Original subtitles

(suspenseful music)

It was one of the most elaborate scams

in the history of art crime,

a devious plan to smuggle precious Egyptian antiquities

that fooled customs officers for years.

But as the legal net closed around him,

the man behind the trade was driven to the point of suicide.

I drank hemlock.

And I knew that it would kill me within three hours.

The case took investigators

from the shadows of the pyramids to a quite English village,

and right to the heart of New York's Madison Avenue,

and it changed the worldwide trade in antiquities forever.

(jazzy music)

In May, 1994, the British Museum Egyptology department

received a photograph of a single sheet of papyrus.

They were asked to translate the text

and verify its origin.

Looking closely at the photograph, they immediately realized

that they had seen the sheet of papyrus before.

They contacted the man who had sent it

and asked him if he had any more.

He said yes, and sent a further 22 photographs

to the department.

They were now sure that they were dealing

with a large theft of Egypt's treasures.

The Egyptology department immediately called the police.

The call went to Scotland Yard's Art and Antiquities Unit.

They in turn called their boss, Dick Ellis.

At the time, Dick Ellis was in America,

working on another case.

Ellis had an international reputation

as one of the leading investigators of art crime.

He took the call from his office

about the Egyptian papyrus.

Well it became very apparent to me that

the investigation itself was,

had the potential of being a very big investigation.

Dick Ellis returned to London,

and went to see the experts at the British Museum.

The people at the British Museum

immediately recognized the papyrus as being

part of a number of sheets of papyrus

that they had in fact excavated themselves back in the 1960s

at Saqqara in Egypt,

and they were aware that these were objects which

they had recorded,

and had placed into an Egyptian government store in Saqqara,

and where they knew that these objects should still be,

so they immediately realized that these were stolen.

These papyrus were written by an animal cult

laying out the methods of mummification of animals

in Saqqara, near Cairo.

(singing in foreign language)

Dick Ellis realized that he was embarking

on a complicated investigation.

If these pieces were stolen, how was this done,

and how had they come from an Egyptian government store

to reach England?

It was the start of an investigation

that would change the laws governing cultural heritage

in both the United States and in Britain.

We were aware, and had been for some time,

of, should we say, the illicit flow of antiquities.

It's been a problem for many countries over the last,

well, several decades.

And it seemed to us that we were looking here at an instance

of the mass theft of Egyptian antiquities.

Of course, none of this was new.

It had been going on for centuries.

During the late 19th century,

Europeans discovered the wonders of ancient Egyptian art.

Archeologists started digging, and recorded their finds.

With this passion to record came the passion to collect.

Egyptian art began to flow from its home country

to the West.

As the demand increased, so did looting.

Artifacts came out of Egypt in two main ways.

Initially, as travelers went to Egypt, they removed objects,

say in the late 18th century, early 19th century,

and those were taken back to various private collections

and public collections.

The other source was through tomb robbing

and removal of objects from temples

that were taken out of Egypt illegally,

then sold at auction.

Egypt initially made a profit

out of selling its national heritage.

In 1983, this all came to a halt

when the Egyptian government passed a law

declaring all newly-discovered antiquities

and those still in the ground to be the property of Egypt.

Any removal of antiquities from Egypt was considered theft.

1983, Law number 117,

was a good law, but was not that good.

The new act in 1983 should've made a big impact,

but all it meant was that it drove the market underground.

There were still people digging up objects,

and rather than declaring them,

tried to pass them through middlemen,

and there was a steady stream of objects

ending up on the European

and North American antiquities market.

Without an international law to regulate it,

the trade flourished.

It was worth a small fortune.

The scale of the problem is enormous.

To give a single example

of one North American auction house,

between 1998 and 2006,

over $100 million worth of antiquities were sold,

of which $35 million worth were Egyptian antiquities.

In fact, David Gill estimates

that 96% of the Egyptian items

had no record of the site they came from.

He believes they were simply removed illegally

from the country.

As Dick Ellis started his investigation,

he had one vital piece of information given to him

by the British Museum,

the name of the man who had claimed to own the papyrus.

Andrew May.

Ellis discovered that May lived in Devon,

a county in southwest England.

His home was called Westaway Cottage,

in the small town of Barnstaple.

Ellis called a senior detective with the local police

to find out more about Andrew May.

Ellis was in for a big surprise.

It was a colleague of mine in the office

took a phone call from Dick Ellis and Art and Antiques squad

from Scotland Yard, and,

the inquiry was, did we know anything about

a man called Andrew May and Westaway Cottage.

Westaway Cottage had been the scene of a burglary

reported the previous year, in 1993,

where a man previously unknown to me

called Jonathan Tokeley-Parry

had been the inhabitant of the premises.

