A leading Italian dealer has been accused of trafficking in thousands of looted artefacts

Authorities in New York have issued an arrest warrant for Edoardo Almagiaa prominent Italian antiquities dealer accused of trafficking tens of millions of dollars worth of Roman sculptures, Etruscan pottery, and other valuable works of art and artifacts.

According to the New York TimesColin Moynihan, who told the story, accuses Almagià of illegally trading thousands of objects. Many of these items are recorded in a ledger known as the “Green Book,” a handwritten list of items allegedly purchased from tomb raiders.

The Manhattan District Attorney antiquities trade unit gained access to excerpts from the Green Book through an informant, who had attempted to photocopy it. Almagià intervened and retrieved the informant’s ledger before the entire book could be copied.

However, the dealer missed one essential detail: Per the Times“he stormed off without realizing that dozens of pages from the ledger had already been printed and stacked in the copier drawer.” Now he is charged with conspiracy, fraud and possession of stolen property.

Prosecutors say Edoardo Almagià kept a list of traded antiquities in his New York apartment, hidden in a Renaissance chest beneath a marble statue of a deer.

They also say he attacked someone who found the list and started copying it from Kinko.https://t.co/UNVvChV9TI

— Colin Moynihan (@ColinRMoynihan) November 1, 2024

“This is absolutely ridiculous. If they want to try me, let them do it,” Almagià told Katelynn Lee and Miriam Waldvogel of the Daily Princetonianthe student newspaper of Princeton University. “We’re getting to the point where if you touch an antiquity, you’re a crook.”

Almagià graduated from Princeton in 1973. Since beginning his career in the 1980s, he has worked with many renowned institutions and museums, including the J. Paul Getty Museum; the Fordham Museum of Greek, Roman and Etruscan Art; Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts; the Cleveland Museum of Art; and the Princeton University Art Museum.

Almagià attempted “to acquire antiquities stolen from Italy, market them as legal, display them openly in well-known institutions to increase their value, and then sell those antiquities for a profit,” prosecutors wrote. Times.

Manhattan investigators began investigating the dealership in 2018. Since then, they have seized more than 200 works of art related to Almagià from many of the prominent institutions he collaborated with.

Almagià has had many more run-ins with the law. In 2000, authorities arrested him at John F. Kennedy Airport for having two stolen Italian frescoes in his suitcase. Six years later, law enforcement officers searched the dealer’s apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. He surrendered various items, but eventually fled to Italy Artnet‘s Jo Lawson-Tancred.

“If Almagià is the first name in your origin, it has been stolen. That is known,” Matthew Bogdanosthe head of the Manhattan district attorney’s antiquities trafficking unit said Princeton Alumni Weekly‘s Rachel Axon last year.

He added: “This man has gotten away with it for so long, and anyone with any respect for the rule of law needs to say, ‘Enough.’”

Almagià tells the Times that prosecutors are going too far and characterizing recent efforts to investigate the illegal sale of antiquities as “witch hunts.” As for his accusations, he adds: “I don’t deny them, but I don’t accept them.”