The Māori portraits, Chieftainess Ngatai-Raure and Chief Ngatai-Raure, were painted by the Czech-New Zealand artist in 1884. The art works were stolen from the International Art Centre gallery and auction house in a “smash-and-grab” incident in April 2017, only a few days before they were to be sold.

The thieves reversed a stolen van into the front window of the gallery and auction house before loading the two paintings into a white Holden Commodore SSV sedan.

The paintings were two examples of Lindauer’s prolific portrait work featuring Māori subjects, ranging from leaders to ordinary people. In March, an auction for a portrait of Harawira Te Mahikai, chief of the Ngāti Kahungunu Tribe, sold for nearly $615,000 US including fees ($1,009,008 NZD).

Last December, New Zealand police announced that Chieftainess Ngatai-Raure and Chief Ngatai-Raure had been returned with only minor damage. According to the Herald, police were “deliberately vague” in providing details on what happened to the portraits, referring only to “an intermediary who sought to return the paintings on behalf of others” to the artworks’ owners.

“To me this is a good news story,” Detective Inspector Scott Beard said at a press conference in December. “You get involved in investigations, you want to resolve them, you want to solve them. The cultural significance and value of these paintings, we never gave up hope. And now we’ve had them returned.”

“We’re still looking for people to come with information that can assist us solving who did the burglary and who stole these [paintings].”

On June 7, the Herald reported the return of the two stolen Lindauer portraits was made through an agreement with two senior criminal figures, but “wide-ranging suppression orders” made by the country’s Court of Appeal will permanently suppress their identities. “Strict non-publication orders” also prevent the reporting and public disclosure of how the Lindauer paintings were safely returned to police.

“The gang members are currently serving long periods of imprisonment but their criminal offending cannot be reported without breaching the suppression orders,” reported the Herald‘s investigative journalist Jared Savage. “There is no suggestion either of the two gang members was involved in the theft of the paintings, rather that they were able to use their standing in the criminal world to obtain access to something the police wanted.”

When Chieftainess Ngatai-Raure and Chief Ngatai-Raure were returned to police, there was fingerprint and DNA testing done. However, no charges have been laid.

The artifacts—dating from the 8th century BCE through the Middle Ages—included clay vases, clothing elements, precious metals and jewels, weapons, tools, furnishings, sarcophagi, funerary urns, detailed mosaics, painted decorations, as well as a variety of statues in bronze, marble and limestone.

The illegally exported items came from “clandestine exacavations” and “offer a cross-section of the many productions of ancient Italy and the islands,” including “numerous and diversified archaeological contexts (funerary, cultural, residential and public) … concentrated in particular in Etruria and Magna Graecia,” according to a statement from the Ministry of Culture.

The most valuable artifacts were identified as a bronze tripod table, two parade horse headboards from the Appulo-Lucan area, two funerary paintings, several Imperial-age marble heads, as well as a wall painting depicting a small temple likely taken from a Vesuvian residence.

The items were recovered from the English company Robin Symes Ltd through an investigation by the Carabinieri cultural heritage police, in collaboration with the Italian Culture Ministry, the State Attorney General and the Italian Embassy in London. According to a press release, the company belonging to Symes had opposed “repeated recovery attempts” by the Italian Judicial Authority, and was also sued in Italy through the State Attorney General.

The repatriated items were presented during a press conference at the National Museum of Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome on May 31 led by Minister of Culture Gennaro Sangiuliano  and the head of the Carrabinieri, Vincenzo Molinese.

Symes’ legacy of trafficking antiquities also popped up last month when Greece recovered 351 antiquities also from the art dealer’s liquidated company after a 17-year legal battle and the Manhattan District Attorney’s office repatriated an item to Iraq. Symes was convicted of contempt of court for lying about antiquities he held in storage locations around the world in 2005. He sentenced to two years in prison, but only served seven months.

The police department for the protection of cultural heritage, the Carabinieri, worked with the special operations group ROS and the “Cacciatori Puglia” airborne squadron to carry out dozens of searches against individuals suspected of looting and illicit excavations as well as the trafficking of stolen archaeology artifacts with “inestimable historical, cultural and commercial value.”

