This story is a fantastic example of how art is used to launder money (like, for real, not just in hysterical art crime rhetoric):

According to the air bill slapped on the crate that arrived at Kennedy International Airport from London, an unnamed painting worth $100 was inside. Only later did federal investigators discover that it was by the American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat and worth $8 million.

This painting, known as Hannibal after a word scribbled on its surface, was brought into the United States in 2007 as part of a Brazilian embezzler’s elaborate effort to launder money, the authorities say. It was later seized at a Manhattan warehouse by federal investigators who are now preparing to return it to Brazil at the behest of law enforcement officials there.

The painting’s seizure was a victory in the economy-rattling, billion-dollar fraud and money laundering case of Edemar Cid Ferreira, a former Brazilian banker who converted some of his loot into a 12,000-piece art collection.

The thing about laundering money through art or antiquities is that the customs officials are not sufficiently trained to recognize a cheap reproduction or no-name artist versus an authentic work or piece. That combined with the sheer volume of goods going through customs at any airport or port, results in a pretty good probability on any particular shipment that you can get a valuable item through.

Check out this 45-minute documentary, Blood Antiques, which discusses the problem of regulating the international trade in antiquities.

Read more at The Age or check out the Interpol listing.

New York Daily News reports:

A construction company has essentially destroyed one of Belize’s largest Mayan pyramids with backhoes and bulldozers to extract crushed rock for a road-building project, authorities announced on Monday.

The head of the Belize Institute of Archaeology, Jaime Awe, said the destruction at the Nohmul complex in northern Belize was detected late last week. The ceremonial center dates back at least 2,300 years and is the most important site in northern Belize, near the border with Mexico…

Nohmul sat in the middle of a privately owned sugar cane field, and lacked the even stone sides frequently seen in reconstructed or better-preserved pyramids. But Awe said the builders could not possibly have mistaken the pyramid mound, which is about 100 feet tall, for a natural hill because the ruins were well-known and the landscape there is naturally flat…

Photos from the scene showed backhoes clawing away at the pyramid’s sloping sides, leaving an isolated core of limestone cobbles at the center, with what appears to be a narrow Mayan chamber dangling above one clawed-out section…

Belizean police said they are conducting an investigation and criminal charges are possible.

Read more on NY Daily News.

The silver was recovered from the SS Gairsoppa, a 412-foot steel-hulled British cargo steamship sunk by a German U-boat 300 miles southwest of Galway, Ireland, on February 17, 1941. The name was given in honor of the waterfalls in Karnataka, India, then still a British colony. The SS Gairsoppa sailed with several convoys before joining Convoy SL 64. When she suffered fuel loss, the ship left Convey SL 64 and headed for Galway. The move left her unprotected and vulnerable to the torpedo attack by a German U-boat, which sank her.

Last year, the company began recovery and salvage of 48 tons of silver from the SS Gairsoppa shipwreck at a depth of 4,700 meters below the sea surface (about 3 miles deep). Odyssey’s first quarter 2013 results indicate that the sale of SS Gairsoppa silver netted them $1.8 million in that quarter, bringing the total proceeds from this project to $41 million to date.

In the quarterly results, Odyssey reported that, so far, 1,218 SS Gairsoppa silver bars have been recovered and sold, and an additional $500,000 was realized from the sale of gold extracted during the silver smelting process. Odyssey further reported that the final stage of silver recovery for the SS Gairsoppa is to commence this month.

This will be the first time this silver is on display. The exhibition is at Discovery Times Square in New York and opens on May 24, 2013.

SS Gairsoppa Shipwreck: VIDEO

Yes, you read that right. No understandable explanation has yet been given, merely that, “many buildings must be pulled down for the success of the application [for several sites in Shaanxi province along the Silk Road]” (quoting an authority who preferred not to be named in the article).

In any event, Attorney and notorious advocate for coin collectors Peter Tompa has asked the question, “Should the US State Department authorize repatriation of every last unprovenanced Chinese coin when China cares so little for major religious sites?”

It’s a good question, loaded with moral inquiry. Is the source of the perceived obligation to return unprovenanced coins the appreciation of those objects by the home country? If the home country were going to simply melt down the coins to make something else, would advocates of repatriation still so advocate? We would be interested to hear the thoughts of those who support the repatriation of all unprovenanced antiquities (or coins, if they are to be distinguished).

So, please, comment away!

Recently, Xian authorities have ordered that a majority of the buildings in a 1,300-year-old Buddhist temple are to be demolished. The announcement has provoked massive outrage online among many Chinese scholars.

According to a staff member of the Xingjiao Temple, authorities are requiring the temple to demolish two-thirds of  its buildings by next month. The temple is currently home to relics of Chinese monk Xuan Zang. Zang traveled to India in the 7th century in order to retrieve Buddhist sculptures. His trip inspired the Japanese show, Monkey, which now has a cult following in Britain and Australia.

The temple was ordered to be demolished as a part of China’s preparation to apply for UNESCO World Heritage status for several of its other sites. According to authorities, “many buildings must be pulled down for the success of the application.”

According to the Egyptian Council for Culture and Arts, 3,000 Egyptian antiquities were stolen just last year. The council believes that the majority of these artifacts are in the hands of collectors outside of Egypt. Many artifacts have been taken directly from Egyptian museums.

To combat the situation, young Egyptians have started a “stop the heritage drain” movement. Members of the movement post pictures as well as descriptions of stolen artifacts on their Facebook page, in hopes of locating the pieces.

Immediately after the initial invasion in 2003, rumors quickly spread that the National Iraq Museum’s entire collection, approximately 200,000 antiquities, had been seized. Luckily, authorities had previously moved the most valuable pieces into secured locations. It was later discovered that approximately 16,000 antiquities were stolen. Only half of these antiquities have been recovered.

One of the biggest mysteries surrounding Iraq’s missing antiquities is that of where they ended up. Very few of the missing pieces have ended up in the antiquities market. Many of these pieces may have been quietly sold to collectors.

According to the the conference Web site, the conference will “address the underlying legal, ethical, and moral reasons and policies behind the return of cultural objects . . . Participants will discuss the repatriation of cultural objects appropriated in the more distant past whose restitution some view as outside the scope of existing law, but others view as a matter of restitutionary justice. They also will address the repatriation of artifacts looted in recent times whose removal is thought to cause contemporary damage to the cultural heritage of communities and nations and to the historical and archaeological record.”

Immediately after it was discovered that objects were missing, local and government officials reported to the museum to examine the scene where the crime took place. The local police forensics team immediately began attempting to extract fingerprints.

According to Culture Minister Gaby Layoun, the thieves would have had no problems carrying the artifacts out of the museum, as all of the missing artifacts were quite small. Layoun expressed his hope that the thieves would soon be arrested, and that the artifacts would be returned. According to Layoun, the stolen artifacts have material, historical, and emotional significance.