by Peter Watson
Or so they felt. Would a judge agree?
Until 1989, Italy’s criminal law was based on the Napoleonic Code and had three different judicial figures—investigating magistrates, public prosecutors, and judges. Then the system was changed from the Napoleonic to the Accusatorio, what in English is called an adversarial system. Under this system the role of investigating magistrate has been taken over by the public prosecutor. Each case can go through three court “degrees”—first level, appeals court, and supreme court, and nearly all cases do. This is because in Italy, until March 2006, not only the defense could appeal, but the public prosecutor could as well. Under Silvio Berlusconi’s government this was changed, and the prosecution can no longer appeal. If they are dissatisfied with the verdict, they can only take it to the Supreme Court. In January 2007, the Constitutional Court quashed part of the new law and further changes are expected. A defendant is considered not guilty until the definitive verdict, which is why people who have been convicted and sentenced to imprisonment may remain free for several years at the end of the first-degree trial.
A major problem with the Italian judicial system is administrative. Due to a chronic insufficiency of means, a shortage of courtrooms, of judges, of personnel in general, and in an attempt to get trials started within a certain period of time (due to the statutes of limitations), proceedings will only be in court on one day a week, or one day a month. A twelve-day trial, therefore, can—and routinely does—last for a year. Many trials, with several witnesses, go on for longer.
In an attempt to improve the situation, the Italian government introduced in 1989 the rito abbreviato, the “abbreviated rite.” This “fast track” (by Italian standards) may be requested by the defendant during the preliminary hearing and means that the case is decided by a judge alone on the basis of documents collected by the prosecution and the defense, and means that witnesses are not called or cross-examined in court unless the judge, at his or her exclusive direction, decides that he or she wishes to hear someone. This system—which Medici chose—offers the defendant the advantage that, if found guilty, the sentence is automatically cut by one-third.
The judge in the Medici case was Guglielmo Muntoni, a small, round-faced dark-haired man, who is half Sardinian. In his mid-fifties, he is a jovial figure, with a lively sense of humor, but is a stickler for the law, insisting that all procedures be closely and correctly followed. He had been the judge in the trial of the tombarolo Pietro Casasanta, so he was familiar with many of the issues raised by the Medici case.
To this point in the book we have, essentially, given the case that the prosecutors offered at Medici’s trial. The trial itself, however, gave him a chance to tell a different story.
Medici is a virile, impatient man, approaching six feet tall, with a strong physical presence, an open, round face, a high forehead, and stronglooking large hands. He favors leather jackets, drives a Maserati, and at his house in Santa Marinella, north of Rome, his study has a window in it in the shape of a capital “G.”
In regard to Medici’s testimony, Muntoni’s approach, one can see with the benefit of hindsight, was to let the defendant talk at length—which he was very willing to do—during the course of which he would incriminate himself, both by revealing more and more of his “inside” knowledge and by contradicting himself, time and again. Once during the trial proceedings, Medici spoke for up to three hours nonstop, by the end of which his shirt was drenched in sweat. He was combative, complaining with disdain about some of the witnesses on the other side, and insisting on his expertise, talent, and standing as a connoisseur and trader. The last session was heard on December 13, 2004.
In the course of his testimony, Medici’s principal defenses were that he was intending to give away the objects in his warehouses to Italian museums, that those in his home were his personal property, not for resale, and were anyway owned by his wife. At the same time, he also claimed that the majority of the objects in the Freeport were not from Italy at all but belonged to non-Italic cultures—in particular Egyptian, Syrian, Phoenician, Anatolian, Cycladic, Cretan, Rhodian, Mycenaean, Sumerian, Hittite, and so on. This made it hard to understand, as the judge observed, why he proposed to donate them to Italian (and not Greek or Egyptian or Syrian) museums.
His protestations of patriotism were fulsome but he turned coy when discussing exactly how he obtained his objects, never naming his sources.
They came from a famous Swiss collection: I bought them lovingly with only one purpose Your Honor, to bring them to Italy. Attention: donate them, not to make a museum and then take the money—donate. The collection of Villanovan clay [impasto] vases, from the twelfth to eighth centuries [BC], a whole series, all of one kind, very beautiful. [I] never wished to sell them. What was the purpose? To bring them to Italy and donate them all to a museum. I repeat: gift.... And the bronze fibulae, all the small Apulian Gnathian vases [which elsewhere he said he didn’t like], preserved in a splendid way, new, something entirely miraculous . . . all collected with jealous care.... Why? Because they had to come to Italy to be donated. What do I mean by all this? I’m saying that of about three thousand objects which were seized from me, two thousand nine hundred were to be donated—that is, donated to the Italian state. Of course, Your Honour, there are a little less than one hundred objects which are valuable—it’s not my fault. Those are the fruit of the sweat of my brow.
However, this sweat and toil on his part did not quite square with his claims elsewhere in his testimony, as when he told Judge Muntoni that these 2,900 objects in the Geneva warehouse “are of no value, objects which can be purchased every day in Italy and kept at home.” Suddenly, the antiquities in Corridor 17 were no longer splendid examples of Anatolian or Egyptian culture, but trinkets—and Italian.
