entitled “Thinking about the Sevso Treasure”, John Merryman had used the example of the Sevso Treasure to explore some of the issues surrounding the museum acquisition of problematical antiquities, and in light of his discussion made a recommendation for its future disposition (Merryman 2012: 51-66). Although this recommendation has been partly overtaken by events, his discussion of the issues involved is still topical, made more so perhaps by the Hungarian purchase which has effectively sundered the Treasure into two parts, with its balance of seven pieces remaining in the private possession of the Marquess of Northampton – an outcome that Merryman was keen to avoid. This article considers the issue of the Sevso Treasure from a new angle, concluding that the parties really to blame for the unfortunate affair of the Sevso Treasure are the various dealers and their expert advisors who worked together intentionally and unintentionally to transform the archaeological assemblage into a valuable and marketable commodity, and, ironically, in so doing, rendered it unsalable.

Welcome to the new issue of The Journal of Art Crime, and thank you for subscribing. Your subscription supports ARCA in our research and educational endeavors, and we are grateful for it. Lauren Zanedis served as proof-reader in this issue, and I was ably assisted by my fellow editors, Marc Balcells and Christos Tsirogiannis, who are both far more organized than I. 

In this issue you’ll find academic papers on Adam Worth (the Napoleon of Crime), national prosecution of cultural heritage, art crime in Slovenia, the Ka Nefer Nefer mummy mask and the Sevso Treasure. We are also looking forward to ARCA’s next academic publication, an edited collection of essays, half of which were published in the Journal of Art Crime, half of which are new. This collection will be published in late 2015 by the fine academic press, Palgrave, and all profits from it will go directly to support ARCA. We are also planning the next ARCA symposium in London, following the great success of last year’s event at the Victoria & Albert Museum—it will be held next Fall at The Courtauld Institute. And the latest news for the Journal is that we have been invited to join the prestigious HeinOnline catalogue of academic journals, which means that the JAC will be available in thousands of research libraries around the world. Having been courted by several fine publishers, we are pleased to sign on with this one and look forward to the chance for a vastly expanded scholarly readership. 

We hope that you will enjoy these articles. Best wishes and thanks again for your support.

Noah Charney
Founder, ARCA
Editor-in-Chief, The Journal of Art Crime

This Christmas, like every Christmas, millions of televisions will broadcast the exploits of young Kevin McCallister, whom his family forgot in their rush to the airport, to spend the holidays in Paris. “Home Alone” is a Yuletide staple, and I make a point of tuning in every year. But while most will watch “Home Alone” for its heartwarming moments, slapstick comedy and family-as-the-greatest-holiday-gift message, I see in it something else entirely—a master class in low-budget museum security.

I promise, this will all make sense in a moment.