Chasing Aphrodite

by Jason Felch

  Williams and the board of trustees turned their attention back to the museum's original home, the Roman villa in Malibu. Their plan called for shutting it down right before the Getty Center opened in 1997, then giving it an extensive makeover before reopening it as the nation's first museum dedicated exclusively to classical antiquities. By moving the other art collections to "the hill," there would be more room at the reborn Getty Villa to showcase its more than 40,000-piece collection of ancient art, much of which was now in storage because of lack of space. The plans also called for establishing the villa as an international center for scholarship and conservation. Making good on his earlier promise, Williams appointed True to oversee the $275 million renovation.

  True saw the project as an opportunity to heal the deep rift between the Getty's museum and conservation staff. Miguel Angel Corzo, the head of the Conservation Institute, was a member of the Getty Villa planning committee and supported True's push for the tougher acquisition policy.

  Pressured by colleagues, director John Walsh eventually buckled, agreeing to the reform but only with major concessions. Instead of drawing the bright line at 1972, the revised policy drew the line at November 1995, when the board was scheduled to approve the measure. It grandfathered in the looted objects but guaranteed that going forward, the Getty would adhere to the tighter restrictions.

  Even in its watered-down state, the policy represented nothing short of an institutional conversion. Long the bête noire of the archaeological world, the Getty was effectively taking itself out of the business of buying looted antiquities. Fearful of infuriating other museums, it avoided bragging about the change. The announcement of the new policy appeared in the sixth paragraph of a November 1995 press release, which otherwise touted the villa project as an attempt to "promote a deeper understanding of, and critical appreciation for, comparative archaeology and culture."

  "We have bought cautiously and only after diligent research and consultation with governments in archaeological countries," Walsh was quoted as saying, almost apologetically, in the press release. "But circumstances have changed. We're more and more involved in joint projects with our Getty partners in the fields of archaeology and conservation, and we will have a broader mission at the Getty Villa. We want the overall effort not to be hindered by the issues raised in collecting undocumented material. We are willing to make this change in the interest of a common purpose."

  The reaction to the change was predictably mixed. At the Met, Philippe de Montebello was furious. Curators at other institutions complained that after a decadelong binge, the Getty was now acting like a reformed alcoholic, trying to shame everyone else into sobriety. Meanwhile, former critics, such as outspoken archaeologist Ricardo Elia at Boston University, hailed the new policy as a genuine change from the old, self-serving standard that had allowed the museum to ask no questions while acquiring undocumented pieces.

  True had kept her word to Papadopoulos; she was pushing the Getty to reform. But Papadopoulos soon learned that his boss still had a few blind spots.

  WHEN THE FLEISCHMAN exhibit completed its Cleveland run in the spring of 1995, Getty experts packed up the objects and transported them back to the couple's Manhattan apartment, where each piece was returned to its original place. Despite the falling-out with the Fleischmans, the Met still held out hope of receiving part of the collection, as did the Cleveland and even the British Museum, where the Fleischmans had joined fundraising groups. But now most assumed that the Getty, with its first-rate exhibit, had an inside track on landing most of it. Barbara Fleischman would later claim that it was not until a year later, around his seventy-first birthday, that Larry came home from his art gallery one day and asked, "How would you feel about giving the collection to the Getty? You know, we don't have as good a relationship with the Metropolitan Museum as before—in that department—and their collection is so vast that they really don't need a big collection to be added. They may want it, but they don't need it." By contrast, the Getty had a "small, choice" collection that could use the help. Why not help a West Coast institution improve its inventory of ancient art? Barbara agreed, and the couple called True to share the news of their decision.

  The offer, which could not have come as a total surprise, nevertheless put True in a terrible bind. Aside from J. Paul Getty's founding gift, the Fleischmans' would be the largest the museum had ever received. The collection perfectly rounded out the Getty's antiquities holdings, especially in the weak areas of bronzes and Etruscan art. For any other curator, at any other time, the gift would have been a career capper. But for True, who had just pledged the Getty to stop buying looted antiquities, it was cause to agonize. The Fleischman collection was filled with suspect pieces.

