Chasing Aphrodite

by Jason Felch

  When Gribbon asked Munitz to meet with the trustees to discuss their differences, the emboldened CEO slapped her down. "As long [as] the Board wants me to serve as CEO, if I perceive that you are having a difficulty, then you must accept that there are problems," he snapped. In other words, you work for me.

  Gribbon was shaken, but she replied to Munitz's criticisms with a lengthy memo, noting that this was "the first time in 20 years at the Getty" that she had received a negative review. Munitz responded with a nine-page letter documenting his earlier complaints for the record.

  In the months that followed, a strange peace settled over the Getty. Munitz even tried to dial back some of the rancor, noodling with board members about whether to hire a professional coach to help Gribbon. Perhaps David Gardner could be a paid mentor. He was going off the board in June and had been pestering Munitz to find some way for him to earn money from the Getty afterward.

  Gribbon herself seemed tamed. She and Munitz worked together on a new acquisition plan and met for a full day to discuss how Gribbon might improve her job performance. She was sanguine, almost solicitous, thanking him for his support. Munitz welcomed the change in attitude. He desperately wanted to present a unified management team to trustees at an upcoming board retreat scheduled for October at a Palm Springs resort.

  Then, on September 21, a messenger walked into Munitz's office with an envelope marked URGENT. Munitz was out of town, so Murphy opened the package. Inside was a letter from Gribbon's attorney. The museum director was resigning her post. She threatened to sue the Getty for harassment and "constructive discharge." As one staff member later said, it was checkmate, the biggest "fuck you" Gribbon could muster.

  Gribbon's attorney sent a similar letter to the new board chairman, John Biggs. Attached to it was a copy of Munitz's nine-page letter ripping Gribbon to shreds—no doubt exhibit A in what would be one very tawdry lawsuit. How could you write that in a letter, Biggs asked Munitz when they spoke. "It's her performance review," Munitz replied with a shrug.

  Biggs and Bernard worked with Erichsen to negotiate a deal with Gribbon's attorney. Concerned that she would speak out about Munitz, the Getty agreed to pay Gribbon $3 million. Both sides agreed not to go to the press.

  The board was asked to approve the agreement after it had already been struck. Some were enraged. It was extortion, they felt, and it was naive to think that Gribbon wouldn't go to the press. Munitz, too, was furious. As part of the settlement, the board would issue a press release attributing Gribbon's departure to "philosophical differences" with Munitz, but the settlement prevented him from speaking publicly about those differences.

  In mid-October, Debbie Gribbon walked out of the Getty Museum for the last time. Unaware of the lucrative deal she had struck, many saw her as a tragic heroine, the only person who had dared to stand up to Munitz.

  19. THE APRIL FOOLS' DAY INDICTMENT

  THE TRIAL OF Giacomo Medici was a rare exception to the parade of inefficiency and bureaucratic dysfunction that is typical of the Italian justice system. Medici had invoked his right to a "fast-track" trial, a maneuver that forced a verdict at the end of an abbreviated proceeding. Medici's lawyers hoped to catch Ferri off-guard, unable to scale the mountain of evidence he had gathered since the raid on Medici's warehouse nine years before. The tactic also severed Medici's trial from that of his alleged coconspirators, Robert Hecht and Marion True, who faced preliminary hearings to determine whether there was enough evidence to indict them.

  But under Italy's creaky Napoleonic court system, even the fast-track trial, which began in December 2003, proved to be a lurching slog. What would have been a two-week case in an American court stretched into a year. Hearings were scheduled once a month. When not delayed by holidays or lawyers' strikes, the sessions degenerated into procedural tussles between Ferri and Medici's lawyers. Outside the courtroom, Medici provided a colorful counterpoint, prowling the hallways carrying paper bags filled with his own "evidence," complaining loudly to the handful of reporters following the trial that he was being railroaded. The Polaroids weren't even his! He had met Marion True only four or five times! He'd never sold her a thing! "They are trying to make a monster out of Medici!" he bellowed in raspy Italian, his hands shooting through the air, spit springing from his lips.

