The Medici Conspiracy

by Peter Watson

  Let us be frank about the picture revealed during the detective work leading to Medici’s trial. It has shown and confirmed the following facts:• We may begin with the sheer scale of the looting. Medici had close to 4,000 objects in his warehouse in Geneva and photographs relating to another 4,000; Robin Symes had 17,000 objects in his thirty-three warehouses; and the woodcutter, Giuseppe Evangelisti, looted on average a tomb a week, with nine objects being unearthed per tomb. Pasquale Camera’s organigram referred to a core of a dozen tombaroli but in the course of his investigations, Paolo Ferri came across hundreds of other names. If each of these were as active as Evangelisti (and why should we doubt it?), then thousands of antiquities were leaving the ground of Italy illegally each week. Ferri, of course, has by no means interviewed—or even become aware of—many other tombaroli. We have left out a lot of names encountered in the documentation. All this means that the scale of the illicit trade is enormous. No one can doubt it now, and the convenient fiction that unprovenanced antiquities have come from some ancient relative’s attic must be laid to rest, once and for all. In the separate trial of Raffaele Monticelli, also mentioned in Pasquale Camera’s organigram, held in Foggia in 2003, in which the defendant was found guilty and sentenced to four years, it was revealed that some tombaroli receive regular salaries rather than being paid only for their discoveries. For them, looting is a full-time job. According to one academic study, there are now as many Apulian pots in North America as there are in the museums of Italy—another measure of the “achievement” of Medici and those like him.

  • Maurizio Pellegrini, Daniela Rizzo, and Paolo Ferri made calculations based on the report of Professors Bartoloni, Colonna, and Zevi, together with the activities of those names identified through Operation Geryon and the interviews with tombaroli such as Casasanta and Evangelisti. They concluded that somewhere in the region of 100,000 tombs have been excavated since Medici and Hecht built up their cordata.

  • The tombaroli, as do many “collectors,” like to pretend that they “love” antiquities, that they excavate carefully, that they preserve sites. This is false, and everyone concerned knows it. The scandal of the Pompeian frescoes shows that the likes of Medici, and those who supply him, do not care in the slightest about the damage they do. Not even Marion True, or Robin Symes, thought that these frescoes could be sold. No one thought they would be able to get away with displaying such obvious examples of loot—hacking them off the walls of the villa they had adorned had done too much damage to the structures where they had been embedded. The same applies to the capitals stolen from Ostia Antica that were deliberately damaged to “disguise” them. In our television program about Sotheby’s and smuggled goods, we had filmed a nighttime “excavation” that had in fact been carried out by means of a mechanical digger—this was hardly a sensitive “dig.” It was more like a rape. Pietro Casasanta, the tomb robber who found the ivory head, liked to say that he “excavated” villas and did not “plunder” tombs, yet Daniela Rizzo has had to pick up the pieces more than once after his illegal digs have been discovered. She confirms that Casasanta did enormous damage to the sites he “excavated.” In fact, she says that he was too ignorant—archaeologically speaking—to realize the damage he was doing.

  • The fiction that the traffic in illicit antiquities concerns unimportant objects has been exploded. The traffic is in fact kept in business by the interest—and demand—from some of the world’s leading rogue museums and a number of rogue collectors who are interested only in very important items. The illicit traffic has provided objects for at least five of the so-called great modern collections: those of the Levy-Whites, George Ortiz, the Hunt brothers, Maurice Tempelsman, and Barbara and Lawrence Fleischman. It has also filled several of the world’s leading museums. The traffic in illicit antiquities has involved hundreds if not thousands of museum-quality pieces. The recent research of the Danish scholar Vinnie Nørskov supports—in a statistical way—many of our findings. In her book Greek Vases in New Contexts (2002), she concludes that in regard to ancient vases, an “invisible” market has developed. She quotes several instances to show what she means. She reveals, for instance, that the most important vases acquired by museums never appear on the auction market. In fact, the first $1 million price tag for an antiquity at auction wasn’t reached until 1988, sixteen years after the trade of the Euphronios krater, by which time at least three antiquities had been sold privately to museums for well beyond that price. From the evidence in this book, we can now say that far more than three antiquities surpassed this figure—there were at least another five and maybe more. Nørskov also concluded that “the vase market has been much larger than the market described through sales catalogues.”

