2023-09-02 15:47:43
The cross : How did you find out that the British Museum was being robbed?
Ittai Gradel: I started buying from a certain “sultan1966” on eBay in 2014. He was selling quality items at very low prices. For example, I had bought a cameo for 15 pounds, which I sold two weeks later for 2,000 pounds.
I said to myself: if the objects have been stolen and he is aware of it, why would he sell them so cheaply? So I asked him where these pieces came from: he explained to me that he had inherited them from his grandfather, who ran a bazaar in York during the interwar period. I checked the name of his grandfather, he had existed, I had no reason to be suspicious: obviously, he simply had no awareness of the interest of these objects.
I first became suspicious in 2016, when he put up for sale the fragment of a cameo that I recognized as part of the British Museum’s 1926 catalog. I have a good photographic memory and it’s my specialty, so I know this document. But I imagined it was stolen before his grandfather died. There was therefore no urgency to contact the museum or to investigate, as there was no imminent risk to the collection.
Same feeling when he put up for sale a cameo in sardonyx, which he quickly withdrew from sale, and which, again, appeared in the catalog of the museum. He told me that this cameo belonged to his sister and that he had made a mistake by putting it up for sale.
Why did you wait until 2021 to alert the museum?
I. G. : In May 2020, the museum posted the recent photo of the cameo on its site, which this seller said belonged to his sister. I then understood that the theft did not go back to the time of his grandfather but that it was recent. I understood that he had therefore lied.
I started checking other things. I realized that the name he gave me didn’t match the name on his bank account given on the eBay receipts: Peter Higgs. But Peter Higgs was a curator at the British Museum.
And his Twitter account had the same name as this eBay account: sultan1966. As I wrote in my February 2021 letter to Jonathan Williams (the director of the collections of the British Museum, Editor’s note), the fact that this seller was selling these items at very low prices made me think that these few sales were just the tip of the iceberg, and that he must be making money selling large quantities of parts. Which turned out to be correct.
How do you explain that such disappearances were possible?
I. G. : To me, that means a lot of the museum’s collection was uncatalogued. This was confirmed to me by a former head of the museum’s Greco-Roman Antiquities department, whom I knew. Some only had one line of description, and sometimes, he told me, certain items had been purchased and referenced in groups, making it totally impossible to identify them.
The worst part of this story is undoubtedly the reaction, or rather the absence of reaction, from the director of the museum. After reading my email and thanking me, Jonathan Williams never contacted me for information about my charges.
On the contrary, he replied to me four and a half months later that everything was in order, in July 2021: ” The museume conducted a thorough investigation, including a forensic review, which concluded that the objects involved are all accounted for and that no member of museum staff was suspected of wrongdoing. The investigation also considered relevant security measures and found that procedures are sound and the collection is protected. » It was his only answer.
It took me contacting a member of the British Museum’s board in October 2022 to get things moving. He immediately forwarded my message to the Chairman of the Board, George Osborne, before I contacted him myself directly in January 2023.
From what I’ve read of Hartwig Fisher’s statements(director of the museum who resigned at the end of August, editor’s note), he seemed obviously not to know the file and not to have read what I had sent him. His resignation is in this sense tragic. On the other hand, Jonathan Williams knew very well what he was getting at. He decided to take a step back when he should be fired. They both failed in their professional duty to protect the museum and its collection.
Are you now collaborating with the police?
I. G. : I was contacted by the police in March 2023 and I have collaborated with them since that date. I was also contacted at that time, or possibly in April, by the museum and by Peter Higgs’ successor. Our relations are very good. I brought back 57 of the pieces I had bought on eBay; I sold 10 of them, which are all traceable, and I forgot three at home. So I’ll give it to them on my next visit.
I have a batch of 150 others left, which the museum is investigating. For the moment, the financial question has not been discussed with the museum. But this act is really cathartic because these last years have been morally very hard: I knew I had bought stolen pieces and I was therefore morally complicit, which is traumatic for a lover of museums and Antiquity like me, but no one wanted to believe me. Today, helping staff find lost items is therapeutic for me.
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