by Jason Felch
"I'm here to propose that the Getty and the Italtan government work on a cooperative scientific agreement for conservation efforts," Gribbon said as the two sides met around a conference table in the Carabinieri headquarters near Rome's Collegio Romano.
Giuseppe Proietti, a sentor Culture Ministry official, blanched. Was Gribbon suggesting that Italy was too poor or inept to take care of its own cultural objects? This was the old argument American museums had long used to justify their acquisition of looted art.
"Italy has had plenty of experience in the field of conservation," Proietti answered stiffly. "We don't need the Getty's cooperation in conservation."
What Italy wanted, he continued, was for the Getty to return the looted antiquities that Italy had requested. And it wanted a promise that the Getty and other American museums would stop buying art from criminal dealers.
"We have evidence that your curator was in touch with known traffickers," Proietti said. "You don't have to buy from these people. We're prepared to loan the Getty our artworks for long-term exhibitions, up to four years, and we want nothing in return."
It was a handsome offer, but Gribbon bristled. "If what you're intending to discuss is the criminal case, then we have nothing to talk about," she said. "And it will be the Getty trustees who decide what the Getty will buy."
"I'm surprised by your statement," Proietti replied, clearly insulted. "Here in Italy, when we refer to bad museums, we use the same term as we do for bad governments—'rogue.' I think the Getty and the Met are rogue museums."
Gribbon stood up. "I don't think we have anything to talk about," she said, then walked out.
A stunned silence filled the room. What was to have been two days of meetings had ended in less than two hours. As the Getty attorneys collected their papers, a conciliatory Carabinieri official asked them to join him in a nearby office for an off-the-record chat.
"We have to come up with some kind of solution before we mess up our relationship," one of Conforti's deputies told the Getty attorneys. "This isn't personal. It's the evidence that's guiding us. We are not talking about the Getty. We're talking about what Marion True did wrong, in her position at the Getty."
If the Getty was willing to give back several of the looted objects as a gesture of good faith, the Italians suggested, they would back down. Otherwise, the Carabinieri official added, "this will go on for years and years, and in the end you're going to give it back to us anyway."
Show us your evidence, a Getty attorney said, and we'll consider your request.
ITALIAN OFFICIALS PROVIDED files on six objects, including the Aphrodite. They gave the Getty its first glimpse of the evidence Italy had mustered against its curator.
Much of it was based on Medici's Polaroids, which appeared to show many of the objects soon after excavation. The most compelling photos were of the marble griffins, broken and dirty in the trunk of a car, spread out on an Italian newspaper. The conclusion was inescapable. Other photos were suggestive but may not have held up in court. The file on a small Greek oil decanter the Getty had bought from Larry Fleischman in 1992, for example, contained a photograph showing it in pieces, which Italian authorities said they had obtained from a person "familiar with local excavations." The weakest case was the one against the Aphrodite. The file on it contained only a rehash of largely circumstantial evidence, including a copy of the limestone study supporting claims that the stone was from Sicily.
Erichsen summarized the evidence in a memo to Munitz and the board of trustees. The photos, he said, were "arresting," but the evidence "does not compel a decision to return." His analysis appeared to be driven not by ethics or evidence, but by his anger at what he and Gribbon perceived to be Italy's attempt to extort the Getty.
"To submit to blackmail—and the circumstances here justify the use of the term—is different in every sense from a collaborative evaluation of archaeological evidence or the decision to return property we know to be stolen ... The Italians' attempt to use the investigation of Marion True to cow us into submission is morally repugnant."
Six months after her disastrous trip to Rome, Gribbon wrote a curt note to Italian authorities, ignoring their request for the return of the six objects and repeating her insistence that the Getty would continue to buy what it deemed fit. In doing so, she was ignoring the advice of the Getty's own lawyers, who had recommended a speedy settlement.
