The History Blog

On February 10, 2008, three armed men wearing ski masks walked into the E.G. Buehrle Collection in Zurich, Switzerland. While one of them held staff and visitors at gunpoint, the other two helped themselves to four Impressionist masterpieces: Claude Monet’s Poppies near Vetheuil, Edgar Degas’ Count Lepic and his Daughters, Vincent Van Gogh’s Blossoming Chestnut Branches and Paul Cezanne’s The Boy in the Red Vest. It was one of the largest heists in Europe in terms of market value. The four paintings were worth an estimated $163.2 million.

Converting famous paintings into quick cash is rarely as easy as thieves imagine, however. The Van Gogh and Monet were found a week later in a car parked outside a Zurich psychiatric hospital. The remaining two disappeared without a trace.

Witnesses at the Zurich museum testified that the thieves spoke German with Slav accents. Two years ago, Serbia’s Anti-Organized Crime Unit, in collaboration with the police of several other European countries, opened an investigation into the theft. They uncovered a plan by four men to sell the Cezanne to a Serbian buyer for three million euros (about $4 million). The plan was thwarted when ringleader Ivan Pekovic was cornered in a parking lot after a high-speed chase through the streets of Belgrade.

The Cezanne was found in his car along with a cache of firearms and more than £1 million ($1.6 million) in cash. Police arrested two other men thought to be part of the ring, one in Belgrade and one in the southern town of Cacek.

A museum curator quoted by Serbia’s Blic newspaper said criminals smuggle artwork stolen in Western Europe through Serbia and on to Montenegro where they are then sold for cash to members of the Russian oligarchs eager to get their hands on a masterpiece.

Another network takes stolen art to Kosovo where thieves sell it to rich Albanians.

The recovered painting has been authenticated by a Swiss expert. It is indeed the missing Boy in the Red Vest, one of four slightly differing versions made by the Impressionist master. The other three are in museums in the United States.

That leaves only the Degas still to be found. According to this BBC article, Serbian interior minister Ivica Dacic said that the Degas had been found in 2009, but I’ve searched high and low and I can’t find anything about this in the 2009 press. You’d think it would have made just as much of a splash as the recovery of the other three have made.

Late at night on Thursday, April 5th, burglars broke through the brick wall of Durham University’s Oriental Museum, smashed two display cases and stole two Qing Dynasty artifacts worth a combined $3.2 million. That’s undervalued in terms of market pricing, I’m sure, because Chinese antiquities are breaking sales records left and right these days, and it’s undervalued in terms of historical and artistic significance. The museum considers the artifacts, high quality pieces from China’s last imperial dynasty, priceless.

The objects are an intricately carved, dark green jade bowl from 1769 and a Dehua porcelain figurine depicting seven fairies in a boat from the 17th century. The bowl has a poem engraved on the inside bottom. The figurine is covered inside and out in a milk-white glaze known as blanc de Chine that is characteristic of the Dehua area kilns. They are easily portable and highly desirable to unscrupulous collectors.

The senior investigating officer, Det Supt Adrian Green said he estimated the burglars had been in the premises for only a minute or two at the most once they forced entry.

“It seems very clear that this was a well-planned, highly organised break-in. They have spent around 40 minutes creating a hole in an outside wall and when it has been big enough, they have entered the gallery and made straight for these two items,” said Det Supt Green.

“I am sure this job has been planned for quite some time and I would think the artefacts have been stolen to order, for someone who has already identified a potential market.”

Alarms did go off, alerting museum security and the police, but the burglars were able to escape before the authorities got there.

Durham Police are pursuing the case with vigour. They are looking for any information people might have regarding the movements of a light blue Audi A3 and an orange Renault Megane. The cars were spotted in the area right before and after the crime. They’ve also arrested five people already on suspicion of assisting the thieves or conspiracy to commit burglary. The five suspects were interrogated and then released on bail, but police want one of them back. The authorities have released the pictures of two people they’re particularly keen on interviewing, Lee Paul Wildman (35) who was one of the five suspects detained earlier, and Adrian Mark Stanton (32).

