Thailand museum chief arrested on fraud charge in Seattle

LOS ANGELES — The director of a Thailand museum was arrested in Seattle and indicted on a wire-fraud charge in connection with a federal investigation into looted Southeast Asian antiquities.

Roxanna Brown, a 62-year-old U.S. citizen, was arrested late Friday while visiting relatives in Seattle and scheduled to speak the next day at the University of Washington.

She was charged with one count of wire fraud. If convicted, she faces up to 20 years in prison. Health problems prevented her from appearing in federal court in Seattle today, and it was unclear when the hearing might be rescheduled, prosecutors there said.

Brown, the director of the Southeast Asian Ceramics Museum at Bangkok University in Thailand, is accused of allowing her electronic signature to be used on appraisal forms that were donated at inflated prices to several Southern California museums so collectors could claim fraudulent tax deductions.

The U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles said it didn't know whether Brown had an attorney.

Michael Filipovic, a public defender appointed to represent her temporarily in Seattle, said he did not know whether Brown had hired an attorney to fight the federal charges in California. He declined to comment on the allegations in the indictment.

She is the first person to be arrested in an ongoing probe into looted artifacts. Federal agents raided several Southern California museums and a Los Angeles gallery in January, searching for artifacts allegedly taken from Thailand's Ban Chiang archaeological site, one of the most important prehistoric settlements ever discovered in Southeast Asia.

An affidavit filed in the case said the gallery's owners, Jonathan and Cari Markell, used Brown's electronic signature several times to falsify appraisal forms. In one case, an appraisal for items to be donated to the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena claims Brown had inspected the items. The couple have not been charged. They have previously declined to comment about the investigation to The Associated Press.

The raids followed an undercover investigation by a National Park Service special agent who posed as a collector interested in various artifacts. The agent learned that some of the artifacts managed to pass through U.S. customs because "Made in Thailand" labels were affixed to them, making it appear they were replicas.

Court documents said the Markells and the agent met more than a dozen times and regularly e-mailed and called one another about antiquities from Southeast Asia.