Scams.&.Scandals.S2024E02.Thief.at.the.British.Museum.
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00:00So what are you holding there?
00:07I'm holding two gems that came from the British Museum
00:11and which I'm now bringing back to them.
00:14Is that stolen property that you're holding?
00:17Yes.
00:19This is Dr Ittai Gredell, and to clarify, he is not the thief.
00:25But the gems Ittai's holding are at the heart of the story
00:29I'm about to tell you.
00:32Remember this?
00:33It's emerged that the British Museum was warned
00:35more than two years ago that objects from its collection
00:38were being put up for sale.
00:40More than 1,500 items were stolen, damaged
00:43or are missing from this place.
00:46This is a story about one of Britain's most revered institutions
00:52and the theft of ancient treasures that were sold around the world.
00:58It was very shocking. It was worrying.
01:00I had no idea of the scale that this would turn out to be.
01:04The records they have of such items is so poor, even if there is any,
01:08they don't know what they've lost.
01:10There's been a huge trauma for many people.
01:13It's a story of warnings that were ignored.
01:19My initial reaction was, there's a cover-up.
01:21It's a dirty story. They don't want it out.
01:23And of thefts inside the museum's own walls,
01:27targeting the very objects it was meant to protect.
01:30I'm 100% certain we've got our man.
01:33I remember that distinctly, my hair stood on end.
01:36I was absolutely shocked.
01:38You want me to talk or not talk?
01:52When Itai told me he'd caught a thief,
01:55it seemed too strange to be true.
01:58Almost.
01:59It starts with an unusual skill.
02:02Itai was born with a photographic memory.
02:07I could actually look at a page of text, close it,
02:10and then I could call forth an image of the page in my mind
02:15and read the entire page.
02:17I used to do that as a party trick when I was young.
02:25It's this skill that led Itai away from academia
02:28and into a rather niche profession.
02:31Buying and selling tiny ancient Roman and Greek gemstones.
02:38Well, I can make money out of it
02:40because very, very few people know about ancient gems.
02:44There's this very elementary thrill of the treasure hunts,
02:50but finding something that is actually far better
02:53than the sellers know about.
03:09It's May 2020.
03:11Itai's at home in Denmark,
03:13looking through a book about gemstones in museums across the world.
03:17He's studying their features when he recognises one.
03:21It says it's from the British Museum,
03:23and it's a gem Itai knows well.
03:26I could just about make out there were tiny little scratches,
03:30bits of incidental damage along the nasal ridge.
03:34It was clearly the same piece.
03:36But he hasn't recognised it because he saw it at the British Museum.
03:42He's recognised it because a broken piece of it is going around the private market.
03:48The man who is selling the gem is Malcolm Hay.
03:52Now clearly, if it was that gem, there's no way I could own it legally.
03:58He's not the thief either, by the way.
04:00And it belongs to the museum.
04:02The gem was even on their website.
04:04And my first concern was to try and contact somebody in the museum.
04:10But how did the gem leave the museum?
04:14Malcolm's gem had passed through more than one pair of hands before him.
04:19But where had it first been sold?
04:22The answer is unsettling.
04:24It came from eBay and a seller Itai had been buying dozens of gems from for years.
04:34Do you remember the first item you saw from Sultan 1966 on eBay?
04:40That was in 2014.
04:42I got it for £15 plus postage, which I think was £8.
04:46So £23 something altogether.
04:49And how much do you think it was worth?
04:51In the proper London gallery or so, it could have been £4,000 to £5,000.
04:56It was obvious, very obviously, a Roman original.
05:02He told me they'd been inherited from a grandfather, which made sense.
05:08And Itai is about to make a discovery about the identity of Sultan 1966.
05:15He told me that his actual name was Paul Higgins.
05:19But Itai had noticed another name on the seller's profile, so he questioned him and he gets a reply.
05:26My name is Paul Higgins, but eBay have messed up my name several times.
