- Cupra Born is a unique electric model that stands out on the road
- AYA Electrolytes Plus helps with hydration and energy
- Museums are facing pressure to return stolen artifacts to their places of origin
- The Benin artworks are a contentious issue as they were taken 150 years ago
- The podcast "Freakonomics Radio" explores the economics, politics, and ethics of returning art
- Matthew Bogdanos, an assistant district attorney, discusses his work in combating antiquities trafficking
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased a gold coffin that was later revealed to be looted during the Arab Spring in Egypt
- The looter contacted Bogdanos through an informant and revealed the truth about the coffin's origins.

- The fate of the mummified priest, Nejemank, was discovered by Matthew Bogdanos, who found out that the looter had dumped the body into the Nile.
- The looter showed Bogdanos photographs of the coffin and its journey from Egypt to Dubai, Germany, and finally to the French dealer Kuniki.
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art was informed by Bogdanos that their $4 million gilded coffin had been looted and was in illegal possession.
- The Met was easily fooled because they did not thoroughly investigate the history and provenance of the object.
- The coffin has been repatriated and is now in a museum in Cairo.
- Many museums are facing questions about the legitimacy of the objects they display and some are beginning to consider the rightful owners.
- Jim Marone, an economist, studies the global market for looted antiquities and believes the market is much smaller than commonly believed.
- The antiquities market is valued at a couple hundred million dollars annually, a fraction of the overall art market.

- The claim that the illegal antiquities market is worth billions of dollars is unsubstantiated and exaggerated.
- Using economic figures as a defense for regulating the market is not appropriate.
- The connection between ISIS and antiquities is not a good way to fight either.
- The provenance of art and antiquities is often not properly verified, leading to potential fraud and looting.
- The loss of scientific and cultural knowledge is a major consequence of the illegal antiquities trade.
- Arguments in favor of keeping stolen artifacts in Western museums are countered by the idea that the decision should be made by the country of origin.
- There have been no known licensing or profit-sharing agreements for stolen artifacts.
- Symbolic harms caused by colonialism should be addressed, rather than focusing on profit.

- The ownership of antiquities and stolen artworks is a complex issue with power inequalities and historical context involved.
- The Nazis looted artworks during World War II for different purposes, leading to complications in identifying and returning stolen pieces.
- The identification and ethical case for returning stolen artworks requires extensive research and documentation, although it may be easier for more recent cases.
- The issue of ownership is often unclear for both antiquities and stolen artworks, with records being sparse and clouded by various factors.
- The cultural and legal aspects of antiquities trafficking create challenges in determining legality and provenance.
- The law and international conventions, such as the Hague Convention and the UNESCO Convention, play a role in protecting cultural artifacts and establishing guidelines for museum collections.
- The U.S. has stricter laws regarding stolen artworks, considering them stolen regardless of good faith exceptions.

- Many European countries have a good faith exception for purchasing looted antiquities, but the US does not.
- The US considers an item stolen if it was taken by force, regardless of when it happened.
- It has become increasingly difficult for civilians to access auction houses, museums, and galleries in the US.
- There are certain names associated with antiquities traffickers that are considered suspicious and likely stolen.
- Dubai has become a major transit point for antiquities traffickers.
- Switzerland used to be a major transit point, but changed its rules after a scandal involving looted objects.
- Museums and collectors in the West create the demand for looted antiquities, which incentivizes looting.
- Some collectors justify their actions by claiming they are "saving" the objects, but this rhetoric has negative consequences.
- Several collectors have been busted for buying looted artifacts, including Shelby White, Michael Steinhardt, and Steve Green.
- Cracking down on collectors may not necessarily diminish the incentives for looters and traffickers.

- The middlemen involved in the illegal trade of looted antiquities often stockpile stolen artifacts.
- Raids on Chubash Kapoor's storage facilities uncovered stolen material from 20 years ago.
- Iraqi and Syrian antiquities do not immediately appear on the market after being looted, but instead go underground for decades.
- The Gulf states have emerged as the top market for looted antiquities from the Middle East.
- Collectors and gallery owners involved in the illegal trade often have a sense of entitlement and arrogance.
- The Manhattan DA's office has recovered over 4,500 cultural treasures worth more than $200 million through deals with collectors.
- The next episode will explore how different countries treat the return of stolen art and visit a museum at the center of a controversy.
- The episode was produced by Morgan Levy and mixed by Greg Rippin.

