The Case of the $4 Million Gold Coffin (Update)

26:53For a long time, the entire art world didn't ask questions about provenance. It was very gentlemanly. Many of these transactions were sort of handshake deals. And maybe you did follow up research into the provenance and maybe you didn't. But if you're not asking questions about provenance when you're bringing something into the collection, it's a little bit like wandering into the middle of a traffic intersection without looking both ways. There might be a disaster about to happen. A disaster like the Metropolitan Museum of Art paying four million dollars for the looted coffin of Nedjamunk. So clearly this is not just a past tense problem.

27:32Here again is the economist Jim Marone. On the ground, people are looting. A lot of the attention nowadays is focused on the Middle East, where quite literally we see from satellite images, people have dug pits in the ground at archaeological sites trying to find stuff. In other areas of the world, for instance, Southeast Asia, statues are being taken from temples where they have been sitting for hundreds of years. You can see evidence of this with like literal chainsaw marks in the temples. Name some countries where this is happening. Cambodia is a very popular country. There's a lot of demand for Cambodian antiquities.

28:19India, Nepal. Let's say we're talking about a museum like the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Let's say we exclude everything from the 20th century onward. What share of art and antiquities in a museum like that was essentially stolen?

28:43the reason i'm pausing is because there's a split in opinion on what that means because if you talk to archaeologists for example unless we know the fine spot it's been recorded in an archaeological excavation report then the object was improperly taken from its place Whether it was illegally removed from the country is sort of a separate question, but you've already lost scientific knowledge there. And it's a real tragedy. I mean, that's one of the biggest reasons why I say you can't use an economic argument to regulate this trade. The loss of scientific and cultural knowledge is so big. That's one of the biggest pieces of violence that this trade perpetrates on the world.

29:31But let me make a purely Philistine argument for a moment. Let's say I hear you, Jim, that the scientific and historical loss and cultural loss can be large. On the other hand, let's say this piece is coming from a country that's in shambles in this long civil war. Let's take Syria or something. And I say, well, at the moment, this century at least, Western Europe or the U.S. or parts of Asia or other places around the world, those are better places for that piece to be not only seen by people but protected by people. One interesting argument about why the art market can be so expensive is that if you put an extraordinarily high price on works of art, then that is a strong incentive for them to be protected into the future.

30:23So is the potentially lost scientific and historical knowledge really so great that it outweighs that potential upside of being, let's say, put in a museum and treasured into the next and the next century? That's one of the more common arguments in defense of museums. The pushback to that is no one is saying that those objects can't stay in New York or London, but it should be the decision of the country of origin to have them there and not the decision of England or the U.S. And one solution is to say, we're going to restitute this object, but we're going to sign an agreement that it will stay on display where it is.

31:11Italy or whatever country can pull it back and move it somewhere else if they choose to. Are there any kind of licensing or profit-sharing agreements? Let's say I'm the British Museum and I've got a piece that was stolen from your country. And I say, well, we're going to keep it here, but we'll pay you X dollars a year. And maybe we'll even arrange for one plane per month to fly from your country full of your citizens. And we'll show them a great time and we'll let them see this work. And then we'll send some more money back to you and some sort of profit sharing. Has anyone pursued that kind of compromise?

31:52I have not heard of anything like that. Would you like a solution like that? Do you think there's a path to fairness? I mean, I think that's interesting. I'm not sure that that would be the sort of harms that we're trying to fix. A lot of these are symbolic harms at this point. And so really, it's about writing what is essentially a harm done by colonialism that's not about profit. So it's more like this antiquity is a symbol of the brutality of your colonialism. So it's not just that we want to be reimbursed. We want that symbol to actually be reversed so that you are not showing off still after these hundreds of years how successful you were at colonizing us.

32:41Right. The fact that this antiquity is where it is, is a symbol of the power that this country or the power inequalities that the system created at the time, or still perpetrates, really. And so reversing ownership is a way to undo some of that inequality. You can see how quickly this issue of ownership gets complicated, especially for antiquities. But it's complicated even for art that was stolen more recently, like during World War II, when the Nazis looted hundreds of thousands of artworks from a variety of countries. Artworks were looted by the Nazis for two different purposes, depending on the type of work.

