Never Stop Looting

Stolen Clay Tablets, Stolen Papyrus, Pizza Arbitrage, The App Economy, and Sneaky Cartoons

Thou Shalt Not Steal

The Museum of the Bible is back in the news - again - because the 3,500-year-old clay tablet they bought from an “unknown auction house” for a whopping $1.6 million dollars, was stolen:

The complaint details part of the journey of this fragment of the oldest known creation tale — from a palace library in ancient Mesopotamia to its present location in a Department of Homeland Security warehouse in Queens, New York.

It alleges that a major international auction house, unnamed in the complaint, obscured the provenance of the tablet, known as the Gilgamesh Dream Tablet, when it sold the tablet to Hobby Lobby in 2014.

I’m not sure why, in a case like this, you’d shield the auction house from public scrutiny, while also alleging that they committed fraud? I’m certain it has nothing to do with who runs auction houses - rich, white people.

Anyhow, I’ve explained provenance before, but the Justice Department claims an American art dealer bought the looted tablet from a Jordanian dealer in London, then sold to two other guys, one of whom forged a letter of provenance, saying it had been owned by someone else for 25 years and was definitely not stolen from the Iraqi government in 1991. Then, in 2013, someone else came to the big auction house and wanted to sell it, but told them it wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny. So, what did the auction house do? Unload it to our old friends at the Museum of the Bible for $1.6 million in a private sale. All seems very above board!

I write about the Green family and their museum full of looted Middle Eastern goods quite a lot - at what point can we all just admit that they are simply a fence for black market artifacts? As a matter of fact…

Dirk Nasty

Back in January, I wrote about a papyrologist named Dirk Obbink, who was accused of stealing manuscript pieces from a collection at Oxford, where he worked, and selling them to the Greens, the Hobby Lobby dickheads mentioned above. At the time, the facts surrounding the case were a bit fuzzy to me, and there was much speculation around how the alleged fraud played out.

Well, I have good news. Ariel Sabar has written a piece for The Atlantic that fills in many of the blanks, and details how Obbink and his co-conspirators milked the Greens and the Museum of the Bible for millions of dollars over a decade.

So who is Dirk Obbink? A guy who got famous - among papyrologists, at least - for reassembling scrolls from the Mount Vesuvius eruption:

Sought by universities and cultural institutions the world over, Obbink taught at Columbia before leaving, in 1995, for Oxford, home to the world’s largest collection of manuscripts from the ancient world: half a million papyri that a pair of young Oxford scholars had excavated in Egypt a century earlier.

Like many intellectuals who go on to become con men, Obbink achieved great success at a young age, and was either unable or unwilling to live up to increased expectations. His rise in the field of papyrology ran headlong into the decision by the billionaire Green family to dump tens of millions of dollars into the acquisition of ancient artifacts.

In 2011, Scott Carroll and Jerry Pattengale, two evangelical history professors who’d been hired by the Greens to acquire artifacts for the Museum of the Bible, met with Obbink at his office at Oxford University. Seemingly as an afterthought, Obbink showed the men a papyrus fragment that would later become the center of a worldwide scandal:

Inside, in plastic sleeves, were ancient pieces from each of the four New Testament Gospels. Obbink tweezed out a fragment of Mark—a small, hatchet-shaped papyrus with verses from the gospel’s first chapter—for his visitors to see. The shape and strokes of certain letters, he explained, were hallmarks of first-century handwriting. Obbink described the fragment as part of a “family collection” and, according to Carroll, “offered it for consideration” for Hobby Lobby to buy.

The fragment was not part of a family collection - more about that later. Nor was it first-century (spoiler alert). But, here was one of the world’s most famous papyrologists telling them it was! The men were excited - if authentic, the fragment would be a huge leap forward in the study of the Bible.

