Questions about Manhattan DA’s Antiquities Grabs and Restitutions to Turkey

Woke ideology? Shakedown? Abuse of power? A good idea gone bad?

B ubon is in the news. No, Bubon isn’t another hot-to-trot, busty pornette. No, there’s not another sham trial about presidential “hush money,” even though Bubon and the Manhattan DA’s office are, these days, sharing headlines. Bubon and the DA’s office, that’s the turf of big Alvin Bragg, are perfect together, since the issue is a prosecutor’s abuse of power. Or is it the art of the shakedown?

I’ll spill the Turkish coffee beans. The DA’s got an art-trafficking division that has been chasing illegally exported antiquities and art swiped during the Holocaust. A good idea, generally. Bubon was, in ancient Roman times, a market town in southwestern Turkey, near the Mediterranean. By the second century a.d., it was also a pagan shrine to Rome’s emperors. It was packed with marble and bronze sculptures.

Over the centuries, through earthquakes, misrule, invasion, and benign neglect, Bubon turned rural as the shrine’s art slept underground. Nobody hid the sculptures. They just sank bit by bit as Bubon itself disappeared. In the 1960s, farmers noticed heads, toes, and the odd finger or two poking from the earth. Over a decade or two, ad hoc excavations uncovered many splendors, which the locals sold to black-market finders, who sold them to dealers, who sold them to rich collectors, in contravention of Turkish law and, in some cases, Ottoman Empire law. Did villagers care about the law? Nah. Law there never served the poor.

Under American law, acquiring these objects is illegal. They’re stolen property. Hence, the art-trafficking division.

I’ve followed its work, much of it well done. In our blighted, fallen world, Americans are uniquely committed to justice. If art in public or private collections is here illegally, we ought to return it, and we do so by instinct. Taking World War II–era loot as an example, the French, Russians, Austrians, and Germans needed to be dragged screaming “sacré bleu,” “nyet,” and “nie in eines Tausendjähriges Reich,” all of which meant they wouldn’t return the art unless forced. The art-trafficking division has been essential.

Good causes can become schticks and, in the case of the Manhattan DA’s stolen-art division, at the very least questionable. Lots of art has been seized and returned to wronged families and countries. Many times, I’ve thought, This makes sense. Over the past few years, as I’ve seen and learned more, I’ve tweaked my take. Has the restitution movement become a shakedown machine? Is it infected with the woke anti-colonialism disease?

In the news are a new batch of DA-forced restitutions and three high-profile lawsuits. On September 12, the Manhattan DA’s office returned antiquities valued at $8.3 million to the Turkish government, most from the Bubon site. The Getty, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and private collectors surrendered their art after the DA’s office threatened them with civil seizure and criminal penalties. They looked at their art, imagined long days à la Trump at the courthouse on 100 Centre Street, and said, “Take it, please.” Good people want to be left alone.

Last year, the Met surrendered to the DA a $25 million headless, larger-than-life Bubon bronze sculpture of, we think, Septimius Severus, a Roman emperor. It had been on long-term loan to the Met from a private collector since 2011. Back to Turkey in went.

The home of Shelby White, then an 85-year-old lady and antiquities collector, was raided. White is a huge and distinguished philanthropist, which means a force for good. I’ve met her. She went to Mount Holyoke, on whose museum board I served. All Holyoke girls are earnest and art-minded.

Whether raided by jackbooted government thugs or not, I don’t know, but the DA’s office seized her things, among them a life-size bronze of the emperor Lucius Verus that had kept its full head of wavy hair. It was in her hallway. The DA is also trying to grab the Cleveland Museum of Art’s superstar bronze, a monumental, draped, headless figure that might depict the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius.

Everyone with whom I’ve discussed the art-trafficking division said “abuse of power” and “shakedown,” unless they were too frightened to talk. I’m old-fashioned and look at law enforcement as an ally and friend, not an oppressor. The questions I’m raising are on everyone’s minds.

What’s the DA’s MO? It’s got three prosecutorial levers of power. Awkwardly, they overlap. First, there’s the power to seize, easily obtained from a judge since the standard is a probable cause to believe, say, that Shelby White’s bronze was, maybe, “stolen,” and that’s a loaded word, and, possibly, that it ought to be returned to its rightful owner.

We live in an era of hoaxes. “Weapons of mass destruction,” Russian collusion, Covid’s from the Bat Cave not the Leaky Lab, “the Earth is broiling,” and “sharp as a tack” are among them. Impressionable people believe that meanie Brits and Americans looted antiquities willy-nilly. Museums and rich collectors need to shed them to decolonize since we gringos are all colonizers and evildoers.

“Probable cause” is squishy, for starters. It’s the standard to get a search warrant. Lots of judges don’t know how to say “no.” And once your bronze is seized, and even if the gendarmes are polite, wipe their feet, and wear white gloves, you’re trapped in the process. You lose sleep. You get the spotlight treatment. Lawyering up is pricy, so you’re now eating Friskies instead of caviar.

Jurisdiction? The DA’s office argues that every work of art of great value at some point comes through Manhattan. And, even if not, DAs tend to stick together. What’s a buddy DA in L.A. if he can’t help a colleague in the Big Apple? Tasers of the world, unite!

