Georges Lotfi Collection

Georges Lotfi Collection

In August 2022, the Manhattan District Attorney's Office issued an arrest warrant for Georges Lotfi, a Lebanese national and a prolific antiquities dealer who allegedly played a key role trafficking looted antiquities out of the Middle East for decades.

The twist: Before Lotfi was a target, he was a key source for the Manhattan DA's Antiquities Trafficking Unit (ATU).

The twisting tale began in March 2018, when Matthew Bogdanos, head of the ATU, received an email from Lotfi, an old source. The dealer was offering info on a "multimillion dollar object in the USA." But Lofti's source, a looter, wanted to get paid for the information. The ATU does not pay for information, and Lotfi eventually stopped helping on the case. But his information proved invaluable. The tip exposed the false provenance of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's golden coffin of of Nedjemankh, and helped prove it had been looted in Egypt in 2011. The ATU's investigation of the gold coffin triggered a sprawling international probe of a trafficking network with close ties to the Met and the Louvre, whose former director Jean Luc Martinez was among those criminally charged in France.

The golden coffin case was one of several in which Lotfi had acted as a source for Manhattan investigators and prosecutors. Lotfi also provided the Antiquities Trafficking Unit with key information about the origins of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Sidon Bull's Head, which he had bought in Lebanon in the 80s. Lotfi "provided me with information on looters and traffickers, and has also told me about many methods by which antiquities are smuggled and trafficked," said HSI Special Agent Robert Mancene in Lotfi's arrest warrant affidavit. Lotfi even diagramed the smuggling routes.

Lotfi's fall from valued source to criminal target appears to have started in September 2018, after he gave investigators a thumb drive labeled "Looted." It contained hundreds of photos of mosaics and statues in the process of being looted.

Among those hundreds of pictures of looted mosaics, investigators later found six in Lotfi's possession. Lotfi told The New York Times he had bought the objects from "licensed dealers" and had invited the ATU to review them. As described in the arrest warrant affidavit, the dealer thought his false provenances – and his role as a reliable source – would protect him from investigation. It didn't.

In July 2021, authorities seized the 23 mosaics and a Palmyrene sculpture from Lotfi's New Jersey warehouses. The objects were the basis for an arrest warrant and criminal indictment filed against Lotfi in July 2022.

In September 2023, the Manhattan District Attorney's Office returned nine of the mosaics to Lebanon, while others were returned to Syria.

Some experts, notably French art historian Djamila Fellague and forensic archaeologist Christos Tsirogiannis, questioned the authenticity of some of the returned mosaics, noting they had been partially constructed from loose tesserae (the small tile fragments used to make mosaics) and closely resembled mosaics currently in museum collections. Evidence submitted in the indictment shows several other mosaics in what appeared to be the process of being looted, suggesting some of Lotfi's mosaics were authentic.

43

Various

Visual Work – paintings, frescos, mosaics

Various

Lebanon

Syria

Jason Felch

Damien Huffer