December 15 - 18, 1999
CONTENTS:
- Theft Alert (stolen jewelry) http://www.antiques-world.com/stolen/Bernaerts/Volbernfr.html
- http://www.xs4all.nl/~securma/mexico.htm PowerPoint presentation at Unesco/Interpol conference on illicit trade in American antiquities, December 1 - 4, 1999 in Mexico City
- Disaster Recovery Workshop "From Chaos to CARM"
- Britain has no plans to return Elgin Marbles to Greece
- France hands back stolen Nazi loot to heirs
- Mayan Carving to Return to Guatemala
- Environment experts damage historic site
- Paramilitaries suspected of art raid
- Painting of Virgin Mary Vandalized
- Dutch museums get to keep masterpieces stolen by Nazis, court rules (Dutch authorities behaved in a controversial way regarding the collection of Amsterdam art dealer Jacques Goudstikker after recovering many works of his wonderful collection of old masters which was stolen by the Nazis during the Second World War)
- query: capacitance sensor that can be attached to the back of a work of art without damaging it.
- U.S. claims Armstong hiding $16 million worth of gold bars, rare gold coins, and antiquities.
- Buried royal treasure fetches GBP.2.3m at auction
Theft Alert (stolen jewelry)
http://www.antiques-world.com/stolen/Bernaerts/Volbernfr.html
http://www.xs4all.nl/~securma/mexico.htm PowerPoint presentation at Unesco/Interpol conference on illicit trade in American antiquities, December 1 - 4, 1999 in Mexico City
(loading these files will take over one minute)
(ConsDisList)
From: Cathie Jilovsky cathiej@caval.edu.au
Disaster Recovery Workshop "From Chaos to CARM"
February 2000
A CAVAL (Cooperative Action by Victorian Academic Libraries) Disaster Management Workshop will be held at the CAVAL Archival and Research Materials (CARM) Centre located on the Research and Development Park of La Trobe University's Bundoora campus on 14th and 15th of February 2000.
The workshop will feature a simulated library or archive disaster. Participants will be led by Jeavons Baillie, and will go into a disaster site, retrieve wet and burnt books, decide what action should be taken, set up an air drying process, learn how to compile a disaster response manual and how to manage disaster recovery effectively.
Attendance will be limited to 20. Cost: $550.00 ($450.00 for participants from CAVAL member libraries). Accommodation can be arranged if required. For a registration form and brochure please contact Nicole Sinclair nicoles@caval.edu.au at CAVAL.
Cathie Jilovsky
Information Services Manager
CAVAL Ltd
Cooperative Action by Victorian Academic Libraries
4 Park Drive
Bundoora Victoria 3083
Australia
+613 9459 2722
Fax: +613 9459 2733
Britain has no plans to return Elgin Marbles to Greece
LONDON AP) - Prime Minister Tony Blair's office confirmed Monday that Britain has no plans to return the Elgin Marbles to Greece, but Blair denied a newspaper report that he personally intervened in the dispute. London's Guardian newspaper said Blair personally has ruled out the return of the marbles in what the newspaper described as a "devastating blow to Greek aspirations." "There is no change at all on the Elgin Marbles," a spokesman at Blair's Downing Street office told the Associated Press, speaking on customary condition of anonymity. "There are no plans to return the sculptures to Greece ... they are part of the British Museum's collection and can be seen free of charge." The sculptures are the subject of a long dispute between Greece and Britain. They were acquired in the early 19th century by Lord Elgin, the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. Elgin had permission to make plaster casts, but by bribing officials he took much of the sculpture home - and secured official permission later. At a London symposium this month, the British Museum said heavy-handed cleaning of the sculptures at the museum in the 1930s was scandalous. But the museum said other sculptures from the Parthenon have fared worse in Greek custody.