33:27That, again, is the legal scholar Patti Gerstenblith. There was artwork that the Nazi leadership that Hitler and Goering liked, and those things were kept by them, either in their personal collections or intended for a museum that Hitler was going to build. Then there were the things that they considered degenerate, impressionist works by Jewish artists, you know, anything 20th century pretty much. Those things were taken and sold onto the international market. In 2019, Germany had to return to the Uffizi Gallery in Italy, a Dutch old master painting that German soldiers looted from a small Italian town where the Uffizi had sent it for safekeeping.

34:09A year later, the Uffizi had to return to Germany, a sculpture that had been sold under duress by a Jewish art dealer in Germany, was later owned by Hermann Göring and somehow wound up in the Uffizi after the war. Again, it can be complicated. Here is Jim Marone. The identification of stolen Nazi artworks shows the same problem as in the antiquities world, which is that it takes an incredible deal of research on a case-by-case basis to identify single paintings or single statues, prove that they were stolen, or make the ethical case that it really shouldn't be where it is and it needs to be sent back.

34:54It's just an incredible amount of work. But I guess there are two fundamental differences there. One, it was not that long ago. So it's more likely that there will be records as opposed to a 2 ,000-year-old Cambodian sculpture, I guess. But also, we're talking about Nazis stealing art often from private homes, where the issue of ownership is more clearly delineated than often is the case with antiquities, right? Yeah, to a point. I mean, the private homes thing is what makes record keeping sometimes sparse. The proverbial, I found this in my grandma's attic. That is sort of like the joke people say about antiquities.

35:34Oh, I found this statue in my grandma's attic. Well, that might be true. It also might be completely false. Or it could be that your grandma was the smuggler. Right. Who knows? It's the same with if grandma had a Monet and it was stolen by the Nazis, was that Monet ever documented? Or did she buy it direct from a dealer back in the 1890s? So it could be cloudy in both cases. Coming up after the break, there is one thing that isn't cloudy, at least in the U.S. If it is stolen, it is always stolen. But in other countries, yes, more clouds. I'm Stephen Dubner. This is Freakonomics Radio. We'll be right back.

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39:07Remember what the economist Jim Marone told us earlier about the cultural aspect of antiquities trafficking versus the legal? Whether it was illegally removed from the country is sort of a separate question. A few years ago, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists published a report arguing that over 1 ,000 artifacts in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York are linked to alleged looting and trafficking figures. Another report by the independent newsroom ProPublica found that many objects in the Met's Native American collection lack clear ownership histories and may well be stolen or fake.

39:46Stolen artifacts from people whose land was also stolen? Yes, there can be layers of ugly history to wade through when it comes to antiquities. In any case, Matthew Bogdanos, the former Marine colonel and current antiquities trafficking prosecutor, has become the public face of the effort to call out stolen artwork in New York. We do not, under any circumstances, want to denude New York of its cultural treasures. I simply want us to respect the rule of law and honor the laws of the countries whose cultural patrimony has been pillaged for millennia. It's just that simple. If it's legal, great. We should keep it.

40:37We should display it. People can buy it. They can sell it. They can do whatever they want. But if it's illegal, then it should go back to the country of origin. I would think that that's a very gray line about legal versus illegal, only because if something was obtained, quote, legally, let's say 100, 150 years ago, under current standards, it might be a repugnant way that it was acquired. I think of the Benin bronzes that are in the British Museum. Those were seized in what was called a punitive expedition. It was an armed raid where they shot up the palace and took everything. So how do you define legality?

41:13Sure, I define legality by the law. That's actually one of the more pervasive myths surrounding what we do. It's actually not that complicated. The law is the law. Countries have laws of patrimony. In the United States, we honor the laws of patrimony of all foreign nations. If someone stole something from Egypt in 1900, that might be a moral question. It is not a legal question. The legal question is, was it looted after 1983 Egypt law of patrimony? In Italy, it's 1909. It ain't complicated. It's actually unbelievably simple. If you take morality and pompous, arrogant, holier than thou out of it and stick to the law, the law will never lead you astray.

42:10There are also international laws to protect cultural artifacts. After the widespread destruction of art and antiquities during World War II, the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict was put in place. In 1970, UNESCO created the Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export, and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property. Here again is the economist Jim Marone. The UNESCO Convention is essentially what the market uses as a benchmark for determining if something's provenance is good enough to enter a museum collection.