  She also found two other long-term trends. First, there was a rise in the number of south Italian vases sold at auction, which grew from the beginning of the 1970s and dropped off in the 1990s. This no doubt had something to do with the publication of Dale Trendall’s scholarly works on the painters of south Italian vases, but of course it was also exactly the time when the Medici cordata was active. After Medici saw—as he put it in his trial—that “beauty pays,” he began to be more active, around the time of the Euphronios krater affair, and more concerned with quality. His activities effectively ended when his Freeport warehouse was sealed at the end of 1995. His period of activity and the dominance of south Italian vases sold at auction overlap uncannily.

  Nørskov’s second point is that since around 1988, the number of vases resold on the auction market has snowballed, rocketing from virtually zero to more than 20 percent. There could be many reasons for this, of course, but it is not inconsistent with unscrupulous dealers buying back and reselling vases to launder them and bolster prices.

  • It is true that many objects of lesser importance appear at auction, but the antiquities auctions—we now know—serve several specific purposes. Apart from their legitimate function, they exist to “launder” antiquities, so that dealers like Medici can claim that they have bought (what are in fact their own) objects on open sale, providing these objects, therefore, with a spurious provenance. These sales provide a benchmark for value—Medici (and how many others?) bid against themselves at auction to maintain the price of basic objects, against which other values can be calculated. And in offering only relatively run-of-the-mill items, the auctions helped establish the fiction that however lacking in provenance these objects are, the “antiquities trade” concerns only unimportant material.

  • But far and away the most serious revelation of the Medici inquiry, and the one that supports the premise of Chippindale’s Law more than any other, is the fact that the illicit trade in antiquities is organized. It is organized into groups—cordate, teams of people “roped” together—so as to achieve one all-important objective. This is to keep the likes of Medici, an Italian citizen who is responsible for smuggling thousands of ancient artifacts out of Italy, at a distance from the world’s major museums, and collectors, so they can deny dealing directly with the underground trade. This is the tactic that in political spin-doctoring is called “deniability.” Such deniability is achieved by means of triangulations—indirect routes that camouflage the actual origin of the objects. There is no need to repeat the detail here, except to reaffirm what Judge Muntoni concluded—that this was nothing less than a criminal conspiracy.

  • An aspect of this organization is delay. There will be those who object to the trials of Giacomo Medici, Robert Hecht, and Marion True on the grounds that the events concerned all took place many years ago. There are several answers to this. One is that law enforcement agencies can only deal with the material available. Although many archaeologists—such as Chippindale and Gill—have argued for years that the circumstantial evidence all points to the conclusion that the vast majority of unprovenanced antiquities in museums around the world and in almost all the modern collections have been looted, both museums and the trade have resisted this reasoning. Hecht himself has said more than o
nce that without documentary proof, he refuses to accept that the objects he deals in are looted. The evidence of Operation Geryon shows that it required both luck and clever investigation to lay bare the organization surrounding Medici. The documentary proof of the extent of the looting is now there for all to see.Another answer is that following the landmark ruling in the Frederick Schultz case, in 2002,ap antiquities looted from countries that have legislation stipulating that objects in the ground belong to that country are deemed to have been stolen—and under U.S. law, derived from British law, good title can never be obtained to stolen goods. So it doesn’t matter how long cases take to come to court: Looted antiquities remain looted.

  Yet another answer is that investigation on an international level is unwieldy and cumbersome, and therefore takes time. As this book has shown, it can take months, if not years, for questions to foreign nationals to be answered. In such circumstances, it is inevitable that prosecutions will take years to mature. This must now be accepted as a fact of life.

