Tom Mashberg

“I used to get so startled when I first saw them in repeats and old shows,” said Sally Regenhard, a skyscraper-safety advocate whose 28-year-old son, Christian, a New York probationary firefighter, died when the towers fell 18 years ago.

Although she still views the towers as “instruments of death,” she added, “I do get less startled now.”

Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center, filmmakers, television producers, Hollywood executives and even curators at the National September 11 Memorial &amp; Museum have pondered how best to deal with material showcasing the towers in opening montages (“The Sopranos,” “Sex and the City”); in scenes of computer-generated conflagration (“Armageddon,” “Independence Day”); or as a setting for romance (“Kissing Jessica Stein”) or affectionate satire (“The Simpsons”).

Of course, it’s not just the family members of those lost who are dismayed by images of the towers, which until that day had been a symbol of New York and its financial might. For just about anyone old enough to remember the attacks, these scenes are likely to evoke sorrow, even today.

“It almost seems like it’s the biggest issue in American etiquette,” said director Sam Raimi, who in 2002 confronted an unusual challenge: how to release a long-awaited blockbuster, “Spider-Man,” that featured an elaborate scene in which the hero foils the helicopter escape of bank robbers by trapping them in an enormous web stretching from the north tower to the south tower.

For Raimi and his associates, leaving in that scene was “unfathomable.”

“We didn’t think it was our right, in the middle of the summer after this terrible massacre, to show a scene of such heartbreak for so many,” he said. Raimi added that he was thinking about victims’ children going to see the movie for fun or as an escape. “I didn’t want to pull them back into the heart of that tragedy,” he said.

Raimi was not alone in excising the towers from film or video in the immediate aftermath of their collapse. Both “The Sopranos” and “Sex and the City” deleted them from their opening credits, starting in 2002. The directors of “Kissing Jessica Stein” and “People I Know,” whose films were on the verge of premiering when the attacks took place, delayed their releases so they could reshoot scenes that depicted the towers as indomitable landmarks.

The producers of “The Simpsons” also halted the rebroadcast of a 1997 episode featuring a tiny Homer racing across the wide trade center plaza (he was trying to make it to a restroom on the top floor of the north tower) as the skyscrapers loom above him.

But as time passes, even the worst wounds begin to heal. As glimpses of the pre-2001 towers began to conjure wistfulness and nostalgia more than horror and trauma, the “Simpsons” episode was put back into syndication. And this year, the original hand-drawn cel depicting Homer’s mad dash to relieve himself was welcomed by the 9/11 museum’s curator, Alexandra Drakakis, as a “hilarious and tender” donation.

“I know my heart hurts when I see them in old images,” said director Bart Freundlich, who did not delete several shots of the towers from his 2001 film, “World Traveler,” starring Julianne Moore and Billy Crudup. “They don’t just represent something tragic but something marvelous about the city as well.”

Thinking back nearly two decades, filmmakers like Jennifer Westfeldt, who was a writer and co-star of “Kissing Jessica Stein,” have not exactly second-guessed their editing decisions but looked back on them with the bittersweet benefit of time and distance.

Westfeldt debuted her movie at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 10, 2001, just hours before the attacks. She recalled the joy she felt after her film, replete with gauzy, golden-hour shots of the towers, was applauded. A New Yorker, she awoke the next day to news of the attacks and spent the next 48 hours camped in front of a TV, crying and contacting loved ones.

Her movie had a second screening on Sept. 12, she said, and “the people who went basically reported back that there were audible gasps and sobs at those images.”

“It was just gut-wrenching,” she added. “All these images that were meant to be beautiful and romantic were now harrowing and triggering in the midst of a rom-com that was intended to make you laugh, not traumatize you.”

Westfeldt said she and her colleagues debated intensely about whether to leave in the trade center scenes and risk “inflicting more pain on people,” or remove them and possibly “erase or misrepresent history.” In the end, they chose to reshoot the scenes. She asks herself now whether the original scenes might have stood the test of time as the despair of losing the towers ebbed.

