by Peter Watson
Both the capitals were there, in the warehouse in Geneva, but—and this also incensed Pellegrini—they appeared to have been altered, by abrasion and other damage, in a crude attempt to disguise what they actually were. The bookmark, slipped in at the appropriate place, gave the game away and confirmed that Medici not only had stolen objects on his premises but that he must have known they were stolen.
In line with this was a folder marked “IFAR Reports,” inside which was a set of magazines called Stolen Art Alert, the publication of the International Foundation for Art Research, a not-for-profit organization in New York. Each month, Stolen Art Alert publishes a list of photographs, a record of art that has been stolen. It is not unlike the Carabinieri list but covers thefts worldwide, not just in Italy. Medici not only had these records but some of the contents were marked with felt-tip highlighting. These included a second-century AD sarcophagus, stolen from the Villa Taverna in Frascati in 1987, and a second sarcophagus, undated but Roman, stolen in Rome in 1986. Pictures of both these objects were among Medici’s Polaroids. He could not have been unaware that the objects he had were stolen.
Elsewhere, Pellegrini found a photograph of a marble head of Eirene, the Greek goddess of peace and wealth, on the back of which was written, in Italian, “Geneva 7/7/93—I hereby declare selling to Mr. Jacques Albert the object depicted in this photo exclusively owned by me and of legitimate provenance (‘di legittima provenienza’). In faith Luzzi Franco. Received Fr 120.” This marble head was stolen in 1993 from the archaeological site of Villa Adriana in Tivoli, Emperor Hadrian’s haven near Rome, where he had a library and a theater and studied philosophy “in peace.” Franco Luzzi was a well-known art and antiquities dealer, who, as Pellegrini, Ferri, and Conforti all knew, had close ties to Medici (he featured in the organigram). In fact, by the time Pellegrini came across this photograph, with the writing on the back, the marble head had already been recovered and was back in Italy. But it was another testament to Medici’s involvement.
These stolen objects were few in number compared to the unprovenanced antiquities that were Medici’s main line of business, but they were important for what they revealed about his attitude and the world in which he moved. Tombaroli, and even Medici on occasions, in the proceedings against him, like to portray themselves as lovers of the arts, as “experts” or professional archaeologists in a sense, helping to “preserve” material that would otherwise be “lost” to history. How plausible is that when the same people knowingly trade in openly stolen artifacts, and deliberately damage them to disguise where they came from? Instead, their real motivation now stands out. They deal in antiquities for one reason and one reason only: the money it brings in.
Pellegrini’s main contribution to Ferri’s investigation was the way he used the documentation to throw light on what we might call the strategic organization of the antiquities underworld. Indeed, Pellegrini’s discoveries in this realm are a major contribution to the history of both archaeology and criminology.
His first insight was his identification of the existence in the antiquities underworld of “triangulations.” A “triangulation” is a term originally used in arms dealing, when middlemen are trying to disguise who the ultimate “end-user” is for a particular set of weapons when general trading in them is, for one reason or another, forbidden. Or, more generally, when for political reasons one country tries to circumvent international sanctions. In this case, it is essentially a way of covering up who the real source of an unprovenanced antiquity is. “A,” the real source (Medici, for example), wants to sell to “C,” a museum or a collector. “C” does not wish to be seen buying from “A.” In this case, “A” passes the object to “B,” the “safe” intermediary (usually, but not always, a dealer in Switzerland), who then “sells” on to “C.” Of course, the intermediary is recompensed in some way for his or her role in the transaction, but the chief purpose of the triangulation is deception.
However, the practice is less obvious, and more deceptive, than the simple triangle, because Pellegrini identified a form of antiquities traffic that was quite unknown before, except to its practitioners, and revealed a new level of organization and cynicism that will prove shocking to many people. This is the practice known to insiders as “the sale of the orphans.” “Orphans” (or “orfanelli,” meaning little orphans) in this case refers to fragments of vases, in particular vases by well-known painters or potters, such as Euphronious, Exekias, or Onesimos. Fragments of their vases—small pieces of pottery—may be quite valuable in themselves, worth as much as several thousand dollars each.
