The Medici Conspiracy

by Peter Watson

  Conforti’s man looked at Harry Bürki, who now admitted that this apartment belonged to his father, Fritz, who was abroad.

  They thereupon thoroughly searched the upstairs apartment, finding many archaeological objects, some with Becchina tags on them. They were all photographed and seized and, somewhat later, the photographs were sent to Rome. There they were examined by Daniela Rizzo so that she could identify whether they had in fact come from Italy. Armed with this information, Ferri and Rizzo returned to Zurich some weeks later to interrogate both Bürkis, father and son.

  Neither was very helpful at first. The interrogations, which lasted three hours, took place at their laboratory.

  Fritz Bürki began by conceding that he knew that most of the objects he had been asked to restore in his career came from illegal digs, even though everyone pretended such antiquities were part of their “family heritage.” When shown photographs of the Guglielmi tripod,r he said he had never seen it, only heard about it five or ten years before. After being shown the J. P. Getty documents relating to the acquisition of the self-same object—which he had signed—he immediately changed his account and said that Mario Bruno had asked him to sign the document as “lender” (by the time of the interrogation, Bruno, the dealer from Lugano described in Chapter 11 was dead). Fritz Bürki didn’t know why Bruno used him as a “front,” he said, but speculated that since Bruno was known as a receiver of stolen goods, perhaps the museum didn’t wish to have direct contact with him. He didn’t know how Bruno had come into possession of the tripod, he said, and later on informed the Getty that Hecht and Atlantis (and not he himself) were the true owners of the object.

  He said he knew Medici, but the latter had never been to his laboratory and he, Bürki, never bought anything from Medici, nor did he restore objects for him. Ferri then showed him some photographs of vases before restoration that had been found in Medici’s Geneva warehouse. Fritz Bürki claimed not to recognize them. Ferri paused, for effect, then pointed out that the furniture and the wallpaper shown in the background of the photographs were exactly the same as that in the room where the interrogation was taking place.

  Grudgingly, Bürki admitted to having some dealings with Atlantis Antiquities and to having restored the Euphronios krater, for which he’d made out a regular invoice, but he refused to answer further questions on the grounds that he had already been questioned (thirty years before, however). Ferri noted that there was a photograph of the Euphronios krater on Bürki’s desk. Bürki could not explain how Medici’s name and details were in his agenda, or why his were in Medici’s. He claimed that what Medici said with regard to his—Bürki’s—delivery of objects to the Freeport for sale was untrue; Medici was lying. He had no memory of specific antiquities or what he might have been paid for working on them.

  He did admit to having acted as a “front” for Hecht, who was his most important client, but denied acting as a “front” for anyone else. He knew Becchina but said he had never been to his laboratory, and Bürki could not explain why some of the objects in his laboratory at the time of the raid had tags with Becchina’s name on them.

  He admitted that his son and he had restored the Pompeian frescoes, of which he was shown photographs. He said that he had never seen the photographs of the frescoes on the clandestine dig, but that the frescoes themselves arrived cut into eleven pieces. The restoration had lasted twelve to eighteen months, and the objects were on his premises for at least three years.

  His son was no more forthcoming. Harry Bürki knew Medici, he said. He had seen him at Sotheby’s auctions but did not store objects in Medici’s warehouse, did not buy anything from him, and claimed that where his name was included in Medici’s documentation, it was false. But he did admit that in restoring the Pompeian frescoes with his father, he had seen the photographs taken in Pompeii by the tombaroli and admitted it was possible Marion True might have seen the frescoes in the Bürkis’ laboratory. He knew Becchina, he said, but the objects on the Bürkis’ Zurich premises bearing Becchina tags had been bought in Munich about five months previously, from someone now dead. He too could not explain why the tags were there and had Becchina’s name on them.

  He admitted that “[p]erhaps he sold some objects to the Getty but he does not remember.” Harry Bürki did not remember from whom he had bought the Etruscan tripod, sold to the Getty for $65,000, but he excluded Medici. Over the years, he said, he sold about ten objects to the Getty, using Hecht as intermediary.

