Chasing Aphrodite

by Jason Felch

  THE ARRIVAL OF Williams and the departure of Garrett sent a clear message to Frel. The changes at the Getty presented a threat to the comfortable situation the antiquities curator had carved out for himself, where virtually no one had the courage to tell him what to do. He decided he needed a buffer between himself and the new leadership, so he hired a new deputy who seemed perfect for the job.

  Arthur Houghton III was everything Frel was not—an injection of superego into Frel's id-driven world. Whereas Frel was erratic and outrageous and loathed bureaucracy, Hought on was diplomatic, a devotee of process and protocol. Frel was a refugee from Europe who spoke with a heavy Slavic accent. Houghton was a scion of East Coast blue bloods who spoke with a yacht club accent.

  Houghton was the great-great-grandson of the man who started a small industrial glass company in Corning, New York. His father, Arthur Houghton Jr., inherited Corning Glass but left his job as its president to combine his passions for glass and art in a subsidiary of Corning, Steuben. Arthur Jr. chaired the boards of more than a dozen New York cultural institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he served for twenty years, and the New York Philharmonic, where he helped create Lincoln Center. Harvard University's Houghton Library was named in his honor, a thank-you for the donation of his rare-book collection. In short, the Houghtons were no strangers to wealth, power, or the arts.

  While young Arthur's cousins went to work in the family glass business, he inherited his father's interest in the arts. He began collecting Greek and Aramaic coins at age fourteen and continued to do so through his college years at Harvard and during a career in the State Department. As he bounced from post to post in the Middle East, Houghton found the antique dealers in each city and grew fascinated by the spectrum of cultures that had passed through the region. Digging through a basket in Damascus, he could find Seleucid, Alexandrian, and Ptolemaic coins in a single handful. It was in the medinas and antique stalls of the Middle East that Houghton became friends with Robert Hecht. The two had dinner every three or four months, whenever Hecht came through town on a buying trip. Houghton soon became a client.

  He never thought of the arts as a vocation, but at thirty-nine he tired of the diplomatic life and returned to Harvard to pursue an academic career. It was in 1981, while he was still pursuing a doctorate, that he dropped by the Getty Museum and first met Frel. The men discovered that they had many friends in common, including Hecht. Frel was impressed by Houghton's familiarity with the market and his ability to pass easily from the wood-paneled halls of academia to the back alleys of Beirut's bazaars. Frel was looking to build his staff. He had already hired one of Houghton's Harvard classmates, a serious-minded Ph.D. candidate named Marion True, to whom Frel had assigned the curatorial grunt work of cataloguing the antiquities collection.

  Most of the job candidates who came through were graduate students who'd spent their lives in the library and had little clue about the real world. Houghton was older and, more important, knew who he was. Frel offered him a job the next time they met, emphasizing the Getty's immense wealth and need to build the collection. Between the two options facing Houghton—a life in academia talking about objects or a life as a curator buying them for the world's richest museum—the choice was easy. He started as the assistant antiquities curator in September 1982. It would not take long for his differences with Frel to surface.

  ABOUT THREE MONTHS after Houghton started his job, he wandered into Frel's office on the main floor of the Getty Villa to ask a question. Frel's desk was in mild disarray, covered with academic papers, letters from dealers, object files, and photographs. Frel was out, but his attractive young German secretary, Renate Dolin, was at her desk, typing. As Houghton walked past to leave a note on Frel's desk, the stationery she was using caught his eye. Instead of Getty letterhead, it bore the name of "Dr. Jerome Eisenberg, Ph.D.," the New York antiquities dealer.

  "Can I ask what you're doing?" he asked.

  "Just typing up some appraisal forms for a new group of donations," said Dolin, nodding toward a stack of blank Eisenberg stationery.

  "Really. Can I take a quick look?"

  Museum curators don't do appraisals, Houghton knew, particularly not for objects they were hoping to acquire. It created a clear conflict of interest. Glancing at the list, Houghton saw several objects whose values looked grossly inflated.

