A Brooklyn man pleaded guilty on Monday to smuggling hundreds of precious artifacts, including ancient Egyptian talismans, gold amulets and a sculpture with the carving of a king from the Ptolemaic dynasty.
The man, Ashraf Omar Eldarir, 52, had been charged with smuggling relics on four occasions from 2019 to 2020, and then selling some to an art dealer for thousands of dollars.
Mr. Eldarir was stopped at Kennedy International Airport in January 2020 by Customs and Border Protection officers, who found him with around 600 Egyptian artifacts in three checked suitcases, all wrapped in bubble and foam. Mr. Eldarir, who was arriving from Cairo, did not declare the items before entering the country, prosecutors said.
When the suitcases were opened, loose dirt and sand spilled out, and the items smelled of wet earth, according to prosecutors. Mr. Eldarir told investigators that the items belonged to his family, and that he planned to use them to furnish his apartment.
“These cultural treasures traveled across centuries and millennia, only to end up unceremoniously stuffed in a dirt-caked suitcase at J.F.K.,” Richard Donoghue, who was then the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said when Mr. Eldarir was indicted in July 2020.
Mr. Eldarir had argued that the artifacts had belonged to his grandfather, who had first arrived in the United States in the 1920s. A lawyer for Mr. Eldarir did not respond to a request for comment.
Federal and local officials have increasingly targeted the smuggling and the theft of art relics, albeit on a larger scale than that of Mr. Eldarir’s operation. Last year, federal prosecutors in Manhattan charged an art dealer with smuggling thousands of stolen artifacts from Italy, including Roman sculptures and Etruscan pottery. On Friday, three men in Federal District Court in Pennsylvania were convicted of conspiring to steal artwork as well as nine of Yogi Berra’s World Series rings.
The focus has primarily been on items looted from overseas, with Iraq being one of the biggest beneficiaries of the broader crackdown on stolen artifacts. In 2021, the country received 17,000 clay tablets and seals that dated to the Mesopotamian Era, most of which from the Museum of the Bible. In 2017, the Justice Department fined the Hobby Lobby craft store chain, whose owners founded the museum, $3 million for purchasing some of the stolen items.
At the state level, Alvin L. Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, has aggressively deployed a task force dedicated to returning antiquities stolen from overseas. That unit has recovered roughly 6,000 relics valued at around $460 million, according to the district attorney’s website, and has routinely returned valuable items to countries including Iraq, Greece and Italy.
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