Should you have any information about the burglary, suspects or cars, please call the Durham Constabulary at 0345 60 60 365 or Crimestoppers at 0800 555111. Sadly, the museum will be closed until further notice.

Greek police raided a home on the hills outside of Athens and discovered a nearly intact ancient marble kore hidden in the goat pen. The 40-year-old goat herder and a 56-year-old man thought to be his accomplice were arrested. The two were trying to sell the statue to a private buyer for €500,000 ($667,000), a large sum for them, but a small fraction of the maiden’s market value. Experts estimate she’d make something more along the lines of $12 million if she were sold in the open market.

The kore (Greek for “maiden”; the male equivalent is “kouros”) is just under four feet tall (1.2 meters) and dates to the Late Archaic period of Greek sculpture, around 520 B.C. She’s missing her left forearm and the plinth under her feet, but otherwise she is complete. Her curled hair frames the serene countenance known as an archaic smile, and her clothes, a modest combination of chiton and peplos, are still caked with the dirt of her recent illegal excavation. Her missing forearm probably held an offering like a pomegranate.

Korai were votive or memorial statues found at religious and funerary sites. Although they have been found all over Greece, it’s very rare that an intact one is discovered at this late date, and since this kore dates to a transitional period wherein the formalism of the Archaic gave way to the stunning realism of Classical Greek art, she holds an important place in art history.

In fact, she looks very much like the Peplos Kore, a marble statue from ca. 530 B.C. that was discovered on the Acropolis in 1884 and is now in the Archaic Gallery of the new Acropolis Museum. The Peplos Kore has traces of her original paint visible. It was the discovery in the 1880s of the Peplos Kore and other sculptures discarded during renovations to the Acropolis complex after the Persians sacked Athens in 480 B.C. that first made people realize that the stark whiteness of neo-classicism was a-historical, that in truth the ancient Greeks painted their statues in a wide array of incredibly garish (to our eyes) colors. The Peplos Kore has been an invaluable source of information about Greek sculpture painting.

Archaeologists hope the looters will reveal where they dug up this kore. There could be an undiscovered sanctuary or temple on the site, or at least some identifiable remnants of archaeological context for the looted statue.

The heart of St. Laurence O’Toole, patron saint of Dublin, was stolen from Christ Church Cathedral sometime between midnight and 12:30 PM Saturday. The heart of the 12th century saint was kept in a heart-shaped wooden box which was held inside a container made of iron bars and hung by a chain on display in Saint Lauds Chapel. The thief or thieves used bolt cutters to break off then bend back the bars on the front side of the box, then reached in and took the wooden box.

Gardaí (Irish police officers) are investigating. They’ve checked CCTV footage of everyone who entered the cathedral between the time it opened at 9:30 AM and when the theft was discovered at 12:30 PM. There were about 40 visitors during that period, and none of them are filmed walking out with a heart-shaped box. There are no signs of a break-in, so it’s possible the thief hid in the church before it was closed for the night only to emerge, steal the heart, and sneak away unseen. A staffer saw a lit candle in the church when he arrived to open the cathedral doors in the morning, perhaps lit by the thief for the expiation of at least one major sin.

The dean of Christ Church Cathedral, the Rev Dermot Dunne, said he was “devastated” by the theft. “It is a priceless treasure that links our present foundation with its founding father,” he said. A church spokeswoman added: “It’s completely bizarre. They didn’t touch anything else. They specifically targeted this. They wanted the heart of Saint Laurence O’Toole.”

There were objects of easily convertible monetary value — like gold chalices and candlesticks — in that chapel that the thieves left untouched.

