by Jason Felch
What the Met lawyer didn't tell Conforti was that U.S. Customs Service officials had already punched holes in the museum's story about how it had acquired the silvers. Investigators found no trace of the Lebanese dealer. Instead, the Customs Service learned that Robert Hecht had carried the pieces to the United States on a Swissair flight from Germany. The middleman's involvement and the Lebanese antiquities dealer cover story were reminiscent of the Euphronios krater scandal of the early 1970s. In the two decades between the cases, it seemed, the Met had not changed its way of doing business.
The exchange between Conforti and the Met soon spilled into public view. In 1998, the Boston Globe revealed the sordid tale of the silvers in a front-page story. The Met still refused to relent. Hecht would not comment, other than to say coyly, "Until someone proves this Euphronios vase or this silver treasure was excavated clandestinely and shows us the hole it came out of, it's as innocent as the Virgin Mary."
Morgantina archaeologist Malcolm Bell then joined the fight. Bell had first seen the silvers in 1987 and immediately connected the pieces to reports he had heard about a hoard looted from an ancient home on the outskirts of his dig site. But when he asked the Met for a closer look, the museum declined his request. That refusal stood for nearly twelve years, until 1999. By then, Bell had dug at the suspected find spot. He had found two holes in the ancient floor, a sign that the site had been sacked by looters, and a deed nearby identifying the residence as the home of a person named Epolemous. At the Met, Bell looked carefully at the display and found that one of the pieces bore this inscription: "From the house of Epolemo."
It was as close as an archaeologist could get to a smoking gun. Yet the Met still refused to budge.
IN OCTOBER 1999, Italy brought its fight against the illicit antiquities trade to the U.S. government with a formal request to the State Department for strict import quotas under the U.S. Convention on Cultural Property Implementation Act. The request wasn't the first to be considered under the 1983 law implementing UNESCO treaty protections. Canada, El Salvador, Cyprus, Guatemala, Peru, and Mali had already succeeded in getting similar quotas established. But Italy's request was by far the most important.
The country gushed ancient art from its dry riverbeds, construction projects, and farm fields. Italian officials now wanted to stop the flow by petitioning for sweeping protection of nearly everything originating from the eighth century B.C. to the fourth century A.D. They argued that demand from collectors in America and elsewhere had fueled the systematic plunder of hundreds of graves, temples, sanctuaries, villas, and public buildings. They cited statistics showing that between 1993 and 1997 alone, the Carabinieri had recovered more than 120,000 items from rings of tombaroli, which nibbled away at government-protected archaeological sites throughout their country.
The State Department's decision rested largely on the Cultural Property Advisory Committee, an eleven-member panel of political appointees chosen to reflect all sides of the contentious antiquities issue—collectors, archaeologists, dealers, and the general public. The committee hearing on the matter was shaping up to be an epic fight. On October 12, 1999, more than fifty collectors, dealers, academics, lawyers, archaeologists, and journalists squeezed into a stuffy hearing room in Washington, D.C., to have it out.
The emotions and rhetoric ran high. Collectors and dealers went up to the microphone first, accusing Itali ans of being unreasonable and duplicitous. Frederick Schultz, a New York antiquities dealer and president of a national dealers association, said that Italy's request was motivated by its totalitarian past. He emphasized that Italy's 1939 patrimony law had been passed under Mussolini, the "same man who wrote the laws expropriating the property of and stripping national identity from Italian Jews."
Arielle Kozloff, former Cleveland Museum of Art antiquities curator turned private dealer, was even more direct. "Ladies and gentlemen, don't let Italy fool you," she told the committee. "She is a wolf in sheep's clothing. She is predatory. And if you support this application, the result will be the intellectual fleecing of America."
The archaeologists present fought back. Ricardo Elia led the committee through the results of his study showing that only 5 percent of the fourteen thousand southern Italian vases sold at auction or written up in scholarly catalogues had come from sanctioned excavations. The rest appeared on the market with no provenance and were presumably looted.
