$35 sculpture found at an Austin Goodwill was looted from a museum during WWII
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“At that point, I realized I was probably going to need some help,” Young says. “I was probably going to need an attorney.”
So she hired a lawyer in New York who specializes in international art law, Leila Amineddoleh.
I don't really understand why it would be hard or complicated, unless she wanted a payout.
She 100% did the right thing here.
And frankly she deserves a payout for all of the legwork.
> She was in possession of a looted piece of ancient art. She couldn't keep it. She couldn't sell it. And giving it back to its rightful owners was a lot harder than it sounds.
Why are you building up a false narrative?
- If you find £10,000 cash in the street, do you keep it?
- If you find a watch in the street, do you keep it?
- If you bought a laptop from your cousin Vinny for $50 and found out it was stolen, do you keep it?
In my country of residence, all of these are crimes (theft by finding / knowingly handling stolen property).
Obviously, someone could choose to keep their mouth shut... but that would not change the fact of it being a crime punishable by law.
I'm willing to keep found treasure as one of my 3.
Everyone here is discussing the situation, given the story reported. What else do we, armchair critics, have to go on?
The story was ambiguous. Don't pretend it wasn't, and don't turn that into a giant strawman.
> What else do we, armchair critics, have to go on?
Everything outside of the article, the sum of our experience with the way the world works. Our experience with the way people work, the way people will give accounts of their actions that make themselves look good. The way the "telephone game" works, where the more people something goes through, the more uncertainty there is. Presumably, the journalist was told by the woman that she believed she couldn't keep it, yes? But the journalist didn't actually quote what she said. The journalist paraphrased what she said instead, rephrased it in his own words. This is generally fine, but you have to remain cognizant of the fact that it isn't precisely what she said. The comment I responded to claimed "She specifically stated this in her article", which simply isn't true. That commenter failed to perceive the difference between somebody being quoted, and somebody's statements being paraphrased. Even when you trust the journalist to act in good faith, there is a big difference between quoting somebody and rephrasing what they said.
Here are some things you could know, if you bothered to read up on the matter: Ludwig I never invaded Italy, never sacked Rome, but did visit Italy as was the fashion of anybody in Europe who had the means to do so. He is known to have purchased numerous artifacts and works of art from wealthy Italian collectors and dealers, which might include this bust.
I doubt I would involve lawyers across multiple nations if I ever encountered such a thing. Preserve it, enjoy it, and donate it to a major museum in my home nation when I die. It will find its way to a rightful home.
But supposing she was looking for a payout in this instance, is it fair to characterize looking for a payout as "trying to do a bad thing"? I don't think so, no. She may well have been within her legal rights to seek a payout. It seems safe to presume she had at least some legal right to the bust, since the deal she came to with the German museum was not simply return it immediately.
The article claims "Young had a problem: She was in possession of a looted piece of ancient art. She couldn't keep it. She couldn't sell it." But the article doesn't directly quote her saying this. It's conceivable she felt she was morally or ethically obliged to return it. Or maybe she incorrectly believed she was legally obliged to return it, and learned differently only after hiring the lawyer.
* How is it going to be transported? Squashing it into airplane luggage is probably not a good idea, neither is sending it via a parcel.
* What happens if something happens to it during transport? Generally works of art are insured before they are being transported. Do you know insurers though? Before you insure it, you need to determine the value.
* For very important works of art, countries might put restrictions onto exports. Not sure if this includes the US, but customs are certainly an important question.
* You might get sued by the rightful owners for wrong handling... ideally you want an agreement that releases you from any requirements to pay for damages to the object.
* Ideally the insurance, transport, etc is paid by the rightful owners, which would be good to have in a contract. How do you enforce that they really pay? Ideally, the owners would take care about the insurer and transportation directly, so that it's them getting the bills instead of you getting them and then having to get the owners to pay them.
There are well-established legal procedures to deal with matters like identity verification, and lawyers can handle them. That's one reason why she needs a lawyer.
