The Future of Cultural Property Protection

Have you ever had anything stolen like your wallet or your phone or your heart ? Now what would you do if that stolen phone ended up in a museum like five thousand miles away . During acts of war, things get stolen a lot. And looting historical and cultural pieces during these times of war is an old act of dominance. It happened when the Romans invaded the Greeks , they stole coins and statues and sacred objects, and it happened when the Nazis invaded Europe and looted over six hundred fifty thousand art pieces that originally belonged to Jewish owners. It's an act that's still happening today . In twenty twenty four, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, one of my favorites right here in New York City, physically returned fourteen statues to Cambodia when they discovered that they had been looted during decades of civil war . And in twenty twenty three, the CEO of Hobby Lobby was indicted when he was found to be at the center of stolen Iraqi pieces that were for his Bible museum . We had a case of an Egyptian doctor. He came into JFK with his luggage. There was not a single piece of clothing in his bags. They were filled with artifacts . So fresh out of the ground that when we were taking the pieces out sand was dripping out of the artifacts, it covered the table and fell onto the floor all the sand from I mean these were freshly excavated artifacts . JP Labot is a retired special agent who worked in the US government's cultural property, art, and antiquities unit. He spent his career investigating stolen artifacts and returning them home. He was part of the team that indicted the CEO of Hobby Lobby and helped return the fourteen statues to Cambodia. And today we're going to talk about the underbelly of the antiquities trafficking industry, the Hobby Lobby case , and why you should always tell customs agents that you're bringing back twenty three bottles of wine from South Africa, like I did . Here again Again , again , again . Hey, I'm Calpen and this is Here We Go Again, a show that takes today's trends and headlines and asks why does history keep repeating itself ? Here, we go . This is an IHR podcast guaranteed human . How is JP Morgan Chase helping people train for in demand jobs? By investing in career training programs all over America. We've helped over one million people build skills for a changing economy. Together, you make what matters happen. Learn more at JPMorgan Chase. com slash America. If you love audiobooks, or you just really love a great story, I want to tell you about my other podcast, Earsay, the Audible and I Heart Audiobook Club. Every episode I nerd out with amazing guests and dive into the best new audiobooks from Audible. Sci fi, comedy, romance, thrillers, you name it. No reading required. Just listening , because let's be honest, having a great story read to you is kind of next level. Check out Earse on the IHR radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The all new twenty twenty six RAT four Limited with a panoramicon Mo Room. Today Rat four is not responsible for the new exotic care style you end up with if you get used to driving the Rat four limited with the Panoramic Moon Room and windows open. You recommend breaking airspace if you want to keep the look. The twenty twenty six RAT four is serious fun There's a difference between liking a house and actually getting it. Redfin is built to make up that difference and close the gap between finding and owning the home for you. Redfin agents close twice as many deals as other agents. So when you find a home you love, you're not a step behind when it comes to making an offer. That means less watching great homes disappear and more focus on the one you'll call home. Redfin helps turn saved listings into real addresses. Get started at redfin. com the dream . Yeah, thanks for being here. Thanks for having me. Yes. My name is John Paul Lavat. I'm a retired special agent from homeland security investigations in New York, and I worked ten years in the Cultural Property Art and Antiquities Unit investigating the smuggling of ancient artifacts. JP, thanks for doing this. And you have one of the most interesting jobs I think I've ever heard of for people listening, can you do your best to explain what the job was slash is, including what you're doing now? Yep, it's funny. It's so interesting that it drew me into it within Homeland Security. So I had spent many years working as an agent with Homeland Security Investigations in New York . And you know, after nine eleven the government merged the immigration and customs components into one organization that created homeland security . Underneath homeland security was ICE and IC encompasses the detention and deportation side of it. And it also underneath the umbrella of ICE is the Homeland Security Investigation side . And those investigators, including myself , wow, we looked at a full range of investigations to explore like money laundering, narcotics, weapons trafficking , the exportation of munitions to suspect countries. And so after being there for twenty years , I had done a fair amount of narcotics cases, money laundering, what have you. And I had heard twenty years in, that there was an agent in our office who was working on the recovery of cultural artifacts. And I was like, where have I been? Like, why can't I get into that? What am I doing with these with these drug cases when I could be recovering artifacts. So I did some inquiries in the office and I actually sought the agent out and found him. I'm like, Hey, aren't you? Brenting, aren't you the guy that does the cultural property