Robin Symes (February 1939 – 30 October 2023)[1][2] was a British antiquities dealer who was unmasked as a key player in an international criminal network that traded in looted archaeological treasures.
Medici and his associates then 'laundered' the objects through established dealers, including Symes and Robert E. Hecht, who then sold the artefacts on, at a vast profit, to major museums and wealthy private collectors.
In January 2016, officers from the art crimes squad of the Italian carabinieri, working in collaboration with Swiss authorities, raided a storage unit that Symes rented at the Geneva Freeport in Switzerland.
It was found to contain a vast haul of stolen antiquities, nearly all of which are believed to have been looted by the Medici gang from Etruscan- and Roman-era archaeological sites in Italy and other locations over a period of at least forty years.
Packed inside 45 crates, investigators discovered some 17,000 Greek, Roman and Etruscan artefacts, including two stunning Etruscan terracotta sarcophagi topped by painted life-sized reclining figures, hundreds of whole or fragmentary pieces of rare Greek and Roman pottery, statuary and bas-reliefs, fragments of a fresco from Pompeii, and an ivory head of Apollo dating from the 1st century BCE, which is thought to have been looted from the Baths of Claudius, near Rome.