Ban Chiang artefacts illegally in American Museums

[KoratCat]

Raids New Blow to American Museums

By GREG RISLING

LOS ANGELES (AP) — It's another public relations debacle for the nation's museum industry, already tarred by reports that top institutions knowingly dealt in looted Italian artifacts.

Federal agents raided several Southern California museums on Thursday, mostly in search of artifacts allegedly taken from Thailand's Ban Chiang archeological site, one of the most important prehistoric settlements ever discovered in Southeast Asia. Authorities believe they were smuggled into the U.S. and donated at inflated prices so collectors could claim fraudulent tax deductions.

Court documents say a 79-year-old smuggler involved in the scheme boasted to an undercover agent that he had more items from Ban Chiang than Thailand itself did. He said he was being sent the items as they were being dug up, in violation of Thai and international law.

Search warrants were executed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena and the Mingei International Museum in San Diego, said Virginia Kice, a spokeswoman with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Authorities said no arrests had been made and no charges had been filed.

In recent years the American art industry including museums such as the Metropolitan Museum in New York, Boston's Museum of Fine Arts and the J. Paul Getty Museum in California has agreed to return to Italy artifacts the Italian government says were looted or stolen.

Court documents indicate Thursday's raids were related to a five-year scheme in which the owner of a Los Angeles art gallery worked with a smuggler to bring in artifacts from Thailand and China, offered them as charitable contributions and then tried to claim the donations as tax write-offs by boosting their value. In some cases, museum officials initially questioned how the artifacts were obtained but eventually accepted them, according to affidavits filed in support of the search.

Michael Govan, director and chief executive officer of LACMA, estimated about 60 items donated to the museum over the past decade have come under suspicion. He said the museum is cooperating with the investigation.

"They were seemingly quite regular objects to be gifted," Govan said. "They came from sources who were members of the museum for many years and regular donors, so no, there was no reason for the museum to know ahead of time."

Mingei director Rob Sidner said the museum was also cooperating fully with the investigation.

"If the results of the investigation show that these objects were improperly donated and — we were assured they were acquired properly — they will be returned to their rightful owner," Sidner said in a statement.

Representatives from the Pacific Asia museum did not return phone calls seeking comment.

A statement from the Bowers Museum said items on display from El Malpais National Monument and Chaco Culture Historic Park in New Mexico were being examined by agents as to whether they were removed without a permit. Items from the Ban Chiang area in Thailand also were being reviewed.

All of the artifacts will remain at the museums, said Thom Mrozek, a spokesman with the U.S. attorney's office.

The warrants stem from an undercover investigation by a National Park Service special agent who posed as a collector interested in various artifacts. The agent targeted Robert Olson, who is alleged in an affidavit to be a smuggler, and Jonathan Markell, who co-owns an Asian art gallery in Los Angeles with his wife.

Investigators also searched Markell's gallery and home. A phone and e-mail message left for Markell were not immediately returned. A call to a phone listed as Olson's went unanswered.

Court documents said that Olson, Markell and the agent met more than a dozen times and regularly e-mailed and called one another about the "sale, importation, and donation of stolen archaeological resources from China and Thailand and antiquities illegally imported from Burma." Some of the calls and meetings were recorded, the warrants said.

In the case of the Pacific Asian Museum, Jonathan Markell, 62, and the agent met with museum staffers in March 2006 to donate items recovered from the Ban Chiang culture in northeast Thailand. Two museum officials questioned the agent about how one of the artifacts was obtained. After Markell assured them that the Thai government would not miss the item because it wasn't "an earth-shattering piece," the museum accepted the donation, the documents said.

Associated Press Jan. 26, 2008

Let's hope they do also recover many of the artifacts from Ban Prasat archeological site in Amphur Non Sung, which is considered by archeologists to be even more important than Ban Chiang, giving proof of a prehistoric rural community of vast dimensions in this area almost 3.000 years ago.