According to the Italian daily newspaper La Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno, the operation was nicknamed “Canusium,” a reference to the ancient name of the municipality where the trafficking group based its operations. Investigative work and precautionary measures spanned the regions of Puglia, Basilicata, Campania, Lazio, and Abruzzo, and lasted almost a year.

While 21 suspects have been arrested so far as part of Operation Canusium, investigators said there are a total of 51 suspects, including grave robbers, international traffickers, and a type of middleman known as a fence. The fences placed the illicit archaeology items, among them vases, jewels, oil lamps, and gold coins, up for sale in both domestic and international markets.

The 3,586 artifacts that have been recovered include loom weights, bell-shaped kraters, jugs, cups, plates, miniature vases, oil lamps, and coins from as early as the 4th century BCE.

Prosecutor Francesco Tosto called the found items rare and valuable, estimating the value of the coins to be €50,000–€60,000.

According to CNN, Italian police also recovered 60 metal detectors and other objects consistent with clandestine excavations, including long metal spikes and shovels.

The Greek Ministry of Culture announced last week that it had recovered 351 objects dating from the Neolithic period to the early Byzantine era previously in the possession of Symes’ company. The illegally exported items included an early Cycladic figurine dating to between 3200 and 2700 B.C.E. a damaged marble statue of an Archaic kore from 550-500 B.C.E., and the torso of a larger-than-life sized figurative Bronze statue depicting a young Alexander the Great dating to the second half of the 2nd century C.E.

The oldest item was an anthropomorphic figurine made of highly polished white stone from the 4th millennium BCE.

Minister of Culture and Sports Lina Mendoni said the case was “difficult” and had plagued her office since 2006, the year after Symes was convicted on two counts of contempt of court and sentenced to two years in prison. He only served seven months.

In a statement, Medoni said her department intensified efforts over the past three years to ensure the return of the artifacts as well as individual fragments and groups of vessel shards. “The repatriation of illegally exported cultural goods is a priority for the Ministry of Culture and the Archaeological Service,” she said.

That initiative gained additional attention in March of this year, after Pope Francis returned three ornately decorated fragments of the Parthenon to Greece that had been held in the Vatican museums for 200 years.

The Greek Culture Ministry’s announcement did not specify whether the hundreds of items were part of the same hoard of antiquities in that authorities recovered from 45 crates belonging to Symes at a Geneva freeport in Switzerland in 2016, according to the BBC.

The long-term claim between Greece and Symes’ company involved a large number of people across different departments, including the Antiquities and Cultural Heritage, Documentation and Protection of Cultural Properties, archaeologists at the Ministry of Culture and Sports; Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Greek police officers, the Legal Council of the State, the National Archaeological Museum, the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki and even the Greek embassy in London.

Greece’s announcement on May 19 also coincided with news from the Manhattan District Attorney’s office of two antiquities being returned to Iraq, one of which had also belonged to Symes. The other item was seized from the collection of former Met trustee Shelby White.

According to the press release, the figures were looted from the ancient city of Uruk, now known as Warka, “stolen from Iraq during the Gulf War and smuggled into New York in the late 1990s.”

The limestone elephant had been hidden “since at least 1999” in a storage unit belonging to Symes, and was noted for its rarity.

“Although elephants were known to have existed in Mesopotamia and have appeared in excavations dating to the 4th millennium, they were rarely represented in art, making this limestone figure one of the very few examples to have survived to the modern day,” the press release said.

A statement from the South Yorkshire police said the theft took place at 6:45 a.m. on May 14 after “unknown offenders forced entry to the museum and caused damage to display cases”.

The items taken include a variety of decorated and multi-blade knives, four animal sculptures made out of stainless steel cutlery, as well as a sterling silver coffee pot from 1773. Several of the items were on loan from the Sheffield Assay office and the Ken Hawley Collection Trust.

