by Craig Childs
Phoenix Ancient Art then sold a four-foot-high slab of Egyptian limestone covered in hieroglyphs that was later confiscated from a Fifth Avenue apartment amid a tangle of provenance issues, and the gallery had to swallow the $210,000 sale. Aboutaam’s brother Ali, who runs the Geneva showroom, was accused of smuggling artifacts from Egypt to Switzerland and was sentenced in absentia to fifteen years in prison by an Egyptian court. He has appealed the charges.
The rap sheet for Phoenix Ancient Art is impressive, but not wildly so for a high-profile gallery moving artifacts reportedly worth in excess of $40 million a year. It is the cost of doing business. “We are seeing auction houses conducting more due diligence than in the past,” Aboutaam told me. “Among dealers and museums there are many more questions about the ownership history of the pieces transacted, and objects are being rejected by a number of buyers. All of these things did not exist—or if they did it was subtle—fifteen or twenty years ago.”
Aboutaam speaks with a rich accent, his words casual but deliberately chosen. He is a clean-cut Lebanese entrepreneur, and though he politely declines the title, he has become the new face of the antiquities business as he strives to make his work more visible, publishing glossy journals featuring the artifacts he is selling and retaining a powerful public relations firm to care for his company’s image. With measured humility he said, “I am working on getting the antiquities trade more public, exposed.”
No longer can brazen and snide men like Hoving rule the market. Now one must be savvy on another level, presenting a smooth and trustworthy persona while deftly pulling strings. Using transparency as his shield, Aboutaam has opened his gallery to greater scrutiny, but in the end, he says, it is easier than hiding in the shadows.
In May of 2009, Aboutaam’s gallery gave back to Italy 251 objects worth $2.7 million. In a bold PR move that suggests how the high-end artifact business might work in the future, the gallery put out a press release stating, “We returned these ancient artifacts in the spirit of cooperation and collaboration with the international art world, and to demonstrate Phoenix’s commitment to the preservation and repatriation of national treasures to their host countries.” The release added, “We have amicably settled the matter with the Italian authorities, and urge others in the art world to follow suit and also the lead of some of the world’s great museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in repatriating antiquities whose provenance may be in doubt.” The approach is a curious one, considering that the gallery sold many of those very artifacts to museums in the first place.
To stay out of trouble, Aboutaam explains, you have to ask many questions and take your time with purchases. Good advice, of course, but it is often hard to follow, given how fast artifacts move through the market. He retains two full-time employees just to research provenance.
“Does this make me immune from being lied to?” he asked. “I don’t think so.”
In 2005, Aboutaam was offered a headless stone statue of a Sumerian king, a small black figure with detailed inscriptions running along its shoulder and back. It happened to be one of the most valuable artifacts stolen from the National Museum of Iraq during the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, after which it was smuggled through Syria and into the States. Aboutaam told the seller he was not interested and contacted federal officials, since this particular statue was on the FBI’s list of the top ten most wanted stolen works of art in the world. Although Aboutaam has been quiet about the details, he was instrumental in tracking down the statue, which was eventually recovered and returned to Iraq.
He would rather talk about acquisitions. His voice began purring as he explained that the gallery had purchased a Cycladic idol, a fantastic Aegean grave offering from circa 2500 BC. “An extraordinary object,” he said. “It is a male figure. There are said to be only six male figures of this kind in the world. It sort of went unnoticed by most museums and private collectors, and I grabbed it at a seven-digit number.”
Aboutaam finds an overarching value in the market because, he says, it keeps history in motion. It pulls the past into the present. Rather than having major artifacts moving invisibly through the black market, Aboutaam wants them to be seen by the public, their history appearing on a larger stage. Certain artifacts he has watched for decades, tracking them through the market or patiently wooing an owner to sell. This idol was one he had long wanted, even though it would be in his possession only briefly before being turned around to another buyer. He wants to be part of its history, to put his hand onto the movement of civilization.