- Cupra Born is a unique electric model that stands out on the road
- AYA Electrolytes Plus helps with hydration and energy
- Museums are facing pressure to return stolen artifacts to their places of origin
- The Benin artworks were taken 150 years ago and are a contentious issue
- The podcast "Freakonomics Radio" explores the economics, politics, and ethics of returning art
- Matthew Bogdanos, an assistant district attorney, discusses his work in combating antiquities trafficking
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased a looted gold coffin and was informed by Bogdanos about its origins
- The coffin has been repatriated and is now in a museum in Cairo
- Jim Marone, an economist, believes the global market for looted antiquities is smaller than commonly believed
- The loss of scientific and cultural knowledge is a major consequence of the illegal antiquities trade
- Arguments in favor of keeping stolen artifacts in Western museums are countered by the idea that the decision should be made by the country of origin
- The ownership of antiquities and stolen artworks is a complex issue with power inequalities and historical context involved
- The identification and ethical case for returning stolen artworks requires extensive research and documentation
- The law and international conventions play a role in protecting cultural artifacts and establishing guidelines for museum collections
- The US has stricter laws regarding stolen artworks compared to many European countries
- Dubai has become a major transit point for antiquities traffickers
- Museums and collectors in the West create the demand for looted antiquities, incentivizing looting
- The middlemen involved in the illegal trade often stockpile stolen artifacts
- The Gulf states have emerged as the top market for looted antiquities from the Middle East
- The Manhattan DA's office has recovered over 4,500 cultural treasures worth more than $200 million through deals with collectors

How did a freshly looted Egyptian antiquity end up in the Metropolitan Museum of Art? Why did it take Kim Kardashian to crack the case? And how much of what you see in any museum is stolen? (Part 1 of “Stealing Art Is Easy. Giving It Back Is Hard.”)

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When you visit a museum and look at all the magnificent art and Artifacts hanging on the wall, mounted on pedestals, encased in glass.

Do you ever wonder how all that stuff got there?

They were taken through brutal armed conflict and colonialism.

If you possess valuable artifacts, or if you control valuable artifacts, you have a form of power.

And power is not something that most people are eager to surrender.

The British Museum's silence is as loud as a gunshot.

Museums have begun to look more closely at their new acquisitions.

It's a little bit like wandering into the middle of a traffic intersection without looking both ways.

There might be a disaster about to happen.

And some museums are returning their long-held treasures to their places of origin.

They are fighting to be the first to restitute important collections.

Today on Freakonomics Radio, we begin a special series on this movement to return the world's treasures to the places where those treasures came from.

It's actually unbelievably simple if you take morality and compass, arrogant, holier than thou, out of it and stick to the law.

Well, some people think it's complicated.

There is no system where they can be returned in a way that is consistent with the values of a museum structure.

Nobody ever asks when a work of art is returned to the family of a Holocaust victim, well, is it really going to be safer in their home than in the museum?

But the minute museums consider returning works of art to African countries, that question is like the first to arise.

We will hear from museum curators and directors, from economists and historians, from legal scholars and prosecutors.

A funerary mask is supposed to be buried with somebody that is dead.

Along the way, some rules will be broken.

I'm quite famous for not doing what I'm told.

And we get in a bit of trouble ourselves.

The economics, politics, and ethics of returning art.

This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything, with your host, Steven Dubner.

Okay, we will begin our story in present-day New York City.

I am an assistant district attorney here in the Manhattan District Attorney's office, and I'm the chief of New York's Antiquities Trafficking Unit.

Okay, how many units like yours exist in the world?

Bear in mind that half of my time is spent as a homicide prosecutor, and 50% of my time is devoted to antiquities trafficking.

Bogdanos is well-suited to run an antiquities trafficking unit.