Sheffield Museums, the charity which runs the Kelham Island Museum alongside five other institutions, issued a statement requesting the public’s help in recovering the missing artifacts, which were part of a special exhibition highlighting the area’s history.

“We’re deeply saddened by the break-in at Kelham Island Museum over the weekend, which appears to have been a carefully planned theft,” said Kim Streets, Chief Executive of Sheffield Museums Trust. Streets also called the items “irreplaceable touchstones of Sheffield’s rich heritage”.

The thefts at the Kelham Island Museum occurred after several other incidents at museums and heritage sites in the area. In April, artifacts were stolen during an overnight raid at the Clifton Park Museum in Rotherham and the Sheffield Assay Office was targeted in January.

“This is the latest in a string of robberies in the city and these criminals need to be stopped,” said Ashley Carson of the Sheffield Assay Office, the authority responsible for hallmarking the city’s precious metals, in a statement. Carson also emphasized that the stolen items from the museum and the assay office are irreplaceable but do not have any resale value.

“Some of these items are likely to find their way onto the market and are very distinctive,” Streets said in a statement from the museum. “We’re appealing to the public to be vigilant and to share any information they have that might aid their recovery with South Yorkshire Police.”

The news was first reported by the Art Newspaper.

The three items had been recovered as part of the criminal investigation into private collector and Metropolitan Museum of Art trustee Shelby White. As a result of the investigation, 89 items from 10 different countries, valued at nearly $69 million, were seized from White. These included nine antiquities repatriated to Turkey last month and seizures of Roman and Greek antiquities that took place last December.

According to the Manhattan DA’s office, the three items were acquired by White from the Mansour Gallery in London; art dealer Robin Symes, who was later convicted of antiquities trafficking in 2005; and from a Christie’s auction in New York.

The first item of the three repatriated items, an alabaster ram, is a funerary object from the Hayd bin Aqeel necropolis in Shabwa, Yemen. The ram was looted in 1994 during the country’s civil war and dates back to the 5th century B.C.E. The second, an alabaster female figure, is also a funerary item depicting a female god. The figure dates back to the 2nd century B.C.E. The third, an inscribed silver vessel, dates back to 200 to 300 C.E. It features an inscription that allowed experts to identify its origin as the same looted location as the alabaster ram.

“This repatriation underscores how art and culture can serve as powerful symbols of hope,” District Attorney Bragg said in a statement. “Our investigation into the collector Shelby White has allowed dozens of antiquities that were ripped from their countries of origin to finally return home,”

Due to the ongoing civil war in Yemen, the three items will be temporarily displayed at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

On Friday, the Department of Justice announced that Angela Catherine Hamblin, 74, had be extradited from Germany to the U.S.

Hamblin had been charged with one count of mail fraud in 2007 after selling an estimate $410,000 in fake works on the online platform eBay and in private transactions that were attributed to the British artist Joseph Mallord William Turner, Spanish Cubist artist Juan Gris, as well as American abstract painters Milton Avery, and Franz Kline. Hamblin was facing a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison for the charge.

Prosecutors said that Hamblin had been selling fake art works for years. “She continued her fraud relentlessly,” they told the Daily Mail. After discovering the paintings were fake, buyers would routinely demand their money back. On the few occasions Hamblin did refund money, she would re-sell the painting.”

Hamblin told the judge she turned to art fraud because of mortgage payments. After she plead guilty in 2009 to two counts of mail fraud and one of wire fraud, Hamblin was sentenced to one year and one day in prison as well as ordered to pay $65,000 in restitution to gallery owner Jeffrey Bergen of ACA Galleries. However, she failed to report to authorities and fled to the United Kingdom.

According to a press release from the Justice Department, Hamblin was re-arrested last May while changing flights at an airport in the German city of Frankfurt on her way home to Scotland from a trip to Vienna. She had been living in the Scottish village of St. Boswells with her husband.

“Hamblin went to great lengths to avoid accountability for her crimes, but this Office and the FBI have long memories and benefit greatly from our cooperation with international partners,” United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Damian Williams, recently said in a statement.

