This is somewhat O/T but this place is nothing if not random, so –
Spouseanon comes home from a book market with a big coffee table book about the Rothschilds' place in England, Waddesdon Manor. You remember, the place where the plane/helicopter crash that killed Capt. Mike Green.
Anyway I flipped through all the glossy pictures of this ego-stroking tome, and it struck me
We already knew that ART was a big money laundering tool of the corrupt elite
Every other kind of antique is, too
Sotheby's, Christie's, any market trading furniture for ridiculous prices
Rugs, porcelains, entire libraries of antique books, objets d'art of all kinds
The piracy has gone on for ages, because for one thing, nobody would challenge the super-wealthy snob crowd, and for another, the very idea of trying to attach any kind of "value" in any currency to that sort of thing is impossible on its face.
This book is just crazy. Waddesdon Manor is so completely overdone; I'd have a task to not walk around chuckling sensibly if I visited it. There's a ton of significantly old and visually pleasing things in it, but it's a museum, not a home. And there are no extra rooms to fill in a grave vault, even for the Rothschilds.