FREDA BEDI CONT'D (#4)

This is a broad, catch-all category of works that fit best here and not elsewhere. If you haven't found it someplace else, you might want to look here.

Re: FREDA BEDI CONT'D (#4)

Postby admin » Mon Oct 31, 2022 12:21 am

The Tomb Raiders Of The Upper East Side: Inside the Manhattan DA’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit
by Ariel Sabar
The Atlantic
December 2021 Issue
November, 2021

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.


Image
Malike Sidibe for The Atlantic

When Matthew Bogdanos got a tip about a looted mummy coffin whose corpse had been dumped in the Nile, he approached the coffin’s buyer—the Metropolitan Museum of Art—with few of the courtesies traditionally accorded New York’s premier cultural institution.

Bogdanos, a 64-year-old prosecutor in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, is chief of its Antiquities Trafficking Unit. The only one of its kind in the world, his squad of prosecutors, criminal investigators, and art specialists polices the loftiest reaches of New York’s art market—a genteel club of museums, collectors, and auction houses that buy and sell the relics of ancient civilizations.

People in Manhattan’s antiquities trade tend to carry themselves with an air of refinement. Bogdanos does not. He’s a retired Marine colonel and amateur middleweight boxer who likes to drive opponents “into the corner and beat the living shit out of them,” his trainer told me.

In the case of the Met’s mummy coffin, Bogdanos got off the phone with a smuggler turned informant in Dubai and, by day’s end, had opened a grand-jury investigation in Manhattan. He subpoenaed the emails, texts, and handwritten notes of every Met employee involved in the coffin’s purchase.

What Bogdanos found “shocked the conscience,” he told me.
According to an official summary of the grand-jury investigation, the Met had acquired the golden first-century-B.C. coffin, for $4 million, despite what Bogdanos saw as a sea of red flags: three conflicting ownership histories, the involvement of known traffickers, a forged export license that bore the stamp Arab Republic of Egypt before the country used that name. The Met had allegedly deleted emails at the dealer’s request and deflected questions from Egypt. Smugglers had so hastily disposed of the coffin’s occupant—an Egyptian priest—that the museum’s conservators found a finger bone still stuck inside.

According to a 2019 search warrant, the Met was the probable site of criminal possession of stolen property in the first degree, a felony punishable by up to 25 years in prison. The intimation was that Met officials knew—or should have known—that the coffin was looted, but bought it anyway. (A Met spokesperson said the museum had been deceived by an “international criminal organization.” Though never charged, the Met apologized to the people of Egypt, reformed its acquisitions process, and forfeited the coffin to the DA.)


Image
Kim Kardashian at the Met Gala in 2018, posing with a coffin that the Manhattan DA later discovered had been looted from Egypt (Landon Nordeman / Trunk Archive)

Over the past decade, Bogdanos and his agents have impounded more than 3,600 antiquities, valued at some $200 million. They’ve raided art fairs on Park Avenue, and Christie’s in Rockefeller Center. They arrested a dealer at the five-star Mark Hotel and seized statues on display at the five-star Pierre.

Tips from scholars, dealers, and other informants have repeatedly led Bogdanos to the Upper East Side. The enclave of old-money families along Fifth Avenue’s Museum Mile is America’s worst neighborhood for antiquities crime.
It’s a long way, culturally, from Bogdanos’s New York. He grew up busing tables at his parents’ Greek restaurant in Kips Bay, and his court filings are salted with sarcastic, class-conscious asides. The problem with “these gentlemen of stature and breeding,” he told one judge, is that they “would never be so gauche” as to check the legal status of ancient art before buying it.

Some dealers have shut down rather than fight back. A 2019 journal article found that the number of ancient-art galleries with Manhattan storefronts had plunged over the preceding two decades from a dozen to three.
“If people in the trade are leaving New York, that speaks volumes about their own consciousness of guilt.”

Other Manhattan dealers continue to operate online or by appointment, but almost none has been spared Bogdanos’s subpoenas and search warrants. Sotheby’s ceased its New York auctions of ancient art in 2016, confining such sales to London. (Sotheby’s says this reflects “demand from collectors.”)

“Reputable galleries that have been in the business for a few decades or more have never seen an environment like this,” David Schoen, a lawyer for the venerable Safani Gallery (and also, incidentally, for former President Donald Trump at his second impeachment trial), told me. “It’s like being hit by snipers,” one person complained to The Art Newspaper.

When Bogdanos was 12, his mother, Claire, a waitress at the family restaurant, gave him a copy of The Iliad to stoke his pride in his Greek heritage. During his parents’ sometimes violent fights, he would take Homer’s epic into a closet and read it obsessively, electrified by Achilles’s rageful war on Troy. When I asked why the tale so moved him, he said, “Everyone acted with honor.”

After earning a law degree at Columbia, he stayed for a master’s in classics. His thesis was a psycho-historical study of how Alexander the Great galvanized followers despite being a genocidal alcoholic with parents who loathed each other. Of the masterworks of classical antiquity, he once said, “I don’t view them as literature,” but as “a travel guide for life.”

Bogdanos served as a military lawyer at Camp Lejeune for three years before joining the Manhattan DA’s Office in 1988 and becoming a top homicide prosecutor. When a jury returned an acquittal in his best-known case—the prosecution of the rapper Sean “Puffy” Combs in connection with a nightclub shooting—he took it as a personal failing and, he says, offered to resign. At the trial, Bogdanos had sat alone at the prosecution table, casting himself as a lone warrior against an army of high-powered defense attorneys. “But at times,” the Daily News reported, he “seemed more like a pit bull on the loose than a hero fighting the dark side.”

Six months later, on September 11, 2001, he was getting ready for work when an explosion rattled the windows of the building where he lived with his wife, Claudia, who is also a lawyer, and their young children. American Airlines Flight 11 had crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center, a block away.

Recalled to active duty, Bogdanos was tasked with improving security at the Kabul airport. He quickly got his hands on travel ledgers that led to the identification of hundreds of senior Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders, including 11 of the 25 most-wanted figures in the War on Terror. According to the citation for his Bronze Star, Bogdanos pulled off this improbable intelligence coup by “seizing unexpected opportunities and relying on his personal courage often at great personal risk.” He was promoted to colonel and named deputy director of the Joint Interagency Coordination Group, a counterterrorism team of agents from the armed forces, FBI, CIA, Treasury, and other agencies, under U.S. Central Command.

The group had decamped to a pair of southern-Iraq port cities in April 2003 when a scandal broke up north.
Just days after the U.S. invasion of Baghdad, looters sacked Iraq’s national museum.
The Pentagon was savaged for failing to protect the compound, which housed irreplaceable artifacts from the cradle of civilization.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld dismissed the controversy: “Stuff happens,” he told reporters. Bogdanos felt differently. “It just hit me in my gut … like a body blow,” he told me. “This stuff matters. It matters forever, and once it’s gone, it’s gone.”

He asked his superiors if he could borrow a dozen or so of his counterterrorism agents, drive them into downtown Baghdad, and get things under control at the museum.

“I said, ‘Well, that’s kind of a wild-ass idea,’ ” his then-commander, the retired four-star Air Force general Victor “Gene” Renuart Jr., told me. Historic preservation lay far outside Bogdanos’s counterterror mission. Bogdanos promised Renuart that the job would take just a few days, and Renuart relented, ordering the Marine not to get himself or anyone else killed. Bogdanos’s team bunked in the museum’s library and somehow extended the assignment to several months. Through a combination of amnesty offers and armed raids, the crew recovered thousands of antiquities across Iraq.

When Bogdanos got back to the States, he published a memoir called Thieves of Baghdad and shook hands with President George W. Bush, who awarded him a National Humanities Medal. A speaking tour and Warner Bros. movie option followed
. Military leaders liked the press, but made clear to Bogdanos that his foray into war-zone museum protection was over.

Bogdanos had other plans. In speeches, interviews, and op-eds, he began promoting the notion that Iraqi insurgents were using the antiquities trade as a major revenue source—“a cash cow”—for terrorism. “In a modern-day version of the old ‘molasses to rum to slaves’ triangle trade,” he wrote in a New York Times op-ed in 2005, “the cozy cabal of academics, dealers, and collectors who turn a blind eye to the illicit side of the trade is in effect supporting the terrorists killing our troops in Iraq.”

Image
Bogdanos in front of the Iraq Museum in 2003, briefing the press on the status of missing antiquities (Behrouz Mehri / AFP)

He’d identified—or, as critics saw it, invented—an alarming link between his official duties and his personal obsessions. A Rand Corporation study last year found insufficient evidence for his claim. (There are stronger signs of organized looting in Syria by the Islamic State, though few objects appear to have reached major markets.)

“I have never said and never will say that all antiquities trafficking is funding terrorism—that’s absurd,” Bogdanos said in one of our Zoom interviews, anticipating my questions about the Rand report. “But some is, and some’s enough.” He had focused on terrorism, he said, to keep antiquities in the news after interest in the Iraq Museum waned.

He’d also begun plotting a new assignment back home. In the same 2005 op-ed, published soon after his release from active duty, he declared that he would return to the Manhattan DA’s Office the next year and “head the city’s first task force dedicated to investigating and prosecuting antiquities theft and trafficking.”

When I asked why that unit took 12 years to materialize, he acknowledged that he’d gotten ahead of himself.
He said that then–District Attorney Robert Morgenthau had allowed him to pursue antiquities along with his other work. But Bogdanos had never asked about a task force, much less gotten approval for one.

So why had he pretended otherwise?

“You know how when you want something to happen, you say it as if it’s true?” he asked me.

Maybe some people do, I thought. But about your employer? In the Times?

On his first day back in the DA’s office, supervisors informed him that he could, in effect, “go fuck himself,” a high-ranking official in the Morgenthau administration told me. The antiquities unit “was completely a figment of his own imagination and his self-aggrandizing personality.”

In the end, Bogdanos prosecuted no antiquities cases under Morgenthau. He says his bosses rebuffed every request for a grand-jury investigation; those bosses, now retired, told me he never presented a viable case.

Undeterred, Bogdanos spent off-hours meeting with art dealers and law-enforcement agents, building contacts in hopes that one day things would change.

Morgenthau retired in 2009. Two years later [2011], Bogdanos received a visit from Brenton Easter, an investigator in the New York office of the Department of Homeland Security. Easter told him that a collector was bringing millions of dollars’ worth of suspect coins to the 40th New York International Numismatic Convention. The collector, a hand surgeon named Arnold-Peter Weiss, was a professor at Brown University’s medical school, a former treasurer of the American Numismatic Society, and a member of Harvard Art Museums’ collections committee.

Bogdanos began working his sources. He was at his family’s lakeside cabin in New Jersey on Christmas Eve when an officer he knew in the Italian Carabinieri called with the investigation’s missing piece: The coins, the officer told him, were Italian national property. Italy had never authorized their export.

Bogdanos called his supervisor, Karen Friedman Agnifilo: Could he set up a sting?

“You’ve lost your mind,” Agnifilo told him. Coin enthusiasts—“the nerdiest people”—hardly fit the criminal stereotype. “How sure are you about this?”

Bogdanos walked her through the evidence, and she gave the go-ahead. “It was indisputable,” she told me.

In January 2012, 10 officers in law-enforcement windbreakers raided the Waldorf Astoria.

Bogdanos and Easter prepped an informant to pose as a high-end buyer. Over pizza on the Upper East Side, Weiss told the informant about a rare coin—a fifth-century-B.C. tetradrachm bearing the head of Apollo. Weiss wanted $300,000 for it. “There’s no paperwork,” Weiss told the informant, according to the criminal complaint that Bogdanos’s team would file. “I know this is a fresh coin; this was dug up a few years ago.” (Weiss also knew that recently excavated coins were rightfully the property of the Italian government, he later admitted to a federal agent.)

A recording of the conversation—the informant was wearing a wire—seemed to give Bogdanos probable cause for arrest. But on what charge? Unlike federal prosecutors, who have broad jurisdiction over U.S. ports and customs, Bogdanos had only New York laws at his disposal. One of the plainest caught his eye: criminal possession of stolen property. The charge was typically brought against pawnbrokers, chop shops, and other businesses popular with thieves seeking no-questions-asked buyers. If a junkyard with an inexplicable surplus of copper wire could be charged, why not an antiquities collector with one too many Sumerian statues?

In January 2012, with the coin convention under way, 10 officers in law-enforcement windbreakers raided the Waldorf Astoria and arrested Weiss in the conference room where he had his booth. Weiss pleaded guilty to three misdemeanors, and the DA agreed to 70 hours of community service, a $3,000 fine, and a requirement that Weiss write an article for a numismatics journal on the perils of unprovenanced coins.
In a twist, all of the coins that Weiss and investigators thought had been looted from Italy—including the tetradrachm—turned out to be fake, so the charges were reduced to attempted criminal possession of stolen property. The Manhattan DA gave the fakes to the Smithsonian Institution to educate federal agents and returned other coins to Greece.


In a single stroke, Bogdanos had criminalized common behavior in the coin world. But as precedent for a broader dragnet, it was limited. Weiss admitted knowing—or believing—that his goods had been looted. What of the far greater number of dealers and collectors who didn’t know, because they didn’t ask?

Willful ignorance—the “ostrich defense,” as Bogdanos calls it—is endemic in the antiquities trade. For much of the 20th century, few Westerners cared to look too closely at how an ancient object came to be removed from its homeland. The important thing was that it had found its way to Europe or America. The grand civilizations that had produced the art were long gone, leaving behind people too poor and ignorant to appreciate, much less protect, their own cultural heritage. So went the colonialist mindset.

Bogdanos needed to pierce the ostrich defense, and he found an awl in the same stolen-property law that had brought down Weiss. A little-noted provision, absent from the New York law’s federal counterpart, said that if dealers failed to make a “reasonable inquiry” into an object’s true ownership, those dealers were “presumed” to know it was stolen. Willful ignorance, in other words, was tantamount to guilt. Bogdanos’s team began seizing not just antiquities, but computers, cellphones, emails, notes, and other personal records showing whether buyers had taken anything more than the most perfunctory steps to investigate provenance.

One recurring target of his search warrants and subpoenas has been the billionaire financier and collector Michael Steinhardt, who has a Greek-art gallery at the Met named after him. Bogdanos’s team has carted off 80 antiquities, valued at more than $20 million, from Steinhardt’s Fifth Avenue office and apartment. It also took one he’d loaned to the Met: a 2,300-year-old marble bull’s head that militants had stolen from Lebanon four decades ago. Steinhardt has openly wrestled with the temptations of the trade.[!!!] Years earlier he’d lost a federal lawsuit over an illegally imported golden bowl from Sicily—after paying $1 million for the relic and another $1 million for lawyers. “It should have turned me off antiquities,” Steinhardt told an interviewer, “but it’s like an addiction.” (Steinhardt, who has not been criminally charged, did not respond to requests for comment.)

Image
A 2,300-year-old marble bull’s head stolen by Lebanese militants.

Image
A 2,500-year-old limestone relief of a Persian soldier that Bogdanos’s team seized in 2017. (Manhattan District Attorney’s Office)

By 2017, Bogdanos had become so buried in antiquities work that he was sleeping in his office. Supervisors alerted Cyrus Vance Jr., the DA, to the swelling caseload, and that December Vance announced the formation of the Antiquities Trafficking Unit—the fulfillment of Bogdanos’s long-deferred fantasy. Vance obtained $2.2 million from a money-laundering settlement for five years of salaries. In addition to Bogdanos, its chief, who still spends at least half his time prosecuting homicides, the unit has three other assistant DAs, five analysts (with degrees in fields like art and archaeology), and two detectives, as well as half a dozen special agents from the Department of Homeland Security.

The DA’s office has returned more than 1,300 antiquities to their homelands: a marble sarcophagus fragment to Greece, a Buddha’s footprint to Pakistan, and, to Italy, a first-century mosaic from a ship in the emperor Caligula’s fleet.
The rest, a couple thousand artifacts, occupy so much space that Bogdanos has taken to referring to their storage sites—in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and, until recently, Long Island City—as “wings.”

The unit’s biggest case is a sprawling 86-count indictment against the renowned Manhattan dealer Subhash Kapoor, who is now on trial in India on similar charges and has denied wrongdoing. In July, the DA extradited from the United Kingdom a restorer who cleaned Kapoor’s antiquities, in part to hide dirt, rust, and other signs of their recent theft. “I avoided asking questions,” the restorer told a New York court before pleading guilty, “because I was suspicious that the answers would reveal that the objects were stolen.”

Though the FBI has an art-crime squad and some countries have police teams that chase antiquities, Bogdanos’s group appears to be the only unit led by a prosecutor. Advocates say the distinction is crucial: Too many police probes of antiquities theft go nowhere because prosecutors lack the expertise or political will to take them on.

