These “priceless” drachmas weren’t worth a wooden nickel.
A world-renowned Rhode Island hand surgeon — who is also one of the world’s most prominent coin collectors — pleaded guilty today to trying to sell three ancient silver coins that he thought were stolen and worth millions but which turned out to be remarkably clever forgeries.
Dr. Arnold-Pete Weiss, 51, had originally been busted for turning up at a Waldorf-Astoria auction in criminal possession of a single stolen coin — a $300,000 4th century BC silver Greek coin called a Tetradrachm.
“There’s no paperwork. I know this is a fresh coin,” Weiss confided to an undercover who was posing as a prospective coin buyer. “This was dug up a few years ago,” he said, admitting that he knew the coin was illegal — in this case, the property of the Italian government, where he thought it had been unearthed.
Investigators soon found that two additional ostensibly priceless coins had been in Weiss’s possession — again believed by Weiss to be looted from Italian soil.
Under his plea, Weiss, who teaches orthopedics at Brown Medical School, will serve 70 hours of community service and must author an article warning of the risks of dealing in coins of unknown or looted provenance for publication in a coin collection publication.
“The experts of the world believed these coins to be real” at the time of Weiss’ arrest, assistant district attorney Matthew Bogdanos said this morning at a hearing in Manhattan Criminal Court and himself an expert on stolen antiquities.
Bogdanos is a Marine colonel and the author of “The Thieves of Baghdad,” about the looting of the Iraq Museum and resulting exploding black market in its antiquities in the wake of the 2003 invasion.
“It was not until the use of a scanning electron microscope that it was determined that each of the three coins were in fact forgeries. Exquisite, extraordinary, nonetheless but forgeries,” said the prosecutor
As for three coins — once considered worth a total of nearly three million dollars — they will become property of the DA’s office and are to be destroyed, the judge said.