  "Who asked you to do that?" Houghton asked.

  "Jiri did."

  Dolin explained that Frel routinely gave her a list of objects being donated and a value for each. She in turn typed them up on Eisenberg's appraisal forms and signed the dealer's name. She believed that Dr. Eisenberg got paid for each appraisal, she added.

  Houghton thanked her for being helpful and left. When he saw Frel later, he asked about the "procedure" for appraisals.

  "Procedure?" Frel replied. "There's no procedure. Jerry gave me a bunch of his appraisal forms, and I have Renate fill them out when necessary. The form is just a formality for the files. If anyone were to question it, Jerry could always say the signature was not his."

  "Yes, but why not have Eisenberg actually do an appraisal and sign his own forms?"

  Frel saw Houghton's surprised look. "Arthur, I've been doing this for ten years. Trust me, you'll understand when you have to do it yourself later."

  "I will not do it later," Houghton replied with a thin smile and walked out.

  "You're too moral!" Frel shouted at his back.

  ***

  HOUGHTON RETURNED TO his desk and jotted down some notes. It was a habit he had acquired during his years in the State Department. Diplomats, Houghton had learned, were essentially glorified reporters, and writing detailed accounts of his activities had become second nature. Taking notes helped him think through a matter and had the added benefit of creating a paper trail if push came to shove.

  Houghton knew that he'd been hired to moderate some of Frel's excesses, but he had not expected this type of behavior to emerge in his first months on the job. It suggested that his boss not only had a corruptible spirit but also showed a certain shamelessness about it. And this was no isolated incident. Over the next few months, Houghton's discreet inquiries brought to light more of Frel's troubling activities.

  The curator was routinely having the Getty overpay for antiquities and "banking" the excess money with various dealers. Frel admitted to Houghton, for example, that the Greek vase with masks of Dionysus, a purchase recently approved by the trustees for $90,000, actually cost $50,000. Frel had used the difference to buy things of scholarly interest—vase fragments, broken statuary, votive objects—that the board would never have approved. These items showed up on Getty records as donations. The scope of the problem was apparent to Houghton from the amount of new material flowing into the department outside the museum's careful accessioning process.

  Houghton also learned that Frel had recruited dozens of people to participate in the donation scheme, including several Getty staff members, who were paid cash for the use of their names on donations. Even a board member was among the donors. Assistant antiquities curator Marit Jentoft-Nilsen admitted that she, too, had been coerced by Frel to forge appraisals in the past.

  Frel was also benefiting personally from his business relationships. He mentioned in passing that one of the museum's trusted antiquities dealers had given Frel's wife, Faya, a beautiful silver necklace, the type of gift expressly forbidden by the Getty's ethics policy. Staff members told Houghton that Frel regularly stayed as a guest at the homes of dealers while abroad or let them pay his hotel bills. On a recent visit to New York, for example, Frel and his wife stayed at the posh Carlyle courtesy of a major dealer, who picked up the bill.

  That type of behavior would have made most American museum professionals queasy and was clearly prohibited by the Getty. But it was just the beginning. During a visit to the museum, Margaret Mayo, a former employee of Bruce McNall's gallery, told Houghton that she was "personally aware" that McNall had made "massive cash
payments" to Frel.

  Houghton found that he was scribbling notes to himself after almost every interaction with Frel. Overpaying for art. Unauthorized acquisitions. Inflated and forged appraisals. None-too-subtle bribes. Frel did little to hide his activities. It was as if the curator was bent on getting caught or, more likely, grooming Houghton as an accomplice, teaching him the ways of the antiquities trade.

  If that was the case, Houghton felt that Frel had misjudged him. He wanted nothing to do with those activities and felt obliged to stop them. But even Houghton's years in the State Department couldn't help him figure out how to handle his growing mountain of incriminating information diplomatically. He was uncomfortable going over Frel's head and decided to try to guide his boss's behavior in the right direction. That, after all, was most likely why he had been hired.

