The billionaire owners of craft giant Hobby Lobby are under federal investigation for allegedly looting hundreds of ancient artifacts from the Middle East for use in their nonprofit Museum of the Bible, according to a report.
The Green family has been under investigation since 2011, The Daily Beast reports, when US Customs agents in Memphis seized nearly 300 clay tablets the family was attempting to send to the store’s headquarters.
The packages were en route to Oklahoma City from Israel.
“Is it possible we have some [illicit] artifacts? That’s possible,” CEO Steven Green told reporters.
The Greens, who own the nationwide crafting chain with three locations in New Jersey, allegedly tried to sneak the artifacts into the country by misstating the contents of FedEx packages as “hand-crafted tiles” worth $300.
The tablets are thousands of years old and inscribed in cuneiform, the ancient script of Assyria and Babylonia, now modern-day Iraq.
The tablets are among the estimated 40,000 artifacts intended for the Museum of the Bible, a Washington DC-based nonprofit funded by the family that is slated to open in 2017.
Museum President Cary Summers told the Web site the tablets are simply “held up in customs.”
“There was a shipment and it had improper paperwork — incomplete paperwork that was attached to it,” he explained.
If the Greens — who made headlines last year when the Supreme Court determined their health plan did not have to provide female employees with all forms of contraception — are prosecuted, they will likely have to surrender the tablets to the feds and pay a fine.
The family has amassed a $4.5 billion fortune since launching the craft store in 1970.
It was not clear how the Greens acquired the ancient tablets.