by Peter Watson
There are two responses to this theory. First, as was explained in detail, k it does not follow at all that “ordinary” material is necessarily unimportant. Its distribution, context, dating, and material of construction, along with any inscriptions it may bear, can all affect its importance. The second response is of course that Medici’s main concern was with important objects—museum-quality objects worth at least $100,000 each and crafted by the most important and accomplished artists of antiquity, objects he was so proud of that he crossed oceans to have his photograph taken with them on display in museums, objects so important he had to hide behind a whole network of fellow conspirators so he couldn’t be linked directly with major museums.
This puts a new light on the antiquities auctions in London and New York. All the people mentioned in this book—Medici, Symes, Hecht, Koutoulakis, Tchacos, the Aboutaams—use the auctions. No doubt they provide a bread-and-butter income, but most of the objects they deal in at the salesrooms are relatively unimportant (not invariably, but mostly).
Critics say that if the auctions of unprovenanced material are abolished, as many would like, the trade will go underground. But what the Medici material shows, in particular the laundering activity through London and New York, is that it is already underground. The important material never comes anywhere near the salesrooms. This is another sense in which the antiquities trade is organized. The organization of the salesrooms—whether the salesrooms themselves realize it or not—is designed to mislead.
Pellegrini’s identification of the London and New York laundries was, perhaps, the niftiest piece of intellectual detective work connected with the Medici documentation. As it happened, it also proved to be the exercise that broke the logjam with the Swiss.
Pellegrini had had his first inkling of what was going on in London back in November 1999, that drizzly, gloomy afternoon sitting at his desk in his office in the Villa Giulia. By the time he had tracked all the other examples and had gotten some replies from Sotheby’s, it was well into 2000. But that was precisely the time when the Swiss and the U.S. courts were agreeing on the massive liability of Swiss banks to Holocaust victims. When the Swiss learned that Medici’s warehouse in Geneva was in part a repository of laundered antiquities, their attitude changed, and changed rapidly. In addition to the Holocaust business, Switzerland was sensitive to being a conduit for drug-trade money laundering. And so, in the second week of March, the prosecutor general of the Geneva canton finally ruled that there was sufficient evidence to consider Medici guilty of receiving and thus causing “damage” to the Italian state. Two days later, on the 15th (the “Ides”) of March, the Swiss Embassy in Rome made a formal request to Italy to proceed against Medici for the crimes of “appropriazione indebita” (“undue appropriation,” or “receiving”) and theft, committed in Switzerland. Exactly a week later, the Italian Ministry of Justice formally initiated proceedings against Medici for his crimes committed in Switzerland, and on June 2 the entire contents of Corridor 17—all of the documents, the Polaroids, the prints, the negatives, and the seized objects, with and without Sotheby’s labels—became available to Conforti, Ferri, and Pellegrini.
At last. Within ten days, a firm of removal experts was found and hired, and two trucks were dispatched to Geneva with a ten-man crew. Supervised by Conforti’s Carabinieri, it took them two whole weeks to load the contents of Medici’s warehouse into crates and then on to the trucks. But by the end of June, it was done. There was a last-minute glitch at the barrier of the Freeport. Since September 1995, when Corridor 17 had been sealed with wax by the Swiss magistrate, no rent had been paid. The management of the Freeport would not let the trucks leave until the rental arrears had been cleared. Fortunately, Ferri had foreseen this problem and had issued the Carabinieri the authority to pay the bill.
When they reached Rome, the trucks separated. The one carrying the archaeological objects made for the Villa Giulia, where the antiquities were unloaded and stored in a reconstructed Etruscan temple, situated in the gardens of the museum. The other truck, with the documents, went to Piazzale Clodio and the Palazzo di Giustizia, where Ferri had his offices.
Finally, the evidence was on Italian soil. Pellegrini’s elucidation of the paper trail was as convincing as it was shaming of so many figures. But now that Ferri had the originals under his control, he had some real muscle. Now the interrogations could begin. And there was no question about where he would start—with a visit to Paris to meet Robert Hecht.