The problem is plainly visible, scholars say, at the Department of Justice, which has a history of treating ill-gotten antiquities as a civil matter
. Federal prosecutors might sue to return relics to their homelands—a practice known as “seize and send”—but seldom charge the people who buy or transport them. This has been true even in cases as striking as Hobby Lobby’s import, a decade ago, of $1.6 million in illicit Iraqi artifacts, some in boxes labeled ceramic tiles. The arts-and-crafts chain paid $3 million to settle a federal civil action and has forfeited thousands of antiquities to the U.S. government. But federal prosecutors filed no criminal charges, even though the company had been warned against importing the objects by a hired expert.

The politics are especially delicate when collectors have reputations as public benefactors. More than 90 percent of the art in American museums has been loaned or donated by private collectors, a fact celebrated by the Association of Art Museum Directors as a “distinctly American tradition of philanthropy.”

Karen Friedman Agnifilo, who until her recent departure was Vance’s second in command, received a call a few years ago from a friend of someone whom Bogdanos was investigating. The caller described the target as “an important philanthropist, a good person,” and asked the DA to lay off. “I was appalled,” Agnifilo told me. “It showed me the world we’re dealing with: these very wealthy, very powerful, very connected people, some of whom think the law doesn’t apply to them.”

[Peter Nahum, Art Dealer] The point about authenticating a painting is, the first and most important thing is, looking at the picture, and judging the paint, the calligraphy, the way the brushstrokes are put on, and the color balance, etc., with authenticated works by the artist. The second most important thing, which is very important if the picture has provenance, histories of previous owners, especially if it takes you back to the artist, and also exhibitions the pictures have been in.

Image

So provenance is very important.

[Jonathan Searle, Fraud Squad, New Scotland Yard] And if you've got the provenance that's there, and the provenances were very, very professional. I've never seen anything like it. And if I had been a dealer, I'd have most certainly been fooled.

[Narrator] And to make the scam work, John Drewe presented himself as a darling of the art world.

Image

[Jonathan Searle, Fraud Squad, New Scotland Yard] John Drewe gave a donation of twenty thousand pounds to the Tate, and as a result of that, he was naturally thought of as a supporter of the arts. And he said he was interested in looking up the old archives -- which he did -- in the Tate. And he set to work. A very busy little bee.

Image

To my knowledge, the type of forgery of archival material, has never been done to this extent with paintings. And not on such a scale, and not so audacious.

Image

Because this was full-penetration of the Tate archives, and the V&A archives, and a number of other archives as well.

Image

Image

[John Myatt] He would fabricate catalogues of exhibitions, by taking a catalogue out of an archive, inserting one of my new paintings into the catalogue, returning it to the archive, and then a researcher will say, "Oh yes, well, you know, that was obviously exhibited in in Brighton Art Gallery, or something, And that is the history which validates the painting -- however poor the quality.

-- Inside Criminal Minds ... Con Men [The Cunning Genius Who Fooled The Art World: John Myatt], Narration by Anthony Wilson, by Real Crime

Image
The Ouroboros or uroborus is an ancient symbol depicting a serpent or dragon eating its own tail.

-- Ouroboros, by Wikipedia


The galleries of the Upper East Side have proved a tougher testing ground in some ways than the battlefields of Baghdad.

When Bogdanos executes search warrants, it’s “like their heads explode,” he told me. “You can’t believe the number of times lawyers will come in and say, ‘All you had to do was call me up on the phone … It’s the way we’ve always done business, the way the feds have always done it. Closed door. No one has to know anything.’

“Are you kidding me? I wouldn’t do that for a drug dealer on 155th Street or a gunrunner on 187th Street, but I’m going to do it for your client?”

Bogdanos’s crackdown comes amid a broader reckoning over the West’s extraction of wealth from poor countries and people of color. The fiercest activists want Western museums to return all antiquities to their homelands, on the grounds that even legal acquisitions were tainted by colonial-era imbalances of money and power.
Randall Hixenbaugh, one of Manhattan’s last surviving ancient-art dealers, told me that he has lost sales of well-provenanced objects, in part, he suspects, because sensational news stories have soured collectors on the entire sector. The push to make antiquities “unpalatable,” he contends, has less to do with the law than with an anti-European cultural politics.

Particularly galling to Bogdanos’s detractors are his seizures of antiquities that have circulated, unquestioned, for decades. Among them is a 2,500-year-old limestone relief of a spear-toting Persian soldier, valued at $3 million. In 2017 Bogdanos removed it from an art fair at the Park Avenue Armory, as its enraged British dealer sputtered curses. The object had been owned by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts since the 1950s. Spurred by a tip from a scholar, Bogdanos’s team used archival records, decades-old photo negatives, and interviews in five countries to argue that the relief had been filched in the 1930s from an excavation in Iran. The British dealer and a colleague agreed to surrender the relief without admitting guilt, and in 2018, a New York judge ordered its repatriation.

If an object with seven decades of documented provenance could be labeled stolen, “then so can tens of thousands of other items in American museums,” Kate Fitz Gibbon, a lawyer who consults for art collectors, dealers, and museums, told me. Bogdanos is “applying standards today that simply didn’t exist in the past.” Some people have decided not to fight Bogdanos’s efforts to repatriate their art, even when they’ve done nothing wrong, Fitz Gibbon said. What spooks them are the stratospheric legal costs—and public opprobrium—if Bogdanos follows through on threats of criminal prosecution. A climate of fear, she said, is chilling the legal trade, imperiling the city’s vaunted cultural life.

Title, like a stream, cannot rise higher than its source. No one can, therefore, transfer a better title than he has, unless by the principle of estoppel the true owner is estopped to assert his superior title. One who has stolen a chattel cannot convey a good title, even to a bona fide purchaser.

-- Barthelmess v. Cavalier, 2 Cal.App.2d 477

Bogdanos counters that he’s not killing the market but saving it, by purging it of loot and effectively raising prices for pieces with unassailable provenance. Dealers who gripe about his clampdown are like pharmacists complaining about drug busts. “I’m ruining the illegal business,” he told me. “If people in the trade are leaving New York, that speaks volumes about their own consciousness of guilt.”

Bogdanos used to give interviews that sounded like closing arguments on Law & Order. “You want to know what will get the vast majority of them to stop?” he once said of unscrupulous dealers. Prison for “some 65-year-old person who has never seen the inside of a jail”—“a nice sentence among one of their own.”

Yet Bogdanos’s dream job, now that he has it, has been chastening. In all 11 of his antiquities convictions, the defendants pleaded guilty before trial. But none of those convictions resulted in prison, the one penalty that antiquities watchdogs had hoped to see more of.

The Met’s golden coffin had been the centerpiece of a new exhibit, visited by nearly half a million people. French officials used Bogdanos’s evidence to charge the coffin’s Paris dealers with money laundering, forgery, and fraud, and the Manhattan DA returned the relic to Egypt in 2019. But no Met employees were ever charged. The museum’s failures of due diligence were deplorable, Bogdanos told me, but fell short of a provable crime.

Nancy Wiener, a prominent Manhattan gallerist, pleaded guilty to three felony counts in September, after selling millions of dollars of stolen South Asian antiquities over more than a decade. She admitted in court that she had covered up evidence of theft by falsifying ownership histories and having a restorer rid objects of suspicious marks. Yet Bogdanos asked the judge to impose no penalty and no probation—nothing beyond the several hours she’d spent being fingerprinted and photographed at the DA’s office after her 2016 arrest. Her extensive help on other cases since then, he told the judge, warranted “evenhanded justice” rather than “absolute justice.”


I asked Bogdanos how he squared these nuanced outcomes with his once-strident calls for “shame and prison.” He rubbed a hand across his lips in a pained gesture, and there was a silence, the longest of our many interviews. “It’s a legitimate question,” he conceded.

Proving mens rea, a suspect’s guilty mind, has been harder than he imagined, he told me. He’s had to reconcile himself to extremely light sentences for some culprits in exchange for testimony against the worst offenders, most of whom have yet to face justice. And though New York is the world’s largest art market, some antiquities have slipped his grasp simply by crossing state lines. In the face of murders, robberies, and violent mayhem, few prosecutors outside his office—and truth be told, few in it—share his sense of urgency.

For a man who styles himself after the code-bound warriors of Greek myth, these deviations from the Platonic ideal haven’t been easy. The galleries of the Upper East Side have proved a tougher testing ground in some ways than the battlefields of Baghdad.

“Sometimes you have to make deals that make you sick,” he said.

This article appears in the December 2021 print edition with the headline “The Antiquities Cop.”

Ariel Sabar, a winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, is the author of Veritas: A Harvard Professor, a Con Man and the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36183
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: FREDA BEDI CONT'D (#4)

Postby admin » Mon Oct 31, 2022 12:37 am

The Art Market is a Scam (And Rich People Run It)
Oct 5, 2021
Writing by Sam Denby
Research by Sam Denby and Tristan Purdy
Editing by Alexander Williard
Animation by Josh Sherrington
Sound by Graham Haerther

admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36183
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: FREDA BEDI CONT'D (#4)

Postby admin » Mon Oct 31, 2022 2:55 am

Court of Palermo dismisses charges of mafia association against Gianfranco Becchina
by ARCA: Association For Research Into Crimes Against Art
art-crime.blogspot.com
October 24, 2018

The Getty kouros is an over-life-sized statue in the form of a late archaic Greek kouros. The dolomitic marble sculpture was bought by the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, California, in 1985 for ten million dollars and first exhibited there in October 1986....

The kouros first appeared on the art market in 1983 when the Basel dealer Gianfranco Becchina offered the work to the Getty's curator of antiquities, Jiří Frel. Frel deposited the sculpture (then in seven pieces) at Pacific Palisades along with a number of documents purporting to attest to the statue's authenticity. These documents traced the provenance of the piece to a collection in Geneva of Dr. Jean Lauffenberger who, it was claimed, had bought it in 1930 from a Greek dealer. No find site or archaeological data was recorded. Amongst the papers was a suspect 1952 letter allegedly from Ernst Langlotz, then the preeminent scholar of Greek sculpture, remarking on the similarity of the kouros to the Anavyssos youth in Athens (NAMA 3851). Later inquiries by the Getty revealed that the postcode on the Langlotz letter did not exist until 1972, and that a bank account mentioned in a 1955 letter to an A.E. Bigenwald regarding repairs on the statue was not opened until 1963.

The documentary history of the sculpture was evidently an elaborate fake and therefore there are no reliable facts about its recent history before 1983. At the time of acquisition, the Getty Villa's board of trustees split over the authenticity of the work. Federico Zeri, founding member of board of trustees and appointed by Getty himself, left the board in 1984 after his argument that the Getty kouros was a forgery and should not be bought was rejected.

-- Getty kouros, by Wikipedia


Image

Following a formal request by the Deputy Prosecutor for the District Anti-Mafia Directorate Carlo Marzella, preliminary reexamination judge of of the Court of Palermo, Antonella Consiglio, has dismissed the charge of mafia association against the Castelvetrano antiquities dealer Gianfranco Becchina. In her decision, the judge cited that the accusations used for the basis of the charge, made via testimonies given by Vincenzo Calcara, an exMafia soldier and pentito (collaborator of justice), have been deemed "unreliable".

The link from Matteo Messina Denaro to Gianfranco Becchina is said to begin with Denaro's father, Francesco Messina Denaro, who was the capo mandamento in Castelvetrano and the head of the mafia commission of the Trapani region. Francesco Messina Denaro was believed to have been behind the theft of the famous Efebo of Selinunte, a 5th century BCE statue of Dionysius Iachos, stolen on October 30, 1962 and recovered in 1968 through the help of Rodolfo Siviero.

Image
Credit: Accademia degli incerti

The informant Calcara, who gave testimony against the art dealer, is a former protege of Francesco Messina Denaro of the Castelvetrano family and has faced his own legal dramas related to his involvement in international drug trafficking and money laundering, some underworld activities which purportedly also implicated the Vatican bank. Verbose mafia defector Calcara's claims of self importance, and connections to the upper echelons of the mafia, have lethal overtones. In the passed he has said he was originally tasked with killing antimafia Judge Paolo Borsellino in September 1991 with a sniper rifle but was arrested before he could carry out the plot.

Image

Involved in the trafficking of weapons, drugs, and political corruption Calcara was once offered a place in the government's witness protection program but refused. Later the Cosa Nostra determined his whereabouts and threatened his wife if she didn't get him to stop talking to authorities.

Back in 1992, Calcara and now deceased former drug dealer Rosario Spatola incriminated Becchina for alleged association with the Campobello di Mazara and Castelvetrano clans implying that there was a gang affiliate active in Switzerland whose role was to excavate and sell ancient artefacts on the black market. At the time of Spatola's testimony, much of his information was also discounted as many were skeptical that he had actual knowledge or whether he invented things for his own benefit.

To dismantle Denaro's operational funding, which authorities believe has helped him remain at large as a fugitive from justice, Italy's Anti-Mafia Investigative Directorate (DIA), through the Court of Trapani's penal and preventive measures section, seized all movable assets related to Becchina in November 2017 including real estate and corporate enterprises on the basis of an order issued from the District Attorney of Palermo. This included Becchina's cement trade business, Atlas Cements Ltd., Olio Verde srl., his olive oil production company, Demetra srl., Becchina & company srl., and Palazzo Pignatelli, once the noble residence of the family Tagliavia-Aragona-Pignatelli, which is part of the ancient Castello Bellumvider (the public part is owned by the city and houses the town hall). Investigators also seized Becchina's land, vehicles and bank accounts.

What will happen with the seized properties and businesses remains a manner for the Preventive Measures Section of the Trapani court to decide but given his close ties with other incarcerated mafia affiliates, Becchina's story is not yet finished.

In 1991 Sicilian building magnate Rosario Cascio became connected with Becchina's Atlas Cements Ltd., and took over as reference shareholder and director. Before his incarceration, Cascio was a Mafia Associate to several bosses in multiple families including fugitive Matteo Messina Denaro with strong ties to the Castelvetrano family. Known as the "cashier of Cosa Nostra." Cascio once had a hit put out on him by mobster Angelo Siino only to have Matteo Messina Denaro intervene on his behalf. Cascio managed the family's economic activities and sub-contracts, and monopolized the concrete market and the sale of and construction equipment. He also steered public contracts towards mafia businesses and managed an extortion racket which imposed sub contracts and labor.

So, while there are no (longer) "reliable" statements proving Becchina is formally "affiliated" with the Castelvetrano organized crime family, his connections to other individuals who are or were, and the properties connected to joint operations with mafia collaborators, are still subject to judicial consideration.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36183
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: FREDA BEDI CONT'D (#4)

Postby admin » Mon Oct 31, 2022 3:01 am

Part 1 of 2

Jiri Frel [Jiri Frohlich]
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 10/17/22

The Getty kouros is an over-life-sized statue in the form of a late archaic Greek kouros. The dolomitic marble sculpture was bought by the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, California, in 1985 for ten million dollars and first exhibited there in October 1986....

The kouros first appeared on the art market in 1983 when the Basel dealer Gianfranco Becchina offered the work to the Getty's curator of antiquities, Jiří Frel. Frel deposited the sculpture (then in seven pieces) at Pacific Palisades along with a number of documents purporting to attest to the statue's authenticity. These documents traced the provenance of the piece to a collection in Geneva of Dr. Jean Lauffenberger who, it was claimed, had bought it in 1930 from a Greek dealer. No find site or archaeological data was recorded. Amongst the papers was a suspect 1952 letter allegedly from Ernst Langlotz, then the preeminent scholar of Greek sculpture, remarking on the similarity of the kouros to the Anavyssos youth in Athens (NAMA 3851). Later inquiries by the Getty revealed that the postcode on the Langlotz letter did not exist until 1972, and that a bank account mentioned in a 1955 letter to an A.E. Bigenwald regarding repairs on the statue was not opened until 1963.

The documentary history of the sculpture was evidently an elaborate fake and therefore there are no reliable facts about its recent history before 1983. At the time of acquisition, the Getty Villa's board of trustees split over the authenticity of the work. Federico Zeri, founding member of board of trustees and appointed by Getty himself, left the board in 1984 after his argument that the Getty kouros was a forgery and should not be bought was rejected.

-- Getty kouros, by Wikipedia

Image
Was Jiri Frel a Spy?

Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino undertook a Freedom of Information Act request for the FBI’s file on former Getty Curator Jiri Frel, and posted the FBI file. The FBI was very interested in Frel, sparking rumors over whether Arthur Houghton was tasked with keeping “an eye on” Frel.

