Michael Steinhardt Antiquities Stolen Artifacts

Crime of the Centuries Tomb raiders, crooked art dealers, and museum curators fed Michael Steinhardt’s addiction to antiquities. Many were also stolen. Just before dawn on January 5, 2018, a team of armed federal agents from Homeland Security Investigations arrived at 1158 Fifth Avenue, a luxury co-op overlooking Central Park. After securing the building’s exits and entrances, the agents headed to the top floor, where they positioned themselves around the door to the penthouse apartment. At the head of the column, Matthew Bogdanos, a prosecutor with the Manhattan district attorney’s office, listened for movement before knocking. The apartment belonged to Michael Steinhardt, a retired billionaire hedge-fund manager and one of the world’s most powerful philanthropists. Born in Brooklyn to a high-stakes gambler with ties to the Gambino crime family, Steinhardt had become one of the most influential investors of his day, competing for top earnings with the likes of George Soros and Julian Robertson and battling with Warren Buffett for control of entire airlines. His fortune had bought him a taste of immortality. Steinhardt’s name decorated the walls of some of New York’s most famous institutions: a gallery of Greek art at the Met, a conservatory of Old and New World plants at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and a school at NYU. In Israel, he established a natural-history museum in Tel Aviv designed to look like Noah’s ark and co-founded Birthright Israel, a nonprofit that has sponsored free trips for some 800,000 young adults. Over the years, he also had multiple run-ins with the Securities and Exchange Commission, but on that January morning, those allegations weren’t what had drawn the authorities to his apartment. It was his art collection. Starting in the late 1980s, Steinhardt amassed one of the world’s great collections of antiquities. Renowned for both their breadth and quality, his private holdings spanned centuries and rivaled those of many museums, with an estimated value of more than $200 million. According to Bogdanos, much of it was stolen property. Steinhardt, he believed, was the principal buyer in some of the world’s most prolific antiquities-trafficking networks — criminal operations that smuggled ancient artifacts from their countries of origin into museums, auction houses, and private collections. For his part, Steinhardt has long maintained that he was nothing more than a collector duped by dealers who had misled him about the pieces’ provenance.

When he opened the door a few moments later, Steinhardt seemed more angry than surprised. “You’re much shorter than I thought you would be,” he said to Bogdanos as he stepped aside to let the agents enter. Inside, they saw marble busts on bedside tables and terracotta vases covering the windowsills. Ancient Greek wine jugs, 2,500 years old, were stuffed into the space between the kitchen cabinets and the ceiling, and sculptures from the same era were tucked away on shelves in the bathroom. A few objects had been left to endure the elements on the terrace.

Over the next four years, agents would return 11 times to Steinhardt’s home and office. They seized frescoes and ceremonial drinking vessels, amulets, idols, and Neolithic masks, as well as invoices, letters, and photographs that detailed his collecting practices over three decades. What emerged was a picture of a global supply chain that began in the tombs of Italy and the caves of the Fertile Crescent and passed through auction houses, art fairs, and even the Metropolitan Museum of Art — and which time and again reached its final stop at Steinhardt’s penthouse. He was “on the top of Mount Olympus,” as Bogdanos put it. But it appeared that his rapacious appetite had finally caught up with him.

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