A Delaware man's legal saga is approaching its end, more than five years after an extremely ill-advised move at an ugly Christmas sweater party that led to an FBI investigation and international tensions. Days before Christmas 2017, Michael Rohana was at an after-hours party in the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, where he made his way into a roped-off gallery and stole a thumb from a $4.5 million terracotta warrior statue on loan from China. Under a plea deal, Rohana is expected to plead guilty later this month to a felony charge of trafficking archaeological resources, which carries a maximum sentence of two years in prison and a $20,000 fine, the Washington Post reports.
Rohana, who was 24 at the time of the crime, could have faced a maximum of 30 years in prison if convicted on an earlier charge of theft and concealment of an object of cultural heritage from a museum. Chinese officials had demanded "severe punishment" for the damage to the statue, which is more than 2,000 years old. Rohana confessed to the crime, describing it as a drunken mistake, and returned the stolen thumb when an FBI agent showed up at his home in February 2018, Artnet News reports. A 2019 trial ended in a mistrial and further legal proceedings were delayed by the pandemic and worsening relations with China.
During the 2019 trial, Rohana, who was captured on surveillance footage taking a selfie with the statue before snapping its thumb off, said he didn't know how he "could have been so stupid." A major issue at the trial was the value of the thumb, which one expert put at $1,000 and another at $150,000. Rohana's lawyer, Catherine C. Henry told jurors the case shouldn't be treated like a major art heist. "These charges were made for art thieves—think like Ocean's Eleven or Mission:Impossible," she said. Rohana, she said, "wasn’t in ninja clothing sneaking around the museum. He was a drunk kid in a bright green ugly Christmas sweater." (More art theft stories.)
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