Espionage allegations aside, the Frel file is a fascinating study of a complicated personality. It hints at Frel’s famously chaotic love life. More importantly, it demonstrates how adept the charismatic polymath, connoisseur and political shape-shifter was at manipulating situations and spinning answers for his own survival. Colleagues at the Getty knew Frel as an Old World snob who constantly complained about America, its broken education system, its obsession with pop culture, its hot dogs and unpalatable mustard. Indeed, years later, when he was caught conducting a massive tax fraud scheme and falsifying provenance for million-dollar fakes at the Getty, Frel left America and never looked back. Yet during his 1971 FBI interview, the reporting agent noted how Frel gushed that “he considers the United States to be in his words ‘a great and good country.

-- Was Jiri Frel a Spy?, by Illicit Cultural Property, illicitculturalproperty.com

Jiří Frel (often spelled as Jiri Frel, 1923, Dolní Újezd, Czechoslovakia — 29 April 2006, Paris[1][2]) was a Czech and American archaeologist. Between 1973 and 1986 he served as a curator for the J. Paul Getty Museum. He is credited with the expansion of the collection of antiquities of the museum, but he was also involved in a number of controversies, including a tax manipulation scheme to buy artifacts of dubious provenance and purchase of a number of artifacts widely considered to be fake.[3]

Frel was born in Moravia [Moravia is a historical region in the east of the Czech Republic and one of three historical Czech lands, with Bohemia and Czech Silesia.] and studied in Paris. He returned to Czechoslovakia after World War II and obtained a doctorate from Charles University in Prague. Subsequently, he was employed by the Greek and Roman art department of Charles University and taught there. In 1969, following the Soviet invasion, Frel emigrated to the United States. For a short period, he taught at Princeton University,

5/24/71

[DELETE] advised there were no records at her institution concerning FREL. His location or activities in the New York City area are unknown to [DELETE]

Inquiry at Princeton University showed he was not employed there.


-- FBI Freedom of Information Act Request on JIRI FREL

... subsequently worked as an associate curator of Greek and Roman art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and in 1973, he became the curator of the department of antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum.[3]

During his tenure as curator, Frel considerably expanded the collection of Greek and Roman artifacts, transforming it to one of the leading museums of the world. He also recruited collectors to donate their items to the museum, apparently frustrated by the refusal of the management to buy new items which were not high-profile. To facilitate this, Frel designed a tax evasion scheme in which fictitious donors paid to an intermediary to get tax reductions for donations of artifact they have never seen.The scam was uncovered by Thomas Hoving, and Frel had to resign in 1984.
[Geraldine Norman] The number of Japanese tourists who come to worship at the van Gogh shrine in Auvers, got a big boost when Yasuda bought the sunflowers in 1987. It will be a terrible disappointment to the nation if they discover their famous sunflower picture is not really by Van Gogh.

[To Tom Hoving, Ex-Director Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC] What do you think Yasuda is going to say if they actually have to face the fact that they are landed with a fake?

[Tom Hoving, Ex-Director Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC] Oh, I don't think they'll face it. I think they hope it'll go away. I do not think that the people in charge of the insurance company are going to let regiments of experts in to take it off the exhibition, and look at it, and maybe even do some analysis, and so on. I just don't think they're gonna do that. I think it would be a very great loss of face. I think the picture was purchased because the only other Vincent van Gogh in Japan prior to the United States firebombing of Tokyo, was a sunflowers, which was destroyed.

[Geraldine Norman] It is said that the painting was relined after its arrival in Japan, which may mean that important evidence has been lost. We asked Yasuda if we could talk to them about this, and our views on the sunflowers problem. Yasuo Goto, the chairman of the company, replied, "We have no intention of participating in any discussion of sunflowers' authenticity, as we hold no doubts whatsoever that it is genuine. We also have no intention of answering the questions mentioned in your letter." I personally find it impossible to believe that the Yasuda sunflowers is by Van Gogh. There's too much evidence against it. It's not mentioned in the letters, or other early documents. It first appears in the hands of Emile Schuffenecker, whose name has long been linked with faking. And it is generally agreed that it is visually inferior to the other two. It does disturb me, however, that so many experts still think it genuine. They aren't talking to each other, and don't know each other's arguments. Which is why the muddle persists. If the experts, the Van Gogh Foundation, and Mr. Goto from Yasuda, could be persuaded to divulge what they know, the truth about the Yasuda picture could be found. Using secrecy to protect their reputations and huge investments just won't do. Christie's has both money and reputation at stake, and has opted for silence. They refused to be interviewed, and issued a statement saying, "We see no reason, on the evidence so far produced, to alter our original opinion that the sunflowers is an authentic work by Van Gogh."

[Tom Hoving, Ex-Director Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC] You don't ever get a concert of opinion in art. Very seldomly you get it. And so this, I think, will just kind of go on forever. And since it's not going to ever be for resale, does it matter?


[Dr. Bogomila Welsh-Ovcharov, Prof. History of Art, University of Toronto] Most of us who know Van Gogh -- and I think a lot of us do, or profess to know a lot about Van Gogh -- know that this very simple man, filled with great humility and compassion for mankind, saw these works as different legacies than financial ones. I think he would be horrified, and distraught beyond anything you can imagine, to see himself somersaulted to such tremendous value, and such crass commercialism. I think it would have been something that he couldn't have ever tolerated.

[url]-- Is Van Gogh's 'Sunflowers' A Fake?: The Fake Van Gogh's, Narrated by Geraldine Norman, World History Documentaries[/url]

Before leaving the Getty Museum in 1986 he hired Marion True, the new curator, who was later charged with laundering stolen artifacts.[3]

References

1. Kennedy, Randy (17 May 2006). "Jiri Frel, Getty's Former Antiquities Curator, Dies at 82". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 4 March 2017. Retrieved 3 March 2017.
2. Bouzek, Jan (2006). "Jiří Frel" (PDF). Classical Tradition and Czech Culture. Archived (PDF) from the original on 15 September 2016. Retrieved 24 April 2016.
3. Frammolino, Ralph (13 May 2006). "Jiri Frel, 82; Colorful Curator Who Left Getty Under a Cloud". Los Angeles Times. Archived from the original on 13 May 2016. Retrieved 24 April 2016.

*****************************

Jiri Frel: Scholar, Refugee, Curator…Spy?
by Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino
Chasing Aphrodite: The Hunt for Looted Antiquities in the World's Museums
September 12, 2011

[The Authors

This blog is written and maintained by Jason Felch. The book Chasing Aphrodite was written by Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino.

Image
Jason Felch

Image
Ralph Frammolino

Jason is an award-winning author and investigative reporter who has spent a decade researching the illicit antiquities trade. He has also written on topics such as arms trafficking, forensic DNA, disaster fraud, money laundering, and public education.

In 2006, Felch and Frammolino were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in Investigative Reporting for exposing the role of the J. Paul Getty Museum and other American museums in the black market for looted antiquities. Their book on the topic, Chasing Aphrodite, was a Los Angeles Times best-seller and has been awarded the California Book Award, the SAFE Beacon Award and the ARCA Award for Art Crime Scholarship.

SPEAKING

Jason is available for speaking engagements on topics including museum ethics; the illicit antiquities trade; art crime and international law enforcement; the ethics and law of collecting; the history of the J. Paul Getty Museum; crisis management; and investigative journalism.

The museum scandals described in the book have local relevance for cities including Los Angeles, New York, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Toledo, Princeton, Dallas/Ft. Worth, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Denver, New Haven, and Washington DC.

CONTACT

Please send inquiries to: chasingaphrodite@gmail.com]




In the early 1980s, the antiquities department at the J. Paul Getty Museum was a hotbed of whispered political intrigue.

Rumors swirled that the department’s Czech curator, Jiri Frel, was a Communist spy. And many believed the deputy curator, former State Department official Arthur Houghton, was a CIA plant tasked with keeping an eye on Frel’s activities.


Image

Frel’s once-classified FBI file, obtained by the authors under the Freedom of Information Act, reveals that the US Government asked similar questions about Frel in 1971, when an investigation was conducted into his “possible intelligence connections.”

As part of our Hot Documents series, we’ve posted the entire FBI file here.

Frel was born in Czechoslovakia 1923 as Jiri Frohlich to a Czech father and Austrian mother, the FBI records show. (The family changed the surname to Frel in 1940s, possibly to hide Jewish roots.) Frel entered the United States in 1969 as a visiting scholar at Princeton University’s Institute for Advanced Studies. The Institute had long been an intellectual home base for leading scholars, including Albert Einstein.

After a year at the Institute, Frel was granted political asylum with the help of lawyers at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he had begun working as an research associate in the Greek and Roman Department under Dietrich von Bothmer. Interestingly, Frel cites additional assistance from George Kennan, the former US Ambassador to the Soviet Union and a leading historian at the IAS.
Unknown to the public, Gene Sharp formulated a theory on non violence as a political weapon. Also he first helped NATO and then CIA train the leaders of the soft coups of the last 15 years. Since the 50s, Gene Sharp studied Henry D. Thoreau and Mohandas K. Gandhi’s theory of civil disobedience. For these authors, obedience and disobedience were religious and moral matters, not political ones. However, to preach had political consequences; what could be considered an aim could be perceived as a mean. Civil disobedience can be considered then as a political, even military, action technique.

In 1983, Sharp designed the Non Violent Sanctions Program in the Center for International Affairs of Harvard University where he did some social sciences studies on the possible use of civil disobedience by Western Europe population in case of a military invasion carried out by the troops of the Warsaw Pact. At the same time, he founded in Boston the Albert Einstein Institution with the double purpose of financing his own researches and applying his own models to specific situations. In 1985, he published a book titled "Making Europe Unconquerable " whose second edition included a preface by George Kennan, the Father of the Cold War. In 1987, the association was funded by the U.S. Institute for Peace and hosted seminars to instruct its allies on defense based on civil disobedience. General Fricaud-Chagnaud, on his part, introduced his "civil deterrence" concept at the Foundation of National Defense Studies.

General Edward B Atkeson, seconded by the US Army to the Director of the CIA, integrates the institute into the apparatus of the US stay-behind network interfering in the affairs of allied states. Focusing on the morality of the means of action avoids debate on the legitimacy of the action. Non-violence, accepted as good in itself and an integral part of democracy, facilitates whitewashing of covert actions which are intrinsically non-democratic.

-- The Albert Einstein Institution: non-violence according to the CIA, by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network

During an interview with FBI agents in September 1971, Frel was “extremely cooperative,” the records show. Frel denied ever being a spy but he admitted to providing Communist government officials with the names, background information and psychological assessments of those he met on his scholarly travels throughout Europe during the Cold War. “He stated that while he was never aware of this information being used for intelligence purposes, he often suspected that the Chechoslovak [sic] Intelligence Service reviewed copies of this form,” the report notes.

The FBI seemed particularly interested in Frel’s ties to his mentor at Charles University, a woman whose name is redacted in the FBI file. We shared the FBI file with an expert on academic life under Communist Prague, UC Berkeley Associate Professor John Connelly, who was able to identify the woman as Ruzena Vackova, a professor of classical architecture in Prague who was condemned to 22 yrs. prison in 1952.

Image

According to Connelly, Vackova was one of the few in academia to speak openly against the Communist regime and was the only professor in Prague to march with student protesters. In Connelly’s book “Captive University,” he describes Vackova telling a group in March 1948, “…if a criteria for dismissing these students was participation in these demonstrations, then I would like to share their fate.” (p.194) Vackova spent 16 years in prison and her dissent continued after her release, Connelly told us in an email.

“She was an extraordinary, outstanding person,” he said.

The FBI had picked up on whispers that Frel may have been a Communist agent who turned Vackova in to the authorities. “Since he was one of her protégés at Charles University in Prague, a rumor began to spread of which he was aware, that he had somehow cooperated with the Communist government in her demise,” the report notes.

Frel denied the claim and railed against the Soviet overlords in his Czech homeland, saying he “vehemently disagrees with the Communist regime.” Yet the curator also volunteered (we imagine somewhat sheepishly, but the bland FBI prose doesn’t say) how he cultivated the regime’s approval by once applying for the Communist party. Frel said he applied “to keep his position at the university,” and was rejected because of his incompatible political views.


Connelly believes that it is unlikely that Frel had any role in Vackova’s arrest. “He was probably a conformist (like the overwhelming majority) who tried to anticipate the will of the regime,” Connelly wrote to us. Few who knew him at the Getty would think of Frel as a conformist, but during his years there he certainly showed a flare for telling those in power what they wanted to hear while doing what he damn well pleased.

Espionage allegations aside, the Frel file is a fascinating study of a complicated personality. It hints at Frel’s famously chaotic love life. More importantly, it demonstrates how adept the charismatic polymath, connoisseur and political shape-shifter was at manipulating situations and spinning answers for his own survival. Colleagues at the Getty knew Frel as an Old World snob who constantly complained about America, its broken education system, its obsession with pop culture, its hot dogs and unpalatable mustard. Indeed, years later, when he was caught conducting a massive tax fraud scheme and falsifying provenance for million-dollar fakes at the Getty, Frel left America and never looked back. Yet during his 1971 FBI interview, the reporting agent noted how Frel gushed that “he considers the United States to be in his words ‘a great and good country.”

The story told by the documents is not complete: 10 pages were redacted, citing exemptions for national security and privacy. But it’s clear the FBI closed its case in 1971, concluding Frel had no ties to foreign intelligence services. Frel died in Paris on April 29, 2006.

As for Houghton and his ties to the CIA, the rumors were not far off. Before coming to the Getty in 1982, he had spent a decade working for the State Department, including time in its bureau of intelligence and research as a Mid East analyst. Houghton was fond of cultivating his image as a man of mystery. In truth, he had burned out on the diplomatic bureaucracy and chose a career that brought him closer to his long time passion — ancient coins. Houghton remains active in the field to this day.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36183
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: FREDA BEDI CONT'D (#4)

Postby admin » Mon Oct 31, 2022 3:02 am

Part 2 of 2



U.S. Department of Justice
Federal Bureau of Investigation
Washington, D.C. 20535

December 14, 2007

MR. RALPH A FRAMMOLINO
APARTMENT 2
33 NORTH EL MOLINO AVENUE
PASADENA, CA 91101

Subject FREL, JIRI
FOIPA No. 1075190-000

Dear Requester:

The enclosed documents were reviewed under the Freedom of Information/ Privacy Acts (FOIPA), Title 5, United States Code, Section 552/552a. Deletions have been made to protect information which is exempt from disclosure, with the approximate exemptions noted on the page next to the excision. In addition, a deleted page information sheet was inserted in the file to indicate where pages were withheld entirely. The exemptions used to withhold information are marked below and explained on the enclosed Form OPCA-16a:

Section 552

(b)(1)
(b)(2)
(b)(6)
(b)(7)(C)

41 page(s) were removed and 31 page(s) are being released.

You have the right to appeal any denials in this release. Appeals should be directed in writing to the Director, Office of Information and Privacy, U.S. Department of Justice, 1425 New York Ave., NW, Suite 11050, Washington, D.C. 20530-0001 within sixty days from the date of this letter. The envelope and the letter should be clearly marked "Freedom of Information Appeal" or "Information Appeal." Please cite the FOIPA number assigned to your request so that it may be easily identified.

Sincerely yours,

David M. Hardy
Section Chief
Record/Information
Dissemination Section
Records Management Division

Enclosure(s)

EXPLANATION OF EXEMPTIONS

SUBSECTIONS OF TITLE 5, UNITED STATES CODE, SECTION 552


(b)(1) (A) specifically authorized under criteria established by an Executive order to be kept secret in the interest of national defense or foreign policy and (B) are in fact properly classified to such Executive order;

(b)(2) related solely to the internal personnel rules and practices of an agency;

(b)(6) personnel and medical files and similar files the disclosure of which would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.

b)(7) records or information compiled for law enforcement purposes, but only to the extent that the production of such law enforcement records or information ( A ) could be reasonably be expected to interfere with enforcement proceedings, ( B ) would deprive a person of a right to a fair trial or an impartial adjudication, ( C ) could be reasonably expected to constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy,

FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION
FOIPA
DELETED PAGE INFORMATION SHEET


Serial Description - COVER SHEET

Total Deleted Page(s) - 10
Page 7 - b1, b6, b7c
Page 8 - b1, b6, b7c
Page 9 - b1
Page 32 - Duplicate
Page 33 - Duplicate
Page 34 - Duplicate
Page 35 - Duplicate
Page 36 - Duplicate
Page 37 - Duplicate
Page 38 - b1, b6, b7c

***

FOIPA # 1075190
MCRP
Jiri Froblich
R53-3-28-72
ALL FBI INFORMATION CONTAINED HEREIN IS UNCLASSIFIED
DATE 10-25-2007 BY 60324 auc baw/rs/ljm

DEPARTMENT OF STATE
AIRGRAM
NO: A-286
UNCLASSIFIED

TO: Department of State (VO)
FROM: American Embassy, PRAGUE
DATE: July 18, 1969
SUBJECT: VISAS: NIV SPLEX Case of Jiri FREL.

