Investigators Say a High-Profile Dealer Trafficked 2,000 Looted Artifacts

In an arrest warrant for Edoardo Almagià, a Princeton-educated antiquities dealer, the Manhattan district attorney’s office detailed what it described as decades of illicit transactions.

Prosecutors in Manhattan obtained an arrest warrant on Thursday for a high-profile, Princeton-educated antiquities dealer now based in Italy, accusing the man in court papers of trafficking thousands of illicit artifacts valued at tens of millions of dollars.

The dealer, Edoardo Almagià, has been charged with conspiracy, taking part in a scheme to defraud and possessing stolen property owned by Italy. Matthew Bogdanos, the head of the Manhattan district attorney’s antiquities trafficking unit, appeared before a criminal court judge, Rachel Pauley, to obtain the warrant.

Next, the district attorney’s office will ask Interpol to file a red notice, which is an international arrest alert that would allow authorities around the world to detain Mr. Almagià, and work with Italian officials to begin extradition proceedings.

The 80-page warrant for Mr. Almagià’s arrest describes a debonair figure who sold and donated prized artifacts to important museums and collectors, but who also operated under a cloud after the Italian authorities came to suspect decades ago that he had dealt with tomb raiders.

Mr. Almagià, whose LinkedIn page says he lives in Rome, could not be reached for comment, but he has previously denied wrongdoing and suggested that efforts targeting him were the work of overzealous investigators.

“They’ve criminalized and destroyed the antiquities market,” he said in an interview with Princeton Alumni Weekly.

Prosecutors, however, depicted him in court papers as a dealer who operated brazenly as he illegally imported several items, including Roman sculptures and Etruscan pottery, during a long stretch of years when he lived and worked from apartments in Manhattan.

The investigators said Mr. Almagià kept important evidence of his illicit activities — a ledger of plundered items he had trafficked — in one apartment, hidden in a Renaissance-era chest beneath a marble statue of a deer. The arrest warrant said an “informant” had found the document some time ago and had brought it to a store to be photocopied, only to be interrupted by Mr. Almagià, who flew into a rage and assaulted him.

Prosecutors said their investigation began in 2018, adding that the antiquities trafficking unit had recovered 221 antiquities tied to Mr. Almagià that had a value of nearly $6 million.

Mr. Almagià and others, they wrote, had worked “to acquire antiquities stolen from Italy, market them as legal, display them openly in well-known institutions to increase their value, and then sell those antiquities for profit.”

Items were recovered from the Cleveland Museum of Art; the J. Paul Getty Museum; the Fordham Museum of Greek, Roman and Etruscan Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the art museum at Princeton University; and other institutions, prosecutors wrote.

Prosecutors also wrote that Mr. Almagià’s dealings were furthered by the “complicit assistance” of Michael Padgett, a former curator at the Princeton University Art Museum, who they said used his “reputation and contacts” to introduce Mr. Almagià into a world of prominent clients and curators at major museums.

Mr. Padgett, who is not facing any charges, responded to a request for comment by email with a statement: “I was not criminally complicit with Edoardo Almagià or anyone else. A similar accusation was made by an Italian prosecutor in 2009, when I was still at Princeton. After a thorough review by the University, I was exonerated of any wrongdoing and the investigation was dismissed by an Italian judge in October 2012. The dismissal was publicly announced, and I went back to my job, retiring in 2021.”

Much of the information in the warrant was gleaned from Mr. Almagià’s ledger, which prosecutors called the Green Book: a handwritten inventory said to list nearly 1,700 stolen antiquities purchased from tomb raiders and then sold from his apartment in Manhattan.

After attacking the informant copying the Green Book, prosecutors wrote, Mr. Almagià stormed off without realizing that dozens of pages from the ledger had already been printed and were stacked in the photocopier tray. Those were later turned over to law enforcement.

Mr. Almagià maintains a website that contains information about his history and interests. In one section, he writes that his passion since childhood has been the study of the ancient world and archaeology and describes visiting an excavation site among ruins in Libya as a child where he picked up fragments of an ancient jar.

In an interview with The New York Times in 2021, Mr. Almagià spoke of what he viewed as the misplaced priorities involved in trying to prosecute antiquities dealers. “So much money is being spent to persecute dealers,” he said, “when it can be used to repair Italian museums, where so many similar items are already at risk.”

He also appeared to justify the display of plundered materials, saying: “There are objects in U.S. museums that are undoubtedly stolen from excavations but when they are not objects of the greatest importance, I think they should remain there so they can be appreciated by American visitors.”

Mr. Almagià fled the United States in 2006 after Homeland Security agents and an officer of the Italian police searched his Upper East Side apartment, according to the warrant. He surrendered six items and made arrangements to return a seventh, according to court papers, but then left the country, hiding some antiquities and documents in a storage facility and putting others in a shipping container bound for Naples.

Tipped off by the informant, the Italian authorities later seized that container, recovering dozens of antiquities and thousands of documents, the prosecutors wrote.