Michael Nozik, producer of the 2002 movie “People I Know,” starring Al Pacino, felt the same way. “We wanted to make sure we were not seen as exploitative and insensitive at a time when there was so much grief,” he said of the reshoot. Now, he said, “It’s nice to look at all the beautiful images of the trade center because it’s more like honoring them than the horror of recalling that event.”

Some directors, though, do not support altering a pre-9/11 picture based on post-9/11 sensibilities. Among them is Michael Bay, the maker of “Armageddon,” a 1998 summer disaster flick that shows one of the towers ablaze after a meteor strike.

“Movies are shot, edited and finished for the world to see,” Bay said. “They don’t get reedited because history changes. If we go there, that means every movie must change. Every book, every short story, every painting of New York in the past 30 years. It would never end.”

Other film and TV makers say it comes down to timing — to asking yourself whether you’ve violated the rule of “too soon.”

British director Paul Greengrass grappled with that question when he decided, in 2006, to make “United 93,” about the Sept. 11 plane that crashed in Pennsylvania after its passengers revolted against their hijackers. As the first commercial post-9/11 feature, it was assailed as distasteful before its release. But when it came out, it was critically acclaimed and saluted by the passengers’ loved ones for its verisimilitude and poignant “let’s roll” ending.

“When I see the towers now, I get a feeling of sadness and loss,” Greengrass said. But, “in a funny way,” he added, “I also see them as a beacon of what was and what can be.”

Jan Seidler Ramirez, chief curator at the memorial museum, said her institution would not shy away from exhibiting both serious and silly images of the towers. Visitors, she said, can watch a 9-minute film that pays homage to the trade center’s role in “The Wiz,” “Home Alone 2” and various Superman movies, thrillers and crime dramas.

“I see it as a positive sign of civic healing for the towers to be reintroduced into the background of films and elsewhere,” Ramirez said, “or seen in postcards and comic books of that era.” She even has the campy “King Kong” 1976 movie poster on display, in which the towers serve as the title character’s last bastion against mankind’s helicopters and flamethrowers.

“For the kids who never saw them,” she added, “they now have a reference for how tall they were and the way they owned the skyline.”

Mary Fetchet, whose 24-year-old-son, Brad, died in the attacks, said, “Many people have understandably fond memories of the towers and the old skyline.”

“There has been healing,” said Fetchet, who helped found Voices of September 11th, an advocacy group for survivors. But she cautioned that “for a lot of people in our community, the images of the towers remain a very difficult and unpredictable trigger.”

This article originally appeared in

The Twin Towers Onscreen: Erase the Past or Honor It?

It can happen abruptly, while flipping through reruns of “Friends” or rewatching a movie like “Armageddon” or “Working Girl”: a sight of the twin towers, dominating the New York City skyline like steel sentinels.

<h1>In a sweeping new criminal case, Subhash Kapoor, a former New York art dealer who authorities describe as one of the world’s largest smugglers of antiquities, was charged Monday with running a multinational ring that trafficked in thousands of stolen objects, valued at more than $145 million, over 30 years.</h1>

Kapoor, 70, is currently jailed in India, where he has been awaiting trial on similar charges for nearly eight years.

Before his downfall in 2011, he was widely feted in New York art circles for consistently obtaining remarkable items for sale and for his donations to museums. After his imprisonment in India though, federal officials referred to him as “one of the most prolific commodities smugglers in the world.

Even though the general scope of Kapoor’s smuggling had been laid out in previous investigations, many details in the complaint filed by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office were new, and jarring.

For example, officials revealed that 39 looted antiquities, valued at $36 million, are still missing. Officials said Kapoor had been able to hide those items, even after his initial arrest in Germany in 2011, by instructing employees to entrust the most valuable ones to his family members, who moved them to “an unknown location.”