  True's internal strife was obvious to Papadopoulos, who was with his boss at a meeting in Rome soon after she received the call from the Fleischmans. Arriving on a separate flight, Papadopoulos found True sitting at a breakfast table in the Hotel Raphael early in the morning, her face glum.

  "What's wrong, Marion?" he asked. "It looks like your best friend just died."

  Ashen, True told Papadopoulos about the Fleischmans' offer. Both knew that by taking the gift, True would be undermining the new antiquities policy she had championed. "What should I do?" she asked.

  "What do you want me to say, Marion?"

  True was silent.

  SHORTLY THEREAFTER, WALSH and True flew to New York and, under the gaze of a silversmith etched on an ancient sarcophagus, worked out the rough outlines of a deal with the Fleischmans that covered all the items in the 1994 exhibit. The Fleischmans were not offering their entire collection as a gift. Ever the hard bargainer, Larry said that they would donate 288 items to the museum, but only if the Getty bought 33 others for $20 million. With the terms broadly defined, the small group toasted the transaction with wine.

  Word of the deal bubbled through the Getty for months, creating a huge rift between those who rejoiced in the museum's good fortune and those who, like Papadopoulos, considered the transaction a grand hypocrisy. Eventually, True convened a meeting of her staff in a tiny annex to the museum kitchen. With her hands shaking slightly and her words coming quick and clipped, she announced that the Getty would, in fact, accept the Fleischmans' gift. The acquisition did not violate the new policy, she said, because the collection had been published before the 1995 cutoff date—by the Getty itself in the 1994 exhibition catalogue.

  Papadopoulos was appalled. The thin rationalization would make the Getty look as if, expecting the gift all along, it had written a loophole into its policy. After the meeting, he pulled True aside and said, "What do you think this does to our reputation in terms of our new acquisition policy? Look, if you come out and accept this, this is something that is going to live with you and haunt you for the rest of your days. You can't get around that."

  "Don't rub it in," she said.

  Papadopoulos began looking for another job. True had done much to lead the way in reforming the antiquities market, including pushing for the Getty's new policy. But the Fleischman acquisition was a giant step backward and exposed the museum as being duplicitous. He was disappointed and a bit angry, but he didn't blame True. It was the nature of the job. But he didn't want to stay in a profession so riddled with temptation.

  On June 13, 1996, the Getty publicly revealed the Fleischman acquisition, calling it a "quantum leap" for the museum's antiquities collection. As Papadopoulos predicted, the news didn't sit well with archaeologists, who felt that they had been snookered by the museum's "tough" new acquisition policy, announced just seven months before. Ricardo Elia howled that the museum had gotten the collection through a loophole. Robin Symes was livid at True, feeling that she had squeezed him out of the commission he expected to receive for helping broker the sale of the collection. Somehow, True had managed to anger people on all sides of the antiquities debate.

  THE DAY AFTER Larry Fleischman signed the contract with the Getty, he and his wife had breakfast with True in
Los Angeles. Larry brought up the subject of her house in Greece. True was still looking for someone who could refinance the loan she had received through Peppas, the Greek lawyer.

  "Now that this is settled, would it help if I lent you the money?" Fleischman asked. He proposed an unsecured loan of $400,000 at 8.25 percent interest, a "wonderful gesture" toward a good friend who had been so generous with her scholarly knowledge over the years.

  Days later, True signed a promissory note for the loan. In mid-July, she wrote to Peppas saying that she was prepared to pay off her original loan.

  "I am happy to inform you that I have finally found an American source for a 20-year mortgage and would therefore like to repay the full amount of my remaining debt to the Sea Star Corporation," True wrote. "You must know how grateful I am to you for helping me to purchase the house in Greece, but as you can imagine the longer period of time will make the repayment process much easier for me."

