The Medici Conspiracy

by Peter Watson

  In the very same week, Ali Aboutaam’s brother, Hischam, pleaded guilty in New York to a federal charge that he had falsified a customs document about the origins of an ancient silver ceremonial drinking vessel that his gallery later sold for $950,000. He had been arrested the previous December for importing an Iranian object, described as “the most important representation of a griffin in antiquity” and for facilitating its sale to a private collector. The antiquity in question was alleged to have been part of the plundered Iranian Western Cave Treasure, said to have been looted in 1992 and dispersed around the world. The silver griffin, dated to c. 700 BC, was falsely stated as coming from Syria. According to the complaint filed in the court, the prominent collector began discussions about the object in Geneva, in 1999, discussions that included Hischam’s brother, Ali. Mr. Aboutaam told the buyer at that meeting that the griffin was originally from Iran. The griffin was hand-carried into the United States by Mr. Aboutaam, and the importer of record was listed as the Bloomfield Collection. The invoice declaring Syria as the country of origin was issued by Tanis Antiquities Ltd., based in the Grenadine Islands and an affiliate of Phoenix Ancient Art. The complaint noted that Syria and Iran do not share a border. The griffin was examined by three experts to attest its authenticity, two of whom had given as their opinion that it formed part of the Western Cave Treasure.ag

  Coincidentally (this was a busy time for the Aboutaams), Phoenix Ancient Art was the source of a bronze statue of Apollo slaying a lizard, purchased by the Cleveland Museum of Art, which they attributed to the Greek sculptor Praxiteles. Experts were divided as to whether the statue was a Greek original or a Roman copy, but they were even more divided over the propriety of Cleveland’s acquisition because of the gaps in the statue’s provenance. Allegedly, the bronze was discovered lying on the ground when a retired German lawyer successfully reclaimed his family estate in the former East Germany in the 1990s. For some archaeologists this was just too convenient.

  In early 2005, two Greek journalists, Andreas Apostolides and Nikolas Zirganos, broadcast the result of a four-year investigation carried out in conjunction with one of the authors of this book (Peter Watson) into the smuggling of ancient artifacts out of Greece. The investigation was wideranging, but in part, it focused on familiar names—George Ortiz, Elia Borowsky, Nikolas Koutoulakis, and Christoph Leon.

  Yiannis Sakellerakis, one of the best-known archaeologists in Greece, said in a TV program on antiquities that a tomb robber had admitted to him to looting two bronze Minoan statuettes, one of which had been identified as being in the Ortiz Collection. The program also revealed that as long ago as 1968, a warrant had been issued in Athens for the arrest of Elia Borowsky for his part in the smuggling of Minoan antiquities but that it had never been followed through and was allowed to lapse. The program further alleged that two Cycladic figures—one in the Met in New York, the other belonging to the Levy-Whites—had been illegally exported from Greece and had passed through Koutoulakis. The source of this information was none other than George Ortiz, who had wanted both objects but failed to get them. The program’s fourth segment revealed that, in 1998, the Greek police had been alerted by the German police (in a rerun similar to the cooperation over the raid on Savoca’s villa) about an almost intact classical Greek bronze figure of a youth, by the school of Polycleitus, which was on the market in Munich. The Greek police hurried to Germany, where they found that the statue was in the possession of Christoph Leon (who had handled Medici’s vases, sold to Berlin) and valued at $6–$7 million. Leon was asking $1 million for his role in the deal, and when the police arrived, the statue was in a box labeled “U.S.A.” They subsequently learned that Marion True, of the Getty, had been to see the statue. However, although the police brought charges against a man called Kotsaridis, who had transferred the object out of Greece (and was sentenced to fifteen years), no proceedings were brought against either Leon or True. Marion True said she had wanted to see the statue out of personal interest and had no intention of buying it.

  In 2000, the collection of Attic vases built up by Borowsky was sold at Christie’s in New York. This was scarcely surprising to the Greeks since the catalog text for the collection was compiled by Max Bernheimer, head of antiquities at Christie’s in New York. None of these vases had any provenance, and they were of exceptional quality. Had any of them been excavated legally, they would without question have been properly published.

