Brit Busted In UES Art Gallery's Global Smuggling Ring, DA Says

UPPER EAST SIDE, NY — A British antiquities restorer has been extradited to the U.S. to face charges for participating in a worldwide smuggling ring that centered on an Upper East Side art gallery, prosecutors said Tuesday.

Neil Perry Smith, 58, was indicted on 29 charges including grand larceny and criminal possession of stolen property for allegedly joining the trafficking scheme, which was first busted in 2019 by the Manhattan District Attorney's Office.

Its alleged ringleader was Subhash Kapoor, owner of Art of the Past: a now-closed gallery on Madison Avenue near East 89th Street whose storefront is now home to the La Civette clothing store. When Kapoor was indicted in 2019, he was already imprisoned in India on similar charges.

Kapoor was accused of looting more than 2,600 Buddhist, Hindu and South Asian artworks, ranging from 11th-century bronze statues to a monumental marble Buddha head worth $4.5 million.

Smith is accused of aiding Kapoor by cleaning the stolen antiquities and covering up defects like dirt, rust or damage that might have indicated they were recently looted, authorities said.

Typically, Kapoor would send the antiquities to Smith or another Brooklyn-based restorer after they arrived at his Upper East Side gallery from abroad, prosecutors said. Once they were restored, Kapoor would store them at the gallery or at storage units — including one on the Upper West Side and another in Long Island City — before selling them.

In 2009, for example, Kapoor bought an 11th-century ceramic Khmer sculpture of a Buddha protected by a serpent that had been broken into more than 50 pieces. He paid Smith £7,925 to reassemble and restore it, then falsely claimed it was Thailand and tried to sell it for $1.2 million, prosecutors said.

All told, Smith is charged with possessing and restoring 22 stolen pieces from India, Cambodia, Thailand and Nepal, including a Shiva Nataraja worth $5 million and an Uma Parvati worth $3.5 million.

Kapoor's arrest caused a stir in the art world a decade ago. Before the scandal broke, Kapoor had been feted at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which later had to evaluate some of the antiquities it received from him to see whether they had been smuggled illegally.

"Without restorers to disguise stolen relics, there would be no laundered items for antiquities traffickers to sell," Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance, Jr. said in a statement Tuesday.

"The arraignment of Neil Perry Smith serves as a reminder that behind every antiquities trafficking ring preying upon cultural heritage for profit, there is someone reassembling and restoring these looted pieces to lend the criminal enterprise a veneer of legitimacy."

Smith, a London resident, is the second member of Kapoor's alleged ring to be extradited and arraigned on the 2019 indictment, following Richard Salmon, the other restorer. Kapoor himself will be extradited after his trial in India.

The investigation was handled by the Manhattan DA's Antiquities Trafficking Unit, which has recovered thousands of stolen antiquities worth more than $175 million combined, the office says.