He'd reported that an Egyptian head had been stolen,

which had a value on a crime complaint

of in excess of 100,000 pounds.

Ellis knew that this

was a remarkable coincidence.

He asked Toms to carry on investigating the two men.

Toms found out that the apparently mysterious

Jonathan Tokeley-Parry was in fact a former army officer,

and a Cambridge University graduate.

He was also regarded

as one of the world's finest antique restorers.

He had been a tenant of Andrew May's,

and had a cottage and a workshop

on the grounds of his house.

We surmised that there was some,

at least a conspiracy, between the two,

Andrew May and his tenant Jonathan Tokeley-Parry,

so we obtained search warrants for Andrew May's house,

for the cottage, and the buildings and the grounds

of the manor house.

On June 28, 1994,

Dick Ellis went with an expert from the British Museum

to join Steve Toms.

They planned to raid Andrew May's stately home.

In Jonathan Tokeley-Parry's workshop,

we found that he had both a workshop and an office.

In the office were filing cabinets, which we seized,

and obviously there were a lot of records there

referring to pieces that had been brought out of Egypt.

They referred to people involved the trade

that Jonathan Tokeley-Parry was involved in.

They had heard that Tokeley-Parry

had left Westaway a few months earlier.

He had now moved to a quiet village

a 30-minutes drive away.

Police went in search of him.

Local people in the village

were shocked by the police interest

in their newest resident.

It was a nice summer's day, the door was wide open.

From behind the bar you can see

straight across to the cottage where Jonathan lived,

and all of a sudden, eight guys turned up,

looking through windows with crowbars in their hands,

and I thought, "This is a bit odd."

The alarm went off,

and I knew they'd actually gained access

through breaking in.

We started to search the cottage.

And there we found in the ground floor sitting room,

we found Jonathan Tokeley-Parry's photographic record,

which showed thousands of objects.

The detectives continued packaging

and documenting their finds,

which included letters, photographs, and diary entries.

But they were suddenly interrupted.

To their surprise, Tokeley-Parry had just returned home

after flying in from his 65th trip to Egypt.

Well, when I got back from the airport,

the door was open for me,

and the cottage was full of policemen and customs,

about eight of them, in fact.

They'd made themselves at home,

I had my computer and all my equipment here in those days,

and they'd just taken the place apart.

When I opened the door, I thought I'd been burgled again.

And I was actually quite relieved to find that I hadn't,

but then I got bloody annoyed, because they were here,

and they were making free with my house.

This is where they got in.

Used crowbars to smash the window,

even though Barry over at the pub had the key.

(mysterious music)

Police had found several pieces

of Egyptian art.

The most interesting find was some false door panels

in Tokeley-Parry's room.

A false door in a tomb is actually a wall

built by the ancient Egyptians

to give the spirit of the dead a passage

to the land of the living.

They'd said to me downstairs,

"What about the antiquity that you've hidden upstairs?"

And I said, "Well actually, there're two of them.

"You've only found one."

When I went away,

I stored one of the friezes underneath the bed,

which is the one they found.

But they actually hadn't bothered to look in the drawer,

where the second one was.

So I handed it over.

The police officers

weren't certain what they'd found.

They weren't even sure if what they now had was real,

let alone valuable.

Dick Ellis asked the British Museum expert

to take the objects back to London to study them,

but Ellis made a decision.

With the wealth of documents, photographs, and objects,

he thought he already had enough evidence.

He arrested Tokeley-Parry

for the dishonest handling of stolen antiquities.

I arrested him there and then,

and we took him to Barnstaple Police Station.

He was surprised.

I don't think he ever thought that we would convict him

of any crime in this country.

To the point that on the way to Barnstaple Police Station

he asked us to detour via his mother's house,

which he went into and came out and gave us

the head of Mariet, a bronze cat,

and other items which he had stored in his mother's house.

Tokeley-Parry was confident

that his interest in Egyptian antiquities

was not breaking any British law.

It all started when

I got tired of telling one of my customers,

and he got tired of listening,

that everything he'd just bought out of Egypt was fake.

And he asked me, would I go with him to Egypt

to certify what he bought before he bought it?

It was a jolly to me.

It ended in disaster,

but it took me down to Egypt for the first time,

and I caught the magic of it.

(lively music)

When I first went to Egypt, I was aware that

I was breaking Law 117 of 1983, Egyptian law,

whereby Egypt nationalized all her antiquity

and claimed every piece in the soil, unfound or found,

as national property.

At first I thought it was just a game.

It was fun.

