Page 10 - Bloomberg Businessweek July 2018

Bloomberg Businessweek
THE HEIST ISSUE

THE Fon his laptop, waiting for a chance to snatch ancient
or days, Christos Tsirogiannis had been hitting refresh
ART artifacts from one of the world’s biggest auctioneers. At
the dining room table of his tidy house on a quiet street
in Cambridge, England, the 45-year-old archaeologist
VIGILANTE was stalking Christie’s website, where the catalog for an
upcoming antiquities auction in New York would soon be
posted. It was important to his vigilante mission that he
see the lots quickly. Tsirogiannis had work to do to repeat
previous exploits in which he’d cost Christie’s and rivals
Sotheby’s and Bonhams millions of dollars in sales—and
AND THE the sale was in less than a month.
CASE his 2-year-old daughter at school and bicycling home,
Then, on a sunny March morning, after dropping off
he returned to his laptop and tried again. The catalog
appeared. He clicked through the pages, eyeballing the
marble statues and clay vases as they flashed by. At Lot 26,
he stopped. “That … is … an interesting one,” he said. He
OF THE moved his cursor toward the image of an amphora listed
EROTIC was expected to sell for as much as $50,000.
as “Property from a Manhattan Private Collection” that

More than a decade ago, Tsirogiannis started building a
secret archive of tens of thousands of Polaroids and other
VASE photos from the artifact underground, where illicitly dug 63
pots and statues are laundered as they pass from tomb
raiders to smugglers to dealers and then on to museums,
collectors, and auction houses. Most of his images were
seized in police raids and given to him by prosecutors
in Greece and Italy. Working independently, Tsirogiannis
matches the photos with objects that surface at auctions
or museums and then works to repatriate the pieces. It
was easy to see why the 2,500-year-old vase jogged his
memory, decorated as it was with an erotic daisy chain
of men, dogs, and one woman. He thought he’d seen the
amphora in the section of his archive dedicated to con-
victed Italian trafficker Giacomo Medici. “There is a simi-
lar one in Medici, definitely, but maybe not that particular
one,” he said. “We will see.”
Tsirogiannis takes great caution to keep the images
from prying eyes. The archive itself—30,000-plus pic-
tures depicting more than 100,000 objects—is a digital
Christos Tsirogiannis has one, taking up a half-terabyte on a server in an undis-
collected tens of thousands closed country in the South Pacific, accessed with pass-
of images from the artifact words he changes twice a week. “There is no actual copy
underground with a singular with me or in my house or in my working space,” he said.
goal: Stop auction houses from
Although he invited me to watch him work, something
CREDITS CREDITS CREDITS Photograph by Kate Peters he hasn’t allowed a journalist to do before, Tsirogiannis
selling looted ancient art

refused to let me in his house when he accessed the
By Vernon Silver
archive. He’d even downloaded part of it to his laptop
before my arrival to avoid being connected to the
July 2, 2018