Decades of weird transnational antiquities crime comes to a close.

So there you have it, Leonardo Patterson is no longer alive. As some of you may know, I’ve researched bits and pieces of Patterson’s life on and off for something like 15 years. I never worked up the courage to try to speak to him (although I always heard there was no point in trying), but still I somehow thought my path would eventually cross with him. The summer before last, when I was in Munich to give a presentation about Patterson for the German Association of Social and Cultural Anthropology, I was halfway convinced that I would see him walking down the street. According to the times obit he probably wasn’t in Munich anymore anyway, but I really did think “now is my time”. I even had questions ready to ask him.

I think there isn’t a lot of use in musing on Patterson, at least not now. I’ve got the contents of the Patterson folder from the Andre Emmerich archive at the Smithsonian and it might be better to muse via what is in there (e.g., sticky note that says “FBI->Patterson” alongside a memo saying the FBI was calling to look for him)

However, perhaps it is a good time for anyone interested to take a look at the papers I’ve published that contain snippets of his criminal life. Here they are, with working open/free link:

Yates, D. and Graham, S. (2024) Reputation Laundering and Museum Collections: Patterns, Priorities, Provenance, and Hidden Crime. The International Journal of Heritage Studies. 30(2): 145–164. https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2023.2284740

Graham, S., D. Yates, and A. El-Roby (2023) Investigating antiquities trafficking with generative pre-trained transformer (GPT)-3 enabled knowledge graphs: A case study. Open Research Europe. https://open-research-europe.ec.europa.eu/articles/3-100/v1

Graham, S., D. Yates, A. El-Roby, C. Brousseau, J. Ellens, and C. McDermott (2023), Relationship Prediction in a Knowledge Graph Embedding Model of the Illicit Antiquities Trade. Advances in Archaeological Practice. 11(2): 126–138. https://doi.org/10.1017/aap.2023.1

Yates, D. (2015) Museums, collectors, and value manipulation: tax fraud through donation of antiquities. Journal of Financial Crime 23(1): 173–186. https://traffickingculture.org/app/uploads/2015/12/Yates-2006-Journal-of-Financial-Crime1.pdf