U.S. Prosecutors Have Issued a Warrant Against High-Profile Dealer Accused of Looting Thousands of Artifacts
On Thursday, October 31st, Manhattan Prosecutors have charged art dealer Edoardo Almagià with taking part of a scheme to defraud and possessing stolen property owned by Italy.
of its investigation of Edoardo Almagià was this pithos from the seventh
century B.C., which was taken from the Getty Museum in 2021 (Foto: Manhattan District Attorney’s Office).
Edoardo Almagià, a famous and high-profile art dealer, born in the United States and graduated from Princeton university who is now based in Rome, Italy, has been accused of importing, selling and donating Roman and Etruscan prized artefacts to well-known museums and collectors. According to the prosecutors, Mr. Almagià had worked to “acquire antiquities, stolen from Italy, market them as legal, display them openly in well-known institutions to increase their value, and then sell those antiquities for profit”.
Among the institutions concerned, items suspected of being trafficked by Mr. Almagià were recovered from the Cleveland Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Fordham Museum of Greek, Roman and Etruscan Art, the Museum of Fine Arts of Boston and the art museum at Princeton University, among others.
New York authorities have obtained the arrest warrant which indicates Mr. Almagià has sold antiquities worth tens of millions of dollars. The antiquities would have been obtained by illegal means, according to The New York Times. The Antiquities Trafficking Unit indicates the details of Almagià’s business transactions were contained in a document allegedly kept in his NY apartment in a “Renaissance-era chest beneath a marble statue of a deer”. The ledger would have been found by an “informant” who had photocopied it, before being interrupted by Mr. Almagià himself. Dozens of pages had already been printed and stacked in the photocopier tray and were subsequently turned over to law enforcement. The information found in this inventory, called the Green Book by the prosecutors, is said to list nearly 1,700 stolen antiquities purchased from tomb raiders to be then sold in Manhattan.
The D.A.’s next step will be to ask Interpol to file a red notice in order for the authorities to detain Mr. Almagià and begin extradition proceedings with the Italian authorities.
In the past decades, allegations of illegal transactions were already made regarding Mr. Almagià. He had been the subject of investigations since the 1990s, when artefacts that were allegedly in his possession and sold by him to a New York gallery were linked with those that had been robbed from an archaeological site outside of Rome. At the time, Mr. Almagià had denied all the accusations.
There have been several other inquiries on his business, including 16 Italian antiquities that Princeton University identified in reports as linked to Mr. Almagià.
In 2006, Mr. Almagià’s apartment had been searched by Homeland Security agents and an officer of the Italian police. Mr. Almagià had surrendered at the time six items but then fled to Italy after hiding antiquities and documents in a storage facility and sending others to Naples in a shipping container, which was seized by Italian authorities.
Since the prosecutors investigation started in 2018, the antiquities trafficking unit has recovered 221 antiquities tied to Mr. Almagià, for around $6 million.
For Mr. Almagià, in any case, if the artworks had been excavated illegally, it would have been before he had bought them.
Art crime/cultural heritage protection specialist and researcher in AI, Machine Learning and Deep Learning. Expert in Impressionist and post-Impressionist art. Provenance researcher and specialist in looted art cases. Master degrees in Art Market and Art History from the Ecole du Louvre and Sorbonne University in Paris and Master degree in Information and Communication Sciences from the CELSA-Sorbonne. Work experiences at the Wildenstein Plattner Institute (2018-2019), Artcurial Paris (2020) and on the EU-funded RITHMS project. Contributor to articles in the Journal of Cultural Heritage Crime, Journal of Art Crime, on the Wildenstein Plattner Institute website and on Hugging Face. Research on AI, more specifically at the moment on LLM/VLM. Studying the impact of AI and new technologies on the art world and provenance research. Author of a Master’s thesis on the state of Impressionism in today’s art market (Ecole du Louvre – 2020) and a Master’s thesis on Claude Monet’s first journey to the Mediterranean (under the supervision of Professor Pierre Wat – Sorbonne Paris I, 2019). Currently working on a book project.
