The private dealer who discovered a theft at the British Museum

Almost 2,000 objects have gone missing from the British Museum: here’s the unlikely story of the antiques dealer who uncovered it all

Lesson summary

Hi there everyone, it’s Jeff and it’s time for English once more, right? Here we go with Plain English lesson number 639. JR is the producer. He has uploaded the full content of today’s lesson to PlainEnglish.com/639.

Today, we’re talking about a caper at the museum, a mysterious crime. Almost 2,000 objects have disappeared from the warehouses at the British Museum. And it caused a tremendous scandal because they think the person responsible was a curator at the museum.

That’s the first half, the story. In the second half of today’s lesson, I’m going to show you how to use the expression “go missing.”

So that’s what we have for you today. Let’s get started.

Private dealer uncovered theft at the British Museum

The British Museum in London is the third-most-visited museum in the world. And it’s one of the most highly-regarded museums in the world, with over eight million artifacts tracing the history of humanity and culture.

But you can’t see the museum’s full collection. Only about 80,000 objects—just one percent—are on display at any given time. The rest are in storage at the museum building, in warehouses in another part of London, or on loan to other institutions.

You might think that every piece owned by the museum has an ID number, a description, several photographs, preservation instructions, and a written history. If you think that, you would be wrong. In many cases, items in the museum’s collection are not fully described and photographed. Some items are grouped together with hundreds of others as just one record in the museum’s database.

To be fair, some items probably shouldn’t be individually cataloged. If there are thousands of fragments of a sculpture, does each fragment need its own record in the database?

But the museum estimates that there are still over a million unique items that have not been indexed and cataloged. And that matters because anything that’s not cataloged is easier to lose—or to steal.

One expert summed it up this way. A lot of items in the museum’s collection have been lying around for over 200 years without any registration system, so who would even notice if they went missing ?

Well about 2,000 items did go missing and nobody at the museum noticed. Most of the missing items were gems, semiprecious stones, jewelry, and glass items. The only person who noticed was a private antiquities dealer from Denmark named Ittai Gradel. He specializes in Greek and Roman gems.

Gradel is a dealer. His job—his profession—is to buy and sell valuable items legally in the private market. And he started seeing gems on eBay, the online auction site. The seller said they were a couple of hundred years old. But Gradel recognized them. They were Roman gems from the Second Century A.D.

In other words , they were far more valuable than the seller thought. Gradel bought his first gem for £15, or less than $20. He sold it to a collector and made thousands of pounds in profit on the trade. He thought he had just gotten lucky.

Gradel kept seeing items for sale below their true value; he kept buying and selling, as a dealer does, making a nice profit. One day, he worked up the courage to ask the seller how he had acquired the pieces. The seller said he inherited the items from his late grandfather, and he was just now getting rid of them.

But something didn’t make sense to Gradel. Gradel has a good memory and he recognized one of the items on eBay; he thought he had seen it in the British Museum’s collection. So he investigated a little more. And that’s when he discovered that the seller’s PayPal account was in the name of a curator at the British Museum.

In 2020, he reported this to the staff at the British Museum. He didn’t get much response, so he kept trying to get people’s attention. In his eyes, a fraud was being committed, and the museum needed to investigate.

Finally, the staff said they had investigated, but they had closed the matter. The curator—the one Gradel thought was selling items from the collection—he was still working for the museum.

Gradel thought it was a cover-up , so he went directly to the museum’s Board of Trustees. And that’s when he started to get results. The curator was fired. The director of the museum was forced to resign. The museum even apologized to Gradel for ignoring his warnings for so long. And the museum had to publicly admit that it had lost about 2,000 items over the course of many years.

The museum’s interim director was called to testify in the House of Commons, forced to explain how the nation’s preeminent museum had been so careless.

But the damage is done. The museum has gotten only about 350 items back and it will be impossible to recover many of the others.

The museum has announced a campaign to document and catalog another 1.3 million items in its collection; the effort will cost about £10 million and will take years.

Hats off to the dealer who uncovered it all. He could have just reported it and let it go. But he spent his own time, his own effort, investigating.

What I don’t understand is why the curator would have done this, if in fact he did. It can’t be for the money. The seller was getting £15 an item? That’s less than $20. So imagine that over a period of decades he sells 2,000 items—he would make a total of $40,000 over many years? And risk his job? And risk going to jail?

So he could not have been doing this for the money. It was probably the power. It was probably the thrill of getting away with it .

Nobody has been arrested, nobody charged with a crime. The curator was fired, but he hasn’t been arrested or charged.