This job is not on Gaunt’s résumé. But records show that he was working with Hecht as early as 1992 and until at least 1999. In 1995, he wrote to a client of Hecht’s about a fresco smuggled out of Italy, according to court records.
Robin F. Rhodes, an archaeologist at the University of Notre Dame, says Gaunt was introduced to him as Hecht’s assistant in the late 1990s. Rhodes was heading to New York for work when the campus-museum director asked him, as a favor, to get an idea of what the museum might be able to buy. He swung by Hecht’s apartment for a prearranged appointment, where Gaunt brought out pieces, Rhodes recalls. He didn’t think about it again until he learned that the Carlos had a new Greek and Roman curator.
“When I heard Jasper was hired, that just surprised me,” says Rhodes, a historian of ancient Greek architecture. “I knew Robert Hecht was notorious.”
Hecht had been on law enforcement’s radar since the 1960s, when he was accused of trafficking in Turkey and Italy. Raiding his Paris apartment in February 2001, authorities found 43 dirt-covered relics under his bed and an unpublished memoir stating that for over 50 years, he’d “accidentally bought objects that were really ‘stolen’ from museums or excavations.” The draft also provided a new origin story for the infamous Euphronios krater, one that differed from what Hecht and the Met had claimed. In this version, Hecht’s source had been a “loyal” supplier who toured Italian villages every morning, “visiting all the clandestine diggers.” The confession would eventually help Italian prosecutors build a case that Hecht was the mastermind behind a global trafficking network of Greek, Roman, and Etruscan antiquities.
Gaunt started working at the Carlos in mid-December 2001, according to news releases. Hirschel remembers hiring him “before the full extent of Bob Hecht’s activities was widely understood.” And he remembers Gaunt agreeing on the need…
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