Spain Arrests Twelve Metal Detectorists for Looting Archaeological Sites

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Twelve people who had been looting archaeological sites in the Mediterranean region of Valencia with metal detectors were recently arrested in an investigation code-named "Operation Necropolis". In the process, Spain's Guardia Civil raided thirteen homes in several towns in the region, and seized more than 9,000 antiquities from them (the newspaper report refers to them as "coins and medallions") dating from several epochs and cultures. These people would go out early in the morning and search archaeological sites in Valencia and Castile-La Mancha for buried artefacts. After digging them out of the sites, they would take them home, tart them up a bit and sell them to the international antiquities trade. In additions to the artefacts recovered in the metal detectorists' homes, authorities found equipment for plundering artefacts (metal detectors and digging tools), maps of archaeological sites in addition to items and products to clean the looted artefacts. The 1985 Spanish Historical Heritage Law (Art 40-43) expressly prohibits searching for archaeological items without authorization, and it requires that any pieces found by chance to be immediately turned over to the authorities with finders getting a financial reward (Art 44).

Source: EFE News Services, 'Spain arrests 12 for looting archaeological sites', 03/08/2011

Spanish Antiquities Bust and the CoinForgery Discussion List

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Apparently coin buyers in the US are feeling the pinch of the Spanish raids. There has been a little coverage of it even on the coin forgery list due to this post by Edward Owen (Lake Hopatcong, NJ):

I just received a phone call from this dealer saying he can't ship 2 very nice coins I won at good prices on eBay because they've been seized by the police. I'm not sure whether to believe him or not and am wondering if he is actually just selling them to someone else at a better price? He's an active Spanish dealer and I'm wondering if he's contacted anyone else about coins they've bought being seized by police or not? I would find it awfully suspicious if only my 2 had been 'seized'.

So much for collectors dealing only with dealers they "trust" eh? Oddly Mr Owen seems unwilling to actually reveal the name of the dealer he is asking about.... (eh?). Anyway a Spanish collector linked to the initial local news reports mentioning the first stages of the investigation, Mr Owen was in denial "Well, I'm not sure whether this is related or not. I somehow doubt my Spanish coin dealer is also dealing drugs and arms sales !" and then he found my account based on the news reports.

What happens next is significant. He was then warned by V-Coins coin dealer Ron Bude (whose numerous offerings of ancient British coins are in themselves worthy of further comment) that "I would not trust Barford's website to provide an unbiased account of the situation". [Quite right, I urge anybody reading this to check for themselves what collectors themselves reveal about the hobby and not take my word for it]. Then follows coin dealer Dave Welsh's attack on my "credentials" to write anything at all on the matter. Then a Spanish collector urges "I will ask all members to make the life of moderators easy and to not place any other message on this subject." The subject that he thinks coin collectors and dealers on the list should not be discussing was: "Arrests of 40 Spanish Coin & Antiquity dealers". He then attempts to change the subject: "Any new interesting fake flying in the net?". I posted a comment pointing out that the raids had disclosed that this network had also been producing and selling fake artefacts too...

It seems pretty transparent what is going on here. One can only imagine what is happening on Yahoo's "Moneta-L" and "AncientArtifacts" discussion lists. Why not register with them and take a look just how antiquity dealers are dealing with the crisis there?

Arrests in Spanish Antiquities Investigation Reportedly up to 81

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I predicted the other day that the usual culprits in the antiquity collecting world would fail to discuss the raids in Andalusia that led to the arrest of forty people supplying the international market with illicitly-obtained artefacts. It seems I was right, we saw instead some attempts by coin dealers such as Dave Welsh at deflection of attention away from the issue.

It seems it is becoming more difficult for them to ignore the implications of these events in Spain. It was reported today from Madrid that the number of arrests in the operation against a ring illegally dealing in antiquities looted from archaeological sites has risen to eighty-one people. The ring that was broken up operated in several Spanish provinces and had clients in the United States, Britain and Germany.

These arrests were accompanied by 115 searches of a number of premises, and thousands of artefacts were recovered. Most of them (as may be predicted from the preferences of the trade in general) were from Roman times, though there was also a quantity of medieval, Islamic and even prehistoric items. Reports note

"more than 6,000 Roman and medieval coins, arrowheads, brooches of Roman origin, Visigothic earrings and buckles, polished stone axes, steles with inscriptions in Arabic, columns and votive offerings".
Some of the looted pieces came from the prehistoric sites of Castulo and Los Villares in the southern province of Jaen, and from Calatrava la Vieja in the central region of Ciudad Real, one of the most important Islamic archaeological sites in Spain.

The report also reveals some of the less savory aspects of the Spanish trade in dugup ancient antiquities. In the modern trade as a whole both deception through fakes as well as dubious auction practices (shill bidding) are endemic. Very often those involved in the trade are also involved in other criminal activities run by criminal organizations. The breaking up of this ring shows clearly that the Spanish market is no exception:

Police also dismantled in Jaen a sophisticated workshop that skillfully restored and, at times, faked archaeological items that they sold as genuine. The criminals would copy an original piece with high-precision tools and age it with chemical and physical processes, making it difficult even for experts to determine if it were a genuine antique or a copy. Afterwards they offered the items on auction Web sites or sold them directly to established customers.

