Murky Provenance

Two mysterious men lie at the heart of the burgeoning museum scandal in Southern California. Robert Olson is a California antiquities dealer who has spent some 25 years buying and selling prehistoric Native American material and valuable Asian art including statues of Buddha, bronze weapons and 2,000-year-old ceramics from Thailand's Ban Chiang site. The former steel-company salesman, now 79 and based in Cerritos, Calif., sold artifacts to collectors, dealers and museums--and even on eBay. In early 2003, he met a collector named Tom Hoyt, who said he was a computer executive anxious to get help in building his collection. Over the past five years, Olson and Hoyt met two dozen times, and the older man sold the younger one Thai goods and introduced him to museum curators and collectors so that the man could make donations of pieces from his newly acquired collections for a healthy tax credit.

In reality, "Hoyt" was a pseudonym, and the man was really an undercover agent for the National Park Service who was the sharp end of an investigation into artifacts smuggling. According to federal documents, the thin man with the mustache (whose real name hasn't been released) recorded dozens of conversations and hundreds of phone calls with Olson and other dealers. The undercover investigation into the art market burst into public Thursday as 500 federal agents executed search warrants at the properties of dealers, collectors and four respected Southern California art museums, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).

The raids made public a five-year-old federal undercover investigation aimed at stopping an alleged black-market trade in artifacts from Thailand, China, Burma, Cambodia and the American Southwest. No one was arrested, and no charges have been filed in the case. The investigation seemed intended to strike a blow at an alleged multi-billion-dollar worldwide trade in looted artifacts by sending dealers and museum officials a clear and urgent message: "We intend to change the culture of museums in this country," Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph O. Johns, the investigation's lead prosecutor, told NEWSWEEK.

Reached by NEWSWEEK on Thursday evening, Olson agreed that he dealt in Native American and Thai art, but he repeatedly maintained he'd kept on the right side of the law. "I haven't done anything wrong or illegal," Olson insisted. "I never dealt in stolen goods." Olson now calls the man he knew as Tom Hoyt a "a son of a bitch." According to search-warrant affidavits, Olson first attracted the attention of investigators in 2003 when an unnamed alleged smuggler steered authorities to Olson regarding Native American art. "Hoyt" then allegedly made purchases of Thai goods. Then the Feds tracked Olson as he allegedly imported at least 16 shipments of goods from Thailand.

The four museums targeted in Thursday's raids included LACMA, the Pacific Asian Museum in Pasadena, the Charles S. Bowers Museum in Santa Ana and the Mingei International Museum in San Diego. Agents seized or copied computer records at all four in order to learn more about the values of donated Asian and Native American artifacts. Each museum issued statements stressing that they were cooperating with federal investigators. "The Bowers Museum has fully cooperated with federal agents," the museum said. Saying that it too was cooperating, LACMA director Michael Govan said that the museum has "a history of returning works of art where ownership claims are substantiated." It remained unclear how many art items may have been seized from the museums.

Peter Keller, president of the Bowers Museum, told NEWSWEEK that he believes he and his staff did nothing wrong. "The Bowers Museum followed standard museum procedures in its acceptance of donations," Keller said Friday. The museum did not become involved in the appraisal value of donated gifts, he says. Most of the relationship between the museum and Olson came from a Bowers curator named Armand Labbé, who died in 2005. Keller allows that it is possible that "maybe through Labbé we did" make mistakes, and "when Labbé passed away, we stopped taking any donations of archeological materials whatever." Keller points out that although "Hoyt" made two donations during Labbé's lifetime, the undercover operative "was quite agitated" when Keller refused to accept a third donation.