In a statement to Variety, creator Lee Sung Jin and stars Ali Wong and Steven Yeun, who also served as executive producers on the show, said the story was potentially hurtful while also defending Choe.

“The story David Choe fabricated nine years ago is undeniably hurtful and extremely disturbing,” they told Variety. “We do not condone this story in any way, and we understand why this has been so upsetting and triggering. We’re aware David has apologized in the past for making up this horrific story, and we’ve seen him put in the work to get the mental health support he needed over the last decade to better himself and learn from his mistakes.”

Video of Choe graphically describing raping a woman was removed online due to copyright claims after the footage of the episode of the podcast DVDASA went viral on Twitter last week.

The Los Angeles–based graffiti artist has received attention for his role on Beef as Isaac, the cousin of Yeun’s character Danny, as well as his title card artworks for the show. Jin told The Today Show that Choe was invited to audition after consulting Yeun and Wong, who are also friends of the artist.

Sometime around Beef’s debut earlier this month, Reveal reporter Aura Bogado posted a video of Choe speaking on the DVDASA podcast to Twitter. The tweet quickly went viral and Choe’s controversial comments received additional attention in Hannah Bae’s review of the show for the San Francisco Chronicle.

In the video, Choe tells co-host and porn actress Asa Akira about a massage with a masseuse he called “Rose” where he said he forced her to perform oral sex. At one point, Akira said, “You raped her.” Later in the episode, Choe appeared to jokingly call himself a “successful rapist.” A conversation during the podcast about “rapey behavior” vs “rape” ended with Choe stating “I just want to make it clear that I admit that that’s rapey behavior, but I am not a rapist.”

Several days after the podcast aired in 2014, Choe responded to allegations on the show’s website, stating that he was not a rapist and declared DVDASA to be “a complete extension of my art.”

“If I am guilty of anything, it’s bad storytelling in the style of douche,” he said, adding, “We create stories and tell tales. It’s not a news show. It’s not a representation of my reality. It’s not the place to come for reliable information about me or my life. It’s my version of reality, it’s art that sometimes offends people. I’m sorry if anyone believed that the stories were fact. They were not!”

Other instances of Choe telling stories about rape, first reported by Hyperallergic, include a 2009 magazine feature that included blog post excerpts from when the artist visited China for a solo exhibition. “I had so much jizz on my brain, I mentally skull fucked and raped every woman in sight, I didn’t [sic] know what to do,” Choe wrote.

In 2010, Choe starred in a Vice Media online series called How to Hitchhike Across America: Thumbs Up. In the first episode, Choe referred to his previous hitchhiking days by saying, “I only almost got raped twice, so hopefully that won’t happen.”

Prior to Beef, Choe’s comments on DVDASA prompted a backlash to a different artistic project in 2017, when he was commissioned by a real estate company for an outdoor mural in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. As a result of Choe’s involvement, the mural was tagged with the word “rapist, and a protest was organized at the site. In response, Choe wrote a long statement on Instagram, citing his mental illness for the comments on DVDASA.

The nine-count indictment unsealed this week in United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York also includes allegations of conspiring to defraud the United States and other governments, evading customs laws, and money laundering for the benefit of Lebanon-based terrorist group Hezbollah.

Ahmad has been sanctioned by the US government since 2019 for his role as a major financial donor to Hezbollah through money laundering activities, as well as for personally providing funds to the organization’s secretary-general. He was barred from conducting business, like collecting and selling “high-value art,” real estate, and diamonds, with US entities and persons.

But these sanctions did not stop Ahmad and his partners from using “a complex web of business entities” to procure valuable artwork from American artists and art galleries, as well as secure U.S.-based diamond-grading services, while hiding the art collector’s involvement in and benefit from these transactions, according to a press release from the Justice Department.

“Luxury good market participants should be attentive to these potential tactics and schemes, which allow terrorist financiers, money launderers, and sanctions evaders to launder illicit proceeds through the purchase and consignment of luxury goods,” Brian E. Nelson, the Treasury Department’s undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, said in a statement.

