The Journal. - How an Antiques Dealer Uncovered a Massive Museum Heist

Episode Date: October 31, 2023

A Danish antiques dealer named Ittai Gradel noticed a particular seller repeatedly listing valuable items for sale online at rock-bottom prices. WSJ's Max Colchester recounts how Gradel's sleuthing would eventually reveal a major antiques heist involving stolen British Museum antiquities.  Further Listening: -How Investigators Cracked a $3.4 Billion Crypto Heist  -Is This Painting a Masterpiece? AI Is On the Case  Further Reading: -How an Academic Uncovered One of the Biggest Museum Heists of All Time  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Have you ever been to the British Museum? Of course, many times. It's a fantastic museum and I highly recommend visiting it. Our colleague Max Colchester is our resident expert on all things UK, including the British Museum. What do you see when you walk in? Well, it's a very impressive building. When you walk into it, it's got these sort of colonnade out the front.

And you go in there and you immediately, you can see the variety of objects on show. It's just incredible. And it really does give you a sort of whirlwind tour through the history of humanity. The museum is home to some of the greatest cultural treasures from around the globe. Places like Greece, China, Nigeria and Egypt. But recently, the museum has been embroiled in a major

scandal. A series of thefts from the collections of one of the world's most prestigious cultural institutions. Information is only just emerging. We now believe more than 1,500 items were stolen, damaged or are missing from this place. It's thought some of them were sold online through eBay. Tonight, the world's largest museum is in crisis. The thefts were uncovered by an unlikely source, a gem dealer who spent years tracking down the missing pieces. source, a gem dealer who spent years tracking down the missing pieces. And the tale of his detective work involves fake identities, a telltale Roman hairstyle, and an apparent cover-up. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Jessica Mendoza. It's Tuesday, October 31st.

It's Tuesday, October 31st. Coming up on the show, how a small-time antiques dealer cracked one of the biggest museum heists in history. Looking for a change of scenery? Come on over. Let us give you the tour. Grab a paddle and explore. Hit the trails and go. When you're ready, kick back and call it a night. New Brunswick, always inviting.

Visit tourismnewbrunswick.ca. If this is a whodunit, who's our Sherlock Holmes? So the man who's the Sherlock Holmes of this is called Itai Gradel, who's a former academic and art antiques dealer who specializes in Greco-Roman gems. There are only a handful of people with his level of expertise in the world. It's a fairly niche area of the antiques market, and it's not one that's widely known about outside of the people who are really into these types of items.

And he resides in Denmark, and he is one of the world's foremost experts in those types of jewelry. And you got to meet Gerdel, right? Yeah. What was he like in person? He's a very intense, quite compact, fast-talking guy. He adores his profession, and he loves looking at these gems. And for him, it really is a sort of window into the soul of our ancestors, what their whims and interests were, and what sort of gods they worship.

And that's really what he gets out of it. And he's also, he has a photographic memory, and that's a key thing to remember during this whole story, is that he is someone who has an ability to remember things in extreme detail for long periods of time. detail for long periods of time. Itai Gradel's journey to becoming an unwitting Sherlock Holmes started about a decade ago when he came across a certain cameo. A cameo is a gem with an image carved in relief. Part of his job is to just scour websites and auction houses to try and find gems that have been mispriced, usually by people who think they are far less old than they actually are. And as part of this, he was on eBay,

and he saw this seller called Sultan 1966 advertising a glass gem from the 19th century. And Gradel immediately saw and recognized that it was actually something far more special than that, that it was actually a Roman Medusa cameo. And the incredible thing was that Sultan 1966 was advertising this item, which is from the second century AD, for 15 pounds, roughly 19 bucks, something like that. So incredibly cheap. And so Gradel immediately bids and buys this thing, wins the auction,

and then sells it on to a collector for a couple of thousands of pounds. Over the next couple of years, Gradel continued buying antiques from Sultan 1966 for rock-bottom prices. They were treasures that were worth way more than what he was paying. It was almost too good to be true. And so Gradel started to wonder who this seller really was. Gradel does do some due diligence on this seller. He emails him and says, you know, how did you come across these

pieces? And Sultan 1966 lists his name as Paul Higgins. And Paul Higgins says, well, I actually inherited them from my grandfather who lived in Northern England in a town called York, and he owned a junk shop there, and he died in 1953. And so Griddell goes online and checks the death records, and sure enough, there's the guy's granddad's name listed as dying in northern England, but in 1952. And he thinks, well, that's just the sort of, you know, when your grandfather dies, you get the year wrong by one year. It's the sort of mistake anyone could make.

