Chasing Aphrodite

by Jason Felch

  That got Walsh's attention. The next day, the two met for more than three hours, during which Houghton brought Walsh up to date on Jiri's most recent transgressions. Walsh said that he was thinking about a deal he could make with Frel to stop what he called the curator's "fiddling."

  The two decided to meet again the following day with Frel's other deputies, Marion True and Marit Jentoft-Nilsen. The two assistant curators had been at each other's throats for months. True was new and a rising star, while Jentoft-Nilsen had been in the department for years and felt she was due some respect. She complained bitterly about the special treatment True received, penning a series of poison poems referring to True as the "lemon-squeezer" and a "self-seeking snake." But with Frel now under investigation by the new museum director, the two acted as a team, offering to fill out the picture that Houghton had painted.

  At a confidential meeting held in Walsh's living room, the women confirmed many of Houghton's allegations. Jentoft-Nilsen added that Frel had forged dealer invoices to support the inflated prices of objects submitted to the board. Houghton said that although he had no hard proof of Frel taking bribes, there was talk of him getting cash from McNall.

  In a private moment with Walsh, True later confided what she felt was Frel's true motive for the donation scheme: to build the study collection and disguise the provenance of recently excavated objects, not line his own pockets. The question of his personal gain, she said, should be left out of the Getty's investigation.

  Walsh and True both knew that the Getty's antiquities collection had the best chance of setting the museum apart as one of the country's best cultural institutions. But to reach that goal, the Getty had to fill some big holes in its collection. In particular, the collection needed to find several major statues from the archaic and classical periods—objects that had rarely come onto the market in recent decades. For all Frel's flaws, True and Walsh knew that he was a master at locating first-class antiquities on the market.

  Walsh wondered aloud whether Frel might be relieved of his curatorial duties but kept on to look for great antiquities. True thought that would be a good solution. But it would need to be approved by Williams, the Getty's CEO.

  BY LATE 1983, word of Frel's donation scheme and the IRS investigation had percolated up to Williams. The news came at a particularly tricky time for the chief executive. He had begun having a relationship with his deputy Nancy Englander as they traveled the world together defining the Getty's mission. Williams, married with two children, had subsequently promoted Englander to director for planning and analysis, and she informally acted as his principal adviser. They were inseparable.

  Their affair was hard not to notice around the Getty. Staff members spotted them walking hand in hand in a nearby oceanfront park. Board members looked the other way, but their relationship became too obvious to ignore. Some board members were urging Williams to choose between Englander and his job.

  The affair compounded existing tensions between Williams and the Getty board over the fate of Getty Oil. The museum controlled an 11 percent interest in Getty Oil, enough to give it the swing vote in a nasty dispute between company executives and Getty's son Gordon, Getty Oil's largest single shareholder. Harold Berg, a Getty Oil executive and chairman of the Getty Trust, wanted to keep Getty Oil intact. Gordon, a trust board member, was despairing over Getty Oil's low stock price and wanted to sell the company. Williams was firmly in the middle of the fight. The former SEC chief believed that it was folly to have the museum's assets tied up in a single stock. But dumping the museum's shares on the market would be a self-defeating exercise, driving the price even lower. He favored selling the company to a rival that would pay a high price, and he took Gordon's side in opposition to Berg, his nominal boss. Now, as Pennzoil and Texaco circled for a possible takeover, word of an IRS investigation of Frel and the trust could queer the deal.

  Williams saw that the probl ems with Frel would not blow over. The Getty needed to investigate.

  A day after a particularly contentious board meeting, Williams and Walsh called Frel into Williams's office. They confronted him with the allegations of phony appraisals and tax fraud and told him that an outside attorney would be asked to look into the latter. Walsh asked Frel to make a list of all the objects that had been donated, along with the price paid for each and the names of the supplier, donor, and appraiser. Meanwhile, Williams asked Bruce Bevan, an attorney with J. Paul Getty's old law firm, Musick, Peeler, to direct the internal probe.

