The story in "The Times" quoted in today's MSN posting is wrong on one key point.
Thanks to a combination of continuing cuts in the central government grants that pay for up to 90% of English local government funding, and a mania for creating mega-departments covering up to a dozen traditional services, the post of Museum Director has been virtually wiped out over the past decade or so, with at least 100 directorships being replaced by jobs at a far lower status (and salary) within other departments of the local authorities.
The result is that there are now major international - indeed world class - museums and collections in which the new "Head of Museums" is at third or even fourth tier of responsibility, who have little or no effective control of, and little influence over, policy or finance, and are paid salaries that are a mere fraction of those of just a few years ago, (which in turn means much fewer promotion opportunities and far lower salary prospects for other staff of these devastated museum services).
Patrick Boylan
LA Eye Doctor Sent to Federal Prison in Art Heist
By Sarah Tippit
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - An eye surgeon convicted of faking the theft of two famous paintings from his Los Angeles home in order to collect $12.5 million in insurance was sentenced to 37 months in prison on Monday, federal prosecutors said. Steven Cooperman, 59, was also ordered by a federal judge to pay restitution to two Pennsylvania-based insurance companies who had insured the paintings. The masterpieces, Picasso's 1932 ``Nude Before a Mirror'' and Claude Monet's 1882 ``The Customs Officer's Cabin at Pourville'' disappeared from Cooperman's Brentwood, Calif., house in July 1992 while he was vacationing. It was later determined that Cooperman had been facing a deflated art market and a $4 million bank loan which he was apparently unable to repay, said U.S. Attorney's spokesman Tom Mrozek. After Chase Manhattan Bank asked him to either pay down the loan or put up more collateral, Cooperman falsely inflated the value of the paintings through a series of transactions, insured them and faked their theft, Mrozek said. In July 1999 Cooperman was convicted of conspiracy, wire fraud and money laundering. The Home Insurance Co. and National Union Fire Insurance Co. will receive restitution from Cooperman, Mrozek said. The amount will be determined at a hearing on Oct. 22, he said.
Cooperman is expected to begin serving his prison sentence Oct. 30, prosecutors said. According to court records, the U.S. government valued the two paintings at around $2.5 million but Cooperman insured them for $12.5 million prior to the arranged fake theft.
LOANED PAINTINGS TO MUSEUM
Cooperman ``loaned the paintings to Los Angeles County Museum of Art, telling them they were worth $12.5 million and the museum issued him a receipt with that figure,'' Mrozek said. He later collected a $17.5 million settlement after suing his insurance companies which had suspected a con and refused to pay him, Mrozek said. Cooperman's accomplice, attorney James Tierney, who physically removed the paintings and arranged to hide them, pleaded guilty to one charge of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Tierney began serving an eight-month prison term last week and has cooperated with authorities, Mrozek said. Tierney testified in court that he and Cooperman first discussed throwing the masterpieces in the trash but changed their minds for fear they might be discovered. They then considered chopping them into pieces, an idea they ultimately nixed because it might bring ``bad karma,'' Mrozek said. Tierney eventually turned them over to business associate, James Little, who stored the paintings in a rented storage unit, planning to hand them over to the insurers after several years. At one point, Little threatened to sell the paintings for money, Tierney testified. Eventually Little's girlfriend alerted federal authorities to the paintings' whereabouts. Cooperman originally faced up to eight years in prison but received a lesser sentence after cooperating with federal authorities in an undisclosed investigation, Mrozek said. http://dailynews.yahoo.com/
Unable to rest in peace
Native burial sites are sacred grounds, not shopping centers
By MAUREEN HAYDEN, Courier & Press staff writerbr(812) 464-7433 or a maureenh@evansville.net http://www.courierpress.com/cgi-bin/view.cgi?200107/30+rest073001_news.html+20010730
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Darlene Applegate has been documenting damage to archaeological sites in Western Kentucky forthree years, but the sight of looted American Indian burials still unnerves her. In June, she returned to a remote rock shelter near the Nolin Lake Reservoir that had been plundered last fall. To her surprise, she found damage that had more than doubled. Under the protective curve of the rock overhang, she nearly stumbled into one of the more than a dozen deep holes freshly dug into the soft soil. Beer cans, vodka bottles, candy-bar wrappers and empty packages of Marlboro cigarettes littered the scene. A dozen large buckets, work gloves, a small shovel and a saw lay strewn near the edge of the holes, along with a wooden-frame screen for sifting. Tucked in the back, on a small rock ledge, was a roll of toilet paper. “Pigs,” Applegate muttered. “What pigs.” It wasn’t just the mess they left that angered the Western Kentucky University archaeologist. It was the damage done. In what may have been a day’s worth of digging, more than 2,000 years of history was destroyed. “This is total destruction,” said Applegate, as she began photographing the scene. “And the infuriating thing is that it’s going on all over and I don’t know how we’re going to stop it.” Applegate and other experts say legions of looters are destroying America’s history and ransacking the sacred sites of the nation’s oldest ancestors. The looters are plundering for profit, they say, motivated by a booming market for artifacts. Among the most prized are the grave goods and human skulls that can be found in rock shelters, river mounds and caves — the places where native tribes buried their dead.
