Chasing Aphrodite

by Jason Felch

  Meanwhile, the squad was pursuing a separate investigation that helped unlock the secret workings of the trade. In a catalogue for an upcoming Sotheby's auction, the Carabinieri had discovered a sarcophagus stolen from a museum on Rome's Aventine Hill. When agents contacted the London auction house for details, Sotheby's directed them to the Swiss holding company, Edition Services, that had consigned the object. At the address listed for Edition Services in Geneva, a dozen unrelated companies were listed on gold nameplates outside the door. It was, in fact, a bookkeeping service that served as the "headquarters" and mail drop for all the firms. Its proprietor was a large, pokerfaced man with a mustache named Albert Jacques. After some prodding, Jacques disclosed that the real owner of Edition Services was an Italian, Giacomo Medici, one of the middlemen named in Camera's diagram.

  Jacques directed the agents to a three-room warehouse that Medici rented in Geneva Free Ports, a five-story, jagged-roofed fortress of anonymous storage suites a few miles away. As its name suggests, Geneva Free Ports had been carved out as a tariff-free zone, allowing merchants of all types to move their inventory in and out of the country without paying taxes.

  In September 1995, Italian and Swiss officers raided Medici's premises on the fourth floor of Sector D. They were taken aback by the treasure-trove of looted antiquities they found.

  The front room of the warehouse served as a small exhibit space, featuring a wood floor and velvet-lined shelves containing dozens of neatly arranged Etruscan, Villanovan, Corinthian, Rhodian, Boeotian, Mycenaean, and Cypriot vases, grouped loosely by style and age. Many of the objects bore tags from Sotheby's that showed the date and lot number of the auction at which they were bought. The coffee tables were made of pieces of thick glass set on sections of ancient Greek capitals.

  The backroom was a large, unfinished storage space with white walls and concrete floors. It held dozens of artifacts in their raw state, before restoration. Large marble fragments of statuary and architectural pieces, many broken and still dirty, lay on the floor or rested atop wooden pallets. There were many large vases and, in one corner, sizable chunks of Roman wall mosaics. Packing material was scattered about. The shelves contained wooden fruit boxes from Cerveteri, home to the famous Etruscan archaeological site north of Rome. The boxes were crammed with shards and architectural fragments still covered with dirt and wrapped in Italian newspapers dating from the mid-1990s.

  A middle room, which served as Medici's private office, included a walk-in safe and a desk. Its drawers were jammed with plastic-sleeved photo albums containing thousands of Polaroids. They showed antiquities, apparently fresh from the ground, in various stages of restoration.

  The Swiss court ordered the warehouse sealed. Word of the raid spread quickly through the antiquities trade. After all, Medici was the source of many of the museum world's most prized classical antiquities.

  BY CHANCE, SIXTEEN days after the raid, an assistant U.S. attorney from the Los Angeles office drove out to the Getty Museum to depose Marion True. The federal prosecutor was there to question the curator on behalf of the Italian government about an Etruscan bronze tripod the museum had purchased in 1990.

  The visit was not unexpected. Count Guglielmo of Florence had reported the tripod stolen from his family's collection. The object had been previously photographed and registered with Italian authorities, so it was only a matter of time before the Italians contacted the Getty. True took the initiative and invited the Culture Ministry to examine the piece, indicating her willingness to send it back. The Italians asked the U.S. attorney's office to question the curator first.

  In a museum conference room, True testified under oath that she had first seen the tripod and its companion candelabrum at the Zurich restoration shop of Fritz Bürki. When asked about Bürki, she described him as one of the "world's leading suppliers of world-class antiquities." Both statements were false.

  In fact, True had first seen the objects in 1987 during a tour of Medici's Geneva Free Ports warehouse, where Medici and Hecht had personally offered them for sale to the Getty. And while True made it appear that Bürki was the source of the suspect pieces, Bürki, a former university janitor, was actually well-known as Hecht's antiquities restorer and frontman. Medici and Hecht had used his name often to ship objects to California. Indeed, when the tripod had arrived in Los Angeles, True had written to Medici, not Bürki, to confirm its receipt.