http://www.nando.net/24hour/adn/global/story/0,1970,500141912-500168444-500626869-0,00.html
France hands back stolen Nazi loot to heirs
03:09 p.m Dec 14, 1999 Eastern
By Crispian Balmer
PARIS, Dec 14 (Reuters) - France's Culture Ministry said on Tuesday it had returned 13 works of art stolen by the Nazis to families of Jewish gallery owners, in the largest such handover of objects for almost 50 years. However, nearly 2,000 other items recovered from Germany at the end of the war remain unclaimed in French museums and galleries, and officials said they saw little possibility of the rightful owners, or their heirs, ever being found. ``We're scrapping the bottom of the barrel now. There is very little chance that we will be able to hand over the rest of the art, although there might always be some nice surprises,'' said Francoise Cachin, director of France's state museum network. Among the 13 art works released in the past three weeks, were paintings, tapestries, stained glass and a writing table. The objects were stolen from the Jacques Bacri gallery in Paris and from three galleries owned by members of the Seligmann family. Seven of the pieces ended up in the private collection of Nazi chief Hermann Goering. The Nazis took an estimated 100,000 art works from France during the war. Of these, 61,257 were found and repatriated. Some 45,441 were reclaimed by their owners between 1945 and 1949. Most of the rest was sold off, with the state hanging on to around 2,000 of the most valuable items which were placed in museums and government buildings. Many of the owners of the unclaimed items were thought killed by the Nazis and critics have accused France of not doing enough to track down their heirs.
FRANCE DEFENDS RECOVERY RECORD
Officials on Tuesday said they had held exhibitions displaying the works and even posted details of the art on the Internet in the hope that people would recognise stolen family heirlooms or property. ``We have been very scrupulous. Other countries have been much less vigorous,'' said Norbert Engel, the Culture Ministry official responsible for the unclaimed art. ``Austria, for example, sold off their (stolen) works of art, which might have been returned. We have a feeling they did not care much about finding the owners,'' he said. A French commission is drawing up recommendations on what to do with the remaining unclaimed items and is expected to issue its report at the start of next year. Cachin said some of the objects might have been legally sold to the Germans during the war, but the receipts were missing. ``The art markets carried on. People sold their possessions, they needed to eat,'' she said. Descriptions of art work stolen from galleries were also sometimes so vague as to make identification impossible. ``This is especially true of modern works,'' Cachin said. Identification of the latest batch of returned art works was made possible by fresh research of old archives which had unearthed some previously forgotten documents. Almost 1,000 objects were returned to the Seligmann and Bacri families in the five years after the war. The Culture Ministry declined to name the heirs who received the 13 latest objects, saying only that some lived abroad. It also declined to put a value on the objects, but said a painting of the arrest of Christ by Cornelis Englelbrechtz and a 15th century crucifixion scene by an unnamed German artist were especially precious. Both belonged to the Seligmann family.
Mayan Carving to Return to Guatemala
By JUAN FORERO
2,000-year-old Mayan stone carving that police detectives discovered in a Brooklyn garage last month will soon be shipped back to Guatemala, where the authorities believe the piece was plundered from a ruin, the Guatemalan consul general in New York said yesterday. The consul, Fabiola Fuentes, said the authorities in her country consider the carving -- a 500-pound oblong stone depicting a jaguar clutching a man -- to be priceless. Ms. Fuentes said she expected the carving to be shipped in the coming weeks to the National Museum of Anthropology and History in Guatemala City, where specialists would try to determine from which ruins the object was looted. The carving, which may date back as far as 150 B.C., was found on Nov. 12 packed in a crate in a garage on Pitkin Avenue in East New York after the police received an anonymous tip. Detective Ruben Santiago of the Major Case Squad said investigators determined that the tenants of the house and the landlord knew nothing about the carving, and no arrests were made. Detective Santiago said the theft might have been committed by a ring trafficking in stolen artifacts. "There is a problem with things being smuggled," he said. "This is not the only piece." Ms. Fuentes said that after detectives notified her about the discovery, she sent photographs of the carving to the Ministry of Cultural Affairs in Guatemala. Although archaeologists there could not determine the artifact's precise