Archaeologists have documented at least 15,000 archaeological sites in Kentucky alone that are “prehistoric,” inhabited by native tribes for 12,000 years before Europeans arrived on the continent. They say most have been damaged, often by people searching for treasure. “People ask me how many sites have been looted,” said Phil DiBlasi, a University of Louisville archaeologist and an expert witness for the U.S. Department of Justice. “How many sites have not been looted would be an easier question to answer.” And the answer? “Not many.”
Authorities crack down
In the winter of 1987, a place called Slack Farm captured the nation’s attention. Thirty miles down the Ohio River from Evansville, it gained fame when Kentucky State Police shut down an excavation operation by 10 men who paid $10,000 to dig in the farm fields. The men were looking for Indian burials. By the time police arrived, more than 500 holes had been dug. Heaps of broken human bones and teeth were piled alongside empty beer cans. Archaeologists called in by the state to investigate said the diggers destroyed what had been a unique archive of life along the Ohio River — an American Indian village that straddled the vital centuries of the first European contact with the New World. For native Americans, amateur digging at Slack Farm was more than just destroying a page of human history; it was the desecration of sacred ground. Slack Farm became a national story that revealed an ongoing debate among archaeologists, artifact collectors and American Indian tribes over who owned the past. It prompted the Kentucky Legislature to pass a new law that upgraded the destruction of a burial site from a misdemeanor to a felony. And it fueled a national movement among tribes to regain control over the human remains and cultural artifacts of their ancestors. Less than two years later, Congress passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Supporters called it civil-rights legislation because it gave tribes the right to claim their dead. It made it illegal to unearth burials or to possess or profit from their contents. It also mandated the return of more than 200,000 human remains and cultural items acquired over three centuries by museums, universities and other federal agencies. The national spotlight on Slack Farm and the subsequent legislation also changed the way many Americans viewed artifact collecting, experts say. “We have a long history in this country of collecting Indian artifacts,” said Randy Ream, a federal prosecutor in Kentucky who is a NAGPRA expert. “When I was growing up in western Kentucky, every kid in a rural area knew what it like to go arrowhead hunting,” said Ream. “We’d walk farm fields after a hard rain and pick them up off the ground.” Some surface hunters went further, though, digging into burial sites in the search of artifacts and human remains.
Slack Farm changed both the law and public sentiment.
“It helped us understand that these were sacred sites,” said Ream. “Slack Farm taught us that it was racist to view them in any other way.” Slack Farm illustrated the disconnection people had made between European settlers and those who had already occupied the land. “Just because a burial isn’t marked with a headstone doesn’t mean it’s not a sacred site,” said John Froman, chief of the Peoria Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma. “There is no lesser moral value to the grave just because it’s an Indian grave.”
Digging up disrepect
NAGPRA was intended to protect sacred burial sites, but it had the unintended consequence of boosting a black-market trade in the artifacts that could be unearthed in them. “People think the artifact trade is just some mom-and-pop operation,” said Martin McAllister, the head of the Montana-based Archaeological Resource Investigations, which advises law enforcement on archaeological crime. “It’s more serious than that. It’s much more lucrative. There’s a multibillion dollar, international market,” said McAllister. “It’s illegal, and it’s dangerous.” Just how lucrative it is can be seen in the prices some artifacts fetch, McAllister said. A rare Mimbres pot that originated in the Southwest recently fetched $400,000 at an auction in Paris. “The motivation for diggers is simple,” said McAllister. “It’s greed, pure and simple greed.” But artifact collectors say McAllister and others like him are too quick to jump to the conclusion that every collection was gained illegally. The Illinois Amateur Archaeological Society, whose members include artifact dealers, have an official policy against trading in illegally gotten goods. Society members say their collections are hobbies, collected and cultivated out of a respect for the heritage of native Americans. But the Society for American Archaeology, made up of professional archaeologists, condemns any commercial trade in artifacts, legal or otherwise, and say it sustains a market that stimulates looting. Ream agrees. “There are plenty of unscrupulous people out there willing to exploit the desire for artifacts and are willing to do it illegally.”
