Chasing Aphrodite

by Jason Felch

  Munitz's decision to take the Getty post stunned his friends but delighted pol itical observers. Those closest to him, including Paramount Pictures CEO Sherry Lansing, immediately saw a mismatch. Munitz fancied himself a crusader for the working class but was about to start taming a notoriously headstrong and snobbish high-culture crowd at the Getty. Others lauded the Getty's coup in landing such a "visionary populist." A Los Angeles Times editorial called Munitz "the Getty's latest treasure" and predicted that the trust would soon take on his qualities of being "extroverted and socially involved."

  Not long after his appointment, Munitz and others charged in the Texas savings and loan debacle settled for $1 million, paid by the thrift's insurer. (A federal judge in Dallas later ruled that government regulators had been overzealous in their efforts to punish Hurwitz and his associates.) The settlement barred Munitz from working in a bank or similar business for three years, but it said nothing about managing one of the largest nonprofit endowments in the world, estimated at $4.3 billion, second only to the Ford Foundation. To the Getty board members who selected him, Munitz's track record at Cal State and the prospects for a change in culture at the Getty overcame any lingering doubts about his past.

  WITH THE GETTY Center opening, attention within the trust turned to transforming the original Getty Museum. Munitz considered it a rejoinder of sorts to the Getty Center, which was a monument to Williams. He privately badmouthed the Getty Center for its outrageous cost overruns and poor planning, which had prompted a front-page story in the New York Times about the embarrassing lack of toilets. Adopting the Getty Villa renovation as his own, Munitz persuaded the board to undertake the $275 million project in one shot, rather than in stages as originally planned. The trust would finance much of the work through tax-free bonds so as not to raid the endowment as Williams had done.

  Meanwhile, True relished her newfound prestige as the person in charge of the villa project. She traveled to Europe to inspect other museums for ideas and became the Getty's public spokesperson for the renovation project. She led a contingent of trust officials and lawyers to a Los Angeles Planning Commission meeting, where they unveiled their plans. The contentious meeting dragged on for a record seven hours. True also attended coffee klatches with nearby homeowners, showing up with her trademark scarf and brooch to discuss their concerns. Their main complaint was about the proposed outdoor Greek amphitheater, a feature True specifically wanted. Fearing that the plays and other events would ruin their seaside peace, the neighbors filed a lawsuit to block the theater. The case went to the California Supreme Court, where the Getty prevailed. But residents delayed construction long enough to force important concessions about when the Getty would use the theater.

  As True took charge, friends and colleagues noticed a change in her personality. The intelligent, quiet assistant curator of the 1980s with the mousy brown hair had become an imposing, matronly woman with a platinum-blond upswept bouffant. Insiders began referring to her as "the Mayor of Malibu" or "the White Goddess of the Villa." To cross or contradict her was to risk provoking her volatile temper. She cut people off with a hot glare or piercing remark and banished anyone who was judged guilty of disloyalty. When drawings curator George Goldner, a close friend, took a job at the Met, True stopped speaking to him.

  True also exhibited the sense of entitlement that seemed to infect many at the Getty. She used the trust's wealth as if it were her own, flying the Concorde to Paris and spending lavishly on fine hotels, chauffeured trips around Europe, and fancy dinners with foreign officials and friends. A recurring name in her expense reports was that of her new husband, French architectural professor Patrick de Maisonneuve. They had married in the summer of 1998 in a private ceremony at her Páros home attended by Greek elites, including Robin Symes and Christo Michaelides. When she went to visit her husband in Paris, it was often on the Getty's dime.

  Paradoxically, the change in True also involved increasingly strident calls for reform. She touted the Getty's new acquisition policy wherever she went. At an international conference on art, antiquity, and the law at Rutgers University in the fall of 1998, True signed a resolution calling for long-term loans of ancient art from source countries, which gave the countries the power to blacklist museums that continued to acquire looted antiquities on the open market. The Getty had abandoned its acquisitive past, she declared, and was looking toward a new era of "sharing of cultural properties, rather than their exploitation as commodities."

