A Japanese antiquities dealer was arrested at a chic Upper East Side hotel for smuggling in a $1.1 million, second-century sculpture called “Footprints of Buddha,” The Post has learned.
Tatsuzo Kaku, whose company — Tokyo-based Taiyo Ltd. — deals in ancient artifacts, was busted March 14 at the Mark Hotel on East 77th Street after he agreed to ship the 440-pound relic to New York, law-enforcement sources said.
The rare Buddhapada sculpture was stolen in 1982 from an archaeological site in the Swat Region of Pakistan, and Kaku bought it later that year, sources said.
It was going to be sold at the Maitreya Inc. Gallery on East 75th Street until the Manhattan DA’s Office and Homeland Security seized it, sources said. Kaku, 71, was charged with possession of stolen property.
His downfall began in 2015, after a rival crooked art dealer started cooperating with the feds and ratted him out, sources said.
The informant had spied several of Kaku’s incriminating e-mails in December 2015 and January 2016, the sources said.
In the e-mails, Kaku admitted that he had purchased the Buddhapada in Pakistan in 1982 after the artifact had been “illegally excavated and stolen,” sources said.
Kaku allegedly smuggled the relic to Japan, where he sold it to a private collector.
He took possession of the sculpture again and sold it to another art dealer in London in 2001, sources said.
Then, in 2003, he bought it back, only to sell it again to a Japanese collector, who, 10 years later, “entrusted” it to him, the sources said.
Kaku admitted to investigators that he “knew it was illegal to buy or possess such material,” sources said.
His lawyer, Jeffrey Traub, did not immediately return a call for comment.