by Peter Watson
The ivory mask in particular was very valuable. Ivory sculptures, even in antiquity, were extremely rare. They were known as Chryselephantine sculptures, after the Greek for gold and ivory. (Great sculptures—such as the Athena Parthenos in the Acropolis in Athens, had their head, hands, and feet made of ivory, and their wooden or stone bodies covered in gold leaf.) Ivory was so expensive in antiquity that only emperors and other important figures could afford such statues. They were so rare that only one other life-size figure is known to have survived in Italy, found at Montecalvo (again, near Rome) and now in the Apostolic Library in the Vatican. And only one set of life-size Chryselephantine sculptures survives in Greece.
Casasanta smuggled the ivory and the three statues out of Italy himself and sold them to Nino Savoca. They agreed on a fee of $10 million.
Casasanta admitted to knowing Medici, having met him once in the “antiquities warehouse” (as he put it) of Franco Luzzi in Ladispoli. (Luzzi, it will be recalled, was mentioned in the organigram, where his area of influence is given as Ladispoli, on the coast north of Rome.) Casasanta said he had never done business with Medici—he didn’t like to deal with “Roman” dealers—but he had always known his name “because in their world he is a well-known figure.” He said that he had on a couple of occasions met Robert Hecht in Basel but that he’d not had “work” dealings with him, nor with Gianfranco Becchina. He had instead concluded a few “deals” with Ali Aboutaam abroad, for which he had “undergone penal procedures.” Casasanta’s problem was that the market “relative to his activity” was dominated by groups (the “cordate”), so he couldn’t even approach “certain milieus.” Casasanta, whose interrogation overlapped with Guarini’s, was the first person to use the word “cordata,” and he indicated that, for him, there were three groups, not two—one out of Italy via Savoca in Munich, one via Becchina in Basel, and one via Medici in Geneva. In his milieu, he said, “it was commonly believed by all that Medici was ‘il boss dei boss’ [the boss of bosses],” even though he, Casasanta, had no knowledge of specific facts. Casasanta believed that it had been Medici who had gotten him into trouble, putting the Carabinieri on to him when he had found the Capitoline Triad (and had left Medici out of the deal). Casasanta said it was rumored that “Medici was at the head of traffickings, a ‘general’ both in Italy and abroad, in London just as in Basel and Cerveteri.” (He meant Geneva, not Basel; it was all the same to him—Switzerland.) In particular, Franco Gangi, to whom Casasanta had sold the objects he dug up for fifteen years—from the end of the 1960s to the end of the 1980s—had told him that when he came into Etruria, “he would find ‘Giacomino’ Medici, because everything in Etruria went through Medici and one could not ‘work’ because Medici would always take everything and controlled the market through his many contacts and relations in the area.”
Casasanta gave an interesting account of Medici’s early years—how, for example, his parents had a stall at the Fontanella Borghese, where they sold small objects. For many years, Casasanta said, Medici had a man, Ermenegildo Foroni, known as “Scotchwhisky,” who acted as his shipper and sold goods abroad for him. This name, Ermenegildo Foroni, was of course one of the names on Pasquale Camera’s organigram. (Casasanta didn’t know about the organigram at the time of his interrogation.) It was common practice, he said, to use Swiss shippers to temporarily store objects on their way abroad. He confirmed that Pasquale Camera would organize thefts from museums and churches and that he had a close relationship with Nino Savoca in Munich—he was part of that cordata. To quote the official record of the interrogation, “Right back at the time when Camera was a lieutenant of the Finanza [Guardia di Finanza], Savoca and his wife would come to Etruria and would sleep at Casasanta’s house because they didn’t want to go to hotels [where they would have to register, showing their passports], thus avoiding being noticed and leaving their names around; then they [Casasanta and Savoca] would go together with Lello Camera [Lello is a nickname for Pasquale]—it was the early sixties—to get frescoes in Paestum.”