But as I began to understand the extent of the corruption,

and of destruction, the sheer nonsense of this law,

I thought that not only was it

the correct thing for me to do, but it was morally correct,

and I began to believe, and still do,

that a lot of these antiquities, had I not brought them out,

would've been destroyed.

So, I have no moral qualms about it whatsoever.

At the time,

police were not sure if they had sufficient evidence

to charge Tokeley-Parry with any offense.

But as they continued their investigation into the case,

another local man came into the frame.

There's a man called Mark Perry.

We'd received some information that Mark was

making frequent trips to Egypt

on the weekends, flying out on a Friday,

returning on a Sunday,

and then he was banking cash sums of money

on the Monday morning,

which was completely out of character.

So what had Perry been up to in Egypt?

Perry was a local handyman

who lived across the road from Andrew May's house.

Dick Ellis was suspicious.

The following morning we went and called on Mark Perry,

and interviewed him.

And again, that was another key part to the investigation,

because, Mark Perry

was until almost his last trip to Egypt

unaware of Egyptian law.

He was unaware of, therefore,

any breaches of the United Kingdom law

that he may have been making.

The first I knew of it was when my door caved in with the

police from Barnstaple Police Station and

New Scotland Yard officers came in,

and that was the first I realized

the depth or the severity of the trouble I was in,

at the time.

All the time we were doing in in that 12, 18-month span,

I'd never thought I was breaking the law.

I didn't comprehend the severity of it,

and 'course I just said, "I've not broken any laws.

"Whaddya wanna know, I'll tell you,

"I've not broken a law."

(singing in foreign language)

But Ellis got some vital information

about the smuggling operation from Perry.

He discovered that Tokeley-Parry had partners in Egypt.

His main contact was called Ali Farag.

I was introduced to Farag by my then-supplier,

who was a rogue, a rascal, and had been cheating me.

And Ali Farag,

I think he wanted to make contact with the West,

he wanted to find somebody that he could trust

and could work with.

He saw what his older brothers were doing,

they were the leading dealers in Egypt, very powerful men,

and he wanted to be like them,

and he saw me, a young man also hopeful,

also wanting to find wonderful things, and to get them out,

and we just clicked.

The problem for Ellis

was that he didn't yet know what Tokeley-Parry and Farag

had been smuggling.

He then received a call

from the expert at the British Museum.

He invited me to come up to the British Museum,

where he'd got something to tell me,

so I went up there, and went into his office,

where he opened the book,

the definitive tome on the tomb of Hetepka,

and he explained to me that having looked at the

style of these wall pieces that we'd found under the bed,

he'd identified them as Old Kingdom,

he had looked closely at, obviously the objects.

He was not happy with the hieroglyphs that appeared on them,

but nonetheless researched them, and he had found

that they were from the tomb of Hetepka.

Hetepka was a statesman,

and a royal hairdresser,

the Vidal Sassoon of the pharaohs.

The tomb had remained undisturbed for thousands of years,

until discovered in the 1960s.

It was panels from Hetepka's tomb

that had been found by police under Tokeley-Parry's bed.

They now knew they had a theft,

but they had no reports of this theft.

Without this, they had no case.

They did not have enough evidence

to convict anyone under British law.

They needed to secure the cooperation

of the Egyptian authorities.

We took a fairly unusual step,

and we invited the Egyptian ambassador in London

to come to Scotland Yard for a briefing

on what we had found and where our investigation had got to.

(lively music)

Under Egyptian law,

certain families were granted the right

to hold collections of antiquities,

but not to sell them.

The Farags had one of these listed collections.

Now with growing evidence of widespread looting,

the Egyptian authorities were prepared to act.

It was a breakthrough.

They opened up their records for Ellis to inspect.

They brought with 'em a vast book.

The size of it was amazing.

It came in a suitcase on its own,

and it was the record of the licensed collection

that the Farag family had under its control.

And we sat down with them and went through this page by page

and compared objects in that to objects,

or photographs of objects,

that we'd seized from Tokeley-Parry,

and we were able to identify a number of pieces

from that specific collection.

But it wasn't entirely clear

what Tokeley-Parry was up to.

Ellis needed to go to Egypt to find out for himself.

The Egyptians regarded our visit to Egypt

as both significant, but also risky.

They were also concerned for our safety,

because clearly there was quite a lot at stake

as far as individuals in Egypt were concerned.

They therefore asked us,

under the guise of visiting Egypt,

to look at the security of various sites of antiquity.

But soon, news spread

about their true intentions.

So, it was of some concern to both them and us

when on the very first day that they

went out and made an inspection of a collection,

they found in the Farags' house a business card,

and on the back of the business card was written my name,

the name of my associate Tony Russell,

and of our interpreter who'd come with us.