cases? And he's like, Yeah, it's me. And he's like, I'm buried. I could really use some help. And we hit the ground running and he taught me all the ins and outs, who the players were, who the collectors were, who the bad guys were. And took me under his wing probably in twenty thirteen. And you know, by twenty fifteen, we're probably at our most prolific . And is that wing the cultural property art and antiquities unit? Is that what it was called? They created a dedicated squadron called the Art and Antiquities Group. And at various points, we've had as few as four and as many as eight agents working full time on antiquities investigations, which is which is pretty impressive. And did you like you'd mention you'd mentioned when you heard that this was a job, you were like, why am I doing drug cases? Were there cultural reference points or things like as a kid that made you interested in this? Or when you heard about it, was it just a random like , oh, I didn't know this was a thing. Like was it like the monument's men or any of those kinds of like movies or TV shows that made you think? You know, when you're in elementary school and you're with the teacher and they tell you at points in life, you're going to have a calling . And that calling will sort of dictate what you want to do in life. So you could say I've had a second calling. So I had an original calling in school , I wanted to be a federal agent from as young as I can remember . And having achieved that and having a successful career , I get a second calling when I learned about the fact that there's these cultural art ifacts that are being trafficked and we're able to investigate them and recover them and return them to where they were stolen from. It just, again, it's like when you're a kid and you're like, That's what I want to do. I want that. that, I need I was captivated by the idea . And so I had to spend a lot of time on my own time just learning and studying because there's so many civilizations and styles of art that it can be overwhelming. What are the kinds of laws that are applied? And I guess what the question behind this question is like, so I feel like because of shows like Law and Order or I mean there's there's ten shows about things like this. People know, okay , like child pornographers should be in prison, drug traffickers whole , you know, they know the problem with violence and international trafficking and all of this. How would you for somebody who doesn't know, how would you describe why your job is important and what are the laws and the players at stake? I could tell you why the cultural property cases are different and that is there exists a legal trade in artifacts. So if you come across narcotics , they're inherently illegal, right? Soon as soon as you come across a pound of dope or some illegal narcotics, they're illegal on their face. Child pornography is illegal on its face, right? I could run down the list of crimes . Coming across someone with an artifact is not inherently illegal. There's a legal trade in ancient artifacts, a flourishing trade. It's existed for a long time. So just because you encounter an artifact at the port of entry or someone has a collection of artifacts doesn't mean they've done anything wrong. And that's what makes it unique and that's what makes it different. You then have to investigate the provenance. And the provenance is the history of the artifact, who owned it and trace that ownership backwards through time so that you can be satisfied it was in the marketplace at a time when cultural property laws prohibiting its entry trade, into commerce existed. So I'll give you a perfect example. The cultural patronyim law for Egypt is nineteen eighty three . So if some of these artifacts were already out of Egypt before nineteen eighty three , we don't have a case. There's a legal trade in there. Okay. But if it came out after ' eighty three , there's a problem. So when we see someone with an Egyptian artifact, we start tracing the history back to satisfy ourselves that it left the country before ' eighty three. And if it didn't, now we start sending subpoenas out, getting more records, doing an investigation. And so every country has a different cultural patrimony law on a different date every country in the world. So you can imagine , you know for, an agent working these cases, you have to be versed in the cultural patrimony law of every country on the planet. It's a lot, it's a lot. That sounds so complicated. How do you how do you check ? Like if there's an artifact that's two thousand years old, how do you check whether it was removed in nineteen eighty three or nineteen eighty four? You check the history , right? So let's say a particular museum had it and they bought it in two thousand rough cake . Okay , you get the records from who they bought it from and you send a subpoena to them, well, who'd you buy from? Where's the invoice? And they tell us they bought it in nineteen ninety three and there are no records before that, right? Or sometimes they tell you, Oh, I bought it in Egypt on the street in nineteen eighty nine, ding ding, ding ding red flag. We were like, okay, that means you weren't allowed to take it out. So yeah, you'd be surprised what we recover from and we have a lot of sources, not just subpoena power, but we do email search warrants. We have informants. Informants are a huge source of information because these are guys on the ground who've been double crossed or maybe got cheated out of a deal and they're going to rat on their co conspirators and they communicate with law enforcement all the time. So informants are huge, you tell . I'm