  On July 10, the Getty officially closed the deal with the Fleischmans, who received their first $7 million installment. A week later, True repaid her loan to the Sea Star Corporation. She had agreed to pay $3,007 a month to the Fleischmans for the next twenty years. Many years later, it was unclear whether she actually made those payments. The Getty's lawyers could find no proof that she had.

  11. CONFORTI'S MEN

  JUST MONTHS BEFORE the Fleischman exhibit opened at the Getty in 1994, a captain in the Rome headquarters of the Carabinieri art squad was thumbing through a stack of unresolved cases. He stopped at the file on the Aphrodite.

  The lead investigator on the case, Fausto Guarnieri, had retired years earlier, leaving the matter to the few overburdened investigators in the Sicily field office. When occasional documents trickled in from forgotten judicial requests, they were stuffed into the file without so much as a glance. Eventually, the file was returned to Rome, bound for the archives.

  The captain glanced through the yellowing pages. He noted that the alleged looters and smugglers of the statue had been indicted but released for lack of evidence. Despite the high-profile target, he saw little point in pursuing a case in which the statute of limitations had nearly run out. But before dumping it, he dropped the paperwork on the desk of a young investigator named Salvatore Morando. Take a look, the captain told him, and tell me if you see anything.

  Morando was a dark-eyed, soft-spoken Sicilian whose bashful demeanor belied a dogged nature. Tougher than he looked, he also had an unassuming manner and the patience needed to cultivate underworld sources and to clear the complex legal hurdles blocking his ability to follow leads outside Italy's borders.

  As Morando browsed through the paperwork, he paused to look at the large black-and-white photos of the statue. It had been found just an hour from Ragusa, his hometown. Reading Guarnieri's notes, he saw that the case had been foiled by omerta, the Sicilian code of silence. Guarnieri and Silvio Raffiotta, the state prosecutor, had tried to take the investigation abroad, but the trail had gone cold in Switzerland.

  Morando then came upon new records that had been added to the file since Guarnieri's retirement. Some came from Mat Securitas, the Geneva-based shipping company that had transported the 1,100-pound statue to Robin Symes in London. Mat Securitas had shipped the statue from Lugano, a large Swiss city just north of the Italian border, a notorious smuggling zone that had churned for decades with an underground economy. The black market there had begun with bootleg cigarettes, smuggled over the mountains after World War II by locals who carried them in large rucksacks at night. The trade had spawned a network of tobacco shops and money exchange houses catering to Italian consumers, who drove up from Lake Como to buy cheap smokes, then smuggled them home in hubcaps and secret linings in their car doors. In more recent years, the smugglers had diversified, dealing in drugs, guns, credit cards, jewelry, rugs, diamonds, fake passports, and art.

  A sales receipt in the file, also sent after Guarnieri's retirement, showed that the Aphrodite had emerged from that murky world. Scrawled on a piece of stationery from a Swiss money exchange house, the one-page note was dated March 1986 and acknowledged the receipt of $400,000 from the London dealer. It said, "I am the sole owner of this statue which has belonged to my family since 1939. Sincerely, Renzo Canavesi."

  Who was Renzo Canavesi? Had anyone questioned him?

  Canavesi's name didn't appear anywhere else in the case file. A quick check by Morando revealed Canavesi to be a former Swiss police officer who owned the money exchange shop named on the stationery. He also owned a cigarette and pipe shop in nearby Chiasso, called Tabaccheria Canavesi. A more perfect profile for a smuggler was hard to imagine. The receipt's reference to 1939, the year Italy's Mussolini-led government passed its strict patrimony law, struck Morando as no coincidence. Canavesi's assertion conveniently legalized the statue by putting it on Swiss soil at the time.

  The documents had the potential to crack the Aphrodite case open. But years had elapsed since Canavesi had sold the object to Symes in 1986. The statute of limitations for trafficking was ten years. It was now 1994. Morando had less than two years to build a case against Canavesi. It might be possible for a prosecutor to argue that the offense was aggravated, tacking on another five years to the deadline. Even then, it would require authorities in Italy, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States to move with unprecedented speed.