St. Laurence O’Toole was born Lorcán Ua Tuathail, the son of a local chieftain, in Kildare County, Ireland in 1128. As a boy, Laurence had been kept as a hostage by his father’s liege lord and former enemy. By the time his captivity — which included a spell spent in solitary confinement in a herdsman’s hut — was over, he knew he wanted to be a monk. Despite his ascetic hermit inclinations, he was an extremely successful monk, becoming abbot of a monastery in Glendalough at the age of 25. Just seven years later in 1162 he was made archbishop of Dublin, the first native Irishman to wear that cap.

After the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland in 1170, St. Laurence helped negotiate peace terms between Henry II of England and Irish king Rory O’Connor. Henry was concerned that the Norman knights would carve themselves out fiefdoms on Ireland that would put them beyond his control. The 1175 Treaty of Windsor confirmed Rory O’Connor as High King of Ireland but as a vassal of King Henry II. The rest of the Irish chieftains and kinglings were to keep their territories and titles as long as they acknowledged Henry as their suzerain and paid him tribute via Rory O’Connor. Laurence O’Toole was one of the treaty’s witnesses.

His relationship with Henry deteriorated, however, after St. Laurence went to Rome for the Third Lateran Council in 1179. Henry made Laurence swear that he would uphold Henry’s rights in Ireland at the council, but Laurence saw to it that the Dublin diocese was put under the direct protection of Pope Alexander III. In the Treaty of Windsor, the Irish Church had been structured as subordinate to Canterbury. Henry II very famously was not fond of clerics asserting their rights at the expense of the crown.

In 1180, Rory O’Connor sent St. Laurence to negotiate tribute with Henry II. Henry was in no mood to parlay with Laurence and kept him waiting in England for weeks, refusing to see him. When Henry left for Normandy, Laurence followed him. Sick and exhausted from the voyage, St. Laurence got as far the Abbey of St. Victor at Eu, Normandy before he could go no further. He died at Eu on November 14, 1180.

It was the monks at Eu who documented his life, preserved his mortal remains and kept a record of all the miracles that happened at his tomb. Thanks to that documentation, Pope Honorius III canonized Laurence in 1225, just 45 years after his death. At some point in the next 55 years, his heart was moved to Christ Church Cathedral. The cathedral has been a major pilgrimage site ever since.

For five years Czech writer and historian Jiri Kuchar has been trying to track down 16 paintings from Hitler’s personal art collection that went missing after the war. As of last July, he’s almost halfway there, because he found seven of them in the convent of the Premonstratensian Sisters in Doksany, a small town 30 miles north of Prague.

Hitler bought or stole about 45 paintings and 30 statues for his private collection which he stashed in the Bohemian monastery of Vyssi Brod along with two other complete collections, one formerly owned by German banker Fritz Mannheimer and the other by the Rothschilds in Vienna. After the war, the Mannheimer and Rothschild collections were removed from the monastery and brought to Munich — a central collection point for art looted by the Nazis — by American troops, but they left the paintings from Hitler’s personal collection behind.

The monks weren’t interested in keeping them so they passed on the hot potatoes. The artworks were split up and went through several hands, including museums and parks, before the group of seven wound up at Doksany. It’s not clear when exactly they showed up there or why.

The Doksany convent was first founded in 1144 but closed by order of Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II in 1782 as part of his campaign to modernize and reform the Church. After that, it was used as a hospital and then rebuilt into a castle for the Aehrenthal family. Under Communist rule the building was neglected and badly decayed, but it was still standing when Communism fell in 1989. In 1997 the monastery in the neighboring town of Strahov bought the castle from the state and restored it so it could be used as a convent again for the first time since Joseph II’s suppression of the monasteries.

The sisters had no idea the paintings Kuchar found belonged to Hitler, of course, but despite that unsavory association they intend to keep the art. Since Hitler had lame taste the collection is not of huge artistic importance, but the historical significance could bring millions of dollars if the paintings were sold.

One piece in particular stands out both in quality and in the subject matter: “Memory of Stalingrad” made in 1943 by Franz Eichhorst, Hitler’s favorite painter. It depicts wounded German soldiers in a trench during the Battle of Stalingrad, one of the bloodiest and longest battles in history (from August 23, 1942 to February 2, 1943) which ended in catastrophic defeat for Germany.

