Chasing Aphrodite

by Jason Felch

  The curator was polite but terse, answering questions without elaboration. Her mandate was to buy the very best objects on the market, she said. Everyone involved in the acquisition of the Aphrodite knew that there would be many questions about its provenance, she said. The trustees, in particular, were completely aware of the risks involved in acquiring such an unprovenanced, high-profile piece. True acknowledged that the statue could have come only from southern Italy or Sicily, but she suggested that it might have been found elsewhere. She was insistent on this point: there was no proof that it had been found in Italy, even if it had come from there.

  True recounted her efforts to contact Graziella Fiorentini, the archaeological director for the Morgantina area, just before the purchase. The Getty had continued conducting tests of the statue during the 1990s "to keep the Carabinieri happy that we're doing something," True said. She also talked about her verbal duel with Ferri at the Villa Giulia. True told Cobey that she had been the first one to urge the Getty to return objects when persuasive evidence was presented. But, she said, it was her professional opinion that the return of the Aphrodite was not appropriate, as Italy had never provided conclusive evidence of its illicit excavation from Italian soil. The outspoken reformer was backpedaling.

  Studying the acquisition files later, Cobey found additional problems. The Getty had listed the statue's country of origin as "Britain" on the official customs form. Obviously, the Getty had known that the statue wasn't from Britain. The Getty's purchase agreement with Symes also had some unusual provisions. Rather than making the dealer say that the statue had not been illegally exported, which was standard wording, the agreement allowed Symes to state that he had no reason to believe that his statements about the statue were incorrect.

  But perhaps most telling was the fact that the Getty had required Symes to provide more than $9 million in collateral during the period covered by the warranty. True told Cobey that it was Williams who had insisted on the collateral, something the museum had never done before. Obviously, the Getty had been worried about foreign claims.

  Only later would the extent of what True hadn't revealed become clear. The curator made no mention of the 1996 letter and photographs the Getty had received from Canavesi, or her reasons for not taking him up on the offer to learn more about the piece. There was no mention of the warnings True had received about the statue, the dirt in the folds, the clean breaks, or the pollen tests that were never pursued.

  By pure coincidence, the day after Cobey sent Martin a memo reviewing the Aphrodite purchase, Renzo Canavesi was convicted in absentia by a Sicilian court in Enna for profiting from the trafficking of the statue. The results of the limestone tests had reinvigorated Italy's pursuit of the statue, and it had finally brought charges against the Swiss man.

  Canavesi's trial lasted all of thirty-three minutes. He refused to appear, and his attorney asked a single question of the sole witness, the Carabinieri captain who had overseen the original investigation. The judge returned an hour and a half later and sentenced Canavesi to two years' imprisonment and a twelve-million-lire fine. Canavesi's absence and unwillingness to defend the purchase, the judge ruled, "clearly indicates the defendant's attempted concealment, logically explained by a bad faith purchase."

  A FEW MONTHS later, Martin and Cobey reviewed another of the Getty's controversial transactions, the Fleischman collection.

  Rumors swirled that everyone had known the collection was "hot" when the museum acquired it. The records did little to refute that notion, indicating that the Getty staff had been well aware of the risks. In Christine Steiner's records, Cobey found scribbled notes of a conversation between Steiner and Gribbon a week before the contract was signed.

  "How clean is this stuff?"

  "Not very dirty."

  Below the notes was a small chart laying out the installments to be paid to the Fleischmans:

  $7 million—provenance OK.

  $13 million—mixed group;

  donation—uncertain

  The transaction appeared to have been structured so that the Getty paid for the most legally defensible objects first and received the rest as gifts. None of the donated objects came with the standard warranties about legal export and import.

  Another note by Steiner suggested that she was nervous about the transaction. In a reference to the International Foundation for Art Research, a nonprofit that compiled an international database of stolen artworks, Steiner wrote, "IFAR noticed—published—displayed—risk ... due diligence... Trustees must decide!"

  The contract signed with the Fleischmans allowed the Getty to rescind the purchase and get a refund if claims were brought against an object. Oddly, True, who had openly agonized over the purchase, had objected to the provision as "unduly untrustworthy" and said that the Getty would never exercise it. She was correct. When in 1999 the Getty returned the bust of Diadumenus to Italy, the museum bypassed Barbara Fleischman and went to Symes, the London dealer, for reimbursement.

  Cobey also found that after Larry Fleischman's death, the Getty had agreed to accelerate its final payment to Barbara—at an additional cost of $2 million, a move that Steiner worried Williams had never run by the board.

  The Fleischmans had built a large collection in a very short time, the Getty lawyers concluded, using the same dealers who were now being investigated by the Itali ans. The bad facts, as attorneys call them, were mounting up fast.

  Cobey and Martin now turned their attention to preparing True for what would likely be the most important meeting of her life.

  16. MOUNTAINS AND MOLEHILLS

  PAOLO FERRI HAD BUILT his case against the illicit antiquities trade like a restorer of Greek vases, carefully binding one shard of evidence to another. Since the Medici raid, it had been a slow, halting process that left the prosecutor and his investigators awash in documents and photographs that seemed to lead everywhere. It also left Ferri groping for answers to larger questions.