Taking a step back, and putting the story I wrote about earlier in some context, the author explains just how much of a stir Steve Green created in the world of antiquities when he came on the scene in 2009 with his piles of craft store money:

Steve Green had loosed tidal forces when he entered the antiquities market in 2009. He was a motivated, first-time buyer with millions to burn in the midst of a global recession. Strangers bearing ancient scrolls, oil lamps, and incunabula approached museum officials unbidden at restaurants, college lecture halls, even supermarkets.

One would-be seller claimed to have a 5,000-year-old Bible that had been perfectly preserved in ice atop Mount Ararat. Another brought a box of manuscripts to the parking lot of a Cattlemen’s Steakhouse near Hobby Lobby headquarters, in Oklahoma City. When Carroll rebuffed him, the dealer set the box on the trunk of Carroll’s car, then dashed off, yelling, “You’ll love these. Call me!”

It’s important to remember, however, that Green was not doing this purely out of the kindness of his heart. He and his deeply evangelical family had an agenda, and it was to create a “serious” museum to push their religious beliefs:

The Greens didn’t want another Creation Museum or Noah’s Ark theme park. They envisioned a “Christian Smithsonian,” as the scholars Candida Moss and Joel Baden described it in their book Bible Nation—an elegantly designed, intellectually serious institution that chronicled the Bible as a profoundly influential historical manuscript.

But secular scholars had doubts. Even before it opened its doors, some critics regarded the Museum of the Bible as little more than a dressed-up version of the many evangelical causes the Greens poured their wealth into—a ministry, in all but name, that cast the New Testament as the unfiltered word of God and America as a Protestant nation. Its detractors saw the Greens as too invested in a particular set of religious beliefs to present the Bible’s many texts and traditions dispassionately.

Carrol and Pattengale didn’t know it yet, but they’d found the perfect partner in Obbink - someone whose reputation was so solid, he could deflect criticism that the Museum of the Bible was a billionaire version of Ark Encounter. Obbink, for his part, seemed to realize he’d found his meal ticket:

He fawned over the Greens’ aspirations, writing to Scott Carroll in January 2010 that he looked forward “to the flourishing of your commendable undertaking.” He closed emails, as his new benefactors did, with the sign-off “Blessings.” And according to a devout former museum official, he bowed his head and prayed before meals in so “theatrical” a way that, even among evangelicals, he was “the most visibly pious person at the table.”

A few months later, Obbink was already introducing his new manuscript buyers to shady dealers:

The men were steps from Sotheby’s—where Pattengale thought they were going—when Obbink turned down a narrow alley to the small, cluttered apartment of a 30-something Turk, who answered the door in a Yankees jersey.

Pattengale would later learn that the man, a dealer named Yakup Eksioglu, was suspected by scholars of illicitly trafficking papyri.

The venue then moved to Texas, where Baylor University had received a stealth grant from the Green family to allow students to study their burgeoning collection of documents and fragments, and had put Scott Carroll on the payroll to the tune of $100,000 a year to oversee the spectacle:

Carroll struck many Baylor professors as less scholar than ringmaster—or “circus act,” as one put it. He showed up with suitcases full of antiquities, passing them around to astonished professors and students.

In 2012, one of the more bizarre twists in the story occurred, as Carroll “dismounted” - or, dissolved in water - an ancient mummy mask in the classics department lounge, for some reason:

He filled a sink in the classics lounge with warm water and Palmolive dish soap, plunged a mummy mask into the suds, and began swishing it around. Then he withdrew a wet fragment and presented it to awestruck students.

“He said, ‘Whoa, now take a look at this, and see if you can read it,’ ” recalled David Lyle Jeffrey, a medieval-Bible scholar and former Baylor provost who helped manage the school’s relationship with the Greens. The fragment turned out to be a piece of Paul’s Letter to the Romans. “The kids were bamboozled: ‘Wow! Wow!’ ” It was the kind of eureka moment any professor might hope to inspire in undergraduates.

There was one problem with this highly dramatic display:

Jeffrey might have been just as floored, were it not for something he’d noticed when students were first gathering in the room.