  Then, in June, Houghton learned something that convinced him he had to act.

  THE KIMBELL ART Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, was exhibiting the collection of Nelson Bunker Hunt, one of the most impressive private antiquities collections built since World War II. Nearly all of it had recently come out of Italy and passed through the hands of Robert Hecht and Bruce McNall. The dealers hosted a splashy evening reception at the Texas museum. Many of the leading figures in the antiquities trade were there for the show, including Frel and Houghton, who had both contributed essays to the exhibition catalogue.

  During the reception, a contact in the trade pulled Houghton aside and whispered a warning in his ear: the IRS was likely to be investigating Frel for tax fraud. The agency was looking at a collection of ancient amber jewelry that Gordon McLendon had donated to the Getty. The IRS had determined that the amber was worth $1.5 million at most, not the $20 million plus that McLendon had claimed on his tax return. When the feds threatened McLendon with a charge of conspiracy to commit fraud, he agreed to pay $2.1 million in back taxes. He was now threatening to tell the IRS everything if McNall didn't reimburse him for the settlement.

  "Don't worry," McNall said when Houghton approached him at the show. "Frel hasn't been implicated yet. I'll talk to him tonight and sort things out."

  When Houghton ran into Frel later, he asked whether he had spoken to McNall.

  "Don't worry about that, Arthur. It's an issue that concerns McNall and McLendon, not us."

  Houghton was agitated. Hadn't Frel seen the recent article in the Los Angeles Times about the IRS investigating museums for accepting fraudulent appraisals of gemstones?

  "Arthur," Frel said dismissively, "we don't collect gemstones."

  THE NEXT DAY, Houghton flew to New York and had lunch with his personal attorney. The assistant curator laid out in detail what he'd learned about Frel—a list of criminal activities ranging from forgery and tax fraud to bribery and embezzlement. He asked his attorney to write a legal opinion, based on a "hypothetical curator's activities," that Houghton could use to convince Frel how serious the matter was.

  At the end of June, with his legal memo in hand, Houghton asked to talk with Frel privately. The two took a long stroll around the Getty's colonnade bordering the reflecting pool. As they walked, they passed bronze replicas of the statues found at the Villa dei Papiri.

  "When I'd talked to you about my concerns about the donations in the past, I was ignorant of the law," Houghton began. "I've asked an attorney to tell me what laws a curator might be breaking by doing these things. It's called conspiracy to commit tax fraud."

  The "hypothetical curator" would expose not just himself but the entire institution to a range of criminal and civil liability under the U.S. tax code. Houghton's legal memo concluded by highlighting the irony of Frel's actions:

  I cannot think of any reason for anyone to engage in the kind of behavior in this hypothetical example, especially if the museum in question was a nationally recognized, well-endowed institution which had no compelling reason or excuse for engaging in such activities. I would not be alone in viewing this sort of deliberate tax fraud as no better than outright theft from the Government.

  The blunt memo did not have the desired effect. "Honestly, Arthur, I had hoped to bring you in more," Frel said. "I see that's not going to be possible. I'll have to reveal less of myself to you."

  The next day, Frel learned that several other Getty donors had had their appraisals questioned by the IRS, including Alan Salke, president of McNall's movie production company; entertainment attorney Ken Ziffren and his partner, Skip Brittenham; Stanley Silverman, a doctor in Huntington Beach; and Lowell and Michael Milken.

  Frel informed Houghton, adding that he had taken home the last of the blank appraisal forms and burned them when he learned the news. Frel vowed that there would be no more donations, aside from the five or so that were still coming in. Frel also said that he had spoken to an attorney friend, who had advised him against discussing the issue with anyone else at the Getty.