Sometimes, as the chief of the police’s cultural-heritage brigade, Antonio Tenorio, said, the crooks submitted phony bids to drive up the prices of their merchandise on Internet auction sites.

Spanish police connect the dismantled organization’s kingpin with a network that launders money through illegal sales of precious metals such as silver and gold.Cops have seized more than 120 kilos of gold and silver, 900,000 euros ($1.2 million) in cash, equipment for smelting metal as well as a machine gun and six other firearms. Meanwhile, around a hundred bank accounts have been frozen in a score of banks, one of them in Switzerland.

Source: EFE, 'Spanish Cops Bring Down Ring That Sold Looted Antiquities' Latin American Herald Tribune, December 11,2010.


UPDATE: See David Gill's excellent Looting Matters post which gives more details Operation Carolina Mosaico: Expoliadores arrested in Spain. It also contains a comment pertinent to the ongoing discussion on certain collectors' forums: "This story should alert any coin dealers who have been buying directly or indirectly from Spain", indeed it should.

Madrid Museum and the Medici Polaroids

Madrid’s National Archaeological Museum may have bought trafficked items concludes Fabio Isman ('Looted" from Italy and now in a major Spanish museum? ' Art Newspaper online 13 Jul 2010). The 22 objects in question (Greek pots and the suchlike) seem to have passed through the hands of antiquities dealers Giacomo Medici and Gianfranco Becchina.

Medici was discovered with a store full of antiquities, photographs (many of them Polaroids without any scientific method) and documents, in Geneva in 1995, while Becchina was identified as the owner of three warehouses in Basel in 2001, allegedly containing thousands of suspicious artefacts and photographs, along with an archive of files on clients, shipping documents, invoices and bank statements. Medici was finally found guilty in 2009 in Rome of trafficking in antiquities (he is appealing: he initially received ten years in prison, reduced by two on first appeal, and a €10m fine payable to the state as compensation for damage to Italy’s cultural heritage), while the trial of Becchina is now beginning. He denies charges of trafficking in illegally excavated antiquities.

The objects in question were bought by the Madrid museum in 1999 for $12m from the 82-year-old collector and entrepreneur José Luis Várez Fisa and they had formed part of his collection of hundreds of ancient artefacts from the Etruscan period, Ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt and Spain, spanning the fifth century BC to the fifth century AD. The archaeological museum’s then director, Miguel Angel Elvira Barba, said in 1999: “We have taken an enormous step forward both in terms of quality and quantity; [this] collection now puts us among the ranks of the greatest museums in Europe and the US”. Their exhibition in 2003 was accompanied by a 500-page catalogue.

In 2006, the Italian archaeologist Daniela Rizzo from the Villa Giulia in Rome and document expert Maurizio Pellegrini, both of whom have assisted Prosecutor Paolo Giorgio Ferri in the case against Giacomo Medici, came across the catalogue. They have been working on a database of tens of thousands of objects that they believe were secretly and illegally excavated from Italy, and put up for sale from the 1970s onwards, many of which have been traced back to the confiscated archives belonging to Medici and Becchina. They have spent so many hours poring over these images that they are now able to almost instantly identify them and, in only a few days, were able to match items from the catalogue with pictures seized in the police raids. They believe that 22 of the artefacts in the Madrid museum’s 2003 catalogue also appear in Medici’s and Becchina’s confiscated photos [...]. A few of them show objects still covered in mud—suggesting they had been recently (and illegally) unearthed—while others show the pieces in fragments, before the dealers sent them to be professionally restored.

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It is important to note that there is no evidence of any dealing between José Luis Várez Fisa and Becchina or Medici, despite the large amount of paperwork seized from the pair, or that Fisa was aware of any problems in the provenance of the objects he acquired. It also the case that the widespread trafficking in illegally excavated antiquities since the 1970s until very recently (despite the 1970 Unesco Convention designed to curb the illicit trade) has meant that objects have inadvertently entered private and museum collections (although higher standards of due diligence over provenance-checking among museums are now the norm). Meanwhile, requests to the Madrid museum from The Art Newspaper to comment on these allegations remained unanswered at time of publication. Nevertheless the case demonstrates how easily all too many recent private collections were formed, and how some of the world’s most important museums (and not only those who knowingly connived to buy objects directly from the “traffickers”), bought antiquities that had been completely decontextualised from their past, with origins were at best extremely obscure. Will the Italian state try to reclaim at least some of the more important artefacts taken from under its soil? And, now that the National Archaeological Museum of Madrid knows all about the illicit provenance of many of its artefacts, will it pretend that nothing has happened? Indifference, surely, is not an option.