(Q108067248)
Statements
Cultural patrimony for sale (English)
0 references
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In 1994 the carabinieri found photographs of artworks in the car of a captain in the Guardia di Finanza (the customs and financial police) killed in a motorway accident. A subsequent search of his home revealed an organigram he had drawn of an international art trafficking ring.It was headed by the American Robert Edwin ‘Bob’ Hecht, a figure already known to the carabinieri. In 1972 he had sold a vase known as the Euphronios krater to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art for $1m. When the tombaroli (‘tomb raiders’), the small-time traffickers in archaeological finds, heard about this sale, they felt swindled. Hecht claimed he had bought the vase from an Armenian-Lebanese collector who had stored it in Switzerland. (English)