  Finally, in 2001, the Elia Borowksy Collection went on display at the Karlsruhe Museum (its normal home was the Bible Lands Museum in Jerusalem, where Borowsky had moved to after he left Canada). This collection, entitled Glories of Ancient Greece, consisted of a large number of superb Cretan objects, of equal quality to the Attic vases. Sakellerakis maintained that on stylistic grounds, most of the Cretan objects could only have come from a tomb in a cemetery at Poros, probably the port of Knossos, the famous site excavated by Arthur Evans. Moreover, they came from a part of the complex only discovered long after 1970.

  It is depressing and distressing to see Christie’s being drawn into this business alongside Sotheby’s. But theirs is the only important new name. Despite the proceedings against Medici, the other members of the cordata are as active as ever.

  17

  THE FALL OF ROBIN SYMES

  IN SOME WAYS, the oddest set of events—the parallel plot that interested Ferri the most—began in the summer of 1999, while he was waiting for the Swiss to make up their minds about whether or not they were going to prosecute Medici. Of course Ferri was interested in prosecuting Medici, Hecht, and Marion True, but the other individual he had most in his sights was the British dealer Robin Symes. Ferri was convinced that Symes did a large amount of business with Medici and had a major role in the triangulations that facilitated smuggling illicit material to the Getty, the Shelby-Whites, Tempelsman, Berlin, and elsewhere. And a major break in the case was imminent: Symes was about to suffer a series of setbacks and disasters that would see his business, his fortune—his entire life—implode in the most devastating way.

  On July 4, 1999, Robin Symes and Christo Michaelides were guests at a dinner in Terni, near Arezzo in Italy, given by the American collectors Leon Levy and Shelby White. Toward the end of the dinner, Christo went in search of some cigarettes—and didn’t come back. When another guest went to look for him, she found he had slipped on some steps and had hit his head on a portable radiator. He died in hospital in Orvieto the next day.

  It is difficult to say who was more distraught, Christo’s close-knit blood relatives, or Symes, his constant companion of more than thirty years. Even today, members of Christo’s family have difficulty putting into words what they feel was the exact relationship between their favorite son and Symes. The dealer, for his part, says that “Christo loved me, for 32 years” but insists that despite living together since 1970, and widely accepted from Gstaad to Los Angeles as a social couple, referred to as “the Symeses,” theirs was not a homosexual liaison but a long-term Platonic friendship. At sixty-four, Symes is a stolid figure, with pale skin and silver hair swept back off his forehead, with eyes that are magnified behind wire spectacles. Thirty years ago he suffered a double brain hemorrhage and his movements are deliberate: He doesn’t rush things. Christo was six years his junior.

  Symes acquired a lifestyle to match his success in the antiquities business. With Christo he had homes in London, New York, Athens, and Schinnoussa, a small island in the Cyclades, across the water from Naxos. The house in London, on Seymour Walk, on the fringes of Chelsea, boasted an underground swimming pool, decorated with classical statues, and an art deco room, filled with Eileen Gray furniture, valued, according to one estimate, at $20 million. Symes, who doesn’t drive, was always chauffeured either in a silver Rolls Royce or a maroon Bentley. Their house on Schinnoussa had a studio for Robin to paint in, and a pastry kitchen for Christo, who liked to cook.

  According to an interview Symes gave, the two men met in the 1960s when Christo visited Sy
mes’s shop, then on the King’s Road, London, and offered him some antiquities. This contradicts what Symes said to Ferri, whom he told during interrogation that he had met Christo in a warehouse in Switzerland. Christo had a girlfriend and Symes was married, with two sons. After he was divorced, however, Symes lived in Christo’s flat for a while and after that they became inseparable. Symes, with his full, baritone voice, clipped way of speaking, and tailored fawn suits, cut a more formal figure than the charismatic and handsome Christo, who was thinner, taller, and altogether more casual and relaxed. A man used to wealth (he comes from a shipowning family), who spoke six languages, Christo would think nothing of spending $100,000 on a Ferrari speedboat for his nephew, or buying him a Porsche for Christmas.