1. VISAS DONKEY Jiri FREL, born Nov. 13, 1923 at Veselicko, CSSR, University Prof., Classical Archeology, Charles University, Prague, [DELETE]. Both regular passports.

2. To accept appointment at School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ. under Prof. [DELETE]. Has valid DSP-66 signed by [DELETE]. ETA 20 Sept. 1969 by air at New York for 10 months.

3. Aliens claim no political affiliations. No apparent ineligibilities.

1969 JUL 24 AM 10 41
MCT-18
REC-73
105-195963
RECORDED
3 JUL 28 1969
Copy to Newark
FORM 4-62 ds-323
UNCLASSIFIED
51 AUG 12 1969
REC'D DOM INTELL DIV
JUL 30 1969
JUL 28 1 47 PM 1969

Federal Bureau of Investigation Records Branch
Attention [DELETE]
Return to [DELETE] OPD
All References (Subversive & Nonsubversive)
Subject: Jiri Frel
Birthdate & Place: 11-13-23
Date: 7-28

Federal Bureau of Investigation Records Branch
Attention [DELETE]
Return to [DELETE]
All References (Subversive & Nonsubversive)
Subject: JIRI FREL
Birthdate & Place: 11-13-23, CZECH
Date: 4-2
FILE NUMBER
105-195963

Federal Bureau of Investigation Records Branch
Attention [DELETE] 818 D.
Return to [DELETE]
All References (Subversive & Nonsubversive)
Subject: [DELETE]
Birthdate & Place: 11-13-23, CZECH
Date: 4-7
FILE NUMBER
105-195963

***

CLASSIFICATION PER OGA LETTER
DATED: 10-22-2007
DATE: 10-26-2007
CLASSIFIED BY 60324 auc baw/rs/ljm
DECLASSIFY ON: 25X 3.3(1) B6 B7C
10-26-2032
4/12/71
REC-15
105-195963-2

SAC, Newark
Director, FBI
JIRI FREL
IS - CZ

[DELETE]

Newark refer to Department of State airgram July 18, 1969, indicating subject with [DELETE] was to enter United States under the East-West Exchange Program, September 20, 1969, to accept an appointment at the school of Historical Studies, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey.
The East–West Center (EWC), or the Center for Cultural and Technical Interchange Between East and West, is an education and research organization established by the U.S. Congress in 1960 to strengthen relations and understanding among the peoples and nations of Asia, the Pacific, and the United States. It is headquartered in Honolulu, Hawaii.

The East–West Center originated as a University of Hawaii at Manoa faculty initiative with a February 16, 1959, memo from professor Murray Turnbull, then acting Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, to political science professor Norman Meller, then chairperson of the faculty senate, that proposed the creation of an International College of Cultural Affairs. However, University of Hawaii President Laurence H. Snyder stated that budgetary constraints prevented proceeding at the time with the idea.

Two months later, following radio reports of an April 16, 1959 speech in Washington, D.C. by then Sen. Lyndon Johnson (D-TX) that proposed the creation of an international university in Hawaii "as a meeting place for the intellectuals of the East and the West," history professor John Stalker and Meller urged President Snyder to respond at once to Johnson's suggestion. With the prospect of federal funding, President Snyder appointed a faculty committee chaired by Turnbull to rapidly prepare a substantive proposal for creating an international college.

On June 9, 1959, Sen. Johnson introduced a bill in the U.S. Senate to establish an educational center in Hawaii to provide for "cultural and technical interchange between East and West," with a companion bill introduced in the U.S. House by Delegate John A. Burns (D-T.H.); the Mutual Security Act of 1959, signed by U.S. President Eisenhower on July 24, 1959, called on the State Department to study the idea and report back to Congress by January 3, 1960.

On May 14, 1960, President Eisenhower signed the Mutual Security Act of 1960 which authorized the creation of a Center for Cultural and Technical Interchange Between East and West (East–West Center) at the University of Hawaii, and on August 31, 1960, signed the Department of State Appropriation Act, 1961, which appropriated $10 million for the Center (including $8.2 million in capital spending for six new buildings), and on September 30, 1961, President Kennedy signed Supplemental Appropriation Act, 1962, which appropriated an additional $3.3 million for the Center.

On October 25, 1960, the University of Hawaii signed a grant-in-aid agreement with the State Department to establish and operate the East–West Center, and received its first installment of $1.1 million in federal funding on November 8, 1960.

University of Hawaii art professor Murray Turnbull served as interim director and acting chancellor of the East–West Center through 1961,[8] when anthropologist Alexander Spoehr, the former director (1953–1961) of the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum in Honolulu, was appointed as the East–West Center's first chancellor, serving for two years before resigning at the end of 1963. University of Hawaii president Thomas H. Hamilton served as acting chancellor of the East–West Center for a year and a half from January 1964–June 1965. In July 1965, he was succeeded by former newspaper publisher and diplomat Howard P. Jones, the former U.S. ambassador to Indonesia (1958–1965), who served as chancellor for three years before being succeeded in August 1968 by linguist Everett Kleinjans, the former vice president of International Christian University in Tokyo, who had lived in Asia for sixteen years.

On May 9, 1961, then U.S. Vice President Lyndon Johnson was a guest at groundbreaking ceremonies for the East–West Center's first six buildings. Five of the new buildings, designed by architect I. M. Pei, were built along the new East–West Road where a new 21-acre (85,000 m2) East–West Center campus just west of Manoa Stream on the east side of the university campus replaced chicken coops, temporary wooden buildings for faculty housing, and the Hawaii Agricultural Experiment Station. A sixth building built under the federal grant for the East–West Center was Edmondson Hall, designed by architect Albin Kubala and built on McCarthy Mall.

-- East–West Center, by Wikipedia

Also refer to New York letterhead memorandum, November 13, 1969, reporting subject's arrival at New York on October 7, 1969. Copies of both communications have been furnished to Newark. Bureau files contain no additional information identifiable with subject [DELETE] or any information he has requested political asylum in the United States.

Newark, through established sources only, determine if subject is still at Princeton University and obtain all available data pertaining to him. Check local INS records to determine his status in the U.S. in view of allegation he has requested political asylum.

WFO check appropriate State Department records to determine subject's status. Submit results by letterhead memorandum and Newark include recommendation for further handling.

Enclosures (2)

2 - WFO (Enclosures-2)

WRS:klk
(7)

SEE NOTE PAGE TWO
MAILED 25
APR - 9 1971
FBI
57 APR 19 1971
SECRET

Letter to Newark
Re: Jiri Frel

NOTE:

[DELETE]

***

DATE: 10-25-2007
CLASSIFIED BY 60324 auc baw/rs/ljm
DECLASSIFY ON: 25X 3.3(1) 10-26-2032
10-25-2032
SECRET

UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT
Memorandum

DATE: 4/28/71
TO: DIRECTOR, FBI
FROM: SAC, NEWARK (105-27435) (P)
SUBJECT: JIRI FREL
IS-CZ
RE: Bulet to Newark, 4/12/71, no copy for New York.

[DELETE]

[DELETE] [Handwritten: JIRI FREL]

Department of State Airgram dated 7/18/69 indicates subject with [DELETE] was to enter the U.S. under the East-West Exchange Program, 9/20/69 to accept an appointment at the School of Historical Studies, Princeton, University, Princeton, N.J.

Subject was born 11/13/23, Valelicko, Czechoslovakia.

On 4/28/71, inquiry was made at INS, Newark, N.J., and it was ascertained that INS file A18 587 955 pertaining to JIRI FREL, born 11/13/23, was transferred to INS, New York, N.Y., on 9/25/70.

INS records indicate FREL entered the U.S. at New York, N.Y., on 10/7/69. No record at INS, Newark was found for [DELETE]

NEW YORK

Will expeditiously review INS file A18 587 955 at INS, New York, and submit results by LHM.

REC 16
105-195963-3
MAY 3, 1971

F376
61 MAY 13 1971
ESPIONAGE
SECRET

***

UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT
Memorandum

DATE: 5/24/71
TO: DIRECTOR, FBI
FROM: SAC, NEWARK (105-27435) -P-
SUBJECT: JIRI FREL
IS - CZ
Re: Bulet to Newark, 4/12/71.
Newark letter to Bureau, dated 4/28/71.

Enclosed for the Bureau are five copies of an LHM dated and captioned as above. Enclosed for New York is 2 copies.

[DELETE] advised there were no records at her institution concerning FREL. His location or activities in the New York City area are unknown to [DELETE]

Inquiry at Princeton University showed he was not employed there.


Identity of source contained in Newark file.

LEAD

NEWARK

AT NEWARK, NEW JERSEY:
On basis of information obtained by NYO from INS file of subject, will determine necessary investigative steps.

REC-35
105-195963-4
ST-102
2 MAY 25, 1971
ESPIONAGE
61 JUN 3 1971

***

UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE
FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION
Newark, New Jersey

May 24, 1971

JIRI FREL
INTERNAL SECURITY - CZ

[DELETE], a knowledgeable source in a position to have information of this type, advised that Frel was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, (IAS), Princeton, New Jersey, for the 1969-70 academic year. His major interest is Greek Archeology and while at IAS was in the Historical Studies group.

Einstein sailed permanently for the United States in October 1933 and never went back to Germany. He became a faculty member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, a center for research and postgraduate training organized by Jewish educator Abraham Flexner on an endowment by Jewish department store magnate Louis Bamberger and his sister, Caroline Bamberger Fuld.

-- The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower: Complicity and Conflict on American Campuses, by Stephen H. Norwood

The governing board of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Institute, called the Board of Managers, reads like a financial statement of the various Rockefeller holdings. Its principal director for many years was the late Lewis Lichtenstein Strauss, partner of Kuhn, Loeb Co., the Rothschild bankers in the United States. Strauss listed himself in Who's Who as "financial advisor to the Messrs. Rockefeller." He was also a director of Studebaker, Polaroid, NBC, RCA, and held government posts as Secretary of Commerce and as head of the Atomic Energy Commission. For many years he funneled Rockefeller funds into the notorious Communist front, the Institute of Pacific Relations. Strauss was also president of the Institute for Advanced Study, a Rockefeller think tank at Princeton, and financial director of the American Jewish Committee, for which he raised the funds to publish the propaganda organ, Commentary magazine.

Another prominent director of Sloan Kettering was Dorothy Peabody Davison, a leading New York socialite for some fifty years. She had married F. Trubee Davison, son of Henry Pomeroy Davison, a Rockefeller relative who had been the right-hand man for J. P. Morgan. Davison was one of the group of five leading bankers who met with Senator Nelson Aldrich (his daughter married John D. Rockefeller, Jr.) at Jekyll Island in a secret conference to draft the Federal Reserve Act in November of 1910. The Dictionary of National Biography notes that Davison "soon won recognition from J. P. Morgan, frequently consulting with him, particularly during the monetary crisis of 1907 . . . In association with Senator Aldrich, Paul M. Warburg, Frank A. Vanderlip and A. Piatt Andrew, he took part in drawing up the Jekyll Island report that led to the crystallization of sentiment resulting in the creation of the Federal Reserve System." As head of the Red Cross War Council during the First World War, Davison raised $370,000,000, of which a considerable number of millions were diverted to Russia to salvage the floundering Bolshevik government. His son and namesake, Henry P. Davison married Anne Stillman, daughter of James Stillman, head of the National City Bank which handled the enormous cash flow accruing to the Standard Oil Company. H. P. also became a partner of J. P. Morgan Co.; his brother, F. Trubee Davison, married Dorothy Peabody, the nation's leading philanthropic family. The Peabodys may be said to have invented the concept of foundation philanthropy, the first major foundation being the Peabody Education Fund, set up in 1865 by George Peabody, founder of the J. P. Morgan banking firm; it later became the Rockefeller Foundation. Dorothy Peabody's father was the renowned Endicott Peabody, founder of the Establishment training school, Groton, where Franklin D. Roosevelt and many other front men were educated. Dorothy Peabody was on the national board of the American Cancer Society for many years, as well as director of Sloan Kettering. She was also a noted big game hunter, making many forays to India and Africa, and winning many trophies for her prize animals. Her husband was Secretary of War for air from 1926-32, and was president of the American Museum of Natural History for many years; this was Theodore Roosevelt's favorite charity. Her son, Endicott Peabody Davison, became secretary to the J. P. Morgan Co., and then general manager of the London branch of the firm; he has been president of U.S. Trust since 1979, director of the defense firms Scovill Corporation and Todd Shipyards, also the Discount Corporation. He is a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Markle Foundation, which makes key grants in the communications media. Eisenhower's Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, was also related to the Rockefellers through the Pomeroy family.

-- Murder by Injection: The Story of the Medical Conspiracy Against America, by Eustace Mullins

Source advised that Frel allegedly sent [DELETE] home and was residing in the New York City area. [DELETE] advised source of this information was unrecalled and the reliability of the information was unknown.

Source said to the best of his knowledge Frel is not in the Princeton, New Jersey area.

This document contains neither recommendations nor conclusions of the FBI. It is the property of the FBI and is loaned to your agency.

105-195963-4
ENCLOSURE

***

UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE
Immigration and Naturalization Service
Office: NYC
File No.: A 18 585 955 (S)
Date: 5/5/71 S/JG

DIRECTOR, FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION,
DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE,
Washington, D.C. 20537

Attention: RECORDS BRANCH

Please furnish any derogatory information contained in any file -- other than fingerprint records which your Bureau may have concerning the following person:

NAME: FREL, Jiri
DATE OF BIRTH: 11/13/23
PRESENT NATIONALITY: Czech
PLACE OF BIRTH: Veselicko, Czech.
MALE
PARENTS' NAMES / DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH / ADDRESS
Father: (till 1945 Frohlich) FREL, Antonin/ 6/11/1894 / Doini / Ujezd, Czechoslovakia
Mother: TOMANOVA, Marie / 2/1/27 / Vienna, Austria / Deceased
RESIDENCE LAST: c/o Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fifth Avenue & 82nd. Street
Institute for advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey.
EMPLOYMENT LAST: Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fifth Avenue, 82nd. Street, N.Y.
LAST ADMISSION TO U.S.: 10/7/69 NYC N-1
PRIOR ENTRIES AND DEPARTURES: 105-195963
SOCIAL SECURITY # 054 48 1251
FOR RELIEF OF: Investigations

NOT RECORDED
9 MAY 25, 1971
Please resubmit in 60
105-195963
60 MAY 284971
[Handwritten note: xerox copy to Newark, Nw Jersey for action 5/25/71. WRS/hrm. Remarks: Note attached from INS. NY and WVO expedite investigation and RK submit [ineligible] & your recommendation for further action.

***

UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT
Memorandum

DATE: 5/27/71
TO: DIRECTOR, FBI
FROM: SAC, NEW YORK (105-111900) (P)
SUBJECT: JIRI FREL
IS - CZ
(00: NEW YORK)

ReBulet to newark, 4/12/71, no copy for NY, and Newark letter to Bureau, 4/28/71, two copies for NY.

It is noted for the information of Newark that subject's INS File Number is A18 585 955, and not A18 587 955, as previously reported. Numerous contacts with the NYC office of INS concerning this case were unproductive due to the fact that the INS file could not be located until 5/21/71, at which time it was reviewed.

[DELETE] [Handwritten: Jiri, Frel, Czech]

Subject is currently a Research Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC, and resides in the NY area with [DELETE]. Subject's previous position was visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ, from October, 1969 until April, 1970. Subject is divorced from [DELETE]. Subject is estranged from his [DELETE] who is also currently residing in [DELETE].

[DELETE] [Handwritten: Jiri, Frel]

In view of the foregoing, the NYO will assume Origin in this case.

Newark is requested to provide the NYO with any pertinent information concerning the subject and specifically a copy of reBulet to Newark, dated 4/12/71. In addition, copies

REC-23
EX-103
105-195963-5
MAY 28 1971
54 JUN 10 1971
T249

ESPIONAGE

DOM INTELL DIV.
JUN 3 10 46 AM '71
DOM INTELL DIV.
JUN 8 3 00 PM '71

NY 105-111900

[In addition, copies] of any further information concerning subject's possible intelligence connections should be forwarded to the NYO.

Upon receipt of the necessary information from Newark, NY will submit results of INS file review and investigation by LHM.

***

UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT
Memorandum

DATE: 5/28/71
TO: DIRECTOR, FBI
FROM: SAC, WFO (105-104484) (RUC)
SUBJECT: JIRI FREL
IS-CZ
(OO:NK)

Re Bureau Letter, 4/12/71.

Enclosed for the Bureau are five copies of an LHM; two copies each for Newark and New York.

The information from the USDS, EUR/SES, was furnished to SA [DELETE]. SA [DELETE] reviewed the Visa file, USDS. SA [DELETE] received the negative information from the Office of Security, USDS.