05:32Itai now feels suspicious of the seller's story.
05:36He decides to investigate further.
05:39I began to look into my PayPal records and there it was, the name Peter Higgins, which he had specifically, emphatically denied was his name.
05:49Remember that name, Peter Higgins?
05:52And it was my colleague who said to me, Itai, you do realise, don't you, that Peter Higgins is the name of a curator in the British Museum.
06:05I remember that, my hair stood on end. I was absolutely shocked.
06:11He'd done his Agatha Christie, he knew who it was.
06:16Peter Higgins, a curator at the British Museum's Greece and Rome department.
06:22Absolutely shocking, but believable.
06:27And why is it believable?
06:29Well, because it made sense.
06:32It's always someone on the inside.
06:37The thief was apparently still operating within the museum walls and it was an insider, someone with access to the stalls.
06:46And that was a truly scary thought.
06:52Itai decides to write to the very top of the British Museum.
06:58He tells them about his discovery.
07:05And of his suspicions that at least three gems he's seen for sale were stolen by their curator, Peter Higgins.
07:11What I said was that all the evidence that I send you here suggests that this man, Peter Higgins, is stealing from the museum.
07:26Either it's he or someone impersonating him.
07:29I also wrote in that email that these items were sold for such measly amounts that this suggested to me that what I discovered was only the tip of a much larger iceberg.
07:45He gets an acknowledgement email from the British Museum's Deputy Director Jonathan Williams.
07:57Thank you for your email and for bringing this information to our attention.
08:02The museum will now look into this matter.
08:04And then Itai hears nothing for months.
08:08Now, remember this gem? The one with the scratches along its nasal ridge?
08:17While Itai is still waiting to hear back, Malcolm Hay returns it to the British Museum.
08:26We had an appointment, they met me at the front entrance.
08:28They weren't really interested in where I got it.
08:32It wasn't a subject for discussion.
08:37Now, whether they already knew more or whatever, I don't know.
08:41They were just happy to have it back.
08:43I think embarrassed. They were clearly embarrassed.
08:46It was awkward for them.
08:48Perhaps embarrassed because they didn't want to ask too closely how they'd lost it.
08:52Almost two months after Malcolm Hay returns his gem, Itai finally receives a fuller response from Jonathan Williams.
09:07I can confirm that the museum has conducted a thorough investigation which found that the objects concerned are all accounted for.
09:17But what about Peter Higgs?
09:19Well, Jonathan Williams also wrote there was...
09:22No suggestion of any wrongdoing on behalf of any member of museum staff.
09:29But hang on.
09:31Malcolm Hay's gem had just been returned to the British Museum.
09:35So Itai knew what they were telling him wasn't the full story.
09:39It was only handed back at my instigation, so that argument was totally beside the point.
09:45It had been sold. It had gone AWOL, gone missing.
09:50And I'd seen to it, with the help of Malcolm Hayes, that it had been returned to the British Museum.
09:55So to use that as an argument was bizarre, to say the least. Totally absurd.
10:00It seems whether, under the influence of the thief or not, the British Museum was trying to face it all down or deny anything had gone wrong initially.
10:12So, but I then asked Jonathan Williams if he could at least explain to me how it was possible that a documented British Museum piece had been offered for sale on eBay.
10:27He then replied to me.
10:28He lied to me.
10:30It would not be appropriate for the museum to share the detail of its confidential internal investigations externally.
10:37So he couldn't tell me anything.
10:38My initial reaction was there's a cover-up. They don't want this. It's a dirty story. They don't want it out. And I advise it not to pursue it. Forget it.
10:49Well, I absolutely reject that. There was no, you know, deliberate attempt to conceal from the public what had happened.
10:57The thief, as we now know and we've revealed to the courts here, went to pretty elaborate lengths to cover their tracks.
11:05The British Museum now believes that Peter Higgs had been altering records, including faking a note specifically about Malcolm Hayes' gem to try and hide the truth from his colleagues.
