Ancient coins were returned to the Greek government ...

Ancient Coins Returned to Greece, Ending U.S. Ordeal


By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.

Among the coins returned were, clockwise from top left, pieces from Opuntian Locris (circa 369-338 B.C.); Thrace (515-480 B.C.); Euboea (375-357 B.C.); and Thebes (circa 405-395 B.C.). Credit Andrea Mohin/The New York Times

Five ancient Greek coins that had nearly been sold at auction at the Waldorf-Astoria were returned on Monday to the Greek government, ending an unusual prosecution that roiled the coin-collecting world and led to the conviction of a prominent surgeon.

The coins were among 20 rare pieces from the ancient world that the surgeon, Dr. Arnold-Peter Weiss, tried to sell at the Waldorf-Astoria on Jan. 3, 2012.

One of the buyers who approached Dr. Weiss was an informant, who caught him on tape saying he knew that one of the coins he was selling had been recently looted from Sicily.

“There’s no paperwork,” the doctor said, according to a criminal complaint filed by the Manhattan district attorney’s office. “I know this is a fresh coin; this was dug up a few years ago.”

The case never went to trial, but Dr. Weiss’s arrest sent chills through the numismatic world, where state charges for possession of stolen property are extremely rare. In years past, American dealers caught with ancient coins dug up in the modern era of strong patrimony laws in countries like Greece and Italy usually faced civil suits in federal court.

At worse, they risked being forced to forfeit the artifacts to the United States government, which in most cases returned them to the source countries without pursuing criminal charges, experts on cultural property law said. As a result, some dealers were willing to market coins with spotty paperwork and murky histories.

“You could almost call it a landmark case — he did something that was suddenly seen as criminal,” said Ute Wartenberg, the executive director of the American Numismatic Society. “This was like something that could have happened to a whole bunch of people; there was nothing particularly unusual about it.”

Faced with his words on the informant’s tape, Dr. Weiss, 54, a hand surgeon who teaches at Brown University and has served on the board of the American Numismatic Society, pleaded guilty in July 2012 to three counts of attempted criminal possession of stolen property.

Those pleas concerned only the three coins he believed to be silver pieces from the fourth century B.C. that he thought had been looted from Sicily, court papers said. Experts using electron microscopes later determined they were clever forgeries. Still, Dr. Weiss had been trying to sell one of them for $350,000 and the other two for $1.2 million, prosecutors said.

The investigation was done jointly by agents from the district attorney’s office and the Department of Homeland Security.

Under his plea agreement, Dr. Weiss forfeited the other 20 coins in his possession to the Manhattan district attorney’s office, including five authentic Greek coins dating back to the sixth century B.C.

Those silver pieces were minted in ancient Thrace, Opuntian Locris, Euboea and Thebes; the coins bear images of Herakles, Demeter, the nymph Euboea and Dionysus, among other things.

On the market, the five coins are worth about $200,000, but the district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., said they were worth far more to Greece.

“As tokens of the world’s oldest democracy, they are, in our view, priceless,” he said as he signed papers transferring the coins to the Greek ambassador, Christos P. Panagopoulos.

The ambassador said it was “a great day of joy for Greece” and promised the coins would be displayed in the Numismatic Museum in Athens.

Rick St. Hilaire, a New Hampshire law professor who specializes in cultural property, said few state prosecutors have pursued cases against dealers for possessing stolen artifacts like ancient coins. Such prosecutions are generally left to federal authorities, he said, even though New York and other states have stronger stolen property laws.

“This is an opening volley and certainly has caught the attention of ancient coin collectors and dealers,” Mr. St. Hilaire said.

Dr. Weiss avoided jail under the plea agreement. He was sentenced to 70 hours of community service, fined $3,000 and forced to forfeit coins in which he had invested more than $2 million.

He also agreed to write a lengthy essay for the American Numismatic Society’s Magazine, titled “Caveat Emptor,” warning other dealers about the danger of hawking coins with murky histories. He acknowledged that American dealers like himself often encountered coins they suspected came from looters but turned a blind eye.

“I was very active in the ancient coin marketplace and paid little attention to foreign cultural property laws, as if they really did not matter within the U.S.,” he wrote. “Well, they do.”

A version of this article appears in print on August 5, 2014, on page A22 of the New York edition with the headline: Ancient Coins Returned to Greece, Ending U.S. Ordeal. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe

AUTHORITY: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/05/nyregion/ancient-coins-returned-to-greece-ending-us-ordeal.html