42:52The convention basically says 1970 is the date at which an object has to have left its country of origin in order to sort of be, we're not going to worry about those things. So they're trying to establish kind of a fresh start, like everything that happened before then, it's too hard to figure. But from now on, we're really going to pay attention. There are national laws that can supersede that, but those are country by country. So 1970 is sort of the magic number to keep in mind. That UNESCO convention has been ratified by 150 countries. The U.S. signed in 1983. But like Marone said, national laws often carry more weight than international law, and U.S.

43:34law is stricter than most. Here again is Matthew Bogdanos. Bear in mind a few central tenets of U.S. criminal law. Number one, if it is stolen, it is always stolen. We do not do what most European countries do. And that is have this good faith exception. If you purchase a looted antiquity and it's been properly laundered, i.e. it's gotten good quality paper, you know, fake, but quality history of ownership. Well, if you buy that item in France or Belgium or Germany or Switzerland, it's yours, period, full stop. That's outrageous. All you're doing is rewarding a good laundering process. We don't reward launderers, whether it's money laundering or antiquities laundering.

44:25We don't do that. Second question, was it actually stolen? Did somebody break into a villa? Did someone break into a museum? Did someone tie people up, put a shotgun to their head and steal priceless antiquities? If that happened, it's stolen. And whether that happened in 1910 or 1940 or 1970, it is stolen. Let's say someone walked into your great-grandfather's house. They tied your great-grandfather up and they stole his property. And then that property appears on the market 75 years later. Are you going to say, oh, well, it was 75 years ago. It didn't belong to my great-grandfather. Of course not.

45:07You're going to say, wait a second, that was stolen. We do the exact same thing. Again, going to repeat this. It ain't complicated. When you personally walk into an antiquity gallery or museum in New York, what kind of welcome do you get? Well, it has become increasingly difficult to walk into an auction house or a museum or a gallery as a civilian. There have been multiple occasions where I've been approached and, oh, Colonel, I'm sorry, did you need anything? No, I really like, I like your museum. I like your gallery. I like your exhibit. Can I just see it? On the other hand, there have been times when I have walked into a museum and I have looked at the curatorial card on the side and said to myself, are you kidding me?

46:01And then, yeah, we have then begun an investigation. Listen, most of the art, most of the antiquities on the market are clean, are legitimate, are legal. Don't worry about it. But there's a handful of names that are radioactive. If you have an antiquity that has passed through the hands of one of about a dozen well-known traffickers, half of whom have been convicted by us and the other half of whom we have arrest warrants out for around the world, chances are pretty good it's stolen. If there's a piece in a museum or a gallery and the first name on the provenance is George Latfi or Simon Simonian or Sarap Simonian or Gil Chaya or Shubhash Kapoor, I'm telling you, it was probably looted and we're probably going to find it and we're probably going to seize it.

47:03You know, in the United States, the hardest thing about an antiquity is getting it in through U.S. customs. That, again, is the legal scholar Patti Gerstenblith. Once you get it through U.S. customs, you're pretty much home free. And where else do antiquities traffickers move their product? It seems like Dubai has become a pretty major transit point. Several things from Egypt, from Libya and elsewhere have gone through Dubai in the last 10, 12 years. If you go back to the 90s, it was Switzerland. Switzerland was the Wild West. And why did they change? Well, there was a huge scandal in which the Swiss authorities finally raided a warehouse of an Italian dealer named Giacomo Medici.

47:47A huge warehouse with about 30 ,000 documents and objects documenting the objects being cleaned and repaired. Clearly, they were fresh out of the ground. So the warehouse was raided in 1995. By 2005, it took a little while, the Swiss had turned over this evidence to the Italian authorities. The Italian authorities then went after U.S. museums, including the Getty curator Marion True. There was a statue that had been purchased by the Getty for about$18 million, I think, in about 1990. In the art world, it's not a huge sum of money, but in the antiquities world, it was a lot. Museums had to return, and in fact, voluntarily returned a large number of objects.