11:16They come across a handwritten note that says, oh, this has been missing, this gem, since 1963.
11:26And they take that on trust. And again, it doesn't cross their mind that someone has written that in the last couple of years rather than back in 1963.
11:36But throughout the museum's investigation, Peter Higgs, now acting head of his department, remains in his position.
11:43After months of trying to get answers, Itai's detective work begins to take its toll.
11:50Well, there were a stretch of time where I could barely think of anything else.
11:57The only way I could actually deal with it was by letting it take over my life, letting it become an obsession.
12:03So, Itai seeks advice amongst his contacts in the antiquities world.
12:13He said that he was very concerned that someone inside the British Museum had been stealing from the collection and selling objects on eBay.
12:23And he was also concerned because he tried to report this to the museum and essentially he felt he'd been brushed off.
12:30The museum had said there wasn't a problem, but he was convinced there was.
12:34He said, perhaps they're dismissing me as a madman quite a few times.
12:38You know, he was, you know, it was clearly chewing away at him and he was, he was in a, yeah, as I say, a dilemma about it.
12:45He didn't, he didn't know what to do about it.
12:48I was worried about him psychologically because he was clearly, it was weighing on his mind and he was making himself ill with it.
13:05I was very worried.
13:06I was diagnosed with serious health issues and a cancer, renal cancer from which I'd suffered many years before.
13:23I'd now returned and it seemed like at the time, like I was a goner, frankly.
13:29I had to get this finished before I was on my deathbed.
13:34And if I died before the job was finished, I found that quite horrible.
13:46It eyes suffering, but when it comes to the British Museum, there's a glimmer of hope.
13:52He eventually finds someone who will listen, a trustee at the institution,
13:57who puts him in touch with the museum's chairman, George Osborne.
14:02He sends me on an email he's received from Dr. Griddle saying there have been thefts at the museum.
14:08I immediately asked the director of the museum, Hartwig Fisher, you know, what's this all about?
14:13And he reassures me, it's a historic allegation.
14:16We've looked into it properly before and we don't believe it's true.
14:21But a few months later, everything was about to change.
14:24I remember so clearly getting the phone call when I was at home getting ready for Christmas.
14:30We were about to have a new baby in the family.
14:33And the director calls me and says things have been stolen from the strong room.
14:39And that's when I immediately said, well, hold on, that must be linked to that email, you know, that I saw a couple of months ago.
14:45The director of the time was a bit skeptical that they were connected, but I was absolutely sure.
14:50It was too coincidental.
14:52And I said we should call the police that day.
14:57More than two years after Ittai first contacted the museum, Peter Higgs is dismissed.
15:04The police are still investigating.
15:10But why did the British Museum take so long to realize something was wrong?
15:15The British Museum has a great collection of ancient objects from Sicily, but they're mostly on a small scale.
15:31They're coins, jewelry, terracottas, pottery.
15:34Peter Higgs was a prominent curator in the museum world.
15:41He'd worked for the British Museum since 1993.
15:45It was very shocking.
15:47You know, it was, it was worrying.
15:49The name that has been mentioned is obviously of someone who was in a position of trust.
15:54And so that identification, if it's right, adds to the shock, definitely.
15:59From what I had heard, he was a rather quiet, introverted individual, kept himself to himself, you know, didn't have some lavish lifestyle.
16:12There were no clues from what I'm told amongst his colleagues that, you know, he was all the while stealing things.
16:19So trusted was Peter Higgs that a few years back, he helped the UK government identify and return a stolen 2,000 year old statue to Libya.
16:33It sounded as though he was one of the great and the good, you know, he was called the monuments man.
16:47He was, he was tracking down stolen goods.
16:51He even appeared on the BBC's Crime Watch programme to speak about it.
16:55You know, we're committed to trying to stop the illegal trade and antiquities.
16:59Well, Peter, it's some brilliant detective work.