[KoratCat]

Museum Workers Are Called Complicit

LOS ANGELES — Appraisal forms, import applications, reference materials. To that usual array of tools a museum might harness in assessing donated artifacts, some museums in Southern California appear to have added one more, according to investigators’ affidavits: a wink and a nudge.

Affidavits related to search warrants executed at four Southern California museums on Thursday say that staff members at two of the four museums worked closely with the main targets of the investigation, visiting a storage locker maintained by a smuggler of stolen antiquities and meeting with the sellers of stolen goods — even while acknowledging that the artifacts headed for the museums might be tainted.

All the activity is said to have taken place even after the emergence of high-profile investigations into the sale and acquisition of stolen artifacts to museums around the world, including the J. Paul Getty Museum here. The picture painted in the warrants suggests that none of this deterred the participants in the transactions, which were the subject of a five-year undercover investigation by federal investigators before being made public this week.

On Friday the directors of two of the museums that were searched denied knowledge of any questionable circumstances surrounding the acquisition of artifacts by their museums.

Joan Marshall, the executive director of the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena, said in a telephone interview that the museum was conducting its own investigation and questioning staff members over allegations laid out in the search warrant.

That document claims that the museum’s former director, David Kamansky, who retired in 2005, visited a warehouse maintained by Robert Olson, who investigators say illegally smuggled large numbers of artifacts out of Thailand and arranged for their sale or donation to museums, including the Pacific Asia Museum.

The document also describes a deputy director of collections at the museum telling an undercover agent that she was supposed to put up “token resistance” to accepting antiquities without proper paperwork. The artifacts, a collection of materials from the Ban Chiang culture in Thailand, were soon accepted anyway.

“That’s not the usual process, and not something the museum condones,” Ms. Marshall said.

In March 2006, that affidavit says, two other senior curators at the museum met with the undercover agent and with Jonathan Markell. Mr. Markell and his wife, Cari, owned the Silk Roads Gallery, which is at the center of the investigation. That gallery was also raided this week. At that meeting, the document says, curators raised questions about where the artifacts had come from, but accepted the donations without requiring documentation of their origins.

Officials from the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana were also described in the court papers as having extensive contacts with Mr. Olson.

Armand Labbé, a former curator at the Bowers Museum who died in 2005, had extensive contacts with Mr. Olson, meeting with him regularly to choose Thai and American Indian artifacts that Mr. Labbé wanted donated to the museum, the papers say. At one point, Mr. Labbé’s secretary told the undercover agent, Mr. Olson called the museum’s offices every day.

Peter Keller, the director of the Bowers Museum, said in an interview on Friday that he had met Mr. Olson only once, in 1991, shortly after he took over at the museum, when Mr. Labbé took him to meet some museum donors. He also said he had seen Mr. Olson “in the halls” of the museum on occasion.

Although the museum has extensive collections of Ban Chiang artifacts, Mr. Keller said, “We honestly did not know this material was illegal.” He added that his researchers had been unable to find evidence of the Thai antiquity law forbidding their export, passed in 1961, in the databases they regularly consulted.

According to an affidavit attached to the search warrant for the museum, the undercover agent discussed the law with Mr. Labbé in 2004 and with Mr. Keller in 2005. The agent was also said to have mailed Mr. Keller a copy of the Thai antiquity law that month. “I don’t recall ever seeing that correspondence,” Mr. Keller said.

The museum has never required proof that artifacts it accepts have been obtained legally, Mr. Keller said. Donors are required to sign a statement saying that they are the rightful owners of an artifact and that it is in the United States legally, he said, but they are not asked to provide documentation.

Mr. Keller said it was a “very difficult thing to prove” where an artifact has come from or how long it has been in the United States. “I don’t know how you prove it,” he said.

One specialist in cultural heritage law said that ignorance of the law was no defense for museums.