Kuchar intends to keep searching for the nine remaining paintings.

“I sent DVDs with the pictures to institutions I thought might have the works,” he said.

He managed to track down several statues and paintings, including a group of statues in the park of the southern chateau of Hluboka, which the administrator has since removed to prevent neo-Nazi tourism.

Kuchar also bemoaned the loss of some works in recent years: “To put it delicately, let’s say they disappeared.”

“I’m afraid there’s a channel leading to the west. I’ve found two of the statues on offer at auction houses, one in Frankfurt, the other in London,” he said, adding one was sold for 150,000 pounds (177,000 euros, $237,000) two years ago.

Two masked men broke into the Siskiyou County Courthouse in Yreka, California and stole the largest nuggets from a display case replete with gold nuggets, leaf, and dust from the area’s rich mining history. They got in through an unlocked window in the back of the courthouse, then broke a hand-sized hole through the thick bulletproof glass covering the display and helped themselves to the choicest pieces they could reach. Court employees discovered the theft when they arrived in the morning.

Surveillance footage timestamps the theft at 1:00 AM on Wednesday. For reasons still unclear, a silent alarm connected to the display never sounded. Authorities are investigating whether the alarm was intentionally disabled in some way or whether it simply malfunctioned. An attempted theft in 1979 was deterred by the silent alarm; the thief stole hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of nugget, but was caught by police just a few blocks away. After that theft, the glass was replaced with even thicker glass and a new alarm installed.

The County Treasurer/Tax Collector Wayne Hammar is the official in charge of the gold. He and his team will inventory the remaining gold to sort out exactly what is left. According to the Sheriff’s office, an estimated third to a half of the gold was stolen, including a famously huge nugget known as the “slipper” or “shoe” because of its shoe-like shape.

The Siskiyou County Courthouse gold was donated to the county over the years since 1851 by miners who lived and worked there. It is (was?) the largest gold display in the continental United States and was exhibited at the 1939 World’s Fair in San Francisco’s Treasure Island. The locals, many of whom have been involved in the mining industry for generations, are deeply connected to these artifacts so dazzlingly symbolic of their history.

That connection is so profound that when faced with a dismal economy the county refused to cash in on their gigantic hoard. They had 20% unemployment in 2010; the county budget was getting slashed left and right. Still, even under that kind of pressure they refused to sell their gold display, worth almost $1,300,000 in gold weight alone and estimated to be worth $3,000,000 because of its historical significance and because the gold is in its natural form rather than melted down into generic ingots.

There’s a very-sad-in-hindsight video of the gold display at the courthouse from 2007 when the Huell Howser PBS show “California’s Gold” filmed a segment there:

Here’s the surveillance video from Wednesday night:

If you have any information about the theft, please contact the Sheriff’s office at 530-841-2900.

Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti is in Tripoli to sign a new treaty with the post-Gaddafi government, and he brought the head of a first century A.D. Roman sculpture with him to seal the deal.

The head belongs to a statue of Flavia Domitilla Minor, the daughter of the emperor Vespasian and sister of emperors Titus and Domitian. The statue was excavated from the UNESCO World Heritage archaeological site of Sabratha and was on display at Sabratha’s Roman museum in 1990 when thieves broke the head off of the body and absconded with it. (Some of the news stories are saying it was stolen in the 1960s, but I think that’s just one of the AP’s trademark typos getting passed around like a game of telephone.)

It turned up last year as lot #261 of the April 14 Antiques sale at Christie’s London. I will give you one guess as to the provenance they claimed on the piece. Oh yeah. It’s our old friend the Swiss private collection. They removed the lot from their website after they got busted, but this article quotes their original lot notes: “private collection, Switzerland, circa 1975; acquired by the present owner in Switzerland in 1988.” It was still attached to its body in a Libyan museum in 1988. Such a blatant lie.