  Bevan's investigation yielded a lengthy and disturbing report. Frel admitted to forging fifteen to twenty-five appraisals per year over five years, letting donors suggest the amount of the write-offs they desired. Alan Salke, for example, had taken a $300,000 write-off for a vase worth perhaps $50,000. Met antiquities curator Dietrich von Bothmer told Bevan that he had reviewed some of the Getty donations as an expert for the IRS and had found that some were, "even to a semi-educated eye, grossly, excessively overstated."

  Frel also had falsified museum records and had repeatedly and deliberately violated the Getty's policy prohibiting the acceptance of donations from dealers. In Bevan's interview with True, she told him that she had seen Frel ask his secretary to forge not only appraisals but also bills of sale from various dealers at prices of his choosing. Bevan concluded that this was likely "an illegal, excessive tax benefit." Indeed, Frel's desk contained a veritable forger's workshop, with copies of blank letterhead from nearly a dozen dealers and museums around the world. Frel's explanation of this—that it was to expedite the transactions—was silly.

  In short, Bevan told Williams, the donation scheme involved "huge, improper tax deductions" based on "deliberately excessive valuations by Frel." But the donation scheme was just the start.

  Bevan also told Williams about the "massive cash payments" McNall was said to have made to Frel. The Czech curator had created phony ownership histories for many of the donated objects, corrupting the scientific record. Frel was also involved in several cases of smuggling, having personally carried one object into the country, besides having his wife smuggle in the Egyptian head that Houghton had already reported.

  "Marion True believes this disregard of formalities unnecessarily places the Museum in jeopardy," Bevan noted.

  But the most serious concern, Bevan said, was Frel's role in the recent purchase of a Herakles torso. Frel had been offered the piece in Egypt soon after it was excavated and had arranged for it to be brought into the United States. He had had the Getty pay $270,000 more than the dealer's asking price. It wasn't the fact that the head had been looted or smuggled that concerned Bevan, but the overpayment.

  "If Frel lied to you and to John Walsh about this transaction ... you probably would wish to consider whether JPGM should have any further relationship with Frel, including a research and writing relationship," Bevan said. "Presumably," he concluded, the Getty Museum "cannot countenance such irregularities."

  Yet Frel was not fired. In late April 1984, Williams, Walsh, and Bevan called the curator into Williams's office and told him that he was being put on paid leave pending further investigation. In the meantime, Houghton would act as interim antiquities curator. Getty staff would be told that Frel was on sabbatical in Paris.

  For the next few weeks, the normally upbeat Frel was despondent. He moped around his office, rarely walked through the galleries, and wouldn't make eye contact with Houghton. One day he went home, packed a bag, and caught a flight for Europe—leaving behind his position at the Getty; his wife, Faya; their young son, Jan; and his son Sasha from his days in Princeton. He continued receiving his regular salary for the next two years, but it was the last most people at the Getty ever heard from Jiri Frel.

  THE TRUE STORY of Frel's ignominious departure was kept very quiet within the museum. Only a handful of senior people were told: those who had to know and others who would have figured it out on their own. Outside the museum, von Bothmer was persuaded to remain silent with the argument that any leak could
destroy Frel's pride or his ability to work as a scholar.

  Meanwhile, there was much to celebrate. Williams proved to be a cunning gamesman in the Getty Oil sale. After helping to lock in a bid at $112.50 a share from Pennzoil, Williams cleverly used the trust's shares to broker an even more attractive $125-a-share offer from Texaco. But he agreed to do so only if Texaco indemnified the trust against any legal action. As expected, Pennzoil sued, winning an unprecedented $11 billion judgment that nearly bankrupted Texaco. The Getty Trust, meanwhile, banked a check for $1.165 billion.

  With total assets now at about $2 billion, the Getty was not just the world's richest museum; it was also the world's second-largest charitable trust, after the Ford Foundation. Williams later told his friends that the Getty Oil deal was the smartest thing he ever did.