  Houghton believed that Frel was trying to limit the circle of people who knew about the donation scam. For the first time, Houghton began to wonder if he might be in physical danger. He was, after all, threatening Frel's entire way of life: his position, his income, his reputation. If Houghton was the only one who knew, would Frel be tempted to try to silence him? Houghton imagined himself driving along the Pacific Coast Highway to work one day and suddenly finding that his car had no brakes. Would Frel do such a thing? His best protection, Houghton thought, was to increase the number of people in the loop. He urged Frel to consider talking to Harold Williams. The antiquities curator said that he would consider it once the IRS cases were settled. But he wasn't exactly contrite.

  "You have no idea what goes on in other museums, Arthur. They accept total junk, and the donor takes twenty times the value in his tax write-off. It's the normal practice."

  Houghton decided that it was time to go over Frel's head.

  AT THE GETTY'S annual Fourth of July party, held at a park not far from the museum, Houghton was introduced to John Walsh, Williams's choice to be the new director of the Getty Museum. Walsh was an expert in Dutch paintings and a rising star in the art world. He had worked at the Met under Thomas Hoving and gone on to become a respected paintings curator at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Tall, sandy-haired, and bespectacled, Walsh was making an effort to be friendly. "I hear things are going great guns in the department," he said to Houghton. "Let's have lunch."

  Walsh wouldn't officially start his job for several months, but he was at the Getty often. They chose a lunch date for early August, just as things appeared to be at a breaking point. After they were seated in a Santa Monica restaurant, Houghton didn't waste a moment. "I'd like to tell you what's happening in the department, but I will have to offer my resignation first," he said. "I don't wish to be seen as profiting from what I'm about to tell you."

  Walsh was dumbstruck. "What are you talking about, resignation? What is it you have to tell me?"

  Houghton carefully detailed how he'd uncovered Frel's activities in recent months. He left nothing out. The situation he was describing was, in his mind, massive, important, and ghastly. Walsh seemed appropriately appalled. He offered to confront Frel immediately. Houghton said he thought that wouldn't be necessary; he would continue to push Frel to come clean. It would be better if it were Frel's own decision.

  Walsh was going on vacation for three weeks but promised to follow up with Williams when he was back at the museum. "I suspect this will blow over," he said.

  THREE MONTHS LATER, Houghton had still not heard back from Walsh about the Frel matter. He found the museum's new director reserved and difficult to read. Hought on had expected to be confronted about his accusations, asked for proof, raked over the coals. But nothing. Meanwhile, the problems had not blown over. Far from it. Donations were still coming in, and for some objects Frel didn't even bother with the formality of finding a "donor."

  As Houghton was driving Frel to the airport one day, Frel opened his carry-on bag and took out a small marble Egyptian head. His wife, Faya, had brought it back fro
m Switzerland, Frel explained.

  "I hope she declared it at customs, " Houghton said.

  "No, she carried it in her handbag." Frel chuckled. "They never noticed ... I'd like you to propose it to the board next week while I'm away. Tell them it comes from the Vanderbilt collection." Frel said that the dealer wanted $80,000 for it, "though it's worth more than that."

  Houghton was appalled. Having Faya smuggle the piece into the country had been cavalier and unnecessary. Frel's claim about it coming from the "Vanderbilt collection" was laughable. And $80,000 seemed far more than the piece was worth. Frel was asking Houghton to put his signature on it.

  A week later, Houghton had a meeting with Walsh to prepare for the upcoming meeting of the board's acquisition committee, when each department would present objects or paintings it hoped to acquire. As the men clicked through slides of various proposed antiquities, the Egyptian head flashed up on the screen.

  "Stop there for a moment, John," Houghton said. He could no longer wait for Walsh to bring up the Frel matter.

  "What is it?" Walsh asked.

  "You need to know about this head. Jiri's wife smuggled it into the country in her handbag. You'll be putting your signature on it when I present it to the board. It's illustrative of the problems with Frel that I told you about, which have still not been resolved."