Chasing Aphrodite

by Jason Felch

  Rizzo and Pellegrini combed through the auction house's documents, familiarizing themselves with the blizzard of images and numbers. They spent weeks making various lists of the objects. What did they show chronologically? What about the companies involved? Why were many objects offered again and again? As time slipped away, they sensed that Ferri was becoming impatient.

  The breakthrough came late one afternoon in Rizzo's office, after everyone else had gone home. Under the light of a small desk lamp, Rizzo and Pellegrini were flipping once again through Sotheby's documents. Something clicked.

  "Stop!" Pellegrini cried as Rizzo leafed past a photocopied picture of a hydria, or water jug. "I've seen that vase before. It was in Medici's warehouse."

  Rizzo checked the photo in Sotheby's records. The vase was one of hundreds that Medici had sold at auction in London. The records showed that it had been offered for sale several times but never purchased. Then, on November 12, 1994, the vase, lot number 295, had finally sold.

  "It can't be in his warehouse," Rizzo said. "It says here he sold it a year before the raid."

  But Pellegrini was already pawing through photos of Medici's warehouse taken by investigators during the 1995 raid. "Here!" He pointed at a photo showing the same vase. It had a small tag around its neck that read SOTHEBY'S 11/12/94 LOT #295.

  The light went on for both of them. Medici must have sold the object to himself, perhaps through a frontman. But why?

  They called Ferri and told him that they had found something but didn't know what it meant. The next morning in his office, they carefully walked him through their discovery.

  Ferri looked up from the records, a boyish grin on his face. "It's laundering!" he said. "It's wonderful!"

  IN ALL, RIZZO and Pellegrini found twelve vases that were presumably sold at the November 1994 auction by Medici and seized at his warehouse a year later. Swayed by that evidence, the Geneva court agreed in February 1998 to unseal Medici's warehouse suite and let a panel of three prominent Italian archaeologists study the thirty-eight hundred objects and fragments inside. Pellegrini accompanied the experts to the Geneva Free Ports to help review the thousands of documents and photographs sequestered there.

  The rules established by the Swiss court for the inspections allowed the Italians to take notes, but not to take pictures or to remove any of the objects or documents. It took six visits over two years for the Italians to slowly digest the contents of the warehouse.

  The Italian archaeologists were horrified at the scope of the inventory. They had spent their careers conducting painstaking excavations in which any one of these objects would have been a noteworthy find. They calculated that thousands of tombs must have been destroyed to produce such a cornucopia of ancient treasures. Based on the cultures represented in the objects, those tombs had spanned all of Italy, from Sicily to Genoa. In some cases, the experts were able to identify precisely where the objects had been looted from because matching fragments were left behind and now resided in Italian museums. The survey of objects in the warehouse shattered any illusion that looting in Italy was limited either to a particular region or to archaeologically important objects.

  Pellegrini focused his attention on the boxes of documents and photographs found in the back office of the warehouse. The documents filled 173 binders—tens of thousands of letters, receipts, bills of lading, and auction results. But it was the photos that caught the former photographer's eye. Medici had kept thirty albums of Polaroids, plus another thirty or so envelopes with negatives, prints, and undeveloped rolls of conventional film. Pellegrini guessed that there were some thirty-six hundred images in total. Taken together, they formed an inventory of the thousands of objects Medici had trafficked during his career.

  Some of the photos showed objects encrusted with dirt, as if they had just been hauled out of the ground. Others captured priceless antiquities wrapped in newspaper, stuck in the trunk of a car, laid out on a cheap carpet, sitting on a tile floor, or propped up on a kitchen table. Some of the photos were of objects now locked up in the warehouse. Pellegrini was aghast. He thought the album looked like a murder book—a voluminous catalogue of archaeological corpses stripped of their context.