  Following Symes’s hemorrhage, he and Christo ran the antiquities business together. The older man found the objects, and the buyers, while the younger one organized the financial side (again, he told Ferri the exact opposite). It was a successful arrangement, and by the 1980s, they were following the calendar of the very rich: Gstaad in February; Bahamas in March; La Prairie, a spa-cum-clinic in Montreux in Switzerland, where they had their annual check-up, in the spring; London in June; Greece for the summer; New York for the sales in November. It was a near-perfect lifestyle.

  Christo’s family, the Papadimitrious, originated in Alexandria, Egypt, and moved to mainland Greece in 1962. They say that following Christo’s death they naturally assumed that since he and Symes were equal business partners, the assets would be divided at some point on a 50–50 basis. They are a close family, so much so that they all live side by side in the same street in the fashionable Psychikos suburb of Athens. In particular, Christo was close to his sister Despina (“Deppy”), who married Nicolas Papadimitriou in 1965. Christo and “Deppy,” they say, spoke to each other twice a day throughout their lives. With their experience and knowledge of shipping, they were adept at setting up offshore companies, registered in Panama, which help both ships and antiquities firms avoid paying tax. At times, they say, Despina personally guaranteed Christo and Robin’s business to the tune of $17 million (shipping people talk only in dollars). In other words, the family—via Despina and Christo—was intimately involved in funding the antiquities business.

  Once that summer of 1999 was over, which they all—Symes included—spent on Schinnoussa, grieving, Dimitri Papadimitriou (Christo’s nephew, who was now leading the family business) told Symes that even though the business should be divided equally, Symes could keep the family’s share and sell it off, over three to five years, after which time they would withdraw. Symes could live in the Seymour Walk property for the rest of his life and would always be welcome on Schinnoussa.

  Privately, Symes didn’t see it like that. Back in London, on his own now, he nursed the feeling that he had founded the business, that he had the “eye”—the ability to distinguish a fine object from a dud one—and that it was he who had found the customers who had produced the income that had caused the business to thrive. (This too was contradicted by what Symes told Ferri, that it was in fact Christo who had the “eye.”)

  Then there were the things that go on in all businesses but are rarely talked about. The onshore business was called Robin Symes Limited, and Symes himself was the only shareholder. Officially, Christo was an employee but, says Symes, “This was a ruse, to divert the attention of the tax people.” In reality, Symes felt, “Christo and I were partners, not in the business sense, but in the husband and wife sense. While we were both alive, we shared equally in the assets and profits and debts of the company, but after death they all passed to the survivor, to me.” This flatly contradicted the Papadimitrious’ view.

  The first inkling that Dimitri Papadimitriou had that things were not going according to plan—to his plan, anyway—did not come until May 2000, when he had a meeting at the Dorchester Hotel in London with Edmond Tavernier, Symes’s Swiss lawyer, to discuss the partnership. At the lunch, Tavernier said that if there were a partnership between Symes and Christo, it was 70–30 in his client’s favor. In a melodramatic gesture, he leaned across the table and, under Papadimitriou’s nose, broke off a grissino, an Italian bread stick, in those proportions.

  Not long after, in July 2000, Symes traveled to Athens for a commemoration service, twelve months after Christo’s death. After it was over, Papadimitriou took Symes to one side and, ignoring Tavernier’s outburst, reminded him that no inventory of the business had yet been prepared on which a 50–50 split could be based. At the same time, Papadimitriou handed Symes a letter from Christo’s mother, Irini, pleading for her son’s personal belongings to be returned. She was eighty-four, she said, and wanted to redistribute his things around the family before she died. These effects, though personal, were substantial. They included several Cartier watches made before World War II and valued at between $50,000 and $80,000 each, a Rolex made by hand in the 1950s, and a pair of Cartier cufflinks, also hand-made, inlaid with sapphires and baguette diamonds.

