Human Traffickers’ Sentences in Federal Prison Are Too Little

A California man who illegally imported Roman mosaics looted from Syria has been sentenced to three months in prison for importing misclassified goods. The maximum possible penalty is two years in federal prison. Even so, it was too easy for him. The charge was that he lied on a customs form to import an illegally obtained item, which he did, but that doesn’t even begin to describe the filth he got into while trafficking in this 3/4th century floor mosaic.

The timing makes me feel particularly sick. In August 2015, Mohamad Yassin Alcharihi, a Syrian, smuggled Syrian mosaics into California during a period when the Islamic State was actively destroying and trafficking Syria’s ancient heritage for profit. In the same month that Khalid Assad was tortured and executed, he sacrificed his life to save the cultural heritage of Palmyra, a man… who only saw massacre and cultural erasure as making money opportunity.

A brief summary of the charges on which he was sentenced: Alcharihi declared to his customs broker that the shipment contained 81 modern vases and ceramic tiles from Turkey, with a total value of $2,199. In fact, he spent $12,000 on an ancient mosaic, which he declared to customs as “ceramic, unglazed tiles” valued at $587.

The misclassification comes just months after the United Nations Security Council adopted a resolution condemning the destruction of cultural heritage in Syria, particularly by the terrorist groups Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and Al-Nusra Front.

The mosaic was placed inside a large metal container, which contained numerous vases and two other mosaics. X-ray images of the container taken by CBP show the mosaic hidden behind a stack of vases at the front of the container, away from the rear access door. After clearing customs, the mosaic was trucked to Alcharis’ home in Palmdale, California.

Alcharisi subsequently spent $40,000 restoring the mosaic so it could be resold for hundreds of thousands of dollars, but before he could arrange the sale, FBI and Homeland Security agents in March 2016 A search and seizure warrant was executed on Alcharis’ home on 19 September. The mosaic was found in his garage and confiscated.

(By the way, the forfeiture part of the case is structured so that the government versus the forfeited items, so by court motion, you can read something like this: “It is hereby ordered that upon the arrest of the defendant Ancient Mosaic…”)

The mosaic is 15 feet long, 8 feet high and weighs 1 ton. It depicts Hercules liberating the Titan Prometheus, who was chained to a rock in the Caucasus Mountains, and being condemned by Zeus for stealing the Olympian fire and giving it to mankind for letting a The giant eagle pecked at his liver again every day. In this scene, Hercules is about to shoot an arrow at an eagle while Zeus and another figure (Hermes?) watch from the clouds. On the left is a woman with a child, looking behind them as they run away, possibly to avoid the eagle. There is a missing section on the left side between the woman’s legs and part of the eagle. I speculate that the gap in the inlay was originally a tree, balancing the one on the right, which anchored the chains of Prometheus.

I’m not sure who that woman is. My possibly silly theory is that Io and her son Epaphus with Zeus. In the version of the myth told in Aeschylus’ tragedy Prometheus Bound, Io encounters Prometheus in chains, who predicts her future. In the play, Io is no longer in human form when she meets Prometheus, and her son has not yet been born. She was turned into a heifer by the vengeful Hera and hunted by the goddess’s minions until she reached Egypt, where she finally returned to human form and gave birth to Zeus’s son, as told by Prometheus What would happen to her. I think the mosaic compresses different parts of the myth, a compositional technique that anyone who saw the mosaic at the time would have recognized.

After his arrest, Alcharihi quickly admitted during interrogation that he had indeed falsified customs information, that the mosaics were ancient, not modern tiles, that he had paid 12 grand for it, no less than $600, and that he had also invested $40,000 . Restore it and hopefully sell it for much more than that. A government expert who examined the mosaic estimated its market value at $450,000.

Although he readily admitted a crime for which he was eventually convicted, four years passed between the seizure of the mosaic and the prosecution. Three more years passed between prosecution and trial. Finally, one year later, on August 28, 2024, he was sentenced. The mosaic remains safely in Los Angeles until repatriation can be arranged.

This was going to be a separate post, but after reading some of the court documents and being shocked by the sheer stupidity of the many stages behind such a serious crime, I decided to split it into two parts. The full backstory and chronology of events is worth paying attention to. Tune in tomorrow for the sequel: sometimes evil is really stupid.