Art logistics is a thriving and lucrative business: https://www.dbschenker.com/de-en/products/art-logistics-
Worst case would be that she sends it to someone over there, then someone else shows up showing they own it. Imagine if someone in the US ended up showing they owned it and the Germans say tough luck. She would then have to defend herself wherever the claimant chooses (possibly even the US), with no actual object should a court decide she has to produce it.
She bought it from Goodwill. What benefit would anything think they could get from suing her if she didn't get a payout?
>She would then have to defend herself wherever the claimant chooses (possibly even the US), with no actual object should a court decide she has to produce it.
How can the court tell her to produce it if she obviously doesn't have it? She was acting in good faith. She bought it for $35, and (assuming she got no payout) gave it to who she thought the rightful owner was for free. Why would anyone think she did anything wrong or owes anyone anything? She got nothing from this. If the museum owns it wrongly, they should sue the museum.
So, yes, best to get proper expert advice, even when you are acting in good faith, as there is nothing preventing others from acting in bad faith.
The contract is generally some generic patchwork piece made with copy and paste. Half the text doesn't apply to the situation at all and when challenged the lawyer says: "These are standard terms that we always put in there".
For example, when (in Germany) you get an "Abmahnung" (https://allaboutberlin.com/glossary/Abmahnung) for filesharing even though how to respond is standardized advice you are probably still better off having it sent by a lawyer. It tells the other party that if they escalate that you are less likely to cave in to the pressure, that they would have to actually have to go to court, which is expensive and time consuming and in filesharing cases only worth it when they want to "send a signal" or create a court ruling to be able to point to.
I meant to say that I trust the legal apparatus in Europe to function more or less correctly even without consulting a lawyer.
Conversely, in the US my idea of what is right generally turns out to be wrong as long as the other party has more money to spend on lawyers.
My boss would make fun of me when my good deeds would result in hassle for me. She was a meanie.
I have been reward cash, wine, simple thanks etc... on the numerous times I've handed in lost property or helped a stranger with directions etc.
I think she likely wanted a payout. Also the terms of the deal are confidential. If she didn't get a payout, I don't see why they would be confidential.
Why? The museum was not built by nazis.
Ludwig I of Bavaria never invaded Italy but he did frequently travel there for pleasure, and was known for purchasing antiquities and art.
> so it is more likely than not that it was simply stolen
You really have little rational basis for this belief. Could it have been stolen? Sure, maybe by Ludwig or maybe by whichever Italian sold it to Ludwig, or maybe by the great-great-great-great-grandfather of whoever sold it to Ludwig. But "more likely than not" stolen by Ludwig? Such confidence is merely a reflection of your biases.
At the time king Ludwig I of Bavaria acquired that bust, the nation you identify as "Italy" didn't yet exist. And that was in the early modern. For most of the medieval age, the small territories that today are within southern germany and northern italy were vassals of the same empires.
And while europa sure was almost constantly at war with itself, there was also a lot of trade going on. Who took that bust from whom and if they paid with coin or sword is most likely lost to time.
I'd hire a lawyer instantly if I became aware I was in possession of stolen war loot. It's a war crime, and things can get quite iffy really quickly - especially if somehow it goes viral.
Much better to just CYA and spend $500 on a lawyer so you ensure you don't go to prison or be held liable for something silly.
Call it a hard lesson I've learned multiple times over throughout my life. When in doubt, it's never inappropriate to hire legal counsel.
> Negotiations began. It was complicated. It takes a long time to figure out all this stuff — even in the best of times. But the pandemic complicated things even further.
The article doesn't say what the legal fees were, but based on this description I could imagine scenarios where they were well in excess of $500.
Because in this situation it’s comically risk-averse and a good way to burn $500 (which I would guess is quite low for what sounds like protracted negotiations) — if she was trying to protect herself and not cash in on this thing.
She’s not a war criminal, she bought a statue at Goodwill.
Once word’s out, just don’t hire a lawyer and stick it in your attic. Somebody’s either gonna come get it or they won’t. If you absolutely must, take it to a police station and drop it off or call the local news and see if they want to do a story on it.
I'm not sure where you're getting this idea from. I'm sure there were plenty of people willing to take it off her hands. The lawyer is there to help that happen in a legal way.
