The Roman was gone.
When I visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art recently, the marble bust of a commanding Roman man I was seeking was missing, along with its pedestal. Only the label, which dated the piece to the 2nd century CE, remained on the gallery wall.
The sculpture had been acquired from Phoenix Ancient Art, a gallery that claimed to adhere to “the antiquities trade’s most vigorous and stringent procedures of due diligence.” The gallery highlighted its efforts to ensure that artifacts had left their countries of origin well before export bans were enacted. With these strong provenances, or ownership histories, Phoenix assured that its antiquities were “collected in full compliance with all legal and ethical rules.”
The Roman bust was considered beyond reproach. However, it was seized by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, who provided a list indicating they had confiscated nine Phoenix artifacts from The Met, valued at nearly $5 million, since 2021. (Three of these were loans.)
A spokesperson from The Met confirmed the Roman bust was repatriated to the Republic of Türkiye this February. The fate of other impressive antiquities sold by the gallery, all with seemingly credible provenances and many still displayed in other American museums, remains uncertain.
Phoenix Ancient Art did not respond to a request for comment on this story.
Ali Aboutaam played a central role in the establishment of Phoenix Ancient Art. Born in 1965, Aboutaam began working in his father’s antiquities business in Beirut during his teenage years. The business thrived in a land rich with artifacts from Roman merchants who once traded luxury goods from the East to Europe. Many years later, these same Lebanese ports continued to serve as launch points for antiquities smuggled from Syria, Turkey, and Iraq.
Becoming an international antiquities dealer became challenging when Lebanon’s civil war started in 1975 and turned impossible when the country banned antiquities exports in 1988. The Aboutaam family left Lebanon, gaining Canadian citizenship in 1990. There, Aboutaam established a company, Hermes Numismatique, which soon received a shipment of 5th-century CE mosaic panels from Lebanon. The largest was an 11-foot-long swirl of geometric patterns that once adorned an entire floor, resembling a stone carpet.
Canadian authorities seized these mosaics after concluding they had originally decorated homes and churches in northwestern Syria. The mosaics were returned in 1999. Other northern Syrian mosaics sold by Aboutaam during the same period remain in museum collections, including Geneva’s Musée d’Art et d’Histoire. (The museum stated they are conducting a “comprehensive provenance research project” on several items, including the mosaic.)
Media reports on the mosaic seizures did not mention Aboutaam’s name. His involvement was only apparent to those who examined court filings and company records. Starting anew, Aboutaam dissolved Hermes and relocated his operations to Geneva. In 1995, he founded Phoenix Ancient Art and opened an elegant gallery in the city’s historic center.
Soon after, Italian authorities conducted the first of many seizures. Phoenix’s storerooms contained hundreds of artifacts looted from southern Italy and smuggled into Switzerland through known trafficking networks. Some of these pieces had already been sold to elite New York City collectors Michael Steinhardt and Shelby White, who both had to return purchases worth millions of dollars. These investigations continue; just last year, The Met returned two artifacts looted from Italy and donated to the museum by the Aboutaams.
Aboutaam was not charged in connection with these seizures, as authorities could not determine if he knowingly purchased stolen goods.
Consider the 251 artifacts Phoenix surrendered to Italian authorities in 2009. Investigators traced some of these items to a temple site overlooking the sea in southern Italy. The looters, who tunneled into the site from a nearby house, found so many artifacts that they laid tracks and used a small miner’s cart to haul them out. Still covered in dirt, the artifacts were packed into fruit crates and sent across the border.
Investigators seized the antiquities while they were still in the crates. The gallery issued a press release claiming it had bought the artifacts “a long time ago, without knowing of their doubtful provenance.” They did not explain why its staff, supposedly committed to legal and ethical sales, were not suspicious about artifacts that clearly had just been unearthed.
Was Aboutaam truly deceived by his suppliers? According to journalists Peter Watson and Cecilia Todeschini, as well as my own research into other lawsuits, Phoenix often claimed that many of the antiquities it was selling belonged to Tanis Antiquities, a shell company registered in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. The trail went cold when investigators could not identify the company’s owner or how it acquired the artifacts.
