Matthew Bogdanos’ team and returned to Italy. The trafficked ... items his team has just seized in the US. What makes the seizure and return of stolen artifacts so difficult is that authorities ...

The United States has returned more than 250 ancient artifacts worth millions of dollars to Italy after learning that they had been stolen and sold during the late 1990s by an international ...

New York officials have returned stolen antiquities worth nearly $14 million to Italy, including dozens of artifacts seized from US billionaire Michael Steinhardt. Over a third of the 142 items ...

Most of the recent items returned to Italy were dug out of clandestine excavations or stolen from churches ... and on display in museums in the United States, Bogdanos told CNN on the sidelines ...

(Instead, investigators work backwards, assessing paperwork and provenance claims for artifacts provided by their owners, as well as undertaking technical tests to best confirm a piece’s true origins.