The case of the stolen masks

0:00This is Planet Money from NPR. One morning, 30 years ago, Yagya Kumar Pradhan was in his village in Nepal. He was washing his face at a communal spigot when he got some terrible news. I was washing my face when someone told me the temple doors had been broken down. The locks were busted and someone had broken into their private Hindu temple. Yagya called the police. When they arrived, they all went into the temple together. Things were overturned, some were broken. It was a total mess.

0:44Small pieces of idols were scattered all over. Hands were missing and legs were missing from some of the small idols. And as he looked around, he realized... They only took the masks. Two masks had been taken, stolen. Yagya is kind of a Hindu priest for his clan, and these two masks had been in his family for more than 500 years, since the 16th century. They're called Bairav masks. Bairav is a protector god, a caretaker of female gods and energy. These two masks were ornate, they were a few feet tall, they were coated in copper, they had skulls and snakes winding through the hair. And these huge bulging eyes.

1:29And when Yagya was a kid, these masks kind of terrified him. I was six or seven years old when I saw them for the first time. We didn't look at them. We were scared of their big, big eyes. Sometimes I'd hide behind my parents and take a peek. These masks may have been scary, but they were important. Very holy, people made offerings to them. Yagya says that during the fall festival, they would pour beer through the masks' mouths and people would gather underneath to get a sip. But now these holy masks had been stolen. And Yagya knew why.

2:13They're not taking them to worship. They're all stolen to take overseas, right? Because foreigners are willing to buy them, people steal them. These kinds of valuable cultural properties are only made in Nepal. Yagya assumed the masks were gone for good. But that was not the case. These two masks were actually hiding in plain sight. And the question was, what would it take to bring them home? Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Nick Fountain. And I'm Erika Barris. Yagya's stolen masks would go on a 30-year journey around the world. They'd be smuggled across continents, sold at auctions, and eventually they'd end up in fancy museums.

2:54Today on the show, The Case of the Stolen Masks. It's the story of a group of amateur art detectives who use modern tools, subterfuge, and the power of the law to return stolen artifacts to their rightful owners. And who are part of this movement that is dramatically changing the way museums and the art world actually work.

3:19In the decades after Yagya's masks were stolen, the case had gone cold. Yagya had run out of leads. But then in 2022, one of his relatives was online and he found a network of amateur detectives. They scour pictures on museum websites and try to match those pictures to items that have been stolen from Nepal. The group is called Lost Arts of Nepal. So Yagya's relative reached out. He sent Lost Arts of Nepal photos of the stolen masks, and they posted them online and tagged a few amateur art detectives, including Erin Thompson. So I'm in the kitchen waiting for the bagels to finish toasting, and I'm thumbing through my phone, and I see on Facebook a photograph pop-up.

4:10Well, two photographs, actually. Erin is an art historian and lawyer. And while most people go to museums to take in art, Erin's hobby is to go to museums to look for stolen art. I have this image of your kitchen wall just looks like, you know, the red tape. And you're like, ha, there it wins. And there it wins. Well, it's not so much the kitchen wall filled full of string. It's the intense spreadsheeting of I found this piece of information in this archive and that one in another one. I'm currently tracking hundreds of objects brought out of Nepal. Which brings us back to those Facebook photos Erin saw when she was toasting her bagels.

4:48The two photos were posted by that group, Lost Arts of Nepal. One was an old photo of the Bayrov masks from Yaga's family. And the other, well, the other was a photo of a mask in a museum. And that museum, it was just a few blocks away from Erin's apartment. Yes, the Rubin Museum of Art. Aaron knew it very well, especially their gallery of Nepalese art. So you walk into the gallery and bam, there's Bayrav. He is the boss of the gallery, a showstopper, a spectacular masterpiece of the museum. Aaron knew the Bayrav mask, but was it the same one as in the Facebook post? She had to go check for herself.

5:31She finishes her bagel, heads to the museum. It's actually not open yet. But when the doors open, she runs right to the Nepalese gallery. I got to the case and took some dignified normal photographs just standing up and then found Lost Arts Post to see the angles of the family photographs and then started ducking and weaving to try and recreate those angles. You feel like anybody was looking at you like, what is that? What is she doing? What is that woman doing? Oh, 100%. But museum visitors can do some weird stuff. So I figured it's just one of the many weirdos in a museum that day. Right then and there, Erin knew.

