Shelby White Collection

Object or Group Name

Case Summary

Shelby White and her husband, the hedge fund pioneer Leon Levy, built an immense antiquities collection over decades, eventually including more than seven hundred objects. They often bought recently looted antiquities from known traffickers with few questions asked, court records show. This included many of the most valuable objects of ancient Greek and Roman art to surface on the market over the past half century, making their collection one of the most prominent – and controversial – in the world.

While aggressively buying looted antiquities, Levy and White were also a prominent donor to art historical and archaeological projects. They donated USD $20,000,000 to the Met, which named its refurbished gallery for Greek and Roman art after the couple. The two were also generous funders of archaeological digs in Israel, an institute for the study of ancient art at NYU and other philanthropic causes.

Despite the couple's deep engagement with archaeology, their private collection was repeatedly criticized for being filled with objects that had been recently looted.

Questions first emerged during the couple's “Glories of the Past” exhibition at the Met in 1990, which led to the publication of many of the collection's most prized objects for the first time. In 1993, the couple returned the Icklingham Bronzes after evidence emerged they had been looted from a field in the UK.

Leon Levy died in 2003, leaving his wife to address continued questions about their antiquities collection. In 2004, White agreed to return her share of a marble torso called the Weary Herakles after its lower half was discovered in Turkey.

In 2008, White returned another 10 looted objects, 8 to Italy and 2 to Greece. Many were linked to photographs seized from known traffickers showing the objects soon after they had been looted.

As new evidence of White's ties to illicit traffickers continued to emerge, federal agents raided her Sutton Place apartment in July 2021 in search of looted objects and related records. It was the first in a series of searches that became the foundation for a criminal investigation of one of the United States' wealthiest and most prominent antiquities collectors.

The sweeping criminal investigation concluded in April 2023 with the seizure of 89 additional antiquities that had been looted from ten different countries and were collectively valued at nearly USD $69,000,000. Seventy one of the objects were seized from White's Manhattan apartment, while an additional eighteen were seized from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where they were on loan from White's collection. White has been a longtime trustee of the Met and sits on the museum's acquisition advisory committee.

No criminal charges were filed against White.