The Global Illicit Antiquities Trade as Economic Crime

• In Event: Art and Antiquities Trafficking

Abstract

In February 2012, evidence was uncovered indicating that Sotheby’s auction house in Manhattan was attempting to sell a thousand-year-old Khmer masterpiece for $3 million dollars, despite allegations thieves had hacked it from a Cambodian temple and trafficked it overseas during the country’s bloody 1970–1975 Civil War. Six weeks later, U.S. Attorneys filed suit in federal court to recover the statue, and return it to Cambodia. The case remained a fixture in both the courts and headlines until December 2013, when Sotheby’s agreed to send the piece home. The resulting case files include a wealth of information about the behind-the-scenes elements of the case, including correspondence between auction house employees and external parties including dealers, collectors and appraisers. Combined with our fieldwork in Cambodia, the information in this case provides something approximating an end-to-end study of a statue trafficking network. Specifically, this paper examines these case filings using a white collar criminological framework, also employing conceptual elements of major theories on economic malfeasance, such as internal organisational normativity, differential association, rational choice theory, or theories of ‘mission creep’ or acculturation to risk-taking including Vaughan’s sociological ‘history as cause’ theory.

Authors

• Simon Mackenzie, University of Glasgow

• Terressa Davis, University of Glasgow

• Blythe Bowman, Virginia Commonwealth University