“Museums are in a sense just turning a blind eye to what everybody knows in their heart of hearts is going on,” said the specialist, Patty Gerstenblith, a professor of law at DePaul University. “By not thinking about what they buy, they are putting money into an international network of smugglers, looters, thieves and destroyers. As educational institutions, museums have a responsibility to look beyond that particular object” that they may be acquiring.

Since Mr. Labbé’s death, Mr. Keller said, the museum has stopped acquiring new materials of that sort and now mostly plays host to traveling exhibitions from larger museums. “I personally don’t see any need to have material in the collection if we are not going to research it or display it,” he said.

The undercover agent described meetings with Mr. Labbé in which the two discussed that some of the Thai artifacts the agent was donating to the museum had recently been dug up in Thailand. At one meeting, in March 2004, Mr. Labbé purchased some beads from Mr. Olson that had just been received from Thailand. According to the affidavit, “The beads were filled with dirt and had obviously just been dug up.”

The agent also showed Mr. Labbé pictures of a new dig site where the artifacts had been obtained — an indication that they would have been acquired in violation of Thai law.

“Mr. Labbé smiled and said he did not want to see them,” the affidavit states.

New York Times Jan. 26, 2008

[KoratCat]

Ban Chiang smugglers busted

The Fine Arts Department has sought an investigation to establish if stolen artefacts uncovered following a crackdown in the United States belonged to the ancient Ban Chiang period.

US authorities raided four museums in southern California last week, breaking an illegal network smuggling the items into the US.

The department wants the artefacts returned to the King-dom if they were found to be from Ban Chiang, the oldest known civilisation in the King-dom, which dates back to 1,000 BC.

Fine Arts Department director Kriangkrai Sampatchalit wanted clear proof about the artefacts. "We would ask Unesco's International Council of Museums to check whether they are genuine objects. If they are real we would provide historical evidence to prove they belong to Thailand," he said by phone yesterday.

Dozens of US federal agents descended on the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Pasa-dena's Pacific Asia Museum, Bowers Museum in Santa Ana and Mingei International Museum in San Diego.

The raids marked the first public move in a five-year undercover probe of the alleged smuggling network, The Los Angeles Time reported on Friday.

The detailed warrants gave agents broad authority to search the museums' galleries, offices, storage areas and computer archives.

They were looking for objects and records related to the primary targets of the investigation: an alleged art smuggler, Robert Olson, and the owner of a Los Angeles Asian art gallery, Jonathan Markell.

Markell's Silk Roads Gallery on La Brea Avenue was also raided.

No arrests were made, but legal experts say the surprise search warrants suggest prosecutors are collecting the final elements to seek criminal indictments against Markell and Olson, the paper said.

Many objects come from the ancient civilisation of Ban Chiang, which occupied northeastern Thailand from 1000 BC to 200 AD.

"The original location where the Ban Chiang culture was discovered was named a World Heritage Site in 1992 and is considered the most important pre-historic settlement yet discovered in Southeast Asia," the search warrants said.

The warrants allege that the Ban Chiang objects are probably looted because they were first excavated by archaeologists in 1967, six years after Thailand banned the export of antiquities.

The Thai government never gave permission for the contested antiquities to leave the country.

Moreover, importing such objects into the US after 1979 was a violation of the US National Stolen Property Act and the Archaeological Resource Protection Act, the warrants state.

Other objects named in the warrants came from Burma, from which the US has banned imports since 2003, and China, which has strict export laws governing its antiquities.

The investigation began in 2003, when the undercover agent with the National Park Service posed as a buyer and began purchasing allegedly looted art from Olson, according to the warrants. Olson, the warrants say, specialises in Native American and Thai antiquities.

Olson allegedly told the agent he had been importing objects from Ban Chiang since the 1980s and had never received a permit from the Thai government. He said he got objects "as they were being dug up" and knew it was illegal to ship them out of the country, the warrants say.

The smuggled antiquities were affixed with "Made in Thailand" labels, and sometimes painted over to make them look to US customs officials like modern replicas, Olson allegedly told the agent.

The Nation Jan. 28, 2008