  Six months later, she appeared at a National Arts Journalism Program event at Columbia University, where she increased the pressure on her peers by expressing "serious reservations" about the curatorial appetite of museums that kept buying "simply to put material in the basement." In the American museum community, such anti-collecting talk amounted to heresy.

  The curator had put herself on the side of the angels as the debate over cultural property turned increasingly nasty. Academic panels, normally erudite affairs laced with platitudes and pleasantries, frequently flared into shouting matches. Archaeologists accused collectors of enabling looters. Collectors condemned their accusers as "retentionists" beholden to the governments of the countries where they dug. Italian officials were dismissed as "nationalists," accused of holding the cultural world hostage with a patrimony law passed in 1939 under the fascist dictator Mussolini. At the Columbia University event True attended, Greek partisans charged the stage when a panelist suggested that the Elgin Marbles should stay at the British Museum because Greece was unable to care for them.

  Legal opinion, too, had begun to tilt against museums. Italian cultural officials had scored a coup in 1995 when they persuaded the U.S. Customs Service to seize a $1.2 million golden phiale, or libation bowl, from the Fifth Avenue apartment of Michael Steinhardt, a wealthy hedge fund manager and benefactor of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The ensuing legal case revealed that the dealer who had sold Steinhardt the bowl had first seen it in Sicily, purchased it in Lugano, and brought it to the United States in a carry-on bag, low-balling its value on customs forms and falsely claiming its country of origin as Switzerland.

  Steinhardt appealed an initial court ruling that supported the seizure. The appeal rallied opposing camps to file heated amicus curiae briefs. The Archaeological Institute of America and similar groups disputed Steinhardt's claim that he was an "innocent owner," unaware of the object's questionable provenance. On the other side, the American Association of Museums led a coalition of institutional and private collectors who called the case "the most serious threat in memory to U.S. museums and the American cultural values which they long have promoted. Vast numbers of cultural objects acquired in the public U.S. marketplace and long exhibited in American museum collections will immediately be in jeopardy."

  The appellate court also upheld the seizure. Steinhardt then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which refused to consider the case, leading to the return of the phiale to Italy. Although on the face of it the museum community had suffered a setback, it breathed a collective sigh of relief. The Supreme Court had let stand an appellate decision that ordered the bowl returned on the narrow grounds of the falsified customs forms. It left unanswered the more important question of whether the bowl could be considered "stolen" under the National Stolen Property Act, something that could have criminal consequences for the dealer and Steinhardt. For several more years, that issue remained unclear in New York, the heart of the antiquities trade.

  TRUE'S REFORMIST RHETORIC was soon put to the test. In 1998, amid her parade of conference appearances as a reformer, someone contacted her with the incredible offer of a fourth-century B.c. bronze statue. A note faxed to her office said:

  Marion: Thank you for your immediate reply to my phone call. It was found in the Ionian Sea, very far away from the Greek boundary. We prefer not to send you a photo by fax. We have the intention to deal anywhere in Europe and when you come to Europe, any place and any time, you can come and inspect the object. After that, you can tell us if yo
u're interested ... Time is very important because we have no alternatives and for reasons that I can't tell you now but if we can meet face-to-face, our choice is that this object would be offered to the Paul Getty Museum.

  The offer bore all the warning signs of a recent illicit discovery. The fax was sent from an Athens phone number and was signed "Jack Wynn," someone True had never heard of. It was followed up by a phone call not from Wynn, but from Christoph Leon, the Basel dealer who had intervened in the acquisition of the golden wreath five years earlier. The seller wanted $6 million, Leon said. He provided a picture of the statue, which was still covered with barnacles collected during two thousand years underwater.

  The bronze was the kind of piece the Getty desperately wanted. It was extremely rare and would be a perfect complement to the Getty Bronze. True told Leon that she would come to Germany sometime in mid-May. She wanted to see the piece.