Elia was followed by Bell, who had ghostwritten the Italian request. Soft-spoken yet blunt, the director of the Morgantina dig ticked off a litany of looting horrors, saying that the illicit trade had become so lucrative that the local Mafia in the region of Campania had begun using illegal immigrants from North Africa and Albania to dig for artifacts. "It is a dirty business, quite analogous to the trade in illegal drugs, or to prostitution," Bell said.
While the battle raged, representatives of museum groups were conspicuously quiet. They had already antagonized Italian officials by backing Michael Steinhardt, the Met trustee, in his unsuccessful court battle with Italy to keep his golden libation bowl. Fearful of offending Italy's cultural officials even more, they sat back and let the dealers mount the attack. Yet one museum official did rise to speak during the marathon public meeting.
Marion True stepped to the microphone late in the day. She wore a sky blue scarf wrapped around her neck and draped over one shoulder, making her blue eyes stand out even more than usual. Despite the wilting stuffiness of the room, her blond hair remained perfectly coifed. As she started to talk, people stopped shuffling papers and looked up.
Saying that she spoke with the Getty's blessing, True strongly defended the Italian request. She deemed "improper" the suggestions of some that it was better to have illicit antiquities on well-tended American shelves than to let the careless Italians keep them in dusty exhibits. American museums were just as careless with their objects, True said. Many still didn't have updated inventories or pictures of their own items. As for those who, like Schultz and Kozloff, accused the Italians of being cultural "retentionists," True noted that Italy was becoming more generous with loans of ancient art. Policies that expected Italy to be able to document objects that had been looted, like the one the Getty used to rely on, were irretrievably flawed. The Italians couldn't be expected to identify looted objects if they didn't know they had been looted in the first place.
The curator went even further in her written remarks submitted to the committee, exposing the museum world's dirty little secrets. She wrote that the illicit trade had thrived because "museum curators like myself and private collectors have profited greatly" from a mishmash of international laws that permitted the flow of undocumented material to American institutions. Museums had "readily ignored" the UNESCO Convention's ideals as well as their own ethical codes to snap up headline-grabbing antiquities. And she conceded that the old saw about items coming from unnamed "established collections" was, in fact, a convenient fiction. True concluded that approving the Italian request would lead to "a decrease in the illicit excavation and traffic in antiquities, and a cleaner art market that is free of the kind of sordid associations that have sullied it for the last three decades."
True's frank assessment had an impact on some of the committee members. Although they were already leaning toward the Italian request, the fact that one of the country's leading antiquities curators was for it helped to solidify their position. The committee eventually recommended approval, prompting the State Department to impose the requested import restrictions. The tide had turned.
FOR MUNITZ, THE activities of his antiquities curator were of little concern compared to the challenge he faced making sweeping changes in the Getty's structure, politics, and culture.
He had inherited an institutional flow chart from Williams that had each arm of the trust reporting independently to the CEO, like children competing for their father's attention. Each program was operating in its own little world. The programs had secretive budgets and jealous turf fights that included exclusiv
e passkeys to their own buildings at the Getty Center, where togetherness was an unfulfilled notion. There was no system of centralized control over spending, leaving each division on its own to order supplies as it pleased. "The org chart is like Versailles under Louis XIV," Munitz complained to his friends.
Munitz also did little to hide his jealousy over the residual loyalty employees showed toward Williams, who, to the new CEO's horror, refused to go away. In retirement, Williams continued to draw a large pension and occupy an office at the center.
But Munitz lost little time in making his own mark. Days after taking office in January 1998, he met with the trust's top one hundred managers and declared a new "dimension of reality." The days of spending without a care were over, he warned. The endowment, which was tied to the stock market, was not going to grow forever. It was time people at the Getty started thinking about how to raise money, as other cultural institutions had to do. He also attacked the practice of "aesthetic obfuscation," in which managers handed in phony budgets to hide from one another what they were really doing. Pulling out a list of staff members ranked by seniority, Munitz said that the Getty needed new blood. He pointedly encouraged so-called Getty babies—those who had been at the institution from internship through management—to consider other work. Word raced through employee lunchrooms that when someone asked where, Munitz had facetiously suggested Starbucks.
