As the New York Times’s Hugh Eakin reports, it has been five years since a former curator of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles went on trial in Rome for conspiring to traffic in stolen antiquities. The case has become a cornerstone of Italy’s aggressive campaign to recover ancient treasures from around the United States and has led major American museums to make their peace with the Italian government. As the museums have relinquished dozens of artworks that Italy claims were looted, receiving loans of other objects in exchange, officials on both sides have talked about a new era of collaboration.

But now an Italian investigation of a second American museum curator, in a case involving similar allegations of criminal conspiracy, seems likely to upend assumptions about any rapprochement. According to a fourteen-page legal notice from the public prosecutor’s office in Rome, J. Michael Padgett, fifty-six, antiquities curator at the Princeton University Museum of Art, is a focus of a criminal investigation of “the illegal export and laundering” of Italian archaeological objects.

Once again an American may be facing a drawn-out legal ordeal, and at least the hypothetical threat of incarceration in a foreign country, for acquiring art for a museum—something that was unheard of before the Getty case, and that many museum professionals believed was not going to happen again.

Also named in the case are a former New York antiquities dealer, Edoardo Almagià, fifty-nine, and two other co-defendants. The document identifies nearly two dozen works and groups of works—among them pieces of a calyx krater attributed to the Attic vase painter Euphronios and a group of Etruscan architectural terra-cottas—that it describes as having been looted from Italian sites and “sold, donated, or lent” by Almagià to the Princeton museum through Padgett from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s. According to Princeton nine of these works are in the museum’s collection.

The document also lists about twenty pieces, including vases, bronzes, and sculptures that it says Almagià obtained illegally and sold to other American institutions in the ’80s and ’90s, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Dallas Museum of Art; the San Antonio Museum of Art; the Toledo Museum of Art; the Tampa Museum of Art; and the Indiana University Art Museum in Bloomington. And it claims that several vase fragments of illicit provenance were “sold and/or donated” on unspecified dates to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

The document, dated March 9, 2010, was provided to the New York Times by someone with close knowledge of the case who asked not to be identified because the charges had not been made public. It reflects the findings of a preliminary investigation by Italian prosecutors and does not constitute a formal request to a judge to move the case to court. But as a formal notification to the defendants, it indicates that a criminal proceeding is under way and advises the defendants of their rights, setting the stage for a possible trial.

“I’m rather shocked,” said Philippe de Montebello, the former director of the Met, on being informed of the investigation of Padgett. In early 2006, shortly after True’s case went to trial, de Montebello negotiated an agreement with Italy to give up the treasured Euphronios krater and other classical artworks at the Met in exchange for long-term loans. “My understanding was Marion True was it, they weren’t going to do this anymore,” he said.