Sacred and Stolen
Page 17
Chapter Ten
The Men Who Knew Too Much
I’m a Kanakaria junkie. There are only a few of us, but when we get going, even now more than a quarter century after the trial, the conversations are intense. I suppose we’re like those conspiratorially minded sleuths still preoccupied with the Kennedy assassination and the Warren Report. Our equivalent to Chief Justice Earl Warren is Judge James Noland. Did Noland get it right? None among the junkies is convinced that he did, and we all have our own way of reassembling the facts and finding the truth. This fixation began for me shortly after the trial when I heard from Chris Mitchell, a London-based documentary film producer for Tartan TV. He was making a short film on the Kanakaria case called Plunder: The Looting of the Kanakaria Mosaics, and he was eager to interview me.
A few weeks later, Chris and I sat down to lunch at a small restaurant just south of the Walters. He said immediately that there was something about the trial that puzzled him, and before he could finish by telling me what it was, I jumped in and completed his sentence: “Where was Vassos Karageorghis?” We each nourished and enriched the other’s conspiratorial thinking, which I have since elaborated and refined in conversations with another junkie (he invented the term), Dan Hofstadter, the author of Goldberg’s Angel. (Goldberg’s Angel: An Adventure in the Antiquities Trade, 1994, was Hofstadter’s elaboration on his two articles on Kanakaria in The New Yorker in July 1992.) Dan led me to realize that the Kanakaria case was an adventure in shades of gray involving an active interchange between Turkish smugglers and Greek Cypriot officials.
I HAD AN EPIPHANY AS I sat on a rock-hard bench at the back of the Indianapolis courtroom on the morning of the first day of the trial. It suddenly occurred to me: “Where is Vassos?” It was Vassos Karageorghis who, in his capacity as Director of the Cypriot Department of Antiquities, had initiated action in this case through the Embassy of Cyprus the previous October, after the tip-off from Marion True. He was the very personification of Cypriot archaeology and, more than that, the voice for justice on the world stage for the grievous cultural losses of the Orthodox Greeks of northern Cyprus after the 1974 invasion. The Kanakaria story was the story of the Fall of Constantinople to the Turks on “Black Tuesday,” May 29, 1453, played out in microcosm right now and almost before our very eyes. And Vassos Karageorghis owned it.
There was no Vassos the night before at our Kanakaria team bonding session at the First National Bank, and no Vassos for the next week of the trial. Vassos couldn’t be found? He wouldn’t be found? (As it turned out, Vassos Karageorghis was at that moment squirreled away in a library on the outskirts of Princeton at The Institute for Advanced Study.) I figured that Vassos was intentionally AWOL from Indianapolis. And then I did a mental inventory of my recent paid reading, and I realized that I had not read a Karageorghis deposition. There was none. This was strange, since who could better speak for the co-plaintiff, the Republic of Cyprus? (Vassos later claimed that he was eager to provide a deposition, but the legal team for the defense said he in fact had refused.) And then I recalled a brief conversation at a cocktail party at Dumbarton Oaks earlier that month during their annual Spring Symposium. Someone mentioned to our group that Vassos Karageorghis had just resigned, abruptly and to everyone’s surprise, from the post he had held since 1963. And isn’t it strange, I thought, that his resignation coincided to the week with Walter Hopp’s sudden and stunning resignation as Director of the Menil Collection.
The headline on the first day of the trial in The Indianapolis Star spelled out the core question to be addressed: “Who Tried Harder?” For both the defendant and the plaintiff it would be a question of due diligence. Had Peg Goldberg asked the tough questions about the origin of the Kanakaria mosaics before she bought them? Had the Cypriots gotten the message out in a timely fashion that the Kanakaria mosaics had been stolen, thus alerting potential buyers to beware? And had they been diligent in trying to discover who had stolen the mosaics and where they were, and then aggressively seeking their return? This second point is especially critical, because if the Cypriots had known about Aydin Dikmen and his Munich warehouse full of Cyprus loot and had failed to act on that knowledge, they would have, in legal terms, “sat on their rights.” This means that Cyprus might be deemed not to have standing in US court to pursue civil action against Peg Goldberg.
Two star Kanakaria players, Walter Hopps and Vassos Karageorghis, suddenly resigned from their positions and then avoided Indianapolis. Was this because they knew things which, if they came out at trial, might have destroyed the Cyprus repatriation case by revealing the truth, that the Cypriots knew all about Aydin Dikmen and his loot and yet didn’t go after him?
Neither Walter Hopps nor Vassos Karageorghis would likely have had to resign if Walter had kept his mouth shut. But he didn’t. When a reporter for The Indianapolis Star called him in early April for a quote on the impending trial, suspecting that there were connections between the Lysi fresco deal and the Goldberg case, Walter jumped in with both feet. This got the attention of Peg Goldberg’s lawyers, who figured Walter must know something. They then deposed him on May 15th, ten days after he resigned his directorship which, I assume, he did just after he was notified about the forthcoming deposition. Walters’ resignation, in turn, was almost certainly the catalyst for Karageorghis’ precipitous actions.
The trouble was, both men knew Walter’s big mouth had created a big problem, and so Walter had to fix it as best he could in his deposition. He would certainly be asked about what he had seen in Aydin Dikmen’s warehouse and apartment besides the Lysi frescoes. So he would have to account for what he did about that stolen Kanakaria Apostle mosaic, and then convincingly insulate the Cypriots with whom he would be negotiating the Lysi frescoe deal just a few months later from knowledge of Dikmen and his Kanakaria loot. Then hope that Peg Goldberg’s legal team could be held at bay and that Judge Noland would be fooled.
