KURT ANDERSEN: There is a scandal boiling over in the art museum world right now. Actually not a scandal, but dozens of small scandals that amount to the same thing. It seems that the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, many of America's richest and most prestigious big museums own a lot of ancient objects with very iffy backgrounds. Vases and statues looted in Europe and elsewhere and smuggled into America.

The cast of characters in this mess include tomb robbers, shady dealers, and disgraced curators. And the Italian and Greek governments and now blowing the whistle louder than ever. With me today to try to explain what's going on and why is Thomas Hoving. He was the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the 1970s, and he's a self described bad boy and good boy in the antiquities game. Tom Hoving, welcome back to Studio 360.

THOMAS HOVING: Thank you Kurt. Bad boy because in the days before 1970 when the UNESCO treaty was formed, which said that people should not acquire stolen and smuggled antiquities, I acquired everything in sight. I didn't care where it came from and I knew it had to come from Italy, I knew it had to come from a tomb in Greece. I said the heck with it.

KA: So when you were at the Met, you're saying ahhhh, it's a shady game. We get it however we can get it.

TH: Not only that, we boasted about getting the stuff. We had rolodexes full of the names of smugglers who could get it out of Italy into Geneva or Lugana, or something like that.

KA: Really? So there wasn't even a pretense of laundering the thing?

TH: No hypocrisy. We were just rotten low down crooks. But after 1970, and I participated in the hearings in Europe to draft the treaty, we all decided the age of piracy is over. So I became a good guy, and have been fighting ever since to stop some of my colleagues from going back and having a little bit of the honey, you know? Just one more vase, come on just one more bronze.

KA: So, here we are 25 plus years later, why suddenly is it exploding in the newspaper everyday?

TH: Three things, in 1995 the Swiss, French, and Italian police made a run on a bonded warehouse in Geneva owned Giacomo Medici. Three warehouses with 12,000 antiquituites in various states of repair.

KA: This is a dealer, Giacomo Medici?

TH: He is a smuggler and a member of the Italian mafia. And they found also in the apartment of Robert Hecht in Paris, who is one of the kingpins of the entire antiquities trade, he's an American who had a place in Paris, they found 10,000 Polaroids of things that these people got from tombs in Italy. And it turns out that the Italian police took a little while to figure out where that polaroid was in a great American collection and more and more of them began to turn up at the Getty Museum which has an enormous collection. Now, the LA Times broke the story because at the Getty there was an internal revolt against the management and the staff loaded onto the LA Times thousands, thousands of pages of internal secret memoranda about all of these antiquities. And WHAM! they began to publish this stuff and WOOF! the whole thing blew up and now these article starting about 8 months ago, a year ago at the most, it's a watershed. From now on no American museum and probably no private collector in America can ever collect and antiquity again without absolute proof of provenanc.

KA: So, there will just be fewer things that people can legitimately buy now that legitimacy is required.

TH: Well virtually nothing because there are no pieces any longer that have a decent provenance, a word which means the history. Where does it go back to? Now, prior to 1970 you get a free pass.

KA: So, amnesty for stuff stolen before then?

TH: Amnesty before 1970. So, if you can prove this into Geneva from Turkey and then into the United States in 1963, you're OK. But are you? Do you want your local paper to say, what? All of these antiquities, Kurt, are not found in Nebraska. They're not known to have been found in Malibu beach. They're found in three places in the world: Turkey, Italy, and some in Greece, but most in Italy and Turkey.

KA: So what should happen now? Should the Met and the Getty say to Italy and Greece and Turkey, "OK, you've got us, we're caught red handed, here's all your stuff back?"

KA: They will.

TH: Of course, these are not young dumb people.

KA: Now I understand of course, the ongoing set of criminal conspiracies was, I understand why these countries want their stuff, their patrimony back. Should we care so much, it's not as though people were killed or objects were destroyed.

TH: People were killed and objects were destroyed by the tens of thousands.

KA: Really?

TH: These guys when they go into an area where there are tombs, they go in with dynamite, bulldozers, and they just go CRUNCH! and they get what's good. And they have those horrible saws that cut up streets, you know NEEEH! those saws. They have them, and they go NEEEH! and they tear temples apart.

KA: You do a very good impersonation of the machine.

TH: Well, I used to have one of these saws and I used to be in the business. No, no, no. It's utter destruction plus when you have it illicitly out of some place you have no idea what the context of history is, and that's scholarship.

KA: So, if this improper and illegal trade as of now is going to become much more difficult, will it have the effect of stopping these looters and smugglers?

TH: You can never stop it. How can you stop drugs, I mean you can't stop it. But you can slow down and it blunts it, and then what you have to do in countries like Italy and particularly Turkey, is to have a system that Peter the Great devised in the 18th century in Russia. Anything ancient found, you immediately got a cash on the barrelhead and a medal and nothing even left old Russia. The Scythian gold and all that stuff gold never left. Now these countries say, well gee, we don't have the money. Well, if they kept these things and had small local museums the tourism would be amazing and people are going more and more. They want to see these things in their location of discovery. So, they're going to have to do all sorts of things at the same…. it'll never happen at once and it'll never stop, Kurt.

KA: But are you hopeful that we really are on the edge of a better new era?

TH: Well, look at America now that these stories have come out and if America will never buy these things without provenance again then the other countries will begin to get nervous.

KA: Tom Hoving, thank you very much.

Thomas Hoving was the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the 1970's and he's the author of many books. His latest is called Masterpieces: The Curators Game.