From ninemsn:

Italian police have seized nearly 9,000 ancient artefacts from a 74-year-old pensioner who sold looted antiquities at a flea market in Rome.

Police stopped the man on Monday night and found three bags full of Etruscan and Roman pieces in his car. They also searched his house where they discovered a laboratory to clean and restore the antiquities, as well as what they described as the classic tomb raider's kit, including three metal detectors.

Among the 8,972 pieces seized were ancient terracotta vases, amphorae, masks, clay and bronze statues and parts of marble columns.

The man, whose name was not given, used to sell bric-a-brac at Rome's popular Porta Portese market. But customers in the know were offered much more prized samples from a collection "worthy of an archaeology museum", police said.


Italian police are cracking down on tomb raiding - a crime that has gone largely unchecked for centuries, with thieves regularly ransacking some of the country's most famous open-air archaeological sites.

A former curator at the J Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles is on trial in Rome for allegedly buying and knowingly receiving dozens of looted Italian antiquities.

This just in: much more extensive coverage of the 74-year-old's capers in the Guardian.


Meanwhile, there's a HUGE article in the LA Times which is the most extensive (outside of Suzan Mazur's stuff) coverage of 'the other players' ... here's just a sidebar thing with some new (to me) names:

An elaborate network

This chart was created by J. Paul Getty Trust attorneys after a review of the museum's transactions with antiquities dealers. The diagram shows how objects originating in Italy passed through dealers and into private collections. The Getty acquired some objects from those collections and others from the dealers and their galleries. The three main dealers are highlighted:

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Private collectors: Lawrence and Barbara Fleischman, along with Maurice Tempelsman, bought antiquities from Symes and Hecht, among others. The Getty acquired Tempelsman's collection in 1985 and the Fleischman holdings in 1996.

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Robin Symes: London dealer who with partner Christo Michailidis courted the world's wealthiest clients.

Giacomo Medici: Convicted last year in Rome of trafficking in looted art. Italian authorities called him the mastermind of a criminal network.

Geneva's Duty-Free Zone: Xoilan Trading, an offshore firm used by antiquities dealer Robin Symes, shared a Geneva warehouse address with two of Medici's companies, Gallerie Hydra and Edition Services.

Robert Hecht: American antiquities dealer, based in Paris, whose memoir chronicles 50 years in the trade. It is now being used as evidence against him in his Rome trial.

Hecht's partners: Fritz Burki, a Swiss restorer used by Hecht and Medici, admitted to authorities that he acted as a straw man through which the dealers sold looted objects. Hecht also worked with Bruce McNall, owner of the now-defunct Summa Gallery on Rodeo Drive. The dealer later worked with Jonathan Rosen, who owned the Manhattan gallery Atlantis Antiquities.

Gianfranco Becchina: Swiss dealer who sold the Getty its famous kouros (a marble statue of a Greek warrior), believed to be a fake, and several other antiquities from his Basel gallery, Antike Kunst Palladion.

Nicolas Koutolakis: A dealer, now deceased, who worked with Becchina.

The whole thing is definitely worth reading ... it's interesting how Bruce McNall's name keeps coming up lately too ...

Sources: Getty records, Times reporting