  Flush with money and promise, the Getty Trust expanded its vision. Williams launched a grant program, buying goodwill with multimillion-dollar gifts to several local museums. The Getty built a photography collection nearly overnight with the purchase of three major collections, its first expansion beyond J. Paul Getty's initial collecting mandate, which had excluded contemporary art.

  Williams and the board invited leading architects to bid on designs for a new central campus that would unite the Getty Museum and the trust's other programs, which were scattered throughout Los Angeles. It was projected to cost $150 million. The board eventually selected Richard Meier of New York, a Pritzker Prize—winning architect, for the job.

  The new Getty Center would be built atop 110 acres of one of the most visible bluffs in Brentwood, overlooking the perpetually jammed Interstate 405. The plan called for art collections at the Getty Museum in Malibu to be moved "up the hill" to the more than one million new square feet of office and exhibit space. The burgeoning antiquities collection would stay in Malibu and become the centerpiece of a transformed Getty Villa. It would be the only museum in America dedicated to ancient Greek and Roman art.

  The future looked bright. Only the lingering issues in the antiquities department threatened to destroy the new image the Getty was carefully cultivating. With Frel gone, Houghton set about cleaning up his predecessor's considerable curatorial mess. There were some eight hundred objects with little or no documentation. The records that did exist were peppered with fraudulent purchase prices, forged appraisals, bogus donor names, improbable attributions, and mythical provenances. Determining what, if anything, was true in the files became a Herculean task.

  Houghton started walking through the galleries with experts, identifying objects of questionable authenticity. On their first round, they identified six potential fakes, including two—a bust attributed to the ancient Greek sculptor Scopas and an archaic funerary relief—that Frel had convinced the board to buy for about $2.5 million each. After scientific tests confirmed them as fakes, the pieces were quietly taken off display and given the designation "AK," the museum's code for a forgery. The value of each was reduced on the books from millions to hundreds of dollars. Either Frel had been fooled repeatedly or had taken to advising the Getty to buy fakes on purpose, likely in exchange for some cut of the purchase price.

  Amid the cleanup, the threat of an IRS investigation lingered. In particular, donations from the two prominent Hollywood attorneys Ziffren and Brittenham hung over the museum like a cloud. Museum records showed that in 1982, the two attorneys had donated eleven objects to the Getty. But Houghton had since learned that their signatures had been forged, probably by Frel. The museum was now in a quandary about what to do with the objects.

  The issue was sensitive enough to be handled directly by Williams, who ordered the objects returned to McNall without notifying the board or the IRS. Bevan, the Getty's attorney, approved the move. He didn't think the IRS would cause a problem unless it concluded that there had been a conspiracy to commit tax fraud. But he was concerned enough to suggest that all the documents "relating to Frel's corruption" be gathered and removed from the building so they couldn't be subpoenaed.

  With that, the cover-up appeared complete.

  4. WORTH THE PRICE

  IN ADDITION TO the tax fraud scheme, Houghton had inherited Frel's greatest discovery and a disturbing archaeological puzzle.

  Sitting in the Getty's conservation laboratory was a seven-foot-tall marble Greek kouros, or statue of a nude young man. The face bore the vague smile that was a signature detail of the archaic period, the end of the sixth century B.c. The man's hands were pinned stiffly to his sides, with one foot slightly forward, in a pose Greek sculptors had borrowed from the Egyptians. Dozens of such statues had dotted ancient Greece as votive offerings, grave markers, or tributes to the god Apollo. Today they were among the most prized objects of ancient art, with only a dozen known to have survived intact. This would be the thirteenth—if it was authentic.

  Frel had produced a sheaf of documents suggesting that the kouros had been owned by the family of a Geneva doctor since the 1930s but never exhibited or studied. Still, it was a far more complete ownership history than existed for most antiquities considered by the Getty. The person offering the statue was Gianfranco Becchina, a Sicilian antiquities dealer whose Swiss gallery was a major source of material for the Getty. Becchina wanted $10 million for the kouros—far more than the Getty had ever paid for an antiquity.

