If You Steal It, the Art Vigilante Will Find You
ByUsing a secret database of tens of thousands of photos, Christos Tsirogiannis is fighting to prevent auction houses from selling looted art.
For days, Christos Tsirogiannis had been hitting refresh on his laptop, waiting for a chance to snatch ancient artifacts from one of the world’s biggest auctioneers. At the dining room table of his tidy house on a quiet street in Cambridge, England, the 45-year-old archaeologist was stalking Christie’s website, where the catalog for an upcoming antiquities auction in New York would soon be posted. It was important to his vigilante mission that he see the lots quickly. Tsirogiannis had work to do to repeat previous exploits in which he’d cost Christie’s and rivals Sotheby’s and Bonhams millions of dollars in sales—and the sale was in less than a month…
If You Steal It, the Art Vigilante Will Find You