So, the Farags were being tipped off

as to the fact that we were there,

and clearly they knew now that this was an investigation

that they were gonna have problems stopping,

but nonetheless one which they would try to.

Ellis and his group left Cairo for Saqqara,

the City of the Dead.

Saqqara was a necropolis, a vast burial ground

for the ancient city of Memphis.

It was also where the papyrus offered to the British Museum

in May 1994 had come from.

On November 19th, Dick Ellis went to see the tomb of Hetepka

in the shadow of the oldest pyramid at Saqqara.

It was just 60 yards from a guard post

manned 24 hours a day.

(tense music)

We got there about four o'clock in the afternoon

to be greeted by the superintendent of the site,

who told us that we wouldn't be able to get into the tomb,

so guessing that he was playing for time,

we said that wasn't a problem,

that we'd go out and we'd clear the sand ourselves.

This is the entrance to the tomb just below ground level.

So, you're looking here at this point of the plan.

This is the entrance.

And in the background, too,

that very short distance away is the Step Pyramid,

the oldest pyramid in Egypt.

The steel door that had been placed over the entrance

still bore its seals from the

antiquity department inspectors,

and the padlock and everything were in place,

to give the appearance, at any rate, the tomb was intact.

What the criminals had done was to

excavate away the sand at the side of the tomb

and enter through the side wall.

They'd actually removed the

stones which had been placed there to protect it.

When you see how close the tomb was to one of these

manned security posts,

you begin to understand the complicity

that existed with the staff.

Going back to the tomb itself,

entering through here, you walk down this long corridor,

and on each side of the corridor,

there's wonderful limestone relief,

which have been drawn in these plans to show the

various life activities of Hetepka,

so you get a picture of this man's life

as you walk down the corridor,

to this area, which is the chapel.

And across here, this whole section was the false door,

from ground to roof.

We were confronted with literally a pile of rubble,

and it very, very dramatically brought home to us

what the illicit trade in cultural property

does to countries like Egypt,

and does to countries like Britain, as well,

when you have ancient sites which are destroyed,

illegally and for personal financial gain.

Ellis discovered that in December, 1991,

the tomb had been broken into from the roof.

He also claims that records show

that Tokeley-Parry had visited Egypt in December, 1991,

and January, 1992.

Everything was falling into place.

What's more, Ellis was beginning to unravel

precisely how Tokeley-Parry was disguising

his stolen antiquities.

(mysterious music)

If you compared the line drawing

to the photographs that were taken

of the two sections that we found

under Tokeley's bed in his cottage,

you see immediately that some of these pieces

have been altered to try and disguise them.

You'll notice that here, the hand is clenched

and clutching some ceremonial cloth.

In Tokeley's version,

what he's done as a restorer is he has altered it

to make the hand open and to make the cloth disappear.

And most importantly, across the top of these,

almost above the head of the figure,

were the remnants of the hieroglyph,

and this hieroglyph, which appears on each of these pieces,

actually spells his name.

So, any remnant of that would immediately tell

an Egyptologist able to read hieroglyphs, Hetepka.

And for that reason,

Tokeley-Parry has taken those out and replaced them with

some fictitious hieroglyph meaning nothing.

Ellis returned to England,

but there was a missing final link

in Tokeley-Parry's smuggling chain.

Ellis suspected he knew what it was.

In among Tokeley-Parry's papers,

there were many correspondence between him

and a respected New York antiques dealer, Fred Schultz.

Fred Schultz had become head of the leading trade group,

the National Association of Dealers in Ancient,

Oriental, and Primitive Art.

He had even advised President Clinton

about the antiquities trade.

One leading archeologist,

who had met Fred Schultz in the early 1980s,

was Dr. Betsy Bryan.

When I first met Fred Schultz, he was quite young,

and in New York he was opening his own gallery,

which he ran right out of his own apartment.

He was a very attractive young man,

and really easy to talk to.

It was hard not to like Fred Schultz, I would have to say.

In fact, Ellis had already

made contact with Schultz.

A few weeks after the raid of Tokeley-Parry's cottage,

Ellis received a call from him out of the blue.

Fred Schultz was on the telephone from New York,

saying that I had this piece,

I'd seized it from Tokeley-Parry,

it was a piece that he had bought in New York

that he had sent to Tokeley-Parry for restoration,

and could he have it back, please.

The simple answer was no.

Dick Ellis asked him for documentary proof

that the piece was his.

Schultz provided him a receipt,

which showed he had bought it

from another dealer for $25,000.

Ellis got on a plane to New York.

His first stop was to meet with Joseph Gorena,

the dealer who had provided Fred Schultz with the receipt.

I went first with an FBI agent to Gorena.