Cycladic idols come from the Early Bronze Age and became popular after World War II. It is estimated that around twelve thousand graves in the Cycladic Islands of the southern Aegean have been opened to find these idols. The slender carvings are notoriously hard to date, as is the exact manner of their use, because they almost all come from private sources rather than from archaeologists. They have almost no documented context. It is ultimately safer for buyers and sellers to obscure or destroy information about where they came from than to preserve archaeological data that could prove incriminating. But like that of most collectors and dealers, Aboutaam’s interest transcends strict archaeological definitions. Artistry and antiquity in themselves tell enough of a story to fascinate him. The primal, curved forms of Cycladic idols represent something that traditional science almost misses, a singular, archetypal shape that suggests who we once were as humans. Reams of data and analysis are not required: it is one straight shot to the heart.
“One of these days this idol is going to go back to the public in an institution, and it will be in every book on the history of art,” said Aboutaam. “It is what I live for. What our father lived for. I feel privileged and honored helping to make that wonderful work of art available to the public and to scholars and to future generations.”
Only top sellers can afford to be as visible as Aboutaam. Underneath are layers of midrange dealers who work closer to the source of their artifacts. For fifteen years Jon and Cari Markell ran an opulent little Los Angeles showroom called the Silk Roads Gallery. Gregarious with their customers and favored by local museums, they carried a nice selection of Ming and Qing dynasty statuary from China, as well as a full complement of artifacts from the rest of Asia and even some pieces from the American Southwest. One-stop shopping, it was a favorite of Hollywood nabobs, with prices ranging from the low thousands up to $60,000.
In January of 2008, federal agents raided the gallery, brandishing a warrant compiled by an undercover agent the owners had come to trust as a buyer. The warrant stated that for at least ten years Silk Roads had been smuggling looted objects out of Asia, beads, bracelets, and statuary coming to the gallery directly through China, Thailand, and Myanmar by the thousands. Silk Roads was named as the distribution end of an illegal export/import chain. Individual artifacts had been disguised as replicas and bore “Made in Thailand” stickers that were then peeled off in an L.A. storehouse before going on sale. The gallery allegedly sold artifacts to clients at prices sometimes elevated to 400 percent of wholesale and soon afterward arranged for the same artifacts to be donated to museums. The inflated donations would have acted as tax shelters, a perk for customers of Silk Roads. All this was told to the undercover agent by the Markells themselves, and by their key acquisition man, Robert Olson.
At the same moment the gallery was raided, four prominent museums in Southern California were waking up to discover armed federal agents on their lawns. The museums, including the renowned Los Angeles County Museum of Art, had dealt with Silk Roads and their clients. The institutions all claimed ignorance as agents pored over their collections and quizzed them about the provenance of their pieces. They said they had taken these donations in good faith and that the items would have drifted back into the opacity of private collections had they not accepted them. But while museums were claiming good faith, a report from the undercover agent charged that at least one curator had accepted donations while admittedly
overlooking paperwork discrepancies that called provenance into question.
Far more than ten thousand objects were confiscated in the raids, many originating in Thailand. Joyce White, a prominent archaeologist in the field of early Thai civilization, was called in to identify them. White is a senior researcher at the University of Pennsylvania Museum, which has had its thumb in Thailand since it began excavating there in 1968 and was the first institution to define some of the most important prehistoric settlements in the world. Early civilization in Thailand dates back to 2000 BC. Known as the Ban Chiang tradition, its artifacts made up much of the Silk Roads haul. White was astonished when she first saw these masses of confiscated artifacts: thousands of bracelets, bells, vessels, and ornate clay rollers. She told me that an entire slice of history, from the late Neolithic through the Iron Age, had been removed from Thailand and deposited in Los Angeles.
If we can assume that most artifacts from the tradition were found post-1961—with Ban Chiang being a fairly recent discovery—then anyone outside Thailand probably has them illegally. Thailand could become the next Italy as it orders the return of its antiquities. The first major repatriation is coming from Robert Olson and the Silk Roads material.