  But we must also remember that delay is not exactly anathema to the underground trade. Objects that are held unseen in warehouses for months and years on end are, when they do surface, more difficult to match to clandestine excavations, which may have been discovered in the interim by law enforcement authorities. Before the 2002 decision by the U.S. courts, the illicit trade was often protected by the fact that statutes of limitations would come into force, preventing legal actions from being initiated (a defense that the Metropolitan Museum tried, unsuccessfully, in the case of the Lydian hoard).aq As was mentioned in Chapter 15, the acquisition of fragments of vases strings out the process, making it more difficult for countries such as Italy to mount claims for these objects. The very fact that it is necessary to write in this way shows that delay, in and of itself, softens attitudes. Illegal actions of the 1980s, say, are seen as less vivid, less urgent, in some way less wrong than events of a more recent date. A moment’s reflection will show that such reasoning cannot be correct. If the underground trade thinks that by delaying it can deflect the interest of law enforcement, then law enforcement agencies must insist on the opposite truth.

  • In an effort to put this whole matter into context, Dr. Ferri calculated that the market price of all the objects mentioned in this book total somewhere in the region of $100 million. This is an impressive sum but still considerably less than the value Robin Symes put on his holdings, which, at $210 million, is more than twice that. According to Ferri, however, Gianfranco Becchina, whose trial will follow that of Marion True and Robert Hecht, may well have been as active as Medici, so that if his trading is taken into account, along with Savoca’s, then Ferri calculates that these few names were controlling illicit traffic in antiquities easily worth $500 million—half a billion dollars. It is an enormous, underground business.

  It is in this sense that Chippindale’s Law comes into its own. Over the past thirty years, many archaeologists, policemen, and other law enforcement officials have known—in their bones—that trade in illicit antiquities was rife. But no one has guessed, even for a moment, that this trade is organized at the level it is, or that a number of rogue collectors, and a certain number of rogue museums, have been hand-in-glove with the network that surrounded Medici and, moreover, that these collectors and museums actively cooperated in the cordate. This is surely the most worrying revelation of all: that ostensibly honest, well-educated, highly qualified professional people—scholars, some of them—should involve themselves in such dishonest and deceitful practices, in secret and in long-term collaboration with known smugglers, fences, and tomb robbers. Christopher Chippindale is right: However bad you feared this state of affairs was, the truth is worse.

  According to Paolo Ferri, it is very unlikely that we will ever again have the level of detail in regard to antiquities looting that we have in the Medici conspiracy. The set of circumstances that gave rise to Operation Geryon, the discovery of the organigram, of the Polaroids and their related correspondence, the leaks from inside Sotheby’s by James Hodges—all these are the sort of episodes that are unlikely to occur together again. Furthermore, the publicity associated with the prosecution will surely change attitudes and practices—both above and below ground, as it were. Collecting habits must change, museum acquisitions policies must change, especially in the United States and Japan, and no doubt trade patterns and practices will change (fewer Polaroids, probably), though we shouldn’t expect much publicity on that score.

  Before we sum up, therefore, we must make it clear that Operation Geryon and its subsequent developments have lifted only one stone in the garden. What is true about the Italian antiquities-looting underworld is equally true in many other areas of the world. In parallel with the inquiries for this book, one of us (Peter Watson) has been involved in a not dissimilar investigation in Greece—with much the same results: widespread looting and not a little violence in the process. Given the other court cases described in Chapters 16 and 17, we can say with some confidence that the predicament facing Italy, Egypt, and Greece is shared by Turkey, Afghanistan, India, Pakistan—and several other countries. In Chapter 16, we described how the actions of the cordate extend to Egypt and Israel. Peter Watson worked undercover in Guatemala and Mexico, and we know that similar looting and smuggling of ancient artifacts is rife there, too, as it is in Peru, where there is even an underground trade in ancient human remains.