IC [DELETE] was advised the files of the Central Office, INS, reveal that subject's file A-18-585-955 is located at INS New York City. The lead to have this file reviewed is being left to the discretion of the office of origin.

The LHM is classified "Confidential" as it [DELETE]
Confidential

This is the lowest classification level of information obtained by the government. It is defined as information that would "damage" national security if publicly disclosed, again, without the proper authorization.

Examples include information related to military strength and weapons.


-- Classified information in the United States, by Wikipedia

ENCLOSURE

ST 101
REC-38
105-195963-6
2 JUN 2 1971
54 JUN
T249

ESPIONAGE

***

UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE
FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION
Washington, D.C. 20535

May 28, 1971

JIRi FREL
INTERNAL SECURITY - CZ

[DELETE]

The files of the Visa Office, USDS, were reviewed May 25, 1971. They contained a letter of April 27, 1970, wherein it was noted Frel had previously asked for asylum in the United States, giving the reasons that under conditions in Czechoslovakia he would be persecuted for coming to the United States and he would be unable to con-

CONFIDENTIAL
GROUP 1
Excluded from automatic downgrading and declassification
ENCLOSURE
105-195963-6

JIRI FREL

[They contained a letter of April 27, 1970, wherein it was noted Frel had previously asked for asylum in the United States, giving the reasons that under conditions in Czechoslovakia he would be persecuted for coming to the United States and he would be unable to con-] tinue his work in classical archaeology.

A letter dated September 17, 1970, from the USDS to the Immigration and Naturalization Service advised the USDS interposed no objection to Frel's remaining in the United States.

A representative of the Federal Bureau of Investigation was advised on April 26, 1971, that the files of the Office of Security, USDS, contain no record of Frel.


This document contains neither recommendations nor conclusions of the FBI. It is the property of the FBI and is loaned to your agency. It and its contents are not to be distributed outside your agency.

CONFIDENTIAL

***

UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT
Memorandum

DATE: SEP 17 1971
TO: DIRECTOR, FBI
FROM: SAC, NEW YORK (105-111900) (C)
SUBJECT: CHANGED
JIRI FREL aka
Jiri Frohlich
IS CZ
(OO:NY)

Title is marked "Changed" to reflect former birth name of subject, before the name FROHLICH was legally changed to the name FREL.

ReBulet to NK, 4/12/71, no copy for NY: NKlets to Bu, 4/28/71; and 5/24/71; NYlet to Bu, 5/27/71; WFOlet to Bu, 5/28/71; and NKlet to NY, 6/9/71.

[DELETE]

One copy of this LHM is being sent to INS locally.

Subject was interviewed on 9/7/71, with SAC authority. The results of the interview are set forth in the enclosed LHM. It is noted that numerous attempts made to interview the subject prior to this date were unsuccessful due to a short illness of the subject as well as his vacation during August, 1971, which extended until 9/7/71.

EX-102
ENCLOSURE
REC-10
105-195963-7
MCT-28
SEP 20 1971
7 SEP 28 1971

ESPIONAGE

NY 105-1119000

It is further noted that FREL was extremely cooperative during the interview and volunteered information concerning his alleged part in the [DELETE] trial in Czechoslovakia, in 1953.

During the interview, FREL accurately substantiated the information set forth in his INS file number A18 585 955.

He advised that he is not in contact with members of the United States Czech community and does no have any knowledge of any activities of Soviet-Bloc intelligence services nor is he acquainted with anyone affiliated with these services.

In view of the fact that FREL appears to pose no security threat to the United States and has little informant potential at the present time, this case is being placed in a closed status.

NYO indices reflect no further information regarding FREL. Credit and criminal checks of the Greater New York area were negative concerning the subject.


In the event information is received by the NYO concerning FREL which would merit further investigation, the Bureau will be immediately advised, and investigation will be instituted pursuant to the provisions of Section 105, M of I.

***

UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE
FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION
New York, New York
SEP 17 1971
Par 1-3, pg 1 & par 1, pg 2

Jiri Frel also known as
Jiri Frohlich
Internal Security - Czechoslovakia

[DELETE]

SECRET
GROUP 1
Excluded from automatic downgrading and declassification.

This document contains neither recommendations nor conclusions of the FBI. It is the property of the FBI and is loaned to your agency; it and its contents are not to be distributed outside your agency.

105-195963-7
ENCLOSURE
SECRET

Jiri Frel also known as
Jiri Frohlich
Internal Security - Czechoslovakia

[DELETE]

On September 7, 1971, Jiri Frel was interviewed by Special Agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) at New York City, and furnished the following information:

Frel advised that he was born as Jiri Frohlich on November 13, 1923, at Veselicko, Czechoslovakia. His father Antonin Frel was born June 11, 1894, at Dolni Ujezd, Czechoslovakia. His mother Maria Frohlichova, maiden name Tomanova was born February 23, 1900. Frel stated that both his parents are deceased. On September 24, 1946, the name of Jiri Frohlich was officially changed as requested by Frel to the name Jiri Frel by the authority of a local district court within Czechoslovakia, having legal jurisdiction over such matters.

[handwritten: Czech]

Frel has been twice married. He is legally divorced from his [DELETE]. On July 5, 1948, in Prague, Frel [DELETE] followed on [DELETE]. On December 26, 1958, in Zbraslav, Czechoslovakia, Frel was legally divorced from [DELETE] who was granted permanent [DELETE]

Shortly after the divorce, Frel married [DELETE] is currently estranged from Jiri Frel and is [DELETE]. Frel advised that upon his first arrival in the United States on October 7, 1969, [DELETE] followed him to the United States on November 7, 1969, but later departed on February 2, 1970.

DELETE]

[handwritten: USA]

-2-

SECRET

Jiri Frel also known as
Jiri Frohlich
Internal Security - Czechoslovakia

Jiri Frel is a full professor of Greek and Roman Art and Archaeology and as such, was employed as a professor and lecturer at Charles University, Prague, from July, 1948, through October, 1969. During World War II, and immediately thereafter, Frel was a student at Charles University studying for his advanced degrees. During his professorship at Charles University, he resided at Mikovcova 3, in Prague. While engaged in his work at Charles University, Frel stated that he had many occasions to visit and study at various institutions of higher learning and universities throughout Western Europe and the Mediterranean. he stated that he often performed work and study at the Museum of the Louvre in Paris, as well as various universities and museums engaged in archaeological study in Greece.

On October 7, 1969, Frel arrived in the United States at New York City, with a J-1 visa which was to expire July 20, 1970. His travel was in connection with an East-West cultural and educational exchange program, which provided a position for him as a visiting scholar in the School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study, at Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey. While at Princeton, Frel resided at 103 Einstein Drive, Princeton, New Jersey. Frel held this position from October, 1969, through April, 1970. He is a current member of the American Archaeological Institute.

During April, 1970, Frel officially requested the authorities of the New York City Office of the Immigration and Naturalization Service that he be allowed to permanently remain in the United States. In addition, during April, 1970, Frel was offered and accepted a position of Research Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 5th Avenue and 82nd Street, New York City, where Frel continues to be employed.
At the time of the acceptance of this position, he transferred his residence to 110-18 64th Avenue, Forest Hills, New York,

-3-

SECRET

Jiri Frel also known as
Jiri Frohlich
Internal Security - Czechoslovakia

[DELETE]. Presently, Frel is the Associate Curator of the Greek and Roman Art Department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Recently, Frel changed his residence to 67-25 Kessel Street, Forest Hills, New York. [DELETE].

[DELETE], who was also born in Czechoslovakia and educated at the [DELETE] of the United States. [DELETE], also of Czechoslovak extraction, is employed as an [DELETE]

Frel was officially aided and assisted in his application for permanent resident status by [DELETE] and by his attorney [DELETE] of Lord, Day and Lord, 25 Broadway, New York City, which law firm also represents the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In addition, Frel advised that he was also assisted by former United States Ambassador to the Soviet Union, George Kennan, who is now at the School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study, at Princeton.

George Frost Kennan (February 16, 1904 – March 17, 2005) was an American diplomat and historian. He was best known as an advocate of a policy of containment of Soviet expansion during the Cold War. He lectured widely and wrote scholarly histories of the relations between the USSR and the United States. He was also one of the group of foreign policy elders known as "The Wise Men".

During the late 1940s, his writings inspired the Truman Doctrine and the U.S. foreign policy of "containing" the Soviet Union. His "Long Telegram" from Moscow during 1946 and the subsequent 1947 article The Sources of Soviet Conduct argued that the Soviet regime was inherently expansionist and that its influence had to be "contained" in areas of vital strategic importance to the United States. These texts provided justification for the Truman administration's new anti-Soviet policy. Kennan played a major role in the development of definitive Cold War programs and institutions, notably the Marshall Plan.

Soon after his concepts had become U.S. policy, Kennan began to criticize the foreign policies that he had helped articulate. By late 1948, Kennan became confident that positive dialogue could commence with the Soviet government. His proposals were discounted by the Truman administration and Kennan's influence was marginalized, particularly after Dean Acheson was appointed Secretary of State in 1949. Soon thereafter, U.S. Cold War strategy assumed a more assertive and militaristic quality, causing Kennan to lament what he believed was an abrogation of his previous assessments.

In 1950, Kennan left the State Department—except for a brief ambassadorial stint in Moscow and a longer one in Yugoslavia—and became a realist critic of U.S. foreign policy. He continued to analyze international affairs as a faculty member of the Institute for Advanced Study from 1956 until his death in 2005 at age 101.

-- George F. Kennan, by Wikipedia

On March 25, 1971, [DELETE] petitioned the Immigration and Naturalization Office at New York City, to reclassify the status of [DELETE] Jiri Frel to that of an permanent resident, and requested that the issuance of an immigrant visa be effected for Frel. On April 23, 1971, the petition was approved. As of August 11, 1971, Frel advised that he has become a United States permanent resident.

Frel stated that while at Charles University he was a candidate for the Czechoslovak Communist Party. He stated that he became a candidate only in order to keep his position at the university. Subsequent to making application however, he advised that his candidacy was rejected and he was expelled on the grounds of his independent political philosophy which did not conform to the accepted Party precepts and maxims. Frel advised that he has never been affiliated

-4-

SECRET

Jiri Frel also known as
Jiri Frohlich
Internal Security - Czechoslovakia

with any type of intelligence service either in the United States or abroad and is not connected with anyone whom he believes to be intelligence affiliated. He stated that during his extensive travels while a professor at Charles University, he was never assigned any type of intelligence mission nor did he receive any financial assistance or reward for any work performed. He did state, however, that when he would return to Czechoslovakia from his travels, he was required to report to the educational authorities of the Czechoslovak government and report his activities and contacts while outside of Czechoslovakia. He stated that he was also required to fill out a lengthy form enumerating any acquaintances made during his trips and furnish background information about them including personality assessments. He stated that while he was never aware of this information being used for intelligence purposes, he often suspected that the Czechoslovak Intelligence Service reviewed copies of this form. He advised that while travelling in connection with his studies he rarely, if ever, met anyone outside of his field of academic study.

With regard to his political activities while in Czechoslovakia, Frel advised that he was very inactive in any matters political. He did state, however, that he was somewhat suspected of siding with the Communists due to the results of a political trial in Czechoslovakia, in 1953, which sentenced [DELETE] professor at Charles University to prison.

He stated that he never testified at this trial nor had any part in it whatsoever. He advised that to his knowledge, the trial was held in secret and was publicized only after the conviction of [DELETE] [LC: Ruzena Vackova, a professor of classical architecture in Prague]. He did state, however, that since he was one of her proteges at Charles University in Prague, a rumor began to spread of which he was aware, that he had somehow cooperated with the Communist government in
her demise. He stated that this was patently false and that he continues to


-5

SECRET

Jiri Frel also known as
Jiri Frohlich
Internal Security - Czechoslovakia

be a friend of [DELETE], although they do not correspond with each other. In 1969, while in Prague, he stated that he inadvertently ran into [DELETE] in the Charles University Library. From that meeting, he stated that it was obvious that he and [DELETE] continue to remain friends.

He stated that he does not keep in contact with members of the United States-Czech community and continues, generally speaking, to associate only with academic figures involved in Greek and Roman archaeological research. He stated that he has never been contacted by anyone whom he thought to be connected with any type of intelligence service while in the United States.

He stated that he does not intend to return to Czechoslovakia and hopes to become a United States citizen. Because of this fact, he has never been in contact with any officials of any Soviet-Bloc country. He stated that furthermore, he would not ever make contact in view of the fact that he vehemently disagrees with the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia, and considers the United States to be in his words "a great and good country.

Frel stated that in the even that he is contacted in the future by anyone who he deems to be connected with any type of Soviet-Bloc intelligence service, he will immediately notify the FBI.

A short physical description of Frel follows:

Race: White
Sex: Male
Height: Six feet two inches
Weight: 185 pounds
Build: Medium
Complexion: Medium
Hair: Thick, gray, wavy
Eyes: Gray
Scars and Marks: None

-6-

SECRET

***

CONFIDENTIAL

PAGE 1 OF 2
DATE: 5/30/85
301939Z MAY 85

FROM: FM DIRECTOR FBI
TO: TO LEGAL ATTACHE PARIS ROUTINE
BT
SECRET
JIRI FREL, AKA JIRI FROHLICH; [DELETE]

THIS COMMUNICATION IS CLASSIFIED "CONFIDENTIAL" IN ITS ENTIRETY.

RE PARIS TELEPHONE CALL, MAY 20, 1985. [Handwritten note: U.S.]

ACCORDING TO A NEW YORK TO FBIHQ LETTERHEAD MEMORANDUM DATED SEPTEMBER 17, 1971, JIRI FREL, A CZECHOSLOVAKIAN PROFESSOR OF GREEK AND ROMAN ART AND ARCHAEOLOGY, ARRIVED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA ON OCTOBER 7, 1969, IN CONNECTION WITH A WORK EXCHANGE PROGRAM BETWEEN THE TWO COUNTRIES. IN APRIL, 1970, SUBJECT MADE A REQUEST OF THE IMMIGRATION AND NATURALIZATION SERVICE FOR PERMANENT RESIDENCY. SUBJECT CAME TO FBI ATTENTION AT THIS TIME, AND IT WAS DETERMINED THAT SUBJECT WAS NEITHER A CZECH OPERATIVE NOR A SECURITY THREAT TO THE

DRAFTED BY: CDF:RCY
DATE: 5/30/85
ROOM: 4634

[SEE NOTE, PAGE 3]

105-195963-9
JUN 5, 1985
AUG 6, 1985
JUL 15, 1985
8/6/85
30 MAY 85

FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION
DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE
FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION COMMUNICATION MESSAGE FORM

PAGE 2

CONTINUATION SHEET

PAGE TWO: DE HQ 0192 SECRET

UNITED STATES. CASE WAS PLACED IN A CLOSED STATUS BY THE NEW YORK OFFICE ON SEPTEMBER 17, 1971.

SECRET

BUTEL TO LEGAT PARIS
RE: JIRI FREL
ETC.

NOTE: THIS IS IN RESPONSE TO INDICES CHECK BY ASSISTANT LEGAL ATTACHE R. L'ALLIER, PARIS.

***
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36183
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: FREDA BEDI CONT'D (#4)

Postby admin » Mon Oct 31, 2022 3:03 am

Robert E. Hecht
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 10/17/20

Image

Robert Emmanuel Hecht, Jr. (3 June 1919 – 8 February 2012) was an American antiquities art dealer based in Paris.

He was on trial in Italy from 2005 to just before his death in 2012, on charges of conspiring to traffic in looted antiquities artifacts.

Personal life

Robert Hecht was born in Baltimore, Maryland. He was a descendant of the family that founded The Hecht Company, a chain of department stores based in Baltimore, where he grew up.

He graduated from Haverford College in 1941, having majored in Latin, was a naval officer during World War II, and after it spent a stint as interpreter at the War Crimes Investigation in Nuremberg and one year at the University of Zurich studying archaeology and classical philology before winning a Rome Prize Fellowship for the American Academy in Rome (1947–49).