  Just how did the trade work? Who were the key dealers? Did they conspire to fix prices, or were they rivals? Or both? What about the academics and experts who seemed to abet the trade by appraising objects without any provenance: did they receive any personal benefit? And how about the clients—curators and private collectors: were they part of the scheme? Amid the blur of facts, Ferri lacked a compelling narrative to drive his case.

  Then, on a February afternoon in 2001, the story line was delivered in a neat package when four Paris policemen and two Carabinieri knocked on the door of a second-floor flat on the Boulevard de la Tour Maubourg. The residence belonged to Robert Hecht, whose name had appeared at the top of the antiquities trade's organizational chart discovered nearly six years before.

  Hecht wasn't home, and his wife initially resisted. But when the officers threatened her with arrest, she showed them into the study, where sitting on top of the desk was a plain beige folder. Hecht had often boasted that he was writing a tell-all book about his life, using the threat to intimidate his rivals and keep them in line. Now Ferri's agents discovered that he had been telling the truth. Inside the folder were eighty pages of a handwritten memoir.

  It chronicled the modern history of the antiquities trade, beginning with the turbulent years after World War II, when Hecht and a handful of European dealers began visiting Greece and war-ravaged Italy to buy cheap artifacts. By the 1960s, the trade had grown more professional, with middlemen organizing regional teams of looters, some of whom were supplied with electric saws by their European sponsors. Hecht wistfully recounted his partnership with antiquities dealer Bruce McNall and his early dealings with Jiri Frel. He boasted of outwitting customs agents and Carabinieri, Italian judges, forgers, dealers, diggers, and American grand juries.

  He lingered on his defining moment, the sale of the Met's famous Euphronios krater. He gave two versions. The first followed the Met's official story. But the second, a long anecdote, revealed that he had obtained the renowned vase from a necropolis in Cerveteri via his most "loyal
supplier"—young Giacomo Medici, who "rose early each morning and toured the villages of Etruria, visiting all the clandestine diggers."

  Ferri nearly wept as he read it. The memoir proved second only to Medici's Polaroid collection as a key to unraveling the largest antiquities cartel of the past century. It was a history of the inner workings of the criminal network Ferri had been chasing. Hecht had provided a road map, a confession, and, most important, a story line on which the prosecutor could hang an unprecedented prosecution.

  It would undoubtedly lead to Hecht's downfall and might finally pry the famous Greek vase from the Met's grip. If the Met fell in line, so would the other American museums, especially the Getty.

  Two months after the raid, True received a telephone message from Hecht's wife, who said that she urgently needed to speak to the curator. On the advice of Martin and Cobey, True didn't return the call.

  IT WAS THE whiteness of the Getty Center that struck Ferri the most. As the van he was riding in inched its way through the morning traffic on the I-405, the public prosecutor craned his neck to look at the museum looming above him. He couldn't get over how clean the complex looked. It was encased in a skin of creamy travertine—quarried, he had heard, not far from where he was born. How absolutely magnificent, Ferri thought. On its promontory in the Santa Monica Mountains, the museum complex seemed removed from the realm of the harried mortals at its feet.

  Ferri's trip to the Getty in late June 2001 would have been unimaginable when he first joined Conforti's prosecutorial team six years earlier. But over those years, the prosecutor had continually found himself being pulled back to the Getty. He had tracked the museum's purchases through scores of subpoenaed invoices, shipping records, Polaroids, and confidential letters. Skittish tombaroli had referred to the faraway museum with awe and longing. Middlemen and dealers had smacked their lips over the Getty's unlimited resources and insatiable appetite for their finest and priciest relics.

  The van squeezed out of the tangle of traffic, took the exit for Getty Center Drive, and was waved through the gates by security. It slowly climbed the winding road to the upper parking lot, where Getty employees were waiting to escort Ferri and his team of investigators across an open plaza. It was a Monday, and the museum was closed to the public. The Italians were whisked up a private elevator into a windowless conference room, where a bust of J. Paul Getty brooded over a table brimming with bagels, fruit, coffee, and cakes. An enormous still life, complete with a dead rabbit, hung on one wall. The Italians took their seats on one side of a massive conference table and waited.

  At last the door swung open, and in walked True. Ferri now took the full measure of his witness, whom he had met only briefly at the Villa Giulia in 1999. Flanked by four attorneys, the curator was composed, the picture of a well-bred art cognoscente—not a conspirator with tombaroli.

  After a round of stiff handshakes and formal introductions, the session began with an off-the-record discussion, an approach the prosecutor hoped would signal his willingness to work with True and the Getty. Ferri described his investigation and outlined his hopes for the cooperation of American museums. As the conversation turned to the Met and Italy's long-standing claim on its prized Greek vase, the Euphronios krater, True interrupted him.

  "Can I talk to my lawyers?" she asked.

  "Of course," Ferri replied.

  True and the Getty lawyers marched out of the conference room. Minutes passed before one of the lawyers came back. "Dottore Ferri, would you please join us?"