In addition to a law degree, he's got a master's degree in classics from Columbia, And he was a colonel in the US Marine Corps during the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.

When he heard that looters were taking advantage of the invasion to empty out the National Museum, he put together an elite task force and rushed to Baghdad to secure the site.

So when it comes to stolen antiquities, Bogdanos knows what he's talking about, which brings us to the gold coffin he mentioned.

In 1 of the most frustrating headlines of all time, there's this headline in People magazine, Kim Kardashian cracks case, which is actually semi-true.

We couldn't find that headline in People magazine, even after paging through a few years worth of issues.

Maybe Bogdanos was remembering a New York Post headline, which we did find.

It says, Kim Kardashian's Met Gala photo helped solve looted gold Egyptian coffin case.

The Met Gala is the annual fashion industry spectacle at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

The photograph shows Kardashian in a shimmering, ornate gold dress, a Donatella Versace design, posing beside a shimmering, ornate golden coffin that's detailed with the face of an Egyptian priest named Nejemank.

Extraordinary, amazing, first century BCE gold coffin, fully intact, brilliant.

Kim Kardashian and the long dead Egyptian priest are essentially twinning.

And of course the photo went viral around the world, as you know, I guess her material does.

No, no, no, I didn't actually know who it was.

I did not know who it was and I had to be told, what are you, a moron?

The gilded coffin had already proved to be a blockbuster exhibition for the Met.

So the Metropolitan Museum purchased the Nejiman coffin in 2017 for approximately $3.9 million, so almost $4 million.

I'm a professor of law at DePaul University College of Law.

And my specialty is dealing with legal issues in the art world and particularly cultural heritage.

Gerstenblith tells us the Met bought the coffin from a French antiquities dealer named Christophe Kunicki and that the museum had done the standard due diligence to ensure the purchase was legitimate.

Their due diligence was based on the export license, which showed that it had been exported in 1971.

But if they had actually read or read carefully the export license, They would have seen that the date of the export license, the name of the country of Egypt had changed in

Until 1971, Egypt had been officially known as the United Arab Republic.

In 1971, the official name was changed to the Arab Republic of Egypt.

And the name of the country on the export license for the date on the license was wrong.

Not the kind of mistake that I think would have been made in

The Metropolitan Museum of Art apparently thought it was acquiring an antiquity that had been legally and properly handled.

Here's how the Met put it in a press release that is still on the museum's website, at least as of this recording.

Officially exported from Egypt in 1971, the coffin has since resided in a private collection.

All that turned out to be false, but it would take Kim Kardashian to bring the truth to light.

So this particular photo went around the world and 1 of the people who saw the photo was 1 of the people who looted the coffin out of Egypt in about 2010 during the Arab Spring.

The coffin had been dug up only recently by thieves under the cover of civil war and political chaos in Egypt.

This person sees this photo, looks it up and finds out that the Met had paid 4000000 dollars for it.

He was told that he would get the money as soon as it was sold.

Well, he's waiting for years, you know, the no honor among thieves, that's really true.

So he was furious and he contacted a very good friend of his who is also a smuggler named George Lotfi.

At the time, George Lotfi was 1 of my informants.

Did he become an informant because you busted him?

So it was worth it to us to keep him out of jail.

So he tells George Lotfi, I can't believe it.

So George puts me in touch with the looter.

Bogdanos interviewed this looter over Zoom.

For 1 thing, he found out the fate of Nejemank himself, the mummified priest who had been buried in the gilded coffin.

had actually dumped the body, the mummy, into the Nile because it was easier to transport out of Egypt.

The looter also showed Bogdanos photographs.

Looters tend to keep photographs of the material in the ground.

And the reason they do that, even though it's evidence, is there's an old saying in antiquities trafficking, if it's looted, it's real.

When people buy things that they either know or reasonably suspect is looted, the first question they ask is, how much?

And the second question they ask is, is it real?

The looter says, here's the photo with dirt still on it in the ground.

From Egypt, the coffin was apparently trafficked to Dubai and then Germany and finally to the French dealer Kuniki.