We cold called him,

and I confronted him with this receipt,

and just simply said, "Is this your receipt?"

"Yup," he said.

And I said, "Did you ever sell that object to Schultz?"

And he realized the seriousness of what he'd done,

and he just said, "No, never did."

Never had the piece, never saw the piece,

only gave Schultz the receipt 'cause he asked for it.

And he asked for it to cover his tracks.

And I did something that we do in this country

they don't do in the states,

I took a written statement from him there and then,

which he signed, and within a matter of hours,

he was trying to retract the statement,

having spoken to Schultz, and to Schultz's lawyers.

But we had it in writing, signed by him,

that he had done this, and the reasons why he had done it,

and he couldn't retract.

(dramatic music)

Ellis then went to Schultz's art gallery

on Manhattan's Madison Avenue.

We then cold called Schultz,

who was not, shall we say, welcoming.

I agreed that he could have his lawyer present.

I spoke to his lawyer on the telephone,

and we arranged a meeting the following day,

at which only the lawyer showed up, Schultz didn't show.

Ellis returned to London

more convinced than ever

that the high profile American dealer

was a key player in the Egyptian smuggling ring,

but he had no idea of the huge scale of the operation,

and least of all, the breathtaking skill

with which it had been carried out.

(dramatic music)

Tokeley-Parry realized as early as 1987

that there was a profit to be made

from procuring and exporting

Egyptian antiquities to the West.

Getting hold of good pieces would be difficult,

so he relied on Ali Farag to find him the very best objects.

(lively music)

The objects that we exported were mostly brought to us.

The Farags had a shop in Cairo,

and it was well known throughout Egypt

that this was the place to bring

antiquities that the fellahin, the farmers,

had found in their fields.

So, although the shop was watched during the day

by the antiquities police,

they would knock of at 11 o'clock at night,

and if they were a little late, they'd let us know,

and as soon as they knocked off, the shop would open,

and all through the night, people would come in.

But how to get all this stuff out of Egypt?

Tokeley-Parry used Mark Perry as one of his couriers

to bring antiquities through customs and into England.

We used to pay customs officers

to carry our suitcases through the customs,

and they'd carry the suitcase, dragging it through,

with probably 40 kilos in there. (laughs)

By 1987, Tokeley-Parry and Ali Farag

had bigger treasures in their sights,

what Tokeley refers to as the Great Game,

a game to find the most beautiful artifacts,

or to make lots of money, or as it turned out, both.

The game involved an elaborate and audacious scam.

In the early period, I carried things naked,

I carried antiquities in my luggage,

and it was clear that sooner or later I would be discovered.

It was Ali himself who had the idea

of disguising them as tourist trophies,

and the standard technique that we developed

was to coat them with a conservation plastic,

and then gild them, and then paint them,

just as if they were vulgar, kitsch tourist pieces.

So that if the customs opened my suitcase,

they would see the usual rubbish that tourists buy.

And it worked very well.

After preparing the piece for export,

they would then buy a similar object from a tourist shop,

and keep the receipt.

Tokeley-Parry would give this to customs officials.

As soon as the pieces were back in England,

I would immerse them in a container of pure solvent,

acetone, which would dissolve the conservation plastic

and everything else that I put on.

Plaster or filling would just float off,

leaving the antiquities exactly as I'd found them,

and also clean, and then if necessary I would restore them.

It was a safe and reliable method

which protected them in transport.

In 1991, Tokeley-Parry and Farag

finally hit the jackpot.

Ali and I had always been hoping to find a great thing,

a world class piece,

something that would finish what we called the Great Game.

Eventually we found it,

and it was the head of Amenhotep III.

Amenhotep III ruled Egypt

between 1386 BC and 1349 BC,

making the head nearly 3,500 years old.

Amenhotep III also was

a man who lived in an extremely interesting time period.

I mean, not only did he inherit this enormous empire,

but he lived at a time where his family

produced all sorts of very famous people,

and for example, he was the father

of a king who's known from ancient Egypt

as the greatest heretic that they ever had,

that was Akhenaten.

He is believed

to have been Tutankhamen's grandfather.

Amenhotep III, A3, caught us by surprise.

We didn't expect a wonderful thing to arrive so soon.

It was the Gulf War that changed everything.

During the Gulf War, the Egyptians were very frightened.

Everybody was trying to get hard currency,

and everybody was producing antiquities

that they had in storage as rain checks

and trying to sell them.

And, although I could not travel,

Ali was going out every night to follow leads,

and the builder came to him saying that

he had discovered this head on his building plot,

he'd dug it up, and he said under ordinary circumstances,

because of the laws, he would've concreted it in,

it would've been too dangerous,

but if we could give him enough money

to fly his entire family to Tunisia for the duration,

then he would just sell it to us.

