Raids suggest a deeper network of looted art

Olson and Markell told the undercover investigator they regularly bought Thai antiquities from looters and smugglers, sometimes smuggling them personally, the warrants state. They then allegedly sold them to clients in Los Angeles. They also admitted running an elaborate donation scheme, selling their clients looted artifacts with forged appraisals that inflated the value of the objects by as much as 400%, the warrants state. They then allegedly helped these clients donate the objects to local museums, which provided a tax write off at the inflated value.

The scheme appears to have spanned the last decade and generally involved repeated donations of objects with values of just under $5,000, the value at which the IRS required additional documentation.

In the case of the Bowers and the Pacific Asia Museum, the warrants clearly suggest that officials were aware that the objects were looted and overvalued but accepted them anyway.

A senior curator at the Bowers Museum, now deceased, regularly accepted donations of Thai and Native American antiquities from Olson that he knew were removed illegally, the warrants say. The documents describe the longtime curator, Armand Labbe, smiling and chuckling as he told the agent he could accept the donations because "he could not determine" what rules the museum was supposed to follow.

The Bowers' current director, Peter Keller, told the undercover agent he knew Olson and had visited his warehouse. An appraiser, described as Labbe's girlfriend, told the agent that she regularly prepared appraisals of objects for Keller to donate to his own museum. Keller denied wrongdoing Thursday.

In the case of the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena, the agent met with two museum officials in in November 2005 and offered to donate Thai material he had purchased from Markell.

Marcia Page, the museum's deputy director of collections, told the agent that given her position, she was "expected to at least put up token resistance to accepting antiquities without proper paperwork," the warrant states. She noted that Markell had donated Thai material, and that she didn't think it was legal. She said more senior people in the museum would have to sign the paperwork.

About two weeks later, Page told the agent that the bulk of his donation had been accepted.

LACMA, the Mingei and the UC Berkeley Art Museum all received similar donations from Markell or Olson over several years, the warrants say, but the documents are unclear about the extent to which museum officials knew of alleged theft or tax evasion.