origin, Ms. Fuentes said, they said features on the stone were very similar to other Mayan carvings found in the Guatemalan highlands. "It is very clear that the piece is from Guatemala," Ms. Fuentes said. "They have experts, and they determined that the piece comes from Guatemala. They know with precision the characteristics of the monuments of Guatemala." Experts familiar with Mayan artifacts say the theft was no surprise. Despite international treaties barring the export of ancient artifacts, the sale of stolen carvings and pottery from Guatemala and other countries in Central America where the Mayans flourished has been a problem for more than 30 years. "Most of the valuable ones have been carved up and taken away already," said Ian Graham, an archaeologist at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University. In August, Graham alerted the authorities that a 1,000-year-old artifact, which was being offered for sale by an American collector, had been stolen from Guatemala years before. For the Guatemalan authorities, putting a stop to the looting is difficult in large part because many of the richest sites are heavily forested and difficult to patrol. Ms. Fuentes also said the Guatemalan officials believed that the thieves worked for powerful criminal rings, possibly tied to drug smugglers. "It's hard to establish how much we lose because there are so many small pieces taken, instruments and pottery and even monuments, like the big one that we lost," Ms. Fuentes said. "It's hard to imagine, but these people have so much logistical and economic power in order to move these pieces from the country."
http://www10.nytimes.com/library/national/science/121499sci-arch-guatemala.html
Earlier message
(November 13, 1999: Mayan Carving in Brooklyn Thought to Be Stolen Ruin
By ANDREW JACOBS
Acting on an anonymous tip, detectives made an unlikely discovery on Friday in the garage of a home in Brooklyn: a 2,000-year-old Mayan carving they believe was looted from a ruin in Guatemala and then illegally carried across the border. Wrapped in newspaper and packed inside a wooden crate, the 500-pound carving features a jaguar, its ferocious jaws clutching a human head. Authorities said they believed the sculpture dated from 150 B.C. "We believe it was brought into the country for eventual sale," said Detective Ruben Santiago of the Major Case Squad. Investigators said they did not know how the object made its way to the gritty stretch of Pitkin Avenue in East New York or when it arrived. Detectives questioned the man who lives at the house at 2808 Pitkin Avenue for several hours and released him after he maintained, convincingly, they said, that he did not know what the statue was doing there. "He was definitely surprised when the cops showed up at his door," one detective said. Property records indicate that the house is owned by Daphne Naraine, who lives in Jamaica, Queens. She could not be reached last night for comment, and the tenant listed at the house, John E. Williams, did not return messages left on his answering machine. Police officials, more accustomed to dealing with the brutal side of urban life, were both intrigued and confused by the discovery. "Anything can happen in New York, but it's something I never expected to run across in East New York, Brooklyn," said Sgt. Paul Helbock, one of the first detectives on the scene. Investigators said they began working on the case several weeks ago after receiving a tip. Sergeant Helbock said they had already contacted the Guatemalan government in an attempt to trace the carving's origin. "It's a very valuable piece, and it shouldn't be in a garage," said Marilyn Mode, the deputy inspector of public information. "You're not supposed to remove it from Guatemala." Friday night, the police lifted the concrete-gray, four-foot-long block into a pickup truck, and briefly displayed it in the courtyard of police headquarters. Detective Santiago said that photographs of the sculpture were shown to an expert in Mayan art, who provided details about its age and origin. They would not reveal who the expert was, but said he was affiliated with a local museum. Ancient Mayan civilization cherished the jaguar, and its image is associated with kings and royalty. Despite laws in both the United States and Guatemala against the exportation of cultural artifacts, experts in pre-Columbian art say that looting from archaeological sites in Central America has reached epidemic levels. Richard M. Leventhal, director of the Institute of Archaeology at the University of California at Los Angeles, said despite stringent rules against the sale of such contraband, art buyers continue to fuel the practice by paying huge sums for Mayan relics. "It's a big, big business," he said. "It's not just a couple of guys who go out digging on the weekend." The United States Information Agency estimates that such thefts have become one of the top law enforcement problems in the world, with the items stolen each year having a value of about $4.5 billion. Since 1970, a United Nations accord has prohibited the import and export of any cultural property without export permits from the government of origin. Still, the practice remains widespread. The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston is currently embroiled in a dispute with the Guatemalan government over a 138-piece collection of Mayan art that Guatemalan officials say was illegally taken from archaeological sites. The museum, however, refuses to return the items to Guatemala, saying the country cannot produce legal title to the objects. )
