in the rarefied world of Antiquities
sales pretty is as pretty done as a deal
a we are all prostitutes you have street
walkers and high class hookers but
basically we are selling our three
Michel van Rijn should know by his own
admission he’s had a very colorful past
I smuggled from Libya
I stole at the time from Qaddafi
smuggling is a very lucrative business
for those who do it well Richard Ellis
is the former head of Scotland Yard’s
art an antiquity squad it’s estimated
somewhere between three and six billion
pounds a year his what is represented in
stolen art antiques and cultural
property and when van Ryan went straight
he looked Ellis up we met because he was
chasing me for ten years all over the
world so one day I was in the Dorchester
hotel and I called him
we had never spoken and I said well
you’re very welcome for a drink you know
handcuffs are optional what do you think
he said well that might be difficult if
we have a drink together so let’s so we
met in the bar and so they started
collaborating today Michel van Rijn
works to expose the art world’s dirty
deeds
recently he teamed up with Scotland Yard
on the recovery of a priceless Mya
headdress
but despite the high-profile recoveries
there is much that slips through
transnational borders undetected
you find whole container loads of
Antiquities the hazard should we say of
trafficking and antiquities of a pretty
low you know since it’s venture stolen
found fresh in the ground in Iraq Iran
in Pakistan Afghanistan nowadays they
are shipped via Dubai where they get a
different passport I mean they say you
know a respectable Dubai firm who will
trends will re export the artwork to
London to Paris etcetera so there are no
question once in transit antiquities can
be sold anywhere but Ellis says the
primary destinations are New York and
London but moving stolen artifacts is
only part of the operation to get top
dollar the object needs to be given an
aura of legitimacy it has to be
laundered one way is to create fake
paper trails documenting its history or
provenance provenance of an object is
literally its history who made it when
it was made where it was made who owned
it another way is to misuse legitimate
tools the Art Loss Register is a
database of known stolen art however if
the smuggler is the only one who knows
the object even exists the database can
help cover his tracks the gallery owner
he can send a photograph of the object
to the Art Loss Register and he will get
a letter back saying it doesn’t match
our archives meaning you have done your
due diligence from that moment on you
can turn around
as a dealer knowingly having a stolen
object you have laundered it and you can
sell it to any museum in the world or
you can sell it to any collector or via
any option in the world furthermore
while some collectors believe that their
purchases are saving endangered
antiquities frequently the opposite is
true these pictures are taken from one
of Richard Ellis’s investigations in
each
at the tomb of hetepka but once luminous
hieroglyphs were sold on the foreign
market tomb walls have been stripped to
bare stone the value of the object
placed on it by the marketplace can be
vastly different to that placed on it by
the archaeologists and science and when
an object is illegally excavated it
loses its context the cards may be
stacked against the authorities but
justice can prevail in 2006 Italian
authorities were able to claim a set of
Hellenistic vessels that had been looted
decades earlier on display at New York’s
Metropolitan Museum since 1972 the
museum has agreed to return the
artifacts to Italy after investigations
into the dealings of a convicted
trafficker revealed a faked provenance
for the set examples like this one give
hope that something can be done to stem
the trade however it may only be a drop
in the bucket there isn’t a country in
the world that doesn’t suffer from
cultural property theft not one
sales pretty is as pretty done as a deal
a we are all prostitutes you have street
walkers and high class hookers but
basically we are selling our three
Michel van Rijn should know by his own
admission he’s had a very colorful past
I smuggled from Libya
I stole at the time from Qaddafi
smuggling is a very lucrative business
for those who do it well Richard Ellis
is the former head of Scotland Yard’s
art an antiquity squad it’s estimated
somewhere between three and six billion
pounds a year his what is represented in
stolen art antiques and cultural
property and when van Ryan went straight
he looked Ellis up we met because he was
chasing me for ten years all over the
world so one day I was in the Dorchester
hotel and I called him
we had never spoken and I said well
you’re very welcome for a drink you know
handcuffs are optional what do you think
he said well that might be difficult if
we have a drink together so let’s so we
met in the bar and so they started
collaborating today Michel van Rijn
works to expose the art world’s dirty
deeds
recently he teamed up with Scotland Yard
on the recovery of a priceless Mya
headdress
but despite the high-profile recoveries
there is much that slips through
transnational borders undetected
you find whole container loads of
Antiquities the hazard should we say of
trafficking and antiquities of a pretty
low you know since it’s venture stolen
found fresh in the ground in Iraq Iran
in Pakistan Afghanistan nowadays they
are shipped via Dubai where they get a
different passport I mean they say you
know a respectable Dubai firm who will
trends will re export the artwork to
London to Paris etcetera so there are no
question once in transit antiquities can
be sold anywhere but Ellis says the
primary destinations are New York and
London but moving stolen artifacts is
only part of the operation to get top
dollar the object needs to be given an
aura of legitimacy it has to be
laundered one way is to create fake
paper trails documenting its history or
provenance provenance of an object is
literally its history who made it when
it was made where it was made who owned
it another way is to misuse legitimate
tools the Art Loss Register is a
database of known stolen art however if
the smuggler is the only one who knows
the object even exists the database can
help cover his tracks the gallery owner
he can send a photograph of the object
to the Art Loss Register and he will get
a letter back saying it doesn’t match
our archives meaning you have done your
due diligence from that moment on you
can turn around
as a dealer knowingly having a stolen
object you have laundered it and you can
sell it to any museum in the world or
you can sell it to any collector or via
any option in the world furthermore
while some collectors believe that their
purchases are saving endangered
antiquities frequently the opposite is
true these pictures are taken from one
of Richard Ellis’s investigations in
each
at the tomb of hetepka but once luminous
hieroglyphs were sold on the foreign
market tomb walls have been stripped to
bare stone the value of the object
placed on it by the marketplace can be
vastly different to that placed on it by
the archaeologists and science and when
an object is illegally excavated it
loses its context the cards may be
stacked against the authorities but
justice can prevail in 2006 Italian
authorities were able to claim a set of
Hellenistic vessels that had been looted
decades earlier on display at New York’s
Metropolitan Museum since 1972 the
museum has agreed to return the
artifacts to Italy after investigations
into the dealings of a convicted
trafficker revealed a faked provenance
for the set examples like this one give
hope that something can be done to stem
the trade however it may only be a drop
in the bucket there isn’t a country in
the world that doesn’t suffer from
cultural property theft not one
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