So far, some 2,600 antiquities, valued at more than $107 million, have been seized from storage locations Kapoor controlled in New York during a decadelong investigation, authorities said. The smuggling ring harvested objects from Afghanistan, Cambodia, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Thailand, the complaint said, and it created false paper trails that gave the items an appearance of legitimacy, then sold them globally for large profits to collectors, art dealers and museums.

Kapoor was charged along with seven co-conspirators, most of them overseas, who would also require extradition. Arrest warrants for all eight men were filed Monday in the Criminal Court of the City of New York, along with a painstakingly detailed complaint that reconstructed a smuggling scheme stretching back to 1986.

Much of the evidence put forward by authorities, including federal agents from Homeland Security Investigations, was based on tens of thousands of records seized from Kapoor’s former Manhattan gallery, Art of the Past.

Those records, officials say, included detailed logs of trips Kapoor made to India to meet with conspirators, often to see the objects he would ultimately acquire. The records also show how artifacts were secreted into the United States using false import documents; how many were then shipped to London to be cleaned and restored for sale; and how the conspirators created fraudulent invoices and provenance papers asserting the items had left their nations of origin legally.

Two of the accused co-conspirators were identified as restorers who enhanced the value of the pieces — often still marked by the dirt from which they had been dug up by hired thieves — and brought them back to life as treasures.

Items said to have been smuggled by the ring and later sold include Hindu and Buddhist statues in stone and bronze that are considered national treasures. In 2005, officials say, a statue of the goddess Uma Parameshvari was stolen from a temple in India and smuggled via Hong Kong to London. After restoration it was shipped to New York and was offered for sale in 2008 for $2.5 million, according to one of Kapoor’s catalogs.

Investigators said buyers included many museums around the world, among them the Toledo Museum in Ohio and the National Gallery of Australia. Often, Kapoor would briefly lend an item to a museum to bolster its legitimacy, telling his customers the object had been vetted by reputable experts, the complaint said.

For now, the objects are being held in secure storage by both federal and local investigators.

Georges Lederman, Kapoor’s lawyer in New York, said Wednesday that he was “in the process reviewing the charges” and would not immediately comment.

Lederman also said he does not know why Kapoor has been held in India without trial for so long.

Kapoor’s case has been a cause célèbre in India for years, in part because it illustrated the vulnerability of that nation’s ancient treasures, many of which were in remote, unguarded temples that were easy targets for thieves.

“The scale and brazenness of the thefts is mind-blowing,” said S. Vijay Kumar, a private investigator from Singapore who has for years tracked many of the items Kapoor is accused of stealing.

Kumar said he grew suspicious after noticing Kapoor was selling so many rare Indian idols out of New York.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/10/arts/design/investigators-say-a-ring-smuggled-145-million-in-ancient-artifacts.html" link="null" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

Art dealer charged in $145 million smuggling ring

Kapoor, 70, is currently jailed in India, where he has been awaiting trial on similar charges for nearly eight years.

<h1>Yemen’s deputy culture minister, Abdulhadi al-Azazi, remembers standing two years ago amid the rubble of a national museum in his war-torn hometown, Taiz.</h1>

Objects he had admired as a youngster — ancient limestone carvings, gilded Torah scrolls, bejeweled Islamic daggers, a 2,500-year-old mummy — were missing amid the charred debris and shattered display cases.

“The museum was wrecked and everything was stolen,” he said in a telephone interview. “Everywhere in our country we see the same thing happening now.”

Some four years into a civil war in which members of a Northern Yemeni faction known as Houthis have fought Saudi-backed Yemeni forces to a stalemate, the human suffering has drawn global attention. Less noticed have been the cultural institutions and archaeological artifacts lost or ravaged during the conflict, including thousands of antiquities taken from Yemen’s museums.

