Art Crime and its Prevention by Arthur Tompkins

Author:Arthur Tompkins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lund Humphries
Published: 2016-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Additionally, there are the theft of art and antiquities from archaeological sites, private collections and national museums; insurance fraud; and art held for ransom or ‘extorted’. These cultural crimes are often used to fund other enterprises such as pirated DVD and computer software sales, which again are interpreted as non-violent crimes and which therefore receive less attention from investigative authorities, both in the United States and abroad.

Unfortunately, thieves like Jonathan Tokeley-Parry, who extensively smuggled important Egyptian antiquities disguised as tourist souvenirs, and Giacomo Medici, who routinely sold Etruscan and Roman antiquities ripped from their historical context, preyed on the hubris, competitiveness and greed of scholarly experts. Most notable among the latter were Frederick Schultz, a former president of the National Association of Dealers in Ancient, Oriental and Primitive Art, who was convicted of selling stolen Egyptian art in New York in 2002; Marion True at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles; and the late Thomas Hoving at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.3

Tokeley-Parry, a graduate of Cambridge with a degree in Moral Sciences, is just one example of an ‘academic scholar’ gone bad. My friend and colleague, Dick Ellis, the founder of the London Metropolitan Police’s Art & Antiques Unit at New Scotland Yard, told me that Tokeley-Parry fled to North Devon before the prosecution could rest its case in the English trial, checked himself into a hospital and attempted suicide by drinking hemlock. Due to his temporary paralysis, a second trial was necessary in the summer of 1997. At that time, he was convicted of his crimes in England. Tokeley-Parry was incarcerated for only three years of his six-year sentence. He was also convicted in absentia in Egypt, where he was eventually sentenced to fifteen years of hard labour.

Thomas Hoving, the flamboyant former Director of the Metropolitan Museum, boasted of his own clandestine dealings in his very popular books King of the Confessors (Ballantine Books, New York, 1981) and Making the Mummies Dance (Touchstone, New York, 1994) while narrating the intrigue of his picaresque adventures acquiring smuggled antiquities, such as the Euphronios krater, or as he called it, ‘the Hot Pot’.4

While assigned to the Los Angeles FBI Art and Property Crimes detail, I interviewed Marion True on at least two occasions as the FBI Agent assigned to respond to an International Mutual Assistance Treaty Act request for investigation from the government of Italy to that of the United States. True blithely and shockingly spoke of ‘package deals’ in regard to her purchases on behalf of the Getty Museum, which at that juncture included an Etruscan tripod and an Etruscan chandelier. She stated that she required no statement of provenance from her ‘vendor’ since, on the prior occasion of the purchase of the Getty Kouros, the provenance information was entirely falsified. She could not recall the amount of value assigned to each object. She stated that she did not receive purchase invoices for this event either. When I asked how she explained the irregularity of these

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