  Judge Guglielmo Muntoni showed a bemused tolerance for Medici's fiery rants about the corruption of the Itali an state and Ferri's lengthy courtroom ramblings. After both sides had had their say, he methodically plowed through the facts about each artifact implicated in the case, throwing hundreds out because there was insufficient evidence that they had been excavated after Italy's 1939 patrimony law.

  In December 2004, Muntoni issued his verdict: Medici was guilty of trafficking hundreds of antiquities that had been looted from Italy. The objects had been smuggled to Geneva, laundered through auction houses, and sold via Hecht, Bürki, Symes, and others dealers to high-end clients, including True. The unprecedented decision was delivered in a 650-page ruling that had taken Muntoni five months to write. He sentenced Medici to ten years in prison and fined him ten million Euros, to be paid in part by confiscation of the dealer's rambling villa outside Cerveteri, the Etruscan site that had been so notoriously looted. It was the stiffest sentence ever given to an antiquities trafficker in Italy.

  THE VERDICT WAS a major victory for Ferri. In addition to being Italy's biggest looting conviction, the Medici case signaled the likely indictment of Hecht and True, whose trials would be largely based on the same evidence. As alleged coconspirators, they were not required to attend Medici's hearings, although Hecht often did. Outside the courtroom, he played the whole thing as a farce, answering questions from journalists with renditions of Gilbert and Sullivan show tunes. Hecht had good reason to be lighthearted. Although he could be found guilty, Italian law prevented him from ever going to prison because he was over seventy years old.

  True clearly had the most to lose and stayed away from Medici's proceedings. The Getty had beefed up her defense team considerably by hiring the well-known Itali an attorney Franco Coppi, who had successfully defended the former Itali an prime minister Giulio Andreotti on Mafia charges. Yet Ferri was more worried about Judge Muntoni. Would he hesitate to order a foreign curator to stand trial in Rome, a step no country had ever taken? Muntoni had mastered the complex Medici case, educating himself not just on the facts but also on the history of the archaeological pieces. But the judge also exhibited skepticism about some of Ferri's claims when it came to True. Clearly, Muntoni was struggling to accept the notion that such a highly regarded curator, best known as an ally of Italy and critic of the illicit trade, was part of the criminal conspiracy.

  In the fall of 2004, Muntoni had called Ferri over to his office in the next dreary cement block of the Piazzale Clodio judicial complex. In a last-ditch effort to prevent True from being indicted, the Getty and True's attorneys had offered for deposition Barbara Fleischman, John Walsh, and True's deputy, Karol Wight. It looked to Ferri like just another stalling tactic. But Muntoni showed interest in the Getty's side of the story and soberly informed the prosecutor that he would attend the American depositions.

  On September 20, Muntoni, Ferri, and twelve other American and Italian lawyers and diplomats crammed into a conference room at the U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan for the examination of Fleischman. Muntoni was aware that Ferri's case against True rested heavily on the notion that the Fleischman collection was a front for laundering looted antiquities. The judge put the question to Fleischman directly.

  "Did Marion True ever exert her influence in the purchase of antiquities from various people, and also from Frieda Tchakos more specifically?" he asked, referring to the Swiss dealer whom Ferri had deposed in Cyprus.

  "Categorically no," Fleischman said.

  Muntoni asked for any invoices or documentation from the couple's purchases over the years. Fleischman acknowledged that she had never supplied any to the Getty but said that she had recently located t
hem all. "Up until a short time ago, I am ashamed to say, I had forgotten all of these files," the Getty trustee explained. "And when my lawyers had said to me, 'You know, you should look and see what there is' of course I went into another room where I had very carefully put them away, and found all the files that related to the sale of the objects, plus a little black book of my husband's which I had never noticed before or seen before."

  The book, she added, listed the price of every object, the check number, even the banks on which the checks were drawn. The idea that Fleischman had never mentioned or supplied the information to the Getty aroused Ferri's prosecutorial suspicion. But when he tried to press further, Muntoni reined him in—ordering him to rephrase his questions, forbidding him to ask others, and bickering with him during long sidebars.

  During the next day's questioning, John Walsh said that the Getty was especially cautious about buying antiquities because it knew the market contained illicit objects. He portrayed True as the institutional conscience behind the 1987 and 1995 acquisition policies, which he described as "radical" for their time. With no hint of irony, he said that the handful of times the Getty had been forced to return objects were proof that the policies worked.

