A mosaic of an intimate scene that was stolen from Italy during World War II has been repatriated to Pompeii. The mosaic on a slab of travertine was gifted to a German citizen, now deceased, by a captain of the Wehrmacht who had helped himself to it in 1944 during the German occupation of Italy. The officer was in charge of military supplies in Italy during World War II.

There are no more details about its origins on the record. The small amount of information we have comes from the heirs of the deceased who realized it had to have been illegally removed from Italy and voluntarily contacted authorities to return the mosaic.

Dating to between the middle of the 1st century B.C. and the 1st century A.D., the mosaic depicts a semi-nude woman with her back to the viewer reaching out to a semi-nude man reclining on a couch. This was a domestic scene rather than the erotic encounter from mythology that were the preferred motifs of the earlier Hellenistic era (4th-1st century B.C.). It is an important example of the transition from heroic figural iconography to domestic love as an artistic motif.

The mosaic is executed in the opus vermiculatum technique, figural mosaics made of small tesserae in undulating lines (vermiculatum means worm-like). This type of mosaic work was primarily used for emblemata, the most finely crafted, detailed panels at the center surrounded by floral and geometric motifs created with larger tesserae in the opus tessellatum technique.

Small emblemata with domestic scenes like this typically decorated the center of cubiculae, the bedrooms of Roman homes. There are a few comparable pieces — meticulous opus vermiculatum mosaics on travertine slabs — in the National Archaeological Museum of Naples, several of which are known to have come from the luxury villas of Stabiae. While its original home cannot be pinpointed with precision, experts from the Office for the Protection of Archaeological Heritage of the Archaeological Park of Pompeii were able to determine that it came from one of the towns under the shadow of Vesuvius.

The panel has been put on temporary display at the Antiquarium of Pompeii where it can be on view to the public pending further analysis and conservation.

Let’s return to August 2015, when the Prometheus mosaic entered the United States illegally from Turkey, cached in a shipment of cheap vases and two other modern mosaics vaguely described as “ceramic, unglazed tiles.” There was an invoice dated June 4, 2015, from a dealer in Turkey listing the ostensible contents and cost of the shipment. At the bottom of the invoice was a statement that is the fake document equivalent of the Not Sure If meme: “We Hereby declare and Certify that the contents covered by this receipt are all Turkish origin and has nothing to do whit [sic] Israel what so ever.” Well, the Israel part is true anyway, bizarre and apropos of nothing, but true. The “all Turkish origin” part, on the other hand…

Mohamad Yassin Alcharihi had engaged Soo Hoo Customs Brokers of Commerce, California, to expedite the movement of his shipment through customs and because of his lies, the container received no extra scrutiny and was trucked to his house in Palmdale. Even if they have looked into it further, the age and importance of the mosaic was obscured by its condition. It had been removed from the ground, adhered to a backing and rolled up for ease of concealment, leaving many tiles crushed and the whole mosaic in need of expert conservation. He engaged Miotto Mosaic Art Studios to restore the mosaic (pdf). They removed the previous adhesive and fabric backing, put the mosaic on a new backing and filled in areas of loss with marble tesserae custom-cut to match the originals.

By the beginning of March, Alcharihi was ready to sell it. Then on March 19, FBI and Homeland Security agents rained on his parade with a search and seizure warrant. The mosaic was seized, and so were a whole bunch of relevant documents (pdf). One of them the real sales contract between Alcharihi and the Turkish dealer Ahmet Costanci. In this contract, Alcharihi agreed to buy the mosaic for 36,000 Turkish lira ($12,000 to $13,000), including shipping. The rest was all window dressing.

Federal agents also found the fraudulent provenance document he had freshly ginned-up only days before the search, and boy oh boy is it a ludicrous concoction. It was a signed and notarized declaration from his neighbor that she had sold “a rolled Mosaic carpet” that had belonged to her late father since the early 1970s to Alcharihi at a yard sale in 2009. When the agents interviewed the neighbor, she said she had sold him a rolled up throw rug, not a rolled up mosaic, in 2009 for less than $100. She thought it was strange that he was asking her to sign a document about a small rug purchase he’d made six years later, but since she doesn’t speak or read English, she had no idea of the bullshit she was signing. It’s enough to make you yearn for a photocopy of a photocopy of a letter from an anonymous Swiss collector.