The letter infuriated the Italtans. Gribbon's delay had put them up against a statute of limitations deadline for bringing the case. But more than that, the Getty was now choosing to ignore direct evidence that its antiquities had been looted. There would be no more negotiating. The only thing the Getty and other American museums would understand, the Italians concluded, would be a criminal prosecution.
18. THE REIGN OF MUNITZ
RESENTMENT WAS SPREADING through the Getty like a virus. Between 2000 and 2002, the trust's endowment had plummeted $2 billion because of falling financial markets, just as the museum was preparing to open the newly remodeled Getty Villa. For the first time since the windfall provided by J. Paul Getty's will, the operating expenses were threatening to exceed the earnings on the endowment. The tough days Barry Munitz had warned about when he first took over were now at hand. The CEO had already done all that he could to avoid the pain.
Munitz asked chief financial officer Bradley Wells to initiate a cost-cutting campaign, a radical proposition for an institution used to bottomless resources. A reorganization led to several rounds of layoffs of blue-collar workers and security guards, many of whom were well-regarded veterans. Wells also instituted a centralized procurement system that forced departments to run their requests for everything from catalogues to Wite-Out through the trust's central administrative office. Some of the changes were petty but struck at popular perks. Holiday parties were canceled. Staffers were asked to pay for tea and coffee in the break rooms. And, as he had at Cal State, Munitz did away with across-the-board raises and initiated performance bonuses. Employees grumbled that the incentive scheme was just a ruse for Munitz to reward his loyalists. Morale hit a new low, however, when the front office disbanded the Getty softball league, in which each department had a team. The reason: too many workers' compensation claims.
The cuts were an insult to the deep sense of entitlement at the Getty, especially when coupled with Munitz's own profligate use of Getty money. Days after laying off seven of the most popular security managers, the CEO drove past their colleagues at the front gate in a new silver Porsche Cayenne. Munitz had ordered the $72,000 SUV at the trust's expense a few weeks earlier, supposedly for transporting board members. He'd demanded that it come with "the best possible sound system, biggest possible sunroof and power everything." Raul, his full-time Getty driver, crisscrossed the city in the Porsche running personal errands for him—picking up a bow tie at Barney's for a formal event, delivering his newspapers and office mail, making the weekly one-hour drive to Long Beach to pick up copies of Munitz's favorite TV shows, The West Wing and Law & Order. Munitz had them specially taped because he couldn't figure out how to use his VCR. All of it was paid for by the nonprofit Getty.
After his intense first years at the Getty, Munitz had grown bored with his job and become an absentee CEO. He began spending more time at home by the pool, reading, thinking, dictating hundreds of messages. He boasted that he never touched a computer keyboard, leaving it to his pool of five secretaries to transcribe his musings and send them out to the world. All his Getty calls were routed to his private line, extension 6658, which rang through to his Santa Monica residence, preserving the illusion that he was in the office. He governed via voice mail.
The system worked with staggering efficiency. All office appointments were scheduled for the day of the week when the maids came to the house. No one remembered the last time Munitz had held a staff meeting. Still, Munitz was remarkably productive, though little of what he did related directly to the Getty. There were tricky demands involving his wife, Anne T. Munitz
. "ATM saw in Europe but can't find here Tropicana blood orange juice, no pulp, not from concentrate," he dictated to an assistant while on the road. "Can you look on the website and find out where we can get this on a regular basis locally?"
Most of his energy went to obsessively cultivating and maintaining a network of well-placed acquaintances. He lavished attention on Hollywood friends and minor European royalty, Los Angeles powerbrokers, and players in higher education and politics. His specialty was making connections between players on the dozen or so corporate and nonprofit boards on which he served.
He fed this network with a steady stream of thoughtful notes, bits of gossip, and witty insights attached to clippings from the morning papers. Nothing escaped his studied gaze. A casual reference by someone at a cocktail party about a good book resulted in Munitz sending along the favored author's next work a year later. His roots may have been in Brooklyn, but he had perfected an easy California intimacy, signing even his business correspondence "Warm hugs, Barry." All of it was driven by a seemingly insatiable need to be accepted, liked, and admired in the highest circles.
