Case of the Runaway Tongue

One day last September an intense, cigar-chomping Hong Kong art dealer bounded into the local U.S. Treasury Foreign Assets Control Office on what seemed to be a fairly routine matter. All he wanted was a license to ship a rare and ancient (1000 B.C.) bronze ax he owned to a buyer in the U.S. Throughout Hong Kong, Dealer J. D. Chen, 55, is known as a shrewd and canny man, but that day his tongue ran away with him.

At the control office, a U.S. official happened to make a general observation about the difficulty of getting permission to export Chinese art objects to the U.S. The block is the Trading-with-the-Enemy Act, which forbids the importing of goods from Red China unless the dealer can prove that he got them from the mainland before 1950. But J. D. Chen boasted that he had of late been doing quite well without going to the bother of getting licenses at all: if a U.S. customer wanted one of his treasures, Chen would get a friend, a tourist or even a diplomat to take the object into the U.S. as a personal belonging. So far, no one in customs had questioned the declarations of these unwitting agents, but to the U.S. official Chen blabbed to, it seemed like a clear case of smuggling.

The official sent word to Washington, and the hunt was on. In Los Angeles a Chinese-American customs officer, masquerading as a prospective buyer, nailed down a young refugee named Paul Yang to whom Chen had entrusted a $12,000 bronze turtle. Sure enough, the turtle turned up in Yang's safe-deposit box, and last week Yang was slapped into jail.

In Berkeley, Calif., U.S. agents found their next man: a Chinese dealer who in 1959 had brought into the U.S. some 70 art objects, all listed as "personal household goods." Searching the dealer's correspondence, the agents found that he had also served as Chen's U.S. agent. But as a result of a disagreement over the division of spoils, Chen had switched his business to one Frank Caro, director of a long-esteemed gallery on Manhattan's art-lined 57th Street. In Caro's gallery alone, agents picked up $282,000 worth of illegal Chi nese treasures.

In Hong Kong, J. D. Chen denounced this U.S. interference, insisted that every treasure had been brought out of Red China before 1950. In fact, he said, the U.S. was being plain silly in making it so difficult for people to rescue China's treasures from the Communists. The Treasury Department was not impressed, predicted that before it was through it would have rounded up more than $1,000,000 worth of illegal Chinese art.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.