guessing that in the countries of origin , local dealers may also be a challenge. Like I'm just thinking about the amount of travel I've done where the person selling you something and this isn't necessarily in the antiquities category, but in the category of like, oh, I know I'm not allowed to bring this particular thing back to the US and like the merchant or the dealer is like, no , you've done so many of these. You definitely can, just buy it and you just keep it in your luggage. I'm like, yeah, no, I'm not trying to lose my global entry over this. But I would imagine that at your level with what you're dealing with, are there trustworthy dealers in antiquities are there is like you said is it like the guy on the street? Or are even the brick and mortar folks in some of these countries? Are there challenges there too? So I would say there's three types of dealers . They're reputable . They check the laws, they check the provenance. They're only going to sell items that they've fully investigated and are convinced are legal . You're going to have your street guys like the ones that you encounter who try to put stuff in your luggage or looking to make a buck . But the biggest challenge is you'll have a reputable dealer , but they like to dabble every so often they'll get a rare piece that is just too good to pass up. It's going to fetch a lot of money. The paperwork for it is lousy , but you know what ? I'll take a chance. And those are the ones that are most problematic for us because on the face of it you see the dealer and you're like, okay, these guys have been good over time, but every so often they dabble. And a lot of reputable dealers have fallen prey to that lure of the one in a million peace that they're going to get rich over. And I just want your listeners to know that the person bringing the piece in is responsible what's in his bag . The person who orders something shipped into the US is responsible for what's put on a customs label . Okay? So I've had a lot of times say well, the, shipp er told me X, Y and Z , for U. S. law , the importer of record is responsible for the accuracy of all the documentation. So if someone puts a different country of origin, they're selling you something from Iraq , but they put turkey , okay? And that comes in. The importer's responsible for those inaccuracies. Is the importer the purchaser? Yes. Since we're on this track, I think this is so interesting for people to know , what are the penalties ? Well, certainly seizure, right? Seizure of your of your material. And that's penalty enough because let's face it, these things cost a lot of money. Using a customs broker is key because the penalties are seizure of your material, and I've seen material come in as cheap as seven hundred dollars, and I've seen material come in over a million. Okay. Wow. You would have spent that money, the government will seize it and you'll be out simply because you didn't spend what eight hundred dollars a thousand dollars for a customs broker. I mean, especially if you're importing something of high value, it's a no brain. Like, why would you why would you roll the dice and it's sort of like an insurance on your on your shipment, right ? Now, if we can prove that you knew that the lies were on there, right? Now you can get charged with smuggling . Oh, right. Okay . So and we've had that. We've had an email exchange where the seller will say, hey, this is from Yemen , but I'm going to change the country of origin just so that it doesn't get flagged by U. S. customs and the buyer will say, What a good idea. In the email. Like, okay. So that's an easy smuggling case for us. Is this a good time to just also give a shout out to like always declare what you're coming in with . Yes. I'm shocked when I travel a lot. I'm always shocked when friends who either don't travel or travel as much as I do just bring shit in that they're not declaring. I'm like, dude , like I remember I did a show in South Africa a couple years ago. I'd never been to South Africa. Excellent wine in South Africa. So much good wine and it was relatively so cheap compared to New York City prices that I brought I brought twenty three bottles of wine back with me, right? And before doing this, you know, went on the DHS website. I'm like, okay, what is the duty that I have to pay and how do I declare this because when you especially if you've got global entry, like you kind of just walk through. So I need to make sure I stop at the right place and tell the right person . So I go through and I go in the right place and I talk to the guy and he's like, Why do you have twenty three bottles of wine? I was like, have you ever been to South Africa, like's there amazing wine and I've just never been there. So I brought back twenty three, but I'm telling you because I want to do I want to do the right thing. I want to pay the whatever I owe you. And he just looks at me and he sighs and he's like, yeah, I'm not trying to do that kind of paperwork for twenty three dollars. Just go ahead So I'm like, huh . And then friends who work in, you know, in that line of work were like, yeah, a lot of times it's just about whether you're disclosing it because if it's not the kind of unlike what you do JP where it has significant impact on a lot. But the point is even bringing a couple of bottles of wine like declare that shit because the penalty for not doing it is huge. And like you say, sometimes it's just even the attempt to declare is enough because for a customs officer, they're like, okay, they're complying with the law. They're clearly not trying to hide something here. We had a case of an Egyptian doctor and