When a vase by a well-known artist or potter is found in fragments, it is sometimes deliberately kept that way. The point of this tactic is that these fragments will be introduced on to the market one or two pieces at a time, over a number of years. The aim is twofold. In the first place, it is to create, in the mind of a museum curator or a collector, a growing desire—a passion—to acquire or own a truly amazing work. By slowly building up the vase, the appetite of the collector or museum is whetted, and this is another area where triangulation comes into play. To prevent naive trustees from spotting what is actually happening, the fragments arrive in the museum over several years but also via several different routes: They may all start with person “A” and all end up with entity “C,” but they reach “C” via “D,” “E,” “F,” “G,” and so on. Trustees are expected to accept the (specious) argument that the subsequent fragments “turned up” in a later dig and this explains how they reached the market by different routes. In fact, the whole rigmarole is a setup.
A second function of fragments is to “sweeten” other acquisitions that museums or collectors are thinking of making. Say a museum has three or four pieces of a valuable vase and is anxious to acquire more, but is, at one particular moment, thinking of acquiring something quite different, a valuable stone head maybe, or a fresco. Should there be any problem or delay with this larger acquisition, then a fragment of the vase that the museum already has part of will suddenly materialize on the market, in the possession of the same dealer offering the larger piece to the museum. The fragment will have surfaced via a triangulation, of course, one dealer doing another dealer a favor, and the museum or collector will be offered the fragment, or orphan, either as a gift, if the main deal goes through, or more cheaply than would otherwise be the case (in the jargon “a partial gift”).
The sale of orphans alerted Pellegrini to one final, more general and particularly cynical aspect of the antiquities trade. The phenomenon of triangulation shows that dealers operate together, do each other favors, cover for one another, and the trading in fragments, in orphans, shows that these triangulations can be quite widespread. Pellegrini asked himself why that should be, and it was some time before he could answer his own question. When he did, however, he surprised even himself. But his insight was confirmed by Ferri’s later investigations.
Because he had access to so much documentation, Pellegrini was in a unique situation to make an overview not only of what was in the papers seized at the Geneva Freeport, but also what was not in them. And what was not in them was an entire set of names—the names of Gianfranco Becchina, who was based in Basel and carried out similar activities to Medici; Sandro Cimicchi, a restorer also based in Basel; and Raffaele Monticelli, who worked in a similar capacity to Pasquale Camera. These names had all been in Pasquale Camera’s organigram, but they weren’t in the Medici documents—why was that? What Pellegrini deduced from this was that the illicit trade in looted antiquities out of Italy was actually divided into two broad groups. Both led to Hecht but by different routes. One led to Hecht via Camera, Medici, Bürki, Symes, and Tchacos. The other led to Hecht via Monticelli, Becchina, Cimicchi, and a Lugano dealer—the equivalent of Tchacos or Symes—named Mario Bruno.
Later, as Pellegrini delved deeper into the paperwork, he found the source of this divide. It lay in an intense rivalry between Medici and Becchina. They were competitors who disliked each ot
her intensely and never passed up an opportunity to do one another harm. Their rivalry suited Hecht, of course: It fueled competition, which only added to the efficiency of the trade and, from Hecht’s point of view, served to keep prices down. Later still in the investigation, Ferri discovered that this rivalry was real enough that the members of the different groups referred to each other as being part of a “cordata.” In Italian, a cordata, coming from “corda,” the word for rope, refers to a group of rock climbers or mountaineers who are bound together on a mountainside for mutual safety. It was a vivid image, all too accurate.
Pasquale Camera’s organigram had outlined the overall organization of the illicit traffic, but the triangulations and the two distinct “cordate” brought extra levels of sophistication. As with the triangulations, the main purpose of these cordate was to keep the end point of the chain—collectors and museums—“clean.” The entire illicit trade out of Italy was organized so as to protect the sources of revenue.
