SoCal Search Warrants Suggest Museums' Complicity

Search warrants allowing yesterday's coordinated raids on four Southern California museums gave federal agents broad authority to search the museums' galleries, offices, storage areas, and computer archives for objects and records related to the primary targets of a five-year undercover investigation into an alleged smuggling pipeline involving objects taken illegally from Thailand, Myanmar, China, and U.S. Native American sites, according to the Los Angeles Times. According to the warrants, the agents were looking for evidence related to an alleged art smuggler, Robert Olson, and the owner of an Asian art gallery in L.A., Jonathan Markell, when they descended on the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Pasadena's Pacific Asia Museum, the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, and Mingei International Museum in San Diego.

No arrests have been made, but legal experts told the Times that the warrants suggest prosecutors are compiling evidence to seek criminal indictments against Markell and Olson and have also laid the groundwork to indict museum staffers complicit in the looting schemes.

The warrants are based on the findings of a National Park Service agent who presented himself to Olson and Markell as a novice collector. According to the warrants, the two men told the agent that they regularly bought Thai antiquities from looters and smugglers, then sold them to clients in Los Angeles. They also provided clients with forged appraisals that sometimes boosted objects' values up to 400 percent, then helped the clients donate the works to local museums for inflated tax write-offs. The warrants suggest that officials at the Bowers and Pacific Asia museums were aware that donated objects were looted and overvalued. LACMA, the Mingei, and the UC Berkeley Art Museum also accepted donations, but the warrants do not make clear whether officials there knew of the alleged thefts or tax schemes.