London-based Libyan archaeologist Hafed Walda saw the lot before the auction and alerted Christie’s that it was the Domitilla head stolen from the Sabratha Museum. They ignored him and sold it to an Italian buyer for £91,250 ($142,000). Archaeologist and brilliant blogger Dorothy King also tried to get Christie’s attention but they blew her off too.

My experience of Christie’s is that that’s par for the course, but just in case … I knew they couldn’t give me the buyer’s details, so I asked the head of department, Ms Georgina Aitken, to pass mine on to the buyer as I had some information about the history of the piece. Ms Aitken said she would not do so unless I told her what the information was. I briefly explained that there was evidence to suggest that the head might have been looted and that the provenance was faked, and that Christie’s were aware of this and did nothing. There are more chances of pigs flying than of this information being passed on to the buyer.

Said buyer took his purchase home only to voluntarily relinquish it a few months later to the Carabinieri Art Squad. Christie’s had the audacity to respond thus:

A Christie’s spokesman said: “Additional information was brought to our attention after the auction. We subsequently cancelled the sale and are assisting all relevant bodies with the return of this object.”

See how weaselly that “additional information” bit is? Because Hafed Walda told them where that head really came from before the auction so they couldn’t say they had no idea they were selling stolen goods again. No, they just got additional info long after the fact, you see, that really clinched it for them. Please. Anyway they just reimbursed the buyer and that’s the end of that. No consequences. This is why they keep selling artifacts from “Swiss private collections” over and over again, even when there’s hard evidence that they were stolen.

To close on a less enraging note, here’s a fun fact about Flavia Domitilla Minor: she died at just 21 years old three years before her father Vespasian became emperor in 69 A.D. Twelve years after that, her younger brother Domitian became emperor. He deified her and granted her the title of Augusta.

Her daughter Flavia Domitilla converted to Judaism/Christianity (the Talmud claims the former, Eusebius the latter) and was exiled to the island of Pandataria by her uncle Domitian for her “atheism” which included a refusal to worship her own mother along with the rest of the imperial family and traditional Roman pantheon. She is now a Christian saint and her former property is the exquisite catacomb of Santa Domitilla.

The late 12th century Buddhist temple complex of Banteay Chhmar (also known as the Citadel of the Cats) in Cambodia has been ill-treated by time, climate, war and looters. Banteay Chhmar is the fourth largest temple built during the Angkorian period. It was built 105 miles from the capital of Angkor in a desolate region of northwest Cambodia near the border with Thailand. It’s baking hot in the dry season, the roads are impassable during monsoon season and jungle vegetation thrives.

It was commissioned by King Jayavarman VII in honor of a Crown Prince, probably his son Indravarman. An inscription found at the site describes how four royal servants saved the prince’s life on two separate occasions. The inscription says they died protecting him and thus their images were placed in the four corners of the shrine. The temple is rich with bas-reliefs depicting deities, history and legend of Khmer culture. Angkor Wat has almost no bas-reliefs.

Despite its historical, religious and artistic importance, however, Banteay Chhmar’s remote location and climatological challenges resulted in eight centuries of neglect. The Khmer Rouge used it as a stronghold and mined the perimeter heavily. After the Khmer Rouge left, looters braved the minefields. In one such shameless and depraved act, Cambodian soldiers drove pickup trucks to the temple walls and used jackhammers to remove entire sections of the bas-relief. The theft was only discovered because by random coincidence a French expert who had worked on Banteay Chhmar found a section of the stolen wall in an antiques store in Thailand and called the cops.

In 2007, the KR mines were finally cleared which gave researchers and very adventurous tourists access to the site. The next year California-based Global Heritage Fund (GHF) began working with the local community under the aegis of Cambodia’s Ministry of Culture to conserve the crumbling structures. Their aim is not to put it all back together like new, but rather to address underlying structural issues and damaging plant growth and turn as many piles of stone blocks back into walls, temples and galleries as possible to ensure the long-term survival of this architectural marvel.

