New York investigators are pursuing the arrest of a California antiquities collector who they say illegally possesses a 2,000-year-old looted bronze statue of a Roman emperor and has conspired with art experts to disguise its illicit history.
The collector, Aaron Mendelsohn, 74, of Santa Monica, a philanthropist and former medical technology venture capitalist, bought the statue in 2007 from a New York gallery.
The investigators from the Manhattan district attorney’s office said in an arrest warrant that Mr. Mendelsohn was aware when he acquired the giant bronze torso, known as “Nude Emperor,” that it had been illegally excavated at the site of a Roman-era city known as Bubon in present-day Turkey.
The warrant, filed in New York Criminal Court last week, asserts that “knowing Nude Emperor was looted from Bubon in the 1960s, Mendelsohn purchased it for $1,330,000.”
However, Mr. Mendelsohn’s lawyer, Marcus A. Asner, said his client did not know — and does not necessarily agree — that the statue came from Bubon. He said the district attorney’s office has no jurisdiction in California, where the bronze has been located since 2007 and where Mr. Mendelsohn has filed court papers to block the seizure of the piece. That case is pending.
“The DA’s effort to shoehorn their civil effort to try to get the statue on behalf of the Republic of Türkiye into a criminal one against Mr. Mendelsohn is overreaching, inappropriate and frankly unconstitutional,” he said in a statement.
In recent years, New York investigators have often invoked criminal statutes as part of their efforts to reclaim looted artifacts, and have at times charged dealers with trafficking in stolen items, but it is rare for them to pursue a collector for criminal possession of the object.
“It is extremely unusual to try to prosecute a collector,” said Patty Gerstenblith, an expert on cultural heritage issues and a professor at DePaul University College of Law. “It shows how the willingness to enforce the law has evolved.”
In its warrant, the district attorney’s office cited email exchanges Mr. Mendelsohn had with experts in the field that made clear, it said, that he had been aware at the time he acquired the item that it had been looted. But Mr. Asner, his lawyer, said the cited emails had been taken out of context.
Mr. Asner said that in August of 2024, the investigators had referred to Mr. Mendelsohn as an innocent purchaser of the work. The prosecutors have countered that, as the investigation continued to develop evidence, including Mr. Mendelsohn’s emails, they became increasingly convinced he had not acted in good faith.
The site of Bubon is famous for an ancient imperial shrine known as a sebasteion, where at least 13 larger-than-life-size statues of emperors and their wives were erected from around AD 50 to 250 to venerate imperial power at a time when the region was part of Rome’s extended empire.
The site was pillaged in the late 1960s by local villagers and many valuable artifacts were trafficked by a network of smugglers, provenance falsifiers and gallery owners known for whitewashing stolen cultural objects, according to investigators with the Antiquities Trafficking Unit of the district attorney’s office.
Eight of the Bubon statues made it into the United States, according to the investigators. In recent years, the antiquities unit has seized and repatriated five of them, including one that was being exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Two more, in addition to the one held by Mr. Mendelsohn, remain under investigation.
The warrant for Mr. Mendelsohn’s arrest contains the most detailed explanation yet of how investigators believe the Bubon statues were looted from Turkey and trafficked by Turkish smugglers and Western dealers to museums and collectors in the United States and elsewhere.
Prosecutors said in the court papers that the statue, “Nude Emperor,” traveled through the antiquities black market from Turkey to London and finally to New York, where it was sold. The filing describes how dealers, curators and others promoted the statues, including them in exhibitions or catalogs, and thus giving them an appearance of propriety that burnished them for eventual sale, prosecutors said.
“Through this insidious sleight of hand, pillaged bronzes and fragments from Bubon, including Nude Emperor, entered American museums or private collections with a thin veneer of legitimacy, thereby increasing their value on the antiquities market,” the filing said.
But the investigators said it was well known in the antiquities world by the late 1980s that the sebasteion site had been “excavated illegally,” and that sculptures removed from there constituted stolen Turkish property.
In the decade after acquiring the statue, investigators say, Mr. Mendelsohn became increasingly aware that the looting of Bubon was a major issue for Turkish officials and antiquities experts. Nonetheless, they said, he “feverishly sought the advice” of art experts who could advise him how best to prepare for an approach by law enforcement.
One expert, Michael Padgett, a former museum curator, advised Mr. Mendelsohn to keep the fact that he owned “Nude Emperor” on the down-low, investigators said. “If you limit access to your emperor to dinner guests and clueless meter readers, you should be fine,” Mr. Padgett wrote in an email, according to the affidavit
Mr. Padgett declined to comment.
Mr. Asner said any anxiety shown in Mr. Mendelsohn’s communications did not reflect concern that the object had been stolen, only worry about the increasingly aggressive efforts by the Manhattan district attorney’s office to seize antiquities. Mr. Mendelsohn was consulting experts, he said, to gather evidence and find out where the statue had come from.
“In fact, Mr. Mendelsohn did not know whether the statue actually was from Bubon and still does not know whether it came from Bubon,” Mr. Asner said.
As part of their inquiry, investigators interviewed a local Turkish farmer who said he had looted the statue with his father in 1967 and identified the statue from a photo array shown to him by investigators. The identity of the emperor depicted is not clear, experts say.
Mr. Mendelsohn’s lawyers have said they had not been allowed to interview the farmer or see the array, but that their client would return the statue to Turkey if convinced by the evidence that it had been looted.
Investigators said they anticipated that local authorities in California would apprehend Mr. Mendelsohn on the criminal possession and conspiracy charges if he did not surrender.
The antiquities unit, led by Assistant District Attorney Matthew Bogdanos, was established in 2017 inside the district attorney’s office to track stolen art. Its investigations have led to the convictions of 18 traffickers and the indictment of seven others. The unit has seized objects from major museums and collectors, but most of those cases ended before criminal charges were brought because the targets chose to relinquish their suspect items.
In one case, Michael Steinhardt, a wealthy New York collector and philanthropist, surrendered stolen objects valued at $70 million and, as part of a legal agreement, was barred for life from acquiring any other ancient objects.
Mr. Mendelsohn is, among other things, chairman of a nonprofit organization he helped found called The Maestro Foundation that, according to its website, holds concerts and lends stringed instruments and bows to young musicians.
Graham Bowley is an investigative reporter covering the world of culture for The Times.
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