Museums grapple legacies as the Metropolitan Museum of Art returns a looted Roman emperor statue to Italy. It was one of the most significant pieces in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection, a marble statue of a Roman emperor, but it had been looted from Italy and was now being returned.
That Roman bust, returned to the Republic of Türkiye this February, was acquired from Phoenix Ancient Art, a gallery once praised for its supposed adherence to stringent due diligence. Yet, its founder, Ali Aboutaam, spent decades at the heart of an elaborate scheme to traffic looted antiquities.
The architect of deception: Ali Aboutaam’s rise in illicit antiquities
His story, alongside that of Indian-American dealer Subhash Kapoor, lays bare how sophisticated smuggling networks have historically exploited market vulnerabilities, leaving major institutions around the world holding stolen cultural heritage.
Born in 1965 into his father’s antiquities business in Beirut, Ali Aboutaam learned the trade amidst Lebanon’s bustling role as a transit point for artifacts from across the region. But the Lebanese civil war, starting in 1975, and a subsequent export ban in 1988, forced the Aboutaam family to seek new horizons. They secured Canadian citizenship in 1990, setting the stage for Aboutaam’s international career.
It didn’t take long for Canadian authorities to intercept a shipment of 5th-century CE mosaic panels, originally from northwestern Syria, destined for Aboutaam’s newly registered company, Hermes Numismatique. These stunning mosaics, including an 11-foot-long geometric swirl, were repatriated in 1999.
Yet, other Syrian mosaics sold by Aboutaam during this period remain in museum collections, with some institutions like Geneva’s Musée d’Art et d’Histoire only now undertaking comprehensive provenance research.
Contested treasures: the Egyptian mask and the Cleveland Apollo
After the Canadian incident, Aboutaam dissolved Hermes and moved his operations to Geneva, incorporating Phoenix Ancient Art in 1995. He soon faced Italian authorities who seized hundreds of looted artifacts from his storerooms, including some already sold to prominent New York City collectors Michael Steinhardt and Shelby White.
Though Aboutaam claimed ignorance, investigators tracing these pieces to a temple site in southern Italy found evidence of looters using a miner’s cart to extract thousands of pieces, packed in fruit crates.
His tactics grew more intricate. When authorities inquired about the origins of Phoenix’s stock, Aboutaam would often claim they belonged to Tanis Antiquities, a shell company registered in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines.
It wasn’t until a 2003 court case deposition that Aboutaam was revealed as Tanis’s true owner, a tactic he learned after the Syrian mosaic seizures made him wary of having his own name on such paperwork.
When his parents died in a 1998 plane crash, he adopted an even simpler alibi: claiming any suspect piece was an inheritance from his father, despite his father’s retirement years earlier.
Consider the Egyptian mummy mask purchased by the Saint Louis Art Museum for $499,000 in 1998. Egyptian authorities quickly identified it as having been excavated from Saqqara in 1952 and subsequently stolen. The museum initially refused its return, relying on Phoenix-provided affidavits claiming a long European history for the mask.
These claims included a Swiss collector’s testimony of seeing it in Brussels in 1952 and a fashion designer’s account of owning it before selling it to Aboutaam’s father in 1997. But a journalist’s investigation found the designer’s son denying his mother ever owned such antiquities, highlighting the fragility of these uncorroborated provenances.
The Cleveland Museum of Art’s acquisition of the Apollo Sauroktonos, a life-sized bronze sculpture, for a reported $5 million in 2003, offers another chilling example. Phoenix presented a lawyer, Ernst-Ulrich Walter, who claimed to have seen the Apollo at his family estate in eastern Germany in the 1930s.
Walter even showed the museum a crumbling structure he claimed was its original fountain setting. However, a 2024 graduate thesis by Sarah Krienen exposed Walter’s story as a fabrication. Property records showed the estate was a farm, not an elegant country property, and the supposed fountain was likely a silo.
Friends of the deceased Walter also revealed he had been in severe financial distress and had even confessed to being offered payment by a Lebanese dealer to lie about an antiquity’s provenance.
Further scientific examination of the Apollo’s clay fragments linked its origins to Sicily, strengthening the belief it was trafficked from southern Italy, much like hundreds of other artifacts seized from Phoenix.
The net tightens: exposing the Phoenix Ancient Art network
For years, Aboutaam’s operations remained largely impenetrable. But in December 2016, a seemingly minor incident at the French-Swiss border began to unravel his elaborate web of deceit.
Customs officers, acting on information from Swiss and Belgian investigations into Phoenix’s display of a Sumerian sculpture at an art fair, stopped a Land Rover registered to the gallery. Inside, they found a Byzantine lamp broken into five pieces. The driver had failed to declare it, a minor customs violation.
But what truly piqued investigators’ interest were receipts for a storage locker at Geneva’s Flexbox Self Storage belonging to Walter Haberkorn, an art restorer who occasionally worked for Phoenix.
The location of the storage unit—a place more suited for old furniture than priceless antiquities—raised immediate suspicions. Before authorities could search it, the driver, released after his customs violation, emptied the locker. This frantic overnight activity expanded the investigation. Aboutaam packed up his apartment’s antiquities, while the driver collected pieces from Flexbox and Haberkorn’s workshop.
All were hastily dumped into a new storage locker, where authorities found them packed in grocery store produce boxes, with a marble bust of Emperor Hadrian tangled in Ikea bags.
Seizing Phoenix’s files and computers finally revealed the extent of the fraud. Alongside the “reassuring provenance information” provided to clients, investigators discovered a hidden Excel file. This file contained the true, often illicit, origins of Aboutaam’s recent acquisitions.
In a 2017 confession, likely to distance himself from suspicions of financing terrorism, Aboutaam detailed his procurement methods. He described a Syrian merchant, whose father had worked with Aboutaam’s father smuggling antiquities from Syria into Lebanon. This merchant would send photos of antiquities to Aboutaam, who would then select pieces.
These were transported by Adnan Mazeh, a Lebanese man living in Romania, who smuggled them across the Swiss border into Geneva.
Many of these newly acquired artifacts arrived broken and soil-encrusted. They went to Haberkorn, whose workshop was raided to find antiquities soaking in a bathtub, a toothbrush at the ready for cleaning. Haberkorn’s computer revealed photographic evidence of his work on countless newly looted items.
Once restored, Aboutaam fabricated elaborate provenances, often tracing back to vague Lebanese dealers or deceased collectors in Switzerland, with no public records. He even paid Swiss dealers like Charles Roland Ansermet, Andrea Zabbeni, and André Lagneau to falsely claim prior ownership, faking letters and sales receipts to solidify the illusion.
Lagneau admitted to concocting fake provenances for Phoenix since 1992, including for the Met’s Roman bust.
A global web of illicit trade: Subhash Kapoor’s $100 million racket
The story of Ali Aboutaam is not an isolated incident but a chilling reflection of a wider, systemic problem. Another prominent figure in this illicit trade was Subhash Kapoor, an Indian-American art dealer who operated the Art of the Past gallery in Manhattan.
Kapoor orchestrated a staggering $100 million international antiquities trafficking racket, primarily looting thousands of artifacts from India and other South Asian nations such as Cambodia, Indonesia, and Nepal. He targeted poorly guarded temples, often using local criminals to spread rumors that kept villagers away while they plundered historical sites.