17:03The British Museum believes items were being stolen from its collection over many years.
17:15We're sure that the thefts had been happening for at least a decade, but we think it may well be more than 20 years.
17:21He prized the gold off some objects and the gold's gone, but the gem remains.
17:28Some of them will be permanently destroyed because the gold will be melted down and who knows where that now is.
17:33I'm 100% certain we, we've got our man, we know who's stole these items, missing items for the British Museum, missing coins were found in his house.
17:43Peter Higgs denies he stole anything, and as for those ancient coins, he says they didn't come from the British Museum.
17:52In January 2023, the museum appoints a new keeper of the Greece and Rome department, someone who has never worked for the British Museum before.
18:03Enter Professor.
18:05Tom Harrison.
18:06Tom Harrison.
18:07I'm the keeper of the Department of Greece and Rome at the British Museum.
18:09Got a kind of dark intimations that something was going to be wrong that I would have to deal with, but no more than that.
18:15Found out about the sort of second or third week, the scale of the damage.
18:20I guess it's an interesting way to begin a job.
18:24Yes, it is.
18:27Within weeks of starting, Tom is given the unenviable task of leading the recovery of the missing items and making sure all the objects in his department are accounted for.
18:39But there's a catch, and it's a serious one.
18:42The vast majority of those missing items had never been formally catalogued by the museum.
18:47There are 107,000 items in the Greek and Roman department collection, and we're effectively going through every one of those to make sure we've got a completely solid basis for saying that they're with us.
19:00So, can the museum ever be sure of what was actually lost? And how do they prove who did it?
19:07I think the only way of hoping to recover them is to get the thief to disclose how he sold them and where he sold them.
19:14But we're a long way from that, it seems. And, of course, also for the museum to disclose what they've lost.
19:20There are layers of data that we can use to establish what came into the collection and what we could have lost.
19:29We're looking at the registers that we have from the 19th century. We're looking at old archive material, which includes receipts, lists that were made before the items came here.
19:39I think the problem is there. They don't know. The records or the catalogue they have of such items is so poor, even though there is any, they don't know what they've lost.
19:50What has this experience been like for you, dealing with the discovery and then the process of recovery?
20:00The people who work here do it because they care about the collection.
20:03And so something like this, the fact that items have been damaged on our watch, if you like, is something that goes to the heart of people's identity.
20:12And they talk about, people here talk about the objects in the collection as if they were people.
20:17So it is felt very, very personally. There's no question about that.
20:28Denmark, the home of Itai and his gem collection. That's what I've come here to see.
20:35Remember, over the years, Itai believes he bought hundreds of gems from Peter Higgs.
20:41It's straight ahead.
20:42Having never considered the possibility they could come from the British Museum.
20:47I can see a lot of white dots. What does that mean?
20:49The white dots is my way of marking out the ones that come from the British Museum.
20:56So that's most of them then.
20:59And how many gems here do you think belong to the British Museum?
21:03I think it's about 150 here and roughly the same amount in my drawer over there.
21:09Itai is now in the process of returning all those gems that he thinks belong to the museum.
21:20I feel I'm righting a wrong and I'm doing something constructive and I enjoy helping the museum with retrieving the objects.
21:31But here's the thing. Itai didn't keep all of the gems he bought for himself.
21:37The items I sold on, I actually sold them on to people I already knew, fellow dealers, colleagues, friends and a collector I knew very well already.
21:51He's now on a mission to return those gems to the British Museum as well.
21:55Itai has travelled to cities across Europe on his hunt to recover them, including here, Paris, where he asked me to join him for the handover.
22:10Hi, happy to meet you.
22:13Happy to meet you.
22:15No one really wants to be mixed up in this story, including the collector. He asked us not to show his face.
22:22As a collector, you laugh and you live with the pieces as well. And it's a very, very sad story for me.
22:37So I'm definitely not happy about it, but I'm happy it's going back to the museum.