  Morando faxed a copy of the Canavesi receipt to Raffiotta in Enna. That same day, Raffiotta wrote two requests for foreign judicial assistance. The first went to Swiss authorities, asking them to arrange an interview with Canavesi. The second went to American authorities, asking them to have the Getty provide a sample of the Aphrodite's limestone for testing.

  MORANDO REPRESENTED A new breed of detective recruited into the art squad by General Roberto Conforti. A highly respected Neapolitan Mafia investigator, Conforti had won distinction by pursuing the Red Brigades and other terrorist groups before taking over the Tutela Patrimonio Culturale in 1992. He inherited an anemic, politically impotent appendage to the Carabinieri. In the two decades since its founding, the art squad had become a retirement queue, filled with aging investigators who had one eye on their work and the other on the calendar. Their methods were so haphazard and their record so spotty that they were considered the Keystone Kops of the art world.

  In a short time, Conforti turned things around. He played on national pride—and the potential for votes—to coax Italy's venal politicians into loosening public purse strings. With the extra funding, he opened offices in Sicily, Florence, Naples, and beyond. Taking a page out of Italy's successful Mafia prosecutions of the early 1990s, he centralized the reporting of all art crimes so as to track the overall pattern. He built the first database to catalogue Italy's vast artistic treasures and hired younger, more agile investigators who were comfortable with technology and steeped in sophisticated techniques. Many were also multilingual and had traveled extensively overseas, where Conforti hoped to take the squad's investigations.

  A slight, dapper man with a pencil mustache, Conforti inspired their devotion with a stern but generous style. His mantra became, Tell me what you need to do your job, and I'll get it. Helicopters to patrol remote archaeological sites? Done. A suitcase full of cash for a sting? Done. He also led by example. Shortly after taking over the unit, he and two of his investigators were jailed for a week for obstruction of justice. They refused to give up a confidential informant who led them to the recovery of Saint Anthony's jaw, a Christian relic stolen from a church in Padua. When pressed, Conforti remained tight-lipped, saying the informant's life was in danger. A lengthy investigation led to Conforti's vindication and the transfer of the investigating magistrate. When the general emerged from jail, the art squad lined the street, all standing at attention, some with tears in their eyes.

  More important than the man, however, was his approach to attacking the illicit antiquities trade. He wanted to snare the big bosses, not just the tombaroli scraping up ancient vases at night to feed th
eir families. Conforti encouraged his men to think beyond Italy's borders. They were to conduct international investigations aimed at apprehending the top dealers, who had long been untouchable in Basel, Zurich, London, and New York. The new art squad made extensive use of surveillance, including wiretaps, to reach higher in the chain of command. He also had his men comb through auction catalogues for suspect pieces, then work their way backward through the supply chain. At the same time, Conforti played the good cop by launching his own brand of diplomacy, reaching out to foreign judges, prosecutors, and academics to help close the enforcement loopholes that allowed the illicit trafficking to thrive.

  Conforti's multipronged approach soon paid off during an investigation of Pasquale Camera, a corrupt former captain in the Naples section of the Guardia di Finanza, Italy's finance and customs police. In August 1995, Camera crashed his Renault into a guardrail, flipping the car and killing himself. Searching through the wreckage, agents found Polaroids in the glove compartment depicting dozens of recently excavated antiquities. That led to a raid of Camera's house and a major coup. Stashed inside the dead man's dresser was a single sheet of lined paper on which he had sketched a diagram of the key players in the flow of illicit antiquities out of Italy.

  The graphic showed a wide base of tombaroli spread across Italy's boot, with arrows pointing up to two key middlemen. One was Giacomo Medici in Rome, the other Gianfranco Becchina in Sicily. Arrows from these middlemen branched off to the European dealers and collectors they supplied—Elie Borowski, Nikolas Koutoulakis, George Ortiz, Frieda Tchakos. Atop the pyramid, most prominent of all, was Robert Hecht, whose name was written in large letters. From Hecht, arrows pointed to American museums and collectors. This was an organizational chart confirming the level of sophistication that Conforti had suspected in the looted antiquities trade.