With nefarious groups raising millions of dollars by looting and selling antiquities, the crafting billionaire and ardent evangelical might have inadvertently financed their activities.
Left, ancient clay artifacts from Iraq that were recovered and returned to the Republic of Iraq after a smuggling investigation by the Department of Homeland Security last March. Right, Steve Green the current Hobby Lobby President.
By Mandel Ngan (Green), by Mark Wilson (Artifacts), both from Getty Images.
On Tuesday morning, the Daily Beast reported that Hobby Lobby’s C.E.O. Steve Green, whose company successfully challenged Obamacare’s contraception mandate on the grounds that it violated the owning family’s religious beliefs, was being investigated for the allegedly illicit importation of biblical-era Assyrian and Babylonian artifacts into the United States.
The four-year investigation involves nearly 300 “small clay tablets” from what’s now modern-day Iraq and Syria, bound for the Museum of the Bible, a multi-million-dollar complex in Washington, D.C. and scheduled to open in 2017, largely financed by the Green family, which owns Hobby Lobby and is worth an estimated $4.5 billion. But when the family tried to get the collections through U.S. Customs—having declared them, according to the Daily Beast, as “hand-crafted clay tiles” worth a collective $300—their actions triggered an F.B.I. inquiry. To date, the investigation is still ongoing, while a representative from the Museum of the Bible characterized the investigation as a problem spawned from “incomplete paperwork”.
But antiquities experts raise another concern: that by purchasing this art in the first place, the Greens may have unknowingly sponsored military groups and terrorist networks like al-Qaeda, which has sold antiquities for more than a decade.
“Anyone who purchases an antiquity without being 100 percent sure it is a legitimate piece is risking funding organized criminals, armed insurgents, and even terrorist networks, whether they be al-Qaeda or ISIS,” says Tess Davis, the executive director of the Antiquities Coalition, an organization devoted to combatting the illegal trading of artifacts.
Last February, the United Nations adopted a resolution stating that its members would seek to prevent terrorist groups, including ISIS, from profiting off these sales. According to Col. Matt Bogdanos, a single, four-inch cylinder seal from ancient Babylonia can sell for nearly $250,000 alone, and the U.N. ambassador from Iraq, Mohamed Ali Alhakim, estimated that ISIS earns more than $100 million per year antiquities trading.
Though he couldn’t comment on the specifics of the Hobby Lobby case, Bogdanos says that in a hypothetical case, “if you have an antiquity that you can trace to Iraq and Syria, the question of where the money went is a fair, legitimate question, as long as you take into account two things.
“One is: there were intermediaries. There’s no [art] owner in the U.S. that’s giving to ISIS. They’re giving money to the dealer, and the dealer gave money to the person who got it out of Lebanon, [for instance,] and that person gave money to the person who got it out of Syria, and that person gave it to ISIS. Money’s money. It went through three or four sets of hands in between.
“Second, just because it’s Babylonian doesn’t mean it came from Iraq,” he said. “A lot of conquerors have been through the area and have done their own looting over millennia.” Citing the case of the Parthenon temple, the remnants of which currently reside in three different countries, Bogdanos says that it’s possible that a shipment of tablets could have been looted hundreds of years ago.
Even if terrorist networks weren’t involved in the sale, there’s also the possibility of organized gangs: “When you’re starting to see these major seizures in the U.S., it tends to be that they’re working with organized gangs in-country to go out and look for specific items,” says Deborah Lehr, Chair and Founder of the Antiquities Coalition.