Displaying items by tag: prison

The former antiquities dealer Jonathan Markell has been sentenced to 18 months in federal prison and a year of supervised release for making false declarations in customs documents to smuggle looted archeological artifacts from Southeast Asia into the US.

Markell and his wife Cari ran the now closed Silk Roads Gallery in LA for a decade.

A former longtime Jasper Johns assistant was ordered Thursday to spend 18 months behind bars after admitting he stole artworks from the pop artist's Connecticut studio and arranged for them to be sold by a Manhattan gallery for nearly $10 million.

James Meyer, 53, of Salisbury, Connecticut, was also ordered to pay $13 million in restitution and to forfeit $3.9 million.

U.S. District Judge J. Paul Oetken said he believed Meyer was genuinely remorseful and was primarily a "kind, caring, thoughtful" man who committed a serious offense, selling unauthorized artworks on at least three occasions from 2006 to 2011, pocketing more than $4 million.

Following a trial that was prominently covered in the German press due to its illustrious protagonists, particularly the heirs of billionaire Berthold Albrecht, one of the founders of the German discount supermarket chain Aldi, German art consultant Helge Achenbach was found guilty of fraud by the District Court in Essen and sentenced to six years in prison on Monday.

The 62- year old used to be one of Germany’s most influential art consultants, entertaining long-term business relationships with some of the country’s wealthiest collectors. Berthold Albrecht, who passed in 2012, was one of his most important clients. Achenbach had repeatedly inflated the net purchase prices for art works and vintage cars he procured for Albrecht and other clients.

A Spanish court sentenced a man on Wednesday to 10 years in prison for crimes including the theft of a priceless medieval document considered the first guidebook to Spain's Saint James pilgrimage trail.

Police recovered the unique 12th-century manuscript in July 2012, a year after it was found to have gone missing from a safe in the famous cathedral of the northwestern city of Santiago de Compostela.

Judges in a court in the nearby city of La Coruna said in a written ruling that they "consider it proven" that an electrician who worked for years at the cathedral, Manuel Fernandez Castineiras, stole the manuscript.

A man who tried to sell stolen paintings worth a fortune, including works by Marc Chagall and Diego Rivera, was sentenced Friday to more than four years in state prison.

Raul Espinoza pleaded no contest to one count of receiving property stolen in 2008 from the Encino home of an elderly couple, Los Angeles prosecutors said.

The whereabouts of a dozen modern paintings from the home of Anton and Susan Roland remained a mystery for more than six years until a Los Angeles police detective got a tip in September that someone in Europe was trying to broker a deal to sell the art.

A brazen art crime has been uncovered in Uzbekistan. As the "Guardian" initially reported, several employees from the Uzbek State Art Museum have been found guilty of systematically selling original artworks and replacing them with fakes over a 15 year period.

Mifayz Usmanov, the chief curator of the central Asian country's premier art museum, was sentenced to nine years behind bars for his involvement in the daylight robbery. Two restorers were sentenced to eight years each.

Art dealer Helly Nahmad has gotten out of jail, well, if not free, at least unexpectedly early.

Mr. Nahmad, 36, has been released from federal prison five months into the one-year-and-one-day sentence he received for operating an illegal gambling business from his Trump Tower home.

The art dealer, scion of the billionaire Nahmad family of Monaco, has been transferred to a halfway house in the Bronx after being incarcerated at the Federal Correctional Facility in Otisville, N.Y., since June, his lawyer confirmed today.

In the spring of 2010, a Queens foundry owner offered to sell a bronze sculpture of a U.S. flag to an art collector. The creator, the foundry owner said, was American contemporary artist Jasper Johns, and the price was around $10 million.

On Thursday, the foundry owner, Brian Ramnarine, was sentenced to 30 months in prison in federal court in Manhattan after pleading guilty in January to three counts of wire fraud, including one for making an unauthorized copy of the sculpture, named “Flag,” and creating false documents purporting that it was a rare gift from Mr. Johns.

Back in February 2011 ArtLyst reported that the disgraced international art dealer Helly Nahmad was in possession of a $20m painting by Amedeo Modigliani, "Seated Man with a Cane" (1918) that had allegedly been stolen by the Nazis from Oscar Stettiner, a prominent Paris gallerist. In 1939. Stettiner escaped Paris leaving the painting behind. The work was confiscated by Marcel Philippon, who was appointed by the Nazis to sell the Stettiner property.

The Nahmad family is now being sued by relatives of the descendants of Oscar Stettiner the original owner of the masterpiece. Helly Nahmad who is currently serving a prison sentence of 366 days as punishment for his involvement in a Russian mob linked, high-stakes gambling ring was, needless to say, unavailable for comment. He was arrested in 2013 as part of an inquiry into illegal gaming promoted as private parties for high net worth individuals including film stars, professional athletes and bank bosses.