Before his demonstration, Carroll had discreetly set a piece of papyrus beside the sink, and Jeffrey had glanced at it. When Carroll withdrew the wet Romans fragment from the mummy mask, Jeffrey recognized it as the piece he’d seen beside the sink. Carroll, he realized, had only pretended to pull it from the mask.

It might be possible to chalk this up to mere showmanship, however Steve Green himself went on CNN days later to claim they “discovered” it at Baylor, when in reality Hobby Lobby had purchased it from Obbink over a year earlier. Deniability, indeed! Why was the billionaire himself involved in the cover-up of the actual source of the papyrus fragments? Green has claimed he was a victim in this fraud, along with his precious museum, but the laundering of stolen artifacts through Baylor continued:

Burris found a spot at a table where Carroll was drying papyri he’d pulled out of the sink, but soon felt his head spinning. Before him was a small Greek fragment with four-line stanzas in an Aeolic dialect—a hallmark of Sappho, the sixth-century b.c. poet from the island of Lesbos, famed for her passionate depictions of love. Sappho is as revered by classicists as her writings are scarce; just one complete poem and fragments of some others survive, many of them from Oxyrhynchus.

That is Greek poetry professor Simon Burris “discovering” a previously unknown manuscript by a famous poet. How convenient! Later, Obbink would go on to claim credit for discovering the Sappho poems, despite all the witnesses at Baylor that day. Documents would show that the pieces were purchased by the Greens from the shady Turk in London.

Obbink and the Greens continued to use the fake dismountings and mummy masks to launder papyri Obbink had stolen from the Oxford collection, or bought from illicit vendors, for years. Importantly, Obbink would claim that all of the fragments and masks belonged to him, and not mention any other source of origin. Like a band of clumsy thieves, the men seemed to believe that if Baylor professors and students bore witness to the false discovery of these artifacts, no one would question where they came from. The chain of provenance began and ended in a teacher’s lounge sink.

By 2014, the Egypt Exploration Society, owners of the collection housed at Oxford Obbink had been helping to curate - which he had apparently been doing with some aplomb! - was starting to become uncomfortable with his behavior, and told him he had to stop working with the Greens and the Museum of the Bible, or they’d revoke his title. In response, Obbink lied to them, saying he’d cut ties with the Greens.

In 2015, word got back to the EES that Obbink had shown the Mark fragment to Carroll, who had been filmed talking about it at a church, which was then upload to YouTube. Obbink was now faced with a dilemma - if he published a report on the fragment, which the EES knew belonged to their collection - Carroll and Green would see it, and realize they’d bought a stolen artifact. Incredibly, when Hobby Lobby had paid 7 figures for the Mark fragment, they’d signed a deal with Obbink that he would retain possession of it for five years for reasons and it was still in his office. Awkward!

It all fell apart a year ago, when a new Green employee flew to London to meet with the EES, and showed them the receipts:

Over lunch at a private club, Holmes pulled out a purchase agreement between Hobby Lobby Stores Inc. and Dirk Obbink. Co-signed by the Oxford professor on February 4, 2013, it showed that Obbink had sold the company not just the Mark papyrus, but also fragments of the Gospels of Matthew, Luke, and John. In the contract, Obbink describes the manuscripts as his personal property, vows to “ship/hand carry” them from “Oxford Ancient,” and dates all four to a historically unprecedented “circa 100 AD,” making each a one-of-a-kind worth millions.

When EES officials saw the contract, Holmes told me, “any uncertainties they had evaporated very quickly.” They banned Obbink from the collection.

As Obbink’s fraud came to light, other middlemen emerged - cutouts who Obbink had used to launder his stolen fragments to other buyers. He’d tried to cover his tracks at EES, but had failed at that, too:

For most of the stolen papyri, the EES’s corresponding inventory cards and photographs were also missing. The thief, it seemed, had sought to cover his tracks by erasing evidence of the papyri’s existence. In a collection of some half a million pieces, perhaps they’d never be missed.

But the thief miscalculated: Copies of the inventory existed in various locations, including University College London.

