The robber of Egypt’s tombs jailed last week was Indiana Jones with an English accent, writes Sara Boseley
JONATHAN TOKELEY-PARRY cuts a flamboyant figure in his bright blue jackets and lime green shirts, his tan and upper-class tones suggesting Raffles or the Raj. He is a Cambridge philosophy graduate and an antiquities restorer turned adventurer, dealer and smuggler.
Well-educated, good-looking, with the sort of genius that made him excel in anything to which he turned his hand, he must once have seemed blessed. This month his luck ran out. He was sentenced to six years in jail for handling goods stolen from tombs in Egypt.
Detective Sergeant Dick Ellis, head of Scotland Yard’s arts and antiques squad, is triumphant. For the first time, the British courts have been used successfully against a man involved in smuggling ancient art and relics, for which London is the world’s clearing house.
Dealers and private collectors like Tokeley-Parry hunger to possess amulets, busts, stone reliefs, even mummies from several thousand years ago. They argue that these treasures will be better preserved in air-conditioned showcases in private homes than in cash-strapped Third-World museums.
Against them are ranged the archaeologists, who say greed leads to the rape of ancient sites, destroying clues to older civilisations. “Our shared history is being extensively looted and has been for a long time,” says Lord Colin Renfrew, professor of archaeology at Cambridge University. “The world’s heritage is suffering more at the present time than ever before through the commercial market, which is fuelled by high-profile private collectors.”
Egypt has passed a law nationalising its national heritage. It is legal now only to buy and sell antiquities held in private hands before 1983. Its tombs and treasures are all catalogued.
Tokeley-Parry argued in court with incredible hauteur that Egypt did not deserve to keep its heritage because it did not have the expertise or money to preserve it all. “There is the moral question of should these pieces still be in Egypt? And the short answer is no. Beautiful objects have always been moving around the world, following the new sources of power and wealth. It seems to me that as long as these objects are where the power is, and where the wealth is, they will be cared for.”
He was doing, he claimed, what all dealers do – circumventing a misguided Egyptian law to obtain antiquities. “I accept that according to the laws of Egypt,” he told the court, “they are stolen property.”
In Egypt, he has been sentenced to 15 years hard labour in his absence for stealing national heritage items. His courier, Mark Perry, one-time business partner Andrew May, and a number of Egyptians were also convicted. It means he cannot set foot in Egypt again, but only a sanction in British law can prevent people like him turning their smuggling talents to other countries. And it is probably only because of Tokeley- Parry’s extravagant ego that he was successfully prosecuted – police found hundreds of pictures of him disguising antiquities for smuggling out of Egypt, and he talked on tape for hours to Ellis after his arrest.
In court, the 46-year-old dealer spun an extraordinary tale of self-justification that was almost as damning as the truth. His Egyptian suppliers, the Farag brothers, would invite him to Cairo, where he would inspect pieces at a workshop.
Ali Farag would show him pieces dug up from some field, he said. This would be a site of which the Egyptian government was unaware, and therefore fair game, he said. The dealer would offer to buy pieces he liked, if they were transported to Switzerland, where the Farags had a store in the duty-free zone of Zurich airport. Tokeley-Parry claimed he would then drive over and collect his purchases.
He denied that he or Perry smuggled goods out in their suitcases. “Why play Indiana Jones and take the huge and absurd risks involved when there is a perfectly normal means of transport?”
In fact, his trips to Cairo were cloak-and- dagger affairs. He went under the name of “Mr Johnson” in one hotel. Perry said they pretended not to know each other at the airport as they carried through customs antiquities disguised with paint and gilt to look like tacky souvenirs from the bazaar. What Ali Farag was showing him were treasures that had been stolen from government stores or, worse still, raided from tombs.
Saqqara, 32km south of Cairo, is Egypt’s most important necropolis, or city of the dead, after Luxor. There are tombs built 5 000 years ago. Some are open to the public, some have been excavated and sealed and some have been reclaimed by the shifting desert sands and are untouched. There are guards, but too few and too poorly paid to safeguard its secrets.
Around 1991, the tomb of Hetepka, superintendent to the royal hairdressers in the fifth dynasty, was raided. Men with chainsaws cut away part of a false door bearing painted stone reliefs depicting ceremonial figures. Then the tomb was resealed.
Mark Perry, the 30-year-old water board employee whom Tokeley-Perry paid 500 a trip as a courier, the principal witness in the case, testified to bringing back parts of that door. A picture was found of Tokeley-Parry in Farag’s workshop, cutting the door into manageable pieces. Perry also carried a bronze statue of Horus, the falcon god, believed to be worth 250 000.
Tokeley-Parry would clean up the relics and alter them to disguise their origin, chipping off hieroglyphics. Then he would supply them with a false provenance. For the stone reliefs, it was “Private collection, England 1992”. He denied this was a lie. “I would prefer to call it a manoeuvre in the market, or a conceit.”
Another trick was to put a piece through auction, alleging it was from a private collector – the Thomas Allcock Collection was one of his inventions, presumably with tongue in cheek. Tokeley-Parry sent most of his loot to a New York dealer who would sell it on at auction or return it – as he did with the Hetepka reliefs. A lot of money was changing hands. The most valuable item Tokeley-Parry sent the dealer, a head of Amenhokep III, was valued by Christie’s at 850 000.
The British Museum tipped off police after Tokeley-Parry’s partner, Andrew May, took them papyrus from a Saqqara store for authentication. In June 1994, Tokeley-Parry and May were arrested. The Hetepka reliefs were found under Tokeley-Parry’s bed.