Nicolas Cage returns stolen dinosaur skull to Mongolia

originally posted by: Generation9
a reply to: Swills

Something sounds fishy. Did Cage ever have possession of the dinosaur skull? Will he get his money back? Was it a way of transferring money from a gullible actor (or a not so gullible co-conspirator) to an art gallery and then on to some further cause? The so-called art world is full of it.

Can you give any examples of when an art gallery has laundered money to some further cause?
I'm not saying I disagree but it would help readers if you could back your statement up with documented facts.

Nicolas Cage proved his worth to mankind when he did Con Air. The perfect movie. If that's not enough for you there's even Face/Off!
The man is a King.

a reply to: Resostone

I thought he was best in Lord of War.

a reply to: Wide-Eyes

That was also really good. Genuinely, really good.

On topic - where was it handed back to? I may have not read the right articles but I'm yet to have read where or whom in Mongolia he officially 'returned' the stolen item to.

Also, Wild At Heart, because David Lynch.

a reply to: Resostone

The Getty museum has been involved in this sort of fraud for many years. Here's a story about the most recent kerfluffle and references to the big ones back in the '70s. articles.latimes.com...
Mostly it is tax fraud and attempts to get documentation for stolen goods to authenticate them and increase the proposed value.

At first look, "Ancient Carved Ambers in the J. Paul Getty Museum" represents the museum at its finest -- decades of scholarship published online in an illustrated catalog that engages the public in a rarely studied artifact of the ancient world. But records -- including internal Getty files -- show that the ambers were almost certainly looted from tombs in northern Italy. The relics passed through the smuggling network of Giacomo Medici, who has been convicted in Italy of trafficking in illegally excavated artifacts. Once in the United States, they were donated to the Getty as part of a tax fraud scheme that nearly brought the institution to its knees in the 1980s. The catalog is silent on this history, which a Getty spokesman says the museum was not aware of at the time, but it does acknowledge the consequences. Because nothing is known of the context in which the ambers were found, little can be definitively concluded about their meaning to their ancient owners. "Were they purchases, part of a dowry, heirlooms, or other kinds of gifts?" writes Faya Causey, author of the catalog. "Unfortunately, we can only speculate as to whether the ambers were actually possessions of the people with whom they were buried, how the objects were acquired, and in which cultic or other activity they played a part." The ambers capture the dilemma that the Getty faces today. Having largely abandoned the purchase of ancient art, it is using its unparalleled resources to restore meaning to objects whose history it had a hand in destroying. The bulk of the Getty's collection of ancient amber was donated between 1976 and '83 by Gordon McLendon, a Texas radio man who pioneered the Top 40 format on AM radio. McLendon was not known as an art collector. How did he come to possess a world-class collection of ancient amber? And why did he donate it to a museum so wealthy it had no need of donations? The answers are in Getty documents and notes collected by Arthur Houghton, a former associate curator for antiquities at the Getty who initiated an internal investigation into the ambers soon after his arrival in 1983. What Houghton found -- and Getty lawyers later confirmed -- was that McLendon was part of a decade-long looting and tax fraud scheme being run out of the Getty's antiquities department. The scheme was orchestrated by Getty antiquities curator Jiri Frel, with help from Bruce McNall, then a Los Angeles antiquities dealer, and Robert E. Hecht, McNall's supplier. In the late 1970s, the three devised a way to build the Getty's collection while moving the less collectible inventory in McNall's Rodeo Drive antiquities gallery. Hecht supplied thousands of recently looted antiquities from Italy, Turkey and Greece, records and interviews show. Frel forged appraisals that grossly inflated their value, and McNall found wealthy friends to donate them to the Getty in exchange for fraudulent tax write-offs. Over a decade, the Getty received some 6,000 donations from more than 100 donors whose gifts were valued at nearly $15 million, tax records show. More than 900 objects were donated by McLendon, including the ancient ambers. In the late 1970s, McNall had alerted McLendon that the Getty was interested in acquiring a group of ambers owned by a Swiss man named Fritz Burki. Burki, a former university janitor turned antiquities restorer, has told Italian prosecutors that he served as a "straw man" for sales of looted objects being fenced by Hecht and his Italian supplier, convicted trafficker Giacomo Medici. Burki's name is associated with hundreds of looted objects that have since been returned to Italy, including several from the Getty's collection.

In addition to the items mentioned above, there were also pre-Columbian artifacts from South America that were so "questionable" that a whole vault of them had to be returned to the countries of origin, particularly textiles looted from graves in Peru. As in all businesses where millions of dollars are changing hands, there is a good deal of corruption. Art and artifacts are no exception.

a reply to: Swills

Watch the documentary called "the thirteenth dinosaur. "

You will learn a lot about dinosaur bones and where they "end up"

awesome story, very fascinating. also let's take a moment to appreciate the title

Nicolas Cage returns stolen dinosaur skull to Mongolia

it's so random it sounds like a mad libs. cracks me up!!!!

I went to see "bob" the triceratops about a week ago before it was boxed up and sent to Tucson Arizona for auction. Price is set at over a million to buy it outright. Museum couldn't afford it. What was sort of a surprise was the Museum it was kept at.

Sounds like good PR for Cage while giving things back to their owners is usually spiritually correct and materially foolish. Dino bones sound like a great investment as it's hard to imagine they can decrease in value. It Probably holds its value better then real estate haha especially if you don't have to sell it. Another way of looking at it the money often goes to digging more up. Some have that Indiana jones mentality of "it belongs in a museum!"...well.....Indiana did like stealing things too! kind of like the government! Someone has to pay to initially dig this stuff up.

www.wday.com...

www.grandforksherald.com...

Part of the story behind bob the triceratops is he's the most complete one ever found and he's s pretty big one.

What kind of irked me is Bob might go to Dubai....
If a near complete triceratops is found in my home state is going to Dubai I might as well go see it before it's boxed up. There isn't much that goes on here outside of Nukes, Dino Bones, Indians and Oil...oh and winter wheat...