Chasing Aphrodite

by Jason Felch

  De Walden provided another, more troubling reason for the Getty to be skeptical of the purchase. His investigation had uncovered the fact that True's relationship with the dealers had gone from professional to personal and financial. De Walden believed that Symes had loaned True money to help her buy her vacation home in Páros. If True had accepted a loan from one of the museum's dealers—be it Symes or, as was actually the case, from his partner Michaelides—she had a serious, undisclosed conflict of interest when it came to doing business with Symes. In the museum world, such an ethical breach was unacceptable.

  Armed with this information, Cobey told Erichsen that if the Getty insisted on pursuing the Poseidon, True should recuse herself. Whatever benefit the museum might gain from acquiring the object would be more than canceled out by the legal risks the curator's involvement would incur. During her deposition, True had given Ferri the clear impression that she wasn't particularly close to Symes or Michaelides. But quite the opposite was true, and Ferri wouldn't take it lightly when he found out.

  Martin sounded a similar alarm, expressing shock that True's draft acquisition proposal had left out any mention of Italy's attempt to re-cover the statue in the 1970s. True was making "materially misleading" statements to her superiors, he said. If the Getty went ahead with the purchase, Ferri would certainly indict her. How could True even consider the purchase knowing she was the target of an Italian investigation? It was reckless.

  But Erichsen was reluctant to believe the worst. He was still new to the antiquities world and deeply influenced by Gribbon. Even if Symes had falsified the affidavit, it probably only meant that he was too lazy to do the research, he ventured. Surely, the British Rail Pension Fund had investigated and concluded that the piece was safe to buy. Erichsen likewise brushed aside suggestions that the Getty investigate the Greek collector or force True to recuse herself. The museum had a better chance of getting to the bottom of this with her than without her. Pulling True off the acquisition would signal the institution's lack of confidence in its curator.

  As for the possibility that True might have obtained a personal loan from the Getty's principal antiquities dealer, Erichsen and Gribbon were skeptical, but they promised to raise the issue with True. "We may be making a mountain out of a molehill here," Erichsen said.

  A FEW DAYS later, Erichsen called Cobey into his office. The battle over the Poseidon had been only the latest conflict between the two since Erichsen had arrived the previous September. Cobey's knowledge of the antiquities problems had kept her at the table, but Erichsen found opportunities to remind her that she was his subordinate. He scolded her for discussing a minor legal matter with Gribbon without going through him. He also pulled a month's worth of her expense accounts and questioned several of her purchases, much as she had done with Munitz, who had made it clear he wanted Erichsen to mute Cobey's shrill warnings.

  When Cobey came into his office, Erichsen brought her up to speed on recent developments. Gribbon had met with True for two and a half hours to talk about the Poseidon. After consulting with her attorney, Francesco Isolabella, the curator had recused herself and asked to withdraw the acquisition proposal. In the end, it didn't matter: the Getty's questions about the statue's origins had led the dealer to withdraw the offer. It was no longer for sale. Erichsen said that he and Gribbon had asked True if she had ever taken a loan from Symes. She'd denied it. Erichsen was satisfied; there was no reason to look into the matter any further.

  Erichsen now raised the real reason for the meeting. Cobey's handling of the Poseidon had been the last straw, he said. Her memos on the Poseidon had a judgmental tone, and he was "flabbergasted" over her most recent one suggesting that the curator recuse herself. "Truth or justice issues should not be prejudged," he said. Cobey had come to see the world through Ferri's eyes, he continued. Her position had become "excessively independent," and her interest in the possible legal consequences for the Getty was "hysterical."

  Erichsen told Cobey to start looking for another job. Fifteen years after the resignation of Arthur Houghton, the former acting curator who had warned about an investigation by a foreign government, the Getty was once again killing the messenger.