In an effort to recover some of the items, Yemeni officials visited Washington and New York in recent days to ask the Trump administration and the United Nations to help them forestall the scattering of a heritage that stretches back nearly 4,000 years. Their central request is that the United States issue an emergency order that would ban importation of Yemeni artifacts that do not carry special documentation. Typically, antiquities from abroad cannot enter the country without documentation mandated in one-on-one agreements between the nation of origin and the United States. Because Yemen is not party to any such agreement, its artifacts simply need to be declared at customs in a routine way.

The Saudi-backed Yemeni government hopes the United States will impose new rules requiring importers to show proof that the objects had been legally obtained. That proof could be in the form of a government authorization or documents proving that the items had a well-established provenance trail dating from before the civil war.

“Yemen was a cradle to many civilizations and a home to multiple faiths, particularly Judaism, Christianity and Islam, which all thrived here,” Yemen’s culture minister, Marwan Dammaj, said in New York on Wednesday. He denounced the pillaging as “a gross affront to humanity at large.”

Restrictions on antiquity imports are usually painstakingly negotiated and require a petitioning nation to show proof of ongoing thefts, illegal excavations and illicit exports. Care is taken not to disrupt any legal antiquities trade, or to interfere with museum loans and educational exchanges. Nations seeking the curbs must show they are working to crack down on black markets and safeguard their antiquities.

Nonetheless, the United States has in recent years issued emergency orders on behalf of Iraq, Syria, Libya and Mali.

The Yemenis say they have strong evidence that their artifacts are being sold off by Houthi fighters and by terrorist groups like al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula and the Islamic State, which infiltrated the country during its current turmoil. To bolster those claims, Dammaj circulated a 290-page report in Arabic and English that details the looting at the Aden National Museum, the Taiz National Museum and the National Museum of Zinjibar.

Accompanying it is a catalog of 1,631 objects missing from the museums. The list includes items that stretch into the depths of civilization in a region known as a vital early trading crossroads, including ivory figurines from the Kingdom of Saba (the mythic realm of the Queen of Sheba); Roman-era gold coins and marble statuettes; and brass finials and Hebrew manuscripts from the many centuries when Jews populated what is now southern Arabia.

“It is clear that violent extremists are plundering our treasures and smuggling them overseas,” said Dammaj, who met with State and Treasury Department officials, U.S. law enforcement authorities and U.N. representatives.

Officials with the State Department said that it was studying the request.

“It is important that we take steps now to prevent the further degradation of invaluable cultural property and heritage sites in Yemen,” the department said.

Dammaj said that Houthis had been arrested several times in the act of smuggling antiquities and had been seen ransacking cultural sites.

Although it is impossible to corroborate every allegation, independent groups that follow Yemen’s plight have also cited a Houthi role in the sacking of some cultural sites. Mwatana, an independent Yemeni human rights group, has cited those forces in the looting of several museums, though it has also accused Saudi air forces of bombing cultural sites where they believed Houthi combatants had taken shelter.

Last month, the Malaysia-based Islamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization assailed the Houthis for plundering manuscripts, historical texts and Islamic relics from the library of Zabid, Yemen’s capital during the 13th and 15th centuries.

Deborah Lehr, chairwoman of the Antiquities Coalition, a Washington group that combats cultural racketeering and helped Yemen assemble the English-language version of its report, said her group had been in contact with foreign archaeologists on the ground in Yemen who report evidence of looting by the Houthi faction.

This article originally appeared in <a id="7c0a661d-859a-4e4a-9da3-5e5c44824563" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/06/arts/design/yemen-united-states-looted-artifacts.html">The New York Times</a>.

Objects he had admired as a youngster — ancient limestone carvings, gilded Torah scrolls, bejeweled Islamic daggers, a 2,500-year-old mummy — were missing amid the charred debris and shattered display cases.

Yemen fights the looting of artifacts

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Tom Mashberg

Articles written by the author

The Twin Towers Onscreen: Erase the Past or Honor It?

Art dealer charged in $145 million smuggling ring

Yemen fights the looting of artifacts