Broadening out, Casasanta said that the Euphronios krater had been found by a certain Renato, whose nickname was “Roscio.” He had been identified but had died. “Franco Gangi used to say he had given 180 million [lire, or $150,000] to Giacomo Medici to buy the Euphronios krater and Medici had ‘nicked’ the money and had sold the vase to others.” Through Nino Savoca, Casasanta had met a “lady, about 35—40 years old in 1995,” introduced as the deputy director of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, who had come to see a Roman head at Casasanta’s home; afterward Nino Savoca had bought the head “following the indications of the woman.” In 1970, he had made a fabulous find, much more important than the Capitoline Triad; he had found over sixty sculptures. He had sold them for not very much to Roman dealers, and the greater part of these had later been bought by Robin Symes and Christo Michaelides. In the autumn of 1970, they came to Rome and often bought objects excavated by Casasanta.
Mario Bruno, he said, was a friend of his, a dealer who operated in Etruria and Puglia, where everybody worked, and he would sell the archaeological material abroad. “He lived in Lugano where he had a villa on the lake. He knew Giacomo Medici and Bruno used to speak badly of him since they were competitors in trafficking archaeological material from Italy, both busy trying to buy the best objects that came to light.” He (Casasanta) had given the Triad to Bruno. Becchina had a fabulous gallery in Basel. It was some years since he had retired to his villa in Sicily, though he had been very active for fifteen or twenty years before. “Becchina used to buy archaeological material principally in Sicily where he had some good suppliers who had also got him some valuable pieces. In Etruria he used to buy from tombaroli who would bring him the merchandise to Basel. Becchina, from being absolutely nothing, from being an emigrant with a small suitcase, had gone to Switzerland, had in some way begun his work in Basel and had become a multimillionaire. Becchina bought himself a large estate in his hometown, he bought a baronial palazzo where he lives alone with four to five servants. . . .” Casasanta knew Frida Tchacos well. He’d also sold her a small head in Zurich in 1990–1993. “Tchacos was powerful and tied to the Symeses and had noteworthy means at her disposal.”
The fact was, the paperwork discovered in Geneva was beginning to work. The details revealed in the Freeport, plus the organigram, convinced the smaller fry at least that their interests lay in cooperating with Conforti and Ferri. The public prosecutor was encouraged. But he would be much more encouraged if he could find that memoir by Hecht that Savoca had mentioned to Guarini, and which had been referred to, so tantalizingly, in the phone taps. Did the memoir exist?
12
THE PARIS RAID ON ROBERT HECHT
IN THE NEXT PART of the investigation, Ferri relied initially on what are known in English as “letters rogatory.” These are, essentially, requests for help in investigations from the judicial authority in one country to the judicial authority in another country. They are cumbersome and unwieldy. A public prosecutor like Ferri will prepare the paperwork, showing the legal grounds and a prima facie case for the investigation, which is passed from the Italian Ministry of Justice to the ministry of justice in France or Britain or the United States. The ministry in the receiving country then passes on the written request to whatever judicial office or police force the proposed investigation might concern. Any reply goes via the same route in reverse. Such a rigmarole can and does take months. It is not unknown for answers to be more than a year in coming back. Often, there is no reply at all. It was a matter of considerable regret, on Ferri’s part, that while he secured prompt and willing cooperation from the French, slower but still willing cooperation from the Swiss and Germans, and grudging cooperation from the Americans, the British and the Danes were totally unhelpful.
Fortunately, the man whom Conforti and Ferri were interested in above all others, Robert Hecht, now lived in Paris and the French police were more cooperative than most. Following the arrival of the material from Gen
eva in Rome at the end of June 2000, Ferri immediately issued a letter rogatory for a raid on Hecht’s apartment in the Boulevard Latour Maubourg, in the Seventh Arrondissement of Paris, near the Invalides and Napoleon’s tomb. Even though the French were totally cooperative, permission for the raid didn’t come through for some months. The raid was finally scheduled for February 16, 2001.
Two of Conforti’s most experienced men and four French police officers took part. Hecht, they knew, had an apartment in New York. The Americans had already denied them permission to raid that address because, the Americans said, the information the Italians had about him was “not recent.” The fact that the Swiss had held on to the documents for so long was already taking its toll. Furthermore, technically the Paris apartment was in the name of Hecht’s wife—in other words, it wasn’t his. Fortunately for the Italians, the French were not as persnickety as the Americans. “In Paris, we had zero difficulty,” says Conforti.