  17. ROGUE MUSEUMS

  IN FEBRUARY 2002, Paolo Ferri's investigation got another big break when a Cyprus customs agent in the Limassol airport detained an elderly Swiss woman who had come off a plane. Antiquities dealer Frieda Tchakos had stepped into a snare set by Ferri, who had quietly issued an international arrest warrant for her based on her involvement in an unrelated looting case.

  Informed of Tchakos's arrest, Ferri pulled the legal net tighter. As he and Salvatore Morando scrambled to catch a plane to Cyprus, the prosecutor refused to lift the warrant, leaving Tchakos to spend the night in a prison cell, where she slept on a wooden table, shivering under a thin wool blanket. Ferri was determined to send a message: I can make your life miserable. "I won't pull the warrant until I get a statement about Hecht, Medici, and everything she knows about the illicit antiquities market," he told the dealer's attorney.

  Tchakos agreed and after her release played host to Ferri and Morando at her brother's apartment. Tchakos served her interrogators cheese sandwiches, then sat across from them at the dining room table, coolly answering questions for the next two days, her two attorneys by her side and a hairless cat in her lap.

  Tchakos was a tough woman who had cracked the tight circle of men who ran the antiquities trade. A player for thirty years, she icily divulged the colorful background Ferri wanted, filling in more details about the trade's dominant characters. Hecht, she said, was a very knowledgeable but "frightful character" who dominated the market with his temper and threats to blackmail competitors with his tell-all memoir. His nickname in the trade was "Mr. Percentage," because he insisted on taking a cut of everything sold. Medici had been an important middleman as far back as the 1970s. She recalled wondering where he got the money for his aggressive purchases at auction, until she realized that he was buying items from himself.

  Ferri was elated. Tchakos was confirming the very laundering scheme that Pellegrini and Rizzo had deduced from the auction records and photos. He pushed for more.

  "Do you know anything about the Aphrodite?" Ferri asked.

  Only that it was rumored that Robin Symes had acquired it from Orazio di Simone, Tchakos said, referring to the reputed Sicilian antiquities smuggler.

  And what about Marion True?

  "What can I say about Marion True?" Tchakos said, her face souring. "She did not like me very much."

  Tchakos recounted how she had at first enjoyed a cordial, even chummy, relationship with True. The two women had exchanged affectionate banter about cats—at one time, True had one named Ajax—and Tchakos had thought she was making inroads with the wealthy Getty. But eventually she realized that the Getty was interested only in objects that came through Hecht.

  True also seemed to have had a hand in building the private antiquities collection of Larry and Barbara Fleischman, Tchakos added. The mention of the Fleischmans surprised Ferri. He leaned in and said, "Fleischman?"

  "Well," Tchakos said, "it became clear how things went ... Each time I showed something to her, she would say, 'Beautiful. Interesting. I can talk to Fleischman about it.'" Later, Tchakos added, Fleischman would call and express an interest in the very same object.

  One piece in particular made Tchakos wonder: a 2,500-year-old marble head from the Cyclades—an exquisitely simple preclassical piece depicting an elongated face. The object, which still bore the original tattoo marks, had caused a sensation at a 1988 Sotheby's auction when it fetched a record $2 million. It turned out that the Getty, through Symes, had been the losing bidder on the piece. Fleischman later acquired it, presumably at a much higher price, and the Getty got it when it acquired his collection.

  The strange thing was that the head didn't seem to fit in the Fleischman collection, which tended toward Greek and Roman pieces from the later classical period. Tchakos told
Ferri that she had offered Fleischman several Cycladic pieces, to no avail. "Each Cycladic is like any other Cycladic," he had said. She was surprised at his change of mind, until she heard the market rumors.

  "It was learned later that Fleischman bought it through a merchant who was at the auction, and to end up in some museum," Tchakos said. The museum, it was clear, was the Getty.

  American curators often offered free advice to wealthy collectors with the hope that someday the collector would donate or sell a particular object to the curator's museum. But Ferri believed he now had confirmation of something far more sinister: True had used the Fleischman collection as a front to launder illicit antiquities. As Tchakos spoke, the prosecutor's feet were dancing involuntarily under the table.