11
PHONE TAPS AND THE GREAT RUMOR
IT WILL NOT HAVE GONE UNNOTICED that several earlier investigations into the illicit traffic in antiquities by the Italian authorities had foundered because, once the alleged tombaroli or smugglers had been arraigned in court, they denied what they had earlier told undercover police, confided to journalists, or admitted on arrest. In most cases, the Italian authorities were unable to make the charges stick because, as Hecht—among others—noted several times, it was always impossible to prove that the objects under scrutiny really had been excavated illegally inside Italy. Independent and incontrovertible photographic or other documentary evidence didn’t exist.
But in Medici’s case, of course, all that had changed. This time there was an amazing richness of material: some 4,000 photographs, tens of thousands of documents, 4,000 looted antiquities. Not only was this material evidence invaluable in its own right, but it also gave Ferri a crucial advantage over some of his earlier colleagues: It provided him with ammunition he could use to search and interrogate other suspects in the Medici network. It was clear that Medici was the biggest quarry the Italian authorities had ever had in their sights in this particular area of underworld activity and that the biggest trial of its kind was envisaged. Serious resources were being thrown at the problem. The photographs, invoices, and letters, not to mention the spread of Italian antiquities in the museums of the world, meant that Ferri could confront a whole raft of tombaroli, dealers, auctioneers, academics, and curators with hard evidence of their culpability, something no one had really been able to do before in this field. The situation was unprecedented.
Conforti recognized it. “After the material arrived from Switzerland, I took satisfaction in holding the Polaroids in my hands. The pleasure of finding myself with something solid, something substantial . . . knowing that we could now put the prosecutor to work on real evidence, on proof.” But Conforti wasn’t going to sit back. He recalled his time in Naples, fighting the Camorra. Then there had been a special Carabinieri unit, battling against the Red Brigade. Conforti had learned a thing or two from these operations, and he now adapted those earlier tactics in the field of antiquities looting.
“I said to the chief public prosecutor, look, at this moment we have 270 proceedings against various individuals. They are all separate. Why don’t we create a pool of magistrates, just as there is with the Anti-Mafia Pool in Palermo, the Clean-Hands Pool [anti-corruption] in Milan, a pool of magistrates who will deal with this kind of criminality, who can work together, exchange information, and become expert in the field they are prosecuting. And so, over time, the same thing was done—in Bari, Turin, Florence, and Palermo.” Paolo Giorgio Ferri, part of the Rome pool, became expert in the laws, not just of Italy but of Switzerland, Britain, Germany, and the United States. Between them they worked out the order of trials, designed to put increasing pressure on the culprits, beginning at the bottom and working up. This book appears partway through that process, and readers may judge for themselves how successful the Italian tactics have been.
We have said that the turning point in the investigation, so far as the interrogations were concerned, came when the Swiss decided to take no action against Medici but instead turned all the evidence over to the Italians. That is true. However, for a variety of reasons, Ferri was able to conduct some interviews before the Swiss decision. For example, the documentation taken from Sotheby’s by James Hodges was not in Switzerland and, as soon as we realized that Sotheby’s w
as not going to take any legal action against us, we made our material available to Ferri. He was able to act on this well before 2000.
In fact, he was able to interrogate Henri Albert Jacques as early as September 11, 1995, two days before the raid on the Freeport. He could do this because Editions Services—for which Jacques was the administrator—in addition to consigning for sale at Sotheby’s a stolen sarcophagus from the San Saba church in Rome,l had also handled an object stolen from an Italian citizen living in the Latina area, a few miles south of Rome. The movement of stolen objects that have crossed international borders has always been easier to investigate than the smuggling of looted antiquities.