In 1953 he married Elizabeth Chase, a graduate student of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. Robert Hecht had three daughters: Daphne Howat by his first marriage to Anita Liebman; and Andrea and Donatella Hecht by his marriage to Ms. Chase. He lived for many years in Paris and died at home there.[1]

Career

Hecht made his first significant sales in the 1950s, including the dispersal of the collection of Ludwig Curtius, former director of the German Archaeological Institute in Rome, and later the sale of a late 6th century BCE red figure vase to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the 1960s and 1970s he reached a pre-eminent position in the trade. Known throughout the museum world for his scholarship and his 'eye' for antiquities,[citation needed] he sold to all the world's major museums including the British Museum, the Louvre, the Metropolitan, the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and to many private collectors all over the world. Other dealers tended to give him first refusal on their 'finds'.[citation needed]

It was a period when major museums and serious collectors in Europe, the U.S., and Japan did not feel it their responsibility to enforce the export laws of southern European countries.[citation needed] Hecht always worked on the assumption that it was the preservation and study of ancient art that really mattered, not provenance.[citation needed] In the 1970s Bruce McNall was his "secret United States partner."[2]

Provenance issues

Image
The Euphronios Krater, or "Sarpedon krater"

The sale of a Euphronios Krater to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for $1 million in 1972 catapulted Hecht into instant fame and international problems. The Italian authorities claimed that the vase was excavated illegally in Cerveteri, north of Rome. An American Grand Jury, investigating the Euphronios Krater at the request of the Italian authorities — whose evidence came from a tomb robber — found the provenance unproven. In 2000, the Italian authorities found Hecht’s handwritten memoir in his house in Paris and those were used as evidence against him at his Italian criminal trial. In 2006, continuing pressure from Italy led Philippe de Montebello, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to negotiate a deal that gave the Italian Republic ownership of the vase.

Hecht had wrangles with both the Italian and Turkish authorities but was acquitted in the only lawsuit to reach Italy's Supreme Court of Cassation (Suprema Corte di Cassazione).

After his death in 2012, a stolen Roman stone coffin (Sarcofago delle Quadriglie) returned from his private collection in London to the town of Aquino, Italy.[3] The coffin was stolen from the “Madonna della Libera” church in Aquino in September 1991. After 21 years of investigations, the artifact came back to the collection of the municipal museum of Aquino.


J. Paul Getty Museum controversy

In 2005 Hecht was indicted by the Italian government, together with Marion True, the former curator of antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, for conspiracy to traffic in illegal antiquities. The primary evidence in the case came from the 1995 raid of a Geneva, Switzerland warehouse which had contained a fortune in stolen artifacts.

Italian art dealer Giacomo Medici was eventually arrested in 1997; his operation was thought to be "one of the largest and most sophisticated antiquities networks in the world, responsible for illegally digging up and spiriting away thousands of top-drawer pieces and passing them on to the most elite end of the international art market".[4] Medici was sentenced in 2004 by a Rome court to ten years in prison and a fine of 10 million euros, "the largest penalty ever meted out for antiquities crime in Italy".[4]

The court hearings of the case against Hecht and True ended in 2012 and 2010, respectively, as the statute of limitations, under Italian law, for their alleged crimes had expired.[5]

See also

• Illicit antiquities trade
• Looted art
• Art and cultural repatriation

References

1. Weber, Bruce. "Robert Hecht, Antiquities Dealer, Dies at 92." The New York Times. 19 February 2012.
2. Hoving, Thomas, Making the Mummies Dance, New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-671-73854-2
3. FABIO TONACCI, FRANCESCO VIVIANO. "[https://www.repubblica.it/speciali/arte/2012/07/19/news/sarcofago_quadrighe_aquino-39309683/Torna a casa il Sarcofago delle Quadrighe fu rubato ad Aquino nel 1991: vale milioni]." La Repubblica. 19 July 2012
4. Men's Vogue, Nov/Dec 2006, Vol. 2, No. 3, pg. 46.
5. Povoledo, Elisabetta. "Italian Trial of American Antiquities Dealer Comes to an End." The New York Times. 18 January 2012.

Bibliography

• Questions for Philippe de Montebello Stolen Art? Interview by Deborah Solomon. The New York Times Feb. 19, 2006
• The New York Times June 21, 2006. Antiquities Dealer on Trial in Getty Case Is Vexed but Unbowed. By Elisabetta Povoledo
• The New York Times January 14, 2006. Defendant in Antiquities Case Speaks Up, Angrily. By Elisabetta Povoledo
• Peter Watson and Cecilia Todeschini, 2006. The Medici Conspiracy: The Illicit Journey of Looted Antiquities: From Italy's Tomb Raiders to the World's Greatest Museums (New York:Public Affairs, 2006)
• The New York Review of Books Volume 53, Number 9 • May 25, 2006. Review Notes from Underground by Hugh Eakin
• The New York Times April 5, 2006. A Clash Over Antiquities by John Henry Merryman
• The New York Times February 28, 2006. Met Chief, Unbowed, Defends Museum's Role. By Randy Kennedy and Hugh Eakin
• The New York Review of Books Volume 53, Number 12 • July 13, 2006 by Cecilia Todeschini, Peter Watson, Reply by Hugh Eakin In response to Notes from Underground (May 25, 2006)
• Eleanor Robson, Luke Treadwell and Chris Gosden (eds), 2006. "Who Owns Objects:The Ethics and Politics of Collecting Cultural Artefacts" (Oxford:Oxbow Books)
• Thomas Hoving, 1993. Making the Mummies Dance (New York: Simon and Schuster)
• John L. Hess, 1974. The Grand Acquisitors (New York: Houghton Mifflin) Two chapters are devoted to the Metropolitan Museum's cautious acquisition of the Euphronios krater.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36183
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: FREDA BEDI CONT'D (#4)

Postby admin » Mon Oct 31, 2022 3:03 am

Giacomo Medici (art dealer)
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 10/17/22

Image

Giacomo Medici is an Italian antiquities smuggler and art dealer who was convicted in 2004 of dealing in stolen ancient artifacts. His operation was thought to be "one of the largest and most sophisticated antiquities networks in the world, responsible for illegally digging up and spiriting away thousands of top-drawer pieces and passing them on to the most elite end of the international art market".[1]

Illegal antiquities trade

After a long-running major investigation by the Tutela Patrimonio Culturale (or TPC, the unit of the Italian Carabinieri (military police) specializing in protecting that country's cultural heritage), Giacomo Medici was eventually charged, tried and convicted for his key role in an extensive and highly lucrative international antiquities smuggling ring.

For nearly 40 years, the group organised the systematic looting and theft of some of the most valuable Mediterranean artefacts ever found, "laundering" these stolen objects through corrupt international dealers and major auction houses, who then sold them on to major institutions and collectors around the world.

Investigation results

The staggering scale and value of the so-called "Medici conspiracy" was revealed in the 1990s by two fortuitous but connected events. The first was the downfall of former Sotheby's employee James Hodges, who in 1991 was tried and convicted of various charges related to his theft of antiquities and money from his employer. Unfortunately for Sotheby's - but very fortunately for investigators - prior to his arrest, Hodges had stolen or photocopied a number of internal Sotheby's documents which indicated that the company was behaving dishonestly and unethically in regard to the trading of antiquities. After Hodges' crimes were discovered, he tried to make a deal, using the stolen documents as a bargaining tool, but when Sotheby's refused, Hodges took revenge by passing the material to investigative journalist Peter Watson. Hodges' documents sparked a series of British press investigations into Sotheby's activities, and although not conclusive in their own right, they would also provide vital corroboration for the even more sensational discoveries made by Italian authorities in the mid-1990s.

The second fortuitous event was the death of one of the smuggling ring's main organisers, Pasquale Camera, a former captain in the Italian customs agency. When Camera was killed in a car accident in August 1995, police found dozens of photographs of stolen antiquities in the glove compartment of his car, which directly linked Camera to a recent theft of valuable antiquities from an Italian regional museum. Subsequent raids by the TCP uncovered a large hoard of stolen and looted antiquities of the highest quality, as well as an extraordinary collection of documents and photographs that chronicled the smuggling ring's operations in forensic detail. Most importantly of all, the raid on the Rome apartment of one of the smugglers yielded a crucial piece of evidence that enabled the TCP to break the entire ring wide open. It was a comprehensive organisational chart, handwritten by Camera himself, which named and linked every major player in the operation, including the gangs of tombaroli (tomb robbers) and their leaders, the middle-men (including Medici) who smuggled the looted treasures out of Italy and other countries, the corrupt international dealers (including British dealer Robin Symes and American dealer Robert E. Hecht) who traded the stolen goods through major auction houses—notably Sotheby's in London—and even the unscrupulous curators, institutions, and private collectors who purchased looted goods from the gang.

The paperwork also revealed that a Swiss-based holding company named Editions Services (the successor to his earlier Hydra Galleries in Rome) was operated by a "frontman" on Medici's behalf, that Editions Services shared the same Zurich address with the antiques company owned by Symes, and that Editions Services had sold three ancient marble sculptures previously stolen from an Italian collection.[2] On September 13, 1995, Italian and Swiss police raided the Editions Services offices in Geneva, Switzerland which were located in Port Franc, "the special commercial zone near the airport where international goods can be stored, bought, and sold, discreetly and tax-free".[2]

Looted artifacts

Image
The Euphronios Krater, or "Sarpedon krater"

A notable object linked to the Medici gang is the "Sarpedon krater", a unique, signed Attic red-figure wine vessel dating from the late 6th century BCE, which was painted by Euphronios, one of the most famous ceramic artists of the ancient world. The krater was eventually shown to have been looted from a previously unknown Etruscan tomb near Cerveteri, Italy, in December 1971, and later sold to the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1972 for the then record price of US$1 million.[citation needed]

Authorities found "hundreds of pieces of ancient Greek, Roman, and Etruscan art—including a set of Etruscan dinner plates valued at $2 million...voluminous sales records and correspondence between Medici and dealers in London and New York; and finally, binders and boxes containing thousands of photographs...of ancient objects...the archive included sequential photographs of single pieces from the moment they came out of the ground...to their finished, reconstructed appearance at the time they entered the art market and were sold for tens of thousands, and occasionally millions, of dollars. In a few cases there were even subsequent photos of the same objects inside the display cases of well-known museums".[1]

The forensic archaeologists investigating the Medici documents even discovered shocking photographic evidence that the gang had illegally excavated and looted at least one previously-undiscovered Roman villa in Pompeii, ruthlessly hacking several complete frescoes off the walls in laptop-sized pieces in order to steal them.

Arrest and trial

Medici was formally arrested in 1997, and in 2004 was sentenced by a Rome court to ten years in prison and a fine of 10 million euros, "the largest penalty ever meted out for antiquities crime in Italy".[1]

In 2005, evidence from the Geneva raid was used by the Italian government to indict American antiquities dealer Robert E. Hecht and former J. Paul Getty Museum curator of antiquities Marion True for conspiracy to traffic in illegal antiquities. The court hearings of the case against Hecht and True ended in 2012 and 2010, respectively, as the statute of limitations, under Italian law, for their alleged crimes had expired.[3]

Book

Medici's operation is detailed in Peter Watson and Cecilia Todeschini's 2006 book The Medici Conspiracy: The Illicit Journey of Looted Antiquities from Italy's Tomb Raiders to the World's Greatest Museums.

References

1. "Breaking Up the Art Mob". Men's Vogue. 2 (3): 46. November–December 2006.
2. "Breaking Up the Art Mob". Men's Vogue. 2 (3): 44. November–December 2006.
3. Povoledo, Elisabetta (18 January 2012). "Italian Trial of American Antiquities Dealer Comes to an End". The New York Times. Retrieved 4 June 2020.

External links

• "Geneva Seizure" ~ Archaeology.org
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36183
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: FREDA BEDI CONT'D (#4)

Postby admin » Mon Oct 31, 2022 3:04 am

Geneva Seizure
by Andrew L. Slayman
Archaeology: A Publication of the Archaeological Institute of America
May 3, 1998; updated September 14, 1998
© 1998 by the Archaeological Institute of America
archive.archaeology.org/online/features/geneva/

On September 13, 1995, Swiss police raided four bonded warehouses in Geneva, seizing a large number of artifacts allegedly smuggled from Italy. The premises were registered to a Swiss company called Editions Services, which police traced to a Roman named Giacomo Medici. In January 1997, the Carabinieri, Italy's national police force, arrested Medici, whom they described as "the real 'mastermind' of much of [Italy's] illegal traffic in archaeological objects." Medici claims that he acquired all of the artifacts legally and that he is not the "monster" he has been portrayed as. He also claims that the search was conducted without his presence or that of a representative of Editions Services, and that the police did not find documents, now missing, that would have shown the legal provenience of the artifacts. He is believed to have been released on his own reconnaissance, and to date he has not been charged with anything.

According to the Carabinieri, Italy's national police force, the warehouses contained 10,000 artifacts worth 50 billion lire (about $35 million), which would make the seizure one of the largest antiquities seizures ever. Medici disputes these numbers, saying that the warehouses contained between 200 and 300 artifacts worth far less than $35 million. Photographs of a portion of the material, however, show at least 500 artifacts, and Medici admits that "the photographs do not represent in full the objects which were inside the premises."

Last year, an account of the seizure and Medici's arrest, along with three photographs of artifacts in the haul, appeared in Peter Watson's book Sotheby's: The Inside Story (New York: Random House, 1997). John J. Herrmann, Jr., curator of classical art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, recognized two stone column capitals in one picture as having been stolen from the House of the Fish at Ostia, the port of ancient Rome. Herrmann alerted the archaeological superintendent of Ostia, and he says the capitals are now back where they belong.

How the capitals came to be in the warehouse is not known, but comparison of the photographs with Sotheby's catalogs, brought to our attention by readers, shows that some of the other material came from auctions in New York and London. A Boeotian figurine and a Minoan jar were sold at a 1990 auction of antiquities in the collection of the Erlenmeyer Foundation for Animal Welfare; according to the catalog, these two items had been published in Orientalia in the early 1960s. Three pieces of Attic pottery--a black-figure kylix, a red-figure kylix, and a red-figure hydria--were sold at a 1990 auction of antiquities in the collections of the Texas oil barons Nelson and William Hunt. According to the catalog, two of these had been purchased at the Summa Gallery in Los Angeles in 1981, while the third had been exhibited at the J. Paul Getty Museum the year before. A bronze griffin protome and two Egyptian relief fragments were sold at a 1991 auction. Frederick Schultz, president of the National Association of Dealers in Ancient, Oriental & Primitive Art, says that many of the other artifacts were acquired at auctions as well.

None of these pedigrees, however, reveals where ultimately the artifacts came from, or whether their excavation and exportation from their country of origin were legal. According to Reuters, in October 1996 the Swiss investigating magistrate, Jean-Pierre Trembley, ruled that they should be returned to Italy. They were cataloged by officials from the Archaeological Superintendency of Southern Etruria, but the following month a Geneva court revoked Trembley's decision, saying that the artifacts' provenance had to be proven before they could be returned. Italy has appealed, and Switzerland's federal court will hear the case.

Medici asserts that "most of these objects could not have been found in Italian archeological sites." Archaeologists who examined the photographs on behalf of ARCHAEOLOGY say the material was made in a wide range of places around the Mediterranean, including Greece (in photos 2, 8, 10, 20, 22, 24, 26, 50, 55, 63, 64, and 67) and Cyprus (54), as well as Britain and northern Europe (59). To this list, Schultz adds Egypt (32 and 51) and the ancient kingdom of Urartu (in parts of what are now Iran, Turkey, and Armenia; see photo 44). There are also a number of Roman pieces (18, 21, 29, 38, 39, 40, 41, 43, and 66), but without further evidence it is difficult to tell whether much of it was made, or found, in Italy or one of the empire's far-flung provinces. Greece, Cyprus, Italy, and Turkey--as well as most of the countries spread over what was the Roman Empire--have longstanding laws establishing national ownership of archaeological remains.

According to the archaeologists who examined the photographs, however, a great deal of the material probably did originate in Italy. There are Etruscan bronzes and ceramics (1, 5, 6, 9, 13, 15, 16, 21, 25, 27, 28, 56, and 57); South Italian pottery (2, 4, 5, 8, 9, 11, 15, 16, 22, and 68); and Villanovan material (from northern and central Italy, 19 and 23). Furthermore, Greek pottery was much loved by the Etruscan elite. The art historian Nigel Spivey has written that "Vulci [an Etruscan necropolis] is still our main source of [Greek] pots. After Vulci, other Etruscan sites: Tarquinia, Cerveteri, Orvieto and Chiusi." Of the pieces whose country of origin are identified in John Boardman's standard survey, Athenian Red Figure Vases, more than 60 percent come from Italy; Greece is second, with only 25 percent.

Letter from Giacomo Medici (also in Italian)

Letter from Frederick Schultz, president of the National Association of Dealers in Ancient, Oriental & Primitive art

We would like to hear your comments, e-mailed to editorial@archaeology.org.