It made cynical sense, but did the museums and collectors know all this? Pellegrini’s next task was to try to find out.
7
THE GETTY—THE “MUSEUM OF THE TOMBAROLI ”
ANYONE WHO IS REMOTELY INTERESTED in archaeology or antiquities cannot have failed to have heard of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Founded fairly recently, in 1954, by the oil billionaire, John Paul Getty, who died in 1976, the museum has made news time and again—sometimes for the right reasons, just as often for the wrong ones.
By all accounts, Getty himself was a fairly miserly and gloomy soul who only came alive when he was collecting art or antiquities (he famously said, “The poor shall inherit the earth—but not the mineral rights”). At Sutton Place, his house outside London, the hallway boasted a massive picture of a bull by Paulus Potter, the famous seventeenth-century Dutch animal painter, and a magnificent triptych by the British modernist Francis Bacon. Yet guests were expected to use the pay phone also installed there. He had begun collecting in earnest in 1938.
His first museum was housed at his ranch, his weekend house on the borders of Malibu. In 1974, however, he opened a brand new one near the beach at Malibu, on the Pacific Coast Highway, just north of Los Angeles, and this time he modeled the museum on the Villa dei Papiri, a rich Roman country house near Naples buried since the eruption of Mount Vesuvius and only partially excavated. The Villa dei Papiri had boasted a big library of scrolls, and scholars believe that the unexcavated part may still contain many originals of lost classics from the ancient world. The antiquities at Malibu were housed on the ground floor, paintings and decorative arts on the second floor.
After his death, the Getty Trust, formed to handle the impressive income from Getty Oil, had its own very special problems, one being that under U.S. law, in order to preserve its charitable status, it was required to spend a minimum percentage of the income from its $3 billion (now $5 billion) endowment within a specified amount of time. The museum was so cash rich there were fears it would distort the art market. That worry turned out to be exaggerated, and the Getty actually behaved quite discreetly on its way to acquiring a number of undoubted masterpieces in the realm of painting, including the Adoration of the Magi by Andrea Mantegna, Portrait of Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici by Jacopo Pontormo, and Irises by Vincent Van Gogh. It was also decided to build an entirely new museum, on a hilltop above the Santa Monica Freeway, at Sepulveda Pass, overlooking both the Pacific Ocean and Los Angeles itself. Designed by the architect Richard Meier, modeled on an Italian hilltop town, and faced with Travertine marble, the new museum opened amid much fanfare in 1997. One of its inaugural exhibitions was Beyond Beauty: Antiquities as Evidence, a seven-part exhibition in which one section considered how scholars cope with antiquities when their origin is not known, and a second dealt with faking and how it can be identified. Irony has run through the Getty ever since the man himself modeled his first museum on the Vesuvian Villa dei Papiri.
Over the years since Getty’s death, however, the museum has often been in the limelight for one controversy or another. Three have involved antiquities. The first was the case of Jiri Frel, an “electrically persuasive” curator who had once worked for Thomas Hoving and Dietrich von Bothmer at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Frel considered the Getty trustees as no more than a raft of “intellectual cripples,” and he was accused by Hoving in a book, Making the Mummies Dance, published in June 1996, of foisting “thousands of dubious works on the museum—for a tab totaling $14 million.” Frel was in fact forced to retire in 1985 after disclosures that he had traded inflated appraisals for donated antiquities. He moved to Italy, where for a while he took up his legal residence in the house in Castelvetrano in Sicily care of Gianfranco Becchina, one of the senior Italian names on Pasquale Camera’s organigram. At the Getty, Arthur Houghton took over as deputy curator and then Marion True was appointed to full curator.