Difficult to prosecute
When the Slack Farm incident became public, Ream was a 34-year-old federal prosecutor just three years out of law school. He’d gotten there a little later than his colleagues, having first earned a master’s degree in American history. Ream was in Washington, D.C., visiting relatives when he got a call from officials and the National Park Service. Their request: make Slack Farm a federal case. Ream tried. He got two federal agents to start the investigation and began to call witnesses before a federal grand jury. But he failed. He didn’t have the evidence he needed to bring a prosecution. For a host of frustrating reasons, he couldn’t prove that the artifacts taken from Slack Farm had been taken across state lines for sale. He’s got better laws now, more than a decade after Slack Farm, but catching and prosecuting looters continues to be difficult. Ream said cracking down on looting is little like guerrilla warfare. The thousands of documented and undocumented archaeological sites in Kentucky are mostly in remote areas, and most law enforcement agencies have neither the resources nor the inclination to devote major efforts to stamping out what many consider to be petty, victimless crimes. “I have no doubt that we are only catching a few looters.”
Incidents underreported
Just how much looting is going on is hard to document. The National Park Service reports 800 to 1,600 incidents of looting on federal land every year for the last decade, but Park Service officials say that’s only a fraction of what’s occurring. There is little monitoring of archaeological sites on private property. David Pollack, the archaeologist for the Kentucky Heritage Council, estimates that 90 percent of the 15,000 known prehistoric archaeological sites in the state have been damaged by looters. Park Service officials at the Hoosier National Forest in Indiana and the Daniel Boone National Forest in Kentucky report that looting is widespread in rock shelters and caves where burial sites are located. “It’s very difficult for us to patrol them because they are so remote, and there are so many of them,” said Cecil Ison, the archaeologist at the Daniel Boone National Forest. There are 700,000 acres in the forest, with 5,000 miles of cliff lines. “There are thousands of rock shelters here,” said Ison. “Most of them are sacred sites.”
Offenders seem clueless
Law enforcement is using a variety of methods to combat the crime. In a recent case involving a Madisonville, Ky., man who was selling American Indian artifacts, Ream sent two undercover FBI agents to the man’s home posing as potential buyers. The agents arrested the 21-year-old man, Sean Long, after he sold them a skull for $100 and offered to sell them two more for another $800. The scale of looting nationwide is severe enough that the U.S Geological Survey has begun omitting archaeological site locations from new versions of its topographical maps. At Mammoth Cave National Park in Western Kentucky and at Big South Fork National Recreation Area in central Kentucky, park officials are using modern technology, including radio-relayed infrared heat sensors, metal detectors and motion sensors to alert rangers when looters show up. Brad McDougal, a federal criminal investigator at Mammoth Cave, spent a string of hot summer days videotaping a rock shelter in the park after discovering some damage. It paid off with an arrest of a man caught with shovel in hand digging in the cave. “In four hours of digging, he probably destroyed 4,000 years of history,” said McDougal. Wayne Elliott, a Mammoth Cave park ranger, said it’s discouraging work. “When we confront them, they don’t think they are doing any damage,” said Elliott. “They think they have a right to it. They don’t see that it’s the same thing as breaking into your house.” In the federal law enforcement system, there are only two agents assigned full-time to investigate the looting of burial sites. One is John Fryar, an agent with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Fryar has worked more than 100 cases, often going undercover posing as a buyer or seller of stolen goods. Fryar believes it’s more than money that motivates looters. “It’s the adrenaline rush,” said Fryar. “It’s the risk of having something no one else has and breaking the law to get it.” Fryar is motivated by more than a sense of duty to his job. He also has a sense of duty, he said, to his own Native American ancestors. “It’s hard to describe how I feel when I see a burial site that’s been robbed,” said Fryar, a member of the Acoma tribe of Pueblo Indians. “There is a sense of moral degradation ... . It is unconscionable for anyone to dig in a grave and claim they are preserving the past,” said Fryar. “It’s a way for them to ease their conscience, to tell themselves they are not really robbing graves.”
Grave Goods: Arrest marked a first success in thwarting sale of artifacts
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- By MAUREEN HAYDEN, Courier & Press staff writer (812) 464-7433 or maureenh@evansville.net --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MAUREEN HAYDEN / Courier & Press Darlene Applegate, assistant professor of anthropology at Western Kentucky University, checks the site where artifacts had earlier been dug from Native American graves.
