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4 Convicted Dealers What We Can Learn Peter Watson Over the past few years no fewer than four dealers in antiquities have appeared in court, in three countries, charged with offenses relating to the illegal excavation and/or illegal export and/or import of antiquities. All of them have been convicted of criminal offences, three have been jailed, and one is appealing the guilty verdict and sentence of ten years in prison. The dealers are Jonathan Tokeley-Parry (British), Robin Symes (British), Frederick Schultz (American), and Giacomo Medici (Italian). In addition, two other dealers—Jean Louis Domercq, of the Sycamore Gallery in Geneva, and Frieda Tchacos, of the Phoenix Gallery in Zurich, were fellow defendants with Symes but did not attend court. This is an unprecedented flurry of court activity, and it has helped throw an unusual light on the often secretive trade in illicit antiquities. In particular, this light has been shone into three areas. The first thing to say is that in each of these cases—irrespective of the country in which the antiquities originated and irrespective of where they finally came to market—Switzerland was a staging post, an entrepôt along the way. Jonathan Tokeley-Parry brought several of his objects from Egypt to the United Kingdom and the United States via Zurich. The same applies with Frederick Schultz. Robin Symes had several warehouses in Geneva where he stored objects. Similarly Giacomo Medici had three warehouses in Geneva Freeport where he kept his antiquities. This is not surprising, perhaps, but it confirms—and confirms abundantly— anecdotal evidence of the past, which has always suggested that Switzerland, because of its lax laws in regard to the import and export of artistic and archaeological material, has been a major “laundering” center for illicit antiquities. We can be thankful that the Swiss have themselves recognized this and, not a moment too soon, last year introduced a new law designed to stop such trafficking (see Gerstenblith, chapter 3, for further discussion). More interesting is the information released during the trials of both Medici and Symes regarding the extent and price levels of their inventory. According to details released by the Italian police, Medici had some ten thousand objects in  / Peter Watson his warehouses in Geneva Freeport, mainly Italian antiquities. So far, no value has been put on these objects. In the case of Symes and his late partner Christo Michaelidis, their twenty-nine warehouses contained seventeen thousand objects valued—by Symes himself—at U.S. $250 million. Just two dealers between them had twenty-seven thousand objects. It is interesting , in the first instance, to compare these figures with the number of objects appearing on the open market, at auction. Antiquities sales at Bonhams, Christie’s, and Sotheby’s usually contain between three hundred and six hundred lots—five hundred lots might be considered an average figure. Bonhams holds two sales a year in London, Sotheby’s holds two sales a year in New York, and Christie’s holds two sales a year in each of those cities. That makes eight auctions a year or, on average, four thousand lots. However, analysis of the lots on sale shows that on average, there are 2.4 objects per lot: if we call it 2.5 to be on the safe side, this means that at the main auction houses, around ten thousand objects pass through the market every year. Putting these figures together, we may say that just two dealers keep in stock the equivalent of nearly three years’ worth of objects that appear at auction. There are roughly twenty-five firms comprising the International Association of Dealers in Ancient Art, and if only half of those—say, twelve—have stock of the order of Medici and Symes, then something like 150,000 antiquities are on the market at any one time. This seems an enormous figure, especially as the recent trials have shown that the great bulk of both Medici’s and Symes’s stock had no provenance. But the figures also reveal that what appears at auction is just a fraction—perhaps as low as 6.25 percent (10,000 out of 160,000)—of what is actually on the market at any one time. This, I would suggest, is a much lower percentage than has traditionally been thought, and it casts a new light on the auction market in antiquities. We know that Medici left Sotheby’s labels on many of the objects he bought at Sotheby’s...

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