The Treasury Department said it identified 52 individuals and entities in an international network across nine countries that Ahmad used to facilitate “the payment, shipment, and delivery of cash, diamonds, precious gems, art, and luxury goods” for his alleged money laundering and sanctions evasion.

The other individuals charged for helping Ahmad include his son Firas Michael Ahmad, his daughter Hind Nazem Ahmad, his brother-in-law Rami Yaacoub Baker, as well as associates Mohamad Hijazi, Mohamad Hassan Ismail, Sarya Nemat Martin, and Ali Said Mossalem Sundar Nagarajan. 

Hind Nazem Ahmad is also the owner operator of the Dida Gallery in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, and Artual Gallery in Beirut, Lebanon. She disputed the allegations, saying she was unaware of the case in federal court; she called the notion of her father being a financier for Hezbollah “absurd.”

“I would have never imagined this would ever be possible,” she told the New York Times.

While one of the defendants was arrested this week in the United Kingdom, the Justice Department said the eight others, including Ahmad, “are believed to reside outside the United States and remain at large.” The American government has also obtained seizure warrants for millions in assets in artwork, cash, and a diamond ring.

Last year, Ahmad’s penthouse in Beirut was featured in Architectural Digest Middle East (since removed from the magazine’s website) for its wide array of paintings and bright sculptures. According to the article, Ahmad’s art collection also includes works by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Ai Weiwei, Thomas Heatherwick, and Marc Quinn. 

The indictment further alleges that Ahmad and his associates obtained artwork worth more than $1.2 million from the US after he was sanctioned in 2019, but notes that amount does not account for the tax evasion from foreign governments. By comparison, the indictment said the total weight and value of the diamonds, which had allegedly passed through Ahmad’s businesses after the sanctions had been imposed, were graded at approximately 1,546 carats, worth more than $91 million.

While the indictment included the prices of the art works based on export records and sales invoices, it did not identify the names of artists and galleries involved, only referring to them by location, such as “Chicago Art Gallery-1.”

Using Google reverse image search on artworks attached to the indictment, several of the works appear to be artists David Salle, Terron Cooper Sorrells, Stickmonger, and UFO907; per the indictment, these pieces were paid for or acquired through other names, entities, or partial payments to obscure they were connected to Ahmad.

Three of the works in the indictment had also been posted to Ahmad’s Instagram account, where he frequently posts images of artists, galleries, and exhibitions to his 172,000 followers. Ahmad identified those paintings as ones by Nicasio Fernandez and Luke Agada.

ARTnews has reached out to each of these artists and Ahmad for comment.

The indictment said the painting by Agada was paid for by wire transfer through an American financial institution based in New York. It shows a woman wearing a black blazer, a white dress with black polka-dots, white gloves, with an antique telephone box instead of a head. The woman holds a cardboard box with a label marked “EVIDENCE.”

The Eid Mar coins were minted by Brutus to commemorate the murder of Julius Caesar on March 15, 44 B.C.E, now known as the Ides of March. Editions were minted in silver to be used as currency and gold as a memento for high ranking officials; of the gold editions, only three are known to remain. Investigators have not revealed the details of how the coin was smuggled out of Greece, or the circumstances of its sale.

“Antiquities trafficking is a multi-billion-dollar business with looters and smugglers turning a profit at the expense of cultural heritage, and Greece – long acknowledged as the cradle of Western Civilization – is especially susceptible to this type of criminal enterprise,” Ivan J. Arvelo, the Special Agent in Charge for HSI in New York, said in a statement. “These treasured artifacts date from as far back as 5000 B.C.E. and were a valued part of life in the ancient world. We are honored to join our partners today in the repatriation of this priceless cultural heritage to the people of Greece.”

Other artifacts included in the repatriation package include a funerary urn which once held the remains of a deceased individual in a chamber tomb. “Neolithic family group”, a collection of five human and animal figures carved from marble from 5000-3500 B.C.E, was also returned to Greece. The group was on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which had accepted it as a loan, until it was seized earlier this month.