US arrest warrant for Almagia for trafficking over 2000 antiquities

Matthew Bogdanos, head of the Antiquities Trafficking Unit at the U.S. District Attorney's Office in Manhattan has an arrest warrant for the Italian-American, Edoardo Almagià, an antiquities dealer, Princeton graduate, now living in Italy. Edoardo Almagià, already investigated and acquitted in Italy due to the statute of limitations, is accused of trafficking thousands of illicit artefacts worth tens of millions of dollars. The charges include conspiring to defraud buyers, innocent victims by selling them stolen goods as if they were lawfully on US soil, receiving stolen property, and money laundering.

In 80 pages, the arrest warrant describes a nonchalant character who sold and donated valuable artefacts to important museums and collectors, but who also acted undercover after the Italian authorities began to suspect decades ago that he had been involved with grave robbers.

In the arrest warrant obtained Thursday by Manhattan Criminal Court Judge Rachel Pauley, a trafficking of Italian archaeological goods between Italy and New York, occasionally triangulated to Switzerland and London, is detailed. This illicit trafficking involved more than 2,000 stolen artefacts recorded in two notebooks (the Almagià archive), one called the 'Green Book', the green book, and the other the 'Yellow Book', the yellow book, in which Almagià kept track of the goods acquired by Mauro Morani, his trusted tombmaster and intermediary, and resold to collectors (such as Lawrence FIeischman, Michael Steinhardt, Shelby White, Jonathan Kagan, Georgia Welles, William Zewadski, Nobel laureate Gilbert Denman) gallery owners (such as Frederick Schultz, Alan Safani, Jerome Eisenberg, the Demirjian brothers of Ariadne Gallery, Hixenbaugh Ancient Art, Rupert Wace, Aboutaams, etc.), auction houses (Sotheby's and Chirstie's in New York and Hindman in Chicago), academics and curators (Michael Padgett, Dietrich von Bothmer, Arthur Trendall, Robert Guy, Aaron Paul, Arielle Kozloff, Jasper Gaunt, etc.), major museums (such as the MET, Getty Museum, Toledo, Cleveland, MFA Boston, Tampa, MFA St. Petersburg, Dallas, etc.) and universities (Fordham, Princeton and Indiana University).

Interesting for Italy is how the arrest warrant also names Almagià's cousin, Peter Glidewell, described as a 'business partner'. According to the American document, he is a man close to the Italian Ministry of Culture and, in particular, to the former undersecretary, now under investigation for money laundering and counterfeiting cultural assets (for the Rutilio Manetti painting), Vittorio Sgarbi. According to the arrest warrant, Glidewell sold goods stolen from Italy to the collector Shelby White or gave them to the Princeton Museum. Glidewell also shared with Almagià, according to the 80-page warrant, the profits from the sale of the illicitly acquired goods, listed in the so-called Yellow Book.

The next step for the Antiquities Trafficking Unit (ATU) will be to ask Interpol to issue a red notice, i.e. an international arrest warrant that allows authorities around the world to detain Edoardo Almagià wherever he goes and to cooperate with Italian officials to initiate extradition procedures.