Dealer Allegedly at Center of Major Antiquities Theft Ring Dies

Euphonios krater
(photo from The New York Times)

Robert Hecht, Jr., a department store heir tied to a global antiquities theft network, died earlier this week at his Paris home at age 92. His obituary appeared in today's LA Times.

Hecht's discovered a passion for the antique world at a relatively young age. That profound interest led him into the world of buying and selling splendid physical remnants of the Greco-Roman world. He was best known for selling the Euphronios krater -- a masterpiece of Greek vase making -- to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The Met eventually returned the vase to its point of origin many years later, when the Italian fine arts bureaucracy, law enforcement, and legal apparatus convincingly demonstrated that the vase was smuggled out of Italy. However, the Met's gaffe was small potatoes compared to the Getty Museum's considerable traffic with the goods Mr. Hecht and his network were allegedly moving. The Getty's antiquities curator, Marion True, eventually was charged with criminal activity by Italian magistrates. The case, as well as one fingering Hecht, flopped. In both situations, the pursuit of the cases went beyond the time permitted under Italian law.

The underworld of fine art theft and smuggling offers an interesting story. For all the romantic tales of sophisticated thieves defying great odds to steal some valuable object, the reality is quite different. It involves hoodwinking a bureaucracy, doing plenty of dirty work behind the scenes, and having well-connected, respectable front men to make the transactions.

Hecht understood that world and, to some extent, shaped it. His passing does not exactly mark the end of an era. However, someone with Hecht's clout, money, and time, is rare, even in the world of high-stakes antiquity collecting.