Chasing Aphrodite

by Jason Felch

  "Yesterday you told me that Medici was not an expert."

  "He's not an expert ..."

  "And how come that in this case he gave you information on the provenance of proto-Corinthian olpae [pitchers]?"

  Ferri was referring to a letter True had written to Medici asking for information about certain pitchers in the Getty's collection. An assistant curator was writing a Ph.D. dissertation on the olpae, and True had queried the middleman on her behalf, asking where they were from. Medici had written back, informing True that the objects had been found in Monte Abatone, a necropolis in Cerveteri. He'd described the type of tomb in detail and offered her other objects found there.

  True struggled to explain the exchange. "The main thing we were trying to find out was where the person who gave the objects to the museum had gotten them. That was the answer. They had come from Giacomo Medici. And Giacomo Medici offered the additional information that they came from Monte Abatone."

  True's attempt to downplay the letters was particularly galling to Ferri. Here, in black and white, Medici was informing the Getty that the objects were looted. And he was offering more objects from the same tomb. Yet True was trying to spin it as some prosaic exchange of academic information.

  "Hiding oneself behind somewhat calculated answers might be useful to your defense, but only up to a certain point," Ferri warned, the strain evident in his voice. "Because it leaves certain areas of shadow that might be illuminated by other people. And that could be dangerous for you. Giacomo Medici is not the person you met only five times. He's a very important character that is behind a lot of various transactions and I need to know from you, if you had even any suspicion that he was behind these transactions."

  "I can't say it better than that," True replied weakly.

  After the lunch break, True came back with a different version of her relationship with Medici. The curator said that she had continued contact with Medici for "opportunistic" reasons. Despite her personal distaste, she needed Medici's cooperation to prove whether the kouros was fake or real. She never told anyone about Medici's bribe attempt because she was worried that he might exact revenge by badmouthing her in the market. "I just want to make clear that my intention is not to protect Giacomo Medici," she said.

  Unconvinced, Ferri turned the floor over to his experts, Maurizio Pellegrini and Daniela Rizzo, who spent the next hour with True reviewing more than seventy images from the Medici Polaroids. She helped place them at museums in Toledo, Boston, Richmond, New York, Minneapolis, and Cleveland; in Sydney and Copenhagen;—and at the Getty. When asked if she would be willing to draw up lists of other items that Medici, Hecht, and others had sold to her museum peers, True didn't hesitate to say yes. By the time she was done, she had helped the Italians trim months, if not years, off their investigation by identifying where they could find the looted pieces in private collections and museums.

  At 6:04 P.M. on the second day, the deposition ended. The two sides shook hands, and Ferri took a last look at True. The curator gave the prosecutor the faintest of smiles before disappearing out the door.

  Once the van was safely away from the Getty and swallowed up in freeway traffic, the Italians relaxed. True had resisted initially, but in the end she had cooperated, saving the investigators untold hours and grief.

  "I guess there's no reason to prosecute Marion True now," Daniela Rizzo said later, at dinner. Ferri was uncharacteristically solemn. Except for True's help identifying where the suspect antiquities were now exhibited, he felt that his trip to the Getty had produced no more leads than if he had come as a tourist.

  "True still isn't telling us everything she knows," he said. "I think I have no choice but to bring her to trial."

  TRUE'S DEPOSITION CHANGED things inside the Getty.

  Getty officials were already nervous before Ferri showed up. Prompted by Richard Martin's gloomy memo months before, the board had formed a three-member committee to monitor the crisis. The board members hoped it would go away once Ferri came to Brentwood and realized that True would be helpful and sincere.

  But True's easy betrayal of museum colleagues and surprising revelations startled even her own attorneys. Martin and Cobey left the first day of the deposition dumbstruck. They had spent two days prepping True, peppering her with questions, asking her if there was anything—anything—that they should know about. She had insisted there wasn't. As a result, her disclosure about von Bothmer and the Euphronios krater had blind-sided them. Why would she volunteer that? How many times had they told her only to answer what was asked? And what else had she kept from her own attorneys? "The Met's never going to speak to us again," Cobey groaned.