Somewhere along the way, it picked up the forged export license as well as a fake provenance.

A provenance is a listing of a given object's origin and its previous owners.

Matthew Bogdanos, armed with all this information, now informed the Metropolitan Museum of Art that their beautiful

million blockbuster of a gilded coffin had been looted and that they were in illegal possession of another country's historic treasure.

Andrea Bayer is deputy director of collections and administration at the Met.

As soon as we found out that our information about the history of the object had been falsified, that we had received falsified documents, we immediately cooperated with the district attorney's office.

To be clear, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is 1 of the richest and most respected museums in the world.

The MET got fooled by not probing deeply enough into the purported history that was given to us.

So there were a number of names in the chain of ownership that were familiar to us, and that gave us a feeling of confidence.

We looked at this provenance and we believed the information as it was on the page.

We asked a certain number of questions, but we did not ask nearly enough questions about it.

Matthew Baudanos is slightly less charitable toward the Met's vetting process.

You know, we get the warrant, we seize the coffin from the Met.

It is an extraordinary, one-of-a-kind item.

It had never been on the market ever before, never photographed ever, not once.

But it was claimed to have been taken out of Egypt and sent to Germany and in Germany it resided there for 60 years and then from there it went to Paris to be sold at auction and then from Paris it was sold to the Met.

If you have an extraordinary object like this, a world-class object that is the centerpiece of any exhibit or display.

And it has never been photographed, never been listed in like an invoice or a will or an international shipping document and it appears on the market for the first time like Athena full-grown from the head of Zeus and it comes out of a country that's just had a civil war.

OK, where is the coffin now or where is it going?

Do you have it in some vault in a basement in some city building?

No, the coffin has already been repatriated.

It is sitting in a museum in Cairo and it is gorgeous.

As I was listening to Bodenas, I found myself thinking a fairly obvious thought.

If a museum like the Met could be so easily fooled in the 2020s, what kind of fooling and deceit and thievery was happening in museums in the 1920s, in the 1820s?

Let's be honest, many of the world's great museums are essentially trophy cases to show off the fruits of colonization and empire building.

Perhaps you have been to the British Museum in London and seen the ancient Parthenon sculptures from Greece, also known as the Elgin marbles, named for 1 Lord Elgin, the British nobleman who had them removed.

Today, Greece would like these sculptures returned.

The British Museum also owns a great many historic and religious artifacts known as the Benin Bronzes seized by Britain in a late 19th century raid in what is today Nigeria.

Again, Nigeria would like these returned and again, the British Museum would rather not.

To be fair, history is not something 1 can simply undo.

That said, many museums have begun to consider who is the most legitimate owner of the objects they display.

There are often clues to that ownership right there on the museum wall.

1 of my favorite things to do is to look at the museum labels and see how the museum acquired the object.

That is Jim Marone, an economist at the Rand Corporation.

I am the only trained economist that I know doing work on antiquities proper.

After the break, Marone walks us through the global market for looted antiquities.

And we will hear from 1 museum that takes provenance issues very seriously.

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We just met Jim Marone, an economist who studies art and antiquities.

All of this work to me is interesting because it touches on this really intangible notion of culture.

Whose property is that and whose identity are we talking about?

Marone especially loves to read the labels on museum walls that describe the object.

In the antiquities wings, which would include not just Greek and Roman, but also Asian and African, those labels will give some indication of when the museum purchased it and how.

They're not going to be the complete provenance history, but they can give some sense.

And museums are filled with stuff where the provenance isn't ironclad.

And We know this because they are now returning dozens of objects every single year

Okay, the return of art is something we'll cover in depth later in this series for now Let's take a step back to consider how antiquities fit into the overall art market

So the art market is really unique because value in the art market is so different from any other market because value is essentially a socially created thing in the art market.

It's not like you can look at the price of soybeans and say, okay, well, I'm going to trade futures.

If you want to learn more about the art market, we put out a series on that a couple years ago.

It's called the hidden side of the art market episodes,

See all Freakonomics Radio transcripts on Applepodcasts

541. The Case of the $4 Million Gold Coffin