At other times he said that the objects in his warehouse had been sent by clients for restoration, “for expertise.” To explain how he sold so much at Sotheby’s in London (when he was supposed to be donating material to the Italian state), he said that in 1982 the Hydra Gallery had opened in Geneva, for which he became an archaeological expert and consultant. The gallery had been formed to sell an inventory of objects put together in 1980, the owner being Christian Boursaud, who also acted as shipper. The minor objects—more difficult to sell—were sold through Sotheby’s in London. When Hydra was closed in 1985, he had the idea of purchasing all Hydra’s objects that were in the company’s warehouse and at the Geneva Freeport, and for this purpose he purchased Editions Services, a bearer-share company. He thus continued to operate as Hydra did before and “furthered his relationship with Felicity Nicholson of Sotheby’s” in London. The antiquities he sent to Sotheby’s never came from Italy.
Sometimes his swagger carried him away and landed him in trouble. At one point he implied that Pellegrini, the document expert, was not qualified to have written the reports for the trial and must have put his name to someone else’s work. “It’s obvious that these reports were not drawn up by Mr. Pellegrini, I don’t understand why he or they who drew them up, did not feel it their duty—and also their pride—to sign them. They let it be signed. . . .”
JUDGE MUNTONI: Medici, you are accusing Pellegrini of criminal acts . . .
MEDICI: No, I’m saying . . .
JUDGE MUNTONI: No, just a minute: if you have elements to confirm . . . otherwise you will be answerable for libel, committed today at this very moment.
MEDICI: Very well, but I . . .
JUDGE MUNTONI: I’ve already told you before: watch what you say in this court, because you will be held to answer for it. You have just accused Pellegrini of fraud together with others . . .
Medici’s lawyer intervened, to try to lower the temperature, but Muntoni was having none of it, saying that Medici had accused Pellegrini of signing reports that he hadn’t drawn up. “That’s fraud. What’s more, he was the designated consultant, so that would be doubly a fraud.”
But Medici was careful to address and dismiss as irrelevant two cru
cial pieces of evidence: Robert Hecht’s memoir and the vast Polaroid collection in his own Freeport warehouse. Of the memoir, he said anyone could produce such a document—even him. So far as his collection of Polaroids was concerned and the fact that they were collected in an orderly manner into albums, with so many objects showing soil still encrusted to them, he offered the following explanation. As in other parts of his testimony, he called in aid some helpfully anonymous Swiss corporations, which provided camouflage:Well then, I mean to say, a big official in an important private Swiss bank calls me, [and] says: “Would you feel up to consulting, but only about the commercial value?” “Yes.” I went, I descended the stairs of this big bank, I entered this large room, there were lots of safes, he opened them for me and inside there was God’s marvel. I must tell you the truth, it really almost seemed to me that it was stuff from recent digs; this is stuff taken from some tomb which was surprised [discovered] now, because they were really in such conditions.... They were all broken, they were all badly glued, they were all full of soil and encrustation, some had been very badly restored. [He agrees, therefore, that the objects shown in the Polaroids came from recent digs.]
I photographed them all, one by one, with the so-called famous Polaroid—careful,’cause if Polaroid gets to know about this, they’ll sue us—because the Polaroid is [typical] of the tombaroli. According to the consultants, some special consultants, like Dr. Pellegrini, say that the Polaroid camera is typical of traffickers. Actually today Polaroids are little used. [This contradicts Symes, who had testified that Polaroids were used throughout the trade and with collectors.] Anyway, I photographed the entire collection of Marquis Guglielmi, one by one at [incomprehensible]. Then they open the other vault, there were bronzes, God’s marvel of bronzes. And what was there, Your Honour? The famous Tripod, the famous Guglielmi Tripod, the stolen one was in the Geneva safe. There was an ox this big, with a hole in his gut . . . there were so many bronzes, all God’s marvel; this doesn’t interest [they said], this one we’ll show him: “What do you think of it?”—“Very beautiful stuff,” I said, “this bull is worth a lot of money; the Tripod is fragile, it’s very museale [museum quality] but it’s very rare, a very beautiful piece.” We work on this . . . I work . . . I make out all the files, for each piece the price. Why? Because they were selling, I don’t know to whom; they were selling it and wanted to know its commercial [value]—not from the point of view of a collector, no, no, venal, venal, how much it’s worth and if it should be put up at auction. So I evaluated each piece, I go away and they pay me the next day.
He said that he kept the photographs so as to be able to study them.
He denied the existence of the cordata, again in fulsome terms. “Medici goes to the international auctions; he buys objects, also very important objects, he is in competition with all those that the prosecution today defines as ‘associates,’ and instead they are bitter competitors Your Honour, they really are.... They are people who perhaps don’t speak to you for two or three months because you nabbed the object they wanted from under their noses.” He agreed that it appeared to the outside world that he and Hecht were associated “[but] there’s a jealousy that eats our hearts, we look daggers at each other.”
At one point, he became so carried away that his self-confidence got the better of him, his testimony verging on a rant (this was the time when his shirt became drenched in sweat).