48:27And the Swiss decided, partly based on that embarrassment, but also in the year 2003, the U.S. led the invasion of Iraq. The museum there was looted, and it created, in fact, a lot of world attention to the issue. And at that point, Switzerland and a bunch of other European countries actually ratified the 1970 Convention on Cultural Property. And that led to the Swiss changing a lot of their rules. And so, as a result, the transit point moves. The more I hear you talk, I can imagine that if I am a board member, a donor, or an executive of a big global collecting museum like the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, you are just a nightmare to have around.

49:15That's my goal. So the story that I'm hearing from you is one of, I don't know, ostrich-ish behavior, right? I mean, nobody who's in this world on the museum side or on the auction house side doesn't know what's going on, do they? I think they know, but there's, well, there's something called willful ignorance. Maybe that's the same as an ostrich. Is that a legal concept? Yes. And it was used in a prosecution of a very prominent New York dealer named Frederick Schultz, where to criminally prosecute somebody, you need to show, in addition to the crime that was committed, you need to show a level of knowledge or intent on their part.

49:59And the way the jury found that Fred Schultz knew, and now I have air quotes around the word knew, was they used this concept of willful ignorance, where if somebody intentionally avoids learning the truth, because if they learned the truth, they would know that it was illegal, and I'm paraphrasing, then the jury conclude that in fact they knew. And that was the basis, or at least that was the jury instruction given to convict Mr. Schultz. Museums, of course, are not the only buyers of antiquities. There are also plenty of private collectors. So they are creating the economic incentive to loot because the money works its way backwards through the system.

50:45And while not necessarily all, particularly archaeological looting, is done for the purpose of supplying the market, much of it is. And so these buyers in the West are creating the demand. If there weren't that demand, there would be less incentive to loot in the first place. And how hard do collectors think about the history of the pieces they're buying? Buyers who don't necessarily care that much about provenance or who think that they are saving the object, and I'm putting air quotes around the word saving, they think they're being altruistic. You know, they're doing a good thing. A lot of people have used the rhetoric of saving or what we call the rescue narrative, which has a history going back over 200 years.

51:31Does that have air quotes around it too? Sure. I mean, going back to when Elgin took the Parthenon marbles or going back to when the British and the Germans and the French looted in Africa, that the current inhabitants are not sufficiently capable of taking care of their own heritage. Therefore, we have the right to take it and save it. Napoleon said the same thing, you know, in the 1790s when he took stuff from what today is Italy. So that concept goes back and several collectors have written themselves and made statements that what they're doing is right because they are saving the object without taking into consideration all of the negative consequences that flow from what they're doing.

52:15One negative consequence for the collectors is that they might get busted. In late 2022, Matthew Bogdanos' team seized nearly two dozen antiquities from Shelby White, a collector who is also a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This was on top of several dozen pieces she had to surrender earlier. The hedge fund manager Michael Steinhardt had$70 million worth of antiquities seized from his home and office and has been barred for life from acquiring any other relics. Steve Green, the president of the retail chain Hobby Lobby, was caught buying 5 ,500 looted artifacts from Iraq. He forfeited the items and he paid a$3 million fine.

53:01The United States is in some senses unique in that we collect from everywhere. We are the largest art market in the world by a good bit. The second and third are the U.K. and China. In China, they tend to buy antiquities of Chinese origin. In the Gulf states, they're interested in Islamic material, for which the market in the United States is somewhat less. So you might think that cracking down on collectors would diminish the incentives for looters and traffickers. I would have said the same thing that you just said 15 years ago. Matthew Bogdanos again. I would have said if you cut off the head, then the tail will die.

53:41There is a but there. What we have found time and time again is that the middleman, that necessary person who is in contact with the looter or sometimes once removed from the looter and the museum or collector, those people, they have stockpiles. When we raided, we did 17 separate search warrants on Shubhash Kapoor storage facilities around the country. Kapoor is one of the dealers Bogdanos referred to earlier as radioactive. He has sold antiquities looted from India, Pakistan, Cambodia, Thailand and elsewhere. Back in 2022, an Indian court sentenced him to 10 years in prison. When we did these raids, we found material that had been stolen 20 years earlier.