What they don’t want is to make Banteay Chhmar the new Angkor Wat, swarmed by a crushing average of 7,000 visitors a day. Right now Banteay Chhmar averages exactly two visitors a day. The local economy, already bolstered by the construction work on the temple, could benefit enormously from the temple’s becoming more popular, but not too popular.

Sustainable tourism is very much a priority for the Global Heritage Fund and for Banteay Chhmar Community-Based Tourism (CBT), an organization of local villagers dedicated to preservation of local heritage for the benefit of the people who live there. There are no hotels in the area, so if you want to visit the CBT has six homestays in Banteay Chhmar village where you can get a room for $7 a night, and you’ll know all that money stays with the villagers instead of lining Paris Hilton’s trust fund. Five bucks will get you entry to the entire temple complex including all the satellite temples over multiple days.

It’s that kind of local investment in the temple’s well-being that will keep it from becoming the victim of unscrupulous looters, tourist exploitation and its own harsh environment.

You can see footage of the conservation work being done on the temple and the marks looters left behind in this short video from the GHF:

If you have time on your hands, watch this fascinating lecture by Banteay Chhmar expert Dr. Olivier Cunin. He’s got architectural reconstructions of how the temple looked when first built and everything.

Thieves broke into an unguarded Roman villa in the tiny northern Spanish burg of Baños de Valdearados (population 419) and brutally hacked out three panels of a 5th century floor mosaic dedicated to the god Bacchus. Two Catalan tourists discovered the monstrous crime on Wednesday, December 28th when they arrived to visit the Roman villa of Santa Cruz and saw through the wooden slats that enclose the ruins that chunks of the mosaic floor were missing.

There is no guard during the winter. The door is padlocked and when tourists come they call a number and someone ambles over to let them in and show them the remains. All the looters had to do to get in is break a couple of the wooden slats. The mosaic was intact when the previous tour was given December 23rd, so the thieves must have broken in some time during that week. Mayor Lorenzo Izcara thinks it went down the night of December 27th, just before the tourists discovered the theft.

The loss is irreparable. The looters used a hammer and chisel to crudely bust out the three panels: a central figurative scene that depicts Bacchus in Triumph standing in his chariot being pulled by a pair of panthers, a hunting scene of a dog chasing a deer labeled “Notus,” the Greek name for the south wind, and another scene of a dog chasing a doe labeled “Boreas,” Greek for the north wind.

The entire mosaic takes up 66 square meters, and the mayor says that considering the enormous size of one of the stolen portions, the criminals must have cut it up in pieces “because it would not have fitted through the hole they made to get in.”

This is not the first time the site has been vandalized. In November, several individuals broke in and destroyed a few square centimeters of the mosaic, forcing authorities to change the locks and adopt a few additional security measures. “The restorer told me then that the mosaic would be very difficult to steal because it had reinforced concrete, but they’ve stolen it all right,” says the mayor, who had already warned the regional government of Castilla y León about the need to improve the site’s surveillance system.

A regional official will be visiting the site this month. Perhaps the immediate horror will get some much-needed investment in security for these off-the-beaten-track gems, but the overall problem remains a knot of Gordian dimensions: 23,000 archaeological sites to protect in the region, no money and personnel to protect them.

It was one of the best preserved Roman mosaics in the country, rare for its immense size (710 square feet), its excellent condition and for the rare combination of Bacchic scenes depicting both the god’s betrothal to Ariadne and his Triumph. Only two other known mosaics depict both those scenes.

The stolen pieces will be almost impossible to sell openly because of how recognizable they are. The police and mayor think the theft was commissioned by an unscrupulous private collector/rapist. I don’t know how likely that is. Art thefts often get chalked up to shady commissions, then you find the Picassos in the trunk of a car years later because the thieves were unable to sell their ill-gotten gain. Also, I don’t really see this artsy Blofeld being thrilled when his minions hand over hacked out chunks of mosaic. If someone is commissioning thefts of antiquities, they probably require their stuff be handled with care or else it’s into the pool with the sharks with frickin’ laser beams attached to their frickin’ heads.