Because if I just want to be rid of the thing, I don’t need a JD to fire off an email that says, “Hey, I’ve got this thing. If somebody wants it, figure it out and let me know, otherwise it’s in the attic.”
If you don't know what to do regarding legal matters, hiring a lawyer is an obvious thing to do. It may not be hard or complicated, or maybe it is, that's for her lawyer to tell.
Why would you expect a priori to understand? Or have you dealt in the past with a meaningfully comparable problem, and found it easy and simple?
thrift stores don't exist to help people find cheap stuff - they exist to raise or earn money, and many org's then use that money to fund the things they want to fund.
It might not be a 'side hustle' for some of these people, it may be the only income they earn, and good for them for showing their entrepreneurial instincts - and doubt very many are getting rich at it (except perhaps a few lucky ones that find that needle in a haystack).
The thrift store has never been about getting the items on sale to needy people that's just literally not the philosophy behind the entire concept.
The thrift store model has been about getting money from the people who shop there who are people who have money but not having to pay for the goods they sell because they are charitably donated to be sold and then using the money they make to advance the mission of the charity.
It's a fundraising concept. The funds come from people who have funds. The goods come from people that have spare goods. And then THE MONEY THEY MAKE goes to actually do good in the world. The limiting factor on every thrift store model I've ever seen is having enough customers. There's always tons and tons of stuff to sell, many have to throw away half the donations they get because there's no room.
The people who are in thrift stores buying things for Ebay and increasing the money that goes to the charity are HELPING the thrift store, not killing it. This mindless outrage is literally the opposite of the actual dynamic at work here.
The person who dug it up and sold it didn't really have an inherent right to it. They just found it.
I say all this not from a legal perspective but from an inheritors of history and culture perspective. We all inherit humanity's history and culture.
While cheesy, Indiana Jones was right: "It belongs in a museum" so it is accessible to humanity. But is that museum inherently this German one?
I don't get it. Why wouldn't a person who found it have a right to it?
How old does the grave, in your opinion, have to be for me to get that right?
I'd assume other European countries have similar laws and processes.
Article 56 of the Hague Convention of 1907 disagrees. Stealing art is a war crime. So do the Allies themselves, in their memorandum on January 5th, 1943.
> The most likely story of this bust is from the 5th century until the 18th or 19th centuries, it was buried in the ground somewhere in Italy or former Roman empire.
Given that the person depicted was originally associated with Drusus Germanicus (the name's a hint here) and Aschaffenburg was in fact part of the Roman Empire back in the day, chances are they found it in the vicinity. The object is a lot more related to Aschaffenburg than Texas, which in fact never was part of the Roman Empire.
> But is that museum inherently this German one?
The wartime looting of art and/or cultural objects is barbaric as it robs the object of its historical context and the regions of their heritage. This is true regardless of the uniform that the criminal wore. If you think Germans should hand back art stolen before or during WW2, you cannot really argue against restitution demands for art stolen by Americans.
It does, but international law doesn't work like national law. Who are you goig to sue? The British Museum? The United Kingdom? The Crown? Under whose jurisdiction? Sure, you can prove that the British Museum outright admits a given artefact's origin but how do you establish rightful ownership? It's not enough to prove that something was stolen, you also need to prove who the rightful owner would be, possibly generations after the initial theft.
And if the British Museum (or the Crown, or the UK) flat out says no, what are you going to do? The US infamously established that it will invade The Hague if any US citizen is ever put in front of the Human Rights tribunal, but even without such blatant threats it's difficult to coerce anyone under international law if their own nation refuses to comply. You can try to propose sanctions but there's no "international community", you just have a whole bunch of politicians representing different nations voting on things and they likely don't care about those artefacts enough to do anything especially things that would damage their already subdued economies.
The Germans lost
Is there anything that isn't a war crime at this point?
Declaring war? War crime.
Making a plan for war? War crime.
Deportation? War crime.
Blowing stuff up? War crime.
Stealing art? Believe it or not, also war crime.
not a war crime
>Making a plan for war?
not a war crime
>Deportation?
war crime.
>Blowing stuff up?
depends on what you blow up.
>Stealing art?
war crime.
> Making a plan for war?