  By the second day, it was also painfully obvious that the Getty had underestimated what it was up against. Rather than the usual myriad of disorganized regional officials, the Itali an cause was now represented by a single, focused man: Ferri. He was obviously smart, cagey, and startlingly well informed. He had grilled True for hours without once consulting his notes. He had asked questions to test the curator's honesty, to trap her, and had exhibited intimate knowledge of the antiquities trade, showing clearly that these "competitors" had acted in concert to take the Getty for more money. And he wasn't easily impressed. By volunteering what she knew about von Bothmer, True may have miscalculated. Instead of impressing Ferri, it may have left him with the idea that she knew far more than she was telling. Hope faded among Getty officials that the Italians merely wanted to consult with True. The prosecutor had her firmly in his sights.

  Worse, the curator's evasiveness during the deposition began a slow, creeping realization among some Getty officials that over the years, the Getty had come to believe its own lies. It had glossed over the messy details in its files and embraced the reformist story line it had eagerly peddled in press releases and at professional conferences. True's performance now had some beginning to ask uncomfortable questions: Could the Italians be right? Did the Getty knowingly buy looted art?

  Those doubts, of course, could not be spoken of openly. Getty veterans such as Debbie Gribbon and True's supporters continued to dismiss such suspicions as absurd. After all, the Getty had set the agenda for reforming the antiquities trade. True had courageously stood up against her colleagues in defense of the Italians. Wasn't she in charge of a nearly $300 million program to remake the Getty Villa into a temple to venerate the science of archaeology? They refused to entertain the notion that both things could be true, that the Getty and its curator had played both sides of the issue, never dreaming that the Italians would stumble onto a cache of photos and documents that might reveal the museum's duplicity.

  As for Munitz, he seemed unwilling to get his hands dirty. He met briefly with Ferri at the start of the deposition and promised cooperation, but otherwise refused to get directly involved. The Italian problem was best dealt with by Gribbon and his bosses, the board of trustees. He also made sure that Martin, not Cobey, was the one to brief the trustees. Munitz was beginning to consider Cobey, his acting general counsel, as something of an alarmist.

  Cobey had begun to raise questions not just about antiquities but about Munitz's personal use of Getty resources. She objected when he used Getty money to pay for his wife's travel. She objected when he ordered gifts for departing board members. She wrote a long memo opposing his proposal to modify J. Paul Getty's original 1953 indenture, so that board members could start being paid for their service. Such moves would likely violate IRS rules against self-dealing, she warned.

  Jill Murphy, Munitz's lieutenant, began to think that Cobey was using these issues to grab some of the institutional power her position had never had in the trust hierarchy. Cobey was supposed to be putting out the legal fires, not sounding the alarm every time she sniffed smoke, Murphy complained. Board members also grew weary of what they considered the attorney's increasing shrillness. After one closed meeting in which Cobey gave a presentation, one trustee whispered to Murphy, "Time to get a new general counsel."

  IN SEPT
EMBER 2001, the Getty did just that. Munitz informed Cobey that she would not be named permanent general counsel and hired Peter Erichsen to fill the post. Erichsen had been associate White House counsel under President Bill Clinton, for whom he helped select federal judges, and later general counsel at the University of Pennsylvania. He was smart, loyal, and politically astute, but he knew nothing about the complex legal terrain of the Itali an case, which now fell into his lap. On September 11, Erichsen was attending his first board meeting in Washington, D.C., where the trustees and senior staff had gathered for a tour of the National Gallery, whose massive plate-glass windows looked out over the Capitol. They were in the middle of a presentation when someone interrupted: there had been a terrorist attack in New York City, and another attack was expected soon on the Capitol.

  Before scrambling to safety, members of the board watched the Twin Towers collapse into dust on a wide-screen television. For many, the attacks on the World Trade Center hit very close to home. Lewis Bernard was a board member of Marsh & McLennan, which lost all its employees and offices in Tower 1. Luis Nogales had an office in the American Express Tower, which was adjacent to the Twin Towers and sustained damage. The children of Agnes Gund, president of the New York Museum of Modern Art, lived not far from Ground Zero.