And it's kind of, in a weird way, adding credibility to the whole thing. Right. The backstory seemed to check out and, like, he'd done his homework. Yeah, it just sort of made sense. It's someone who didn't know what they were doing, selling off their granddad's stuff. And then, in 2015, a new stone caught Gridel's eye. Salza 1966 had listed a green Roman gem with a portrait carved into it. The subject's hairstyle stood out.

One of the amazing things about Gridel is that he, as we said, he has this photographic memory, but also to try and date these stones the portraits one of the things he did is he's he's memorized every different type of hairstyle romans wore in different periods naturally as one does as one does so that so that he can look at a picture on a stone and say oh hang on that guy's got a hairstyle like this. That means he's, you know, from this time. And this green gem gets put up on eBay. And Gridel notices this guy has a big lock of hair sticking out of his, out the front of his head, which is unusual. Gridel didn't wind up buying the stone. The piece went to another dealer. A few years later, Gridel was reading a book by a Polish gem specialist,

and something piqued his interest. It was a detailed close-up of a stone from the British Museum's collection, a Roman cameo featuring a guy with a familiar hairdo. And immediately a light bulb goes off in Gradel's head, and he thinks, hang on a minute, I've seen this gem before. The hairstyle is the same. He recognizes this lock of hair sticking out the front. So Grudel looks very carefully and he notices there are sort of scratches on the profile's nasal ridge. And so he concludes that this is the same piece. And he goes online and sure enough, on the British Museum's own website is a picture of this gem. This seller, Sultan 1966, is selling stuff that was in the British Museum.

So Griddell suddenly thinks, what's going on here? Sitting in his study, he goes back to his PayPal account and checks his payments to Sultan 1966, who was going under the name of Paul Higgins. And he looks at his PayPal account and he realizes that he's been paying money to someone who's not called Paul Higgins. He's called Peter Higgs. And Gradel has never heard of someone called Peter Higgs. So he thinks it's just a bit strange that he's paying someone with a different name

and then there are these pieces that are supposedly in the British Museum, but he's been trying to buy them on eBay. Right, it's getting kind of fishy. Exactly. So he calls a friend of his who also bought items from this eBay seller. And his friend just tells him,

you know, you do realize Peter Higgs is the name of a curator in the British Museum, right? And suddenly it dawns on Gradel that this is potentially a huge inside job that he's just uncovered. Suspicion is one thing. But could Gradel actually gather any real evidence? That's after the break. Looking for a change of scenery?

Come on over. Let us give you the tour. Grab a paddle and explore. Hit the trails and go. When you're ready, kick back and call it a night. New Brunswick. Always inviting. Visit tourismnewbrunswick.ca Need a great reason to get up in the morning? Well, what about two?

Right now, get a small, organic, fair trade coffee and a tasty bacon and egger breakfast sandwich for only $5 at A&W's in Ontario. So a Tiger Dell finds out that the seller on eBay is actually Peter Higgs. Who is Peter Higgs? What do we know about him? Well, firstly, we should be very clear. No one has been charged with a crime here, okay? So, Peter Higgs is not officially charged with stealing anything

and has not been found guilty of doing so. And his family have protested his innocence in this whole affair. So we should be very clear on that. But Peter Higgs himself is, he's a stalwart of the British Museum. He's been there for three decades. He's an expert in ancient Greek history. And he spoke in interviews about how he discovered as a young boy his fascination with ancient artifacts. And he lives in southern England. He seems to live a fairly modest lifestyle.

And he's sort of like your classic upper mid-level employee, lifer. Okay, so that's Peter Higgs. Griddell now had some suspicions and a little bit of proof, but he still didn't want to jump to conclusions. So what does he do next? So next you get this involvement of this crew of ancient gem experts who Grell begins to consult as he tries to A, raise the alarm about this, and B, make sure that he's not wrong on this stuff. So Griddell made some calls to confirm his suspicions. And he learned that the greenstone was part of the British Museum's collection.

