Today I produced an hour on the Southern California museum investigation.  You can listen to it here.  Our guests were Jason Felch, the investigative reporter for the LA Times who's been providing most of their coverage.  In fact, based on his piece yesterday on Robert Olson, it seems Olson is talking with abandon to the press.  It's quite a pathetic portrayal of Olson, talking to Felch in a stained undershirt, bare feet, and basically broken in spirit. 

Other guests on the show were Heath Fox, a former museum administrator (SDMA, MOPA) and now assistant dean at UCSD, Terressa Davis, Project Director for Heritage Watch, and Judith Bresler, an attorney and expert in cultural heritage law.  Unfortunately, I wasn't able to include Lee Rosenbaum of CultureGrrl - only because I didn't have enough time in the hour.  She would have been great because she's been writing about the museum industry for so long and is well aquainted with investigations of this kind.  You should follow her coverage. 

Anyway, we covered a lot of ground this morning, providing the basic facts of the story, exploring what happens in museums when a donation is made, the difficulties of establishing provenance, how a looted item moves illegally from the excavation site across the border to a museum, and the international law governing the movement of antiquities.  

We also talked appraisals.  Remember, there are two important aspects to this investigation.  One is the theft of art from source countries which ends up in museums or collections.  The other aspect is really about tax fraud:   dealers who sell a piece to a collector or donor at one price - say $1,000 - but then connects that buyer to a shady apprasier who will inflate the appraisal to something like $5,000.  When the donor then donates the piece to a museum, with the inflated appraisal, he or she can report a $5,000 donation to the IRS and get a bigger tax write-off.    

Jason Felch says we've only begun to see the fall-out of this investigation.  Terressa Davis said the same thing when she and I talked yesterday. Terressa also sent the following pictures from different raided temples and sites in Cambodia.  Though the pieces under investigation are from Thailand, she said the look of raided historical sites is pretty similar.   

Above is the looted aftermath of Bronze Age cemetaries in northwestern Cambodia.  It looks looks like the moon.

Above is a looted Cambodian temple called Preah Khan.

This is a looted Cambodian temple called Phnom Banan. 

You get the idea.  

A high profile collector in Chicago named Barry MacLean has been implicated in the federal investigation of looted antiquities and four Southern California museums, including the Mingei.  MacLean is a trustee of one of the most respected and prestigious art schools in the country - the Art Institute of Chicago.

MacLean's private collection was searched by federal investigators last week, the same day the four museums were searched. The reason?  He purchased a significant amount of his collection from Robert Olson.  Olson really is the connective thread so far in this ongoing story. 

The LA Times reports:  In a phone interview Monday, Olson confirmed that MacLean was his biggest client, saying the Chicago collector purchased as much as $50,000 to $100,000 in Asian antiquities a year during the eight to 10 years they did business.

I guess we're going to find out how many collectors and collections Olson has been involved with beyond Southern California.  

One other thing, MacLean is chief executive of MacLean-Fogg, an $800-million-a-year multinational company.  Once guys like this start to be implicated in the investigation and the press, this story is going to get more and more interesting.

Robert Olson, the "art smuggler" identified in affadavits from the federal investigation of four Southern California museums, including the Mingei International Museum in Balboa Park, was recently interviewed by the Orange County Register. 

The interview paints a detailed portrait of the man and his trade, which is more than shady.  Olson bragged at one point about having more antiquities from Thailand than Thailand itself.  The article says of Olson: "He started making trips to Thailand every two or three months to buy antiquities; over time, he developed a network of about half a dozen dealers whom he would visit in person. He said he even had a house in Thailand for some time in the 1980s." 

How did Olson get these items out of Thailand and into the United States?  He told the OC Register he would pay a shipping company to ship the items to the US and never asked questions as to how they accomplished it.  But according to the affadavit, Olson told the undercover agent he would have the shipper affix a "Made in Thailand" label on the items to make them look like replicas.   

Federal agents are searching four museums in Southern California, including the Mingei International Museum in Balboa Park, looking for possibly stolen artifacts.

Culture Lust just spoke with Rob Sidner, Director of the Mingei.  He said there were about 30 federal agents in the museum raiding the collection, searching for pieces from ancient Thailand that the IRS says were improperly donated to the museum.  These items could be looted artifacts.  Federal agents are also exploring whether appraisals for the items were inflated for improper tax deductions.

The LA Times reports four Mingei officials were interviewed by federal officials at their homes today.  Sidner would not comment on who those officials were. 

Sidner said the donations to Mingei’s ancient Thailand collection come from a number of different people over the course of many years.  However, he said the search warrant refers to an item or items donated by an undercover agent to the Mingei.   This agent was working undercover to expose an art smuggling network that eventually led officials to four Southern California museums:  the Mingei, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art in Santa Ana, and the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena. 

Culture Lust asked Sidner if he knew who met with the undercover agent at the time of the donation to the Mingei.  Snider responded, "If the gentlemen is who I think it is, this agent met with me but only one time."   Throughout the investigation, the undercover agent secretly recorded conversations he held with museum officials from some of the raided museums.  Sidner said the search warrant indicates his conversation with the undercover agent was in fact recorded.   

The roots of this investigation date to 2003, when the undercover agent began posing as a collector.  Two Los Angeles gallery owners were under investigation:  Robert Olson and Silk Roads Gallery owner Jonathan Markell.   The LA Times reports both men allegedly admitted to selling recently looted objects and inflating appraisals. 

According to the affidavit, the Mingei accepted five ceramic vessels, along with two other pieces, in June 2006.  The undercover agent allegedly paid $1,500 to Markell, who declared a value of nearly $5,000 to the museum.  

Markell allegedly sent an e-mail to Sidner claiming his piece came from a now-deceased former curator at LACMA and were all imported before Thai export restrictions took effect.

When asked about Jonathan Markell, Sidner said he and the museum have dealt with the Markells for a number of years.  He explained the Markells have donated to the museum, and the Mingei has purchased items from their gallery.  Sidner says, “I was entirely surprised by their involvement in this.  It’s a tremendous shock.”

Sidner explains that the relationship with the Markells began through Armand Labbe, now deceased, a longtime Mingei board member and the former Director of Collections and Research at the Bowers Museum.  Sidner said Labbe “vouched for the absolute trustworthiness of the Markells.”

Sidner said the last dealings the Mingei had with the Markells took place just before Christmas. 

Markell is pictured with his wife and the Dalai Lama on the Silk Roads Gallery Web site.   According to their bio page, both Jonathan Markell and his wife serve on the board of the South and Southeast Asian Arts Council of LACMA, which is under investigation.  Jonathan Markell was also a board member of the Southeast Asian Council of The Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena, also under investigation. 

Culture Lust asked Sidner how the Mingei Museum establishes provenance.  “Our policy is that we should receive things we believe we have a right to,” Sidner said. “Sometimes the provenance is clear, sometimes it’s unclear, but we would never accept it if we thought it was improperly donated.”

The Union Tribune is reporting that federal agents are conducting a raid at the Mingei International Museum in Balboa Park.  There were several dozen agents there with warrents early this morning.  The LA Times has a more comprehensive article on the raid.  Apparently the Mingei is one of four museums being raided - the others are the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Pasadena's Pacific Asia Museum, and the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana. 

The Mingei focuses on folk art, craft and design from around the world. I'm going to try and dig up something more....