Recovering stolen art and cultural artifacts is usually a feel-good exercise in law enforcement — as the FBI put it, art theft is “like stealing history.” But a recent fight over a 3,200-year-old Egyptian mummy mask with questionable provenance shows the hazards of government overreach when seizing disputed assets.
The feds came up short in a bid to return the Mask of Ka-Nefer-Nefer to Egypt after a federal judge ruled that the government couldn’t prove that the mask, which allegedly vanished from a storage box in Cairo sometime between 1966 and 1973, was actually stolen. On Oct. 14, the government shelled out $425,000 to cover the legal fees of the mask’s current owner, the Saint Louis Art Museum. The museum was represented by Dentons and Husch Blackwell.
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