An hour before the sun rose on New Year's Day 1999, Sean Long and a friend climbed into a pickup truck and headed to the highest point in Western Kentucky. With videotape rolling, the duo talked eagerly about their destination, what Long's companion called “the mama of all rocks.”
full story: http://www.ourierpress.com/cgi-bin/view.cgi?200107/29+GRAVE02901_news.html+20010729
Ukraine: Smuggling Leads To Loss Of Cultural Legacy
By Lily Hyde
Like many former Soviet states, Ukraine is fast losing its artistic and historical heritage to the international criminal trade in antiques and cultural treasures. Correspondent Lily Hyde reports from Kyiv on efforts to stop the illegal flow of unique historical objects out of Ukraine. Kyiv, 1 August 2001 (RFE/RL) -- A glossy catalog resembles that of an exhibition of some of Ukraine's most precious examples of cultural and artistic traditions. But the items featured -- icons and crosses, paintings, jewelry and books -- will most likely never be exhibited in the country. They have all been stolen and carried out of Ukraine illegally for sale on the international market. The catalog is the work of a new state organization created to protect Ukraine's cultural treasures from being carried across the border. The service hopes to counter the problem of vanishing cultural and artistic objects that has afflicted Ukraine and much of the former Soviet Union. Churches and families alike have been robbed of icons and crosses that are generations old. Museums and libraries have been targeted as well. In 1997, thieves entered a museum in central Ukraine and escaped with two paintings attributed to Dutch and French masters. The paintings were eventually recovered in England. A year later, a visitor to the Ukrainian National Library in Kyiv walked out with one of the world's four known copies of Nicolaus Copernicus's 1543 work "On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres." Not all of Ukraine's art thieves have been traditional criminals. Staff from Israel's Yad Vashem museum earlier this year smuggled out of Ukraine frescoes painted by the Jewish writerBruno Schulz. They claimed afterward that the works rightfully belonged in Israel. Svetlana Shklyar, who co-heads the new cultural- protection organization, says Ukraine has to preserve its stock of artistic treasures, much of which was looted during World War II: "Ukraine sustained many losses during World War II. Books and paintings were stolen and destroyed. During the war we were spiritually impoverished. Now we need a renaissance, and the renaissance is impossible without a spiritual renaissance." Ukraine also lost many of its valuable items to Russia during the Soviet era, and is still struggling to have them returned from museums in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, weak security and a lack of adequate cataloguing have left many cultural treasures easy prey to professional art thieves. Shklyar cites Interpol statistics indicating that Europe has no fewer than 40 powerful criminal groups specializing in the theft and sale of antiques and works of art. Hampered by inadequate information about the value and importance of many of its objects, Ukraine is also hindered by a web of contradictory legislation that is not always easy to enforce. Current law on the transport of cultural treasures says that only items catalogued by the national museum, culture, archive, and library funds are banned from export. The catalogues, however, are far from complete. Other legislation says that any object of religious, cultural, historic, or artistic value pre- dating 1945 cannot be taken out of the country. The law traditionally covers items such as icons, paintings, china, medals, and coins. But such items are readily available at street markets and in licensed antiques shops, where most of the customers are foreign tourists. Oleg Kepko, deputy head of the antismuggling department at Ukraine's Borispil airport, says shopkeepers are not always honest about the legality of carrying such items abroad:
"Unfortunately, those shopkeepers don't tell you important information [like the fact] that you can buy these items, you can use them, you can possess them -- but only on the territory of Ukraine. It is forbidden to take them elsewhere." Customs officers at Borispil, Ukraine's main airport, have registered 92 incidents over the first half of this year of historical valuables being taken out of the country. During the same period last year, 64 such cases were registered. In the majority of cases, the goods are confiscated without charges being pressed against the people carrying them, who are most often tourists who do not attempt to hide the items from customs officials. Kepko says that in seven of the cases, large amounts of objects were involved and led to criminal investigations. The airport customs service donates confiscated objects to churches, museums, and libraries. Kepko says the objects his service has donated this year have been valued at roughly $24,000. But of all the objects listed in the catalogue published by Shklyar's cultural-protection service, only one item -- a painting -- has been tentatively tracked down, to a private collection abroad. Shklyar and a team of experts are continuing to catalog those objects deemed "unique monuments of portable culture." Eventually, all such objects will be included in a state register and have their own passport. Shklyar says the blanket ban on all objects pre-dating 1945 is to be lifted. At that point, she says, all antiques shops will be expected to list clearly which objects can be legally taken abroad, and to provide proof of purchase and ownership. http://www.rferl.org/