Prior to some big court cases and changes to repatriation law in the 80s and 90s, the mafia was heavily involved with looting archaeological heritage in places like Italy. Criminals would dig them up and move them through Swiss freeports using false provenance records and auction them off to museums and private collectors in other countries. This caused irreparable damage to our understanding of these objects history and context.
It’s not often discussed, but much of what you can see of Greco-Roman artifacts in the permanent collections of American museums, for example, was likely to have been looted.
https://www.npr.org/2011/05/16/136252401/chasing-aphrodite-a...
It’s not often discussed, but much of what you can see of Greco-Roman artifacts in the permanent collections of American museums, for example, was likely to have been looted.