Man to plead guilty to swiping statue’s thumb at museum’s ugly-sweater bash
In 2017, a partygoer’s alleged drunken excursion through a Philadelphia museum sparked international outrage and a years-long criminal case after museum officials realized a piece of a historic artifact had been stolen.
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Michael Rohana, then 24, sneaked into a closed-off section of the Franklin Institute while attending an after-hours party and broke the thumb off a $4.5 million terra-cotta warrior on loan to the museum from China, the FBI said.
Felony charges followed. The city of Philadelphia called the theft an embarrassment, and a Chinese official from the cultural center that loaned the statue called on the United States to “severely punish” Rohana. But the case against Rohana dragged on for years, impeded first by a hung jury and then the covid-19 pandemic and worsening relations between the United States and China.
Now, more than five years after Rohana’s alleged heist, he is set to face penalties. The Delaware man is expected to plead guilty later this month to a lesser felony charge of trafficking archaeological resources, according to court documents filed last week.
Rohana’s plea deal offers a lighter maximum sentence — a fine of $20,000 and two years in prison — than the charges prosecutors initially sought.
Attorneys for Rohana did not respond to a request for comment.
Man stole an ancient terra-cotta warrior’s thumb in Philadelphia, FBI says
Rohana attended an ugly-sweater party hosted by the Franklin Institute in late December 2017, according to an affidavit filed by the FBI’s Art Crime Team. Surveillance footage showed Rohana, dressed in a green sweater, enter a special exhibit of terra-cotta warriors sent from China that was closed and roped off at the time.
Using his phone as a flashlight, Rohana explored the exhibit and approached one of the figures, an ancient Chinese cavalryman, according to the affidavit. Investigators said he took a selfie with it, then appeared to break something off the figure’s left hand and place it in his left pocket before leaving and returning home.
Museum staff noticed the statue was missing its left thumb in early January. A week later, Rohana confessed to stealing the thumb and returned it when an FBI agent interviewed him, according to the affidavit.
A Chinese official blasted the theft in a Beijing newspaper in February 2018, accusing Rohana of undermining and robbing the “human cultural heritage.” The city of Philadelphia passed a resolution in March 2018 apologizing for the incident.
Rohana was initially charged in 2018 with the theft and concealment of an object of cultural heritage from a museum and interstate transportation of stolen property, offenses that carry a total maximum sentence of 30 years in prison.
In an April 2019 trial, experts from China testified that the statue whose thumb Rohana allegedly swiped dated back to the 3rd century B.C. — one of thousands of life-size clay soldiers that the first Chinese emperor, Qin Shi Huang, commissioned to be buried with him after his death. Seven terra-cotta warriors were part of the exhibit loaned to the Franklin Institute, each insured for $4.5 million.
The cavalryman had been designated as a national treasure, said Rong Bo, an artifact conservation expert who visited the Franklin Institute to assess the damage.
“We were very shocked,” Rong testified. “We saw that the thumb was broken off, and the damage was pretty significant.”
Prosecutors called Rohana’s alleged theft an egregious act of harm to a cultural artifact. Rohana’s attorneys did not dispute that he took the thumb but cast the act as a mistake committed during a drunken escapade facilitated by the Franklin Institute’s lax security.
Lawyers on each side also clashed on the worth of the cavalryman’s thumb and whether its value exceeded the $5,000 threshold to be considered an “object of cultural heritage” under U.S. law. Rohana’s attorneys disputed the prosecution’s valuation of the thumb at $150,000 and argued that because the terra-cotta warriors were discovered in pieces and reassembled by archaeologists for display, the damage to the cavalryman wasn’t as significant.
A jury was ultimately unable to come to a consensus in April 2019, and a mistrial was declared. A scheduled retrial in February 2020 was postponed after the outbreak of the coronavirus and the Trump administration’s restrictions on visitors from China, which prevented the prosecution’s Chinese experts from returning to repeat their testimony.
Subsequent deterioration in U.S.-China relations led the Chinese government to suspend cooperation in American criminal matters, and the Chinese experts remained unable to travel for the retrial, prosecutors said in a March court filing.
On March 28, prosecutors said in court filings that Rohana had agreed to plead guilty to a felony charge of trafficking in interstate commerce in archaeological resources. He is scheduled to appear in court on April 17.
The terra-cotta cavalryman and his thumb were returned to China, where experts had begun planning its restoration, Rong testified in 2019.
Source: The Washington Post
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