1. Miscellaneous pottery, some South Italian; Etruscan candelabrum; Roman (?) sculptures
2. Attic and South Italian vases
3. Bronze griffin protome from a cauldron. Formerly of the Thetis collection. Sold at Sotheby's London on July 8, 1991. No further provenience information available.
4. South Italian pottery
5. Mixed Etruscan bronzes and South Italian pottery
6. Etruscan fibulae
7. Gold jewelry
8. Various Messapian, Attic, and South Italian vessels
9. Miscellaneous pottery, some South Italian; Etruscan candelabrum; Roman (?) sculptures
10. Boeotian terra-cotta figurine. Formerly of the Erlenmeyer collection. Published in Orientalia in 1962. Sold at Sotheby's London on July 9, 1990.
11. Miscellaneous pottery, some South Italian
12. Pottery, figurine, and sculptural head
13. Etruscan pottery
14. Bronze fibulae
15. Miscellaneous pottery, some South Italian; Etruscan candelabrum; Roman (?) sculptures
16. Mixed Etruscan bronzes and South Italian pottery
17. Mixed pottery and sculpture; opus sectile, possibly fake
18. Mixed pottery and Roman column capital
19. Villanovan and other pottery
20. Attic pottery, South Italian figurines, and sculpture
21. Mixed material, including Etruscan vases and a Roman painting
22. Mixed South Italian, Attic, and Messapian pottery
23. Villanovan and Etruscan funerary material, and later sculpture
24. Attic red-figure plate and other sherds
25. Etruscan and Italo-Geometric pottery
26. Attic black-figure cup. Formerly of the Hunt collection. Sold at Summa Galleries, Los Angeles, on September 18, 1981. Sold at Sotheby's New York on June 19, 1990. No further provenience information available.
27. Etruscan pottery chalice
28. Etruscan bronze fibulae
29. Roman glass vessels
30. Italian black-glaze pottery and lamps
31. Pottery
32. Relief of marching warriors, possibly fake. Left and center, sold at Sotheby's London on July 8, 1991. No further provenience information available.
33. Corinthian or Italo-Corinthian aryballoi
34. Two pots
35. Bronze horse bits, fibulae, and dagger
36. Sculptural fragments
37. Miscellaneous
38. Roman draped female figure
39. Roman column capitals
40. Roman column capitals
41. Roman architectural block
42. Flask and zoomorphic vase
43. Etruscan and Roman bronze candelabra
44. Cypriot (?) pottery
45. Various, mainly sculpture and carved architectural blocks
46. Fish plates and other pottery
47. Stone and metal points, and metal ax heads
48. Stone beads
49. Opus sectile, possibly fake
50. Minoan (?) jar. Formerly of the Erlenmeyer collection. Published in Orientalia in 1961. Sold at Sotheby's London on July 9, 1990.
51. Grave relief and Herakles statue
52. Bronze bull protome
53. Metal vessels
54. Mixed Cypriot and possibly some Attic pottery
55. Rhodian pottery
56. Mixed Etruscan bronzes
57. Mixed Etruscan bronzes and votive terra-cotta anatomical models
58. Corinthian or Italo-Corinthian aryballoi
59. Miscellaneous Romano-British and Celtic bronzes
60. Label
61. Pottery
62. Glass vessels
63. Attic red-figure cup. Formerly of the Hunt collection. Sold at Summa Galleries, Los Angeles, on September 18, 1981. Sold at Sotheby's New York on June 19, 1990. No further provenience information available.
64. Attic red-figure hydria. Formerly of the Hunt collection. Published in Stamnoi: An Exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum (1980). Sold at Sotheby's New York on June 19, 1990. No further provenience information available.
65. Gnathian krater
66. Roman wall paintings
67. Mixed Mycenaean and Geometric pottery; Boeotian figurine
68. South Italian pottery
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36183
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: FREDA BEDI CONT'D (#4)

Postby admin » Mon Oct 31, 2022 3:04 am

Arthur Houghton
Biography
byarthurhoughton.com
Accessed: 10/18/22

Seleucus apparently minted coins during his stay in India, as several coins in his name are in the Indian standard and have been excavated in India. These coins describe him as "Basileus" ("King"), which implies a date later than 306 BC. Some of them also mention Seleucus in association with his son Antiochus as king, which would also imply a date as late as 293 BC.

-- Seleucus I Nicator, by Wikipedia

In the early 1980s, the antiquities department at the J. Paul Getty Museum was a hotbed of whispered political intrigue. Rumors swirled that the department’s Czech curator, Jiri Frel, was a Communist spy. And many believed the deputy curator, former State Department official Arthur Houghton, was a CIA plant tasked with keeping an eye on Frel’s activities....

As for Houghton and his ties to the CIA, the rumors were not far off. Before coming to the Getty in 1982, he had spent a decade working for the State Department, including time in its bureau of intelligence and research as a Mid East analyst. Houghton was fond of cultivating his image as a man of mystery. In truth, he had burned out on the diplomatic bureaucracy and chose a career that brought him closer to his long time passion — ancient coins. Houghton remains active in the field to this day.


-- Jiri Frel: Scholar, Refugee, Curator…Spy?, by Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino


Image

Image

Arthur Houghton attended Harvard College (BA 1963), the American University of Beirut (MA in Near Eastern studies, 1966), and Harvard University (MA in Fine Arts, 1982). He entered the US Department of State in 1966 and held positions in the American embassies in Beirut, Amman and Cairo; and with the White House National Security Council staff. He was Associate Curator and acting Curator-in-Charge of the Department of Antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum from 1982 to 1986.

Houghton holds current or previous board memberships with the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Corning Museum of Glass; the American Numismatic Society (where he served as president from 1985-89); American Near East Refugee Aid; the American School of Classical Studies at Athens; the Cyprus-American Archaeological Research Institute; the Middle East Institute; the American Council for Cultural Property; the Cultural Policy Research Institute, and the Council on Cultural Policy. His public service includes membership on the U.S. Cultural Property Advisory Committee (1984-87) and an advisory committee of the U.S. Mint (2007-2012).

Houghton's publications include, among others, more than sixty articles and four books dealing with archaeology, ancient history and art. He was awarded the American Numismatic Society's 2015 Archer M. Huntington medal for his career contributions to numismatic scholarship. He continues to be engaged with U.S. collecting museums and the issues of cultural property ownership and protection. Dark Athena, which draws on his experience in US government service and as former curator of the J. Paul Getty Museum, is his first novel.

Arthur Houghton Full CV

(June 2015)

I. Books

Coins of the Seleucid Empire, Ancient Coins in North American Collections IV (New York, 1983).

ed, with S. Hurter, P.E. Mottahideh and J. Scott, Studies in Honor of Leo Mildenberg: Numismatics. Art History and Archaeology (Wetteren, 1984).

(with Catharine Lorber) Seleucid Coins. A Comprehensive Catalogue. Part 1. Seleucus I through Antiochus III (New York and Lancaster/London, 2002).

(with Catharine Lorber and Oliver Hoover) Seleucid Coins. A Comprehensive Catalogue. Part 2. Seleucus IV through Antiochus XIII (New York and Lancaster/London, 2008).

II. Articles

1. (With R. de Neufville) "A Description of Ain Fara and Wara," Kush 1964.

2. (With G. Le Rider) "Un trésor de monnaies hellénistiques trouvé prés de Suse," Revue Numismatique 1966.

3. "The Seleucid Mint at Lampsacus," American Numismatic Society Museum Notes 23 (1979).

4. "Timarchus as King in Babylonia, RN 1979.

5. "The Second Reign of Demetrius II at Tarsus," ANSMN 1980.

6. "Notes on the Early Seleucid Victory Coinage of 'Persepolis'," Schweizerische Numismatische Rundschau 59 (1980).

7. "Tarrik Darreh (Kangavar) Hoard," ANSMN 25 (1980).

8. "A Tetradrachm of Seleucia Pieria at the Getty Museum," J. Paul Getty Museum Journal 10 (1982).

9. "A Pergamene Head of Athena," JPGMJ 11 (1983).

10. Introduction to Archaic Coins, An Exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum, 1982.

11. “The Coins of Nelson Bunker Hunt: Coins of the Ancient World,” Wealth of the Ancient World (Fort Worth 1983) pp. 145-154.

12. "The Portraits of Antiochus IX," Antike Kunst 1984.

13. (With W. Moore), "Some Early Northeastern Seleucid Mints," ANSMN 29 (1984).

14. "The Royal Seleucid Mint of Seleucia on the Calycadnus," Kraay-Mőrkholm Essavs. Numismatic Studies in the Memory of C.M. Kraay and 0. Mőrkholm (Louvain-la-Neuve, 1989).

15. "The Seleucid Mint of Mallus and the Cult Figure of Athena Magarsia," Studies in Honor of Leo Mildenberg: Numismatics, Art History and Archaeology (Wetteren, 1984).

16. (With G. Le Rider) "Le deuxième fils d'Antiochos IV à Ake­-Ptolemaïs," SNR 1985.

17. "A Colossal Head in the Antakya Museum and the Portraiture of Seleucus I," Antike Kunst 1986.

18. "The Elephants of Nisibis," ANSMN 31 (1986).

19. "Syria and the East," A Survey of Numismatic Research (London, 1986).

20. "A Didrachm Issue of Antiochus VI of Byblos," Israel Numismatic Journal 9 (1986-7).

21. "The Double Portrait Coins of Antiochus XI and Philip I: A Seleucid Mint at Beroea?" SNR 66 (1987).

22. Preface to J.M. Doyen, Les Monnaies Antiques du Tell Abou Danné et d'Oumm el-Marra (Campagnes 1976-1985) (Brussels, 1987).

23. (With G. Le Rider), "Un premier règne d'Antiochos VIII Epiphane à Antioche en 128," Bulletin de Correspondance Hellénique 112 (1988).

24. "The Double Portrait Coins of Alexander I Balas and Cleopatra Thea," SNR 67 (1988).

25. (With W. Moore) "Five Seleucid Coin Notes," ANSMN 33 (1988).

26. With S. Bendall, "A Hoard of Aegean Tetradrachms, etc." ANSMN 33 (1988).  

27. "The Royal Seleucid Mint of Soli," Numismatic Chronicle 149 (1989).

28. "A Victory Coin and the Parthian Wars of Antiochus VII," Proceedings of the 10th International Numismatic Congress. London. September 8-10.1986 (London 1989), p.65.

29. “The Royal Seleucid Mint of Seleucia on the Calycadnus,” Kraay-Mörkholm Essays, Numismatic Studies in the Memory of C.M.Kraay and O. Mörkholm (Louvain-la-Neuve, 1989).

30. (With A. Spaer) "New Silver Coins of Demetrius III and Antiochus XII at Damascus,1' Schwietzer Münzblatter 157 (February 1990).

31. (With W. Müseler), "The Reigns of Antiochus VIII and Antiochus IX at Damascus," SM 159 (August 1990).

32. "The Antioch Project," Mnemata: Papers in Memory of Nancv M. Waggoner (New York 1991).

33. "Some Alexander Coinages of Seleucus I with Anchors," Mediterranean Archaeology 4 (1991), pp.99-117.

34. "The Advent of Antiochus VI at Apamea: the Numismatic Evidence," Abstracts of Papers. XIth Numismatic Congress. Brussels. September 9-12. 1991

35. Introduction to The Heritage of Tyre, a Colloquium, Washington 1987.

36. "The Accession of Antiochus VI at Apamea: the Numismatic Evidence," Proceedings of the XIth International Numismatic Congress, etc.

37. "The Revolt of Tryphon and the Accession of Antiochus VI at Apamea: the Chronologies of Antiochus VI and Tryphon," SNR 1992, pp.119-141.

38. "The Coinage of Demetrius I at Ake-Ptolemais," Florilegium Numismaticum. Studia in honorem U. Westermark edita (Uppsala, 1992), pp.163-9.

39.. "The Seleucid Mint of Aegeae in Aeolia" RN 1992, pp.229-232.

40. "Two Late Seleucid Lead Issues from the Levant," INJ 11 (1990-1), pp. 26-31.

41. "Bronze Coins of Antiochus IV of Mallus," SM 169 (1993), pp.5-8.

42. “The Reigns of Antiochus VIII and Antiochus IX at Antioch and Tarsus,” SNR 1993, pp. 87-111.

43. “Four Seleucid Notes. 2: The Chronology of the Later Coinage of Demetrius I at Ecbatana” and ibid, “4: Countermarks of Tryphon: Comments on the Circulation of Currency in Northern Syria, ca. 150-140 B.C.”, AJN 5-6 (1993-4), pp. 46-53 and 59-68.

43A. “The Chronology of the Later Coinage of Demetrius I at Ecbatana,” AJN 5-6 (1993-4), pp. 46-53.

44. (with Catharine Lorber), “The Seleucids and the Ptolemies,” A Survey of Numismatic Research 1990-1995 (Berlin 1997), pp. 115-124.

45. “Some Seleucid Test Pieces,” AJN 9 (1997), pp. 1-5.

46. “Aradus, not Marathus,” Studies in Greek Numismatics in Memory of Martin Jessop Price, R. Ashton and S. Hurter, eds. (London 1998), pp. 145-6.

47. “A New Coin of Antiochus XI and Philip of Antioch. The Struggle for the Seleucid Succession, 94-84 B.C,” SNR 1998, pp. 65-69

48. “The Early Seleucid Mint of Laodicea ad Mare (c. 300-246 B.C.)”, Travaux de numismatique grecques offerts à Georges le Rider A. Amandry and S. Hurter, eds. (Paris 1999), pp. 169-184.

49. (With Andrew Stewart) “The Equestrian Portrait of Alexander the Great on a New Tetradrachm of Seleucus I,” SNR 1999, pp. 27-35.

50. “A mint of Antiochus IX at Samaria-Sebaste?” AJN 12 (2000), pp. 107-112.

51. “The Production of Money by Mints of the Seleucid Core,” in C. Augé and F. Duyrat, eds, Les monnayages syriens. Quel apport pour l’histoire de Proche-Orient hellénistiquee et romain? Actes de la table ronde de Damas 10-12 novembre 1999 (Beryrouth, 2002), pp. 5-19.

52. (with Catharine Lorber) “Antiochus III in Coele-Syria and Phoenicia”, INJ 14 (2000-2002), pp. 44-58.

53. “Seleucid Coinages and Monetary Policy of the 2nd c. B.C. Reflections on the Monetization of the Seleucid Economy,” Topoi, Supplément 6 (2004), pp. 49-79.

54. “Some observations on coordinated bronze currency systems in Seleucid Syria and Phoenicia,” INJ 15 (2003-6), pp. 35-47.

55. (with Catharine Lorber) “Cappadocian Tetradrachms in the Name of Antiochus VII,” NC 2006, pp. 49-85.

56. (with David Hendin), “Defining Rarity,” The Celator, June 2008 (Vol. 22, no. 6), pp. 28-31.

57. (with Oliver Hoover and Petr Vesely) “The Silver Mint of Damascus under Demetrius III and Antiochus XII,” AJN 20 (2008)

58. (with Catharine Lorber and Oliver Hoover) Seleucid Coins. A Comprehensive Catalogue. Part 2. Seleucus IV through Antiochus XIII ( New York and Lancaster/London, 2008).

59. (with Catharine Lorber) “An Early Seleucid Bronze Hoard,” INJ 17, 2010

60. (with Catharine Lorber) “Antiochus III Hoard”, AJN 21, 2010

61. ( with Andrew Meadows) "The Gaziantep Hoard 1994 (CH 9, 527; 10, 308)," Coin Hoards 10 (2010), pp 173-223).

62. “The Seleucids,” Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Coins (2012).

63. “New Light on Coin Production under Seleucus II in Northern Syria, Commagene and Mesopotamia,” AJN 2011

Reviews

M. Thompson, "Alexander's Drachm Mints I: Sardes and Miletus," American Journal of Archaeology 88 (1984).

In Preparation

"The Seleucid Mint of Sardes, Antiochus I - Seleucus II (281-226 B.C.)" (working title).

"The Seleucid Mint of Damascus under Antiochus VII"
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36183
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: FREDA BEDI CONT'D (#4)

Postby admin » Mon Oct 31, 2022 3:05 am

Some Early Far Northeastern Seleucid Mints
by Arthur Houghton
and Wayne Moore
ANSMN 29 (1984)
© 1984 The American Numismatic Society

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.

Seleucus apparently minted coins during his stay in India, as several coins in his name are in the Indian standard and have been excavated in India. These coins describe him as "Basileus" ("King"), which implies a date later than 306 BC. Some of them also mention Seleucus in association with his son Antiochus as king, which would also imply a date as late as 293 BC.


