Out of Egypt

"The equivalent figures [to Marion True] in other museums who've bought [antiquities] up to the present have been given pause. They're really being much more cautious," says Bell. "One of the [punitive] methods that the Italians are going to be using is helping those museums that have reasonable acquisitions policies, and not helping the ones that don't: not making [curatorial] loans. The result of this, I hope, is going to be that museums adopt written policies that are acceptable to the countries of origin, and that reflect the actual circumstances of the market, which is pretty murky and dismal."

If the Egyptian government awarded the mask to M. Zakaria Goneim in 1952, as a footnote to the provenance speculates, no law prohibits the Saint Louis Art Museum from possessing it — even if the archaeologist smuggled it out of the country at the time.

"If it was illegally exported in the '50s from Egypt, that doesn't make it illegal in the United States," says Gerstenblith. "That would require U.S. courts to apply the law of a different country on a U.S. institution."

But if the mask belonged to the Egyptian state when it left the country, Egypt could make a legal claim on Ka-Nefer-Nefer.

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At any given time, there are only a few galleries worldwide that deal with antiquities on any significant scale. Of those, the elite dealers are the ones whose trade includes the unique, hard-to-find or never-before-seen. Regarded in another light, there's strong incentive for dealers — and museum curators — to traffic in plundered goods.

"Many curators would think: 'I really want the stuff. My job is to buy; it is to acquire. If I'm not building my collection, I'm not doing my job,'" says DePaul's Patty Gerstenblith. "It's very tempting for them to come in with great intentions, but when push comes to shove and they really want the piece, some of them will succumb to temptation and not ask too many hard questions."

Oiled by gentleman's agreements in the tony galleries of Geneva, London and New York, dealers closely guard their sources. A collector's request for anonymity is often honored as a matter of delicacy, and many dealers argue that merely because an item does not have a clear provenance does not necessarily mean it's been looted: Many objects passed into private collections before source countries tightened export laws.

In the late 1990s, Phoenix Ancient Art's aggressive buying habits vaulted the dealership to the top of the antiquities food chain. Founded in the 1960s by Sleiman Aboutaam, the enterprise passed to his sons Hicham and Ali when their father died in a 1998 plane crash. With galleries in Geneva and New York, the Aboutaams have sold pieces to the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Cleveland Museum of Art.

They have also sold several artifacts whose provenances have subsequently been challenged, leading some in the antiquities field to regard the partnership with suspicion.

"St. Louis bought something from these guys? Boy, they should have known a lot better than that," marvels Thomas Hoving, former director of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. "As a museum director and as a curator, the very name 'Aboutaam' — bells would have started ringing immediately."

In the years since the Saint Louis Art Museum bought the Ka-Nefer-Nefer mask, both Ali and Hicham Aboutaam have been convicted on smuggling charges. In July 2004 a Manhattan federal judge sentenced Hicham Aboutaam to a year's probation and fined him $5,000 for fraudulently importing to the U.S. an Iranian drinking vessel that dated from 700 B.C. Declaring that the ceremonial vessel, or rhyton, originated in Syria, Aboutaam had sold it through his gallery to a private collector. Though the attorney who prosecuted the case initially charged Aboutaam with illegal importation, a felony, the dealer ultimately pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor charge of falsifying a customs document.

Earlier that same year an Egyptian court sentenced Ali Aboutaam in absentia to fifteen years in prison in an antiques-smuggling case. Aboutaam, who lives in Geneva, has denied the charge.

Reached by phone at his New York gallery, Hicham Aboutaam disputes the Egyptian court's ruling against his brother. "It's all false," says Aboutaam, who adds that an appeals court recently ordered a retrial in the cases of several of Ali's co-defendants.

(Asked to provide documentary evidence, Hicham Aboutaam sent what he says is a sworn statement from an attorney who confirms the appeals court's ruling. The Egyptian Embassy in Washington, D.C., was unable to confirm the status of the case.)

The day before Hicham Aboutaam pleaded guilty to the smuggling charge in New York, Phoenix Ancient Art sold a bronze statue of Apollo to the Cleveland Museum of Art. Soon after the purchase, allegations surfaced that the statue's provenance was false. The Aboutaams have stood by the artifact's purported history, as have Cleveland museum officials.

A similar scenario played out in 2001, when the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth quickly returned a Sumerian statue it had purchased for $2.7 million from Phoenix Ancient Art.