Second, there’s an adjudicated loss of ownership. A “preponderance of evidence” will do — 50.1 percent of evidence showing that the ancient bronze is smokin’-hot stolen goods, 49.9 percent showing that it’s clean. These objects are often worth millions of dollars. When a museum is forced to surrender an object, the public loses, and so does scholarship. Most of these restituted antiquities return not to public delectation in Italy, Greece, Turkey, Iraq, or Egypt, but to cold, dark vaults. These countries already have enough antiquities to choke every hydra in Lerna. And the decolonized don’t get a refund. They swallow the loss. For a museum, these charity dollars go down the old stone cistern. All because of that preponderance of evidence, that little fraction of a fraction.

And third, there’s always criminal law. When it comes to art, there’s an overlapping civil and criminal dynamic. “We’re very concerned about your behavior under criminal law,” the New York DA’s office might say. Suddenly, it’s worse than eating cat food.

Shelby White, now 86, might think she’ll be ending her years making license plates at Bedford Hills, New York’s maximum-security women’s prison. And Jean Harris, who plugged the Scarsdale Diet guru, isn’t even there anymore. She might’ve been good company. She went to Smith.

Unless a collector has very deep pockets and fire in his belly, it’s likely that the DA will win through intimidation alone. This is unjust. Though the art-trafficking division has racked up convictions and returned more than 4,000 objects, I don’t think it’s ever won a case in a full-fledged trial before a jury. Most museums simply don’t have the money to contest a claim. Even the Met is afraid.

Unafraid, it seems, are two of America’s premier museums and the formidable Aaron Mendelsohn, a Los Angeles collector who owns a bronze said to be from Bubon. Right now, he’s contesting jurisdiction. Hands-across-America politics aside, and even if L.A.’s mega-woke DA wants to help, Mendelsohn says that the Manhattan DA’s jurisdiction is confined to the island that cost the Dutch $24 in beads.

A bigger brouhaha involves the Cleveland Museum’s bronze, The Philosopher, which it says dates from 150 b.c. to a.d. 200. The art-trafficking division has, evidently, made the standard litany of threats. Cleveland has called its bluff, suing Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg — he of the Trump show trial, he of Hamashole Columbia vandal liberation, he of the Soros Best Bud Club — in federal court, seeking a declaration that Cleveland is The Philosopher’s rightful owner.

The museum might very well win. Dating is crucial. If the thing is pegged as Hellenistic, and that’s 150 b.c., it’s too early to be from Bubon. Scholars on the stand will battle over style. There’s also the question of how long a statute of limitations on contesting ownership ought to run. The DA’s take is “forever.” Stolen property is stolen property till the end of time, or until it’s returned to its rightful owner. New York law says the statute of limitations on prosecuting stolen-property cases is five years. The Cleveland Museum has owned The Philosopher since 1986. It will make the case that it bought the sculpture in good faith.

The “forever” rule makes for a self-aggrandizing dynamic. Who died and made one division of one department of one borough of one city the sheriff of omnium and gatherum? At some point we have to draw the line and say “Case closed.” The British Museum’s Parthenon sculptures have been there for more than 200 years. The Greeks waited until the 1980s to push for their return. Pegasus long ago flew from the barn.

Another big problem for the art-trafficking division is called findspots, or, more precisely, the thicket of conflicting opinions among scholars on where antiquities were actually found. The DA’s office has a scholarly adviser — Elizabeth Marlowe, a Colgate antiquities professor — who has informed its thinking on where objects were initially found.

Marlowe is a very good scholar but also a restitution extremist who has drunk the decolonize-me flavor Kool-Aid. Putting this aside, Cleveland will find specialists who will testify that The Philosopher was found not in Bubon but in Greece or Sicily or, who knows, Shaker Heights, courtesy of the Angel Moroni. Marlowe does make a very good but sure-to-be-contested point about how much the museum knew in 1986 about The Philosopher’s provenance. She has written that The Philosopher’s findspot in Bubon was rumored then and that the museum should have known it might have been illegally excavated, at least according to Turkish law. And for years the museum titled it “Marcus Aurelius” and said it might be from Bubon.

Coulda, shoulda, woulda. I wonder why the Manhattan DA is carrying water for Turkey, of all places. It’s got a crypto-fascist, Jew-hating government. Turkey is in NATO, but with friends like Erdoğan, who needs enemies? Goodness, the Feds are now claiming that Turks, some in Erdoğan’s government, have been funneling bribe money to New York’s mayor for years, not for bronzes but run-of-the-mill, low-down favors. Why do anything for them? And why are we enforcing laws dating to the Ottoman Empire? New York’s criminal class would fill a tome as big as the Manhattan phone book. Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang now here in force after our southern border collapsed, operates in plain sight in migrant shelters in New York. Shouldn’t Bragg’s bruisers hit them first rather than an 85-year-old lady on Sutton Place? New York is the land of millions of moving parts, but is this a priority?

And why is the Department of Homeland Security working hand in glove with the DA’s office? Don’t they have bigger anchovies to fry? Like reforming the Secret Service, which seems, well, a Greek tragedy of dysfunction?

How can I not admire Matthew Bogdanos, the head of the art-trafficking division? He’s a Marine. The questions I hear and fears expressed to me are about practices, not personalities. Restitution fever might very well be going too far. “Basta” might be the order of the day. Italian, yes, but I don’t know how to say “Time to back off” in Turkish.

Next week, I’ll write about a big Holocaust restitution lawsuit that, with these antiquities lawsuits, might make for teachable moments aplenty.