Freeports are the most expensive and secretive warehouses in the world, which now hide some of the world’s cultural treasures. TheBrockJohnson traces the path of one lost Modigliani painting in this episode of LastSeenPodcast:
John David Washington: Nuclear Holocaust?Ben: Okay, so I can’t really follow the plot either. But what’s important here is that there’s a time-traveling, nuclear code-having, Russian villain played by Kenneth Branagh, who stores his super valuable art in a Freeport.Staff Member: Our logistics department ships to and from any freeport around the world without customs inspection]
Atossa: Given that world trade mostly happened by ships back in the day, freeports did tend to be near where the ships came in.Atossa: Typically a freeport would be used to store grain from where the traders were bringing grain from one place, pausing to, you know, get more food and water at a port, leaving the grain there and then moving on elsewhere.
Atossa: And then some clever accountants and capitalists seized on it and made it work for them. And the world is full of these little provisions. Freeports are definitely one of them. Ben: Anyone even vaguely following the money has probably heard of offshoring. Putting funds in the Cayman Islands. Basically storing money in places where taxes can’t get at it. And like these other loopholes exploited by the super-rich, freeports have become really useful as places to store wealth. But not ones and zeros. Like, actual physical treasure. Treasure gets its value by being scarce, right? OrJohn Zarobell: The art market is a relatively opaque structure right now.
Ben: Over the last century, one specific type of treasure being stored in high-tech dungeons has become more popular - art. That’s because most other ways of storing value — cash, bank accounts, land, stocks - have become more regulated. And when it comes to international finance, John says the regulations have ramped up even more in the last couple of decades. Why?
Ben: Stashing hard assets from the art trade in high-tech dungeons is getting more difficult, in some places. Ben: And a new family became connected to Seated Man With a Cane. The Nahmad family. Another Jewish art dealing family that is considered by some to be the single biggest buying force in fine art. The grandson of Stettiner quickly filed a claim against the Nahmads. But the Nahmad family said, no no, we don’t own the painting! We just represent the company that owns it called IAC. International Art Center.
John: And I asked them about freeports and the fellow from the FBI basically said straight out they're opaque. Right. We just don't know what's going on there. And if we want to get inside, if we have a good lead, we have to work with our, you know, the regulatory authorities in our partner countries. Right. So they have to use Europol or Interpol in order to make these kinds of requests through a Swiss government.
Ben: We don’t know how many of those works are super valuable. But,"Seated Man With a Cane" for instance has alone been valued at 35 million dollars. That is one piece of art that’s gone missing in a freeport. The information John says we do have mostly from surveys done at the highest levels of the art world suggests the art trade is a 70 billion dollar annual industry.
John: A great example of that is when the Benin bronzes came to light, it became clear that the sub-Saharan Africans, you know, that Nigerians before the Renaissance really created a means of generating lifelike images that was far superior to anything that Europe had at the time. And that, of course, is going to disarm any ideas of African art being primitive.
Atossa: Freeport's have gotten a bit of a, have hit a rough patch recently, in part because of all of the scandals of looted mummies and whatnot, and also because some of the major figures in the freeport world have had some lawsuit problems. Ben: But the website for Arcis is still up. So I called the main number one morning to get answers. A man picked up the phone with an unofficial, “Hello?” I asked if this was Arcis and he excitedly said, “Yes!” But when I told him where I was from and why I was calling, the conversation immediately took a hard turn. “This entire conversation is off the record,” he said and he told me to send him an email with my questions.
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