  The deposition gave the prosecutor enough on-the-record corroboration to indict True on conspiracy charges. During another deposition a short time later in Rome, Robin Symes confirmed Tchakos's suspicions but added his own twist: "I believe that Fleischman put the collection together in order to sell it ... to the Getty, but I don't think the Getty knew that."

  The allegation regarding the Fleischman collection would become a central part of Ferri's case against the Getty curator. The circumstantial evidence—the speed with which Fleischman had built his collection; the way Larry Fleischman kept buying, especially the Cycladic head, at a time when he was supposedly experiencing financial difficulties; the all-too-convenient way the Getty used its publication of the Fleischman exhibit to justify the acquisition of the largely unprovenanced collection—all pointed in the same direction.

  Energized by his recent breakthroughs, Ferri met with General Roberto Conforti to plot a strategy for the prosecution. Like the drug trade, the illicit antiquities trade had to be attacked from both the supply and the demand sides. Prosecuting a few dealers or middlemen would not stop the trade for long. To eliminate looting, the Italians would need to force museums—particularly the world's biggest buyers, American museums—to change the way they collected. And for that to happen, the museums would need to be publicly brought to account.

  In the fall of 2002, Conforti began putting American museums on notice. In an interview with ARTnews, he said that Italy was launching a "coast-to-coast" campaign to "systematically scour ... every major collection of Etruscan, Greek and Roman antiquities in the United States" and to recover those artifacts that had been looted. What he didn't say was that his plan included making an object lesson out of the Italians' three biggest targets: Hecht, Medici, and True.

  AS FERRI WAS nailing down the details of his criminal case, a federal district court in New York stripped American museums of their most important legal defense for buying unprovenanced antiquities.

  In February 2002, Manhattan antiquities dealer Frederick Schultz was convicted on one felony count of violating the National Stolen Property Act for trafficking an illicit Egyptian antiquity into the United States. Schultz was president of the leading association of antiquities dealers. Just a few years earlier, he had argued at the State Department hearing against the Itali an request for import quotas, saying that smugglers could easily get around them by faking provenance for any items they desired. Now he was accused of doing exactly that—colluding with an English smuggler to import a fourteenth-century B.C. head of the Egyptian pharaoh Amenhotep III that had been dipped in plastic, disguised as a tourist knockoff, and later attributed to a fake collection.

  In ruling after ruling, presiding U.S. district judge Jed S. Rakoff had dismissed the arguments of Schultz's attorneys, who claimed that Egyptian patrimony laws had no standing in America. "If an American conspired to steal the Liberty Bell and sell it to a foreign collector of artifacts, there is no question he could be prosecuted," Rakoff wrote. "The same is true when, as alleged here, a United States resident conspires to steal Egypt's antiquities."

  The lethal blow came in Rakoff's instructions to the jury, which took direct aim at the "no questions asked" approach that collectors and museums had hidden behind for decades. "A defendant may not purposefully remain ignorant of either the facts or the law in order to escape the consequences of the law," Rakoff told jurors. With that in mind, the jury deliberated for four and a half hours before delivering a guilty verdict. Rakoff sentenced Schultz to thirty-three months in prison and fined him $50,000. The era of "don't ask, don't tell" in the American antiquities trade had come to a sudden, rude end.

  The lurid account that dribbled out of the Schultz trial accelerated a change in attitude about looted antiquities, both within and outside the museum community. Following up on the Berlin Declaration, four German antiquities museums agreed to adopt strict guidelines forbidding the acquisition of undocumented ancient art. In return, Italy loosened its restrictions on cultural loans, offering German institutions a series of unprecedented four-year loans of some of its best pieces. The pact represented a new way forward for museums.

