The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office has returned nearly 40 items worth $5 million from a cache of looted artifacts owned by billionaire Michael Steinhardt to Israel.
The repatriation comes after Steinhardt “lost” 180 items that were worth $70 million last December, although not all of those items were recovered. He was later banned from buying more artifacts – a ban rarely imposed on collectors of any kind.
Alvin L. said: Bragg Jr., the Manhattan District Attorney, said in a statement: “These rare and beautiful artifacts, dating back thousands of years, have been kept from the public due to looting and illegal trafficking.” “My office is proud to put historical monuments back where they rightfully belong.”
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When this ban was imposed on Steinhardt in December, his prominence in the art world was already fading away. In 2019, Steinhardt was accused of making comments of a sexual nature to women who worked for the non-profit organizations he founded or supported. He denied the allegations at the time. The previous year, New York authorities confiscated nine Greek and Roman artifacts from Steinhardt’s Manhattan home.
Prior to this, Steinhardt and his wife Judy were seen as forces within the New York art world. They are said to have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on art, and have previously loaned works from their collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where a wing dedicated to Greek and Roman art bears his name. They are rated ARTnews List of top 200 collectors each year between 1999 and 2018.
Of the 39 artifacts brought back home, three are death masks that the bureau said belonged to California. 6000 to 7000 B.C. They were purchased from the Israeli merchant Gil Chaya, and the two are now worth $650,000 together, according to authorities.
The Manhattan District Attorney’s office said Shaya helped Steinhardt purchase a number of items that were returned to Israel. The bureau accused Shaya of locating Steinhardt’s loot and of “cleaning a filthy artifact in a New York City hotel bathtub” before bringing it to the collector’s home.
Technically, not all of the 39 items that have been repatriated have been returned to Israel yet.
Twenty-eight of them were officially returned on Tuesday, although eight were not found, and the remaining three were “transferred” to the country. In addition, two more items – a cosmetic spoon and a sunfish amulet – are expected to be returned to the Palestinian authorities.
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