Environment experts damage historic site
BY PAUL WILKINSON
A GOVERNMENT agency charged with protecting the countryside faces prosecution after it bulldozed an historic monument. The remains of the 300-year-old Rookhope Old Smeltmill in Weardale, Co Durham, one of the best-preserved examples of 18th-century lead mining in Britain, were buried by Environment Agency staff constructing lagoons to trap contaminated water seeping from the workings. Heavy machinery shifted hundreds of tons of soil, destroying walls and floors at the site, which had been undisturbed since it was abandoned in the late 1730s. It was designated a Scheduled Ancient Monument by English Heritage in April 1997. Niall Hammond, the Co Durham archaeological officer, said: "They have made a mistake and caused extensive damage to an archaeological site of immense importance." Under the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Areas Act, 1979, special permission has to be sought before any work is carried out at a scheduled site. The Environment Agency admits it made a mistake when last summer it dug three lagoons without prior agreement, to protect wildlife from poisoning.
Paramilitaries suspected of art raid
PARAMILITARY involvement was suspected yesterday when masked gunmen stole an annotated first edition of Jonathan Swift's classic Gulliver's Travels during a raid on a library in the cathedral city of Armagh. The librarian, Harry Carson, said: "One cannot help but think that there was a paramilitary connection. If such things have been chosen for a collector who has ordered them for a private collection, we will never see them again." Vincent McKenna, founder of the Northern Ireland Human Rights Bureau, which has highlighted the continuing high level of armed robberies by republican and loyalist groups, said: "It is highly unlikely that anyone not connected with a republican or loyalist group could operate with a gun in Armagh. It is a very tightly controlled place indeed." Because the robbers were seen heading towards the Shambles, a staunch republican district, there was strong speculation that either the IRA or dissident republicans might have carried out the robbery for fundraising. The Royal Ulster Constabulary refused to make any comment, saying that it had no immediate indication of paramilitary involvement. In the 1980s, the IRA was suspected of involvement in the kidnapping of Shergar, the racehorse, but its role was never proved. Mr Carson said that the GBP.30,000 copy of Gulliver's Travels, dated 1726, contained handwritten alterations to key words in the text by the author. "Swift had underlined the ones he wanted changed and written in the alternatives over the top. I hope that the changes he wanted were incorporated into later editions. I have never checked," he added. The two raiders gained entry to the public library at 9.45am posing as researchers. They donned balaclava masks as they climbed to the first floor where they pointed a gun at Lorraine Frazer, a 22-year-old assistant and the only person present, before tying her up. They then smashed glass cases containing literary and other treasures from the collection of artefacts and made off with a haul valued by Mr Carson at about GBP.170,000. Other stolen items included a 1611 Geneva Bible, a 13th-century Dutch missal, an ancient miniature Koran measuring 1in by 1in, and two 17th-century Dublin silver maces worth GBP.25,000 each. They were used by the Queen to restore Armagh to its city status. The librarian believes that the robbers were local. "They knew everything about the library. When it would be at the emptiest, what exactly to take. That is what is so terrible. It seems that they were prepared to plunder the heritage of their own city." Only 24 hours earlier Armagh had been the most heavily-policed spot in Ulster when it provided the venue for the first session of the new North South Ministerial Council, attended by all 15 members of Bertie Ahern's Cabinet and ten out of 12 ministers from Stormont's new power-sharing executive. The first edition of Gulliver's Travels had been acquired earlier this century and because of the handwritten alterations, had pride of place in the library. Archbishop Robert Eames, the Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland, said he was heartbroken by the "devastating blow".