  Ferri found True and her attorneys huddled in a small staff kitchen, the only place they could find privacy in a building with an open floor plan. As he walked in, Ferri pretended to put a priest's stole over his neck.

  "I am ready to take your confession," he joked, hands clasped in mock prayer.

  True spoke. "I want to be honest about something, but it's very difficult for me to talk about ... people that I don't like to drag in. I mean, this is my interrogation. And Dietrich von Bothmer was my Doktorvater," she said, using the German term for academic adviser or mentor.

  Then she came out with it: von Bothmer had once confided in her that he knew the precise tomb from which the Euphronios krater had been looted. In fact, he had shown her the location on a map of Cerveteri that he kept in a drawer.

  It was a stunning betrayal, yet it struck Ferri as curious. He had come to talk about the Getty and True's role in the illicit trade, but the curator seemed all too eager to lead him in another direction. Still, her comments might help the Italians solidify their claim to the krater. The prosecutor agreed with the Getty attorneys to include True's statements in the subsequent deposition. They all went back into the conference room, and the morning slipped away, consumed by discussions of legalisms and procedures. The official session started at 2:34 P.M.

  Over the course of several hours, Ferri plumbed the curator's business dealings and personal relationships with the key players in the antiquities trade. Medici's Polaroids and Hecht's memoir had given the prosecutor a view of the trade from the bottom up. Now True was describing it from the top down.

  Her world was glamorous but not pretty. Hecht was a compulsive gambler, she said, and a serious alcoholic, who could quickly turn from charming to "very hostile, very sarcastic, very sinister." Robin Symes had once pushed George Ortiz, one of the world's most prestigious private collectors, down a flight of stairs and referred to Medici disparagingly as "the Butcher's Boy." Nicolas Koutoulakis, another dealer, was called "Cyclops" because he had only one good eye. Gianfranco Becchina, the dealer for the ill-fated kouros, had threatened to blackball her when she had questioned him about the piece.

  Ferri found True surprisingly willing to dish the dirt on the characters who inhabited the spiteful environment in which she operated. Yet the prosecutor began to identify a familiar pattern. She admitted no transgressions of her own. She complained about the backbiting, dirty tricks, vicious gossip, and blackmail committed by others, but she always came away as untainted, somehow apart.

  When Ferri questioned True about Medici, she described the five meetings she had had with the middleman. They included a 1989 meeting in a Swiss bank vault, where he had tried to give her a vase fragment while offering her a small statue of Tyche, the goddess of fortune.

  "He offered a bribe, basically," True volunteered. "The ... fragment was presented to me, that this was for me, if I wanted it personally..."

  "Personally?"

  "Personally."

  Ferri sat stone-faced. He simply didn't believe her. His investigation showed that by 1989, Medici was already the museum's major supplier of antiquities, although his name never appeared on museum records. Why did he have to bribe her? Why risk offending the curator if he already had her business?

  "Was Medici an expert for the J. Paul Getty Museum?" Ferri asked. It was a trick question. He knew from letters captured at Medici's warehouse that True had sought the dealer's "expertise" on where certain Getty objects had been found.

  "Absolutely not," True said. "Was he an expert for anybody?...I wouldn't have considered Medici an expert."

  Ferri settled back in his chair. Another contradiction.

  While discussing her dealings with Hecht, Ferri raised her earlier, off-the-record revelation about von Bothmer.

  "He confided in you in a major way...," Ferri said. "Can you tell me what that is?"

  "At one point, I was in his office, and he had a photograph, an aerial photograph, which showed the Necropolis of Cerveteri. And looking at the Necropolis, he pointed to a certain spot on the photograph and said, 'This is the place where the Euphronios krater was found.'"

  The betrayal was complete.

  FERRI STARTED THE second day of the deposition by raising the stakes. He put on record that True was now being considered a "person of interest" in his investigation.

  "We'd like to state to Professor Marion True that this office will be taking action against her for these charges," Ferri said, before laying out his theor
y. True, along with Medici, Hecht, and Hecht's Swiss restorer, Fritz Bürki, had trafficked in objects taken from illegal excavations, resulting in archaeological damage. They had conspired to hide the origins of these objects by making false declarations to customs officials.

  Ferri's maneuver was a technical one. Under Italian law, True could have legally disavowed what she had said the day before. Now, with the official warning, her words were part of a court record that could be used against her.

  Throughout the remainder of the deposition, True responded with a studied detachment. Yet Ferri knew that she must be roiling inside, and he sharpened his attack. True had said that the Getty didn't buy from Medici. But the prosecutor produced a letter that True had written to Medici in 1992, after the attempted bribe. "During one of these visits I hope we'll be able to get together and have some further discussions about future acquisitions," the letter said.

  If Medici had tried to bribe you, Ferri demanded, why were you making plans to buy from him? "It's very important that you clarify this," Ferri said menacingly. "Because if Medici is interrogated on this point and he says something different than what you're telling me, it would be very unfortunate, a very unfortunate piece of evidence against you."

  "That may be but ... I am not going to be rude to a person who has tried to do something helpful. The reality is I was writing a letter to him trying to be appreciative of the help he had given."