  Before True's testimony could boomerang, the Getty announced that it was giving the tripod back to Italy. True personally carried it to Rome the following year, using the occasion to meet senior cultural officials for Italy and the Vatican. On the Getty expense form, True stated the purpose of the trip as "public relations."

  THE ITALIANS' REQUEST for samples from the Aphrodite went unheeded for more than a year. When True responded, she did so informally and in the most favorable context: during discussions with cultural officials over returning the Francavilla Marittima material. Pietro Guzzo, the archaeological head of Pompeii and a close friend of True's, was visiting the Getty when she handed him a baggie with some fingernail-size chips from the back of the statue.

  Italian authorities hoped that science might be able to accomplish what their criminal investigators had not. A team of University of Palermo geologists examined the specimens under an electron microscope and found an abundance of nanofossils—microscopic organisms that had become entombed when the stone was formed. Using the fossils like a geological fingerprint, the scientists eventually matched the sample to limestone found in an ancient quarry near the Irminio River, fifty miles south of Morgantina. The sample was also strikingly similar to the limestone of another acrolithic sculpture discovered in Morgantina in 1956 and on display in the city's small museum. The team delivered its conclusion to Italian investigators: the Aphrodite's stone could be linked with near certainty to a location half an hour's drive from Morgantina, where rumors about the statue had first sprouted.

  But as one evidentiary door opened for Italy, another closed. The Swiss end of Morando's criminal investigation hit a dead end.

  The Carabinieri had waited two years to receive permission from Swiss authorities to interview Renzo Canavesi, now retired and living as a recluse in his mountain home in Segno. An imposing, barrelchested man with a mane of thick hair, Canavesi showed up for his interrogation alone and refused to say anything. His silence brought the Aphrodite investigation to a halt. Time was running out.

  Morando conferred with Raffiotta, who by now had been chasing the statue for eight years. The prosecutor knew that the statute of limitations would expire before Canavesi's trial could be completed, but he hoped to convince the court that the Getty's delays in providing the limestone had stopped the clock. If the argument bought him time, he and Morando might be able to squeeze out more evidence as the case ground its way through the Italian courts. It was a gamble.

  The government of Italy indicted Canavesi for trafficking in stolen property.

  AS ITALIAN INVESTIGATORS were closing in on Canavesi in 1996, the Aphrodite's former owner sent a letter to Getty CEO Harold Williams introducing himself and offering to provide the museum with several missing pieces of the statue. He also wanted to supply information about the original position of the statue's missing right hand—information that had the potential to solve the central mystery of the figure's identity.

  Was this Hera, the wife of Zeus? Was it Aphrodite, as True had long suggested? Or was it Demeter, holding a torch aloft to find her kidnapped daughter? If it was Demeter, Canavesi's offer could point once again to Morgantina, where an ancient cult devoted to the goddess had thrived.

  To show that he was serious, Canavesi enclosed two photocopies of photographs taken of the statue years earlier. The copies were of poor quality, but one showed the outlines of the statue's head, and the other showed what appeared to be its body. Williams promptly forwarded the letter to Walsh, who relayed it to True with a note: what did she make of this?

  An academic known for her
thorough research, True reacted strangely. She ignored the potential for acquiring crucial evidence and questioned Canavesi's motives. Did he want money? Perhaps. Or maybe his intentions were more sinister. Why hadn't he simply provided the missing pieces and the information he offered?

  True called Symes and Michaelides in London. With obvious annoyance, Michaelides confirmed that Canavesi was indeed the previous owner of the statue, but he said that Canavesi had agreed never to contact the Getty directly.

  True sent a letter to Canavesi vaguely committing to meet with him when she was next in Europe. In a fax, Canavesi upped the ante by asking for a meeting in Switzerland, adding that he had dozens of photos of the statue he could show her. True answered with vague but polite interest, then dropped the matter.