  After the initial shock wore off, he began to notice details. Many of the photos were low-quality Polaroids taken with a 1970s model camera. Two such cameras were found in the warehouse. Pellegrini knew that looters and middlemen liked using Polaroid cameras, which spit out self-developing photos. It was far safer than using conventional film, which had to be developed by an outsider, who might tip off police. The cameras themselves were essential pieces of evidence, proving that the objects had been excavated and photographed sometime during the 1970s, long after Italy's 1939 patrimony law had gone into effect. Each picture had a serial number on the back that indicated more specifically when the film had been manufactured.

  Medici had scrawled notes in a primitive code along the white borders of some of the Polaroids. Pellegrini eventually deciphered the markings. "V" stood for venduto, "sold"; "12" meant $12,000; "CRO" was Christo Michaelides, Robin Symes's partner; "Bo" was Robert "Bob" Hecht.

  Pellegrini went home from his first day at the warehouse stunned by what he had seen. Aching to talk about it, he called Rizzo in Rome.

  "It's—it's incredible," he stuttered. "It's terrible."

  "What is? What did you see?" Rizzo asked.

  "You have no idea what there is here..." Pellegrini's voice trailed off.

  "Look, whatever you see, look for the auction tags and write down the lot numbers and dates. We can use them to trace the objects."

  During his return visits to the Geneva warehouse, Pellegrini constructed a written record of what he saw in the Polaroids. One scene in particular sucked the wind out of him. The photos showed an underground room half-filled with volcanic ash. The walls were covered with intricately painted frescoes in deep reds, blues, and ochers. The room obviously belonged to an undiscovered Roman villa in Pompeii or Herculaneum, ancient cities buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79. Subsequent photos showed the same frescoes cut into dozens of suitcase-size squares and laid out carelessly on a table, ready for export. Still other photos depicted the squares after they were roughly plastered back together, ready for restoration. The end product was in the warehouse room next door. Pellegrini recognized two of the frescoed walls, packed in bubble wrap, ready for shipment. One was already gone. Where was it today? The question hung in the air.

  Ferri and his investigators recognized the significance of the Polaroids. For decades, Itali an efforts to recover looted antiquities had been stymied by the fact that it was almost impossible to find definite proof that an object had been illicitly excavated. By the time the Carabinieri caught up to a smuggler, the plundered piece had been wiped clean through restoration or was gone altogether. Looters in Italy were, for the most part, too careful to keep detailed records of their wares. By the time the piece showed up on a museum's doorstep, there was no way to trace its progression through the trade.

  Now, in the warehouse of one of the principal middlemen, authorities had stumbled upon an archive filled with that kind of proof. The Polaroids detailed the step-by-step process, from fresh find to clumsy restoration, when the object's value could be discerned by academics or collectors. Finally, they depicted the object at its most glorious—professionally restored and in a museum display case.

  One task remained. Ferri's team needed to figure out just where the looted artifacts had ended up. Who were the end buyers?

  That job required matching pieces from Medici's photo albums to those in glossy publications of the world's greatest antiquities collections. But until Swiss officials let Italy have Medici's Polaroids, it had to be done by memory and notes.

  Pellegrini burned the images into his brain, then returned to Rome and retreated with Rizzo to her home to search through the museum catalogues. It became an obsession, a high-stakes game of Concentration. The search required an amazing ability to
distinguish subtle variations in vases that, to untrained eyes, all looked alike.

  As Rizzo and Pellegrini painstakingly linked Medici's objects to museums, the scope of the investigation grew far beyond anything they had previously imagined. Looted artifacts had ended up on museum shelves in Germany, Switzerland, France, Spain, Japan, the Netherlands, and Denmark. But by far, the most had gone to American museums. There were Medici objects at the Met in New York City, Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, and smaller but significant museums in Cleveland, Tampa, Minneapolis, Princeton, San Antonio, and Fort Worth. Not surprisingly, the single biggest buyer of Medici's antiquities appeared to be the world's richest cultural institution—the J. Paul Getty Museum.

  Medici himself had marked the trail to Malibu. He tagged some of the Polaroids with "PGM," shorthand for Paul Getty Museum, as the Italians called the Getty. There was also a batch of conventional negatives that Medici had labeled "Trip to LA," which included snapshots of Medici and Hecht visiting the Getty and posing before several of the museum's masterpieces.

