Arrest Warrant Obtained for Dealer Accused of Trafficking Looted Artifacts Worth Millions

New York authorities have obtained an arrest warrant for embattled dealer Edoardo Almagià, whom they said sold antiquities that were worth tens of millions of dollars.

According to the New York Times, which first reported the news, Almagià has been charged with conspiracy. The charge centered around Almagià’s dealings with centuries-old cultural property that Manhattan officials say belongs to Italy.

The investigation into Almagià is being led by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit, which has regularly made headlines in the past decade for its aggressive pursuit of dealers who have obtained and sold stolen artifacts.

Almagià is said to have trafficked in Roman sculptures and Etruscan pottery that were obtained by illegal means, according to the Times. Per the Antiquities Trafficking Unit, Almagià recorded the details of his business in the form of a document that he kept inside what the Times described as “a Renaissance-era chest beneath a marble statue of a deer.”

While the arrest warrant may be new, allegations that Almagià illegally sold the artifacts is not. He has been the subject of scrutiny since 1992, the year that authorities connected him to a tombarolo (tomb robber), according to an Art Newspaper report from earlier this year.

His alleged ties to tombaroli resurfaced again four years later, when New York investigators announced that a New York gallery was in possession of 24 artifacts that were looted from an archaeological site outside Rome. Almagià, they said, was the one who sold those objects to the gallery. (He denied having worked with tombaroli, both in that case and in others, from 2000, involving stolen Italian frescoes and antiquities.)

With his name having periodically come up in reports on looted Italian antiquities, institutions that own objects that have passed through his hands have also received their fair share of suspicion—none more so than Princeton University, the school that he attended.

That university’s art museum has over the past year and a half released two reports on its connections to Almagià. In January, the institution said it had identified 16 artworks in its collection that could be linked to him.

“They were never excavated illegally or they might have been excavated illegally but that was before I bought them, and that no one will know,” Almagià told the Princeton Alumni Weekly. “… What do they know about what I sold? Absolutely nothing.

Matthew Bogdanos, leader of the Antiquities Trafficking Unit, told that same publication, “If Almagià is the first name on your provenance, it is stolen.”