Fake it till you make it

Jonathan Tokeley-Parry, who died last month, had a business card in the early 1990s that described him as ‘Jonty “Brown Trews” Tokeley: Smuggler and Fabricator of Egyptian Antiquities’. ‘Jonty’ was a nickname from the Territorial Army. Born Jonathan Foreman, he renamed himself ‘Tokeley-Parry’ while at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he got a degree in moral philosophy in 1974.

While he was working on a PhD, his girlfriend introduced him to some antiquities collectors. He dropped the philosophy and taught himself to restore ancient artefacts. The problem was, though, that after he brought a battered piece back to life in his workshop, he had to return it to its owner. A restorer was merely a ‘servant at the tables of the rich’. Tokeley-Parry wanted to be a master.

In 1988, a client invited him along on a buying trip to Egypt. All newly discovered antiquities were property of the state and their sale or export was banned. But farmers or construction workers whose shovels turned up treasure would sometimes sell it on the black market. Tokeley-Parry met an Egyptian middleman who offered to supply him. All he had to do was get his loot out of the country.

By his own estimate, Tokeley-Parry smuggled three thousand antiquities out of Egypt in 65 trips over six years. His success was down to his skill as a ‘fabricator’. He made genuine antiquities appear fake by covering them in layers of conservation plastic, plaster, gaudy paint and gilt. His goal was to make a piece ‘look as much as possible like a kitsch bazaar thing, the sort that idiots buy in hotel shops’.

As long as he could convince the antiquities police guard at the airport X-ray machine that his suitcase contained a plaster souvenir instead of a stone artefact weighing ten times as much, Tokeley-Parry was in the clear. Given that he risked a long sentence with hard labour, his trips through the airport were so nerve-wracking that Tokeley-Parry described them as ‘a brown trouser job’.

The phrase caused some confusion when he was asked about his card in a federal court in Manhattan in 2002. He had been called as a witness in the trial of Frederick Schultz, a New York dealer who sold some of the smuggled artefacts after Tokeley-Parry had dunked them in acetone to dissolve the plastic coating and float off the plaster and paint. Tokeley-Parry and Schultz had worked together on another form of fabrication: creating a false provenance for the pieces to make it seem they had left Egypt long before the country banned their sale or export.

Tokeley-Parry proposed that they pretend the artefacts were an inheritance from his great-uncle, Thomas Alcock, a civil engineer who often passed through the Suez Canal in 1920. Schultz agreed. ‘He kept on asking me did I really have a relative who was Alcock,’ Tokeley-Parry said in court. ‘He found it very amusing.’

Schultz suggested that Tokeley-Parry make paper labels like the ones used by turn-of-the-century collectors. Tokeley-Parry whited out the text on a Victorian pharmaceutical label and glued on letters photocopied from other labels to spell out ‘Thomas Alcock Collection’. He ran off copies, dabbed them with a wet tea bag and dried them in an oven to simulate the stains and brittleness of age, then glued them onto his artefacts.

Now that collectors could believe the looted pieces had been in England long enough for Egypt to have no claim to them, the money began coming in. Tokeley-Parry bought forty handmade suits and a British racing green TVR sports car, which he nicknamed ‘the Beast’ and soon crashed. ‘It was a very charming transition,’ Tokeley-Parry later told an interviewer about his new-found wealth. ‘I must say I enjoyed it.’

Schultz put up the money to buy more pieces and Tokeley-Parry sent him a stream of faxes to keep him up to date on negotiations. The faxes sometimes addressed Schutlz as ‘004½’ and were signed ‘006½’ – a little short of 007. ‘Read this and then eat,’ Tokeley-Parry scribbled in the margins of one. He didn’t follow his own advice, though. To keep track of what he had told his partner, he pasted copies of the faxes into his journals, where he recorded the details of each purchase.

Tokeley-Parry’s downfall came when he tried to expand his operations. Looking for couriers to smuggle antiquities out for him, Tokeley-Parry made an arrangement with the farmer in Devon who was renting him a converted barn to use as a workshop. The farmer would help with the transport in return for an apprenticeship in smuggling, but he soon began buying for himself from Tokeley-Parry’s supplier. Not knowing whether a set of papyri fragments were valuable or even genuine, the farmer dropped off a sample at the British Museum for an evaluation in 1994.

The expert who examined the papyri could identify them precisely because he had dug them up himself in Saqqara. The artefacts should have been in an Egyptian governmental storeroom, not on his desk in London. Feigning innocence, the curators asked the farmer if he had any other examples of these interesting documents. He brought them several dozen more, which he left along with his real name and address. The Egyptologists then called Scotland Yard.

Dick Ellis, the lead investigator of ‘Operation Bulrush’ (the biblical name for the plant that papyrus is made from), recognised that sending such easily identifiable stolen artefacts to a museum was ‘such a dumb thing to have done’ that the farmer couldn’t possibly be the brains behind a smuggling network. Ellis called the Devon police to ask if there were other Egyptophiles in the area: Tokeley-Parry had recently reported the theft of an Egyptian stone head from his workshop.

A raid found that Tokeley-Parry had kept thousands of photographs documenting every stage of the smuggling process. In one shot, the yellow wires of Tokeley-Parry’s Walkman disappear into the popped collar of his pink polo shirt as he leans over a fragmentary statuette. In another, the smuggler gives a slight smirk as he rests his hand on the gilded hair of a disguised ancient head.

Despite claiming that his journals were notes for a novel in progress about a would-be smuggler, Tokeley-Parry was sentenced in absentia in Egypt to fifteen years’ hard labour and was also put on trial in England. He tried to persuade the court that convicting him would be ‘doing the dirty work for a corrupt third world regime’ incapable of protecting its own treasures. It was morally permissible, he suggested, to steal antiquities from Egypt and bring them to collectors who had the wealth to restore and preserve them.

It’s an argument that many collectors would like to believe, but the court declined to see Tokeley-Parry as a saviour. He didn’t only buy pieces churned up by ploughs or excavators, but artefacts stolen from storerooms or chainsawed off the walls of tombs that had survived intact for four thousand years only to fall victim to the art market.

Tokeley-Parry was the first person to serve a prison sentence in the UK for dealing in stolen antiquities. When he was released after three years, he agreed to testify in Schultz’s trial, thinking he could persuade the American authorities of his argument. Again, he failed, and Schultz was sentenced to 33 months in prison.

Tokeley-Parry and Schultz remain, as far as I know, the only people to have been jailed for such acts in either the US or UK. (A handful of other criminal charges have resulted in probation or home confinement.) The seizure and repatriation of smuggled antiquities is much more common. Unlike a criminal conviction, this doesn’t require them to prove that the handler knew the pieces were illegally trafficked. Few other people have been as unwise as Tokeley-Parry to keep such vivid proof of their own state of mind.

His ploy of reassuring buyers by pretending the artefacts came from an old European collection is still widely used, though. In 2023, for example, an antiquities dealer in Switzerland, one of Tokeley-Parry’s old competitors, was found guilty of arranging for accomplices to produce false receipts and affidavits saying they had long owned artefacts that the dealer had in fact recently bought from smugglers. Despite his conviction, the dealer’s gallery continues to sell antiquities. The many artefacts he sold to museums around the world remain on display.