6:15This is the same object. There's no denying it. Now, Erin has been in this situation before. She's found dozens of pieces of stolen art and helped bring some of them home to their rightful owners. And she says there's a process. We could have approached the museum and said, hey, here's a photo. And they probably would have said, okay, we're sending it back right away. Really? Does it ever work that cleanly? Like the museum sees it and goes, oh, yes. Oops. Here you go. Here's this object. Well, yes. But if you want more information to build a picture of how these objects were stolen, how they were laundered and got fake paperwork, who is involved in buying and selling them.

7:00So sometimes you don't want the objects as much as you want the information. Now, up until this point, Erin had just wanted to reunite Yagya with his stolen Bayrov masks. And she had the evidence to do that. But at this moment, she decides. She doesn't just want to get the masks back to Yagya. She also wants to make sure that this never happens again. And to do that, she needs to uncover the smuggling network that led to the theft in the first place and shut it down forever. For an object to transform from stolen goods into an artwork that can be displayed to museum visitors takes a whole system of conservation, restoration, auction houses, dealers, etc.

7:51etc. Aaron teams up with Lost Arts of Nepal, which, by the way, is a very secretive organization. We don't know if it's like one person, if it's many people, but they told us they want to remain anonymous. And that might be because speaking out could make them a target for smugglers. In order to make a case against, say, a smuggling ring, Aaron and Lost Arts of Nepal are going to need to gather lots of evidence. Evidence that they'll end up giving to the Manhattan District attorney's office. There, they have an entire unit called the Antiquities Trafficking Unit. So the DA's office will want evidence that this wasn't a sale.

8:29You know, did somebody regard this as an old Tashkent tchotchke they didn't want anymore, so they might as well sell it to some tourist or some foreign dealer and make some money. So Erin starts tracing where the mask at the Rubin Museum came from. And her partners at Lost Arts of Nepal start trying to figure out what happened to the masks in Nepal. Erin learns a few things. This mask was actually part of a set. The other mask appeared to be at the Dallas Museum of Art. And she finds evidence that one of them had been sold in the year 2000 for$85 ,000. And it was at one of the big auction houses, Christie's.

9:07Auction houses. You know, the paddles flying into the air, people bidding on jewels and rare champagnes. lots of artwork passes through auction houses. The two big ones are Sotheby's and Christie's. A lot of people think, oh, if it's sold by a big auction house by Christie's or Sotheby's, it must be legal for me to buy. It must be an unproblematic object. But that's just not true. The auction house only makes money if it sells the objects. And if it has to say, oh, sorry, these were stolen. They don't make money. Yeah, the auction houses make money when they facilitate sales. And most of the time, there are no names attached to those sales.

9:48That seems a little odd to me. How do you not know who sold it and bought it? The whole point of the auction house is to conceal who sold and bought it. Okay, so there's no way of knowing then? There's no way a member of the public can know that. The only people who can know are authorities who can subpoena the records of the auction house. Erin says to think of the way cultural artifacts in the U.S. are bought and sold as don't ask, don't tell. Right. So she puts together a case file with all the evidence that she and Lost Arts of Nepal have gathered so far. The photos of the masks and evidence that one had been sold at Christie's, which will be helpful to the Manhattan DA's office.

10:29They can subpoena Christie's for info about the seller and the buyer. And Aaron also knows that the DA's office will want incontrovertible proof that the mask was indeed stolen. And here there's a particular type of law that can be very helpful. Yeah, a little background here. Markets for stolen objects exist as long as there is supply. So some countries have tried to cut off the supply of these stolen objects. They've passed what are called patrimony laws, which say for the most part, objects that are culturally or historically significant are not allowed to be sold and exported from a country.

11:07So like even if someone owns something, they cannot sell it abroad because it's not legally allowed to leave its home country. So Nepal banned the export of these type of ritual sacred cultural goods in 1956, which is before they were of desire to collectors in the West. It wasn't until the 60s and 70s that you have the fad for sort of Eastern spirituality, in scare quotes, yoga, tofu, and these beautiful objects. So they start to get stolen. They start to get smuggled out of Nepal. Whenever you see a sacred artifact from Nepal, outside of Nepal, you know it's not there with the consent of Nepalese.

11:52Now, museums are, of course, aware of this law. But smugglers will forge paperwork to show that the object left Nepal before 1956, which makes the object look legit. And indeed, when the Rubin Museum acquired the mask, it came with an official report which found that the mask had not been reported as stolen. But Yagya had reported the mask stolen. When his family's temple was broken into and he called the police, they had written up a police report. And Yagya, he had kept the report for nearly 30 years. Erin adds the police report to the case file, along with the photos of the masks and the evidence from Christie's.