  True arrived at Leon's apartment on May 19. The statue was lying on the living room carpet in a wooden box. Leon said that it had been found in international waters, meaning it was up for grabs legally, but he offered no proof.

  UNBEKNOWNST TO THE curator, the Greek art squad had been in hot pursuit of the bronze for three years. An informant had alerted the Greek national police about the statue's illegal removal from the waters off Préveza, on the Ionian Sea. Investigators had narrowly missed catching its smugglers several times. Like their Italian counterparts, the Greek art squad had grown in numbers and sophistication, spurred by the 1990 theft of 274 artifacts from a museum in Corinth that had shocked the Greek government into action.

  When the informant passed word of True's visit to see the bronze, it sent the Greek art squad scrambling. They knew the curator's name from their ongoing investigation of the Getty's golden funerary wreath. Now the informant said that True had expressed interest in the bronze and agreed to the $6 million asking price, beating out a Japanese collector who had offered only $5 million. The bronze had been transported to the German town of Saarbrücken, where the deal was about to be closed.

  The chief of the Greek art squad dashed off an urgent request to his superiors for 500,000 drachmas to set up a sting with German authorities. They hoped to seize the statue, the smuggler, and perhaps even the curator.

  "Tomorrow one of our officers will fly to Germany via Frankfurt and he will pretend that he's a buyer," the chief wrote. "If you don't issue a ticket and give him the money, then there's a possibility ... this object is going to be bought by the curator of the Paul Getty Museum. She is now in Germany to see the object."

  To add urgency to the request, the chief alluded to the case of the funerary wreath, which still galled the government. "Christoph Leon and Marion True are well known to our department because they were well connected to a similar case."

  The money came through, the undercover agent was dispatched, and the trap was set. On May 29, undercover officers swooped down on a hotel parking lot in Saarbrücken, arresting a Greek citizen with a record of smuggling drugs, guns, and cigarettes. They recovered the statue and other antiquities in a wooden box locked in the trunk of his Volkswagen Golf. The box was stamped U.S.A.

  True's trip to view the object did not remain a secret. Around the time of the Rutgers conference, the Germans asked the FBI for help. Leon, they said, had "previously come to the attention of our organization in regard to a Greek gold funerary wreath of illegal origin... Subject is of record with Swiss authorities in connection to U.S. bond fraud, forgery of documents and embezzlement in 1996." FBI agents went to the Getty to question True and associate curator John Papadopoulos, who had sent a form letter turning down Leon's offer without knowing that his boss had already gone to see the statue.

  With Getty general counsel Christine Steiner in the room, True admitted that she had seen the statue at Leon's apartment but said that she had never intended for the Getty to buy it. She had gone to the apartment, she said, because she was "very interested to personally see it." As for Leon, True confirmed that he had sold the Getty the funerary wreath five years earlier. The curator claimed that she was now having second thoughts about his "unorthodox" ways.

  "When Dr. Leon offered the bronze statue, Dr. True let us know she was very suspicious about the provenance of this statue," the FBI agent reported back to German authorities. The FBI agent never asked True why she had failed to alert authorities about her suspicions. In the end, the incident was a near miss.

  13. FOLLOW THE POLAROIDS

  THE CASE AGAINST the Aphrodite reached what appeared to be another dead end when Silvio Raffiotta, the Sicilian prosecutor, abruptly abandoned the investigation in 1998.

  Raffiotta had been pursuing leads in Switzerland when he received a clear warning not to go any further. A Sicilian tombarolo accused him of protecting looters and their regional boss. Raffiotta denied the charge but believed that the powerful cabal of European dealers was behind it and knew that the next warning would not be so subtle. He asked to be reassigned to Palermo, where he took what he felt was a safer job hearing Mafia-related cases as an appellate judge. The allegations eventually faded but succeeded in stopping the prosecutor's chase of the Aphrodite.

