A felony courtroom in New York has issued a warrant for the arrest of Georges Lotfi, a outstanding Lebanese collector and seller of antiquities who for years had tipped authorities off to the actions of looted and smuggled artefacts. Now he stands accused of dealing in the identical supplies.
A former prescribed drugs businessman primarily based in Tripoli (northern Lebanon), Lotfi, 81, has been an avid collector for many years and an energetic seller of Roman mosaics. He has been accused of trafficking “a whole bunch of items” allegedly smuggled from war-torn Lebanon, Syria and Libya that he saved in his residences close to Beirut and in Tripoli, Manhattan, Paris and Dubai, or in storage in New Jersey, earlier than placing them available on the market. A number of artefacts have been seized by the Artwork Trafficking Unit (ATU) of the New York District Lawyer’s workplace, led by Colonel Matthew Bogdanos, in addition to customs officers in France and Lebanon.
Among the many revelations within the affidavit supporting the arrest warrant, dated 3 August, Lotfi allegedly admitted to being the primary holder of the $12m Sidon marble bull’s head that was seized from the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork in 2017, a serious coup for the ATU. Excavated in 1967 by a French archaeologist from the Lebanese website of Eshmun, the 4th century BCE bull’s head was stolen by the Phalangist militia in the course of the civil conflict in 1981 from the fortress of Byblos. In 2010, when it was loaned to the Met by a personal collector, the curator of the Greek and Roman antiquities division Joan Mertens acknowledged in an inside report that the primary recognized proprietor was “Mr Lotfi/with Frieda Tchacos in Zurich (Nefer Gallery)” (the gallery has since closed).
That preliminary declare in regards to the marble bull head’s provenance was initially dismissed by investigators because it had not been clarified or documented, however now it seems—primarily based on Lotfi’s personal admission—that he was certainly the prior holder of the marble head. In an e-mail he wrote to particular agent Robert Mancene of the Division of Homeland Safety on 22 January 2018, the collector claimed he purchased the bull’s head in northern Lebanon within the Nineteen Eighties together with a marble torso and, later, a draped male determine from a neighborhood seller named Farid Ziadé. Put available on the market for $10m, the torso was seized at Lotfi’s Fifth Avenue residence in 2017 and finally repatriated to Lebanon together with the bull’s head. The draped determine was recovered a 12 months later by Lebanese customs in a container shipped from New York to Tripoli.
In response to Mancene’s affidavit, Lotfi had served as an informant to the ATU, delivering “priceless data on quite a few antiquities-smuggling investigations”, purportedly within the hope of defending his personal enterprise. The investigator additionally reveals that it was Lotfi who “first contacted ATU with data” in regards to the notorious gold sarcophagus seized on the Met in 2019, resulting in an investigation spanning the US, France and Germany into Egyptian antiquities offered to the Met and the Louvre Abu Dhabi.
The affidavit states that in March 2018, Lotfi requested Mancene if “a monetary reward” could be doable for data that “might result in the invention of faux provenance paperwork” for a “multimillion greenback object which is within the USA”—the gold sarcophagus, on the time the star attraction of an exhibition on the Met. Lotfi stated the reward was not for him however for one of many traffickers, who subsequently was in touch with Bodganos (requests for monetary rewards had been repeatedly refused).
Mancene additionally claims that Lotfi offered the Met an allegedly looted Egyptian bronze statuette of a kneeling priest or ruler, which was seized from the museum final February and might be returned to Egypt (because the sale occurred in 2006, the case is roofed by the statute of limitations).
In response to Mancene’s affidavit, Lotfi was additionally in possession of three Cyrenaican funerary deities seized in 2012 at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle Airport on suspicions that they had been looted in Libya (that case remains to be pending). The putting effigies had been on the centre of an exhibition staged on the Louvre on archeological looting in 2021. Different statues from Cyrenaica, a website closely looted in the course of the civil conflict in Libya, had been noticed on the US market after allegedly being photographed in Lotfi’s Manhattan residence. One was seized in 2019 on the Brooklyn residence of Jamal Rifai, proprietor of the Aphrodite Historic Artwork Gallery.
The affidavit additionally mentions a carved limestone statue from Palmyra displaying a reclining male determine surrounded by his spouse and three youngsters, shipped from Dubai to New York in 2011, and a collection of Roman mosaics from Syria and Lebanon. Twenty-four of those antiquities, some offered to Lotfi by the identical Farid Ziadé, all utilizing the identical allegedly “fabricated generic provenance“ based on Mancene, had been seized in New York in 2021. However the investigator says that “a number of“ different mosaics that handed by way of Lotfi’s fingers are nonetheless available on the market or within the possession of the Met.
Neither Rifai nor representatives for the Met had responded to requests for remark by press time. Lotfi tells The Artwork Newspaper he “made the error of creating a friendship with Bogdanos” and can “very quickly” refute the allegations towards him, claiming the affidavit “altered or misinterpreted some conditions and statements” he had made.