The Roman villa of Santa Cruz was unearthed in November of 1972 during farm work. Excavations ended after a few years with only an estimated fourth of the site uncovered, including the Bacchic mosaic. The digs revealed an elaborate villa with at least 10 rooms, including baths heated by a hypocaust system, and four halls. The home is typical of late Imperial period (between the fourth and sixth centuries) latifundia, great agricultural estates manned by vast numbers of slaves and owned by absentee landlords.

The New Mexico History Museum returned a gold pendant shaped like a monkey’s head from the pre-Columbian Moche culture (ca. 100-800 A.D.) to Peruvian embassy officials in a ceremony in Washington, D.C. on Thursday. The monkey is 1.75 inches high by 2.25 inches wide, with turquoise and shell eyes, a turquoise tongue, a lapis lazuli nose and a ball inside that makes the head rattle when you shake it. It’s a superb example of Moche workmanship, probably worn on a necklace by royalty or other august personages.

So superb, in fact, that Peruvian archaeologist Walter Alva, who along with his wife Susana Meneses discovered the spectacular Moche Lord of Sipán tomb in 1987, thought it looked a little too familiar when he saw it on display at the Art of Ancient America exhibit in the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe in 1998. The Sipán tomb, which Alva had discovered intact, was looted shortly after its discovery by brothers Juan, Samuel, Emilio, and Ernil Bernal. They dragged dozens of sacks full of gold from the tomb to their house, buried the loot in their backyard and then sold it all off to eager collectors who, as usual, asked no questions.

The monkey was purchased by collector John Bourne in the late 80s along with a number of other Moche artifacts for $120,000. He donated it to the New Mexico History Museum in 1995. He also loaned two Moche ear spools and a gold rattle for the 1998 exhibit, although he retained ownership of those items. Bourne denied that the monkey’s head (or the other pieces) came from Sipán. He claimed instead that it came from La Mina, another Moche archaeological site in north Peru which was looted in 1988. This is no rebuttal to the charge that Bourne bought stolen goods, of course, since even if it did come from La Mina its theft and export were just as illegal as they would have been had the artifact come from the more famous Sipán site. As a legal maneuver, however, it was damned effective because establishing which site an artifact was stolen from is a basic requirement of making the case in a court of law.

The Peruvian government officially requested that the artifact be repatriated since it had been looted from the Sipán archaeological site and exported against Peruvian law. Alva went directly to the FBI, which opened an investigation in September of 1998. Citing the National Stolen Property Act, the FBI seized the monkey, ear spools and rattle, but since experts disagreed on whether they had been stolen from Sipán (as Alva and Peru alleged) or from La Mina (as Bourne claimed), in 2000 the U.S. Attorney General’s office in Albuquerque declined to prosecute. The pieces went back to the museum where they remained on display until 2008 and then the loaned objects were returned to Bourne.

That’s where things stood until this Spring. In May of this year, Peru wrote to Attorney General Eric Holder asking the Department of Justice to look into the situation. In October, the Board of Regents of the Museum of New Mexico voted to return the monkey head to Peru.

Pet peeve time. U.S. Attorney Charles M. Oberly III made the following statement about the return of the gold monkey:

“This repatriation is the result of the joint efforts of this office, the FBI Art Crime Team, the Department of Justice Office of International Affairs, the New Mexico Attorney General’s Office and the Museum of New Mexico. I commend all parties for their efforts in producing this positive outcome. In particular, I commend the Museum of New Mexico for its selfless and noble action in returning this invaluable artifact to Peru. Artifacts like this Moche monkey head represent the history not only of the source country, in this case Peru, but the history of all mankind. We hope that this repatriation will help repair at least some of the damage caused by the looting of Moche sites.”

What is with the legal authorities kissing the ass of museums and collectors who finally return the stolen goods they refused to cough up for decades? The Museum of New Mexico was not selfless and noble in returning this invaluable artifact they KNEW was stolen all along.