Somebody [a rival at an auction] will say: “Medici, remember I want that, don’t make the winning bid” and I say to them, “OK, up to what figure do you mean to go?”—“Up to twenty thousand dollars.”—“OK, then . . . I’m a friend; when you stop, if somebody still continues, I have the right to participate.” And often that’s the way it happens. Why? Because unfortunately people don’t know how to do this business well, Your Honour, believe me, and this has provoked much envy against me. When an object is beautiful, beauty pays . . . Medici Giacomo has understood these things. So an object—I’ll give you an example—is evaluated by everybody at five hundred million [lire = £250,000/$400,000+]. Medici says: “It’s not so.” Why? Because if it’s worth five hundred million, it can be worth a billion, it can be worth a billion and a half, it can be worth two billion, and if I go mad, it’s worth five billion.... Believe me, this is a marvellous secret which life’s experience has taught me. When I used to go to auction sales, people would look at me flabbergasted and would say: “But this man’s mad! Who’s behind this man? Who will this man sell to? How come this man can spend all this money?” . . . they would just sit there looking at me, wondering how come I raised and raised. They said: “But the Getty Museum is on the phone! . . . is he crazy? What’s he doing? Waging war on the Getty Museum?” —“But there’s the Metropolitan Museum! . . . there’s Fleischman, how is it possible?” . . . It was possible in this way: I knew that these gentlemen wanted to spend a certain sum, and [I] would buy for these gentlemen [i.e., with them in mind], because as countryfolk say: I waited for them at the bridge [an idiomatic Italian saying, meaning that’s there’s only one bridge and, if you wait there long enough, everyone comes by, to cross the river—in other words, patience and positioning pays off]. I would never seek them out, I waited [so] that it would be they who’d look for me. Then . . . there’d be a phone call, or an emissary would arrive and say: “Medici, we know you bought that object. How much do you want for it? . . . five hundred thousand dollars? We’ll give you six hundred.” I used to say: “I bought that object for myself, I love it. I would sell it for a million and a half dollars, otherwise don’t bother me.” That was my strength . . . I’m not here lying to you. . . . When I used to purchase at the auctions . . . even if I put a pencil in my mouth, to let the auctioneer understand that as long as I had the pencil in my mouth I wanted the object, somebody understood and so they knew I had bought.... For years I bought in Italy and nothing happened. Then, suddenly, those objects which I regularly bought became illicit.
In another self-confident—even audacious—move, but one that characterized himself as an honest man, Medici challenged Ferri to prove that even one object in the Freeport came from a tombarolo. “I challenge, meaning it in a good sense, I challenge the prosecution to prove that one . . . not three thousand, one object which, in inverted commas, comes from a tombarolo. . . . Because if I, I repeat, did wrong, if I . . . if it were to be proved from the documents of the trial that I did wrong, I must pay. Because it is right, because there are laws. . . .”
His response to the charge that he had been laundering objects through Sotheby’s was equally forthright. “If Dr. Ferri finds one single object of those seized put there [i.e., sold at Sotheby’s and bought back] by Medici Giacomo or Editions Services, you, Your Honour, must condemn me without attenuating circumstances, you must condemn me severely.... No, no, it’s I who ask.”
In essence, Medici characterized himself as an innocent consultant, albeit one with an unusually large photo collection. The real villains, he said, were elsewhere. Though his testimony was vivid, strong on rhetoric and expressed in a forthright manner, it was not overly rich on detail. At the end of it all, Medici ringingly declared: “I don’t consider myself guilty of anything.”
Judge Muntoni took five months to reveal his considered reaction to Medici’s performance. He began in a fairly uncompromising way.
As can be seen, even in the course of his long spontaneous declarations made during the hearing, Medici never stopped lying and in fact accentuated the distortion of reality, so as to depict himself as an innocent subjected to persecution by the Italian Judiciary, by the Swiss Judiciary, by the Police forces of the two countries, and by his own “work” milieu. What strikes one most in this long series of lies, is that they were told in spite of the fact that Medici knew very well that the documentation and the photographic archive which had been seized from him were part of the documents of the case and objectively give him the lie and cannot be confuted. Medici even reached the point of several times invoking an exemplary
sentence against himself if even only one single archaeological object was proved to have been recycled.... Very well, the objects that beyond doubt were recycled, as will be highlighted in the specific paragraph, are dozens . . . Arts Franc bought all the objects at the above-mentioned auction following the indications given by Medici, at the price indicated by Medici and with the money furnished by Medici, and [were] delivered to Medici . . . for years numerous goods were sold through auctions by Medici so as to be repurchased by himself, so much so that they were found in his possession.
The judge found that 99 percent of the objects featuring in the case had no provenance.
Muntoni accepted that “innumerable objects” were sold by Medici to individual persons and to museums “by means of triangulations through Hecht, Symes-Michaelides, Bürki and others, as written by Medici himself at the bottom of Polaroids, which depict objects sold.” The judge said Medici had no convincing explanation as to how, having been born into a poor family, he could open a “prestigious gallery” in the center of Rome, in the fashionable Via del Babuino, only to then transfer to Switzerland “where he could work more freely.”