Mostly, Munitz spent his time traveling. In his eyes, that was precisely what he had been hired to do, to plug the navel-gazing Getty into the real world. The board had wanted him to be the Getty's ambassador to the world, to woo big donors and build partnerships, and Munitz was determined to play that role to the hilt.
He took his wife and friends on lavish cultural tours around the globe. Many were thinly disguised vacations, billed to the Getty by virtue of the touch-and-go cultural stops he had his secretaries add at the last minute. The opportunity to view Getty conservation projects in Italian hill towns helped pay for $13,000 first-class airfare and half the $21,000 cost of renting a fifteenth-century Tuscan farmhouse, where the Munitzes partied at night with their Hollywood friends. A Munitz birthday jaunt to Australia's Great Barrier Reef with Paramount Pictures CEO Sherry Lansing and her husband, director William Friedkin, became a Getty business trip with the addition of a few cultural meet and greets in nearby Sydney. The foreign trips, sometimes a dozen a year, were interspersed with excursions throughout the United States to catch up with friends, attend board meetings, or, when traveling alone, meet one of the fresh-faced young women he had a habit of taking under his wing.
In Munitz's absence, running the Getty fell to his protégée, Jill Murphy, now thirty-one. Besides having a penetrating mind, she was adept at pitting people against one another and playing favorites. With Munitz out of their sight, Getty staffers began focusing their growing anger on her.
IRONICALLY, THE ILL will ran deepest within the Getty Museum, which Munitz had coddled early on. In 2000, the CEO had convened an acquisition task force and agreed with its recommendation to plow serious money—more than $1 billion—into acquisitions over the next ten years to upgrade what remained a mediocre collection. That pledge came while Munitz shuttered the Education and Information institutes. Now there were whispers that the museum's acquisition budget would have to be rolled back. No one was more disturbed about that than Debbie Gribbon, the Getty Museum's new director.
Gribbon already had a hard time swallowing the fact that, unlike her counterparts at the Met or the British Museum, she had to run every acquisition through Munitz before presenting it to the board. That collecting might have to be scaled back only guaranteed closer scrutiny by the CEO or, worse, Murphy. Gribbon's worries helped destabilize what was always a fragile alliance between the museum and the trust. Munitz had gone out of his way to back Gribbon's appointment to curry political favor with John Walsh, her mentor and close friend. After Walsh's retirement in September 2000, the relationship between Munitz and Gribbon became strained.
Gribbon was a literalist. She dealt with facts and did not look beyond them for meaning—an unusual personality for someone with a Ph.D. in the arts. By contrast, Munitz lived in a relative world, where concepts and facts were often fluid. Impressions were everything. At first Murphy was able to mediate between the two, but as her own relationship with Gribbon grew cold, a steeliness set in. Gribbon often signaled her disdain for her boss by referring to him as "Mr. Munitz," despite his repeated requests that he be called "Dr. Munitz," so as not to be outdone by the proliferation of Ph.D.'s working at the Getty.
Within the museum, Gribbon had stopped talking to True, tired of the curator's insistence on defying her by speaking out on patrimony issues. The rift grew into a yawning chasm after Gribbon's disastrous trip to Rome in the summer of 2002, creating a paralysis within the department that threatened the much-delayed opening of the renovated villa.
True, meanwhile, had sunk into despair over her legal predicament. The board prohibited her from engaging in discussions about the conflict with Italy—the very type of cultural conflict she had prided herself on resolving. She lived under an information blackout, complaining that no one could even explain the specific charges she faced. Francesco Isolabella, the Italian lawyer hired by the Getty to defend her, was half a world away. Board members had turned down her repeated requests to hire a second attorney in Los Angeles to help her sort things out.
