US awaits this Indian antique smuggler

Nobody knew Kapoor was under probe , suspected of running a $100 million art smuggling operation

The 30 or so guests enjoying spring rolls and white wine were gathered in a small third-floor gallery at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to celebrate Subhash Kapoor, a convivial Manhattan art dealer who had donated 58 miniature drawings of Indian aristocrats, deities and beasts.

On this spring evening in 2009, Kapoor, 60, owner of Art of the Past on Madison Avenue, stood atop the Indian art world. After his 35 years in business, museums and collectors were paying seven figures for his Hindu, Buddhist and South Asian antiquities. A 900-year-old dancing Shiva went to the National Gallery of Australia, a 1,000-year-old bronze Ganesha to the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio.

What no one in the room knew was that Kapoor was under investigation on two continents, suspected of running a $100 million art smuggling operation. Two years earlier, Indian officials had tipped US authorities that a company in West Nyack, New York, Nimbus Import Export, was about to receive seven crates from overseas labelled “marble garden table sets.” Today, US and Indian investigators say they have compiled an enormous dossier against Kapoor: emails and databases seized under search warrants; bank-transfer records and shipping forms; the testimony of former associates, including his office manager, who were arrested and have agreed to cooperate.

Much of the material has been the product of an investigation called Operation Hidden Idol. The US authorities say they have concluded that the modest and esteemed Kapoor was, in volume and value, the most ambitious antiquities smuggler in US history. Kapoor has adamantly denied doing anything illegal.

Their best evidence, they say, is an almost unimaginable 2,622 items, worth $107.6 million, confiscated mostly from storerooms in Manhattan and Queens, and virtually all of it contraband from India.

Since 2011, when Indian officials had him arrested on charges of theft and smuggling, Kapoor has been awaiting trial in a jail cell in Chennai. When that case is resolved, prosecutors with the Manhattan district attorney’s office hope to extradite him to face charges that include receiving stolen property. In April, they filed court papers asking for formal custody of Kapoor’s trove of merchandise so that it can eventually be returned to India and other nations. Officials are also urging unlucky Kapoor clients to surrender hundreds of costly treasures that they say were not his to sell. Museums in the United States and abroad, including institutions in Massachusetts, Ohio, Hawaii, Singapore and Australia, are shedding rare holdings because they came from Art of the Past, which closed in 2012.

Kapoor, who started in the trade working alongside his father, rejects the allegations. His lawyer in India, S Kingston Jerold, said his client dealt only in replicas and never exported or bought actual antiques.

It is a hard fall for a man long lauded by the international art market. In 2009, a prospering Kapoor told Apollo magazine that his gift to the Met - which has not been challenged as illicit - was “my way of giving back to the field.” Six years later, investigators say, Kapoor will be giving back nearly everything.

For almost a millennium, priests have climbed the ruined stone steps of the Varadharaja Perumal temple, in what is now the village of Suthamalli in Tamil Nadu and entered a moss-covered chamber where dozens of 11th-century bronze and iron idols awaited prayers.

Balakrishnan Gurukkal, the latest in that line of priests, trod those steps on April 14, 2008, to celebrate the Tamil New Year. Though the site had once been a vital place of worship, locals now favoured another temple nearby, and Gurukkal had not been there for months. He reached for the rusty lock on the flimsy metal gate and found it broken.

He lit a candle and stepped inside. The idols were gone. Within an hour, said Chelamma Kumar, who lives beside the weed-strewn temple in a thatch hut overshadowed by a white and lime-green water tower, “there was a big crowd and lots of police with sniffer dogs and all that.” The theft had occurred a bit more than a month earlier, Indian investigators said. Since that time, the artefacts had sped from Suthamalli to Chennai to Hong Kong, then on to London and New Jersey; been falsely labelled inexpensive handicrafts; and been deposited in a New York storage unit controlled by Kapoor. Scrubbed and restored, they would soon be displayed in his gallery, often identified as objects from private collections.

No one really knows when the looting Kapoor is accused of began. But India is a ripe target: It is home to thousands of remote shrines and archaeological sites with rare Hindu artefacts that sit unguarded. Vishakha N Desai, a scholar at Columbia University who knew Kapoor, said government officials “show little concern for the protection of ancient heritage.” Representatives from the Idol Wing of the Tamil Nadu Police Department, in Chennai, which focuses on antiquities crimes, said Kapoor was already active in 2005 when he met with an associate, Sanjivi Asokan, at the five-star Taj Connemara hotel there.

Indian prosecutors believe that men Asokan hired to commit the break-ins would even spread tales of killer bees and bat infestations to keep villagers away from the targets. Asokan and Kapoor would then smuggle the artefacts out of India, police say, and send them on serpentine journeys to the United States.

“The scale and brazenness of the thefts is truly mind-blowing,” said S Vijay Kumar, a private investigator from Singapore who grew suspicious after noticing that Kapoor was selling an extraordinary number of rare Indian idols out of New York. With Kumar’s help, the Idol Wing set about matching lustrous pictures from Kapoor’s catalogs with black-and-white images of the Tamil Nadu statues, which had been photographed in the 1960s by French archivists from a scholarly institute in India.

Kapoor’s network

They saw that the objects being offered, in many cases for millions of dollars, bore a singular resemblance to pictures of religious icons that had disappeared from Tamil Nadu and other sites across India. In 2009, the Idol Wing distributed wanted posters of the statues. Soon, three burglars suspected of being paid by Asokan were arrested with Suthamalli statuary in their possession, police say. They implicated Asokan (who has been charged in India with theft and smuggling) and Kapoor.

After comparing notes with those of US investigators, Indian officials in October 2011 issued an arrest warrant for Kapoor, who was then in Frankfurt, Germany, for an exhibition, and German officials jailed him in Cologne. In July 2012, Kapoor, a US citizen, was extradited to his homeland.