In his interrogation, Jacques confirmed that Editions Services was a Panamanian company created in 1981 and bought in 1986 by Giacomo Medici. In 1991, he said, the company had rented rooms in the Geneva Freeport, from Mat Securitas SA. He said that “the only purpose of the company was that of collecting the proceeds deriving from antiquities sales at Sotheby’s in London, and that purchases were made exclusively through Sotheby’s.” It was Medici, he said, who managed these sales and kept the proceeds, and he observed that “no bookkeeping of any kind had ever been maintained.” He also gave it as his view that “very many objects, also of great value, had been handled through Sotheby’s.” He insisted that he was only the administrator and that Medici had all the “economic rights” in the company. But Jacques did admit that he was the administrator of other companies, including Tecafin S.A. and Xoilan Trader, Inc. He had administered Xoilan since 1976. He himself had started this company for an English citizen, Robin Symes.
Danilo Zicchi, of course, was interrogated immediately after his premises were discovered in February 1996. He fleshed out the general picture given here in two ways. He confirmed—and this was very important as evidence—that the organigram was indeed in Pasquale Camera’s handwriting, and he revealed that sometime around the end of 1994 or beginning of 1995, Camera had told him about a treasure of more than 100 Roman silver pieces that had been found in the Vesuvian area. (This is by no means improbable. In July 2005, a 2,000-year-old silver dining service—twenty goblets, plates, and trays—buried in volcanic ash in Pompeii when Vesuvius erupted, went on exhibit at the archaeological site, after being unearthed by workers digging a new highway that will pass near the Pompeii ruins.) Zicchi said the treasure was of such a quality that it could only be compared to two similar ones, the Pisanella Treasure at the Louvre (this 109-piece silver hoard was excavated in 1895 at the Villa Pisanella in Herculaneum and given to the Louvre by Edmond de Rothschild), and that of the House of the Menandro, discovered in the basement of the home of the Pompeian poet Menandro, in 1930, and now at the National Archaeological Museum in Naples. Together with the clandestine silver, Zicchi said that a few hundred gold and silver coins had been found, also from the Roman era, of the Julius Claudian dynasty (which ruled in the first century BC and the first century AD). This treasure, “found in about 1990 by an elderly person,” had, he said, been bought by a Benedetto D’Aniello of the Naples area (named in the organigram), who had sold it to Giacomo Medici. Camera had revealed all this to Zicchi because he was furious that the treasure had been “dismembered.” This had happened, apparently, after Medici took the hoard to Switzerland and sold part of it to “the Symeses.” Other parts had been sold to a Persian (whom Zicchi named), a man living in Switzerland but with a warehouse in London.
Then there were a number of tombaroli whom Ferri interrogated as part of Operation Geryon. On occasion, their information—backed up by phone taps—confirmed the emerging picture of the organization of the cordate. One was Walter Guarini, interrogated several times in March 1999. Guarini was a tombarolo from Puglia who had stepped up the ladder and become an important middleman-dealer in his own right. The Carabinieri had had their eyes on him for some time, and Guarini, no fool, had several times given them tip-offs and information when—of course—these didn’t directly jeopardize his own activity. Guarini confirmed that Hecht has “always been Number One in the world, for many years.” Here is the next exchange:PUBLIC PROSECUTOR [DR. FERRI]: Do you know if Hecht is the person to whom all of Europe turns to launder these objects, or not?
GUARINI: A large part turns to him.
P. P.: To launder them?
G.: Yes, to sell them. But not only Italians, also foreigners: Turks, Lebanese, Syrians . . .
P. P.: “Launder” is quite a scientific term in this field. You see, I wanted to be precise about this.
G.: Put them on the market.
P. P.: And why did he [Medici] not, for example, go directly to the Paul Getty Museum?
G.: I think that the Getty uses a filter to buy certain artifacts.
P. P.: Why do they use a filter?
G.: Because I believe Bob Hecht is highly accredited for his profession, which he has been practicing for forty years, almost fifty years.
P. P.: So this filter is in charge of buying and selling?
G.: He’s certainly the reference point.
Guarini also set down the names of those in the various cordate, specifying who was linked to whom. He listed a raft of tombaroli names from Puglia, Sicily, Campania, and Lazio who supplied Savoca, including [Vincenzo] Cammarata; he listed the people in Naples and Rome who supplied Frida Tchacos, including Pasquale Camera; he said that “Frida’s contacts abroad are [Michael] Steinhardt [a New York dealer], Leon Levy, Jiri Frel, and Marion True.”