  In one, Medici stood smiling in front of the Getty's griffins, which had been purchased from the Tempelsman collection. Sure enough, Polaroids in Medici's binders showed the sculpture broken into three sections, one of which was sitting on an Italian newspaper, another lying on a blanket in the trunk of a car. The progression from archaeological contraband to museum showpiece appeared incontrovertible.

  As they raced through the catalogues, making match after match over pizza late at night, Rizzo and Pellegrini also felt an adrenaline rush of a different kind. Bound by a common purpose, working closely together, they found themselves falling in love.

  IN FEBRUARY 1999, the Getty announced that it was returning three more antiquities to Italy, including the vase painted by Onesimos that had caused the skirmish at the Viterbo conference nearly a year and a half before. The public confrontation had forced the museum's hand. The Getty decided to give back the vase and two other pieces that had troubled True for some time. One was a torso of the Roman god Mithra, a limbless second-century A.D. sculpture acquired in 1982. A graduate student had recently alerted the antiquities department that the torso bore a striking resemblance to a piece that was once pictured in a private eighteenth-century Italian collection. When True called the collection's curators, they discovered that the sculpture was indeed missing. The second object was a bust of the famous Greek athlete Diadumenus, acquired as part of the Fleischman collection. A German scholar had notified the Getty that the stone head had once been in the inventory of a government-sanctioned dig at Venosa, in southern Italy.

  In February 1999, the Los Angeles Times called the return of the three pieces "a graphic illustration of the Getty's continuing attempt to position itself as a model of ethical behavior in the notoriously shady world of collecting antiquities." It quoted a Greek vase expert as saying that the Getty's decision to return the Onesimos vase was a "courageous move." Assistant museum director Debbie Gribbon gave all the credit to True, who told the paper, "Reliable sources in the market confirmed the allegations to be true. And once I had that information, I felt the best thing was to return it."

  As she had with the return of the tripod three years earlier, the curator personally accompanied the objects back to Italy for the repatriation ceremony at the Villa Giulia. She was signing paperwork when a member of the Carabinieri art squad standing nearby called over a smallish man who seemed to be browsing the collection. It was Paolo Ferri.

  "I would like to talk to you about several objects in your museum," Ferri said to True after introducing himself.

  True was silent, taken aback. It was the reaction Ferri had been looking for. He wanted True to know that he was watching the Getty.

  "Securing the repatriation of the Onesimos is only a starting point," he continued with a smile. "The Getty must do more."

  "I'm sorry. I can't..." The curator blanched, then scurried around Ferri and the Carabinieri and started walking away.

  "Maybe next time," Ferri called, "you'll bring back the Venus of Morgantina."

  "Maybe next time," True snapped, "you'll have evidence it came from there."

  14. A WOLF IN SHEEP'S CLOTHING

  THE RETURN OF the Onesimos vase galvanized a growing resentment toward Marion True.

  Most American museums would have returned the two objects that were obviously stolen from documented collections. But the Onesimos vase was not stolen in the traditional sense—it was the product of looting, like thousands of other ancient objects in museums across the country. By giving back the Onesimos, True and the Getty were suggesting that looting was the moral equivalent of theft, a notion museums had fought for generations. And given the growing severity of the Italians, many colleagues thought it was like waving a red cape in front of an angry bull.

  Inside the Getty, the return aggravated a nasty feud between True and Debbie Gribbon, True's immediate boss. Still stung that True had been given control of the Getty Villa renovation, Gribbon began complaining to Getty CEO Barry Munitz about True's crusade against looted antiquities. She argued that it was dangerous, given the Getty's past acquisitions, and put the museum at odds with the rest of the museum community.

  "She's wandering all over, speaking out on all these issues, but is she speaking her own opinion? Or is she speaking for the institution?" Gribbon asked Munitz. "Are we comfortable with how she's behaving? She's calling attention to us and making things uncomfortable. A lot of other museums think we're holier-than-thou."