  The Bürkis admitted as little as possible, but even so their dissembling was quite obvious.

  Frida Tchacos was interrogated in rather dramatic circumstances that came about partly by accident. The route to her went via the statue of the Artemis, a photograph of which had been found in the glove compartment in Pasquale Camara’s Renault, the one that overturned on the Autostrade del Sole near Cassino and killed him. The Artemis was important partly because three other versions of it were known, all of which were in Italian museums, and partly because it might be the Greek original of those Roman copies. Even if it were a Roman copy itself, it was still valuable and it would be important to find out where it had been excavated.

  Danilo Zicchi, Camera’s colleague, in whose apartment the Artemis had been photographed after it left the butcher shop, said that he thought Frida Thacos was involved with the statue. Walter Guarini, the Puglia tombarolo we met in Chapter 11, was known to be one of the main suppliers to Frida, so pressure was now put on him to help with the return of the Artemis.

  Sure enough, the statue was returned. It was left in a field near Bari and the local police alerted by an anonymous telephone call. That seemed to have concluded the matter—except that one day while going through the transcripts of some telephone taps, Ferri happened to notice that members of the cordata were still referring to a statue of Artemis. A frightening thought occurred to Ferri: Was the statue that had been returned a fake? The sculpture returned in Bari had been examined by experts and declared genuine, and its measurements conformed exactly to the other three known works. But still . . .

  Ferri had other experts look at the Artemis, and they made an unusual observation. The measurements of the “Bari” Artemis, if we can call it that, were indeed exactly what they should have been, except that in the case of the recovered statue, its height was the same as all the others including the base. Clearly, the forger had designed his work using good photos and had been given the dimensions. However, he had misunderstood that the height of the statue referred to the Artemis without its base. The Bari figure, if not the entire ensemble, was a good few inches shorter than it should have been.

  It was clear that the Bari statue was a serious attempt to mislead the law enforcement authorities—it took money, time, and not a little skill to create such a forgery. All this was confirmed when Conforti found the forger and he confessed. Conforti and Ferri were both incensed. Yet more pressure was put on Guarini, and he admitted that the real Artemis was still with Frida Tchacos in Switzerland, whereupon Ferri issued an international warrant for Tchacos’s arrest and initiated the legal process for her extradition to Italy. Now she couldn’t travel—the minute she crossed any international border, she would be arrested and held.

  While the extradition process was working its way through the Swiss legal system, Ferri received a visit in Rome from Tchacos’s lawyers, seeking agreement. After several hours of discussion, Ferri agreed that he would drop the charges against her if she complied with two demands. First, the real Artemis must be returned, and second, she must write a detailed memoir, setting out what she knew about the antiquities underworld in general, naming names and giving particulars about Medici’s and Hecht’s and Symes’s operations. And here there arose a misunderstanding that, eventually, would work to Ferri’s advantage.

  Tchacos agreed to Ferri’s conditions and, before long, the Artemis was returned to Italy. At this point, Ferri rescinded his extradition request. But Tchacos never complied with the second request, and never sent Fer
ri a memoir. Maybe she didn’t think it mattered, that what Ferri really wanted all along was the Artemis. But the public prosecutor is a stickler for the rules of fairness, and to him a deal is a deal. And so, although he withdrew the extradition request, he did not withdraw the international warrant for Tchacos’s arrest.

  Therefore, when Tchacos—believing that there were no legal impediments hanging over her—next took a trip abroad, she was in for a surprise. She had a brother who lived in Cyprus, and in the second week of February 2002, she landed at Limassol airport. At passport control, she was recognized, arrested, and held. The Italians were informed, and she was kept in jail overnight, before being placed under house arrest at her brother’s. It took three or four days before Ferri and two of Conforti’s senior men could get to Limassol, and the intervening period was clearly a distressing experience for her and may help explain why, during her interrogation, when it came, she was so cooperative. It may also have had something to do with the fact the Ferri, normally so mild-mannered, now saw his chance and, sensing Tchacos was vulnerable in Cyprus, agreed to hurry only if she agreed, in his words, to “amply cooperate.” She agreed, he hurried, and she was interviewed over two days on February 17 and 18, 2002.