he came into JFK with this luggage , you had maybe two or three bags . There was not a single piece of clothing in this bags. They were filled artifacts . So fresh out of the ground that when we were taking the pieces out, sand was dripping away out of the artifact, it covered the table and fell onto the floor all the sand from I mean these were freshly excavated artifacts . Yeah . What did he say ? He ended up getting a guilty conviction in the eastern district of New York. It was last year . If you're listening to Here We Go Again, chances are you enjoy smart conversations, great stories, and maybe discovering something new along the way. That's exactly what we're doing on my other podcast, Earsay, the Audible and I Heart Audiooko C blub. Each episode, I'm diving into some of the most exciting new audiobooks on Audible, everything from big sci fi adventures and unforgettable fiction to romcoms, thrillers, and laugh out loud comedy. 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Was your office's job also to find the looters themselves or does it stop at the mule . You know, the looters are always in the foreign country. Yeah . So it's going to be really hard to prosecute the looters because they're abroad. And then additionally, the looters are so far removed, you know, there are a lot of hands in this. I can give you a perfect example. So I had a very famous case the Gilgamesh tablet. It's a cunaiform tablet. Cunaform is some of the oldest form of writing and it's basically done with something that you can make impressions on clay and the writings on it, your chameir form is the oldest form of writing. The writings on it told a story of Gildamesh from the Bible extremely rare and extremely valuable. Well , you had a dealer in London who had a bunch of Iraqi Caniform tablets, including this one. He sold them for ten thousand to a collector who wasn't quite sure what they had, ships everything to California. Once in California, he sells the Gilgam tablish by itself for ten thousand . So he's already made his money back from the trip and he still has a whole box of artifacts that he can still sell. So he's made a profit already . The book dealer realizes that this tablet is rare and gets it read by an expert and realiz es, holy geez, this is something super valuable. Sells it for fifty thousand . The person who buys it for fifty thousand said, This is a score . I can get a lot more money for this . Sells it to someone in London . Oh come on. Yeah, I don't have the purchase price for that, but ultimately, that gets sold at auction through Christie's tobby lobby who buys it for an excess of one million . Wow. One million. So when I tell you there's a lot of hands in these , you know, to try and find the person who originally looted this thing from Iraq is near impossible unless you had the access to the London dealer. And even then, who knows how many hands it passed through before he got it. Well, so then it's crazy that it went from unscrupulous immediately to a really reputable auction house. Isn't that something? That's crazy. So since you brought it up, can you can you walk me through the hobby by lob case? How was it presented to you? How did it unfold? And then how does something like a Christie's acquire something with absolutely no paperwork? The case unfolded just from simple targeting , you know, Burnt, my mentor, he had been flagging shipments from a dealer in Dubai. For a long time , a number of antiquities in the Middle East all funneled through Dubai, and in particular one shipper named Hassan Fazelli was like the number one shipper of illicit antiquities in Dupai . So Bord had intercepted some items from Fazelli over the years and it's like, you know what? need I to need to flag this guy and just keep an eye on what he's shipping because already three times now every time I open up a package from Fizeli it's problematic. So sure enough Fizzelli is shipping to Hobby Lobby and the customs agents hit on the record and they go to inspect the packages and they're not wrapped like museum quality. They're a bunch of Quaneir form tablets thrown in a box, literally thrown in a box gusty, crumbling, like what is this? And they're going to Hobby Lobby. Hobby lobbies has a massive complex in Oklahoma City . And they're by the way, they're going to Hobby Lobby not spec ifically to the museum. They were going to the corporate headquarters is that right? The museum's not built yet. Okay, this is Hobby Lobby itself. The arts arts and crafts, you know, Hobby Lobby they're all over. Yeah . So the corporate building itself is a massive complex. It's I don't know, probably the size of like a few city blocks. And because they have so many arts and crafts coming in from all over the world that they have to inventory, shipments coming in , there are multiple docks , loading docks and entry points to the building. Each of those entry points has an address, a physical mailing address that you can send something to. Okay. So if you're sending beads , beads go to one address of the block. If you're sending material for scarves, they would go somewhere else. So it's like five addresses . These cuneiform tablets coming from Fizelli each addressed to a different address of the same complex around the blog . Okay . Now, why would you do that quite simply? If one particular address was being targeted , then the other ones will make it through. It is the basics of smuggling. If I'm going to send material to you and you have three addresses, I'm going to send them to all three and hope that some of them get through in case customs is targeting one particular address . Now I've told you before earlier in the show here , who's responsible for the accuracy of the import ation paperwork? Not Fizzelli. Oh right. This Hobby Lobby, the importer on record is responsible for the accuracy of all documentation submitted to customs. So you can't hide behind both Zelli shipped me stuff he wasn't supposed to. You're responsible . And so the more we started digging into this , the more we saw that there were plans to build a Bible museum . And so the owner of Hobby Lobby, Steve Green, goes on a massive buying spray of artifacts that may have had a connection to the Bible so that he can open up this new Bible museum . The problem is there are rules, right? There are rules for importing artifacts. There's a again we talked about cultural patrimony laws and when it's okay for items to leave a country . The fervor created by Steve Green to get all of these art ifacts spread throughout the ancient artifact community . Everyone knew there was an American with depockets who was spending top dollar to get artifacts. So what is that going to do? It's going to spur more smuggling, right? It's going to spur more looters. It's going to spur more shady people coming out of the woodwork, offering to sell something with a connection to the Bible so they can make a buck. And unfortunately , Steve Greene chalked it up to naivete in the art collecting world that he didn't know the rules and didn't know what he was doing, and just bought things without taking the time to properly vet them. And as a result bought a lot of material that was illicit. I mean, this was such a massive case, right? So from that initial like, hey, we are realizing what's happening and we see who's responsible, from there to a conviction , what's the process? So the question is , does Hobby Lobby know that on the import ation paperwork they're described as ceramic tiles? These are ancient artifacts are. Th notese ceramic tiles. But you know what? Ceramic tiles going to an arts and craft store wouldn't raise any bells, right? we already know how the lobby is responsible for the paperwork because they have the import ed or a record. So that's enough for custom s to seize all the material, which we did. Now, can you go the next step? Can you charge them with smuggling? Can you prove that they knew that the pieces were illicit and that they improperly imported them . I thought we had enough. I thought in interviewing all the employees , in looking at all the emails, I traveled to Israel and interviewed the dealers who sold the material to Habil Lbobyby, I thought we had enough to convict . But ultimately, that decision rests with the U. S. Attorney's Office and they determined the evidence wasn't sufficient . And so there was not a conviction for smuggling for Steve Greenoff or Hobby Lobby. Interesting . But they did acknowledge that the artifacts were imported improperly And so they relinquished everything that had come in , including stuff that had made it through to Hobby Lobby. A couple of shipments made it through before we stop the ones at the port . So they relinquished all of those . They paid three million dollars to the government, and we had a really successful repatriation at the Iraqis ambassador's residence in Washington, DC. It was really, really moved at the return of all of the artifacts. And what was interesting was the Caneiform described a particular city in Iraq. It's called Erisa Grig . Erisa Grig doesn't exist in modern literature . It doesn't exist in any books. It doesn't people have heard of it . They thought it was this mysterious city. Maybe it didn't really exist because there have been talks about it, but there was no proof . These tablets actually talked about the missing city in Iraq called Irisa Greek. So it was the first time there was confirmation that the city did exist and it was on these tablets. That's amazing. It was fascinating. for scholars and historians , they were salivating over the fact that the tablets had they like, we need to research this and they were pouring in. I'm a New Yorker, so I've been going to the Met. I mean, I grew up outside of the city, so I've been going to the Met since I was a kid. And I was really interested to read about the return of I think it was fourteen Cambodian statues . So like going to the met and you'd see like, you know, okay, here's this. My dad is Jane. So look at this rare Jane statue from blah blah blah, right . And my first reaction would be I would mumble something like, I wonder when that was stolen. And then another kid would look at the little plaque and be like, no, it's from the what's it called family? It's on loan. I'm like, yeah, that white family stole it at some point because it does not have the name of a Jane family. It's not like it's on loan from, you know, the Shah family or something for . So ever since then, I just remember and I love the met , but it's always with a little bit of speculation. I think you answered that question that those if something came before a certain year, that there's an understanding of why it's there. Can you quickly walk us through the Cambodian case how that, unfold ed and what your role in was that? Yeah, so my predecessors Brenton and Dan Brazer had worked on the Douglas Latchford investigation. And similar to how Brent had targeted Fiselli with shipments coming in, he had noticed that Latchford's name was associated with Cambodian pieces that had never been seen before . That were excellent examples of Khmer craftsmanship that you would have thought because they're so superb they would have been talked about. They would have been seen, there would have been some rumblings about wow, did you ever see