The Looters Read Online Free PDF Page A

pieces. Years later, when their homes were raided, the police discovered photographs of the items. It was impossible for the tomb raiders to claim that they had acquired the pieces legitimately because they took the photographs with dirt still on the dug-up pieces….
    I had questioned the provenance of the Hellenistic vase because of a bulletin I received that mentioned Turkish police had busted workers who had come across an antiquity site while digging an agricultural ditch in a rural area. Turkey was a rich source of antiquities because much of its coastline figured prominently in ancient Greek history. The men had confessed.
Wouldn’t we all to the Turkish police?
I thought.
    The vase that Neal was auctioning fit the description in the bulletin. Of course, its provenance showed it had been in the collection of a German family for a hundred years.
    Eric, in fact, had argued that we should bid on the vase. “It’s worth at least three million and it’ll sell for half that because of the questions.”
    Neal told me that the reserve on it was $700,000.
    A reserve was usually about 80 percent of the lowest estimate. The reserve was supersecret, known only to the seller and the auctioneer. Neal revealed the reserve amount during pillow talk. After sex, while he was still basking in the masculine glory of my faked orgasm, he liked to “talk shop,” boasting about how he could manipulate items being auctioned. I didn’t sleep with him for insider information. I sincerely liked Neal and his titillating conversations.
    It went without saying that if I wanted to acquire a large number of pieces for a new museum, I had to grab what was offered. But being eager didn’t mean I would knowingly buy an antiquity that entered the market through the back door. With the word on the street that the piece was under investigation, you could bet that someone from the Turkish Department of Antiquities would come snooping around soon after the sale.
    Besides, the vase didn’t fit our collection. If it had, I would have bid on it. It did have a provenance attached. And I wasn’t a police officer—my job wasn’t to investigate whether the provenance was a fraud. Not unless there was something about it that was inherently suspicious. When it came to provenances, if I had acquired pieces in the past from the dealer and a degree of trust existed, I usually took the dealer’s word that the paperwork was legit.
    Neal had few bids for the Hellenistic vase even though it was a lovely piece. Not that anyone would know by his facial expression—auctioneers had to be good actors. And Neal knew how to work the audience. He was capable of making people give away more of their money than they had planned. When Neal didn’t meet his reserve price, he showed no fear. He just moved right along.
    He had a high bid of $690,000 with the reserve at $700,000. There had only been three bids. The room was going cold and he needed an extra $10,000 to meet the seller’s reserve. With whispers that the piece had dirt on it, if he didn’t meet the reserve, Rutgers would sell it privately to avoid the public exposure and they would never see a commission off of it.
    If the piece went by auction, the auction house earned both a “seller’s commission” and “buyer’s premium,” with the lion’s share coming from the buyer.
    In other words, the house got money from both ends.
    I did a quick calculation in my head as to what the auction house would earn if the piece sold for its $700,000 reserve: On that amount, the seller would pay a commission of $35,000 and the buyer would pay a “premium” to the auction house of about $100,000, for a total of $135,000 going to Rutgers.
    At this point Neal had a choice: He could “buy-in” the vase—auctioning parlance for failing to sell an item—and return the vase to the seller because it didn’t meet the reserve. Or he could accept the $690,000 high bid. If he accepted that bid, Rutgers would have to pay the