These two are, on the stipulation that it's a war of aggression and not a defensive one.
The modern notion of either Germany or Italy doesn't fit into the context of this artefact. Both countries share a history with the Roman Empire - just like most of Europe does.
Everyone else wants to be a "Boutique" and charge high end prices for used goods. Blame Macklemore?
And now Facebook neighborhood free groups are (often unknowingly) supplying such stores; as well as folks simply turning around and relisting on Facebook marketplace.
A few years ago my Goodwill went through three store managers in a row for stealing over a period of 10 years. One manager was pilfering the jewelry from the safe regularity, and loading up her van after everyone left.
I find it ironic they have cameras everywhere, and signs worning about shoplifting, when it was the employees stealing for years.
You can still get lucky on books, but you need to show up early. The professional resellers are there with their bar code readers at opening. Every once in a while a decent business suit can be found, but those days are kinda gone too. None of the clothing is cleaned before being put out.
Another manager had multiple antique dealers that he was selling to. He was so out in the open about it, the employees didn't batman eye. Good stuff would never leave the back room. He basically had everything sold within hours to his cronies.
There's a good book out their on how Goodwill is run.
It's eye opening. Supposedly the only employees making a real living wage were the Regional managers. 20 years ago they were getting $250,000/yr., and a car.
Don't get me completely wrong, I don't dislike Goodwill. They hire felons for a year.
They are a bit better than most of our 501c3. That's still a low bar though where so many, especially the nonprofits who incorporate in Deleware, are basically formed to reward the founders.
I won't even get started on In Defence for Animals because the founder died a few years ago.
It makes some amount of sense; there's a bigger market online so they get higher prices and people looking for obscure things are more likely to find them than by visiting stores and hoping to get lucky. It's kind of a shame though that the stores are less fun to visit.
My best find though is back around 2015, I walked into a Goodwill in Buckhead Atlanta (Atlanta's Beverly Hills) looking for a suit for an interview. Found a matching 5 piece Hugo Boss suit, all in all cost me about $50 but had a retail of I think around $2500. Absolutely insane find, ended up selling it on eBay for a few hundred and getting a brand new suit.
It’s obviously not a German artifact and while I might be wrong, I assume it was “looted” from Italy.
If Britain invades and occupies Egypt, and starts digging up artifacts that end up on a British museum, that's looting.
If some Frenchman digs up some artifacts in France, and then sells/trades/gives them to a British museum, that's not looting. Because the sale/trade/gift is not done at gunpoint.
In this case, if the artifact was not plundered from an (occupation of)/(war with Italy) to begin with, the most recent rightful owner is someone in Germany, not the nation of Italy.
According to French law, it is both looting and traficking ;) We have a different approach to it than the British.
How the german museum acquired it originally is anyones guess. But it’s possible it was legally acquired at some point over the past 1900 years.
I'm trying to remember which state it is that periodically asks for their Confederate flag back from the Union state that acquired it on the battlefield.
One interesting place this came up was in the post-2008 financial crisis... turns out a lot of banks had been using an off-the-books legal record system, and transferred ownership of the property to the record system, and the record system would move it around internally to avoid filing fees every time a mortgage was resold. But this is actually specifically illegal in most jurisdictions, governments have a strong interest in a verifiable chain of custody maintained by themselves, they don't want it to go to an off-the-books system because then they might not be able to trace the true owner of a property. There is actually case-law dating back to the mid-1800s on specifically this - modern bankers aren't the first ones to try and create a "bearer note" conveying ownership of a mortgage lien, and it was specifically slapped down at that time, ruling that doing so would "separate" the note from the actual deed, invalidating the lien.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/06/business/06mers.html
https://repository.uchastings.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl...
And it also turns out that many of the banks did it digitally, so they could not actually provide the original wet-ink mortgage, so they did not have an effective lien on the property at all in any respect, nor could they rebuild it themselves unless the owner voluntarily re-signed a note. So many of the properties in that era have (big airquotes) """title insurance""" that includes a clause that basically says "in the event of a defect in title, the title insurance doesn't pay out". So if the original owner figured out they might be off the hook, they could come back with improper foreclosure and get the property back, and you would be left paying a mortgage on nothing because the title insurance didn't pay out. My parents were looking to buy a foreclosed property in that timespan and the bank tried to pull one of those and they walked away.
