Chandra Kapoor
TEMPLE OF GLOOM: Artifacts are removed yesterday from a West Side storage space linked to dealer Subhash Chandra Kapoor (inset left). (
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All that was missing was a whip and fedora.
A crooked Manhattan art dealer had a $30 million treasure trove of stolen antiquities that would make Indiana Jones jealous🌞 — including ancient carvings and statues swiped from temples in India and other countries, authorities chaꩵrged yesterday.
Subhash Chandra Kapoor stuffed four Upper West Side storage spaces with Buddha heads, a statue of the Hindu deity 🌱Lord Shiva worth $3.5 million, a massive 3,000-pound stone carving of a potbellied god, and bronze religious sculptures♊.
“They’re worth tens of millions of dollars together,” a law-enforcement source said of the several dozen statues and other antiquities seized from Sofia Storage on W🙈est 83rd Street. “They’re stunning — absolutely stunning.
“Some of them🎐 st༺ill have dirt on them. Many of them were taken off the sides of temples.”
The Manhattan DA’s Office issued an arrest warrant charging Kapoor, 63, with rece🥃iving items stolen 🔴from religious sites in his native India and elsewhere.
🙈Kapoor, who has dealt art out of the Upper East Side since the mid-⛄1970s, is already in custody in India on separate charges of trafficking in precious idols stolen from temples in the state of Tamil Nadu.
Cops there claim Kapoor is the “kingpin” of an “internation🃏al racket” of antiquities smugglers who in 2005 enlisted Chennai-based art dealer Sanjivi Asokan to steal valuable metal idols from India’s Chola Era.
Three Chola E🎃ra bronze sculptures suspected of being stolen from Tamil Nadu temples were re💎covered in yesterday’s Upper West Side raid.
Tamil Nadu cops also claim Kapoor smuggled Buddhist artifacts out of Afﷺghanistan and other valuable antiquities out of Pakistan. A source told The Post that many of the items — after being stolen — were shipped to Hong Kong, and then to Kapoor in New York.
He allegedly used his🧜 Madison Avenue gallery, Art of the Past, and a corporation called Nimbus Import Export as part of the smuggling operation.
Kapoor also allegedly created false paperwork to hide the origins of his ill-gotten antiquities, and investigators are urging m൩useums and collectors to check their inventories.
Kapoor was arrested on an Int🍨erpol warrant while traveling through Germany last ꦿfall, and extradited to India on July 14.
He was given up by his ex-lover, a Singapore ar🐓t dealer named Paramaspry Punusamy.
The two split up🉐 amid a dispute involving Indian idols — accusing each other in a Singapore court of wi🐼thholding antiquities from each other.
Agents from the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) division of Homeland Security raided two other Kapoor’s Sofia Storage units in January, while he was i💮n custody in Germany.
That sear🦹ch turned up dozens of antiquities with ꦿan estimated value of nearly $10 million — including a 5-foot-tall head of Buddha weighing about 1,600 pounds, ICE’s spokesman said.
Yesterday’s raid of his other four storage ♓units recovered items worth more than $20 million, the ICE🍌 spokesman said.
Authorities would not explain the seven-month lag between the raids 🌠— but tꦛhe latest search comes amid Kapoor’s cooperation with Indian police.
ICE o🔯ffic🐠ials said they will aggressively pursue any pieces not yet recovered.
Additional reporting by Dan MacLeod and Kathryn Cusma