the government says museums should be very careful to make sure all artifacts are purchased or donated legitimately
- From: Chim <ChimS1@xxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 26 Jan 2008 02:19:55 -0800 (PST)
Murky Provenance
As the California museum scandal unfolds, the government says museums
should be very careful to make sure all artifacts are purchased or
donated legitimately.
By Andrew Murr
Newsweek Web Exclusive
Updated: 9:08 PM ET Jan 25, 2008
Two mysterious men lie at the heart of the burgeoning museum scandal
in Southern California. Robert Olson is a California antiquities
dealer who has spent some 25 years buying and selling prehistoric
Native American material and valuable Asian art including statues of
Buddha, bronze weapons and 2,000-year-old ceramics from Thailand's Ban
Chiang site. The former steel-company salesman, now 79 and based in
Cerritos, Calif., sold artifacts to collectors, dealers and museums--
and even on eBay. In early 2003, he met a collector named Tom Hoyt,
who said he was a computer executive anxious to get help in building
his collection. Over the past five years, Olson and Hoyt met two dozen
times, and the older man sold the younger one Thai goods and
introduced him to museum curators and collectors so that the man could
make donations of pieces from his newly acquired collections for a
healthy tax credit.
In reality, "Hoyt" was a pseudonym, and the man as really an
undercover agent for the National Park Service who was the sharp end
of an investigation into artifacts smuggling. According to federal
documents, the thin man with the mustache (whose real name hasn't been
released) recorded dozens of conversations and hundreds of phone calls
with Olson and other dealers. The undercover investigation into the
art market burst into public Thursday as 500 federal agents executed
search warrants at the properties of dealers, collectors and four
respected Southern California art museums, including the Los Angeles
County Museum of Art (LACMA).
The raids made public a five-year-old federal undercover investigation
aimed at stopping an alleged black-market trade in artifacts from
Thailand, China, Burma, Cambodia and the American Southwest. No one
was arrested, and no charges have been filed in the case. The
investigation seemed intended to strike a blow at an alleged multi-
billion-dollar worldwide trade in looted artifacts by sending dealers
and museum officials a clear and urgent message: "We intend to change
the culture of museums in this country," Assistant U.S. Attorney
Joseph O. Johns, the investigation's lead prosecutor, told NEWSWEEK.
Reached by NEWSWEEK on Thursday evening, Olson agreed that he dealt in
Native American and Thai art, but he repeatedly maintained he'd kept
on the right side of the law. "I haven't done anything wrong or
illegal," Olson insisted. "I never dealt in stolen goods." Olson now
calls the man he knew as Tom Hoyt a "a son of a bitch." According to
search-warrant affidavits, Olson first attracted the attention of
investigators in 2003 when an unnamed alleged smuggler steered
authorities to Olson regarding Native American art. "Hoyt" then
allegedly made purchases of Thai goods. Then the Feds tracked Olson as
he allegedly imported at least 16 shipments of goods from Thailand.
The four museums targeted in Thursday's raids included LACMA, the
Pacific Asian Museum in Pasadena, the Charles S. Bowers Museum in
Santa Ana and the Mingei International Museum in San Diego. Agents
seized or copied computer records at all four in order to learn more
about the values of donated Asian and Native American artifacts. Each
museum issued statements stressing that they were cooperating with
federal investigators. "The Bowers Museum has fully cooperated with
federal agents," the museum said. Saying that it too was cooperating,
LACMA director Michael Govan said that the museum has "a history of
returning works of art where ownership claims are substantiated." It
remained unclear how many art items may have been seized from the
museums.
Peter Keller, president of the Bowers Museum, told NEWSWEEK that he
believes he and his staff did nothing wrong. "The Bowers Museum
followed standard museum procedures in its acceptance of donations,"
Keller said Friday. The museum did not become involved in the
appraisal value of donated gifts, he says. Most of the relationship
between the museum and Olson came from a Bowers curator named Armand
Labbé, who died in 2005. Keller allows that it is possible that "maybe
through Labbé we did" make mistakes, and "when Labbé passed away, we
stopped taking any donations of archeological materials whatever."
