Around 2004, thieves drove down to a remote village, targeting a dilapidated temple in southern India. They stole a couple of bronze idols with little effort. Later, they returned and stole a few more idols until all the bronze idols were gone. These statues, they're absolutely priceless, and they've all been plundered and stolen right from under our noses. It wasn't in the psyche of people that they could be looted because they're considered so sacred. They're central to the faith system of the community. For them, gods are considered a living entity. A single village will have one idol that they have worshiped for 2,000 years, and now they worship an empty pedestal or they worship a photograph. Most of the stolen idols popped up in big museums across the world, some art galleries, and some private collectors. This was not some random theft. This was an organized looting on an industrial scale where the best of Indian art was priced

and then smuggled out of India. The mastermind became one of the most prolific commodities smugglers in US law enforcement history. Even today, when you talk
to officials involved in that case, they'll tell
you that they're not sure of the true extent of
loot taken from India. When we opened up the
first storage facility and saw tens of millions of dollars of looted idols piled
on top of each other, I'll confess a little
part of me died inside. My day job is in shipping. I've been in the shipping
industry for the last 34 years. My second job, that is basically hunting
down stolen antiquities. Is it here? It's here. India is losing about 10,000 major works
of art every decade. That's about 1,000 a year. So our goal is to bring back artifacts that have been smuggled out
of the country back to India. I hail from a small
village south of Chennai.

where my great-grandfathers
were technically headmen, and there are small temples
built by them there. So you could say that a little bit of temple building was in the blood. I had built up my own portfolio of lesser-known ruin temples within India, and a lot of friends
got together and said, why don't you share what you
have on a public platform? So I started writing
it out in Google groups and Yahoo forums. And that led me to cast a net for like-minded friends out in the world who had similar interests and ideas. I would say the vast
majority of ancient art that you see in American museums
was stolen at some point. The question is really when. A lot of the objects
on display were stolen since World War II and would
be considered kind of part of the contemporary black
market in antiquities. In the absence of really
dedicated law enforcement in the illicit antiquities trade, different people started
using the internet

to connect across international lines and compare notes on what they were seeing about the black market. So I had a blog called Chasing Aphrodite. Vijay had a blog called Poetry In Stone. We were writing about these
issues from different points of view, but found that our
worlds overlap substantially, and that we were actually
writing about two different ends of the same criminal network. So anytime I would have a new
case that I was investigating, I would tweet about it and ask for help and solicit volunteers to help me track down objects
at museums around the world. Vijay similarly has used a
really powerful social network. Tamil Nadu has, let's
say 43 to 47,000 temples. These bronzes and the stone sculptures have survived for 1,000 years. But when we went to some of these sites, we realized that what should
have been there were not there. Obviously, there was rampant
looting happening very visibly.

And that's the point that we started looking at Indian art that was coming into the markets in Europe and America on a very regular basis. I would say that it is naive to think that most museums do not have at least some stolen artifacts, but in many cases, the museums couldn't have known when they acquired it, it was stolen. Not only would the pieces themselves be cleaned, but also they would get good appearing provenance, bills of sale, and the like. There are names that are radioactive. If you walk into a museum and you see a curatorial card and one of these names is on that list, chances are it's probably stolen, and we just haven't gotten to it yet. In every Shiva temple in India, you can see the dancing Shiva idol Nataraja. Nata means dance, and the Raja is called as king. So this is the king of dance. So the dance represents the source.

of all the movements within the universe. And foreigners also love this idol because it has a symbolic
representation of the cosmos and also because it is very beautiful. These statues, they're central to the faith system of the community. They believe that those gods have powers, and they have genuine
faith that those prayers would be listened to by the gods. So what typically happens is you have a very
remote unguarded temple. Maybe there's one or two
idols in there of value, but the people who live
in that area are unaware that they could sell
for one or two or three or more million US dollars, and the smugglers prey on that ignorance. So both these temples had amazing bronzes, the Suthamalli temple and
the Sripuranthan temple, including four-foot-tall dancing Shiva. The smugglers met at an
upscale hotel in Chennai, and they exchanged
photographs of the targets. That was quite unique. You don't get to see early bronzes

of this vintage all set in one temple. These two petty criminals,
they targeted one after the other temple,
and they broke the locks, and they loaded the stolen idols in a truck, and they used some glue to fix the lock so that without alarming the villager, they can come back again and again. And they don't even
leave one bronze behind. So in 2007, Indian authorities got a tip of a shipment of stolen
idols being taken to the US, and they tipped off the US customs. They went on and seized the
container which possessed hoards of antique idols and statues. When customs inspects a crate and finds illicit antiquities inside, the dealer is faced with a choice. They can claim the crate and go through a legal process
to defend their importation of those objects, or they
can abandon it and let it go. I got to know through the police that there were some
documents, some receipts, which were destined to Nimbus Exports.