Robert Hecht’s family founded the Hecht chain of department stores and he grew up in Baltimore. Born in 1919, he attended Haverford College, outside Philadelphia. He learned Latin in high school, started Greek at college, and had begun graduate work in archaeology when he was called up in World War II. After serving in the navy, he spent a year at Zurich University working on a Ph.D., then won a two-year fellowship at the American Academy in Rome. In 1950, he turned from the academic life to dealing art and made his first sale, an Apulian vase of the fourth century BC, which he sold to the Metropolitan in New York. Balding, with a fringe of white hair, Hecht walks with a limp now, though he has never allowed an artificial hip to stop him from playing tennis, one of his passions. The others—besides antiquities—are his two daughters, claret, and backgammon. He is an inveterate gambler.
The Paris apartment was on the second floor. The senior French officer knocked on the door. Hecht’s wife, Elisabeth, opened it. At first she tried to resist the incoming policemen. She said Hecht wasn’t there and, moreover, that he did not live there, and hadn’t for fifteen years. The police—both French and Italian—were expecting this (it was a familiar delaying tactic) and presented her with a simple ultimatum: Either she could let them in willingly, in which case they promised not to enter her own bedroom; or they could do it the hard way, break down the door if she barred them, when they would go through the entire apartment.
She let them in.
Inside, it was “[n]ot luxurious, but elegant,” says one of the men who was there. A spacious hallway featured an impressive chandelier, and the apartment had two bedrooms. The furniture was antique rather than modern. There was a study on the left, but Elisabeth led them to one of the bedrooms, which, she indicated, was Hecht’s. The two Carabinieri in the raiding party had often enjoyed a joke that in the movies, police searching an apartment always look first under the bed. In real life, no one ever hides anything under the bed. Well, on this occasion—at the very moment they entered the bedroom, they could see some white plastic shopping bags wedged under the bed. They placed them on top of the covers, and reached inside. The first things they took out were some ancient vases—Attic, Apulian, Corinthian—full of earth. Then they found a bronze helmet, and a bronze belt, both dusted in soil. Next they came across a number of vase fragments, in the same dirty condition.
The rest of the discoveries that day were mixed. There were several folders with photographs packed inside. One contained thirteen Polaroids, all marked with the same serial number. These showed an oinochoe with a wild boar, the base of a large vase, possibly Apulian, a bronze mirror with two warriors, a winged figure—and one showed a sculpture-antefix with two horses’ heads. Polaroids of an identical object were found among Medici’s documents in Geneva (which by now, of course, were in Rome).
Another file had fifteen color photographs showing female busts, “very dirty with earth,” according to the official report on the raid. They were ready to be cleaned and restored. Then there were photographs of the twenty red-figure Attic plates, the same as had been found in the safe at Geneva, and exactly the same set of photographs as Medici had, including the one with the tag on it that said “21 pieces 2,000.”m These were in a folder with a copy of the letter that Hecht had sent to the Getty in which he informed the museum that he had the plates on consignment from Medici. A final folder of photographs showed twenty-three objects, each of which had been found in Medici’s photograph albums seized in Geneva.
Among the letters was one dated April 18, 1991, from Felicity Nicholson, director of Sotheby’s Antiquities Department, to Editions Services at 7 Avenue Krieg, Geneva. It included this paragraph: “We also have an Attic black-figure Panathenaic Amphora which Bob Hecht asked should be put in your name. This we intend to include in our July sale.” Sotheby’s, or at least Felicity Nicholson, was perfectly aware of the Medici-Hecht cordata.
In a sense, however, these photographs and letters, though very useful as corroboration, only confirmed what Ferri and Pellegrini already knew, that Medici was responsible for bringing illicit material out of Italy and that Hecht was the main conduit between him and the world’s collectors and the great museums. And that members of the cordata traded antiquities in each other’s name. In contrast, the other documentation found in Hecht’s Paris apartment was much more interesting for the fresh light it threw on the world inhabited by him and Medici.