Griddell then explained the situation to a fellow art dealer who'd bought the stone. When the dealer heard about the stone's dubious origins, he turned around and gave it back to the British Museum. And then Gradel, I think, thought, okay, well, they've got this item, they're obviously just going to retrace their steps. And they'll look into Sultan 966 and they'll see it's Higgs. And the case will be closed, they'll get the stuff back, and they'll look into Sultan 966 and they'll see it's Higgs. And the case will be closed, they'll get the stuff back, and that'll be that. But in fact, what happens is absolutely nothing. Gradel, basically, in the interim, becomes increasingly obsessed with the idea that he has traded stolen goods and he feels very bad about it

and he feels like a coward he feels he should have maybe he should have just outed Higgs straight away so in early 2021 he decides to do two things which will have a massive bearing on this whole saga. The first thing is that he decides to email the deputy director of the British Museum directly saying, here's what I found and here's the name, here's the guy who I think is doing this, Higgs. Griddell also makes a quite serious mistake at this point, which is that he decides to contact a sort of archaeologist and author who had worked quite closely with the Department of Greece and Rome at the British Museum. And he tells her what he found and that he suspects that this curator Higgs is stealing things. And what he doesn't know is that she then turns around and tells Higgs. Not what you want them to be doing, yeah.

No. And things start to get a bit weird at this point, because suddenly, for example, this gem, which at one point, a picture of which was on the British Museum's own website. So Grudel looks very carefully and he looks and he notices suddenly that picture disappears from the website. And it's as if the thief is starting to cover his tracks. Meanwhile, Griddell got an email back from museum officials saying they'd done an investigation and everything was fine. But Griddell found out that they never interviewed the person

who originally bought the green gem from Salts in 1966. And so, at this point, what does Griddell think is happening? Well, he thinks it's a cover-up. And he comes to the conclusion that what's happening here is so embarrassing for the museum that they are hoping that it'll just disappear and that it'll be easier if this is just quietly forgotten about as opposed to blown up into the open.

And so he becomes incensed, basically. He feels like he's being fobbed off by the British Museum, who are sort of telling him to get lost. And it makes him very cross. I just couldn't get these people to listen, despite the fact that the evidence I had gathered was absolutely incontrovertible. That's Gridel talking recently to Sky News. There was no innocent explanation was even remotely possible for the evidence I sent.

And yet it was ignored. been remotely possible for the evidence I sent them. And yet it was ignored. And so in October 2022, Goodell just decides to circumvent the management themselves and goes straight to the board of trustees. And then that's when this thing suddenly unravels quite quickly. and the unravels quite quickly. The museum did a fresh investigation. The police got involved. And it turned out that over a period of about 25 years,

around 2,000 pieces from the museum's collection had disappeared. It was such a big scandal that the museum's chair testified before the House of Commons a couple weeks ago. But essentially, we were the House of Commons a couple weeks ago. But essentially, we were the victims of an inside job by someone, we believe, who over a long period of time was stealing from the museum and who the museum had put trust in. And then they fire a member of staff who turns out to be Higgs, and the director of the museum essentially is forced to resign. So far, no one has been charged with a crime. Higgs' son has said he believes his father is innocent. Higgs himself didn't return Max's request for comment. How could this have happened?

I mean, it's a long-term crime that was happening right under the British Museum's nose. Well, I think it happened for a very simple reason, which was that the collections were crime that was happening right under the British Museum's nose. Well, I think it happened for a very simple reason, which was that the collections were not properly catalogued, right? I mean, that's the crux and that's the weakness in the system that this person was able to exploit, which was that the British Museum has an estimated 8 million items in it, and it has catalogued around 4.5 million of those items. So there's a lot of items that are not catalogued. The British Museum has since recovered a few hundred items out of the 2,000 that are missing.

The museum says that it will continue its search and that it's accelerating its efforts to catalogue its collections. search and that it's accelerating its efforts to catalogue its collections. What does this mean for the British Museum? Well, it's a tricky one because it's both a kind of the ultimate inside heist job and also it punches a very sore bruise for the British Museum, which is that there's a lot of foreign cultural artefacts in the British Museum. Quite a few countries across the world are asking for some of these, especially high-profile items, to be returned to them, saying that they were taken during Britain's age of empire,

and that they were unfairly taken, they were looted, and that they would like them back. But if the British Museum doesn't know it has these items, and worse, lets other people steal them, then that's a problem for them. What about Gradel? What's next for him, now that he's solved this particular mystery? He sort of wants to wash his hands of this now.

I think he found it very draining. I think he feels like his work has been done in this regard. And I think he's still helping the British Museum trace some items, but I think he broadly wants to step back from that and go back to the quiet life he was leading in Denmark. Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. If you like our show, follow us wherever you get your podcasts. We're out every weekday afternoon. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.