  The Illicit Antiquities Research Centre, at Cambridge University in England, is the only outfit of its kind in the world. Its researchers have concentrated their activities outside the traditional countries of the Mediterranean, determined to show the worldwide nature of the problem. For example, Neil Brodie has conducted a longitudinal study of the London auction market in Iraqi antiquities, from 1980 through 2005. He has shown that large numbers of unprovenanced antiquities were sold, particularly after the first Gulf war of 1991. He writes: “These unprovenanced antiquities largely disappeared from the London market after UN trade sanctions were imposed through a strong new law in 2003.” UN sanctions, so far as antiquities are concerned, were implemented in Britain as Statutory Instrument 1519, which crucially inverts the burden of proof that normally applies in a criminal prosecution. That is, it prohibits trade unless it is known that the objects left Iraq before 1990—in other words, objects are presumed “guilty” if there is nothing to indicate otherwise. Brodie also notes that large numbers of cuneiform tablets have been offered for sale over the past ten years with a certificate of authenticity and translation provided by one emeritus professor of Assyriology. “Presumably, if a tablet needs authenticating and translating in this way, it is because it has not previously come to the attention of the scholarly community. The alternative explanation that large numbers of previously unseen tablets have begun to surface from forgotten collections is possible, but hardly credible.” The Assyriologist concerned, Wilfred Lambert, has admitted that when he authenticates an object, he does not necessarily know its origin “and he suspects that very often the dealers themselves don’t know either.” Brodie concludes that all this shows that those objects without provenance in the auction catalogs “really don’t have one, despite trade protestations to the contrary.” No less interesting, Brodie also told us: “It is also clear that through the 1990s Iraqi and Jordanian antiquities were being moved through Amman and London by means of a trading chain very similar to the cordate described here for Italy.” The names are known to police forces in the countries concerned.

  Brodie has also examined what he calls the “baleful effects” that the commercial market exerts on African heritage. The plundering of Africa’s past, he says, is “intimately related” to the demand of Western museums and collectors. He notes the author’s comments in a 1960 book, for example, that “African clay sculptures are very delicate, and are rarely to be found in museums.” By 1984, all that had changed, probably brought about by an exhibition at the Zurich Kunsthaus in 1970, which sparked “a collecting frenzy.” Bura statuettes f
rom Niger were only discovered in 1983, in an official dig. But after a show toured France in the 1990s, widescale looting of Niger followed. Many were on sale at the Hamill Gallery in Boston in 2000, together with 44 Nok terra-cottas. Many of these latter came with a thermoluminescence date from the Bortolot Daybreak Corporation. Brodie said, “Bortolot’s Web site makes for interesting reading. It claims that before 1993 most Nok terra-cottas appearing on the market were fake, and that genuine objects were usually poorly preserved fragments. Then, in 1993, a consortium of European dealers organized systematic looting of the Nok area, whereupon there was a flood of genuine heads and the fakes all but disappeared.” The threat posed to the archaeology of West Africa became so serious that the International Council of Museums felt constrained to publish in May 2000 a “Red List” of African antiquities under imminent threat of looting or theft. Among the eight most threatened types of antiquity were Nok terra-cottas and Bura statuettes. In a mere seventeen years, the latter had gone from being first discovered to an “endangered species.”

  With his colleague Jenny Doole, Brodie also looked at the collecting of Asian antiquities by American museums. The pattern follows that disclosed in this book—namely, that older, nineteenth-century acquisitions have a much more detailed provenance than those acquired since, say, 1970. In examining the collections of such individuals as Norton Simon in California, Walter C. Mead in Denver, Sherman E. Lee in Cleveland, Avery Brundage in San Francisco, John D. Rockefeller III at the Asia Society in New York, and others, a familiar pattern emerged—the lack of provenance of most of the objects. But there was an additional and more cynical pattern—later collectors knew far less about Asian art than the nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century collectors. Brundage, for instance, would often leave his objects in storage, unwrapped and apparently uncared for. Yet the researchers found that “Brundage loved being known as an important collector.” They also noted, “In the late 1800s and early 1900s there was very little museum expertise available, and often it was the collectors themselves, men like [Ernest] Fenellosa and [A. K.] Coomaraswamy, who were hired to provide it. By the 1950s and 1960s this was no longer the case. ‘Asian Art’ was a well-established museum specialty with a mature professional structure. The art museum could provide the expertise if the collector could provide the money.”