(also, in that era many banks responded by simply forging the wet-ink mortgage notes. When they got caught, oops, no penalty and they got to try it again. Laws are for plebians.)
https://www.propublica.org/article/disputes-over-citigroups-...
https://financialpost.com/news/economy/four-years-later-u-s-...
The original owner doesn't lose valid title just because it was stolen, and two people can't hold valid title at the same time (unless shared obviously, but you can't have two 100% owners). The second purchaser's title would not be valid, even if they initially thought it was at the time of purchase.
It doesn't matter that you didn't know it was stolen - it's still not yours, it belongs to the person it was stolen from. It's your job to get your money back from the last person, and their job to get their money back from the previous person - all the way back to the thief.
If it's not possible to recover the money from the thief - wow, sucks to be you. You have a claim against the thief, but that doesn't matter if they don't have any money. You can garnish their wages from their McJob when they get out of prison.
Morally, it's debatable. Legally, it's straightforward, a stolen item does not become un-stolen with time, nor does the claim of the original owner diminish. Morally that's not how people think, but legally that's how it works.
The British Museum argument does not work for plebians. It's not "yours" just because you kept it for 100 years. Nor is it the next person's because they didn't know it was stolen.
The British Museum only works for the British because they were a god-ordained royal family that controlled an empire spanning the globe, then a nuclear-armed imperial power. It was based on the rather debatable legal theory of "try and stop us". It's increasingly recognized that it's unjust and seems increasingly likely that it will be dissolved sometime in the next hundred years. Because yeah, the same arguments apply to shit the British looted as shit the Nazis looted. It's not theirs. Maybe some countries will be willing to loan them back on a permanent basis though.
Also notable here is that German law, and many other European countries is opposite the English common law rule, and effectively the burden goes the other way and the scope of good faith is widened. Article 932(2) of the German Civil Code covers this for instance.
When dealing with stolen property from 50+ years ago there are issues with the statute of limitations, and with laches as well
Yes, and everyone who bought it under false pretenses are entitled to a refund, but what actually happens in reality is messy and pretty much down to how far law enforcement is willing to go. Someone is always left holding the bag, ideally it would be the original thief but it's most likely going to be the last person in the chain who can be identified or isn't willing to go to the effort.
It could also be from the following countries:
At its zenith, the Roman Empire included these today's countries and territories: most of Europe (England, Wales, Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Austria, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Belgium, Gibraltar, Romania, Moldova, Ukraine), coastal northern Africa (Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Egypt), the Balkans (Albania, Greece, Hungary, Bosnia, Slovenia, Croatia, Bulgaria, Turkey), the Mediterranean Sea, the Black Sea, Asia Minor, and some parts of Mesopotamia and the Middle East (Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, Israel).
https://www.schloesser.bayern.de/englisch/palace/objects/as_...
Why is it "obviously" not? The subject was named Drusus Germanicus, after all.
The Roman Empire covered everything from Great Britain to the Persian Gulf. Artifacts produced anywhere in that (very large) region could be described as "Roman".
The Roman Empire covered Germany and it covered that specific part of Germany (Aschaffenburg) as well.
The actual Roman Empire seems to have only just reached Aschaffenburg.
Because the museum was the rightful owner of the piece.
> It’s obviously not a German artifact and while I might be wrong, I assume it was “looted” from Italy.
To start with, Italy has been actively looted by Italians since at least the later part of the Middle Ages, but more actively from the Renaissance onwards. A lot of the pieces you see in other countries, and I'm quite certain this one fits the bill, were just traded privately between aristocrats for centuries. And that's assuming it's from Italy at all, it could just as well have been found in German soil. Germany happens to host a few major Roman cities.
Wished they at least said what it would go for on the open market, so we could get a hint of how much she banked!
I don't understand. Museums in the West are full of looted ancient art [1]. Why are they allowed to keep it, but this woman cannot keep this one item?