Painting of Virgin Mary Vandalized
By DONNA DE LA CRUZ Associated Press Writer
NEW YORK (AP) - A man smuggled white oil paint into an art museum Thursday and squirted it onto a painting of the Virgin Mary decorated with elephant dung, museum officials and police said. The painting was cleaned and will be back on display Friday at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the museum said. The artwork has incensed various groups, including the Catholic League and Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who tried to cut off city funding to the museum. The man who allegedly defaced the painting, Dennis Heiner, 72, was immediately surrounded by security guards and taken into police custody. He was charged with criminal mischief, a felony. He was still in custody Thursday afternoon and couldn't be reached. Heiner allegedly smuggled the paint into the museum in a small plastic hand lotion tube, said museum spokeswoman Sally Williams. ``He squirted it on the painting and then smeared it with his hands,'' she said. In a statement, the museum said the board of trustees and its staff ``are shocked and extremely saddened by this incomprehensible act that has attempted to deface an important work of art by a world renowned artist.'' Chris Ofili's painting, ``The Holy Virgin Mary,'' is part of a exhibit of works by young British artists. The mayor's attempt to cut off the museum's $7.2 million annual subsidy was denied by a federal judge on First Amendment grounds.
Dutch museums get to keep masterpieces stolen by Nazis, court rules
By The Associated Press
THE HAGUE, Netherlands -- A court Thursday rejected a Jewish family's request for restitution of hundreds of paintings stolen by the Nazis during World War II. U.S.-based descendants of Amsterdam collector Jacques Goudstikker, who died in the Holocaust, had demanded the return of paintings taken during Germany's wartime occupation of the Netherlands. But the district court ruled the family's request was inadmissible, saying that after the war the Goudstikker family had "in a deliberate and well-considered manner relinquished its rights" to the paintings. Family members could not be reached for comment on the ruling. Although Jacques Goudstikker's widow, Desiree, received $1.5 million from the government in a 1952 settlement, the family maintains the government withheld information on the paintings' true value. The court rejected that argument, saying that at the time the claimants were free to seek independent appraisals. The Dutch government recovered 235 of the 1,200 paintings in the collection after the war, including Jan Steen's "The Sacrifice of Iphigenia," portraits by Nicolaes Maes and a river landscape by Salomon van Ruysdael. The paintings are on display or in storage at Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum, the Noordbrabants Museum in Den Bosch and decorate the walls of government offices and overseas missions.
Distributed by The Associated Press (AP)
(NAZI PILLAGE: THE DUTCH POINTED OUT
http://www.artcult.com/pillage.htm
Dutch authorities behaved in a controversial way regarding the collection of Amsterdam art dealer Jacques Goudstikker after recovering many works of his wonderful collection of old masters which was stolen by the Nazis during the Second World War. Dutch journalist Pieter den Hollander has published a book, De Zaak Goudstikker, released in January 1999 relating the fate of this collection and proving that the Dutch Administration refused to surrender to Goudstikker's widow some 300 works recovered from the Nazis. The author also stressed that over 3 500 works, also recovered from Germany, had still not been surrendered to their legitimate owners. Jacques Goudstikker fled the Netherlands just before the German invasion of May 14th 1940 and left behind him over 1275 masterpieces, which formed his remarkable collection. With his wife Desi and his son Edo he boarded a ship, the SS Bodegraven, but was refused entry in England. The SS Bodegraven continued her route to South America but during the night of May 15th and May 16th 1940, the dealer and his family were ordered to stay in the storeroom of the ship. Wanting to breathe some fresh air, the dealer went on deck but when he wanted to get back to the storeroom he opened another door and fell to his death. His wife and son were allowed to disembark in Liverpool and to travel to the U.S. In the meantime, Jacques Goudstikker's gallery had been sold to Alois Miedl, an Amsterdam-based German dealer. On learning of this deal, Marshal Goering