So when the US Customs
official started probing into the case, they found
this Nimbus Exports is owned by a gallery owner, Subhash Kapoor. So we began to understand that Subhash Kapoor was
trafficking in looted antiquities, and we began working that investigation, and we did it the way you do
every single investigation. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Subhash Kapoor is a long-time dealer. He owned a gallery here in New York, and he developed a
pretty exceptional trade. Many people called him
the dealer to the stars, and he was very good at what he did. Kapoor was born in Delhi, and his father was an antiquities dealer. As a child, Kapoor was kidnapped, and in the incident, Kapoor's
right ear was cut off and sent as proof of life to his father. So Kapoor left India in the 70s, moved to the United States with
other members of his family.

but carried with him this kind
of scar from his childhood, which he felt disfigured him. He also carried with him
his father's business in ancient objects, and so when he came to the United States, both he and his brother
both started galleries in Manhattan selling Indian antiquities and paintings to the western art market. I'm covering crime
almost three decades now. So I have noticed a lot of criminals. They start their business legitimately, and then after a point they'll
feel like they are the boss and suddenly they embolden to
do whatever they want to do. He was legitimately selling
some real antique pieces, which was brought from
his native town in Punjab. But after a while, he started
selling couple of idols, which was abandoned near the temple, and finally he thought, we can go ahead with a larger network. It was really not until the early 2000s that he became a prominent donor initially and later dealer to some
of the leading museums.

in the United States and in the world. He donated a series of paintings to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 2009, they hosted a
birthday party for him to celebrate his contributions, where a number of prominent curators and other guests attended. Subhash Kapoor is a master salesman, definitely, because he
started reading many books when he was in the US. So he learned a lot about the antiquities, and he became an expert in art. After a while, he
started convincing people that the priceless antiquities
are worth several millions. And then he'd market these things and catalogs that he published every year. Often, you know, asking
millions of dollars for these. Both private collectors and museums around the world
would get these catalogs and then come to Kapoor's
gallery in Manhattan. But the problem that dealers face when they get looted antiquities from the market is they need to create and invent some other story about how this object
can come out of India.

One of the more prominent objects was the dancing Shiva. This was acquired by the National Gallery of Australia for $5 million. Kapoor provided them with documents that suggested it was formerly in the private collection of a woman named Raj Mehgoub. When I started investigating it, I looked into Raj Mehgoub and discovered that she lived in a brownstone in Queens and was unlikely to have ever possessed the dancing Shiva, much less the $30 million of other art that had been associated with her. I also found that on Facebook, she was friends with the Kapoor family, so she was likely a cutout. So Kapoor had used Raj Mehgoub and had used family members all to create false provenance for these objects that he was selling. I published pictures of the dancing Shiva as it had looked in the temple and then compared those to the object on display at the National Gallery of Australia. Vijay Kumar, he did a very close comparison of these two

and was able to confirm that
they were indeed a match. That evidence we thought was
compelling enough to show that the ownership history that the museum had been
provided by Kapoor was false, and that this object had
actually been stolen. We helped the law enforcement in India. We worked with Jason
to obtain photographs, and we were able to prove that it was the Sripuranthan Nataraja. When we provided the
information to the then curator of the National Gallery
of Australia, he said, there are hundreds of bronzes. You guys don't know the difference. You can't tell one from another. But people do not realize
that these bronzes are done by the lost wax method,
which literally means that the mold has to be broken
to reveal the metal icon, and the mold cannot be reused. So every Nataraja is indeed unique, and so we managed to
provide conclusive evidence that could not be challenged in court, and there was no escape.

