Prosecutor with a Crusade Against Art World is Dismissed

Enemy of the free market in antiquities

‘Crusader prosecutor’ Attorney Preetinder Singh ("Preet") Bharara has been removed from office by the the President in part of a cleanup of the judiciary and the mess left behind by the Obama administration. It was an abrupt end to Bharara’s nearly-eight-year tenure prosecuting powerful people in finance and politics. But the Indian born official was engaged in a campaign to police the art and antiquities trade ("Top US prosecutor has art market in his sights")

Bharara’s office has overseen at least 15 high-profile art-related forfeiture cases—as the office refers to them—in the past five years. The cases include the return to Brazil last year of a painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Hannibal (1981), which Edemar Cid Ferreira, the founder and former president of Banco Santos, had used in a money-laundering scheme; the repatriation in 2014 of a Cambodian statue that had been scheduled to be sold at Sotheby’s in 2011; and the prosecution of the New York-based art dealer Helly Nahmad for his involvement in an illegal sports gambling operation. Since Bharara took the job in 2009, almost every major case involving art has either passed through his office or been initiated by it. [...] The Southern District’s influence is disproportionately large because it deals with business conducted in New York, the largest city in the US.

According to the Art Newspaper, Bharara has been involved in a number of antiquities cases:

March 2015, An Iraqi Assyrian head.  This was returned to Iraq after being looted following the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003

February 2015, An Etruscan bronze statuette (†fth/sixth century BC).  The statuette was taken from the Oliveriano Archaeological Museum, Pesaro, in 1964. It was returned to the Italian government.

December 2013, The Duryodhana Cambodian sandstone sculpture (tenth century), valued at around $2m to $3m. Allegedly stolen from the Prasat Chen sanctuary at Koh Ker in Cambodia, the sculpture had been scheduled for sale at Sotheby’s in 2011 before it was returned to Cambodia..

 July 2012, Peruvian art (around 1700).  A Spanish colonial silver-gilt and enamel monstrance, originally from Cusco, Peru, was repatriated along with other plundered artefacts. 

The Manhattan DA’s office has seized and sent abroad several other ancient artifacts since that article was written:

In August 2014, five coins dating as far back as 515 B.C. were returned to Greece after coin collector Arnold Peter Weiss was charged with and later convicted of attempted criminal prosecution of stolen property, the DA’s office said. He had several coins he believed had been stolen dekadrachma and tetradrachma from the Sicilian cities of Agrigento and Catania.

In April 2016, a 2nd century Buddhist sculpture worth more than $1 million was returned to Pakistan after the investigation and prosecution of Tatsuzo Kaku, who had been selling stolen antiquities smuggled from South Asia.

In May and June 2016, two bronze statues and four carved artifacts dating to the 10th and 11th centuries A.D., valued at several million dollars, were returned to India as part of a series of seizures of stolen antiquities.

 More recent is the case of a fragment of an ancient marble sarcophagus fragment which was seized from a dealer and then sent to Greece.Hopefully the new appointee will have less of a missionary zeal to do the bidding of archeologists and foreign governments when it comes to the property of collectors of ancient art and culture.