  What he wanted from her was what he had originally asked for—a memoir, her view of the way the underworld really worked, and the part played in it by Medici, Hecht, Symes, and the others. She did not disappoint this time, immediately confirming the existence of the cordate. She said Symes had told her Hecht was a dangerous man, that she too found him “vindictive” and was afraid of him. She confirmed that Medici was Hecht’s “right-hand man,” that Hecht was writing a book to be published after his death, for the benefit of his wife, and that he had once photographed Symes when he was holding something “compromising”—in other words, looted.

  She went on to say that the Aboutaams were replacing the older dealers. In 2001, Harry Bürki had told her he no longer restored—only traded. Medici was not an expert, she said: “[H]e really couldn’t recognize one painter from another, just as I can’t.” But he was well aware of when he was selling fakes. The Symeses (i.e., Robin Symes and Christo Michaelides) had sold a marble Venus by Doidalses (one of the more famous classical Greek sculptors) to Jiri Frel at the Getty. It was fake and originated, she thought, with Medici. She had met Medici in the 1970s “and at that time he was already a person of intres . . . an important person.” He already had premises in the Freeport in Geneva and asked her there to see some marbles. Among these marbles was a Venus by Doidalses (a Venus “acoupis,” crouching), but most of the objects there that day were fake. She said the Getty had already bought one like it: “It was already known that these fake Venuses were on the market.”

  She confirmed that Medici was known as the biggest dealer, “that he had contacts with all . . . with all the big dealers, the biggest dealers . . . with Hecht mainly, [but] not with Gianfranco Becchina—they hated each other.” She knew that Medici had the Hydra Gallery and that Christian Boursaud fronted for him. Then this exchange followed:FERRI: Was Hecht already famous at that time? [They were talking about the 1980s.]

  FRIDA TCHACOS: He was already famous. Hecht was in Paris, he was known to be the biggest, he always lost money on . . . on . . . the Casinos. Then . . . yes, of Medici I can say that once I’d been struck by him when I saw him at Sotheby’s, this in ’85 . . . in ’90, when he was buying vases, red-figure or black-figure vases, but at very high prices and I didn’t understand how someone like Medici could have the money to buy these vases. And I tried to find out, but no-one could tell me why he bought these vases. At the time I thought he bought them to have . . . to have a collection of vases for himself, then I understood . . . that he did . . . did all these movements with Sotheby’s, to put vases . . . to sell his vases and then buying them so as to have a provenance, which I didn’t know at the time. And in the last . . . in the last years I learnt that he was in partnership or worked with the Aboutaams, the Arabs of Freeport, Geneva.

  FERRI: These last years, what does this mean?

  FRIDA: Hmm . . . since they opened at Freeport, it’s not yet ten years . . .

  FERRI: Yes.

  FRIDA: And first there was the father . . . and also on the Aboutaams, afterwards I’ll repeat this, that at a certain point at Sotheby’s the Aboutaams were seen buying vases next to Medici. They were both standing at the back, they weren’t sitting down, and the Aboutaams were buying very important vases at very high prices.

  She further confirmed that Medici sold “quite a lot” to Robin Symes, that Symes “undoubtedly” bought vases from Medici, and she agreed that Symes bought the Morgantina Venus from Orazio Di Simone. “That was what was always said.”1

  Returning to Hecht, she said that “he was a scholar, but a terrible character, who made one afraid . . . he was an old man, an old nasty man. I was always afraid of him . . . What else can I tell you? Hecht was called ‘Mister Percentage’ . . . because he took a percentage . . . I think from Medici as well . . . his great clients in Los Angeles were the Hunts, the Hunt brothers . . . I knew though that Medici was behind him . . . yes, yes.”

