Why Do So Many Museums Hold a Convicted Antiquity Dealer’s Treasures? After The Met returned a Roman bust connected to Phoenix Ancient Art, the question of what will happen to other works sold by the gallery to dozens of US institutions remains open.

The Roman was gone. When I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in search of a marble portrait bust, both the sculpture and its pedestal had vanished. Only the label dating the piece to the 2nd century CE remained, marooned on the gallery wall. The sculpture had been purchased from Phoenix Ancient Art, which boasted stringent due diligence procedures.

But when the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office seized nine Phoenix artifacts worth nearly $5 million since 2021 alone, including three loans to The Met, it became clear that not all was as it seemed. A spokesperson confirmed that one Roman bust had been repatriated to Türkiye in February, but many other pieces remain in American museum collections.

Ali Aboutaam, the key figure behind Phoenix Ancient Art, began his career in Beirut before moving to Geneva after Lebanon banned antiquities exports in 1988. His company’s operations were often linked to well-known trafficking networks, yet he was never charged with knowingly purchasing stolen goods.

The question of what to do with these contentious pieces lingers: should they be repatriated, or kept for their historical value? In a world where provenance is everything, museums face tough ethical dilemmas when dealing with artifacts that once belonged to shady dealers.