And we gave him $6,000,

which was an extraordinarily low price,

and he got his family to Tunisia, and we had the head.

The extraordinary head

had been unearthed from a town

several hours' drive from Cairo.

When I first saw the head,

I knew that it was something more than I'd ever seen before,

and I thought, "Well, perhaps this is it,

"perhaps I can sell this for $50,000.

As I began to know it, it seemed more and more wonderful.

But I had no idea of really what it was

and how important it was.

I jus thought, "Christ, I've got to get this

"out of the country."

That was my concern.

This is roughly speaking what I took

to the airport that morning.

The head of Amenhotep III with a false nose,

because A3's nose is killed, chopped off,

the beard made up, the rear socket filled in,

gilded, painted to make it look as vulgar as possible,

and with a false bottom,

an entire new section added along here in plaster,

with the word Semiramis written,

which is the hotel from which I bought the copy

and from which I had the receipt.

This was specifically put there

for the customs official to scratch.

And sure enough, when they opened up my suitcase,

the first thing he wanted to know was why is it so heavy,

because it weighs 100 pounds,

and a plaster one should only weigh 15 pounds.

I said, "Oh, I think they put stone inside."

He then got out his keys and was about to scratch there.

That would've been disastrous for me,

because there's only a millimeter between

the gilding and the stone.

If he'd discovered the stone,

I would've been in prison within half an hour.

I had to get him from there to there,

and I had to do that by using

what the military call the voice of command.

And as he was going to there I said,

"No no, not there, down there, please."

It's plaster.

And he did, without thinking,

and he went down there and scratched,

and found that it was plaster,

and then just lost interest and walked away.

Tokeley-Parry successfully

brought the head to England.

Now he needed to find a partner

who could sell the magnificent head for him.

He was a restorer, not a dealer,

and did not have the right contacts.

My first task was to try and work out

what this wonderful head was worth.

And, there hadn't been any such objects

sold through the rooms for the previous 20 years.

There was no other way for me to find out other

than by getting the information from a dealer.

So, I thought I'd play a little game.

I took photographs of a lot of heads

in museums around the world,

and then I photographed a photograph

of my head of Amenhotep III,

so I had, as it were, a collection of photographs,

all in the same format, with the joker in the pack.

And the idea was to give this pack to a dealer

and just watch his reaction,

and without letting him know that I owned it,

find out how much he would pay for it.

And I gave the pack of photographs to Fred Schultz.

He went through them, he said,

"Oh, this is wonderful, this is in Cairo,

"this is in the Met, they're wonderful,"

and then he reached my photograph and he said, "What's this?

"I ought to know, this is wonderful."

And I said, "Oh, that's mine, I brought it out last month."

And literally within 10 minutes,

he'd gone into a bureau de change

and he'd taken out 10,000 pounds English,

and he'd given me the money

so he would have first refusal to deal with my head.

So I thought, "Seems a nice enough chap."

And that was how it started.

Tokeley-Parry thought

he could easily sell it for $50,000,

but then Fred Schultz valued it at $2 million,

a sum Tokeley-Parry had never dared dream of.

He had found in Schultz the partner he had longed for,

a well-connected and ambitious man.

The two men faced one obstacle.

Dealers would only buy pieces if they knew their provenance,

a history of ownership.

So they came up with a story,

giving the head a false provenance, a false history.

It was a story that even duped leading archeologists.

Schultz wanted to get a picture of the head published

in a respected catalog.

This would give the piece prestige,

and make it easier to sell.

He knew someone who was about to publish

just such an exhibition catalog.

Well, when I first saw the head, I was extremely excited,

because it represented a particular

type of statue that was unusual,

but was almost characteristic

of this reign of Amnehotep III,

because it was a life-sized head.

In this particular case, we knew he had done this

in his funerary temple in Luxor,

or on the west side of Luxor,

but he never used this particular stone.

This meant that there was another temple

someplace in Egypt, and so I was extremely excited

and wanted to know where it was.

Fred Schultz had expected this question.

He and Jonathan Tokeley-Parry

had already created a fake historical collection

that was almost beyond question.

The reason for old collection provenances are simple.

If Fred had said that he had A3 from a European dealer,

Europe is a large place,

but half an hour would've located that dealer.

It's a very small market.

If Fred had said that it came from a European collector

who did not want to deal with anybody else other than Fred,

this is an unseen cast of thousands,

and an old collection is even better,

because it means that the piece has been out of Egypt

since long before there could be

any legal squabble about it.

So, I created a 1920s collection,

which was actually rather tremendous fun.