Munitz knew that, months after opening the $1 billion-plus show palace, his talk of austerity would be greeted derisively by the staff. But he was remarkably tone-deaf to their reactions. His hearing was tuned instead to board members, who felt that Williams had let costs get out of hand while building the Getty Center. Time and again, the Getty had dipped into its endowment to make up the difference. Munitz took a cue from board chair Robert Erburu, CEO of Times Mirror and a trustee of the Huntington, a library and museum complex in San Marino, California, which had burned through money from a neglected endowment left by railroad baron Henry Huntington in 1927. Both Munitz and Erburu were determined not to make the same mistake in Brentwood.
Munitz began retrenching. After setting up peer-review committees to evaluate how each unit was performing—something many insiders considered a Darwinian exercise, pitting Getty employees against one another—Munitz disbanded the Information and Education institutes, considered the weakest of the bunch. Other programs faced cuts.
The only Getty enterprise excused from scrutiny was the museum, where allegiance to Williams had been the weakest. Museum director John Walsh had openly clashed with Williams over the years. Munitz seized on that poorly concealed animosity, allowing Walsh to ride out his time to retirement in the newly created post of trust vice president. The CEO then threw his support behind Walsh's deputy and confidante, Debbie Gribbon, to take over as museum director.
A tall strawberry blonde with a sharp mind and acid wit, Gribbon came from a family of overachievers. Her father was a prominent Washington, D.C., attorney, and her sister was a high-ranking U.S. appeals court judge, widely considered a possible candidate for the Supreme Court. Gribbon had earned her Ph.D. in fine arts at Harvard and was a curator at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston when Walsh recruited her to the Getty in 1984, shortly after his own appointment. Although she could be charming, even disarmingly vulnerable, Gribbon had the instincts of a tiger when it came to protecting her turf.
Some board members were dubious about Gribbon's appointment. They wanted a nationwide search for a better-known, more widely respected replacement. Others doubted whether Gribbon was ready for the job. There was also the matter of her personal life. As Walsh's deputy, Gribbon had carried on a yearlong affair with drawings curator George Goldner, who was junior in rank but reported directly to Walsh. The affair, which was an open secret, ended in 1991. Goldner soon moved to New York City, but Walsh agreed to let him keep running his department by commuting to Malibu twice a month. In 1993, he left the Getty for a job at the Met.
The episode would have remained a quiet part of the Getty's institutional lore except that Gribbon ended up tangling with Goldner's successor, Nicholas Turner. She demoted him over allegations that he had sexually harassed his secretary. Turner left for another job, and the episode was forgotten—until days before the Getty Center opening, when Turner struck back. He filed a defamation lawsuit accusing Gribbon of trying to sabotage his career and characterizing his indiscretion as part of a sexually charged Getty culture. As evidence, he cited Gribbon's affair with Goldner. Scrambling to keep the charges quiet, trust officials negotiated a $650,000 settlement with Turner. One of Munitz's first acts as CEO was to approve the settlement, which spared Gribbon public humiliation but left a bad taste in the mouths of trustees.
Now hoping to promote her to museum director, Munitz argued that Gribbon should be forgiven. The board should move on. He assured trustees that she was ready to head the museum and warned that the Getty risked losing her to a competing institution if it dithered. Eventually, board members backed down, figuring they should let their new CEO have his way.
Gribbon's appointment was a political victory for Munitz. In the same vein, he sought to reshape the board itself. He soon found an opening through Barbara Fleischman.
