Exhausted competing with dealers who somehow get away with selling stolen artwork.
Day 1 - "When he bought the letter from Martayan Lan, a rare book dealer in New York City"
Day 2 - "When he bought the letter from a rare book dealer in New York City"
Day 3 - "When he bought the letter from a rare book dealer in the United States"
Day 4. -"When he bought the letter from a rare book dealer"
Day 5. - "When he bought the letter."
Jamie McCall - Do your due diligence you Idiot. Show some true results for what we taxpayers pay for you to have practically unlimited resources. Do you have any idea of what the word "pattern" means?????????????????????????????????????????????????
I have had to compete with this for over 40 years and am exhausted from it.
Here is the latest story about another dealer who probably will get away with doing the same thing repeatedly:
Centuries-Old Stolen Copy of Christopher Columbus Letter Recovered in U.S.
The document was taken from the Vatican Library and replaced with a fake. It turned up in Atlanta
The Columbus letter is a copy of an account the explorer wrote about his journey to the New World that European printers turned into a pamphlet to spread news of the voyage across Europe. PHOTO: U.S. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE
Robert Parsons spent $875,000 for the crown jewel of his collection of rare books about early exploration of the Americas, a centuries-old copy of Christopher Columbus’s account of his first voyage to the New World.
Meanwhile, a forgery of the Columbus letter sat inside theVatican Apostolic Library, keeping company with some of history’s most important texts.
Investigators at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, acting on a tip, tracked the letter to the collection of the late Atlanta actuary, who unwittingly purchased the stolen document from a rare New York book dealer in 2004, according to documents filed in federal court this week. Mr. Parsons died in 2014, and his widow has agreed to return the letter to the Vatican.
Columbus wrote the letter for his Spanish patrons after he returned to Europe in 1493, telling of lands with “large flowing rivers” and “trees of endless varieties,” and of timid natives who “are so unsuspicious and so generous with what they possess, that no one who had not seen it would believe it,” according to a translation of the letter from the Independence Hall Association, which runs ushistory.org, an educational website that focuses on Revolutionary and Colonial eras of American history.
European printers converted the letter into pamphlets that spread the news of Columbus’s journey across the continent. Roughly 80 copies survive, investigators said in court documents. The oldest, including the copy purchased by Mr. Parsons, date to 1493, according to the documents.
The letter has resurfaced as cities debate the explorer’s legacy and whether his brutal treatment of indigenous people warrants removing statues of Columbus and severing his name from landmarks that bear it, a conversation stoked in recent weeks by the displacement of Confederate statues.
An expert examined the leaf dimensions and bookbinding, among other things, of a copy purchased by Atlanta actuary Robert Parsons and concluded that his copy belonged to the Vatican, and that a copy in the Vatican Library was a fake.Published Credit: U.S. Department of Justice PHOTO: U.S. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE
The historical significance of his report to the king and queen of Spain, however, isn’t in dispute. The Catholic church came into possession of the copy in the mid-19th century. It had been part of a collection of rare books and manuscripts belonging to Roman bibliophile Gian Francesco De Rossi, according to court documents.
Mr. De Rossi’s wife donated the collection to the Jesuits, a Catholic religious order, after her husband’s death in 1854, according to the Bookman’s Journal and Print Collector catalog of 1922. The superior general of the Jesuits gave the collection to Pope Benedict XV in 1921.
The letter was stolen from the Vatican Library “at an unknown time and date,” the Justice Department said in court documents.
Agents traced the letter to Mr. Parsons’s collection this year, possibly through an expert whom Mr. Parsons hired to confirm its authenticity when he bought the letter from Martayan Lan, a rare book dealer in New York City, said Mark Marani, an attorney for Mr. Parsons’s widow, Mary Parsons.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Jamie McCall said in court documents that Mr. Parsons acquired the letter in good faith “without having any knowledge whatsoever” of the theft.
Richard Lan, owner of Martayan Lan, said he was unaware of the theft and investigation of the Columbus letter. He declined to comment on how he came by it.
“I had no previous knowledge of this,” he said in an email.
Special agents contacted Ms. Parsons about the letter in March, court documents say. She agreed to let an expert working for the government compare her copy of the Columbus letter to the copy at the Vatican.
Analyzing the leaf dimensions and bookbinding, among other things, the expert concluded that Ms. Parsons’s copy belonged to the Vatican, and that letter in the Vatican Library was a fake.
The Columbus letter was “the crown jewel” of Mr. Parsons’s collection, and it was difficult for Ms. Parsons to part with it, Mr. Marani said. He said she plans to send a personal letter to the pope along with the Columbus document.
“She knew returning this to the rightful owner is something her late husband would have wanted her to do,” Mr. Marani said.
The return of the document to the Vatican marks the second time U.S. authorities hunted down a stolen Columbus letter that thieves swapped with a forgery.
A researcher who inspected a Columbus letter in the Riccardiana Library in Florence in 2010 noticed that the gutters of the booklet appeared to have been pasted together to hide the absence of a watermark, according to an affidavit filed in federal district court in Delaware in 2014.
The researcher, who is not named in the affidavit, then contacted U.S. authorities, suspecting it was a fake. An expert working with the U.S. government examined the letter and concluded the same, the court document shows. The real letter had been in the Library of Congress since an estate donated it in 2004.
It is unclear if Homeland Security agents learned about the theft of the Vatican letter in 2011 from the same person who alerted them to the possible forgery in the Riccardiana Library.
A spokesman for the Homeland Security Investigations field office in Philadelphia, which is investigating the letters, declined to comment. A spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Delaware, where the court documents in connection with both letters were filed, also declined to comment.
— Francis X. Rocca contributed reporting
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