forced Miedl to surrender the entire collection of Goudstikker's paintings at a third of their real value. In exchange, Miedl was allowed to buy the remaining properties of Goudstikker, a country-house, a castle and a 17th Century building in Amsterdam. Miedl, whose wife was Jewish and therefore needed Goering's protection, then worked closely with many Nazi dignitaries to whom he sold some 4000 works, during the war. Most of these works had been bought at low prices or stolen from several Jewish families, which faced nazi persecutions. Goering got hold of 780 paintings from the Goudstikker collection while 500 others were sold back to Miedl. Among the masterpieces kept by Goering or destined to Hitler's Reich Museum in Linz were works by Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Velasquez, Goya, Rubens, Brueghel, Teniers, Ruysdael, Jan Steen, Van Dyck, Cranach, Bellini, Titian, Tintoretto or Bol. Goering kept the best works by old masters and bartered Impressionist, Expressionist or Cubist paintings, described as «degenerate works» by the Nazis against other old master pieces. Desi Goudstikker returned to the Netherlands in 1946 and discovered what had happened to the collection and the properties of her husband. Meanwhile, the Dutch government had recovered some 300 paintings of the collection found in those of Goering and Hitler but did not take the opportunity of surrendering these to the Goudstikker family. It adopted the same strange behavior vis à vis the legitimate owners of thousands of other works which had also been recovered from the Nazis. Instead, Dutch authorities intended to allocate most of these pieces to many museums and Desi Goudstikker had no choice but to enact a legal suit to recover what had been saved from the collection of her husband. After seven years of painstaking negotiations, she only managed to recover the building properties of her husband and some paintings, which had remained in the gallery run by Miedl during the war. She however failed to obtain the 300 masterpieces recovered from the collections of Goering and Hitler. In fact, Dutch authorities did not wait until the end of the lawsuit to auction those works which were not considered as national treasures. The Dutch government only sought to enrich the National collections at the expense of the Goudstikkers who were never informed about allied investigations into Nazi pillages during the war nor about the transactions between Miedl and Goering. Desi Goudstikker was thus forced to reach a compromise agreement leaving 235 masterpieces to the State, including works by Jacob and Salomon Ruysdael, Jan Van Goyen , Adriaen van Ostade, Gerard Ter Borch, Pieter de Hooch, Jan Steen, Giovanni Bellini, Veronese, Tintoretto, Lucas Cranach, Hans Memling and many others. Desi Goudstikker then married August Von Saher, a lawyer, while her Edo lived in Greenwich, Connecticut, with his wife. Desi died in 1996 and Edo in 1997 while his wife and their two daughters, Chantal and Charlene, ignored what had really happened of their grandfather and his collection until the press covered at length the problems of Nazi gold in Switzerland and Nazi pillages during the war. Now several investigations regarding stolen art works have been under way in the Netherlands shedding new light on the controversial role Dutch authorities played after the conflict. Dutch authorities have finally promised to surrender some 3750 artworks recovered after the war to their legitimate owners but have rejected the demands made by the Goudstikker heirs arguing that an agreement had been reached with Desi in 1952. However, Chantal and Charlene have found new elements in the National archives in Washington which have prompted them to start another legal action against the Netherlands. They now claim the 235 works exhibited in Dutch museums and compensation for those which were auctioned by the government after the war. Their lawyers are also determine to launch investigations about the remaining 500 works still missing from the Goudstikker collection which are probably dispersed throughout the world. For example, the Dutch authorities have called for the restitution of four paintings from the collection which were found recently in Russia as well as others found in what was East-Germany. The Goudstikker lawsuit will probably be examined next Spring by the High Court of Justice of the Hague and the plaintiffs have suggested that the U.S State Dept. and the participants of the Washington conference on Nazi pillages to act as arbitrators.)
