Art broker arrested for Picasso theft, and Monet fraud
By Gail Appleson, Reuters, 5/6/2003
NEW YORK (Reuters) - A once-prominent art broker was arrested in Brazil Tuesday for his alleged role in two multimillion dollar schemes that involved the theft of a Picasso painting and cheating buyers of a Monet work.
Michel Cohen, who lived in New York and Malibu, California, had fled the United States in 2001 after Sotheby's Holdings and other big names in the art world sued him, alleging he swindled them in a series of lucrative schemes.
The criminal complaint, which was unsealed Tuesday in Manhattan court, charges the French-born Cohen with interstate transportation of a stolen Picasso, which he allegedly sold for $4.5 million. He is also charged with wire fraud for cheating buyers, who believed they were acquiring an interest in the Monet, out of about $7.5 million.
The interstate transportation charge and the fraud charge carry 10-year and five-year prison terms respectively. Each of the two counts also carry a possible $250,000 fine.
Federal prosecutors said they would seek Cohen's extradition from Brazil.
The criminal complaint alleges that Cohen arranged in 2000 to broker the sale of ''Nu Accroupi,'' a painting by Pablo Picasso, for the Richard Gray Gallery. Under a consignment agreement, the gallery agreed to lend Cohen the painting for a day so he could show it to a prospective buyer. The painting was to be returned to the gallery the next day.
Instead, Cohen allegedly arranged for the painting to be shipped to a buyer in Iowa who paid Cohen about $4.5 million for the work. The gallery was never paid for the painting and had sued Cohen in 2001.
In the second scheme, Cohen sold what he said was a half-interest in Claude Monet's ''Le Repos Dans Le Jardin, Argenteuil'' to Beadleston Gallery for $2.5 million.
He also reached a separate pact with a European art dealer to jointly buy the same Monet painting, resell it and split the proceeds. The art dealer paid Cohen $5 million to help carry out the transactions.
Cohen never gave the painting to the gallery or the art dealer and never returned their money, the complaint charged.
Separately from the allegations contained in the criminal complaint, Sotheby's had sued Cohen in 2001, alleging that Cohen swindled it out of nearly $10 million in loans to buy four Marc Chagall and Picasso paintings.
http://boston.com/dailynews/
IRAQ
Germany: Police On The Watch For Looted Iraqi Antiquities
By Roland Eggleston, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
Germany has begun making regular checks of art dealers, collectors of Middle Eastern antiquities, and suspected smugglers in the search for treasures looted from Baghdad and other parts of Iraq following the end of the war. According to a leading German expert, the black market in Europe, the United States, and Japan is known for having an insatiable thirst for cultural treasures from Mesopotamia.
Munich, 6 May 2003 (RFE/RL) -- No one knows for sure how many antiquities were stolen from the Iraqi National Museum in Baghdad and other institutions after the fall of the capital to U.S. troops on 9 April. Some estimate that at least 170,000 artifacts were carried away in a two-day frenzy. Some of the stolen pieces are worth million of dollars, such as the so-called Warka vase, a piece of Sumerian alabaster more than 5,000 years old. Most of the thousands of other pieces are less archaeologically valuable and therefore easier to sell. Experts expect these to be offered for private sale or to appear in antique shops in the Middle East, Europe, and North America, sometimes for as little as a few hundred dollars each.
The German national police says it expects some of the less valuable pieces looted from Iraq to turn up in Germany, although none has so far done so. Police and other agencies are calling regularly on art dealers and collectors of Middle Eastern antiquities to see if they have heard from possible sellers.
A police spokesman identified Berlin and Munich as the two German cities where some pieces might circulate on the black market.
Professor Walter Sommerfeld of the University of Marburg is a specialist on Mesopotamian antiquities. He said any pieces smuggled into Germany or other parts of Europe are sure to find buyers, despite the worldwide campaign to recover the looted pieces and return them to Iraq.
He said many collectors and cultural institutions "lose their conscience" when it comes to obtaining Mesopotamian antiquities. "There are art lovers, rich collectors who will pay practically any price. I know of a few who have bought thousands, even tens of thousands, of pieces in the last few years --- and all out of the soil of Iraq," he said.
For Sommerfeld, looting after the fall of Baghdad is just an extension of the robbery of the cultural treasures of Iraq that began after the first Gulf War in 1991. Such robbery took place with the approval of Saddam Hussein's regime, which shared in the profits.