I made up the labels, and I patinated them,

and I luckily had an uncle called Thomas Alcock

who was a colonial engineer

who had spent his life going up and down the Suez Canal

and was the ideal person to have had such a collection.

The story that Fred Schultz gave me

about this Alcock collection

had the ring of truth to it,

because yes, there were a number of cases where,

especially families from England

collected pieces while they were in the military,

or even earlier in the 19th century,

and so it was a story that had

all sorts of reasons that it might be believed.

Betsy Bryan asked for further verification,

but didn't get any.

I asked Fred whether the family would agree

to our publishing the one photograph that we did have

in the exhibition catalog,

and that's what we did.

For more than a year, I still labored,

believing that it was the head from the Alcock collection.

In 1993, Fred Schultz was able to sell

the head of Amenhotep to a British art dealer

for $1.4 million,

and Jonathan Tokeley-Parry had his big payday.

It was a year later that the pages of the papyrus turned up

at the British Museum,

and Scotland Yard started out on the trail

of Jonathan Tokeley-Parry.

Betsy Bryan knew nothing of this investigation,

but the next time she visited London,

she was in for a big shock.

I visited the British Museum,

and was asked by one of my colleagues

to come into his office, and when I did,

he handed me a photograph of this head, and he said,

"Do you know this head?"

And I said, "Of course I do, I published that head

"in the catalog last year."

And he said, "I think maybe you wanna sit down

"before I tell you what I'm going to tell you,"

and he then pulled out the set of polaroids

that showed the head in its prior existence,

when it had had gold paint all over it.

I was so angry, and, really very hurt,

because I had known Fred, not really, really well,

but I had known him for years and years,

and to have been so baldly lied to,

and I guess my pride was deeply hurt. (laughs)

(tense music)

The trial of Jonathan Tokeley-Parry began

in central London.

He was charged with dishonestly handling stolen goods.

Tokeley-Parry was still convinced

he had broken no English law.

I contacted my barrister, who said to me

that they had made a mistake,

I was not breaking English law,

and could not be breaking English law,

it's not even a customs offense, and she said to me,

"Just don't upset them,

"because they'll realize that they made a mistake,

"and they'll drop the whole thing."

A lot was at stake, not only for Tokeley-Parry,

but also for the antiquities market.

Dealers knew that if the police were successful

in getting a conviction,

it would set a precedent in British law

that would change the art market for good.

Mark Perry was the key witness.

In court, he gave damning evidence

detailing how he smuggled into Britain

the doors of Hetepka.

I can remember covering them,

and I can remember painting in the hieroglyphics,

and I can remember painting in the pictures

in a black paint, gold leafing it,

and then painting it again in whatever,

and then writing something stupid on there

like "Welcome to Egypity" or whatever it was.

We took it through the customs, got it back to the UK,

and I remember Tokeley-Parry actually unwrapping it

and putting it into a bath of acetone,

and it just lifted everything off,

and it was a fantastic transformation, really,

because it went back to the original stone.

Together with the photographic evidence

of the destruction of the tomb,

Perry's evidence was devastating.

Hetepka was a mistake I made.

There were six pieces, I bought two,

and from their condition at the time,

I thought that they had been in an old collection,

that is to say, they had been cut off

probably before the war,

and so therefore were quite safe and morally safe to handle.

I was wrong.

(somber music)

As the final verdict approached,

there was a dramatic twist to the story.

Tokeley-Parry was convinced that he was a victim

of what he called a political trial.

And at that point I think I finally understood

what they'd been telling me,

that I was going to be convicted to create a precedent.

And I think that was when I just finally

lost my temper about the whole thing.

In despair, Tokeley-Parry admitted himself

to Barnstaple Hospital, and attempted suicide.

I checked myself into a psychiatric ward,

to be assessed as to whether I was fit enough

to continue trial,

and I decided that I was not prepared to be

bounced in public ceremony, humiliated,

just so these buggers could actually

change the law and manipulate.

And I drank hemlock.

And I knew that it would kill me within three hours.

Tokeley-Parry could hardly have chosen

a more dramatic exit.

Hemlock was used in ancient Greece

to poison condemned prisoners.

The most famous victim was the philosopher Socrates,

a fact that was probably not lost

on the philosophy graduate Tokeley-Parry.

Then, the best-laid plans of mice and men, farce.

The police turned up at the psychiatric ward

and insisted on taking me down to the police station

to change my bail.

It was pointed out to them

that this was against all the rules,

I said to them, "I have taken medication,

"will you please be as quickly as possible,"

but by the time they got me back, they were dragging me.

I couldn't walk.