54:29That pattern has actually been repeated often. So with a little sophistication and tweaking, it's fair to say that eventually you might cut off the looting if you start cutting off the collectors, but not right away because they will stockpile material. It's the same with Iraq. After the Iraq Museum was looted in 2003, everyone said, okay, just start monitoring the markets because you're going to see Iraqi antiquities on the market. No, you're not. No one's putting an Iraqi antiquity in the market for at least a decade or more. Syrian antiquities, the same deal. No one's putting Syrian antiquities on the market right after the Syrian war.

55:09It's not going to happen. This stuff goes to ground for decades. The second argument, which I didn't even anticipate, and that is if you cut off the market in New York, illegal market, the market simply goes elsewhere. So many of the antiquities looted from the Middle East, Libya, Lebanon, Egypt, the West Bank, Israel. We have seen so many of those antiquities don't come to the normal New York, London, Paris anymore. Where are they going now? Gulf states. The number one emerging antiquities collecting market in the world are the Gulf states. And when they go there, they never come out. The reality is there is a hubris.

56:00There is an arrogance. Now, it's not criminal to be arrogant. You know, I'd be in a lot of trouble. And maybe you too, by the way, Steve, no offense. These aren't crimes, but you have to understand these are people who who have grown accustomed to getting their way in everything they do. I see it, I want it. That's actually a quote. If I see something I want, I just buy it. I've heard this so many times. I've had people in my office who have right to my face said, you're never going to get to me. And then that conversation has often ended with, please stand up, turn around, put your hands behind your back.

56:38You were once asked what would put an end to illicit collecting. And you said that a good start would be to put in jail some 65-year-old person who's never seen the inside of a jail. And presumably that 65-year-old person has at least several million and maybe a billion dollars. Has that happened yet? Has a collector been imprisoned? No, not for more than a day or two. And think about why, though, right? We, the Manhattan DA's office, the prosecutor in the U.S. doesn't do the sentencing. We do the sentencing recommendation. The judge does the sentencing. The reality is in today's climate, alternatives to incarceration are always heavily considered, heavily favored.

57:18My biggest frustration, you dance with the devil. You make deals that sometimes you have to take a deep breath, grit your teeth and say yes. Yes. Let's say I have a collector or I have a high end gallery owner here in New York and that high end gallery owner. I've got them dead to rights, straightforward conviction, seize all their property, shut down the gallery. And then I can make my pitch to the judge. Judge, these are serious felonies. I'm asking for time. I can do that. I would get a great headline and everyone would say, oh, yes, he's finally carrying through on his promise. He's putting all these rich people in jail.

57:58Okay, I can do that. What if that person comes to me and says, I can get you 500 other looted antiquities from my source. What do you do? Do you take the cheap headline, easy out, and you do the little, you know, celebration dance in the end zone, and you go out and you have a drink and say, hey, great job, guys. Well, 500 antiquities have now gone elsewhere. Or do you suck it up? Yeah, you sound like the kind of guy who sucks it up, I assume. You make that decision every day. And every time you make that decision, it takes a little bit out of you. So we've made that deal. We have made that deal with the devil.

58:35And as a result, this office has recovered almost 4 ,500 priceless cultural treasures from 30 countries around the world valued at more than$200 million. Okay, that's amazing. Big question. What happens to it next? Great question. So every country is, you know, it's like I have four kids and each kid is special. Every country is special. They really are. Every country treats these differently.

59:13As of June 2026, Bogdanos' unit had recovered over 6 ,000 antiquities from 38 countries, valued at nearly half a billion dollars. Next week in part two of our series, we will get on a plane to visit the museum at the center of this controversy over returning art. Which museum? Stop me if you've heard this one before. Why are the Great Pyramids in Egypt? Because they were too big to fit into the British Museum. That's next time on the show. Until then, take care of yourself and if you can, someone else too. Freakonomics Radio is produced by Renbud Radio. You can find our entire archive on any podcast app.

59:58It's also at Freakonomics.com, where we publish transcripts and show notes. This episode was originally produced by Morgan Levy and updated by Dalvin Abawaji. It was edited by Gabriel Roth and mixed by Jake Loomis. The Freakonomics Radio network staff also includes Augusta Chapman, Eleanor Osborne, Ellen Frankman, Elsa Hernandez, Ilaria Montenecourt, Jeremy Johnston, Pete Madden, and Tao Jacobs. Our theme song is Mr. Fortune by the Hitchhikers, and our composer is Luis Guerra. As always, thanks for listening.

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