The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office has recently repatriated over 30 antiquities to Spain, Italy, and Hungary, the office announced in a press release Wednesday.
The return is just the latest for Alvin Bragg, who has served as D.A. since 2021, and the Antiquities Trafficking Unit, which has been led by assistant D.A. Matthew Bogdanos since he established the unit in 2017. In the years since, Bogdanos, Bragg, and the ATU have aggressively pursued investigations into antiquities traffickers and collectors, leading to a near-constant stream of high-profile seizures and returns.
The objects returned this week came from investigations into several convicted traffickers, including Giacomo Medici, Giovanni Franco Becchina, Robin Symes, Robert Hecht, and Eugene Alexander. Several objects also came from an investigation into Edoardo Almagià, for whom the D.A. obtained an arrest warrant and who is awaiting extradition from Italy. The DA said that the ATU has seized 295 objects that were allegedly trafficked by Almagià, totaling over $6 million.
Among the 31 objects repatriated to Italy was a 1st-century CE marble head depicting Alexander the Great as the sun god Helio, which was excavated from the Basilica Emilia in the Roman Forum, before it was stolen from an archaeological museum in Rome.
A Jesuit manuscript from 1675, stolen during World War II, was seized from a New York-based rare books seller earlier this year, and then returned to Hungary.
To Spain, the ATU returned several Visigoth pendants dating back to the 6th century C.E. and later trafficked by Symes and sold to the Met in 1990. The ATU seized the items from the Met earlier this year.