  "In my time, I think I never presented to the board an object whose circumstances, provenance, were such as to make me worry about the propriety of the acquisition," Walsh said. It was a bold statement, omitting two decades of internal handwringing over Frel's sins, the kouros, the Aphrodite, the funerary wreath, and his own handwritten notes from his September 1987 conversations with Harold Williams. When Ferri attempted to bore in, Muntoni once again held him back, summarily dismissing his questions.

  Two days later in Los Angeles, Ferri suffered what he considered his most embarrassing run-in with Muntoni. During the deposition of Karol Wight, the prosecutor became irked by Wight's constant requests to speak to her attorneys before answering questions from him and others. One response in particular revealed how heavily Wight had been coached. When Muntoni asked what had prompted the Fleischmans to donate their collection to the Getty, the associate curator turned to her attorneys and asked, "Is this the time for the story?" Then she launched into the anecdote about how the Fleischmans had been charmed by a group of kids admiring the antiquities during their 1994 exhibit.

  Muntoni drew Wight out about the Getty's procedures for accepting the collection. Under his persistent questioning, Wight conceded that the museum had accepted the pieces before receiving any information about their provenance—an exception from the usual practice. When Muntoni asked what the Getty had relied on for the provenance, Wight cited the museum's own 1994 exhibit catalogue.

  "So, basically, the only documentation you had was the information that was—produced in the catalogue, but you didn't have actual documentation of the ownership, the chain of ownership of each individual art piece or object?"

  "No..."

  During a break, a fed-up Ferri tangled with Richard Martin over Wight's constant consulting with her attorneys in the midst of the deposition. Ferri claimed that it was a violation of Italian procedures, but when he appealed to Muntoni to intervene, the judge deferred to the American rules. Ferri felt betrayed.

  Muntoni's repeated rebuffing of Ferri gave hope to Getty officials. Erichsen advised the trustees at their February 2005 meeting that Fleischman, Walsh, and Wight had "hit the ball out of the park." Muntoni appeared to be leaning toward the Getty, but he was still under pressure to indict the curator. Erichsen suggested that the museum should do something to give him a nudge, a "Hail Mary pass" to save True. "I think we're going to get this but we need to give back something," he said.

  THE DEPOSITIONS AND Muntoni's steely contrariness had rattled Ferri. Back in Rome, the prosecutor decided to do a painstaking review of his nearly decadelong investigation. He needed something that would convince Muntoni that the Fleischman collection was a front, or his case against True would be precariously thin. The collection accounted for about half of the items traced from Medici's warehouse to the Getty. Ferri began writing a lengthy memo to Muntoni laying out a road map of the evidence.

  On a Sunday afternoon in October 2004, Ferri was sitting in his office surrounded by reams of documents from the case when his gaze fell upon the invoices Fleischman claimed to have recently unearthed. One showed that her husband had bought a certain Greek vase in 1988 for $400,000. But something was curious about the handwriting on the document. Ferri recognized the distinct style as belonging to Robert Hecht.

  He began searching through the photographs seized from Medici's warehouse and found a Polaroid showing the vase. Medici had written along the border, "Okay con Bo, tutta mia, 1991"—Okay with Bo [Medici's shorthand for Bob Hecht], all mine, 1991. A second Polaroid showed the vase in Medici's warehouse. More printing on the border: "Da Bob"—From Bob.

  How could a Greek vase that the Fleischmans purchased in 1988 still be in Medici's warehouse in 1991? The receipt, Ferri concluded, was either backdated or a fake. Given the handwriting, it had almost certainly been concocted by Hecht.

  Ferri began jumping around the room with the forged receipt. Then he dashed to the phone and called his investigator, Maurizio Pellegrini. "I got them!" he shouted. "I got them!"