  MORE THAN A year later, in October 1997, True traveled to Italy's University of Viterbo as a featured speaker at a conference titled "Antiquities Without Provenance."

  The audience was full of leading experts on the subject. Some were friends—such as archaeologist Malcolm Bell, Wolf-Dieter Heilmeyer of the Berlin Museums, and even General Conforti. But many had had run-ins with the Getty and its curator: Silvio Raffiotta and Graziella Fiorentini from Sicily and several senior Itali an Ministry of Culture officials and archaeologists. True's task was to convince them that the Getty had changed its ways.

  Before she could, however, an outspoken Italian archaeologist named Maria Antonietta Rizzo had a surprise for the Getty curator. Rizzo delivered a paper on an important Greek vase in the Getty's collection, one potted by Euphronios and painted by Onesimos, two of ancient Greece's most acclaimed artists. The museum was especially proud of the piece, which True had assembled painstakingly from shards purchased from several different dealers. But rather than praise the vase's artistry, Rizzo revealed convincing evidence that the fragments had all been looted from the Etruscan archaeological site at Cerveteri. She claimed to have spoken to the tombarolo who had excavated the Onesimos fragments from one of the underground tombs there. The Getty should have suspected the Etruscan origin of the vase, she continued, because Cerveteri was home to a thriving cult of Hercules. The Getty's own publications noted that there was an inscription on the foot of the vase containing the word "Ercle," the Etruscan name for Hercules.

  "Will the P. Getty Museum, represented here in the person of Marion True ... give back to Italy a piece that has been trafficked in such an obvious way?" Rizzo asked, locking eyes with True, who sat in the front row of the audience.

  The curator was visibly stunned. Her face turned deep red, but she kept her composure until it was time for her own presentation, titled "Refining Policy to Promote Partnership." As she stood to speak, she looked angry and nervous.

  "It is unfortunate that this information and substantial evidence has never been formally presented to the Getty Museum," True said. She promised that the Getty would investigate Rizzo's allegations. If they proved true, the museum would return the vase.

  True soldiered on with her prepared remarks, painting herself as the broker of a new peace. In the wake of the ambush by Rizzo, however, her words struck some as ironic.

  "Confronted with the brutally direct evidence of destruction of sites presented by the archaeologists at this meeting, it seems hard to understand why the process for change has been so long and frustrating," True said.

  The blame, she continued, rested with all sides—the collectors, archaeologists, museum curators, and government officials sitting before her. Each group had let their personal feelings and professional vitriol get in the way of reform. She called for a new understanding, a staking out of the middle ground. She endorsed Heilmeyer's solution of long-term loans from source countries to museums and noted her own efforts at the Getty, recounting in a slide show her role in the Goldberg mosaic case and the museum's 1995 acquisition policy, as well as the return of the Lex Sacra and tripod.

  She then displayed a slide of the Aphrodite, going on at length about the museum's openness in the dispute over the object. She said that the Getty had acquired its limestone and marble goddess only after "no information or objections were offered" by Italy and underscored the museum's cooperative spirit in supplying the limestone chips to help Italian geologists ascertain the origins of the statue. Although a preliminary analysis of the limestone suggested that it had come from Sicily, there was still no proof that the statue was from Morgantina, she added.

  It was a bold performance—too bold for some in the audience. True was staking out a public position she would not be able to sustain for long.

  12. THE GETTY'S LATEST TREASURE

  IN DECEMBER 1997, the Getty Trust officially opened the new Getty Center, a cluster of brilliant white structures set atop a promontory in Brentwood, overlooking the sprawling Los Angeles basin.

  The unveiling was a cultural coming-out party, noted around the world. The Getty Center had taken fifteen years and well over $1 billion to build—an obscene amount that far exceeded even the most inflated estimates produced over the years. But unlike the original Getty Museum, which had been greeted with scorn, Richard Meier's modernist creation was received with breathless reviews. Critics hailed the center's six buildings, clad in white aluminum and fourteen thousand tons of Italian travertine, as a monument to the growing sophistication of southern California. Los Angeles, it seemed, had finally outgrown its reputation as the vapid capital of Hollywood kitsch.

