Out of Egypt

Van Rijn's St. Louis sojourn — marked by the purchase of a $25,000 personal gym, lavish Champagne-and-caviar parties at his white-columned manse, frequent expeditions to the antique shops on Euclid Avenue and a buying spree that saw him purchase the city's supply of Mickey Mouse paraphernalia — ended after six months, with a U.S. Customs Service investigation into a burgeoning heap of debts.

The Customs Service probe was prompted by a complaint from local defense attorney Scott Rosenblum, to whose client, well-to-do area businessman Ray Niemeyer, van Rijn had attempted to sell alleged forgeries of works by El Greco and Rembrandt.

"We'd like to talk to him, but we've got to find him first," then-Customs Service agent Allan Severson told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1992. "This guy is pretty slick. He seems to have the modus operandi of going into a place, doing his business and slipping away."

Reached for comment for this story, van Rijn discounts accusations of wrongdoing in the Gateway City: "Everything was cleared, everything was paid," he writes in an ellipsis-pocked e-mail. "The most hurting was a guy who said I didn't pay for my gymnasium... Poor soul... His fifteen minutes."

Eventually van Rijn would find himself on the receiving end of a deal gone bad. Following a lengthy lawsuit regarding looted Cypriot mosaics, he cut a deal with British investigators, agreeing to help track down stolen artwork in return for protection.

In 1999 he set up his Web site as a vehicle to expose looted artworks via a network of old smuggling chums. Today van Rijn is looked upon as a well-connected and prolific — if bombastic and not always accurate — provocateur.

"Would I touch him with a ten-foot pole?" posits former Metropolitan Museum of Art director Thomas Hoving. "I'd hit him over the head with a ten-foot pole."

"He has a very mixed reputation," adds an attorney familiar with van Rijn's history who declined to be identified for fear of ending up on the receiving end of the Dutchman's ire. "I will say on the other hand: Sometimes you find stuff on that site that is correct. It's a minefield: He could be right, he could be wrong, but I wouldn't take anything he says as gospel truth."

One of van Rijn's favorite targets has been the Aboutaam brothers, to whom he refers as "the Aboutermites." He accuses them of everything from antiquities smuggling to having connections to the Lebanese terrorist organization Hezbollah.

The Aboutaams responded by accusing van Rijn of attempted extortion. Last year, in fact, a Swiss court jailed him for eight days on charges of extortion and calumny, the Swiss equivalent of slander. In the end, however, the court ruled it didn't have jurisdiction over van Rijn, a Dutchman, and dismissed the case.

"He was basically trying to blackmail us," says Hicham Aboutaam, who adds that associates of van Rijn have also solicited money in exchange for stemming the tide of negative publicity. "He was taken semi-seriously in the beginning when he launched the site, but not any more."

Retorts van Rijn via e-mail: "They can (pardon my French) fuck themselves. If I was poor and desperate, I would prefer to starve [rather than take] one penny from the Devil or anybody else."

Unbowed, van Rijn says that he has sources familiar with the theft, and that the Aboutaams knew the Ka-Nefer-Nefer mask was stolen property when they sold it to the Saint Louis Art Museum.

Reached via e-mail, Maarten Raven affirms his e-mail to van Rijn, adding, "I know for sure [the theft] must have been January 1986 or one of the following years."

Raven bases this assertion on his own excavations at Saqqara. "Objects of our 1985 season were included in the theft," the archaeologist explains. "Of course, we reported this to the local authorities of the antiquities organization, who made a full inventory of the [facility] and confirmed that objects from [Goneim's] Sekhemkhet excavations had also fallen victim to the robbery."

Raven cautions that he can't say for certain whether the Ka-Nefer-Nefer mask was among the looted objects. "I cannot confirm that the mask now in St. Louis was one of the pieces," he says. "[But] [a]s far as I know, this mask was never brought to the Cairo Museum [where other objects from Goneim's excavations are on display]."

Van Rijn has also garnered support from Ton Cremers, founder of the Museum Security Network, an online clearinghouse for information about stolen art.

"It is quite obvious that this acquisition was against the law...and against basic moral principles," Cremers writes in an e-mail he sent to Saint Louis Art Museum director Brent Benjamin and also copied to Riverfront Times. "It is totally flabbergasting that...requests for information about the provenance of a very valuable, and rare, AND stolen Egyptian mask are ignored."

Additionally, van Rijn's online campaign has caught the attention of Hany Hanna, general director of the department of conservation for Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities.