Antiquities dealer Schultz goes to prison

Frederick Schultz, the former president of the National Association of Dealers in Ancient, Oriental and Primitive Art, has started serving a 33-month sentence at Fort Dix, a federal prison in New Jersey. Schultz’s surrender to Fort Dix in July followed a landmark ruling by a federal appeals court in New York on 25 June which upheld Schultz’s previous criminal conviction in New York, the first for a dealer charged with conspiring to receive antiquities claimed by a foreign government. The court rejected all four grounds of Schultz’s appeal.

Read the rest at the Art Newspaper. Fort Dix is low security, but not minimum security (here's a description by a current inmate). It is also the present home of Providence's former mayor, Vincent "Buddy" Cianci.

I met Schultz in the early 1990s while we were both auditing lectures at the Institute of Fine Arts. Though I've had no contact with him since, his ending up in prison is still rather disturbing -- even if there can be little doubt that he knew exactly what he was doing (if not correctly anticipating their eventual consequences).

ADDENDUM: There is a good article on this case and its ramifications in Archaeology; it originally appeared in April of last year, but its online version has been updated a few times since. The section titled Collectors and Protectors lays out the extremes (advocates of unrestricted trade in artifacts, advocates of banning all trade in artifacts) and usefully quotes Gary Vikan as the voice of a sane and conscientious middle ground.

Posted by David on September 3, 2003 1:17 PM