22:41This is a much more important situation as my emotions about that.
22:46Some of the gems Itai sold on have been on quite a journey. He says one even ended up in Hong Kong.
22:53And two others ended up back in a museum, just not the right museum.
22:58Those gems took pride of place in a small exhibition in a remote part of Germany.
23:05One is even on the first page of their catalogue.
23:09It's pretty hard to miss it. Not that that museum could ever have imagined they might be displaying stolen items.
23:16But what about the other gems sold by Sultan 1966 that Itai didn't buy?
23:22I was not the only buyer because the eBay seller, certainly, Sultan 1966, he had other listings.
23:31So a substantial number has gone to other buyers than me.
23:39In fact, we've seen court documents submitted by the British Museum,
23:44which claim at least 45 different buyers bought from Peter Higgs.
23:50But who could they be?
23:51I sincerely hope that other people who have in all innocence come by such gems will do the same and simply hand them back.
24:02We've discovered that a large number of gems ended up in Washington DC, around 260,
24:10and a handful of others ended up in New Orleans.
24:13The FBI is now involved and we've managed to get our hands on an email sent by an agent to a buyer in the US.
24:21I am a special agent at the FBI.
24:24We are assisting the London Metropolitan Police Service Economic Crimes Unit with their investigation of missing or stolen items from the collection of the British Museum.
24:31Hundreds of the artifacts the British Museum says were stolen have been returned so far.
24:41And much of it is down to the work of one man, Itai Gredell.
24:48It has removed all my former joy of buying and selling objects, ancient gems, because I'm left with this as a constant fear.
25:01I fear this might happen to me again that I could run into an inadvertently buy stolen goods.
25:06So it has sort of robbed me of my previous innocence as a dealer and I hope I will eventually overcome it.
25:16But he is comforted by the thought that he has made a difference and some of the gems that Itai once owned are now on display at the British Museum.
25:32Yes, this is what I will be remembered for, it will be my epitaph.
25:39I do think that his steadfastness and his refusal to just go away would have been much easier for him just to shut up and not worry about it, but he did keep worrying about it.
25:52You know, I think Itai Gredell did the museum a great service. I'm sorry he was not listened to in February 2021 when he alerted us to these thefts.
26:01But I hope he can look at the changes that have been made and see that some good has come out of what has been a very sad and unfortunate series of events.
26:11So how does the British Museum even begin to recover from this and all at a time when there is increasing pressure for it to repatriate contested objects in its collection, including the Parthenon sculptures?
26:31I mean, I think it has been a very damaging story for the museum. I think it's tarnished its reputation as, you know, a safe custodian of World Heritage.
26:43So I think it's got a job to do to recover from that. I don't think it's broken, but I think it's tarnished.
26:52Well, I'm always nervous of saying something can never happen again. And unfortunately, human beings, you know, are capable of doing bad things.
27:02The museum today, a couple of years on, as a result of this saga, I think is much more open, much more transparent.
27:09But we may never truly know the extent of what has disappeared from its collections.
27:15We're not only talking about items that are fully missing, but also items that are partially stolen.
27:20So I think in some of those cases, I think it's very unlikely that we're going to see the material back.
27:24And the likeliest interpretation is that it was sold for scrap, unfortunately.
27:28As for Ittai, life for him is now moving on.
27:35Things are much more cheerful now, as I said. For whatever reason, the growth of the cancer has sort of stopped.
27:41Back then at the time, it looked pretty disastrous, and I was very conscious that I had to sort of get this wrapped up before I died.
27:53You thought you were dying, and you were having to deal with this. You were having to concentrate on the British Museum.
27:59Yeah, but I mean, you can't spend your entire day concentrating on dying, can you?
28:11The end is near in terms of your gem hunt.
28:13Yes, absolutely, yes.
28:15How does that feel?
28:16Great, lovely. It's like a closure for me.
28:21...