LOS ANGELES : Ex-Museum Director Loses New Mexico Job

Patrick Houlihan, convicted earlier this month of stealing numerous art objects while director of the Southwest Museum in Los Angeles in the 1980s, has lost his current job.

The board of directors of the Millicent Rogers Museum in Taos, N.M., issued a statement saying that Houlihan’s employment as executive director of that institution “is no longer in the best interests of this museum.”

Board President Barbara Hornby said that the decision came at the end of a “very long meeting” of the board over the weekend.

Houlihan, who went to the Taos museum in 1988 shortly after leaving Los Angeles, will receive as severance a month’s worth of salary for each year that he was at the Millicent Rogers Museum.

His convictions on seven counts of grand theft and embezzlement came after a Superior Court trial in Los Angeles that lasted five weeks.

He is to be sentenced April 2 and could receive up to six years in prison.

Officials at national museum organizations say they believe that he is the most prominent museum officer ever to be convicted of stealing from his own institution.