In January 1997, Larry Fleischman had a fatal heart attack in London. The Getty held a memorial service for him, and at Barbara's request, Harold Williams accelerated payment on the antiquities acquisition, costing the trust an extra $2 million. Since then, Barbara had heard nothing from Malibu, a silence that offended the longtime socialite and Met trustee, who understood the necessity of maintaining close ties with donors.
When True passed word to Munitz that Fleischman was peeved, the gregarious CEO swung into action. With a 1999 board meeting scheduled in New York around the time of Fleischman's birthday, Munitz arranged to throw a lavish party for the widow at the Four Seasons Hotel. He also invited her to speak to trustees about how the Getty could improve its poor record of raising outside money. Fleischman urged trustees to capitalize on the villa renovation by organizing a "Villa Council" made up of donors willing to give $5,000 a year in exchange for special perks, ranging from previews of exhibits to going on summer antiquities tours arranged by True. Getty trustees were so charmed by Fleischman's enthusiasm that they put her name on a short list of candidates for upcoming board vacancies. They also voted to waive their mandatory retirement age so that the seventy-four-year-old donor could be eligible.
Fleischman was sworn in as a trustee at the June 2000 board meeting, which fell on an unexpectedly chilly day in Malibu. Munitz was triumphant, believing that he had sent a clear signal down the line that he was serious about cultivating and rewarding donors. It was also a sign to the rest of the museum world that the Getty, once thought to be above such things, was ready to woo and reward generous patrons.
Gribbon's appointment was announced at the same meeting, but the circumstances proved less felicitous. Minutes before Gribbon showed up glowing—hand in hand with her husband, a UCLA psychiatry professor—a fax from Nicholas Turner's attorneys had come through to the general counsel's office. The former curator was preparing a second lawsuit accusing the Getty of reneging on its earlier settlement agreement, which not only paid him money but also allowed him to question the collecting acumen of Gribbon's former lover, Goldner, in an upcoming Getty journal. The Getty had changed its mind about publishing Turner's comments after Goldner had caught wind of the article and threatened a lawsuit of his own.
Rather than have the entire mess, including Gribbon's affair, blow up in public, Munitz recommended paying Turner another $450,000. In the end, the Getty paid Turner $1.1 million to spare its new museum director embarrassment.
BETWEEN THE PROMOTION of Gribbon and the appointment of Fleischman, True came out ahead. While Gribbon, an enemy, seemed to have greater authority to derail the curator's crusade against looted antiquities, Fleischman, an ally, now had the institutional clout to give the curator political protection from above.
The same month the board approved Gribbon and Fleischman, True took her reformist message to the Association of Art Museum Directors' annual meeting in Denver. The theme of the gathering was "Who Owns Our Collections?"
As she had at the Cultural Property Advisory Committee's meeting in Washington, True dismissed fears within the museum world that accepting reforms would open the floodgates to new claims that could empty the shelves of American museums. The museum community had long used arguments that were "distorted, patronizing and self-serving," she said, singling out for criticism the popular mantra among curators that unprovenanced objects were innocent until proven guilty. "Experience has taught me that in reality, if serious efforts to establish a clear pedigree for the object's recent past prove futile, it is most likely—if not certain—that it is the product of the illicit trade and we must accept responsibility for this fact," True said. "It has been our unwillingness to do so that is most directly responsible for the conflicts between museums, archaeologists and the source countries."
It was a remarkable denunciation. With these few words, she had exposed the rationalization American museums had used for decades.
The date was June 1, 2000. The next day, in a courthouse halfway around the world, a Swiss judge ruled that Italy could take possession of the contents of Giacomo Medici's warehouse. Soon after, two trucks filled with crates of photos, artifacts, and documents began the journey to the Villa Giulia in Rome. As soon as they arrived, Paolo Ferri began building a criminal case that would lead him to Marion True.
Oil tycoon J. Paul Getty was a millionaire with a miser's heart. He considered ancient art an addiction he could not shake. When Getty died in 1976, he left most of his personal wealth to his small museum in Malibu, making it the world's richest art institution overnight.