Second, there was the matter of the Sevso treasure, fourteen magnificent pieces of Roman silver that appeared on the art market in London, via Switzerland, in mysterious circumstances in the early 1980s. These items were offered to the Getty in circumstances no less mysterious, in that the silver was purported to come from The Lebanon, but the export licenses turned out to be fake. The Getty played an active role in discovering that the export licenses were forged and did not acquire the silver, but neither did it alert any law enforcement or other authority as to what was afoot.
Two years later, in 1986, the Getty unveiled a new acquisition, a larger than life-size statue of a youth, known in Greek as a kouros. It had been acquired in Switzerland, the museum said, where it had been in a private collection since the 1930s. Stylistically, the statue appeared to date from the sixth century BC, but a controversy immediately erupted over its authenticity. As one scholar put it, “Why was the statue so pristine and white? Why did the style of the hair not match that of the feet? Would an ancient sculptor have mingled so many styles in one figure?” The discussion was not helped by the fact that most kouroi are in fragments; only thirteen are known that are as complete as the Getty figure (though it had arrived at the museum, in 1983, in seven pieces).
The Getty decided to have the marble tested, to see if it had come from one of the quarries known about in antiquity and to see whether the patina, or surface crust, was ancient or modern. The geologist asked to carry out the tests concluded that the marble was from the island of Thasos, in the north Aegean, an ancient quarry site, and that it had a “calcitic” patina that could have developed only over a long period of time.
Later, however, it turned out that the documents providing a Swiss provenance for the kouros were fake and that the surface patina was more complex than the original geologist had said and not necessarily ancient. It was also reported that the Getty was shown a marble torso, plainly fake, that had many similarities with the kouros. The Getty bought the fake, took the kouros off display, did more tests, and then transferred both statues to Greece in 1992, for an international colloquium to try and settle the issue. Despite this, scholars remained divided, though they were split along disciplinary lines: The art historians and archaeologists were convinced the kouros was a fake, whereas the scientists thought that the science proved it was genuine.
In Italy, it is fair to say, there was an added level of skepticism toward the Getty. This was for two reasons. In the first place, Italian archaeologists had not forgotten Dietrich von Bothmer, at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, for his role in the controversial acquisition of the Euphronios krater. In the 1970s and early 1980s, the curator of antiquities at the Getty was Jiri Frel, a former pupil of von Bothmer’s. In addition, other curators at the Getty who followed Frel, in particular Marion True, had also been students of von Bothmer. The Italians asked themselves if these students shared the same rather cavalier attitude to provenance that their teacher had revealed in the Euphronios krater affair.
A second reason for the Italian wariness of the Getty was due to its publication of Greek Vases in the J. Pa
ul Getty Museum. This catalog, published in six occasional installments, from 1983 to 2000, contained many vases that the Italians believed could only have come illicitly from Italy, and yet in the catalog they were given no provenance. This suggested, to the Italians at least, that the Getty curators did indeed share von Bothmer’s attitude toward provenance. In short, they weren’t overcareful about where their vases came from. Instead, they were busy making their mark, assertively acquiring and publishing their collection of Greek vases, intent on showing that the museum’s collection was rapidly achieving distinction.
Thus, it would also be fair to say that when Maurizio Pellegrini began sifting through the documents seized in Medici’s Geneva warehouse, he kept a special eye open for anything to do with the Getty Museum. He was not to be disappointed.
Section E of the public prosecutor’s preliminary report to the Rome court ahead of Medici’s trial in 2004 was devoted to Medici’s relations with the Getty, and it was by far the largest section. It began: “In spite of the fact that Medici was found in possession of tens of thousands of archaeological objects, and in spite of the fact that he dealt with the most important objects purloined from Italian territory—to the point of making [Frida] Tchacos-Nussberger describe him as being the ‘monopoliser’ of the market—Medici never appears among the sellers [to the museum] and he is never mentioned in official certificates.” Yet Pellegrini soon found that with no fewer than forty-two major acquisitions by the Getty, Medici was the source, and a number of the relevant people at the Getty knew it.