Last month at the San Ysidro border, a U.S. man was caught trying to smuggle 52 reptiles from Mexico.
It was at 3AM and he was driving a truck, but a quick search revealed 43 horned lizards and nine snakes inside his clothes.
Ten years ago, officials at Amsterdam's Schipol Airport found inside a German couple's clothes 200 tarantulas and other insects. They were returning from Peru.
Twelve years ago a German man was caught trying to sneak 44 endangered geckos and skinks out of New Zealand found in pouches sewn into his underpants. Each could be sold for $2000.
From 2010 to 2012 six others were caught attempting to sneak out these same reptiles out of the South Island of New Zealand, including Manfred Bachmann, a German from Uganda, who was only sentenced to 15 weeks in jail for 16 jewelled geckos packed in tubes. Also arrested were Thomas Benjamin Price of Switzerland and Gustavo Toledo-Albarran of Mexican for catching these geckos on Otago Peninsula, passing them on to Bachmann. Nine of the sixteen were pregnant, and each was said to be worth $200,000.
In 2005 a woman was stopped at the Melbourne Airport wearing a specially designed apron-like garment with 15 containers for 15 tropical fish.
In 2010 this 70 million-year old Tyrannosaurus bataar skeleton was smuggled out of the Gobi Desert in Mongolia to the U.S. in pieces and auctioned for over $1 million. The Feds caught the Florida fossils dealer and sent the bones back to Mongolia, which will become the centerpiece for a new dinosaur museum.
All the above leads to the current crisis of what museums throughout the world are doing about artifacts stolen from Egypt and other areas of the world, and when they will be returned. According to a report commissioned by President Emmanuel Macron, 90% of African cultural property resides in European museums.
Mighty museums such as the Metropolitan in New York, the Getty, the Louvre, the British Museum and the Humboldt Forum in Berlin have locked up the precious legacy of other lands taken in wars of aggression or by theft or duplicity. They have refused demands to return them although many were taken by colonial armies in the course of what would now be regarded as crimes against humanity. They argue that they are entitled to keep "the spoils of war" -- although that doctrine is now rejected by international law -- or else rely on that school playground philosophy of "finders' keepers" no matter how unconscionable the finding.
How much is all the above to be returned worth? Priceless. For example, just the Queen's Crown Jewels with Kohinoor Diamond is said to be valued between $10 billion and $12 billion.
Another British Museum artifact is the Rosetta Stone, which was stolen by the French from Egypt, then confiscated by the British after defeating Napoleon, ending up in the British Museum in 1802. How can you calculate the worth of something like this created in 197 BC, so steeped in history, never to be sold? And perhaps never to be returned.
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