  For the Getty, the new campus fulfilled the vision of its founding CEO, Harold Williams. The trust's seven far-flung programs were now gathered together on one site from the anonymous office suites and warehouses around the city where they had been located for years. A circular building housed the Getty Research Institute, with its 900,000-volume library. Others housed the Conservation, Education, Information, and Leadership institutes, as well as the Getty Grant Program. But the centerpiece was the five pavilions dedicated to the Getty Museum's art collection, expanded in the 1980s from J. Paul Getty's original collecting areas of antiquities, decorative arts, and paintings to include drawings, illuminated manuscripts, and photography.

  As the Getty entered a new era, it was intent on shedding its image as aloof and elitist. More than seven hundred dignitaries and guests took their seats on the center's massive open-air plaza for the inaugural ceremony, a carefully choreographed display of Los Angeles's diversity. After a youth orchestra introduced the program, the all-black Crenshaw High School Elite Choir, in blue robes with billowing yellow sleeves, swayed to a hand-clapping Gospel rendition of "America the Beautiful." Actor Denzel Washington spoke movingly about the Getty's commitment to bringing high culture to inner-city black and Latino schoolchildren. A giant temporary screen lit up with a video of First Lady Hillary Clinton walking through the galleries with a group of minority youngsters while discussing the emotional impact of Monet's haystacks and van Gogh's irises. The headline act was Los Lobos, the Latino rock band that had its roots at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles.

  The event also served as a triumphant sendoff for Williams, who was scheduled to retire on his seventieth birthday, just seventeen days after the ceremony. He was being replaced by Barry Munitz, who was largely overlooked during the ceremony. When Munitz was called up to the stage at the last minute, he made a statement without saying a word. While most of the honorees were dressed in white shirts and dark suits, the Getty's incoming CEO made his debut in a turtleneck and sports coat.

  Munitz, former chancellor of the California State University system, already had his marching orders to revamp the Getty Center's image. His goal was to change the Getty's profile from that of an aloof, gluttonous institution to one that was leaner, more focused, and intent on "coming down the hill" to connect with the diverse metropolis it served. A small, high-strung man of fifty-six with a walrus mustache and perpetual tan, Munitz couldn't have been more different from his avuncular, wattle-necked predecessor. Whereas Williams was usually quiet and discreet, Munitz was an incorrigible schmoozer and name-dropper who fanci
ed himself a man of the people.

  Munitz had grown up in a Russian Jewish immigrant family in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. His father got up from the dinner table one day and disappeared for years, leaving the young Munitz to help his mother and clubfooted sister scrape by. He managed to parlay his smarts into a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship at Princeton University, where he eventually received a Ph.D. in comparative literature. He taught briefly before launching into the political side of education, rising through the academic ranks to become chancellor of the University of Houston—Main Campus at age thirty-five.

  Munitz's charm cut a swath through Houston society. He left his third wife for his fourth, the associate director of the Houston Grand Opera, and then left academia for an excursion into high finance with a tennis buddy, corporate takeover impresario Charles Hurwitz. By the late 1980s, Munitz was vice president of MAXXAM, which through its subsidiary Pacific Lumber had enraged environmentalists by harvesting old-growth redwoods in northern California. He also became chairman of a Texas savings and loan association, which federal regulators seized in 1988, making it the fifth-largest thrift failure in American history. The federal government accused Munitz and the association's board members of enriching themselves through hefty pay raises while hiding millions of dollars in losses from junk bond and tanking real estate investments.

  By the time regulators sued, Munitz was four years into his chancellorship of the 369,000-student California State University system, the largest degree-granting institution in the world. He steered it through a severe financial crisis by cutting costs and hiking fees, winning praise from the business community and outrage from students and faculty. He emerged as a national spokesman for higher education, speaking of students as "customers" and education as a "product." He drove a purple Camaro with the license plate CUS CHIEF and indulged his childhood passion for chess, displaying fifty sets from around the world in his Long Beach office.