  True had to be reined in, Gribbon insisted.

  Munitz tried on various occasions, calling the women together to hash things out. Invariably, True defended her position as the right thing to do. Gribbon countered that the antiquities curator was not a free agent and should not to be "proselytizing." The curator promised to tone it down, but it was often only a matter of weeks before Gribbon stuck her head inside Munitz's office to say, "She's doing it again."

  Gribbon was not imagining things. Other museums that collected antiquities felt burned by the Getty's 1995 acquisition policy, which, by requiring an ownership history, had effectively ended the Getty's active collecting. Now True's gratuitous outspokenness was threatening to bring other museums legal trouble.

  Few were angrier at True than Philippe de Montebello, director of the Met. Since succeeding Thomas Hoving in 1977, he had become the undisputed lion of the museum world and the longest-serving director of a major cultural institution. The descendant of French aristocracy and World War II resistance fighters, de Montebello had a master's degree from Harvard in European paintings, but his administrative shrewdness surpassed his scholarship. Whereas Hoving was a playfully self-obsessed populist, de Montebello was elitist and haughty. Constantly surrounded by people with much more money than he possessed, he never let them forget that he had the better family name.

  Nothing galled de Montebello as much as the changing tide in the cultural patrimony debate, which cut to the core of his institution's identity. De Montebello was a hawk on the antiquities issue, a firm believer in museums' right to acquire what they wanted from the art market. He viewed demands by Italy, Greece, Turkey, and other source countries as naked nationalism, exercises in hypocrisy. The same cultural ministries had for decades ignored or winked at the antiquities trade, with their bureaucrats often benefiting directly from bribes. Now to cry foul and paint American collectors and museums as the bad guys offended de Montebello's sense of fairness. He was likewise disdainful of the "dirt archaeologists" who opposed the antiquities trade. If they had their way, he argued, they would lock up priceless artifacts in anonymous storage sheds or conservation labs, depriving the public of a chance to learn about them.

  The Met's acquisition policy allowed the museum to acquire anything that had a documented hist ory going back ten years. It also made an exception for any object deemed of sufficient beauty or cultural significance—a huge loophole that angered archaeologists. Although most of his own staff favored the bright line offered by t
he 1970 UNESCO Convention, they knew better than to incur de Montebello's occasional wrath with suggestions to change the Met's antiquities acquisition policy. De Montebello's prominence and his resistance to reform set the tone for many major American museums. In the annual meetings of the Association of Art Museum Directors, the profession's most powerful group, de Montebello and others beat back an effort by younger museum directors to introduce a model policy that hewed closely to the UNESCO treaty. Now True's outspokenness represented a challenge to his authority.

  De Montebello had another reason for being upset. Quietly, the Met had been fighting its own battles with Italy over claims of looted art. Besides the occasional noise the Itali ans made about the Euphronios krater, the Met had become locked in a tug of war over a collection of ancient silver vessels that it described as "some of the finest Hellenistic silver known from Magna Graecia."

  The silver service, which included an ornate medallion of Scylla, a sea monster who threatened sailors with shipwreck, was acquired in two installments during the early 1980s for $2.74 million. Italian officials claimed that the hoard had been taken illegally from the ruins of an ancient house in Morgantina, then smuggled out of Sicily along with the marble hands, heads, and feet that were subsequently sold to Maurice Tempelsman. Indeed, these were the same silver vessels that Fausto Guarnieri, the art squad investigator, had learned about while investigating the Aphrodite.

  In 1996, after General Conforti met Met president William Luers at a social event, he wrote a series of letters to the museum chief asking for the voluntary return of the hoard. He warned that Italian officials were prepared to file a formal judicial request with U.S. authorities if the museum didn't comply. Met general counsel Ashton Hawkins deflected Conforti's efforts several times, claiming that the silvers had been purchased from a Lebanese antiquities dealer and had a long history of previous ownership.