(PLATES 1-2)

In the forty-five years since E. T. Newell's publication of Eastern Seleucid Nlints1 the appearance of important new numismatic material and the work of a number of scholars have helped dispel some of the mystery surrounding the early activity of mints operating in the far eastern part of the Seleucid empire. For example, new light has been shed on the production of coinage under Seleucus I and Antiochus I at the two cities of Seleucia on the Tigris2 and Susa,3 and what Newell believed to have been a flourishing mint at Persepolis in the same period is now thought to have produced no coinage at all.4
At the great marriage ceremony at Susa in the spring of 324 BC, Seleucus married Apama (daughter of Spitamenes), and she bore him his eldest son and successor Antiochus I Soter, at least two legitimate daughters (Laodice and Apama) and possibly another son (Achaeus). At the same event, Alexander married the daughter of the late Persian King Darius III while several other Macedonians married Persian women. After Alexander's death (323 BC), when the other senior Macedonian officers unloaded their "Susa wives" en masse, Seleucus was one of the very few who kept his wife, and Apama remained his consort (later Queen) for the rest of her life. -- Seleucus I Nicator, by Wikipedia

A new mint, evidently producing silver coinage for local use only under Antiochus I, has been generally located in the Baluchistan area.5 In the province of Bactra, the excavations at Ai Khanoum have produced evidence supporting the existence of a mint at that city, although the scope of its production remains very uncertain.6 New examples of coinages which Newell recognized as being from the east and several previously unknown issues from the same general area have appeared, moreover, all adding depth to the scant material which he was able to catalogue from the far northeastern reaches of the Seleucid empire.7

A sufficient number of silver coins produced by one such mint now exists to give a clearer picture of its range of activity than Newell had supposed and to provide some indication of its general location. With no certain identification possible at this time, we propose to call it Mint X.

Mint X's production comprises a coherent series of Alexander-type issues struck in the name of Antiochus, including tetradrachms, drachms and hemidrachms. All are linked by the distinctive left field monogram [x], and are related by technical and stylistic affinities. They are generally characterized by cupped flans, moderately so in the case of the tetradrachms, very evidently in that of the drachms and hemidrachms. Also, the die adjustment of the tetradrachms, where known, is in the upright position (↓ or [x]), with the exception of one coin (Group 3, A2-P3); the dies of the smaller denominations appear to have been left unadjusted. The group is also unified by the unusual configuration of the inscription, which runs from beneath the exergue to the right of the figure of Zeus, curving around the rear throne leg so that the king's name must be read from the outside.

Stylistically, the issues of Mint X generally follow the conventions of Alexander-type coinage struck at other eastern mints, including Seleucia on the Tigris and Ecbatana. The Heracles head of the obverse retains the forceful brow and emphasized orbital common to late fourth century B.C. heroic imagery. The face, however, has a certain mannered refinement closely related to that appearing on tetradrachms of Seleucus I struck at Ecbatana, where the similarity of detail extends to the long and free-flowing lion's mane.8 The reverses, which show the figure of Zeus seated on a throne without a back, have no close parallel among the Seleucid coinages of the east.

MINT X

ANTIOCHUS I

Obv. Head of Heracles in lion's skin r.

Rev. [x] (in exergue) ANTIOXOY (to r., upward); Zeus seated I. on throne, holding scepter with l. hand and eagle in outstretched r.; to l., [x].

Group 1: [x] beneath throne.

Tetradrachms

A1-P1 ↑ 14.32. BM (Oman Coll.). WSM, p. 35, cited as 755[x] and noted as being from the Punjab. Plate 1, 1.

A1-PI [x] 16.62. ANS (Newell Coll.). Hamburger, June 1930, 412. ESM 755. Plate 1, 2.

A1-P1 ↑ 17.43. SNGFitz 5524; WSM, p. 35, cited as 755.F.

A1-P1 ↑15.65. Kovacs 4, 8 Aug. 1983, 103 (ex ANS, Kelley Collection: see H. A. Troxell and N. Waggoner, "Robert F. Kelley Bequest," ANSMN 23 (1978), p. 37, 45); Glendinning, 18 Apr. 1955, 567. Possibly the same as the Sydenham coin, below. Plate 1, 3.

A1-P1 ↑ 15.42. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum. ESM 755y.

? ? = 15.65. Ex. Sydenham Coll. WSM, p. 35, cited as 755[x].

Group 2: [x] beneath throne.

Tetradrachm

A1-P2 14.90. The inscription has been extensively recut and the monogram is not fully clear. Naville 10, 15 June 1925, 836; ESM 755a ("cast?"). Plate 1, 4.

Hemidrachms

ai-pi [x] 1.88. BM. Plate 1, 5.

aii-pii ← 1.99. The monogram beneath the throne may be [x]. ANS. Said to be from Afghanistan. ANSMN 23, p. 37 (where the lower monogram is recorded as [x]). Plate 1, 6.

Group 3: [x] beneath throne.

Tetradrachm

A2-P3 ↓ 15.53. BM. WSM, p. 35, cited as 755§ and noted as being from Chanda Mall (Pakistan). Plate 1, 7.

Drachm

a1-p1 The monogram appears to be [x]. Sotheby's, 20 Feb. 1980, 286. Plate 2, 8.

Group 4: [x] beneath throne.

Drachm

a2-p2 [x] 4.14. From Iran. Houghton 1308.9 Plate 2, 9.

Group 5: [x] beneath throne.

Drachm

a3-p3 ↓ 3.64. Said to be from Afghanistan. Private U.S. Coll. Plate 2, 10.

Uncertain Group

Hemidrachm

aiii-piii ↓ 2.05. Monogram beneath throne, if any, off flan. Ashmolean. WSM, p. 36, 755A. Plate 2, 11.


The relationship between the issues of Mint X and those of Ecbatana struck under Seleucus I extends to the cupped flans and unusual configuration of the inscription, which recall similar features on early Alexander-type coins of Antiochus I also assigned by Newell to this mint.10 An issue from the Median capital may have been used as a prototype for Mint X's tetradrachms; alternatively, an engraver from Ecbatana may have been transferred to cut the dies of the series. That the mint was not under the direct influence of Bactra seems likely, given the absence of Alexander-type issues within the known production of this mint and the fact that the dies of coins struck at Bactra were consistently adjusted to the inverted position.11

Only two obverse tetradrachm dies are known for Mint X. If one assumes a moderate but continuous rate of operation, the period of production for the entire series of Mint X's tetradrachms did not extend beyond a year or two. The drachms and hemidrachms could also have been struck within this time frame, perhaps a bit longer: with a very incomplete picture of the mint's production of small denomination coinage, it is more difficult to tell. The impression one has in any event is that Mint X's activity, and therefore importance, was very limited.

Based on the fact that elsewhere in the Seleucid east Alexander-type issues were struck during the early years of rule of Antiochus I, Mint X would appear to have been active under this king soon after 280 B.C., perhaps earlier.12

Where exactly Mint X was situated is problematical. The provenances of its coins range from Iran in the west to Rawalpindi, Pakistan, suggesting its location in the general area of Afghanistan or eastern Iran. One of the major cities of the area, such as Artacoana-Alexandria in Aria (Herat), could have issued the coins in question, but the limited production of Mint X would seem to preclude the likelihood of a major provincial center.13 An alternative possibility is the area of southern Afghanistan near Kandahar, which may lie close to the site of ancient Alexandria Arachosia. Kandahar itself is on a southern branch of the route from western Iran which passes first through Herat, turns southward to Seistan, then goes up the Helmand Valley to present-day Kabul.14 Coins produced at a city in this area would have been likely to reflect the style and technique of issues struck at Ecbatana, but not necessarily those of Bactra, whose location north of the Hindu Kush would have made contact with Seistan difficult at best.15

Several other issues in silver and bronze from the general area of Afghanistan, of a style and technique quite different from those of Mint X, can be added to the material of known eastern origin. We propose to assign a coherent small group of these to Mint Y.

MINT Y

ANTIOCHUS I

Obv. Head of Heracles in lion's skin r.

Rev. [x] (in exergue) ANTIOXOY (to r., upward) Zeus seated l, on throne, holding scepter with l. hand and eagle in outstretched r.

Drachms

a1-p1 ↑ 3.84. To l., uncertain monogram; beneath throne, [x] Private U.S. coll. From Afghanistan. Plate 2, 12.

a2-p2 ↑ 3.64. King's title off flan; to l., [x] ; beneath throne, [x]. Private U.S. coll. From Afghanistan. Plate 2, 13.

a3-p3 ↑ 3.47. To l., [x]; beneath throne, traces of monogram. BM. Plate 2, 14.
 

The three known drachms of Mint Y, also Alexander-types issued in the name of Antiochus, are all struck in low relief on relatively flat flans. There are no die or monogram links between the individual coins, but they are unified by the configuration of their inscriptions, which like those of Mint X run from the exergue to the right field behind Zeus, and by their stylistic cohesion (the dies of all three appear to have been cut by the same hand). Like the small denomination issues of mint X, their dies are unadjusted.

The few examples cited above are insufficient to give more than a very incomplete picture of the activity of Mint Y. Their provenance (all are from Afghanistan) is too vague to isolate a specific locality where they may have been struck, but their epigraphic similarity to the issues of Mint X and their general relationship to the Alexander-type coins of Seleucus and Antiochus produced further to the west also suggest a mint operating in the general area of southern Afghanistan in the years shortly after Antiochus's accession. Little more than this can be said at the present time.

Two other mints appear to have issued silver coinage of the Alexander-type from locations in the general area of Afghanistan during the early Seleucid period. Both evidently operated for only very brief periods. One is represented by a tetra drachm and a drachm struck under Seleucus I on very flat flans with unadjusted dies, united by a common monogram and similar styles. Their inscriptions, in both instances [x], are written in two lines to the right of Zeus but face in different directions (read from the inside in the case of the tetradrachm, from the outside in that of the drachm). The tetra drachm was found at Ai Khanoum; the drachm is from Iran. It is not now possible to establish the exact site of the mint producing these issues, although it has been located in a very general manner in the east.16

The site of the second mint is equally uncertain. It is represented by two tetradrachms, both from India (ESM 747-48), struck during the co-regency of Seleucus I and Antiochus I. They have no monogram in common, but have a similarity of fabric, style, reverse detail, and die adjustment ([x] in both cases). Newell has proposed their assignment to a mint in eastern Iran, possibly Alexandria Prophthasia in Seistan.17 Bernard and Guillaume have suggested instead a mint in Bactria, not Bactra itself.18 The arguments for -- and against -- each seem equally strong.

Two recently discovered bronze coins of Antiochus I, also from Afghanistan, may be related to the mint at Ai Khanoum. Both coins, a double and a unit, are part of a series modeled on the staters of Alexander the Great and Seleucus I, with the obverse type of a helmeted Athena head, the reverse that of a standing Nike bracketed by the inscription [x] (Plate 2, 15 and 16).19 As is commonly the case with bronze coinage struck in the east, the edge of their flans is beveled. The coins of the group, including the related double and three halves found in the excavation material at Ai Khanoum, have no monograms.20 The unit illustrated at Plate 2, 16, fills a gap in the series, all of the known examples of which have inverted dies.

The latter element in itself suggests that this group was produced at a mint associated with the provincial center of Bactra. The provenance of four examples in controlled excavations at Ai Khanoum adds to the possibility that this site was the originating mint, although the evidence is not conclusive. Other bronze issues of Antiochus I have been found in the Ai Khanoum excavations in such quantities as to indicate unequivocally the existence of a mint at this site producing small denomination coinage.21

Our current state of knowledge, including the evidence of the new material from Ai Khanoum and Mints X and Y, does not radically change the picture which emerged from Newell's study: that of a single major mint in the Seleucid northeast,
at Bactra, operated from the second decade of the third century to ca. 256 or later.22


Ashoka, 3rd Mauryan Emperor, Reign: c. 268 – c. 232 BCE, Coronation: 268 BCE -- -- Ashoka, by Wikipedia


It does however, add to our understanding of supplemental mint activity in the same area and period, particularly under Antiochus I. In the early part of his reign, Antiochus appears to have established a small group of mints located from Bactra in the north, through Seistan, to the western edge of the Baluchistan desert in the south. The types of silver issues produced at these mints were based on coins struck at major provincial mints of western Iran, replicated stylistically as well as iconographically. The principal routes of travel seem to have determined the transfer of form -- Alexander-types from Ecbatana to Bactra and Seistan; Victory types from Susa to Baluchistan.

The period of production of these peripheral mints appears in each instance to have been quite short. The reasons for this are obscure, and perhaps not identical in the case of each mint. On the one hand, their brevity of operation suggests that the need for locally-produced money was not as great as may have been originally perceived, and that currency requirements were in time met from other sources. On the other, the possibility exists that one or more mints may have been opened as much for political as monetary reasons, perhaps during the early period of Antiochus's city-building, which extended to the empire's easternmost reaches. In such circumstances, the coins would have functioned as a symbol of Seleucid territorial preemption.

A firmer determination of cause will have to wait until a fuller picture is available of the archaeology and numismatics of the area in the early hellenistic era. Today, the new numismatic material and the excavations at Ai Khanoum provide a tantalizing and still very incomplete glimpse of a broader pattern of mint activity in this period than was hitherto known.

Image
Plate 1: Early Far Northeastern Seleucid Mints

Image
Plate 2: Early Far Northeastern Seleucid Mints

_______________

Notes:
 
1 E. T. Newell, Eastern Seleucid Minis, ANSNS 1 (New York, 1938), cited hereafter as ESM. For their generous assistance in providing photographs and other information on which this article is based, we wish to thank Andrew Daneman of Summa Galleries, Beverly Hills; Gunther Dembski of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Yienna; Frank L. Kovacs of San Francisco; Mrs. E. Maries of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; Martin Price of the Department of Coins and Medals, British Museum; T. R. Volk of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; and Nancy Waggoner of the American Numismatic Society.
 
2 N. Waggoner, "The Early Alexander Coinage at Seleucia on the Tigris," ANSMN 15 (1969), pp. 21-30.
 
3 A. Houghton, "Notes on the Early Seleucid Victory Coinage of 'Persepolis'," SNR 59 (1980), pp. 5-11.
 
4 Houghton (above, n. 3).
 
5 Houghton (above, n. 3), pp. 11-13.
 
6 P. Bernard and O. Guillaume, "Monnaies inedites de la Bactriane grecque a Ai Khanoum (Afghanistan)," RN 1980, pp. 17-19; see also G. le Rider, "Les Monnaies," Fouilles d' Ai Khanoum 1, Memoires de la Delegation archaologique francaise en Afghanistan, 21 (Paris, 1973).
 
7 For example, C. Y. Petitot-Biehler, "Tresor de monnaies grecques et greco-bactriennes trouve a Ai Khanoum (Afghanistan)," RN 1975, p. 40, no. 52; also, the many new issues discussed by Bernard and Guillaume, above n. 6, pp. 9-32. 
 
8 Noted by Newell, ESM, p. 264.
 
9 A. Houghton, Coins of the Seleucid Empire, ACNAC 4 (New York, 1983); hereafter  cited as CSE. 
 
10 For example, ESM 508 and 512.
 
11 ESM, p. 230 and note 9.
 
12 See the Alexander-type coins of Seleucus I, WSM, p. 35, 754A (a tetradrachm) and ESM, 754 (a hemidrachm), with the left field monogram [x] and [x] beneath the throne, which may have been struck at Mint X. They differ from the issues of Mint X in their crude obverse style and their inscriptions, which show the king's title and name on two lines to the right of Zeus. The find spot of the tetradrachm, to the east of the Helmand River in Seistan is, if not indicative, at least suggestive of a mint site in southern Afghanistan.
 
13 There is no compelling reason, in any case, to revise Newell's somewhat tentative assignment of ESM 727-45, issues of Antiochus I, II and Seleucus II, to Artacoana, comprising as they do a major mint series of royal coin types, produced over a period of more than 30 years. While these coins have cupped flans like the issues of Mint X, there is no monogram or stylistic relationship between the two groups.
 
14 K. Fischer, "Zur Lage von Kandahar an Landverbindungen zwischen Iran und Indien," Bonner Jahrbucher 167 (1967), pp. 129-32, documents the route but provides little evidence for the location of ancient cities between Herat and Kabul.
 
15 A professional Afghani, who has dealt extensively with Seleucid coins in his own country, has mentioned the frequent appearance of drachms with cupped flans from the area of Seistan. It is difficult to give great weight to the report without the specifics of the coins themselves, but it intersects with other information pointing to a possible location of Mint X in the southern part of Afghanistan. 
 
16 Petitot-Biehler (above, n. 7), p. 40, no. 52 (tetradrachm); CSE 1305 (drachm).
 
17 ESM, p. 261.
 
18 Bernard and Guillaume (above, n. 6), p. 19, n. 19.
 
19 Both coins are in the W. Moore collection, Portland, Oregon. The double: ↓ 5.98: Plate 2, 15; the unit: ↓ 4.47: Plate 2, 16.
 
20 Bernard and Guillaume (above, n. 6), pp. 29-30, no. 4.
 
21 Bernard and Guillaume (above, n. 6), p. 21, no. 1.
 
22 For the chronology, see the discussion in CSE, p. 118.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36183
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

PreviousNext

Return to Articles & Essays

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 30 guests