In search of answers, I spent days in the records room of the Southern District of New York, examining every case I could find involving Aboutaam and Phoenix. Eventually, a deposition hidden in the filings of a 2003 case revealed that Tanis’ owner was Aboutaam himself.
The Syrian mosaic incident seemingly taught Aboutaam the risks of having his name on the paperwork. After that, he regularly purchased antiquities through shell companies, which then consigned their pieces to Phoenix, allowing Aboutaam to deny any knowledge of their origins when authorities found evidence of looting.
When Aboutaam’s parents died in a Swissair plane crash in 1998, the strategy became even simpler. If caught with a looted artifact, Aboutaam often claimed he had inherited the piece from his father and knew nothing about its origins. This was the case with three sculptures repatriated by Swiss authorities in 2024 after discovering they had been stolen from Iraqi museums in the mid-1990s. Aboutaam blamed his father, despite having testified in the 2003 case that his father had retired in 1992.
Aboutaam’s methods for evading the law remained hidden in 1998 when the Saint Louis Art Museum purchased an Egyptian mummy mask from Phoenix for $499,000. Created around the 13th century BCE, the mask was made of linen, plaster, gold, paint, and colored glass, depicting a woman with refined features.
Soon after the acquisition was revealed, Egyptian authorities identified the mask. It had been excavated in the necropolis of Saqqara, near Cairo, in 1952. Records indicated the mask had been stored for decades until it was found missing during a routine check. Egypt demanded its return.
The museum refused, claiming the mask had been exported to Switzerland shortly after its discovery and held in private collections. They argued Egypt’s records were simply incorrect.
The museum’s defense relied on information from Phoenix, including an affidavit from a Swiss collector who claimed to have seen the mask in a gallery in Brussels in 1952. Phoenix also presented testimony from a fashion designer who said she bought the mask in the early 1960s and sold it to Aboutaam’s father in 1997.
Neither the designer nor anyone else could provide an export permit, old photograph, sales record, or any third-party document to definitively prove the mask’s supposed European history. When journalist Malcolm Gay tracked down the designer’s son, he stated his mother hadn’t owned an Egyptian funerary mask — or any antiquities at all.
The mask remained in Saint Louis even after an Egyptian court convicted Aboutaam in 2004 of conspiring to buy antiquities stolen from Saqqara. The trial was held in absentia, allowing Aboutaam to argue the accusations lacked merit — even though prosecutors played recordings they claimed were wire-tapped calls between Aboutaam and the smugglers.
Over time, a pattern became apparent. Phoenix offered its clients highly sought-after artifacts with provenances based on the assurances of one or two individuals. The more a buyer desired a piece, the less rigorous they seemed to be about the provenance.
One of the largest cases began in 2003 when Michael Bennett, the Cleveland Museum of Art’s curator of ancient art, visited Phoenix’s Geneva gallery. Staff removed a black cloth to reveal a life-sized bronze sculpture of Apollo Sauroktonos (Lizard-Slayer). It depicted the young god playfully poking at a lizard, foreshadowing his future triumphs over more formidable foes. Bennett was so taken by the sculpture’s beauty that he had to catch his breath.
When Bennett asked about the sculpture’s provenance, Phoenix connected him with a lawyer named Ernst-Ulrich Walter, who claimed to have seen the Apollo during childhood visits in the 1930s to a family estate in eastern Germany. Bennett visited the estate, where Walter showed him the crumbling remains of a fountain at the garden’s bottom, where the Apollo had supposedly stood.
Walter had reacquired the estate, lost by his family during the war, in the early 1990s. He said he had found the Apollo in a pile of rubbish, assumed it was just a garden ornament, and sold it to a dealer for a few thousand dollars.
Walter could not provide any documentation to support his story. Nevertheless, the museum purchased the Apollo for a reported $5 million.
While working on her 2024 MA thesis, graduate student Sarah Krienen decided to investigate Walter’s story. Local property records indicated the estate was a large farm, not the elegant art-filled country estate Walter described. Additionally, the crumbling structure Walter showed Bennett was likely a silo used for animal feed, not a fountain.
Walter had died, but his friends told Krienen he faced severe financial troubles when he spoke to Bennett. Walter even told a friend that a Lebanese dealer once offered to pay him to lie about an artifact’s provenance.
