Interpol Washington files detail 2025 cultural property cases

Interpol Washington coordinated with U.S. law enforcement agencies and a Latin American cultural authority, believed to be Peru, over multiple cultural property matters involving U.S.-based auction houses in early 2025, records released under the Freedom of Information Act show. No related cases appeared in U.S. court dockets.

Urgent Matter filed the FOIA request with Interpol Washington, which acts as the U.S. National Central Bureau for Interpol and connects U.S. law enforcement with international agencies. The request asked for records about cultural property, antiquities or artworks linked to U.S. forfeiture actions, investigations or returns that were closed or inactive in 2025.

Interpol Washington released 37 pages with redactions but withheld 772 additional pages in full, citing law-enforcement confidentiality provisions and restrictions governing information received from foreign National Central Bureaus.

In a cover letter dated Wednesday, Interpol Washington said the withheld material came from a foreign agency and could not be released because it could disclose confidential sources and investigative methods.

Interpol Washington said that information originating with Interpol and foreign National Central Bureaus is provided to it “with an understanding that it is for law enforcement purposes only.”

The released records span multiple closed matters rather than a single investigation. Among them is one case involving a foreign cultural asset listed for auction by Antiques Online Auctions through the LiveAuctioneers platform. At least eight pages of the FOIA response appear to relate to that matter, though they are largely redacted.

Those pages show that Interpol Washington received a foreign request for information about the item in February 2025. The request included a document titled “INFORME N000048-2025-DRE-DGDP-VMPCIC-NCA-MC 25FEB2025.pdf.”

That file-naming structure is consistent with Peru’s Ministry of Culture bureaucracy: MC for Ministerio de Cultura; VMPCIC for Viceministerio de Patrimonio Cultural e Industrias Culturales; DGDP for Dirección General de Defensa del Patrimonio; and DRE for Dirección de Recuperaciones.

Peru seems to be the only country that uses that precise combination of acronyms, though other Spanish-speaking countries cannot be ruled out.

In February 2025, the Dania Beach auction house identified in the records conducted a sale on LiveAuctioneers titled “The $10 Store – Art and Antiques,” according to the platform’s public listings. The auction house held another sale in March 2025, but only the February auction coincided with the timing of the foreign request and the Interpol Washington records reviewed.

Other materials in the FOIA release suggest Interpol Washington also coordinated on requests involving additional auction houses, including Black Rock Galleries and Auctions 4 America, in connection with cultural assets offered through LiveAuctioneers. Details in those matters were also redacted.

Internal logs show Interpol Washington performed routine database searches, including name-based, document-description and report-number queries, while responding to foreign requests for information related to the sale of cultural or documentary material. Those searches returned no matching records in its systems.

An internal email from Interpol Washington shows that U.S. officials forwarded a set of foreign cultural heritage reports and alerts, instead of starting a U.S. enforcement action. The attached documents include reports and official letters from 2024 and 2025 with the same acronyms.

One of the foreign documents referenced is a 2025 legal memorandum issued by what appears to be Peru’s National Archives, indicating the matter involved documentary cultural heritage rather than a criminal enforcement action.

Internal review forms show that at least one foreign request was labeled “unable to process.” This suggests U.S. authorities may not have had the authority to act on the request at that time.

The letter to Urgent Matter shows Interpol Washington coordinated with U.S. agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the FBI, both of which were referred portions of the file for independent FOIA review. Urgent Matter has not yet received responsive documents from those agencies.

A review of federal court records in the Southern District of Florida, which covers Dania Beach, found no civil forfeiture cases involving cultural property during the relevant time. Usually, these cases are titled “United States of America v. One [Object],” but none appeared on the docket between late February and April 2025.

The lack of a public court case does not mean the matters were dropped. Cultural property cases are often settled through administrative means, such as voluntary surrender, customs holds, or quiet returns arranged between governments.

The records also show that online auction platforms now play a major role in selling cultural items, which used to be sold mostly by private dealers or traditional auction houses.

This is the latest in a series by Urgent Matter in which we file FOIA requests in an attempt to bring transparency to government actions involving the art market and cultural heritage.

Earlier this week, U.S. Customs and Border Protection provided records showing that federal officers closed multiple art and antiquities enforcement cases at New York ports in 2025, including detentions of Roman- and Islamic-era coins, with several cases later transferred to other authorities.

Other FOIA requests filed by Urgent Matter are still pending.

For now, the records show that cultural property investigations often involve several governments, mostly happen out of public view, and rarely leave a record in U.S. courts even after they are closed.

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