  Ferri was convinced that Fleischman's recent "discovery" of the receipt was a cover-up, a way to deflect suspicion from the fact that True had been guiding their purchases. In her deposition, Fleischman claimed she had not met True until 1991. Pushing the purchase date back to 1988 would blur any link to True and avoid another embarrassing question: how could Larry Fleischman afford the pricey antiquity after 1991, the same year he had sold the Getty objects because he was supposedly experiencing financial difficulty? Either the Fleischmans had been lying about their finances, or they were acting as surrogates for the Getty, Ferri concluded. Later in court, Hecht volunteered spontaneously that Ferri's theory about the vase was right; it was not sold in 1988, as the receipt indicated. How, then, had the vase ended up in the Getty? Hecht didn't say, but he left the impression that it had gone directly from Medici to the Getty, with the Fleischmans acting only as a pass-through on paper. Hecht seemed to be purposely shredding Fleischman's story, sending a message not to the prosecutor or the judge, but to True.

  TRUE'S PRELIMINARY HEARING dragged on for a year and a half. By early 2005, as the proceedings lurched toward the final arguments, Ferri still had no idea whether Muntoni would rule that there was sufficient evidence to indict the curator.

  In a final bid to demonstrate her innocence, True's attorneys called the curator to the stand in March to answer questions directly from the judge. Muntoni had treated everyone with respect during the proceedings, even showing a kind of admiration for Hecht, who had obviously lived his life unapologetically. But as True took the stand, Muntoni's line of questioning became unusually direct, revealing for the first time that he was leaning Ferri's way.

  Muntoni had come to America mentally prepared to drop the case against True. All he needed to see was some documentation, any documentation, showing that the Getty had made some effort to check the provenance of the Fleischman collection, the most compelling part of Ferri's case. But no one—Fleischman, Walsh, Wight, their attorneys, or the attorneys for the Getty—could show him that documentation. Instead, Muntoni became dismayed at how Larry Fleischman had simply bought up what he could, regardless of its legal status, and how the Getty had later rushed to acquire the collection, ignoring its own policy about checking into the origins of the objects. Muntoni found it incredible that the Getty would accept such important antiquities without verifying their provenance. And with Ferri's subsequent discovery of the apparently backdated invoice, Muntoni's attitude toward the museum and True hardened. Over two days, he pushed the curator with questions reflecting his thorough knowledge of the case, the facts of which he appeared to have memorized.

  In particular, Muntoni homed in on one transaction that Ferri had covered only in passing. It concerned the fragments of three prot
o-Corinthian pitchers that True had written to Medici about in 1992. The middleman had revealed in his letter to True that they had come from a tomb in Cerveteri. Medici had gone on to describe in detail the style of the tomb and other objects found in it. Clearly, he had been there when it had been illegally excavated, or he had been told about it in detail by the looters.

  "When you received the communication from Medici that these objects were sold by him and were excavated from Cerveteri, why didn't you inform Itali an authorities?" Muntoni asked True. "What else did you need to know that they were looted and illegally exported from Italy?"

  True looked as if Muntoni had pricked her with a pin.

  "Probably nothing," she said.

  As the curator stepped away from the stand, Muntoni gave her a sympathetic smile.

  "I'm sorry," he said softly.

  On April Fools' Day 2005, Muntoni indicted True for trafficking in looted antiquities and ordered her to stand trial in Rome. She was the first American curator to be criminally charged by a foreign government.

  THE NEWS PROMPTED amazement and anger within the Getty, but the secrecy surrounding the investigation kept word from leaking out for weeks. American newspapers, unaware of the agonizing back-and-forth with the Italians or the preliminary hearing, picked up the story late. The Los Angeles Times ran a front-page article about True's indictment nearly two months after Muntoni handed down his decision. Public reaction was muted, even puzzled, seeing as the matter involved arcane legal arguments in a faraway courtroom. Getty officials called the indictment a mistake, predicted that True would be exonerated, and reaffirmed that the museum had never knowingly bought looted art.

  Within the art community, the indictment provoked an odd sense of cognitive dissonance. True was widely known (and often quietly criticized) as the country's most outspoken proponent of reform, an ally of Italy in its quest to end the illicit trade. No one had done more to end the practices she was now being accused of engaging in. More than two dozen of her colleagues at Los Angeles area museums signed an open letter lambasting the charges as politically motivated and calling on Munitz to spare no effort in defending the Getty curator. Marion True didn't lack supporters as she braced for an unprecedented legal fight.