So they took me into intensive care,

and I didn't think there was any possible antidote,

and I was very, very unhappy and angry boy when I woke up.

With Tokeley-Parry in a state

of temporary paralysis brought on by the hemlock,

the trial collapsed.

Meanwhile, his accomplices in Egypt

were facing an even worse fate.

Ali Farag was charged with being part of a smuggling ring,

and was sentenced to 15 years hard labor.

By comparison, Tokeley-Parry got off lightly.

In the summer or 1997,

a second trial took place in London.

This time, the trial passed uneventfully,

and on June 18, 1997,

he was sentenced to six years in prison.

The judge, in sentencing Tokeley,

actually stated that in the view of the court,

this was a serious crime for which,

not only should Tokeley be punished,

but also, there had to be an example to other people.

But that wasn't the end of the story.

The FBI now wanted to take action against Fred Schultz

for his role in the crime.

Stolen property statutes,

they're five-year statute of limitations.

So the clock was ticking in that sense.

When I got it, there was already, the clock was ticking on,

if you were gonna move forward this case,

you had to find a violation,

you had to find a violate that was chargeable

within the statute of limitations, and move from there.

So it was already far along as far as the life of this case,

and I had to act quickly.

Investigators had all

of Tokeley-Parry's diaries

and the correspondence with Schultz.

What we got here are some of the letters,

copies of the letters that we found

when we searched Tokeley-Parry's house and his workshop,

and when you read them,

you can see, again, the knowledge that Schultz had

that what he was dealing in was stolen material.

For instance, this one, "Dear Fred,

"What a year was 1991.

"Two major pieces, and an also-ran.

"Now that Ali and I seem to be making fewer blunders,"

they know that these are stolen pieces,

these refer there to the head of Amenhotep III,

you know, major piece.

"I'm looking forward to 1992.

"As you say, when we aren't playing bankers

"and insurance salesmen, it really is fun,

"this Great Game.

"Have you read Kipling's 'Kim?'"

As Agent Gildea started his investigation,

it was clear who was bankrolling

Tokeley-Parry's smuggling ventures.

I thought that the key to this was

to pay a visit to Mr. Tokeley-Parry.

I thought that Jonathan Tokeley-Parry would be

the ideal person to take everyone through,

from start to finish, the whole conspiracy, the operation,

along with the correspondence between

himself and Mr. Schultz.

He'd be the perfect person to tell the story,

and what better soapbox than New York City?

Media capital of the world, if you will.

The hard part was convincing Mr. Tokeley-Parry.

Gildea first interviewed Tokeley-Parry

in prison in 1999,

a year before he completed his sentence.

When Tokeley-Parry left prison,

the FBI persuaded him to give evidence against Schultz.

With his help, Fred Schultz was arrested,

and charged with conspiring to smuggle stolen goods.

Tokeley-Parry became the star witness.

Well, I think he showed this conspiracy in effect,

the operation, this smuggling operation

that he was involved in.

He wrote these things down, so through his correspondence,

through both his position in this

and through Mr. Schultz's position in New York,

it just all came together, obviously,

that this was an illicit operation.

It was illegal.

Mr. Tokeley spelled it out,

generally through his correspondence.

These letters showed, in fact, that this was going on,

and well after the laws were enacted.

With the help of Tokeley-Parry's testimony,

and especially details of their correspondence,

Schultz was convicted.

He was sentenced to 33 months prison,

and fined $55,000.

The ring had finally been cracked.

This really demonstrated to the antiquities trade

that they were now suddenly vulnerable

to criminal prosecutions,

and to the penalties that that imposed,

which, as was the case with Schultz and Tokeley-Parry,

meant imprisonment.

And they were suddenly vulnerable to criminal prosecutions

within their own jurisdiction,

within their own home territory, as it were.

(somber music)

More than a decade after Dick Ellis

started his investigations into the theft of the papyrus,

Egypt is still fighting the battle against smugglers.

The illegal trade in Egyptian antiquities continues,

despite the convictions in US and British courts,

convictions that Tokeley-Parry still believes were unjust

and politically motivated.

Both countries needed some fall guy,

where the precedent could be established to change the law.

I think Fred and myself have grounds to be extremely angry.

Jonathan Tokeley-Parry was reported

to have smuggled more than 2,000 pieces of Egyptian art.

Most have since been returned

to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

Still angered by the destruction of Hetepka,

Ellis continues his crusade against antique traffickers.

That is what this trafficking is all about.

It's about enabling a relatively few people

to get extremely rich off the proceeds

of another country's cultural heritage,

and it's a heritage which if you went to Egypt

and you wanted to see, I'm afraid it's too late.

You've missed the tomb of Hetepka.

(jazzy music)