Keller points out that although "Hoyt" made two donations during
Labbé's lifetime, the undercover operative "was quite agitated" when
Keller refused to accept a third donation.
According to the federal affidavits, the Feds will use information
gleaned from the raids to establish whether looted goods were sold or
donated to the museums and whether museum officials knew about the
allegedly doubtful provenance. Investigators are also gathering
evidence about potential tax violations based on those donations in
which the donors would receive artificially high charitable write-offs
because the dealers and the museums approved inflated appraisals three
and four times the price that the undercover operative actually paid
the dealer. In one transaction laid out in the affidavits, the Park
Service operative allegedly paid Olson $12,000 for two sets of Thai
items that were then appraised at $44,700 and donated to the Bowers
Museum in 2003 and 2004. Olson, who said he has yet to consult an
attorney, denied any involvement in tax scams. He accounted for the
disparity in pricing by saying that he charged the undercover
operative "wholesale" prices for the goods he sold him, and the
appraisals were made at "retail" prices.
In Thursday's raids, Olson said that agents also visited two of his
warehouses, as well as the home of his adult son and daughter. In
addition, Olson says that another federal raid took place in the
Chicago area, at the home of "my best customer." He declined to name
the person, as did federal officials. Agents also raided The Silk
Roads Gallery in Los Angeles and the home of its owners, Jon and Cari
Markell. According to the affidavits, the Markells dealt in goods from
Thailand, Burma and China, and donated goods to LACMA and other
museums. The Markells did not reply to telephone or e-mail requests
for comment.
If the allegations are true, the investigation will prove to be
another embarrassment to American art museums, which have been rocked
in recent years by revelations that high-profile collections contain
stolen artworks brought to them by a shadowy network of looters,
collectors and dealers. Last year, California's Getty Museum agreed to
return 40 items to Italy, including million-dollar statues that the
Italians claim were looted by local thieves and then sold to the
museum. Former antiquities curator Marion True is on trial in Rome for
related charges. Charges against True, who has repeatedly said she is
not guilty, were dropped in a similar case brought by Greece.
Meanwhile, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Metropolitan
Museum in New York also agreed recently to return looted classical
art, including the Euphronios Krater, a stunning painted terra cotta
urn that the Met returned to Italy this month.
Past scandals started when foreign governments brought complaints;
this case appears to be the first homegrown crackdown on museums for
alleged looting. Applauding "a federal sting operation like those
conducted against other crime networks," archeologist Brian Rose of
the University of Pennsylvania said it was "a good thing" that "looted
antiquities and contraband drugs are being treated as the same thing
[by investigators]." But Rose, who is also president of the
Archaeological Institute of America and a curator at Penn's museum,
adds that many museums have installed tougher provisions to check a
potential acquisition's provenance, or history of ownership, in the
wake of recent scandals. "Museums in general shouldn't be treated as
villains," he added.
According to search-warrant affidavits in the case, federal agents are
exploring whether museum officials and the collectors and dealers
violated federal and state laws blocking the unlimited traffic in
antiquities. Federal laws such as the Archeological Resources
Protection Act prohibit the sale of domestic American archeological
remains recovered on federal lands. They also allow prosecutors to
charge a federal crime when looters violate state law. California law
prohibits the sale of goods whose export is banned in the country of
origin, effectively making the traffic a federal crime, according to
the affidavits.
Much of the furor surrounds artifacts from the Ban Chiang culture in
northeastern Thailand, which flourished between 1,800 to 3,000 years
ago, producing fine ceramics and bronze works. Thailand banned the
unapproved export of antiquities in 1961, and Ban Chiang artifacts
only began to be excavated later that decade, according to the federal
affidavits. Other works came from China, Burma and Cambodia, according
to the federal documents. The Bowers Museum raid also concerned a
collection of Native American ladles found in the Southwest that Olson
said he donated to the museum more than 20 years ago.
As agents sift through the seized records, it may be weeks or even
months before the targets learn whether or not they will be charged in
the case. But long before that, the ongoing sting operation may well
force anxious museum officials around the country to tighten their
acquisition procedures and make looters and dealers much more
careful.
.
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