30 Priceless Artifacts, Two Disgraced Dealers, and Greece’s Triumph Above All

Late last year, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin L. Bragg, Jr. announced, via press release, the return of 30 “exquisite” antiquities to Greece totalling a whopping $3.7 million. Included in the array of marble statues, breastplates, helmets, and pottery are a marble statue of Aphrodite based on the Aphrodite of Knidos, a Marble Figurine illegally excavated in the Cyclades, and a Corinthian Helmet that was smuggled out of Greece, given false provenance in Germany, and then put on consignment by a New York art dealer. In the press release, Bragg described that the process for the return of these objects was a “team effort” and thanked the “analysts and prosecutors in [his] Office who put in tireless work to bring these pieces home.” 

Curiously however, only 21 of the 30 pieces have been tied to specific collectors and dealers, with the final nine linked to “unspecified” or “anonymous” individuals. According to Adam Schrader with ArtNet News, “the remaining eight items are in the possession of investigators, who know that the items were stolen, but have not yet specified where, how, or by whom they were stolen or recovered from.” Regardless, all 30 works were repatriated to the People of Greece via a repatriation ceremony attended by Consul General Konstantinos Konstantinou, Secretary General of Culture Georgios Didaskalou and others from the D.A.’s Office and Members of the U.S. Homeland Security Investigations. 

The two names that the Manhattan D.A.’s Office revealed in their press release are Michael Ward and Robin Symes: two disgraced dealers that have faced their fair share of long legal battles against the Hellenic Republic. While Ward managed to get out of a court case through an out-of-court settlement (wherein his corporation would donate the artifacts to the Society for the Preservation of Greek Heritage in Washington, D.C.) in December 1993, Symes was not as lucky. He lost his 17-year-long case in May 2023 and Greece recovered 351 artifacts from his liquidated companies.

Two months prior to this repatriation effort, the Association for Research Into Crimes Against Art (ARCA) blog flagged a series of criminal charges against Ward following the repatriation of 19 antiquities to Italy. In a blog post by Lynda Albertson, ARCA’s CEO, she lays out Ward’s “own ‘skin in the game’” through a 114 page document that describes his connections to Michael H. Steinhardt (New York’s most “prolific antiquities collector”) and other corrupt (mostly Italian) dealers to whom he sold looted Italian artifacts through the years. On September 8, 2023, Ward pleaded guilty to one count of Criminal Facilitation in the Fourth Degree under New York Penal Law § 115.00 (committed on or after September 1, 1978). In order for Ward to have been found guilty of this crime, the state of New York has to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Ward: (1) “engaged in conduct which provided (specify person facilitated) with means or opportunity to commit a crime,” (2) “did so believing it probable both: that (specify person facilitated) intended to commit such crime, and that he/she, the defendant, was rendering aid to (specify person facilitated) to do so,” and (3) his “conduct in fact aided (specify person facilitated) to commit the felony of (specify the facilitated felony).” 

Albertson’s investigation into the case revealed that Ward was running, through his gallery at 980 Madison Avenue, a money laundering scheme with Eugene Alexander (a Bulgarian antiquities trafficker), involving the “selling [of] looted antiquities from several countries onward to European and American collectors.” Confiscated emails reveal that Ward was involved in facilitating documents that furthered Alexander’s scheme. In the 114-page document that Albertson cites, which includes a list of 180 antiquities and statements of fact, the District Attorney of New York County uncovered that looters would take photographs of their stolen antiquities and send them to Alexander, who then smuggled them into Germany. 

In Ward’s plea agreement, it appears that about 80 of these looted artifacts passed through Ward’s gallery. They all have vague provenances that include a ‘tie’ to an “ex Geneva private collection” and even Art Loss Register (ALR) certificates, which assert that there is “no match” to stolen artifacts in the ALR database. Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) recovered 35 of these artifacts while executing a search and seizure warrant in New York in early September 2023. When German authorities conducted their own investigation into Alexander, they found “incriminating correspondence between the Bulgarian dealer, traffickers, and the American gallerist” and photographs that he had sent to Ward.

Thus, if we review the three elements of Criminal Facilitation in the Fourth Degree under New York State Penal Law § 115.00 (1), we find that: (1) “the defendant [Ward] engaged in conduct [his money laundering scheme through the gallery which provided [Eugene Alexander] with means or opportunity to commit a crime” and (2) “the defendant [Ward] did so believing it probable both: that [Eugene Alexander] intended to commit such crime [through the photos and incriminating emails] and that he/she, the defendant, [Ward] was rendering aid to [Eugene Alexander] to do so [through his gallery].”

Now, in terms of proving element 3 beyond a reasonable doubt, we must turn back to what Ward and Alexander did in order to facilitate the looting and selling of these artifacts. Testimony from HSI-ICE Special Agent Robert Fromkin, who oversaw communications between Ward and Alexander in his 20+ year money laundering scheme, confirmed that “the defendant's [Ward’s] conduct in fact aided (specify person facilitated) to commit the felony of (specify the facilitated felony).” 