  Although he didn’t show it at the time, Symes was doubly affronted by these approaches. He had arrived to pay his respects to his former companion but instead he had, as he saw it, been ambushed and made to feel an outsider. The business was his, as were Christo’s personal belongings. And in any case, Irini’s demands were fanciful. “Christo didn’t possess a shirt that took cufflinks,” he says with a shudder, as if the family should have known this.

  But this exchange had a catalytic—and catastrophic—impact on subsequent events. In November 2000, Symes finally sent a briefcase containing Christo’s personal effects from London to the Papadimitriou “compound” in Athens. When Deppy scanned the contents, she could scarcely believe her eyes. Far from containing Cartier and Rolex watches and hand-made cufflinks set with sapphires and diamonds, as she had expected, the briefcase contained: a plastic cigarette lighter, a half-burned candle, Christo’s birth cross, a plastic Swatch, a box of playing cards, refills for his pens, a cushion with a teddy bear on it, a cheap camera, some photographs.

  Now, was Symes being provocative at this point? Was he deliberately trying to tease or irritate the Papadimitrious because of the pressure he felt they were putting him under? Was he trying to rub in the fact that he, and not they, was Christo’s rightful heir? Or did he genuinely believe that these were the personal effects they were expecting? Deppy was too upset to let her mother know that the briefcase had even arrived. But the “insulting” contents hardened Dimitri Papadimitriou’s heart. He had already discussed the situation with a London lawyer, Ludovic de Walden, of Lane and Partners, whose offices are near the British Museum on Bloomsbury Square. De Walden is well known in the London art world. Among his clients is the Getty Museum in Britain.

  Before Papadimitriou and de Walden could decide what action to take, the family received two more shocks. In early December 2000, Symes mounted an exhibition in New York in which 152 objects—mainly antiquities—were offered for sale with a collective value of $42 million. Second, when Papadimitriou visited Seymour Walk toward the end of January 2001 to pick up some chairs that were his, he found that the entire collection of Eileen Gray art deco furniture had disappeared. Thanks to the work of a private detective nimbly hired by de Walden, they soon found out that the Gray furniture had been sold the previous September, at the Paris Biennale, for—they were told—$20 million. Far from preparing an inventory, as the family was expecting, it now seemed that Symes was selling off many of the company’s assets, for cash.

  Symes saw it differently. As the survivor who had inherited the business, he felt he was entirely within his rights to mount whatever exhibitions he deemed necessary; and the New York show was held in Christo’s honor, with a tribute printed in the catalog, written by Symes. “It was a public exhibition,” he says. “There was no question of me trying to sell things in a sneaky way—how could there be?” As far as the Eileen Gray collection was concerned, here is yet another flat contradiction. The family says they bought the furniture in the first place, bu
t Symes says he did, and he produced a 1987 article in the New York Times that appears to support his claim. “In any case,” he says, “it didn’t fetch $20 million, but $4 million, and I told Dimitri as much on the day I made the sale.” Dimitri Papadimitriou has no recollection of this conversation.

  The deteriorating relations between the two sides collapsed completely in February 2001 when Symes did something that no one who was “family,” in the Greek sense, would dream of doing.

  Late on the morning of February 23, a Friday, the doorbell rang at Deppy’s house on Diamantidou Avenue. When she went to the door, she was astonished to be served with court papers from the Athens Multi Member First Instance Court. While the family had dithered about taking Symes to court, he had got in first. He was suing them.

  From their point of view, Symes’s claims in his lawsuit were distressing and, yes, insulting. Far from accepting that Christo and he were partners, Symes now claimed that:• Christo had only ever been an employee and had never participated in the business with any share, “hidden or shown”;

  • Neither Christo nor “any member of his family” had contributed financially to Symes’s business;

  • Symes had no obligation to return any property to Despina or any other Papadimitriou.

  But Symes didn’t stop there. Arguing that in their approaches and letters to him, Irini and Despina were interfering in his legitimate business interests, he called for them to be fined or imprisoned (for up to six months), or both, if they continued to interfere. He had inherited Christo’s share of the business and that was that.