A Brooklyn man admitted to smuggling hundreds of Egyptian artifacts into the United States, many of them so freshly excavated they still smelled of wet earth when customs officials found them in his suitcases.
Ashraf Omar Eldarir, 52, pleaded guilty Monday in Brooklyn Federal Court to smuggling charges, the same day jury selection was scheduled to start in his trial.
Eldarir, a naturalized U.S. citizen, could face roughly three to five years behind bars based on federal sentencing guidelines, and there’s a chance he could face denaturalization as a result of his sentence.
Eldarir’s artifact-selling business came to an abrupt end on Jan. 22, 2020, when he flew into JFK Airport from Cairo with three suitcases carrying 590 undeclared cultural items, according to prosecutors.
Part of his stash included gold amulets from a funerary set, a relief with the cartouche of a Ptolemaic king that was originally part of a royal building or temple, and wooden tomb model figures with linen garments dating to approximately 1900 BCE, prosecutors said.
The items were protected by bubble and foam wrapping, and when customs officials removed that wrapping, loose sand and dirt spilled out.
He didn’t have any documents authorizing the artifacts, the feds said, and further investigation showed he’d smuggled before. He had photos on his cell phone of several artifacts with metadata showing they were taken in Egypt, and after flying back to the U.S., he sold those items to an art dealer in 2019, according to court filings.
Eldarir made up a bogus story to tell interested art dealers about how he got his hands on the items — that they came from a collection one of his ancestors brought into the U.S. in 1948, prosecutors say, decades before a 1970 UNESCO treaty prohibited the unauthorized importing of cultural items.
Judge Rachel Kovner is slated to sentence Eldarir on June 12.