  A whole year would pass before the board would hear about the Italian problem again. By then, the implications had become darker. Just weeks after 9/11, Martin flew to California to brief Erichsen on the case. New problems were emerging as Martin and Cobey, who stayed on as Erichsen's deputy, continued hunting through internal files, hoping to find some way out. It soon became clear that the Getty was entangled in a legal Catch-22.

  Maurizio Fiorilli, a seni or government lawyer representing the Italian Ministry of Culture, was demanding that the contested objects be returned as a gesture of the Getty's goodwill. Yet it was almost certain that Ferri, who answered to the Ministry of Justice, would use any return as an admission of guilt in a criminal case against True. The Italians portrayed the two ministries as acting independently, but Martin knew that Ferri and Fiorilli were in lockstep. Indeed, if there was a trial, the two lawyers would sit at the prosecution table together. The Italians were whipsawing the Getty.

  The dilemma paralyzed the museum. Could the Getty cut a deal with one ministry without a guarantee that it would not get burned by the other? And to what extent were the fates of True and the Getty linked? Should the Getty risk a withering legal and public relations assault by the Itali ans to protect its temperamental curator? Board members were loath to consider cutting the curator loose. Yet, as Martin's January 2001 memo to Munitz had hinted, at some point the interests of the museum and its star curator might diverge.

  "Dr. True is anxious to start a systematic campaign of promotion" of her innocence, Martin had written. "I have told Dr. True that we cannot begin that process until we have completed our review of all of the files ... It is important that we be certain of what our position is before we undertake such a campaign."

  There was no evidence to suggest that True had been acting as a rogue curator. Indeed, documents unearthed in the internal review suggested that Gribbon, Walsh, and Williams had been fully aware that the museum was buying looted art and had approved all of the objects around which the Italians were building their case. Cobey and Martin considered these documents to be "radioactive."

  There was Houghton's 1986 resignation letter, eerily predicting dire consequences if Walsh failed to deal with problems in the antiquities department, including the potential for "a sweeping external investigation of the Getty Museum's records." The impact of such an investigation on the trust's reputation would be "catastrophic."

  There were the funerary wreath documents, in which True declared the object "too dangerous" to buy, only to mysteriously reverse herself and recommend its purchase—a recommendation endorsed by Walsh.

  Finally, and most damaging, there were Walsh's own handwritten notes of two 1987 meetings with Williams to discuss the antiquities acquisition policy on the eve of the Aphrodite purchase. In languid script scrawled across yellow legal paper, the museum director had recorded his boss's troubling words: "We are saying we won't look into the provenance ... We know it's stolen, Symes a fence." Walsh and Williams knew very well whom True was dealing with. A few days later, Walsh's notes quoted Williams again laying the issue on the table: "Are we willing to buy stolen property for some higher aim?" Also, "We knowingly buy stolen goods. We knowingly deal with liars by accepting their warranties."

  The notes not only implicated True's bosses; they also appeared to destroy a key element of the Getty's defense: that it had acted in "good faith" while buying the suspect antiquities. Even if Italy was able to prove that several of the artifacts had been looted, it was important that the Getty be able to argue that it had had no knowledge of the fact at the time. If revealed, these documents could be used to prove that the Getty had violated not only Italy's cultural patrimony law but American criminal law as well, specifically the National Stolen Property Act.

  As the full implications of the documents became obvious, Martin sent an e-mail to Cobey. "When we were speaking yesterday about our unfortunate documents, a line from T. S. Eliot kept coming back to me," he wrote. "It's from 'Gerontion':

  "'After such knowledge, what forgiveness?'"

  IN MARCH 2002, eight months after being deposed by Ferri, True proposed a remarkable purchase to her superiors at the Getty. It was a magisterial third-century bronze statue of Poseidon, god of the sea. Valued at $4 million, the one-half life-size figure was to take its place next to the Getty Bronze as one of the most valued antiquities ever found.