So another large Nataraja dancing Shiva popped up in the Kapoor's gallery in Manhattan. An anonymous scholar, he raised the suspicion because it has an inscription which was made in Tamil on the base of the idol, and should belong to a temple in Tamil Nadu, and he tipped off the Vijay Kumar. The Shiva Nataraja and Uma had inscribed bases, so it reads Su tha valli in Tamil. We were checking, searching everywhere for a temple or a village by name Sutha Vali. So we couldn't match the temple because over a thousand years, the village name had changed. So this Va had become Ma. So the village today was known as Suthamalli, and because of this one alphabet change, we were stuck for almost two years, but now we know. Police investigated in a reverse engineering process. So after they came to know that Sripuranthan and Suthamalli Temple's idols were stolen,

they started probing it, and they started targeting
the petty thieves involved in stealing smaller idols
from smaller temples, and they found that a couple
of idol thieves were in prison, and they gave some tip-off about two more petty thieves involved in this Sripuranthan
and Suthamalli temple. They inquired them, and they spilled the beans
about the involvement of the key person Sanjeevi Aosokan. So based on his confession,
police established that Sanjeevi Aosokan
played a pivotal role in Chennai, based on the
instructions of Kapoor, and to piece it together and to narrow down Kapoor
to the temple thieves. And when these two bronzes
land up in Subhash's gallery, it was where we could
connect all the dots. Indian authorities arresting
an American citizen in American soil is not possible. So they started looking
into how to bring him back to get the stolen idols. That was the primary thing in the minds

of the Indian authorities. So they were waiting
for someone to open up from Kapoor's side, and they
got a breakthrough also. It was actually Kapoor's ex-girlfriend, and the police got some bits and pieces, and finally they managed
to apprehend Kapoor. When you mix love and looted antiquities, things go wrong. And that's the big breaking news from rare artifacts to objects
of the Harappan culture. As many as 300, believe it or not, have been seized by the US Immigration and Customs Department from arrested art dealer
smuggler Subhash Kapoor. Now many of these... Kapoor was arrested in 2011 while on a business trip in Germany on an Interpol red notice. And soon after, federal authorities descended on his gallery in Manhattan and his storage facilities and seized not just $100 million worth of looted antiquities, but
also Kapoor's business records. His hard drive proved to
be a key piece of evidence.

because his correspondence with traffickers really around Asia, across Cambodia,
Afghanistan, Southeast Asia, and India, revealed his business dealings and how he'd sourced all
these objects for decades. Operation Hidden Idol was the case name for Homeland Security Investigation of Kapoor and his network. We ultimately raided more than
a dozen storage facilities in and around the New York area. We seized over 2,500
idols that he had hidden. ICE put out a release after
the Kapoor bust, saying that this was the single biggest
commodity trafficking case in the agency's history. This put antiquities
trafficking on the map for law enforcement in a way
that few cases had previously. I think we've recorded only about 5% of what he has stolen, stashed, and sold. We are still looking for
objects related to him. So Homeland Security is being going after his storage locations, buyers, collectors, dealers, and we are continuing to
see seizures happening.

So Operation Hidden Idol is still ongoing. So, Subhash Kapoor is in prison in India. He has been convicted. My feeling back in 2011 was
India had the greater harm. He pillaged them the most, and so they asked to prosecute him first. So I consented to that. I didn't know the trial itself in India would take more than 10 years. They have just concluded
he's been convicted of all charges, all counts in India. He has been sentenced, and now he's still in
prison awaiting extradition. He is fighting extradition
right now to the United States, but he will be prosecuted by
this office for his crimes, truly for his crimes against humanity. He completed 10 years in the
first case of conviction, but in the remaining seven
cases, police are investigating, and if he's convicted,
he should be in prison for 70 years almost. Once I met him in the prison, and he claimed that he was
innocent, he was framed.

he can be freed very soon. He didn't have any kind of grief or remorse for doing whatever happened. He was so arrogant to say that I have not stolen
any valuables from India. It's all gifted to me.
I didn't do anything. For museums, the argument
is that these idols and sculptures have a historic
value and an academic value. So museums are the best places
for these to be preserved. On the other side, the
argument is that if they need to be preserved, they should be preserved within the community or
close to the community. I think we'll see an
increase in restitutions in the coming years, but this
is an enormous black market, and I think without citizen
detectives like Vijay Kumar, without people in the
Manhattan DA's office that took this seriously, Subhash Kapoor would most
likely still continue doing this work today. We are far from reaching the goal. Antiquities trafficking.

is still active all around the world, and Manhattan, in particular,
continues to be a place where looted antiquities are
bought and sold every day. When I started this job,
the only two questions that were ever asked by anybody
in a museum or a collector or anyone about an antiquity
was how much does it cost, and is it real? Those are two fair questions. Keep asking them. I just want a third question. Is it legal? How did you get it? And the good news is, they're starting to ask those questions because one pillaged idol is too many.

Bringing Down India’s Biggest Art Thief | Bloomberg Investigates

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