Thanks to a group of modern-day Monuments Men, a valuable cache of ancient Egyptian artifacts pilfered by U.S. smuggling rings is on its way home.
In a ceremony Wednesday afternoon at the National Geographic Society in Washington, officials from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) repatriated 16 illegally smuggled ancient artifacts to the Egyptian government, including a Greco-Roman-style Egyptian sarcophagus and a few ornamental wooden boots, receiving in return the personal thanks of Egypt’s ambassador to Washington.
The discovery of a rare artifact in a Brooklyn, New York, garage six years ago provided a critical break in tracking down a major smuggling operation.
“The investigation started with a small piece — a tiny figurine. In this case it was the investigation of a suspect’s shipment that came into New York City, Chief Assistant U.S. Attorney Kelly Currie said at the ceremony. “And when that piece was pulled, it unraveled an investigation that took several years” to complete.
Investigators, most of whom work in ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) unit, conducted a top-secret mission called “Operation Mummy’s Curse.” Their investigation targeted an international criminal network that illegally smuggled and imported more than 7,000 cultural items from around the world.
National Geographic CEO and President Gary Knell compared the investigators to the famous “Monuments Men” who tracked down and preserved precious artworks held by the Nazis in the closing days of World War II, the subject of a recent Hollywood movie starring George Clooney and Bill Murray.
“I would like to unearth and introduce to all of you the modern-day Monuments Men — and they are better-looking than George Clooney,” Mr. Knell said.
The men and women behind the sleuthing returned more than 80 items to Egypt in a series of four repatriations since 2007. This same group of investigators has returned more than 7,800 artifacts to over 30 countries, including paintings from Paris, Germany, Poland and Austria.
“Preserving mankind’s cultural heritage is an increasingly difficult challenge in today’s society. To think that some of these treasured artifacts were recovered from garages, exposed to the elements, is unimaginable,” ICE Director Sarah R. Saldana said.
“These items have a very high monetary value, we get that. But there is no way to measure their worth to a living and breathing culture. There is no measuring that,” Ms. Saldana added.
In 2010, following up on leads from the Brooklyn case, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers at the Detroit Metropolitan Airport peeled back several more layers to the case, uncovering a shipment of smuggled Egyptian funerary boat models and figurines.
“Egypt has suffered from illegal digging and theft by organized gangs of antiquities smugglers,” Egyptian Ambassador Mohamed Tawfik told the crowd.
He added that governments need to take the thievery of cultural antiquities seriously because “our history is your history. It is shared by all of humanity, as a collective treasure that we must preserve and protect.”
To date, Operation Mummy’s Curse has secured four indictments, two convictions, 19 search warrants and 16 seizures totaling approximately $3 million, according to ICE.
The smugglers, dealers and antiquities traders never served time for their roles in the affair.
“No one is in prison. All of those tried pled out,” Karen Orenstein, assistant U.S. attorney in Eastern District of New York City told The Washington Times.
“The judge did not think that it was a prison-worthy case,” she added. “But we were just happy to get the stolen property back [into] Egyptian hands.”
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