Then came this next exchange. It appears that during Ferri’s discussions with Guarini about Robert Hecht, Guarini happened to mention a memoria (memoir) that Hecht was writing. (Remember that this interrogation took place in 1999.)
Ferri leaped on this reference because in their phone taps, the Carabinieri had more than once heard mention of a “memoria,” yet hadn’t been able to make sense of what they heard. Was it something written? A tape? And what was its purpose?
P.P.: What is this memoria of Bob Hecht? Bob Hecht’s memoria—what is it?
G.: I heard about it in Savoca’s house, at Nino’s . . .
P.P.: In what year?
G.: Last year, or two years ago.
P.P.: And where is this memoria?
G.: This memoria is . . . it appears that Bob has it, that he wrote all . . . all his trafficking [“traffico”] in the last years with all the characters . . .
P.P.: It’s not that Nino Savoca had the memoria of . . .
G.: No, no. He didn’t have it nor did he know . . . in fact, at the time he was afraid of this memoria.
P.P.: Savoca was afraid of this memoria? Why?
G.: Probably because they too were in this memoria.
P.P.: Of course, I imagine so . . .
G.: Just as all the dealers who had anything to do with . . .
P.P.: I understand . . .
[deletion for legal reasons]
P.P.: . . . in the end I suppose I’ll have to say thank you to good Mr. Guarini, but at the moment I can’t say thank you, because the members of your cordata have not emerged. So, this memoria of Bob Hecht’s?
G.: If I had it, Doctor, I’d give it to you immediately . . .
P.P.: And Savoca hasn’t got it by any chance?
G.: No, no. They’re all so afraid, Doctor . . .
P.P.: Who?
G.: Savoca also is afraid of the . . .
P.P.: They haven’t got it, no . . . ?
G.: . . . of the direct contacts . . .
P.P.: . . . in some floppy disk?
G.: No, no, absolutely not, because when . . . the guy who died [Savoca died in 1998] was telling me, that when this subject was touched, Bob Hecht became secretive, and then without putting . . . without recording please . . . Can I say something without recording?
P.P.: Oh no, you can’t. Better that you keep it to yourself. Not to me. Nothing doing.
G.: No, well . . . It concerned Bob, who is an extremely dangerous man. Absolutely.
P.P.: Oh, I imagine so; he’s central to international tr
afficking [“traffici internazionali”] for the past twenty years.
G.: Yes, but apart from this, he’s dangerous.
Another tombarolo was Pietro Casasanta. Among tomb robbers in Italy, Casasanta is notorious. A rough, portly chain-smoker in his late sixties who lives in Anguillara, north of Rome near the shores of Lake Bracciano, he began digging in 1960 and told us that he has discovered “about a hundred villas” (he does not, he says, “plunder tombs”). He is notorious for making three extraordinary discoveries. In 1970, he found L’Inviolata, a large settlement, a temple cult that he says contained sixty-three statues, twenty-five of them life-size. Many of these, he says, he sold to Robin Symes. He returned to L’Inviolata in 1992 and discovered the famous Capitoline Triad, a six-ton marble statue of three seated gods—Jupiter, with a sheaf of lightning in one hand and an eagle at his feet, Juno, with a scepter and a peacock, and Minerva, with a shaft and an owl. Made of Lunense marble, this sculpture is unique, the only example depicting this triad that is intact. After a two-year Operation Juno, the piece was recovered by the Carabinieri and is now displayed in the Palestrina National Archaeological Museum in Palestrina, a town southwest of Rome (L’Inviolata is in Palestrina municipal district). Casasanta was jailed for twelve months. Then, in 1995—that is, within a year of his release from prison—he discovered an ivory head of Apollo, dating from the fifth century BC, and three Egyptian statues of goddesses, two in green granite and one in black. He found these, he says, in a field not far from a well-known archaeological landmark, the Baths of Claudius, and he believes he discovered a luxurious villa that belonged to the family of the first-century Roman emperor Claudius.