A recent examination of the Apollo provided another clue. The hollow sculpture held clay fragments that might have come from the molds used to shape its bronze. Scientists compared the elements in this clay with a database of tens of thousands of pottery samples from around the Mediterranean. The closest match was from Sicily.
The Apollo continues to be prominently displayed at the entrance to Cleveland’s galleries of ancient art. Keeping it there requires believing all of Walter’s dubious stories and dismissing the possibility that it was trafficked from southern Italy, like so many other antiquities seized from Phoenix.
For years, Phoenix had skeptical observers, but proving what occurred behind the scenes was impossible. This changed just before Christmas in 2016, when a Land Rover registered to Phoenix and driven by a gallery employee passed through a checkpoint on the France-Switzerland border. The station, located in a southern Geneva suburb, was usually unmanned. This time, customs officers appeared as the SUV rolled past and signaled it to stop.
This was not a random spot check. Swiss and Belgian authorities had launched investigations after Phoenix displayed a large Sumerian sculpture at an art fair in Brussels earlier that year. The Islamic State had been looting archaeological sites in Syria, and authorities suspected Phoenix might be selling the loot, possibly financing terrorism.
The officers searched the Land Rover and discovered a Byzantine lamp broken into five pieces. Under Swiss cultural property law, which took effect in 2005, the driver should have stopped at the border to declare the lamp and pay import duty, a small percentage of its value.
Failing to declare the lamp was a minor infraction, and the driver was released after a few hours. However, investigators were intrigued by something else found in the car: receipts showing that Walter Haberkorn, an art restorer sometimes employed by Phoenix, had rented a locker at Geneva’s Flexbox Self Storage.
Flexbox was the type of place where people stored furniture after a bad breakup, not a secured, climate-controlled facility for a restorer. Even if Haberkorn wasn’t particular about storage, why were his receipts in Phoenix’s car?
Investigators decided to search the storage locker. When they arrived at Flexbox the next morning, the space was empty. Security footage showed the driver, shortly after his release, carting away its contents. Curious about what Aboutaam didn’t want them to find, authorities expanded their investigation.
They discovered that Flexbox wasn’t the only site of activity that night. Aboutaam packed up antiquities from his apartment, while the driver collected pieces not only from Flexbox but also from Haberkorn’s workshop. All these antiquities were placed in a new storage locker. When authorities raided it, they found artifacts hastily packed into improvised containers, including grocery store produce boxes. The heaviest piece, a marble bust of Emperor Hadrian, was still entangled in a carrying sling made from blue Ikea bags.
When authorities seized Phoenix’s files and computers, they found that the gallery’s inventory management system recorded the reassuring provenance information customers received. Investigators realized this reassurance was an illusion when they found a hidden Excel file containing the truth about where, when, and from whom Aboutaam had purchased many of his antiquities in recent years.
Aboutaam himself helped investigators understand his schemes in a confession he gave in 2017. Seemingly to defend himself from suspicions of working with terrorists, Aboutaam explained he had purchased the Sumerian sculpture from one of his regular suppliers. (I found no indication that Phoenix ever sold anything sourced from the Islamic State. Several experts I spoke to regarded the Sumerian sculpture in question as an obvious fake.)
This supplier’s name is redacted from court documents. Aboutaam described him as a merchant born in northern Syria in the 1970s, holding Syrian and Ukrainian passports, who had lived in Beirut since the mid-2000s. They knew each other because their fathers had worked together — Aboutaam’s father bought antiquities smuggled by the merchant’s father into Lebanon from Syria.
Aboutaam explained how the transactions worked. The merchant would email or text photos of antiquities to Aboutaam. After choosing what he wanted, Aboutaam had the merchant hand the pieces over to Adnan Mazeh, a Lebanese man living in Romania. Mazeh traveled to Lebanon three or four times a year to collect Aboutaam’s purchases, smuggled them across the Swiss border, and delivered them to Aboutaam in Geneva.
As many new acquisitions from the merchant or Aboutaam’s other suppliers arrived broken and covered in soil, Aboutaam sent them to Haberkorn for restoration. When authorities raided Haberkorn’s workshop, they found antiquities soaking in an old bathtub, with a toothbrush on hand to scrub them clean. Photos from Haberkorn’s computer showed he had cleaned and repaired many newly looted antiquities.
