Lebanese art dealer Georges Lotfi, who once helped authorities seize looted antiquities, is now accused of doing his own share of trafficking

In 2018, Lotfi tipped off the Manhattan DA’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit (ATU) to the murky provenance of the Met’s first-century BCE gilded Egyptian coffin, which was returned in 2019. Lofti put the ATU in contact with an unnamed trafficker of the coffin, according to the search warrant. According to a 2019 letter from the DA to the Egyptian Minister of Antiquities, the first documentation of the coffin appeared in photographs sent to Roben Dib, a German-Lebanese gallery owner who was one of three leaders of the trafficking ring. Another of the leaders, Christophe Kunicki, was arrested in 2020 for money laundering and fraud.1

Lotfi’s criminal activity, however, has been on the radar of the Manhattan DA’s ATU since 2017, when a $12 million 2,300-year-old bull’s head at the Met was first suspected to have been looted from Eshmun, Lebanon. (In the Met’s provenance information, Lotfi was listed as the object’s first owner.) That same year, a $10 million ancient marble torso surfaced for sale. The ATU discovered that the torso and the bull’s head had both been looted from Eshmun in the 1980s, during the Lebanese Civil War. The Met returned the bull’s head to Lebanon and the DA seized the torso from Lotfi’s Fifth Avenue apartment. Later on, the Lebanese authorities discovered a third object — scavenged from that same site — which Lotfi had sent from New York to Tripoli, Lebanon.

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According to the search warrant, Lotfi still has antiquities for sale that have yet to be seized.

The “Palmyra Stone”
The “Palmyra Stone” - The seized artifacts include an expansive collection of mosaics, most of which were looted from Lebanon and Syria and purchased by Lotfi in the 1980s. The objects also include the “Palmyra Stone,” a Syrian funerary relief from the second-century CE. “Informant #2,” who the warrant identifies as a “smuggler of looted antiquities,” told authorities that he saw the work in Lotfi’s Dubai warehouse in 2010 or 2011, a particularly damning timeline given that during this time period, the Islamic State was looting Palmyra and selling antiquities on the black market.