He said this explains the sudden appearance at the Iraqi National Museum in Baghdad, on 9 April, of what several witnesses have described as professional gangs of thieves who knew which artifacts were the most precious. "They have been pillaging antiquities in Iraq for years," Sommerfeld said. "And they have regular customers ready to pay."
German television has shown gangs stripping valuable paintings from their frames in what appears to be a professional manner. Experts have said that heads were removed from statues from the ancient city of Hatra -- an indication that looters knew exactly what they wanted.
Experts believe the most priceless treasures were taken by such gangs, rather than by ignorant looters. These include the so-called Harp of Ur, a gold-inlaid piece from the Ur region, the legendary birthplace of Abraham. Other missing items include ancient stone carvings of kings and princesses, as well as ceramic urns and bowls. All date back at least 2,000 years and some more than 5,000 years.
Sommerfeld believes the current international hunt for antiquities looted from the Baghdad museum and other institutions should be widened into a worldwide search for all of the antiquities stolen in recent years. He said the UN's cultural organization, UNESCO, should take measures to protect the sites of cities dating to the Sumerian and Babylonian eras.
Since the 1991 Gulf War, these sites have been easy targets for thieves, who use not only shovels but even bulldozers in their search for loot. He said some use trucks to haul away what they find.
UNESCO is expected to send a team of experts to Baghdad this week to begin assessing the damage done by looters at the Iraqi National Museum. One of its tasks will be to begin work on a catalog of artifacts known to have been looted, which will be circulated worldwide. It is not known whether the UNESCO team will also examine the looting in the south of the country cited by Sommerfeld.
German experts say they are not optimistic they will find many of the stolen treasures. They recall that of the 4,000 cultural treasures looted in the first Gulf War, only 40 have been officially located.
http://www.rferl.org
Iraqi Looting was Disaster for National Heritage, say Western Museum Experts
Jenny Badner New York 06 May 2003, 05:21 UTC
Curators from New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and London's British Museum say the war-time looting from the Baghdad Museum was a disaster for Iraq's cultural heritage.
Curator of Ancient Near East art from the British Museum, John Curtis recently returned from a trip to Iraq where he assessed the damage at the Baghdad Museum. He says 30 to 40 objects that were on view in Baghdad are known to have been stolen. Those objects include a precious bronze statue vase from about 23-50 B.C., and a heavy ancient bronze casting that must have taken several people to move.
However, Mr. Curtis says an unknown but probably large number of works were stolen from the museum's storage area, which held as many as 200,000 objects. Crucial documents, photo negatives and computer disks in 130 of the Baghdad Museum's administrative rooms were also destroyed. "The scale of the disaster? Well yes, it is a huge disaster," says Mr. Curtis. "We hope that by the end of the day that many of the significant pieces that were on exhibition before still are safe and can be put back on exhibition but it is nevertheless a terrible tragedy that probably so many objects from the storage areas will have been taken and the loss of the documentation also is very, very sad." Mr. Curtis says it is unclear how long it would take to determine how many objects were looted from the storage area. An audit could take several months, if not a year. That task, he says, is made more difficult by the loss of the museum's paperwork.
British Museum Director Neil MacGregor says that until a new government is formed, Iraqi curators will be reluctant to disclose where they moved particular objects prior to the war on the orders of Saddam Hussein's government. Museum officials spoke at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, where an exhibition of Mesopotamian urban treasures from third century B.C. Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Pakistan are on view. Metropolitan Museum Curator Philipe de Montebello calls on the international community to take steps to prevent further looting and the destruction of the stolen objects. "Equally important if you think of the objects, one must think of their preservation and this is why I call for immunity from prosecution and for compensation because the moment you eliminate the black market you condemn the objects that instantly become evidence against the looter therefore it is either melted for the value of the gold, $330 an ounce, or it is smashed," says Mr. de Montebello.
U.S. tanks are now stationed in front of the Baghdad Museum to prevent further looting. And international experts and law enforcement officials are holding a two-day conference in Lyon, France, to coordinate efforts to track down art stolen during the Iraq war. That meetings follows last week's gathering in London by the world's top curators and U.N. officials.
The United Nations Education, Science and Cultural Organization, UNESCO, is posting a list of objects known to be looted from Iraq on its website and is pushing for a Security Council resolution to broaden international safeguards banning trade in cultural artifacts.