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.

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.