White says her willingness and ability to step into the legal fray is unusual for an archaeologist. In her opinion most of her colleagues avoid knowledge of the antiquities market simply because it is depressing. They are also afraid to put their necks on the line by stating in a trial what an artifact is and where it came from, a decision that could have catastrophic effects on other people’s lives.
“The sale of prehistoric objects needs to end,” White said firmly. “It’s time archaeologists step up to the plate.”
White’s analysis helped secure the first arrest in the widening probe around the Silk Roads Gallery. Five months after the raid, Roxanna Brown, a sixty-two-year-old curator for the Southeast Asian Ceramics Museum at Bangkok University in Thailand—and one of the leading experts on the ancient pottery of Southeast Asia—was arrested in Seattle. Brown, who moved in some of the same circles as White, had left her home in Bangkok in the winter of 2008 and traveled to the United States for a speaking engagement at the University of Washington. The agents who apprehended her in a hotel room claimed that her electronic signature had been found on appraisals of smuggled Ban Chiang artifacts that vastly inflated their values. She was told that if she was found guilty she faced twenty years in prison for wire fraud, and because of her ties to Bangkok she was deemed a flight risk and held without bail. The experience shattered her. While in custody she became so enfeebled (she had a prosthetic leg, the result of a car accident) that other inmates had to carry her to the shower. On May 14, 2008, not long after her incarceration, an ulcer in her stomach ruptured, and Brown died in her jail cell, choking on her own fluids.
At the time of her arrest, Brown was considered a staunch preservationist, having publicly implored collectors not to purchase unprovenanced artifacts. A friend called her a tireless defender of ethics in the art trade. The kind of research she did—studying ancient ceramics trading in early Southeast Asia—required that she work only with artifacts from 100 percent intact assemblages. Bogus collections were worthless to her: their pieces could have come from anywhere, and she was mapping the trade routes of the time. For this reason Brown worked mainly with shipwrecks, sites she could verify as unpillaged, their dishes still stacked in cupboards drowned at the bottom of the sea.
On a visit to the United States two months before her arrest, Brown had confided in her brother that she was worried about the Silk Roads case. She said she had signed one appraisal for the gallery, but only one, and she had done it by e-mail after scrutinizing photographs of an artifact. But agents found her appraisals on numerous documents. According to her brother, Brown’s signature had been hijacked to appear on documentation for artifacts even outside her field of study.
I spoke to Fred Brown a few weeks after his sister’s death. He was beside himself, contending she had been caught in a witch hunt. “She went into the field to stop [illegal trade],” he pleaded. “That was the whole point, why she needed a doctoral degree. People were telling her that there was so much corruption that she needed to be high up to stop it.”
But the case is not so simple. Brown’s contacts and transactions reveal that she was deeply tangled in the antiquities underworld. Brown herself had transported undeclared artifacts from Thailand to the United States and had sold them to the Markells at the Silk Roads Gallery. Polite e-mails between Brown and the Markells attached to the warrant indicate she had a friendly working relationship with the gallery. Brown knew she was in slippery terrain. The Markells wrote to reassure her, telling her not to worry about getting caught: “If you are nervous about doing this, please realize that Republicans are still in office, the IRS does not have enough personnel to review small time appraisals and the appraisals are very well written and will never be challenged even if they do.” To which Roxanna responded, “No problem! I am delighted to be your partner in this.” At one point the Markells offered $300 for her services as an artifact appraiser. She turned down the cash, later explaining to the agents who apprehended her that she was happy just to help get these artifacts donated to a museum. In confiscated letters, Brown said she had been buying artifacts for the Bangkok museum for which she curated, moving them out of private hands into public collections regardless of provenance, transactions certainly not unheard-of even for major museums in the past (and some would say even now).