Drawing on such backups, the EES said it has so far identified 120 papyri that “appear to be missing, almost all from a limited number of folders.” In what might well be British understatement, it warned “that a few more cases may emerge.”

Like many stories, once it is unraveled it turns out to be a greedy guy, stumbling from one fraud to the next, his resume papering over - sorry - his failure to live up to his reputation.

And, as I’ve been saying time and time again, the Green family became the enablers of this behavior as a conduit for their religious world view. They are giving thousands of papyri back to Egypt, to Iraq, to the other places they’ve been stolen from, because they are billionaires and they can afford to do this. Some of the thieves may be punished for their actions, but if there are thousands of illicit artifacts that we know about in the Museum’s collection, how many will go un-returned?

Door Dud

The last time I wrote about Doordash, it was when they had raised money at a $13 billion dollar valuation after being outed for stealing tips from their drivers.

They are back in the news now, for a more…amusing reason? Ranjon Roy has written a piece about a friend’s pizza place who discovered that Doordash had hijacked his Google listing:

To confirm, he had never spoken with anyone from Doordash and after years of resisting the siren song of delivery revenue, certainly did not want to be listed. But the words "Order Delivery" were right there, prominently on the Google snippet.

[…]

Doordash was causing him real problems. The most common was, Doordash delivery drivers didn't have the proper bags for pizza so it inevitably would arrive cold. It led to his employees wasting time responding to complaints and even some bad Yelp reviews.

But he brought up another problem - the prices were off. He was frustrated that customers were seeing incorrectly low prices. A pizza that he charged $24 for was listed as $16 by Doordash.

Yes, Doordash was taking orders for his pizza, calling his restaurant posing as a customer, then sending their delivery driver to pick them up. Customers - fairly! - thought they were ordering delivery from him, and would call him and complain when they had issues with the order. And, Doordash was taking a 33% loss on every order! What the fuck!

This, they discovered, was what Doordash calls a “demand test” where they hijack an available listing, scrape the restaurant’s site, and create a money-losing offer for awhile, to gauge customer demand for the delivery. Then, armed with this data, they would approach the restaurant and show them how much more money they could be making with Doordash. In this particular case, their scraper did a lousy job, and they were charging the base price for a pizza for every order, regardless of toppings. Not that Doordash seems to care about losing money, since they lost $450 million in 2019.

The Doordash Model

All of this begs the question - do any of these delivery services make money? I’ll save you some time - the answer is no. So, why are there so many, and why do they seem to have infinite amounts of money to burn?

Roy’s piece has kicked up a flurry of blogs and articles about the food delivery and gig industries, but the one I found to be the most concise was by Josh Barro in New York Magazine. His conclusion, basically, is that restaurants who can make money doing delivery are already doing it, and despite what the tech companies claim, they cannot create some magical efficient market with their apps:

…with a lot of apps, the promised boost to productivity never materializes. The worker still has to render personal service to one customer at a time, and the app doesn’t do much to reduce the worker’s downtime or help him or her complete the task faster. As such, the productivity boost that is needed to make the financial model pencil — paying the worker a high enough hourly rate while charging a fee the customer is willing to pay and still having a positive profit margin — does not materialize.

The same applies to Uber - which has been losing money on both its ride-sharing and food delivery services for years. The pitch Uber made to investors for a decade has been - “we are losing money now, but if we capture enough market share, we will start making money.” The question they can never seem to answer is - how? Will they suddenly raise prices on rides by 40% - though they’d need to raise them more to actually turn a profit, that’d just be a break even - or charge meal delivery fees as high as the cost of the meal? Obviously not. People use gig services because they are cheaper. Until recently, hardly anyone paused to wonder how these services were so much cheaper - the answer is that investors were footing some of the bill. As I cited above - Doordash lost $450 million dollars in 2019 on revenues of $900 million. Uber Eats lost a staggering $461 million dollars in one quarter of 2019. They are losing over a billion dollars a year, and they supposedly have the advantage of scale.