that piece in London when you were there? Nothing. It just shows up time and time again. He's coming up with the most remarkable pieces . And when you see that as an investigator, you're like, okay, something's not right. Like how has no one seen these spectacular pieces of art that when they're up at Christie's and they're up at Sotheby's, people are raving that this is like so rare and one of a kind and yet no one seen it before. So Brent and D ambraser started flagging Latford and saying, Hey, this is someone who we need to start paying more attention to. And then of course there was the big Duradonic case. It was the statue that was going through Sotheby's and obviously it was problematic and there were some legal challenges to it. And ultimately, you know, people did the right thing and the statue was sent back home . And that was the first instance where now you see Douglas Latford is dealing in dirty antiquities. The investigators had gone to Cambodia and found the base and the feet still intact for that stat ue, so it had been chopped off and sent, and who was the dealer, it was Latchford. So now you're like, wait a minute, if that one was so obviously looted and trafficked, what else of Latchford's is suspect? And so that's when we opened up an investigation into him . I inherited the case and we started pouring over all the records, all Latchford Provenance . We subpoenaed Christ in Suthley, started going through all the records and pieces at the Med pieces. I mean, he was so prolific. There are latchered pieces everywhere. Probably about a dozen US museums still have Laks pfieordces that are still being investigated by HSI. They're not off the hook, so if they're listening, your name's on a list and you may be getting a call from homeland security very soon. If you're listening to Here We Go Again, chances are you enjoy smart conversations, great stories, and maybe discovering something new along the way. That's exactly what we're doing on my other podcast, Earsay, the Audible and IHART Audi obook Club. Each episode, I'm diving into some of the most exciting new audiobooks on Audible, everything from big sci fi adventures and unforgettable fiction to romcoms, thrillers, and laugh out loud comedy. And I'm joined by great guests to help unpack why these stories are such great listens because there's just something different about listening to a story. When it's really good, it pulls you in, you start seeing it in your head and when it's over, you immediately want to talk about it with someone. That's what Earsay's all about. Listen to Earsay, the Audible and I Heart Audiobook Club on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts . If you sometimes turn down the podcast just to hear the hum of your engine, then shell has the fuel for you . Shellby Power Nitro Plus fuels every drive from the Pacific Coast Highway to the Sierra Peaks with a fuel like no other. It provides engine performance that lasts to give you more time on the road , because your car's engine matters. That means more protection with active ingredients for longer lasting engines. Shellv Power Nitro plus Premium Gasoline Engine performance that lasts. Chances are, you're not far from a shell station. Find it using the Shell app. Formulation Unique to Shell Compare to Minimum Detergent Gasoline with continuous use of v S Phelower Nyitro plus and gasol ine direct injection engines. Actual effects and benefits may vary. 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Find your perfect match plan, and get a quote at petsbest. com. Pet insurance products offered and administered by Petsbest Insurance Services LLC are written by American Pet Insurance Company or Independent American insurance company for terms and conditions visit www. pets best. com back slash policy. Products are underwritten by American Pet Insurance Company, independents American insurance company or MS Insurance Company, and administered by Petsb Insurance Services LLC. One dollar day premium based on twenty twenty four average new policyholder data for accident and illness plans hits age zero to ten. In the Met case, were there penalties or prosecutions for any of the individuals involved , in cases like that, do they just hide behind the entity of the Met? Is the individual also responsible or what ended up happening? It's hard. It's hard . In this particular case, it's hard because Latchford was crafty . He used a lot of false provenance. He used the names of dead people to say that the artifacts are in their collection . He always provided proven ce was, it was, it inauthentic, but he provided it. So you as a buyer would be shielded from any prosecution. Oh, I see. Because you actually have a provenance. She said, Listen, I asked Pvenroance. I got this sheet. It seemed okay and so I went through with the deal . So at least we have evidence of them asking. Now we've since discovered that some collectors conspired with Latchford to create false provenance. So those people, yes, we have convicted some people in a Latchford case for their role. Is the pressure of your office enough for somebody to just cooperate right out of the gate or do they always w ait for the threat of a prosecution ? I would say there's two things that drive that certainly the pressure, right ? You know , the government's scary . When the government shows up and knocks on your door, I have a warrant in my hand or have a subpoena, people genuinely get frightened and they're like, Oh , government's here. You know, I don't want any trouble. What did I do? I have an architect. Yeah , here you go. I want no trouble. I'm out of here. So certainly there's that