This isn’t Ward’s first instance of criminal activity however. In another ARCA blog post, “Exploring Michael Ward and some peppered-about, possibly-problematic, pieces which might have provenance problems,” Alberton lays out numerous artifacts that (illegally) passed through Ward’s collection and to other buyers and collectors in the United States and around the world. His 1993 slap on the wrist court case didn’t stop him from buying and selling illicit antiquities “via several networks of suppliers, who one by one, and over many years, were unveiled as corrupt.” Court documents reveal that 40 objects stolen from Italy, Turkey, and Greece made their way into Ward’s hands with reported values ranging from $200,000 to $4 million.

As Eileen Kinsella with ArtNet News writes, Ward affirmed that he would plead guilty in open court to the charge “with a promised sentence of a conditional discharge for a period of one year…the conditions of which are that he will surrender additional antiquities, if any, that he or [the District Attorney] identifies in his possession that were sold, consigned, or previously possessed by Eugene Alexander.” As the court papers report, Ward will assist Italy and Germany with their own parallel investigations, the D.A. will not pursue any additional charges against him, and he is immune from prosecution in Italy.

Turning now to the case against Robin Symes, authorities were able to recover a lot more artifacts on a much larger scale. Following the successful outcome of their long term claim against Robin Symes Ltd., the Greek Minister of Culture and Sport, Lina Mendoni, extended her “warm congratulations to those who have contributed over the years to the happy outcome of the case” in a press release in May 2023. The indicative list of antiquities records 85 items, though 351 were ultimately restituted, including a Neolithic anthropomorphic figurine from the 4th millennium BCE and a Copper poly-candle that dates to the 6th-7th centuries AD among other incredible finds. A joint investigation by the Carabinieri and Swiss authorities that began in 2014 revealed 45 crates of Roman and Etruscan artifacts in one of his warehouses in Geneva with a combined worth of several hundred million dollars. Between May and August 2023, close to 500 artifacts from Symes’ warehouses were returned to Italy and Greece.

Symes’ list of accused crimes is nothing short of a convoluted web of crimes, intrigue, and greed. Though he was once London’s “most successful art dealer” and a big name in the art world, the accusations levied against him, that he was connected to a global network of looters and other art dealers who handled stolen Italian antiquities, sealed his fate as the world’s most disgraced and unscrupulous art dealer.

For 30 years, Symes and his partner, Christo Michaelides, were the main players of the global antiquities trade as they illegally moved artifacts between London, New York, and Athens. They were known for wining-and-dining the rich and famous—including Leon Levy, Shelby White, and J. Paul Getty to name a few. Another ARCA blog post in 2016 notes that at the height of the Symes-Michaelides crime empire, they owned $170 million worth of antiquities in their various storage units across the world. By creating “fictitious ‘paper trails’” for many of these works, the Symes-Michaelides team were able to “launder antiquities internationally” and sell loot to famous museums like the Getty Center, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Minneapolis Institute of Art. After Michaelides died in 1999 and Symes refused to return his partner’s assets to his family, Michaelides’ son launched a $16 million investigation into his father’s partner—the first of many into Symes’ criminal business dealings. As a result of this primary investigation, Symes went bankrupt in 2003 and then, in 2005, was served a prison sentence on two counts of contempt of court, of which he only served 7 months.

In his Medium article, Howard Swains, a freelance journalist, investigated a few of the items belonging to Symes. He, along with Christos Tsirogiannis, a Greek forensic anthropologist, positively identified artifacts belonging to the seized Symes stock with those in the Medici and Schinnousa archives. Tsirogiannis is rather knowledgeable about Symes’ and other art dealers’ dealings, for while he worked with the Greek Cultural Ministry, they found 1,300 artifacts during a raid that matched up with a photographic archive kept in a Geneva office. These photographs, belonging to Giacomo Medici and Gianfranco Becchina, would “often show antiquities fresh from the ground, still with soil encrustations on them.”

The raids on Symes’ Swiss warehouses would prove to be some of the most important discoveries of the century, with the ARCA blog calling it “an Ali Baba's cave-worthy hoard of Roman and Etruscan treasures.” Since then, antiquities with links to Symes have been repatriated to Greece and Italy left and right, especially those that have been offered up at auction by Sotheby’s and Christie’s. As Tsirogiannis said in a statement to ArtNet News, “This case is simply the result of very poor provenance research by the members of the antiquities market.”

With respect to the December 2023 repatriation ceremony, District Attorney Bragg reaffirmed his commitment to fighting art crime in New York, promising to “aggressively investigate those who are using Manhattan as a base to traffic stolen antiquities.” The Consul General of Greece in New York, Ambassador Dinos Konstantinou, added, “Investigating the trafficking of art and archeological artifacts is no easy task. Cracking down on smuggling cultural property across the globe requires thorough investigations and efficient cooperation between law enforcement authorities. The return of these artifacts to our country is a testimony to his steadfast commitment to combating illegal trade of antiquities.”

The fight for returning pilfered cultural heritage is far from over. But as more and more art dealers, looting rings, private collectors, and illegal sales practices are exposed, we can expect artifacts to return to their countries of origin by the hundreds of thousands. For as the Greek Minister of Culture, Dr. Lina Mendoni says, “Cultural heritage is an integral part of our identity as people and nations. It is therefore essential and nowadays crucial to protect and preserve cultural heritage for future generations.”

(Cover Image: Some of the repatriated items during a December 2023 press conference, Consulate General of Greece in New York via X)