But it was his computer and phone, also seized by the Feds, that held the real motherlode of information. They found emails to potential buyers from late 2015 claiming the mosaic was removed from a destroyed historic building in Idlib, northwestern Syria. His cover was that the owners of the property removed it in 2010 and sent it to Turkey for restoration and sale. (A government expert later determined that the mosaic’s style is consistent with mosaics found in the city of Idlib and environs.) This email also claimed the mosaic was from the Hellenistic era (lol no), that it depicted Zeus, Hercules, Aphrodite “with her famous baby boy, with two other persons and a black bird” in a scene from “a story of releasing Zeus from prison after he was captured in a war by his enemies.” Evidently this clown couldn’t trouble himself to crack Bullfinch’s Mythology or even Wikipedia to get some semblance of a coherent account.

The smoking gun was the extensive communication via text and email between Alcharihi and his main accomplice in Syria, Belal AlJrad starting in January of 2015 when AlJrad sent Alcharihi pictures of the mosaic in situ and discussed how much it would be worth on the international market. When the federal agents interviewed Alcharihi on March 19, he insisted that he’d bought it from a dealer in Turkey and assumed it was Turkish, but it was clear from his texts and emails with AlJrad that from the first minute Alcharihi became aware of the existence of the mosaic, he knew that it was in Syria.

But he stuck with the lie like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. He even had the unmitigated gall to file a petition for the return of the “Turkish mosaic,” as he called it. Representing himself, he complained that he had paid for its importation, paid for professional restoration and transformed it from “an item of low value close to trash” into a “precious item of great value” and forfeiture was “causing loss of goodwill and the risk of losing the interest of potential buyers of the Mosaic and other properties.” There were no other properties. Prometheus was the one and only mosaic he had restored and was about to sell, so this was basically like someone demanding the judge release him on bail so he can leave the country. Surprising absolutely no one, the petition was denied (pdf).

As the case moved like molasses through the system, Alcharihi had another brainwave: he insisted that his co-conspirator Belal AlJrad be allowed to testify for the defense at trial. The prosecutors were like “uhh, sure” because obviously they would have been delighted to cross-examine the guy who had done the actual looting on the ground in Syria. He’d need a visa to be allowed into the United States from his current abode in Saudi Arabia, and the prosecution coordinated with several federal agencies to secure one. They granted AlJrad “safe passage,” guaranteeing he wouldn’t be arrested for anything he said on the stand.

There was just one teeny weeny problem. His visa application was denied (pdf) by the State Department and Homeland Security on the grounds of his ties to terrorists. They had found a picture he’d emailed himself of four members of Jabhat al-Nusra, a terrorist group affiliated with alQaeda operating in the Idlib area, holding machine guns and smiling. They were known to have engaged in widespread looting of antiquities in the areas under their control. So that’s a no on visiting the States, then.

Unbelievably to anyone with firing synapses, Alcharihi still wanted AlJrad to testify on his behalf. Defense counsel argued that his testimony would counter the government’s theory of the case and if he couldn’t appear in person, they wanted to arrange testimony via live video teleconferencing. The government did not oppose this, because, yet again, it was blatantly to their advantage to get to eviscerate this asshole on the stand, be in person or virtually. They did, however, oppose the defense’s motion that no references be made to AlJrad’s visa denial on terrorism grounds, his known links to terrorists and his copious history of lying under oath. So this worst of all possible witnesses was all set to testify from the US Embassy in Saudi Arabia, when on the eve of trial, defense counsel informed the prosecution they would not call him.

Instead the defense was reduced to one rather weaksauce argument: that the mosaic was fake anyway. They engaged an expert witness to testify that it was a “modern forgery or reconstruction” because a) it wasn’t good enough to have adorned a wealthy home in Syria, b) the woman with the child appears to be wearing anachronistic pants, and c) who is that woman with the child anyway? There isn’t one in the typical Prometheus iconography. The government had three experts plus the restorer saying otherwise, and the jury found them more persuasive.

So Alcharihi was convicted and sentenced, far too miniscule a measure of justice for the many horrific crimes underpinning the crime that’s sending him to federal prison for a couple of months.