Brown also knew Olson, named in the warrant as “the smuggler” supplying Silk Roads with material from Thailand. She told an agent she had been in his storehouse and seen bronze bracelets still hanging from human arm bones, so she had to have known what Olson was up to. In a handwritten letter to him, she reported that she had found a source for Paleolithic artifacts that he should jump on because a London dealer was also interested. She supplied him with lists of available objects and sent out an invoice confirming that she had received $14,000 in cash from him for a prehistoric Thai bell. She added that she was fully prepared to give the money back if the bell was not satisfactory. (Brown eventually assisted a U.S. investigation in which she helped finger Olson—no indictment resulted. She stated that she thought he was the largest and perhaps only commercial U.S. importer of Thai antiquities and that she believed what he was doing was both illegal and wrong.)
Brown was walking a tightrope, part antiquities mule dispersing artifacts from the field and part respected museum conservationist and scholar. On the surface, the two positions may seem incompatible, but if her goal was to assure an optimal state of preservation for antiquities, Brown was probably doing what she believed was best; a lesser evil than letting them vanish into the hodgepodge of middlemen in foreign markets. She was getting objects directly into the hands of a dealer she trusted, knowing that dealer had access to quality museums.
With Brown’s death, the Silk Roads case came to a standstill. Olson was not indicted, and neither were the Markells, who took their business out of the gallery and moved it online. Brown remained the only arrest. Her brother told me, “They say she’s part of an elaborate scheme. She’s not. It’s the last thing she said: I didn’t do anything wrong.” I could not help siding with him in his grief. Roxanna Brown has become an unwitting poster child for the ethical dilemmas of antiquities. But whether she knew it or not, Brown was indeed part of an elaborate scheme, less a scandal than simply part of the landscape. It goes well beyond the Silk Roads Gallery, beyond Aboutaam and Hoving, into a hunger for the past that resides at the seat of the human experience, and it has been around much longer than any of these characters.
CHAPTER 7
A HISTORY OF URGES
It used to be much cleaner. You would grab a chisel and a pith helmet and go to whatever country you liked, and as long as you could afford a caravan and had a working knowledge of weaponry to fend off bandits or angry locals, you were in. There were even places where
you did not need a gun. In the nineteenth century, colonial Brits were using the Taj Mahal as a picnic ground, and as one early witness recalled, “revellers [would] arm themselves with hammer and chisel, with which they whiled away the afternoon by chipping out fragments of agate and carnelian from the cenotaphs of the Emperor and his lamented Queen.” More famously, the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire around the same time removed about half of the surviving Greek sculptures of the Parthenon and hauled them back to the British Museum (the Elgin Marbles are now a source of bitter international contention).
How much cleaner was it back then? If you look closely, you will always find the seed of trespass that led eventually to the entanglement we are dealing with now. An episode comes to mind, the fate of one of the most important archaeological sites in northwest China at the beginning of the 1900s. For China it was the archaeological crime of the century, and it starts like a joke: a Taoist monk runs into a British archaeologist in the desert. But to get the full story, we must go back a few years before this fateful meeting.
It begins with a forgotten library at the edge of the Taklamakan Desert in China, where towers of scrolls once lay heaped upon each other under several centuries of dust. In this collection was the Diamond Sutra, the oldest known printed book in the world (its inscription read May 11, 868, which puts it 587 years earlier than the Gutenberg Bible). There were also the so-called Jesus Sutras, extremely rare texts of Christian teachings introduced to China in the seventh century. There were stacks of Tibetan pothi, originally brought from far away and housed by the thousands, along with scrolls from a number of other cultures and a handful of diverse written languages. The scrolls contained legends, ballads, rhymes, medical charts, and rules for debtors—the meticulously detailed record of an earlier civilization. There was even a thousand-year-old etiquette guide that explained the exact words one should use to apologize to a host for drunkenness at a party, and how a host would properly respond to such an apology. This is the kind of collection in situ that archaeologists would die for.