  Salvatore Morando, the lead Carabinieri investigator, turned for help to a newly formed pool of state prosecutors specifically designated to take on art theft cases. Unlike regular prosecutors, who were largely ignorant of how the looted art trade worked, the five prosecutors appointed to General Conforti's special pool in Rome became experts in illicit antiquities. They could discern the links between disparate cases and target the big bosses rather than the foot soldiers. Conforti also convinced the Ministry of Culture to appoint several government archaeologists to the pool to serve as technical scientific consultants.

  In the case of the Aphrodite, Morando turned to a gnomish, redbearded prosecutor in his mid-forties whose expertise was international cooperation on criminal investigations. For most of his career, Paolo Ferri had slogged away in the Italian justice system as an investigative magistrate in the public prosecutor's office. He cut his judicial teeth early trying juvenile cases, including prosecuting members of the Red and Black Brigades during Italy's fight against domestic terror in the early 1980s. He became known for his meticulousness inside the courtroom, as well as his easygoing, self-deprecating manner outside it. His fine-honed sense of procedure also earned him a position representing Italy on a European Union group developing new protocols for pursuing criminal investigations across the continent's recently opened borders.

  Ferri had jumped at the chance to join Conforti's pool of art prosecutors in 1995. He had no formal training in antiquities, yet he fancied himself an amateur archaeologist, having spent several summers prowling the ruins of Greece. Conforti was delighted. Ferri had exactly the kind of methodical legal mind the art squad needed to navigate the cumbersome system of petitioning foreign governments for judicial assistance.

  Morando brought the Aphrodite case file—several binders, bound with red cloth ties—to Ferri at his nondescript office in the rust-laced concrete judicial complex on Piazzale Clodio, not far from the Vatican. Looking at the photos, Ferri admired the statue's size and intricately carved drapery. The Venus of Morgantina, he thought. She was like Helen of Troy, a national beauty that had been stolen by foreigners. I want this back in Italy, he said to himself. Such loveliness belongs at home.

  For the moment, little could be done. But the Aphrodite stuck in Ferri's mind, even as he turned his attention to another case he was wrestling with—the investigation of Giacomo Medici.

  ***

  IMPORTANT AS IT was, the Medici case had languished in a bureaucratic eddy for two years after the warehouse raid. The first thing Ferri did was fire off a series of requests to authorities in the countries where Medici's tentacles led: the United Kingdom, the United States, and Switzerland. Ferri knew that the process could drag on for years. Antiquities "market" countries such as the United Kingdom and United States did not give a high priority to such matters. But t
he Swiss were worse. Even in rhetoric, they continued to resist the notion that looting was a serious crime. With no archaeological heritage to speak of, the country had no law against trafficking in looted art and had not signed the 1970 UNESCO Convention. Ferri knew that he would need to come up with evidence of a more serious crime to gain the cooperation of the Swiss government.

  Surprisingly, one request soon hit its mark in the UK. It went to Sotheby's, which had been linked to the looted antiquities trade in an unrelated journalistic exposé. Two months after the Medici raid, a London television station aired the first of three documentaries by arts reporter Peter Watson, who used leaked documents and undercover work to show how the venerable auction house regularly sold smuggled art, including artifacts dug up illegally from ancient Italian graves and trafficked through Switzerland. The revelations resulted in criminal convictions of two Sotheby's employees and forced Sotheby's to move its antiquities auctions from London to New York.

  Hoping for a foothold, Ferri turned the Sotheby's files over to the archaeologist assigned as technical adviser to the Medici case. That was Daniela Rizzo, an attractive, middle-aged government archaeologist with a supple mind. She was working at the Villa Giulia, a sixteenth-century papal palace that served as the nation's premier, if seldom visited, museum for Etruscan antiquities. Rizzo set about analyzing Sotheby's records with her museum colleague, Maurizio Pellegrini. A former photojournalist who couldn't stomach shooting human tragedies, Pellegrini was in charge of children's programs at the museum and made amusing educational films explaining the ancient world. For Ferri's purposes, his eye for detail was an invaluable asset.