From: "Norman R Selinger" norman.selinger@gte.net
Subject: query: capacitance sensor that can be attached to the back of a work of art without damaging it
Please include me in the mailings from your organization relative to museum security. I just completed the design of the security system for the new Smithsonian Institute Dulles Air & Space Museum. Will be working on others soon. I would also like to know if anyone has developed a capacitance sensor that can be attached to the back of a work of art without damaging it. It has to be very small and use very thin wires. A wireless sensor would also be acceptable if it met the size requirements.
Norman R. Selinger, Senior Security Engineer
Micro Affiliates
5901 Montrose Rd. Suite S1605
Rockville, MD 20852 USA
Telephone: 301 881 4115
Fax: 301 881 0340
e-mail: norman.selinger@gte.net
Thank you
Norm
U.S. claims Armstong hiding $16 million worth of gold bars, rare gold coins, and antiquities.
Friday, December 17, 1999
The Associated Press
NEW YORK -- U.S. prosecutors claim Martin Armstrong, the renowned market forecaster accused of defrauding Japanese investors, is hiding more than $16 million worth of gold bars, rare gold coins, and antiquities. Armstrong, founder of Princeton Economics International Ltd., was arrested in September and charged with bilking Japanese companies out of $1 billion. His assets have been frozen as prosecutors try to find money to repay investors. Prosecutors filed a motion Wednesday asking the court to hold Armstrong in contempt for refusing to turn over seven boxes of corporate documents and assets, including 102 bars of gold, a $750,000 bust of Julius Caesar, hundreds of rare coins, a bronze helmet, and other antiques. "The value of the missing property is very substantial," said Marty Glenn, an attorney for O'Melveny & Myers, which is the court-appointed receiver in the case. "Given the magnitude of the losses, any dollar we can recover is a dollar more we have to repay creditors," Prosecutors believe Armstrong still has the valuables, which he kept in an upstairs hallway closet of the home in Maple Shade, where he lives with his mother and two children, court documents say. "I observed Mr. Armstrong sit for hours in the hallway outside his bedroom studying the coins," according to a sworn statement by Tina Mustra, who was Armstrong's executive assistant and live-in girlfriend. Armstrong has pleaded not guilty to charges of fraud brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the U.S. Attorney. He is free on $5 million bail.
http://www.bergen.com/biz/arm17199912177.htm
Buried royal treasure fetches GBP.2.3m at auction
By Will Bennett, Art Sales Correspondent
A TREASURE buried by one of Germany's oldest royal families to prevent it from being looted by Soviet troops in 1945 was sold for almost GBP.2.3 million at Sotheby's in London yesterday. The Moritzburg Treasure remained hidden for more than half a century until a German postman, Hanno Marschner, found some of it with a metal detector three years ago. The royal family of Saxony, which became part of Communist-ruled East Germany after the Russian invasion at the end of the Second World War, reclaimed the treasure from Marschner, who received only GBP.10,000 as a finder's fee. Yesterday, a 17th century silver gilt marriage cup shaped in the form of a Moor's head became the most expensive piece of silver auctioned in Europe when it fetched more than GBP.1.7 million. It was bought by a consortium of British and German dealers. A gold and silver gilt jewel casket shaped like a basket of flowers made in 1701 for the Polish king Augustus the Strong was bought for GBP.194,000 by a European private collector. The family treasures sold yesterday were only a fraction of the collection built up by the royal house of Saxony, which abdicated in 1919. Most of the buried collection was found by the Soviet authorities after the estate forester was forced to reveal where it had been hidden. But three crates containing the Moor's head marriage cup, the flower basket, silverware, cutlery, coins and medals were buried in a second hiding place near the family's home at Moritzburg Castle in Saxony and escaped detection. The proceeds of the sale will be used to finance the family's return to Saxony. An Old Master painting by the 18th century French artist Jean-Honoré Fragonard sold for a world record price of almost GBP.5.3 million at Christie's in London. Le Verrou, sold by the widow of the late Syrian arms dealer Akram Ojjeh, had been expected to fetch GBP.1 million to GBP.1.4 million. It was bought by an anonymous private collector bidding by telephone.