12:32She sends it all to the Manhattan DA's Antiquities Trafficking Unit. And the next day, she gets an email back. They basically say we're interested in opening an official case. After the break, what happens next in the case? and what this all means for the future of museums.

12:54Museums have been dealing with the problem of stolen antiquities quite a bit. Recently, there have been thousands of objects identified as stolen and eventually returned to their home countries. Can museums survive this?

13:13Yeah, I mean... That does not sound very convincing. This is Ben Davis. He's a longtime critic at Artnet News and the host of the podcast, The Art Angle. Ben says right now the art world is rethinking their whole system for acquiring art and antiquities. For a time, museum directors described themselves as kind of pirates going out into the world, collecting its treasures and bringing them into Western galleries. But that's not really the vibe anymore. And some institutions are struggling with that legacy, which can be a huge problem. There is a snowball effect where certain kinds of questions that are asked lead to other kind of questions that are asked and they feed off of each other to the point where it really does feel like a new moment.

13:56Yeah, it's not just about Nepalese art. It's about Nazi looted art and Native American art, art from so many places. And Ben says the reckoning happening in the art world boils down to three big problems for museums. One is diplomatic problems. Right. This is not like a good look. It's not a good look. Yeah. A nation calling up a museum and saying, hey, by the way, you have some of our stolen property. Can we have it back? Okay, that's problem one. What is problem two? Problem two is economic. Lots of museums are nonprofits. And it's hard to fundraise when you're regularly getting investigated and having objects seized.

14:37And that leads to problem number three. It's hard to get people to want to work in an environment that is under this kind of legal and cultural scrutiny. I mean, we're talking looted property, perpetuators of colonization. That makes the museum a less cool place to work. You're going to be associated with, you know, the worst aspects of Western culture. And museums are trying to find solutions. Some have hired staff whose only job is to look at where exactly their items came from and decide whether they should keep them. One museum that won't have to worry about these problems is the museum that had Yagya's Bayrov mask, the Rubin Museum.

15:20They've decided to close their doors later this year. They say they're going to become a museum of traveling exhibitions, lending out pieces here, bringing exhibits there. But yeah, no more physical museum anymore. And the Rubin says this change doesn't have anything to do with how things ended up with the case of the stolen masks, which is this. After Aaron sent all that information to the Manhattan DA, they got to work. They worked backwards, tracking the masks from the museums, this time with subpoena power. The one that ended up at the Rubin, turned out, came from a private French collection.

15:57Before that, it had been sold at Sotheby's, and at some point before that, it had passed through Hong Kong. The other mask, the one in Dallas, that one also came from a private collection and it also passed through Hong Kong. Hong Kong is one of the places where stolen art can get forged papers and leave Asia. Now, no one has been prosecuted for trafficking the masks yet. We reached out to the Manhattan DA's office. They didn't want to be interviewed, but they told us their investigation is still ongoing. Which brings us to the last leg of the journey for Yag-Yag's masks. A year ago, the DA's office approached both museums with evidence that the masks had been stolen.

16:35And they both said, yeah, they should go back to Nepal. A few months ago, the DA's office held a repatriation ceremony in New York City. We are receiving them today, and we feel the last guards were being held. That's an official from Nepal. I convey deep gratitude and utmost appreciation from the government and people of Nepal and the consulate general to the district Manhattan district. And big news, Yagya's masks are now home in Nepal after their 30-year journey. We hadn't even imagined having those returned. Yagya never stopped thinking about the masks. Sometimes he'd see similar-looking Bayarov masks in magazines from abroad.

17:24I've collected pictures of gods and goddesses, and I used to wonder where they could be. If a foreigner gets them, they would surely keep them private, in a showroom or a museum. He says his family is building a new temple where these masks will be kept. And in the meantime, you can see them at the National Museum in Kathmandu. There's a Nepali saying. But even the river changes its direction in 12 years. So the return of this idol after 30 years proves that such things can be returned back if you can find the source. Yagya says when the new temple is built, a stronger lock is going in. And they're going to put in a guard system.

18:22James Sneed produced today's episode. It was edited by Jess Jang and fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. Siring Vista did the voiceover work, engineering by James Willits. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer. Prava Adhikari and Pragati Shahi were our interpreters. Also, special thanks to Sanjay Adhikari and Roshan Mishra. I'm Erica Barris. I'm Nick Fountain. This is NPR. Thank you for listening.

18:50Thank you.