What little True learned about the legal deliberations came from Barbara Fleischman, and the news wasn't encouraging. Erichsen, still a novice at patrimony law, urged the board not to give in to the Italians' strong-arm tactics but couldn't determine who in the labyrinthine Itali an bureaucracy to approach for a settlement. Even as Fleischman demanded that her fellow trustees stand by True, the realization was dawning that the legal interests of the trust and its curator were at odds.
One day, True called Fleischman in tears. "Barb, I don't know what to do," she said.
"For heaven's sake, Marion. Pick up the phone and call Barry."
"I'm not allowed to see him," True said.
Fleischman was outraged. Munitz was clearly insulating himself from the antiquities scandal. Fleischman promised True to do all that she could. Her complaint to the board's executive committee was the strongest distress signal yet received by the trustees, and it came outside the official lines of communication that Munitz and Murphy jealously guarded.
IN THE FALL of 2002, board chairman David Gardner called Munitz at home on a weekend with a warning. "I want you to know, Barry, that I hope you will be in your current position forever," Gardner began. "But there are problems brewing that you might not be aware of."
Gardner ticked off the complaints he was hearing from board members: Murphy was running the Getty through intimidation and fear; Gribbon and True were at each other's throats; work on the villa had stalled; the Italian problem was getting out of hand. Gardner told Munitz that board members had talked it over and agreed that the CEO was away too much.
Munitz was blind-sided by the criticism. Keeping a board happy was his forte, a topic on which he lectured to corporate governance groups. Suspecting that the whispering campaign was timed to undercut negotiations for his next contract, Munitz pushed Gardner for more information. But Gardner wasn't giving up his sources. He suggested that Munitz conduct a quiet assessment of how he was perceived among top management. Munitz should present the results, along with an explanation of his work schedule, at the board meeting in January.
Munitz had good reason to expect that Gardner would take care of him. The two had been friends for years. While president of the University of California system, Gardner had thrown a welcome-to-California party for Munitz, the incoming chancellor of the California State University system. Later, as director of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and a Getty board member, Gardner had helped recruit Munitz for CEO.
Recently, Gardner had made it clear that he, too, expected to be taken care of. Even before becoming board chairman in 2000, Gardner had been hounding Munitz and his staff for perks and pay from the Getty, which had never provided compensation to its board members. Gardner's demands had become a recurring problem, consuming staff time and thousands of dollars for outside legal opinions. As a condition of taking the chairmanship, Gard
ner wanted the Getty to provide him office space in his Utah home. When the request was turned down because it would violate private foundation tax laws, he pressed for the Getty to pay for his wife to travel with him first-class to board meetings. Staff members gave her tours of the museum or escorted her to her favorite Westside hairdresser while he chaired the sessions. It was at Gardner's insistence that Munitz began investigating how to amend the trust indenture so that board members could be paid.
Munitz appeased Gardner as often as possible, but he wanted to leave nothing to chance when it came time to defend his performance. He spent hours drafting and redrafting his response to Gardner, an eight-page letter in adjective-encrusted prose that flattered Gardner, promised emphatic but vague changes, and recast his supposed shortcomings as strengths. He gave a lengthy defense of the "dramatic transformation" he had accomplished at the Getty during the past five years and maintained that the "complex challenge with Italy" was being adequately handled. "Our interest in that international question increases with each new insight regarding our special curator and our Board member," Munitz added, unable to resist a swipe at True and Fleischman, whom he suspected of starting the complaints.
THE ITALIAN INVESTIGATION was the main item on the agenda for the January 2003 Getty board of trustees meeting. The executive committee handling the issue—Gardner, attorney Helene Kaplan, and investment guru Lewis Bernard—had a lengthy conference call with Munitz and Erichsen in November 2002 to discuss how to broach the subject with the other trustees. Erichsen had spent months preparing a briefing paper laying out the facts and legal issues. It contained explicit references to the troubling documents the Getty's attorneys had found in their review of the museum's files three years earlier but had kept from Ferri.