The most dismaying was a series of letters that General Conforti, writing in his capacity as head of the Carabinieri Art Squad, had sent to William Luers, the president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, about the Morgantina silver.n In his letter, dated November 15, 1996, Conforti referred to some letters rogatory that were being prepared in relation to the silver that, he said, had been “unlawfully excavated,” but he raised the possibility that the Met might want to return the treasure voluntarily “with adequate publicity.” Ashton Hawkins, executive vice president and counsel to the trustees, replied, saying that the museum “remained convinced of the facts as they were given at the time of the purchase.” Hawkins was polite but firm, and Conforti was rebuffed. One is prompted to ask why Hecht had been sent this correspondence. What interest did Hecht have in the Morgantina silver? According to the museum’s official account, the silver pieces came from Turkey and were acquired legally, in Switzerland. What role had Hecht played in the museum’s acquisitions of them? The suggestion that arises from this scenario, that the Metropolitan Museum in New York is in a closer, cozier relationship with the antiquities underworld than it is with the legitimate police authorities, is disappointing, to say the least.
The nature of Hecht’s close relations with museums—and theirs with him—was further reinforced by two other documents found in Boulevard Latour Maubourg. These were notices, sent to two museums and signed by Conforti, that announced that the Carabinieri was putting on its Web site 500 images of archaeological objects that had been stolen or illegally excavated in Lazio, Puglia, Campania, and Sicily; in other words, these objects had been looted and Conforti was asking the museum directors to look out for them. What did the directors do? They sent the information to Hecht. Why? Could it be they were warning him? Once again, it seems that some of the world’s museums are on more intimate terms with the sources of illicit antiquities than they are with the legitimate police authorities. One of the museums was the archaeological museum in Geneva, the other had its name obscured with white-out. One of the Carabinieri lifted the page up to the light. Held in that way, the name of the second museum was clearly visible: the Archaeological Museum in Munich (the Antikensammlung). Why did the museum want its name covered up?
There was one other document of consequence that the Carabinieri came across that February day in Paris. Ever since the discovery of Pasquale Camera’s organigram in 1995, the Italian authorities had realized that Hecht was the main figure, the top man at the head of the cordate that smuggled material out of Italy. But, more than that, during the subsequent investigations, discussed in the previous chapter, they had picked up from variou
s sources the fact that many of the lesser figures were frightened of Hecht and intimidated by him. The main reason for this, as Ferri was told, was that Hecht had let it be known—among those he dealt with regularly—that he was writing a book about the antiquities underworld. Although Hecht never actually said so (he was too clever), the implication of this was that anyone who stepped out of line, anyone who crossed him, anyone who tried to bypass him, anyone who tried to usurp his role, anyone who tried to poach his contacts would be named in the book and exposed. It was never made clear whether Hecht would publish the book in his lifetime or, as some sources appeared to have been told, after his death, to provide funds for his wife to live on. Each time Ferri, Pellegrini, or any of Conforti’s men heard about this “book” or “memoir,” the more intrigued they became. By the time they obtained permission to raid Hecht’s flat, on that February day in 2001, it was the main thing they were looking for.
Naturally, the discovery of the letters and Polaroids at Boulevard Latour Maubourg provoked much discussion among the raiding party, especially the Italians. Besides discussing the decoration on the vases that had been found, they naturally referred to other, related documentation found in Geneva that fitted with what they were uncovering in Paris. At this point, however, one of Conforti’s men noticed Elisabeth Hecht listening in on what they were saying. This was odd because when they had entered the hallway to the apartment, at the beginning of the raid, she had spoken French to the French policemen and, in response to a direct question, had denied being able to speak Italian. Neither of the Carabinieri gave it a thought to begin with. But then one of them recalled that among Hecht’s correspondence was a letter to his wife at Via di Villa Pepoli—she had lived in Italy. And so he gave her a fresh ultimatum. Either he and his colleague would step away and discuss their next moves out of earshot, or they could all speak Italian.