Thread by @artcrimeprof

What happens if you believe "if Los Angeles is to achieve its destiny as the metropolis of the 21st Century, it must have art from the 3rd and 2nd millennia B.C."? Welp, you found a museum in Beverly Hills and commit tax fraud! A thread about the California Museum of Ancient Art.

The California Museum of Ancient Art (CMAA) was established in 1983 "to gather the first significant collection of ancient art from Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Holy Land in the western United States." web.archive.org/web/2019041009…

CMAA: "The collection will be a focus for people in Southern California, giving them access for the first time to the roots of Western Civilization."

People in Southern California: "'For the first time'?!?"

The founder, Jerome Berman, "lives, eats and sleeps this museum," according to his lawyer. We'll get back to the lawyer part...

He worked out of his North Hollywood apartment - the CMAA never had a physical location. It did have a Beverly Hills postbox and members signed up by Berman and paying annual dues: "$40 for an individual membership and $1,000 for the Pharaoh’s Circle"

The museum also acquired, mainly it seems through donations, "about 2,600 pieces from Anatolia in Western Asia, Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Levant."

How did a museum without a display space end up with so many donations? Berman helped donors falsify their records so they would get more in value for donating just-purchased antiquities than they paid for them! dailynews.com/2007/03/14/mus…

"if a person owns a piece of art for more than a year, he can donate it and write off its appraised value. But if he owns it for less than a year, he can claim only the purchase price... Berman helped museum donors falsify purchase dates on at least 11 income tax returns..."

In 2007, Berman pled guilty and was sentenced to a year in federal prison and paid restitution of nearly $263,200. latimes.com/archives/la-xp…

By the way, the dealer selling these antiquities to the donors was, SHOCKER, Berman himself.

Berman's restitution was only for his personal tax liability - he pulled the maneuver on his own tax returns. He helped others evade at least $565,000 in taxes - and that's only the known cases.

The stories about the CMAA case mention that its art was in an LA storage facility. "Oh no!" I thought. "Whatever happened to these poor abandoned masterpieces of ancient art?!?" jewishjournal.com/uncategorized/…

I don't know where they are, but after checking out the images on the CMAA's now-defunct website, I am... not so worried about them any more. web.archive.org/web/2019042420…

They owned a lot of stuff that looks a lot more 21st century than 3rd millennium, if you know what I mean.

#mood

Get out of my nightmares.

Sort of insulting to sell someone your very first try at forgery, no?

This would get you thrown right out of scribe school.

Here's the masterpiece of CMAA's collection - a black stone kudurru (boundary stone) carved with symbols of various deities: web.archive.org/web/2019041709…

Through my expert knowledge of ancient art* I discovered the likely model for the CMAA's painful forgery, this kudurru in the @britishmuseum (thanks, @googlearts!): artsandculture.google.com/asset/boundary…

*aka by Googling the list of deities and seeing which other artwork had them all together

@britishmuseum @googlearts FYI, a decade after its director was sentenced for fraud, this "museum" with a collection of laughable fakes received $348,540 in contributions and grants in 2017, the last year I can find records. projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/dis…

@britishmuseum @googlearts "It was always a very marginal operation," said David Noel Freedman, biblical scholar at UC San Diego, who was on the museum’s advisory board. "...I used to wonder how this guy did what he did. I always felt like the less I knew, the better." dailynews.com/2007/03/14/mus…

@britishmuseum @googlearts Conclusion: I'm going to have to keep talking about the link between tax fraud and forged or smuggled antiquities for a very, very long time, aren't I? Sigh. Here's a previous piece on this issue: albanylawreview.org/Articles/Vol82…

@britishmuseum @googlearts Boy howdy, the sentencing memo by Berman's lawyer is full of revelations. Here's a link to a PDF and screenshots:

@britishmuseum @googlearts Berman was acting as an art dealer, with something called "Oxford Collection Partnership" or "the Oxford Collection": lawfuel.com/blog/internal-…

@britishmuseum @googlearts Berman's lawyer claims the 2,600-piece CMAA collection is valued at $12 million, although admits that only about 100 of these are rare/important enough to be on permanent display at, say, the British Museum.

@britishmuseum @googlearts So..... that's $12 million in potential further fraudulent tax deductions still presumably sitting around in a warehouse in Southern California?

@britishmuseum @googlearts The sentencing memo also describes the CMAA's prized possession, a fragment of an Assyrian relief from the Southwest Palace of Sennacherib at Nineveh. "The British Museum published it!" they said. "Bullshit!" I said.

@britishmuseum @googlearts But... not bullshit at all!

@britishmuseum @googlearts I guess in 1998 it was still ok for the British Museum to publish non-provenanced objects from a collection full of obvious fakes, giving them market value and allowing their collector to try to use their ownership as a reason why a court should be lenient on his tax fraud case?

@britishmuseum @googlearts I also wonder if this fragment from a "private California foundation" is also connected with Berman? Was he selling things donated to the CMAA?
digital.library.stonybrook.edu/cdm/compoundob… and digital.library.stonybrook.edu/cdm/compoundob… if you want to follow along at home.

@britishmuseum @googlearts Another reason given why the court should be lenient: the CMAA's objects have contributed to our knowledge of the world through scholarly publications!

@britishmuseum @googlearts My quick JSTOR search found only two articles, both from JNES: jstor.org/stable/545565 and jstor.org/stable/10.1086…

@britishmuseum @googlearts Heya, scholars, please don't publish unprovenanced antiquities you haven't personally examined, because decades later some jerkwad on Twitter (me) is going to make fun of you for ever thinking that it was genuine.