  True had seen the statue at the 2002 Winter Antiques Show in New York, an annual event sponsored by the nonprofit East Side House Settlement and featuring the wares of dozens of exhibitors. She immediately put it on reserve. As she detailed in a draft acquisition proposal, the Poseidon was the first full-figured bronze to appear on the market in a long time. It was being offered by Rupert Wace, a reputable London antiquities dealer, on behalf of the British Rail Pension Fund, which had owned the statue since the late 1970s. It had been exhibited at the Royal Museum of Scotland and the Detroit Institute of Arts, as well as the antiquities fair in Basel in November 1999. Wace had even published the statue in 2001. The Poseidon appeared to meet all the stringent requirements of the Getty's 1995 acquisition policy. Missing from True's draft proposal, however, was the name of the statue's original owner: Robin Symes. William Griswold, the museum's deputy director, noted the omission and alerted the Getty's lawyers.

  Martin responded with some alarm. "What we have learned about Symes since June of last year means that we can not place any reliance on anything he says as to provenance ... We have been put on notice that he is part of a group which has dealt in stolen objects and systematically falsified provenance documents. The story Symes has given us about this object fits exactly the profile of stories used to cover objects which were, in fact, recently looted from Italy."

  Symes had given True a sheaf of documents to support his claim that the statue had been found near Alexandria, Egypt, during the early 1930s and sold soon after to a Greek collector. The statue had been transferred to Switzerland in 1956, then sold to Symes in September 1973, the documents claimed. But Cobey thought that the two affidavits looked suspicious. Some quick checking confirmed her fears. One of them had supposedly been signed at the American embassy on June 4, 1978. Cobey looked up the date and found that it was a Sunday—an unusual day to be doing business. The more recent U.S. customs forms also seemed strange. The Poseidon had been imported into the United States with a number of other objects, whose country of origin was given as "multi."

  More alarming, the statue had been the subject of a major controversy in the late 1970s after the Carabinieri told the British media that the statue had been found in the Bay of Naples and smuggled out of Italy. Articles about the incident included a curious comment by Symes: "If I knew about it
, I wouldn't talk. If I didn't, I couldn't." The Italian investigation had apparently petered out.

  With Erichsen's approval, the Getty went ahead with True's suggestion that the museum take the statue on loan for study. No harm could come from looking more closely at the object, Erichsen felt. Others knew that once the statue arrived, there would be considerable pressure to acquire it. In the meantime, Erichsen suggested that True contact Wace with the Getty's questions about the provenance documents. Cobey and Martin objected, warning that relying on True to check out the statue's story would be a mistake.

  The Getty also turned to a London attorney named Ludovic de Walden for advice about the bronze. De Walden occasionally acted as outside counsel for the Getty. A Bloomsbury Square lawyer who dressed in colored shirts with white collars and flashy cuff links, de Walden had been busy spearheading a legal attack against Symes. His clients were the family of Christo Michaelides, who had died on July 5, 1999, the day after he fell down the stairs of a Tuscan villa rented by clients Leon Levy and Shelby White. When Michaelides' family asked Symes to return Christo's valuable personal effects as keepsakes, Symes had sent them only a cheap watch and some playing cards. Irate, the family filed suit against Symes and hired de Walden to investigate the dealer's holdings across Europe, arguing that half of his assets belonged to them. De Walden's relentless pursuit exposed Symes as a pathological liar, earning the dealer time in prison for perjury. It also unearthed several caches of unreported antiquities.

  When approached by the Getty, de Walden didn't mince any words. Marion True, he said, had to be "insane" to propose buying the Poseidon. If the Getty were to look into the "Greek collector," de Walden hinted, it would find that she was Michaelides' poor aunt, an eighty-year-old woman who was unlikely to have inherited any art, much less a precious Greek bronze. Symes had often used the story of an object that had "left Egypt before the Suez War" as a fake provenance, de Walden said. In short, the Poseidon was clearly hot, and Symes had used the British Rail Pension Fund to launder it.