  Closer to home, the Met's Philippe de Montebello received his own crash course in the shift of the public's mood. Before the Schultz verdict came down, he was invited in for a discussion with the New York Times editorial board, which was responsible for determining the paper's official positions on major issues. He expected the usual gentlemanly conversation with the board, this time about the museum's plans to reopen its renovated Greek and Roman gallery. What he got was an angry debate over the Elgin Marbles. The Acropolis figures were back in the news because, two years in advance of the Athens Olympics, the Greek government had asked the British Museum to loan them to Greece for display. The British Museum had refused the request.

  The Met director was shaken by the editorial board's attack on his position that restitution demands of source countries were a product of excessive nationalism. A subsequent editorial in the Times accused Britain of "cultural imperialism" and called on the British Museum to return the Elgin Marbles to Greece for good. "Museums around the world fear establishing a precedent that would cause a broad new look at the legal status of their own antiquities," the editorial said. "But that look has already begun. And there can be few instances where the case for repatriation seems so reasonable as this one."

  De Montebello was also quietly wrestling with his own Itali an problem. Months earlier, Ferri had followed up Conforti's warning by filing a detailed judicial request to the Met for documents about several of its antiquities, including the Euphronios krater and the Morgantina silvers. The prosecutor also had asked for an interview with Dietrich von Bothmer and other museum officials. Not long after that, Conforti had sent a letter to museums around the world asking for their help in identifying the location of some five hundred looted antiquities depicted in Medici's Polaroids. Several were strikingly similar to objects in the Met's collection.

  In the past, de Montebello had haughtily brushed aside Italy's requests, saying he would be happy to entertain them when Italy had gathered "irrefutable proof" that an object had been looted—a standard beyond that required even in capital murder trials. After the Schultz trial, however, that kind of prove-it bravado was not just out of step with public opinion; it was no longer legally tenable, de Montebello's advisers told him. The way was now clear for some ambitious federal prosecutor to make a name for himself by escorting a curator, or even a museum director, out of his or her wood-paneled office in handcuffs.

  The in-house lawyers at the Met and other major museums decided it was time to bring their bosses together for a dose of reality. In March, as Schultz awaited sentencing, de Montebello sent invitations to the directors and top attorneys of the Getty, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago to join him for a "confidential discussion" about the recent changes in cultural patrimony law. "Because of the sensitive nature of this discussion," de Montebello wrote, "I would ask that you not circulate the agenda."

  The group met on April 22, 2002. As the guests began to pick at their salads in a conference room off his office, de Montebello shared the story of his harsh treatment at the New York Times editorial board meeting. Th
en Stephen Urice, an expert on cultural property law from the Pew Charitable Trusts, presented an overview of how museums and archaeologists, once partners in the early twentieth century, had become enemies over the question of buying ancient artifacts. He ended with a pointed warning: "Acquisition today of any substantial antiquity will be subject to withering scrutiny from an organized and activist archaeological community, from investigative journalists and possibly from editorial boards. In other words, acquisition today of an important unprovenanced antiquity is tantamount to the museum's acquisition of a major public relations battle."

  The group then discussed a legal case study of a hypothetical curator who acquired a Greek vase from a hospital that had purchased it twenty years earlier from a dealer under criminal investigation. The example, epitomizing a problem that all of the museums had encountered at one time or another, was a thinly disguised version of True's ill-fated proposal to buy the Poseidon. The consensus around the table was that the make-believe museum curator would most likely be indicted and convicted of trafficking in looted art.

  Most of the museum directors in the room appeared to be getting the message. One, however, sat stone-faced and silent throughout: Debbie Gribbon of the Getty.

  TWO MONTHS AFTER the secret Met conference, the Getty dispatched Gribbon and Peter Erichsen to Rome to explore a possible settlement with Itali an cultural officials. Richard Martin had been urging a rapprochement for months. He figured that if the Getty could draw the Culture Ministry into a collaboration with the offer of money and the services of Getty conservation experts, it might loosen Ferri's prosecutorial grip on True. It was the Getty's best shot at settling its differences with Italy.