  In December 1983, the trustees gathered in the conservation lab to see the sculpture. In one of his last presentations as curator, Frel had extolled it as "the greatest example of ancient art in the world," a piece badly needed to fill a gap in the Getty's antiquities collection. When the curator finished, one trustee erupted.

  "But this is an incredible joke!" exclaimed Federico Zeri, the esteemed Italian art historian. He attacked the kouros with troubling specificity, pointing to a flaw in the marble in the statue's forehead. No ancient sculptor would have chosen such a flawed piece of marble for such an important work, Zeri cried. And the fingernails were too realistic, reflecting a naturalism not found in Greek sculpture until a much later period.

  "Marvelous. Extremely complex," he told his stunned colleagues. "But it's clearly a fake."

  ZERI'S DENUNCIATION ONLY added to concerns that Walsh and Williams had been quietly harboring about the kouros.

  Williams, a lawyer by training, was troubled by potential legal problems raised by the statue. In all of Frel's paperwork, there was no indication of where the statue had been found or how it had left its country of origin. Frel had suggested that it had been smuggled out of Athens by a notorious looter in the 1930s—long enough ago that Greece was unlikely to raise any legal claim. But what if Frel was wrong about the Greeks, Williams wanted to know. And how could the museum justify buying any antiquities in a market where, he was being told, much of the supply had been recently looted and illegally exported? "Indeed," he complained to Walsh, "much of the conversation is to the effect that 90% of the objects on the market are presumed to have been recently come out of Italy or Greece." He asked for a detailed briefing on the legal implications and how other museums handled the issue.

  Walsh's concerns focused more on public perception. Such a large, important acquisition with murky origins would no doubt further outrage archaeologists. The rift between museums and the scholarly world that had spilled over into public view in the 1970s with the Met's Euphronios krater controversy had never healed. Indeed, the animosity had deepened and focused on the Getty, whose aggressive antiquities acquisitions were being denounced by the Archaeological Institute of America as "flagrantly unacceptable." Emily Vermeule, a Harvard professor and one of the leading classical scholars in the country, had recently told Houghton that she would never visit or be associated with the museum in Malibu, which had "compromised everyone who had come in touch with it" and did nothing to promote scholarship, while doing much to hinder it.

  A few weeks after first seeing the kouros, Walsh asked Houghton in a confidential memo how buying it would affect the Getty's reputation. "I am sorry to make you my tutor in the subject of colle
cting ethics, but you are surely the best informed and the most concerned colleague at hand," Walsh wrote. "What would it be necessary for us to do in the future to secure the approval and respect of those whose opinion we ought to value?"

  In effect, Houghton was being asked to explain a central paradox of American museums: how could institutions dedicated to the diffusion of knowledge justify their participation in an illicit antiquities trade that ultimately destroyed knowledge?

  His answer came in a series of memos laying out the rationalization American museums had relied on for generations. There was a clear link between the demand created by the aggressive buying of the Getty and other institutions and the looting of items in source countries, Houghton acknowledged. The result was beneficial in one way: it brought "very significant material into the market." But most archaeologists believed that it led to irreparable cultural loss through vandalism and destruction of ancient sites. Thus archaeologists would "probably be prepared to come down hard against a museum which demonstrably and visibly engaged itself in supporting this process, however laudable the result."

  Archaeologists believe that objects should be preserved in context at the source, where they can be carefully excavated and studied, Houghton explained. Museum curators have a more practical approach. "They tend to accept the troubling and messy realities of unenforceable laws and of a market in antiquities whose more blatant excesses may be curtailed but which will continue to exist whatever the circumstance." Indeed, curators feel that they have a "special obligation" to acquire, study, and publish information about important antiquities, even if their original context has been lost. The Getty's wealth meant that it was better prepared than most museums in the country to preserve, publish, and make available to scholars and the general public the objects it bought.