New York authorities have obtained an arrest warrant for Edoardo Almagiàa major Italian antiquities dealer accused of trafficking tens of millions of dollars worth of Roman sculptures, Etruscan ceramics and other valuable works of art and artifacts.

right New York TimesColin Moynihan, who broke the story, the 80-page warrant accuses Almagià of illegally trading thousands of items. Many of these items were recorded in a ledger known as the “Green Book”, a handwritten list of items allegedly bought from tomb raiders.

At the Manhattan district attorney’s office antiquities traffic unit he had access to fragments of the Green Paper through an informant, who had tried to photocopy it. Almagià intervened, taking the notebook from the informant before the entire book could be copied.

However, the dealer left out a crucial detail: Per the Timeshe “walked away not realizing that dozens of pages from the ledger had already been printed and stacked in the photocopier tray.” Now, he has been charged with conspiracy, fraud and possession of stolen property.

Prosecutors say Edoardo Almagià kept a list of trafficked antiquities in his New York apartment, hidden in a Renaissance-era chest under a marble statue of a stag.

They also say he assaulted someone who found the list and began copying it at Kinko’s.https://t.co/UNVvChV9TI

— Colin Moynihan (@ColinRMoynihan) November 1, 2024

“It’s absolutely ridiculous. If they want to judge me, let them,” Almagià tells Katelynn Lee and Miriam Waldvogel about The Daily Princetonianthe student newspaper of Princeton University. “We’re getting to the point where whenever you touch an antique, you’re a fraud.”

Almagià graduated from Princeton in 1973. Since beginning his career in the 1980s, he has worked with many renowned institutions and museums, including the J. Paul Getty Museum; Fordham Museum of Greek, Roman and Etruscan Art; Boston Museum of Fine Arts; Cleveland Museum of Art; and the Princeton University Art Museum.

Almagià worked to “acquire stolen antiquities from Italy, market them as legitimate, openly display them in well-known institutions to increase their value, and then sell those antiquities for profit,” prosecutors write. Times.

Manhattan investigators began probing the dealer in 2018. Since then, they have seized more than 200 works of art linked to Almagià from many of the prominent institutions he worked with.

Almagià had many other brushes with the law. In 2000, authorities stopped him at John F. Kennedy Airport for carrying two stolen Italian frescoes in a suitcase. Six years later, law enforcement raided the dealer’s apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. He surrendered several objects, but eventually ended up fleeing to Italy, per artnetthis is Jo Lawson-Tancred.

“If Almagià is the first name of origin, it is stolen. It is well known,” Matei Bogdanossaid the head of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit Princeton Alumni Weeklyof Rachel Axon last year.

He added: “This guy has gotten away with it for so long, and anyone who respects the rule of law has to say, ‘Enough.’

Almagià tells him Times that prosecutors are going too far, characterizing recent efforts to investigate illegal antiquities sales as a “witch hunt.” Regarding his accusations, he adds: “I don’t deny them, but I don’t accept them.”