So, what happens when investors decide they don’t want to invest in companies who can never turn a profit? Uber is laying off employees from its ride-sharing business as it tries to expand its food delivery business. Is this just a game of musical chairs at this point? Gig and app companies burning through piles of investor cash, then pivoting to a new industry and repeating the process? Is investing a scam? Ryan Cooper of The Week takes a stab at decoding the madness:

In turn, the major reason for that situation is for years there has been far more investor capital than there have been high-quality investments for that capital. "We find ourselves in a liquidity surplus," as one investor told the Wall Street Journal about money-losing companies going public. Thanks to inequality, global plutocrats are sitting on vast hoards of wealth, but there are few places to invest it precisely because they have left nothing but scraps for the broad population who would serve as customers for new businesses.

You’re reading that correctly - the reason companies like Uber and Doordash can exist and lose billions of dollars is rich people don’t have anything better to do with their money. Witness Mohammed Bin Salman, crown prince of Saudi Arabia and murder enthusiast, dumping billions of the oil state’s money into Softbank, which shovels it into the cash furnaces at gig start-ups like Uber and WeWork. Softbank had to write down $10 billion dollars’ worth of losses last year on those two companies alone.

So, the companies who promised us we’d have everything - food, taxi service, office space, electric scooters, whatever - on demand and at our fingertips, haven’t actually figured out a way to provide those services with any efficiency. Instead, what they got very good at was convincing investors that they could do it - some day - and taking gigantic piles of their money to spend on…I’m not sure what. Will the pandemic change anything? Will the rich people suddenly decide their money might be better spent investing in the millions of new small start-ups we’ll need after the pandemic has forced so many out of business? Investing in, say, a profitable pizza restaurant is a lot less sexy than a tech company who says they can deliver robot pizzas in a moving truck, so I won’t hold my breath.

Rascally Pasqually

Okay, let’s talk about a good pizza story. A customer in Philadelphia ordered from a restaurant called Pasqually’s Pizza & Wings, only to discover that it was a re-branded Chuck E. Cheese, doing delivery under a new name. Diabolical!

A user named u/KendallNeff placed a Grubhub order from a place called Pasqually's Pizza & Wings, believing that she was doing her part to support a local business. But when she received her food, she was slightly suspicious about where it really came from. "Just curious," she texted her Grubhub driver. "Was this food from Chuck E. Cheese?"

You know what? I am fine with this. It is a creative, and I would say sly way for a company that is suffering from a lack of in-person customers to find new ways to make money. Pasqually is a member of something called Munch’s Make Believe Band - I have never set foot in a Chuck E. Cheese - and has apparently decided to pursue a solo career in food service. The brand says the new offerings are…better quality? Which is cool, I guess, but kind of throws shade on what they’ve been serving the kids:

Pasqually’s Pizza & Wings’ recipes use fresh, homemade pizza dough, just like Chuck E. Cheese, but it is a different pizza that features a thicker crust and extra sauce, giving consumers a more flavorful, more premium pizza experience.

Wow, really, Chuck? Just giving those kids a non-premium pizza experience. Saving the good shit for the parents.

Anyhow this isn’t a scam, it’s just a story about pizza, and I agree with Richard the Grubhub Driver that it is funny and a bit sneaky:

Corona Stuff

A vast international fraud network is stealing millions of dollars from state unemployment systems by filing false claims. The CDC and some states have been misreporting COVID-19 test data. The USDA hired unlicensed contractors to deliver critical aid to food banks.

Short Cons

GQ - “Musk is allowed to get away with all of these things because we have a two-tiered justice system that treats violations of the law by the wealthy as materially different than violations of the law by people who are not. Musk can tweet about his willingness to be arrested because he knows it would only happen with his consent.”

ABC News - “The social security numbers and home addresses of thousands of unemployment applicants inadvertently were exposed this week in three states that had contracted with Deloitte to build unemployment portals.”

Sorry, I had to:

Tips, memes, and ancient poems to scammerdarkly@gmail.com