  She confirmed that there was “a precise triangle”—Hecht, Becchina, Monticelli—and that the latter mainly supplied “[e]verything that could be found in the south of Italy; I think Apulian [vases], I think terracottas, I think bronzes. . . .” She later amended this cordata to include George Ortiz and Mario Bruno. She said that Mauro Morani was part of the Savoca cordata, and he had provided the kylix by Onesimos, or at least some of it. She met Morani through Guarini and knew him to be “a very able creator of fakes.”

  She gave evidence that before Marion True was married, she had a lover in Rome in the early 1990s, one Enzo Constantini.

  Aha, aha. She frequently went to Italy to see this lover. And it was interesting because after the visits of Marion True in Italy, in Rome, the Romans knew a lot more about the Getty—the Romans in general knew more than the Paul Getty itself . . . all the Italian market knew that the Getty was buying or not buying, from whom.... And every time I showed her something she . . . she said to me: “Beautiful, interesting, I can speak to Fleischman about it. . . .” So, later we understood how the Fleischman-True things went. . . . Dealers offered Marion True some things, and she, just as with me, refused or bought, I don’t know. But with me she refused and then she received a phone call from Fleischman who said to her: “What have you got for me?” and then, after you’d waited many months, perhaps years, reserving something for Marion True, Fleischman would come into the game . . . Fleischman was in relationship with Medici. . . . But it was Marion True who got them together . . . Fleischman was a dealer, Tempelsman was not.

  Tchacos confirmed that the Levy-White Collection was purchased from Symes, and the routing was: “Mainly from Hecht; I don’t know if from Medici but if we say Hecht we say Medici; recently she [Shelby White] was buying a lot from the Aboutaams.”

  She described von Bothmer and Robert Guy as academic “enemies,” that if one attributed a vase to one painter, the other would attribute it to someone else. She said that George Ortiz was the biggest collector in Europe and that his collection was made by Becchina but that he also had links with Savoca. She confirmed that Becchina sold a great deal at Sotheby’s and that Borowsky had had contact with German museums.

  One of the things that came over strongly in Tchacos’s interview was how bitter the rivalry was at times between the different cordate. She herself heartily disliked Hecht. Elsewhere in her interview, she referred to an occasion when several of the Swiss-based antiquities dealers were on the same plane, traveling to Japan for the opening of the exhibition of the George Ortiz Collection at a museum there in 1993. During the flight, she said, Becchina had come up to her and said, as she put it, “We mustn’t allow certain people to work.” When asked who Becchina meant, she replied that he had been talking about Savoca.

  Tchacos also confirmed that Fiorella Cottier-Angeli, the Swiss expert and cu
stoms official who “has this collection of Etruscan vases,” had told her that she had a key to Medici’s warehouse. After beginning as an adviser to Medici, for customs appraisals, “there began this activity of knowing Swiss collectors, to whom she then also supplied objects, which undoubtedly came from Medici . . . she was connected to the Director of the Geneva Museum, who was a rather weak character and did what she wanted of him.”

  Ferri asked: “Which means?”

  “. . . means that if she wanted to do . . . to sell something to a collector, she had an expertise drawn up by this guy of the Geneva Museum, this . . . [Jacques] Chamay.”

  Tchacos was astonishingly forthcoming. Perhaps it was her character, perhaps it was the fact that she was, at the time, under arrest in Cyprus.

  Ferri’s instincts about Tchacos’s mood in Limassol were correct. While they were there together, they arrived at a deal. There were certain objects that the Italians were anxious to recover, and chief among them was the ivory head discovered by Casasanta and sold to Savoca. The life-size head of Apollo, which had once formed part of a Chryselephantine statue in antiquity, was quite possibly the most important archaeological object to be unearthed since the Euphronios krater in 1971 (many people think it is even more important than the vase). In Limassol, Tchacos let it be known—without actually saying so—that she could help in the recovery of this object. In view of her cooperation, Ferri now let it be understood that in return for her help with the ivory head, he would limit the charges he would bring against her. He said the charges would be confined to offenses that carried penalties of two years or less (with a good chance that the prison terms would be suspended) and, most important, Tchacos would not be joined in the conspiracy charges that he was planning to bring against Medici, Hecht, Robin Symes, and perhaps Marion True.