Here an intresting article by Tom Mashberg posted on the NYT website last February 27.
Federal
investigators on Friday plan to seize an ancient Roman sculpture from
a Queens warehouse on behalf of Italian officials who say there is
evidence the marble statue of a reclining, half-clad woman valued at
$4 million was looted from Italy decades ago.
United
States officials said that they began tracking the life-size,
1,700-pound statue last year after they were alerted that it had been
exhibited for sale at the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan by Phoenix
Ancient Art.
In
a complaint filed on Thursday in federal court in Brooklyn, the
authorities said the sculpture had served as the lid on an
1,800-year-old sarcophagus of a Roman noblewoman, and was probably
looted in the 1970s or early 1980s. Officials said they did not know
when the statue entered the United States or where precisely it came
from in Italy.
But
they said they believe it to be one of the antiquities obtained
illegally by Gianfranco Becchina, a longtime Italian art dealer who
was convicted in 2011 of trafficking in thousands of plundered Roman
artifacts.
Photographs
of the statue were among thousands of pictures of looted antiquities
found in Mr. Becchina’s Swiss gallery in 2002, the officials said.
Henry
J. Bergman, a lawyer for Phoenix, said the gallery did not own the
statue and had “only exhibited it on behalf of a client,” whom he
declined to identify “on grounds of confidentiality.” Mr. Bergman
said Phoenix had not played a role in shipping, importing or storing
the item.
The
complaint was filed by the United States attorney’s office for the
Eastern District of New York based on an investigation by the
Department of Homeland Security.
“The
forfeiture of this sarcophagus lid brings us one step closer to
returning this stolen treasure to its rightful owner: the Italian
people,” said James T. Hayes Jr., the special agent in charge of
homeland security investigations in New York.
This
month, investigators learned that the statue was at a storage
facility in Long Island City, Queens, and arranged to take photos of
it, officials said.
The
Italian cultural police then matched those photos to others that had
been seized from Mr. Becchina’s Swiss gallery.
Mr.
Becchina, an Italian citizen who operated from Basel, was prosecuted
in Italy after investigators examined archaeological artifacts,
commercial documents and photographs of thousands of illegally
excavated items that had been sold by him and his associates as far
back and the late 1970s.
Some
of the records found that the sculpture, which represents the
mythological figure Ariadne, was bought by Mr. Becchina in Italy and
then shipped to his gallery in Switzerland in 1981. The item was
exhibited for three months in late 1982 and early 1983 at a Swiss
museum.
Federal
officials said they were not sure where the item was between 1983 and
2013.
“We’re
still investigating, and can’t confirm who currently owns or has an
interest in the property,” said Karin Orenstein, the assistant
United States attorney handling the case.
Here the link to see the original page:
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