The ‘Hot Pot’ Heist: How Night Thieves and Billion-Dollar Museums Plundered the Ancient World
When a New York museum paid a fortune for an ancient vase, it exposed a global underground network of night thieves, elite smugglers, and prestige institutions profiting from stolen history. Late one morning in the mid-1970s, near the ancient Italian town of Cerveteri, a television crew stepped over freshly churned earth to inspect a hole…