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/16/learning/should-museums-r...
http://www.marcfennell.com/stolen (Sorry I couldn't find the RSS feed)
PODCAST MAIN PAGE: https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/stuff-the-brit...
RSS FEED: https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/stuff-the-brit...
Anyways, I think to some extent our civilization is descending into a kind of mass packrat disorder. We seem to fetishize preservation to an unhealthy degree on both small and large scales. Sometimes things break, are burnt down, or are left unmaintained until they die. But new things are created all the time, and maybe sometimes we get a little too stuck on the old stuff and don't acknowledge the new.
Of course if you’re talking about architecture, there’s lots of fetishization of the not-very-old stuff from last century, because They don’t want you to know that we lost the building techniques of the Tartarian Empire. Or something.
Problem solved
But really I'm talking about broader social trends and what we do at the society level. Yes, architecture. Mustn't tear down that building that no one has been able to live in for 20 years, it's sacred. But also relics, ideas, monuments to even monumentally stupid and awful things, etc.
Indeed, across the entire globe, only a tiny fraction of the population own the vast majority of land and other resources.
Let's all sort out this much bigger and globally impactful inequality first, before worrying about some museum pieces.
This is true for many things: homes which people own taken from Japanese-Americans, wage theft discovered too late,…
If you only care about your children and you have an effective means of transmitting wealth gotten through evil means, you merely have to forgo the benefit yourself.
Or is all of that legitimate because they all spoke French? (Remember, Napoleon was a Corsican!)
My reading might be wrong.
but reading closer it says:
>Back at home, Young had a problem: She was in possession of a looted piece of ancient art. She couldn't keep it. She couldn't sell it. And giving it back to its rightful owners was a lot harder than it sounds.
So it sounds more like she felt she couldn't keep it or sell it because of her morals.
on edit: of course if she had sold it maybe 10 years down the road the Germans come and say we want our head of Germanicus back please, then either the people who bought it are on the hook or maybe also her for selling stolen goods (depending on laws and how much people want to enforce them)
I own land in the UK, which in reality means I brought it from someone who brought it from someone who brought it from someone who brought it from someone who was given it by the king as a reward for helping kill the previous owner.
And if someone quarries marble on my land to make a statue, it has the same provenance.
So we've basically decided there's a sliding scale. If it was stolen at gunpoint 1960 you've got to return it, but if it was in 1690 you get to keep it.
Then let me help your imagination: A rich Bavarian king frequently goes on holiday in Italy, as was the fashion in Europe at the time. There, he regularly meets and intermingles with rich Italians who share his interests in antiquities. He purchases numerous artifacts from them, at a price both agree is fair.
The Roman Empire covered a lot of territory.
See also: Scipio Africanus; he got that name for conquering Carthage.
Romans were notorious for reusing names.
Even if it were the famous one, he was, in fact, in Germany, yes?
You're not alone in thinking that. The article says the sculpture might actually be Pompey, not Drusus Germanicus. Evidently there's no name written on it, so it was probably catalogued as Drusus Germanicus because somebody thought it looked like the Drusus Germanicus, but they may well have been wrong.
> Even if it were the famous one, he was, in fact, in Germany, yes?
He certainly was. As far as I'm concerned, Germany is a perfectly fitting place for a sculpture of Drusus Germanicus.
My main point here is you can't assume a Roman was from the place they were named after. They might have been, or might not have been. Generally speaking, it's not even a given that a person named Germanicus was ever in Germania nor had any ancestry from Germania. The son of Drusus Germanicus was the Germanicus, the most famous Germanicus. The Germanicus to whom you can refer with the name Germanicus alone. The Germanicus inherited that name from his father Drusus. Complicating the matter, the Germanicus then went on to lead numerous military campaigns in Germania as his father did before him, but he already had the name Germanicus as a child, inherited from his father Drusus. There are actually a whole slew of Romans with the name Germanicus and many of them likely never set foot in Germania. Emperor Claudius (brother of the Germanicus and son of Drusus Germanicus) had the name Germanicus as well, but he was probably never in Germania. Nero and Caligula were also named Germanicus. A ton of Romans were.
The art is not the NFT. The person only "owns" a hash code that points to the art.