Prosecutors in New York announced on Friday that they had repatriated thirty antiquities to Cambodia and Indonesia that had been stolen, sold, or transferred illegally by networks of American traffickers and dealers.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg stated that the antiquities were estimated to be worth $3 million in total.
In two recent repatriation ceremonies, Bragg declared in a statement that he had returned 27 items—three to Jakarta and one to Phnom Penh—including a stone bas-relief depicting two royal figures from the Majapahit empire (the 13th and 16th centuries) that had been stolen from Indonesia and a bronze image of the Hindu deity Shiva (also known as the “Shiva Triad”) that had been taken from Cambodia.
Bragg accused art dealers Subhash Kapoor, an Indian-American, and American Nancy Wiener in the illegal trafficking of the antiquities.
Kapoor, accused of running a network trafficking in items stolen in Southeast Asia for sale in his Manhattan gallery, has been the target of a US justice investigation dubbed “Hidden Idol” for more than a decade.
Arrested in 2011 in Germany, Kapoor was sent back to India where he was tried and sentenced in November 2022 to 13 years in prison.
Responding to a US indictment for conspiracy to traffic in stolen works of art, Kapoor denied the charges.
“We are continuing to investigate the wide-ranging trafficking networks that… target Southeast Asian antiquities,” Bragg said in the statement.
“There is clearly still much more work to do.”
Wiener, sentenced in 2021 for trafficking in stolen works of art, sought to sell the bronze Shiva but eventually donated the piece to the Denver (Colorado) Museum of Art in 2007.
The antiquity was seized by the New York courts in 2023.
During Bragg’s tenure, the Antiquities Trafficking Unit has recovered nearly 1,200 items stolen from more than 25 countries and valued at more than $250 million.
New York is a major trafficking hub, and several works have been seized in recent years from museums, including the prestigious Metropolitan Museum of Art, and from collectors.
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