Leonardo Patterson Collection

Leonardo Patterson Collection

In 2008, the Costa Rican antiquities dealer Leonardo Patterson fled to Germany with more than 1,000 Pre-Hispanic archaeological items while facing charges of antiquities trafficking in six countries.

Patterson was born to Jamaican parents but raised in Cahuita, Costa Rica. He said his long career as an antiquities dealer started at age seven, when he found ancient pottery while digging in a yam field and became hooked after his cousin told him it could be thousands of years old. He later worked in the New York gallery of Everett Rassiga, best know for the theft of the Mayan artifact Fachada de Placeres.

He quickly ran into trouble with the law. Patterson was sentenced for fraud in Switzerland in 1975, according to an Ojo Publico investigation. In 1980, he sold USD $2,000,000 in pre-Columbian antiquities to a group of Australian businessmen, who donated them to local museums to take advantage of generous tax write-offs allowed at the time. In 1984, Patterson was convicted of fraud for trying to sell a fake pre-Columbian fresco in Boston, the New York Times reported. A year later, while still on probation for the first felony conviction, he was arrested at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport and later convicted of illegally importing into the United States a pre-Columbian ceramic figure dated between 650 and 850 A.D. He also had with him 36 sea turtle eggs, the Times reported. In 1991, he was allegedly involved in a "swindle" over the sale of fake works attributed to Salvador Dalí.

In the 1990s, Patterson began organizing exhibitions and sales in Europe that drew celebrity attendees such as Oscar Arias Sánchez, a former president of Costa Rica, and the Guatemalan Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchú. Patterson was also known to sell forgeries. Mexican authorities said that more than 200 of his objects were made by a forger named Luis Bianchi. In 1995, Val Edwards, a self-professed antiquities smuggler, told The New York Times that he had often worked with Patterson to bring looted objects into the US and other countries. They included two objects offered at Sotheby's November 1994 Pre-Colombian sale. When pressed for detail, Sotheby's said the European collector had purchased them from Leonardo Patterson. "We could not stay in business if I interrogated our clients," the Sotheby's official told the newspaper.

Patterson was allowed to keep the remaining objects, which were acquired in Peru, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Colombia and Ecuador and displayed in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, in 1996. The exhibition led to an Interpol alert and criminal charges being laid in five countries in 2004. Peru recovered 273 objects from the exhibition in 2006, according to Ojo Publico.

In November 2015, a Bavarian civil court found him guilty of possession and illegal export of cultural assets, but only with respect of two wooden Olmec heads that were confiscated from him for return to Mexico. A criminal court also found him guilty of selling a fake Olmec bust to a German buyer. He was given a suspended sentence of one year and three months prison and a fine of 36,000 euros.

Today, Mexico continues to seek 691 Mayan archaeological artifacts in Patterson´s collection, which remains in storage in Munich while authorities decide the fate of pending claims.

Ojo Publico reported that Patterson´s name is also linked to the brutal murder in 1996 of the Peruvian collector Raúl Apesteguía. "On the day of the crime, one of the most important pieces of Pre-Columbian art disappeared from the victim´s house in Lima: a headdress of Moche gold which represents a human head. In 2006 the piece was discovered at the residence of Patterson’s lawyer in London. Peruvian prosecutors however, never investigated the links to this still unpunished case," according to the report.

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Various

Various Pre-Colombian

Mexico

Peru

Jason Felch

Damien Huffer