Once restorations were complete, Aboutaam crafted false provenances to transform looted artifacts into high-end collectibles. Many of these provenances supposedly began in the 1960s, placing the artifact in the possession of someone identifiable but not easily researched. Lebanese dealers were a popular choice, as no one would expect to find a complete inventory of their stock after so many decades of war and displacement.
The provenances then described the antiquity’s export to Switzerland, where they were claimed to have passed through the hands of a collector or two — all deceased, of course. These transactions were always private sales, leaving no public record.
Finally, the provenances named one of a few Swiss dealers who had supposedly purchased the antiquities, including Charles Roland Ansermet, Andrea Zabbeni, and André Lagneau. Aboutaam paid these dealers to tell customers they had once owned the artifacts. Old letters and sales receipts were sometimes faked to support their stories. Ansermet, Zabbeni, and Lagneau were convicted on charges related to their involvement. Fiorella Cottier-Angeli and Emmanuel Koutoulakis were also named in connection with the scheme, but not formally charged.
Some of these dealers were also convicted alongside Aboutaam during the Swiss investigation. Lagneau, for instance, admitted to fabricating fake provenances for Phoenix since 1992. His name appeared in the provenance of The Met’s Roman bust, which he claimed to have purchased from his friend Pierre Sciclounoff in the 1970s.
Sciclounoff, a lawyer who amassed wealth advising clients on securing funds in Swiss banks, decorated the foyer of his Geneva mansion with Roman busts. The Met’s bust did not appear in photographs of this display. Nor could it be found in other images of Sciclounoff’s frequently photographed mansion, where he often hosted musical evenings for Europe’s social elite. The absence of the bust from Sciclounoff’s photos does not prove that Lagneau’s story was false, but since Sciclounoff left no relevant inventory records when he died in 1997, there was nothing to stop Lagneau from claiming the collection included some overlooked items.
Sciclounoff’s name appears in several provenances provided by Phoenix, including a Greek vase purchased by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and a Roman sarcophagus now at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Lagneau’s name is a cornerstone of the provenance of more artifacts from Phoenix now in American museums, including an Assyrian statuette and a Roman mosaic in Houston, a Greek lamp at Harvard, and a Sumerian sculpture in the Saint Louis Art Museum.
As of press time, neither the Saint Louis nor the Cleveland museum had responded to my requests for comment. Representatives from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and Harvard Art Museums stated that they are continuing to research the provenance of their Phoenix artifacts.
Aboutaam was previously ordered in 2021 to pay $4.5 million in back taxes and $2 million in fines for failing to pay customs duty on his imports. In January 2023, he pleaded guilty to violating the law on the transfer of cultural properties. Due to Aboutaam’s cooperation, the court gave him a light sentence: only 18 months, which he wouldn’t have to serve unless he violated probation.
Aboutaam also agreed to surrender around 60 artifacts for repatriation, including a Roman sarcophagus from Turkey and 15 antiquities from Greece. The prosecutor warned this didn’t mean he believed all the pieces in Phoenix’s stock had legal origins, but that he simply accepted the impossibility of fully verifying the provenances of so many thousands of artifacts.
Only a few English-language media outlets reported Aboutaam’s conviction, and none detailed the investigation’s findings. The lack of reporting was partly due to the difficulty of obtaining information. Switzerland releases only anonymized versions of penal judgments, and the court documents were riddled with blanks in place of the names of witnesses, accomplices, and businesses.
Fortunately, a pair of American collectors sued Swiss authorities over the temporary confiscation of some antiquities consigned to Phoenix. Their court filings included enough unredacted documents from the Swiss investigation for me to determine who was behind the blanks.
After piecing together the details from these investigations, it’s evident that museums and collectors should be wary of a Phoenix Ancient Art provenance if it relies on the testimony of anyone who might have been paid to lie. Although it’s been over three years since Aboutaam’s conviction, as far as I know, The Met is the only U.S. museum to have returned an artifact related to the case.
Given the layers of deception that Aboutaam layered over his purchases, this is a complex task — especially since Aboutaam died this May. I wish the museums luck and will continue to monitor the situation.