Walter Hopp’s fix-it scheme played out in his deposition in two dramatic acts, both of which involve Aydin Dikmen who, in Dan Hofstadter’s book, calls Walter’s two yarns outright lies. Lies or not, they worked: Judge Noland not only believed what Walter Hopps had to say; he paraphrased Walter’s testimony in his decision on behalf of Cyprus.
Both narratives grow out of Walter’s recollection of the day in June 1983 when he and Dominique visited Aydin Dikmen in Munich to examine the Lysi frescoes. And there, as a vexing bonus, he saw at least one Kanakaria Apostle mosaic and learned that it had been published by Dumbarton Oaks. They knew immediately that the mosaic was historically very important and that it was stolen; so what were they going to do about it?
According to Walter, Yanni Petsopoulos announced a bold scheme to get that mosaic (along with any others that Dikmen might have) back to Cyprus where it belonged. He would go to Dikmen’s villa near Konya, in Turkey, for a social visit, and after dinner emotionally confront him. For what? For the lie Dikmen had told him about the Lysi frescoes—the claim that they had been discovered in a long-lost Byzantine church buried beneath the sand in southeastern Turkey. This was Dikmen’s lie, and Petsopoulos was going to make him pay for it by browbeating him into returning to Cyprus any and all Kanakaria mosaic fragments he might have, at no charge. (Hofstadter’s book reports that Constantine Leventis helped things along to the tune of 180,000 Deutsche Marks.)
At this point, Walter Hopps’ deposition moves into a cinematographic mode. After a congenial dinner, Yanni gets emotional and throws a crystal decanter into the fancy fireplace. Aydin apparently crumbles and, not long thereafter, via Petsopoulos, hands over not one but four Kanakaria mosaics. These are then delivered to Constantine Leventis, who, as I learned from Dan Hofstadter, had for some time been active in buying back looted Cypriot antiquities for the museums in Nicosia. Sure, two of the four were bad fakes, but as Hopps claimed and Judge Noland believed, with this transfer Dikmen’s Kanakaria inventory was depleted. This meant that no amount of due diligence on the part of Cyprus at that time, nearly
six years before the trial, would have done any good in retrieving Kanakaria loot from Aydin Dikmen.
No one in Indianapolis, including Judge Noland, expended much energy trying to figure out how Aydin Dikmen replenished his supply of Kanakaria mosaic fragments back up to at least four by the summer of 1988. Nor did anyone seem concerned about the claim Walter Hopps made in his deposition that neither of the two genuine Apostle mosaics returned via Petsopoulos to Leventis was one and the same with the Apostle mosaic he had seen over Dikmen’s sofa in 1983.
But surely, Walter Hopps must have revealed the name of Aydin Dikman and the address of his Munich apartment to Vassos Karageoghis and others in Nicosia at some point after the Lysi deal had been consumated and the frescoes shipped to London. Why wouldn’t he? The answer comes in Walter’s second deposition vignette that, for we Kanakaria junkies, is nothing more than another fairy tale concocted to build a firewall to keep the Cypriots off Aydin Dikmen’s trail and thus protect their due-diligence-facade standing in court. Constantine Leventis, in his videoed deposition in Indianapolis, said that he pressed Walters Hopps repeatedly for the name of the person who possessed that Kanakaria Apostle mosaic that Walter said he saw with the Lysi frescoes in June 1983.
But Walter swore under oath that he was mum and unrelenting. This was because he claimed that if discretion in these matters was not maintained, as Dominique de Menil had insisted, either one or both of two very bad things could happen. First, Dikmen might destroy the mosaics and thus the evidence against him. And second, he might send his henchmen in reprisal against those individuals involved in the recovery as well as their families. According to Walters Hopps, Vassos Karageorghis understood this danger of reprisal and recounted one instance when the “quarters” of some individual helping Cyprus recover some antiquities were bombed. As Judge Noland paraphrased Walter Hopps on the issue:
It was pointless and destructive to require the plaintiffs to have taken additional steps to investigate the recovery of its property if it was reasonable that such steps might result in physical harm or destruction to human life or to the art itself.
The net effect of these two Walter Hopps yarns was to wash away for Judge Noland the big problem created for Cyprus that day in June 1983 under the heading of due diligence. Though oddly, Walter’s two fairytales contradict one another. Fairytale one was concocted to create the impression that Aydin Dikmen’s Kanakaria inventory was reduced to zero not long after that fateful June encounter in Munich, thanks to the intimidating rage of Yanni Petsopoulos. Fairytale two, on the other hand, was meaningful to Judge Noland precisely because it assumes that Aydin Dikmen still had Kanakaria loot that he might destroy.
The stakes in Indianapolis were much higher than the fate of four early Byzantine mosaics. The trial was a morality play in which the Greeks of northern Cyprus were the victims, the invading Muslim Turks the villains, and the Greeks of the south the heroes. Worse by far than losing the mosaics to a crooked small-time art dealer in the American Midwest would be losing that narrative, that is, the moral and political high ground. Walter Hopps and Vassos Karageorghis had together touched the third rail, in the person of Aydin Dikmen; they knew too much, and they had to go.
SO WHERE DID I FIT in? That night in Indianapolis when we were all drunk on retsina and ouzo I found out how they had picked me, the (then) third-tier David Bowie look-alike from a small town in Minnesota. My advocate was Marios Evriviades, Press Officer in the Embassy of Cyprus. Marios was sitting next to the Ambassador in November 1983 when the Ambassador hurled invectives at me intended to be passed on to Dominique de Menil, whom he regarded as blackmailing his country by saying, in effect: “Cyprus, take this generous deal of mine or risk losing the Lysi frescoes forever. And, by the way, I’m not going to tell you where they are.” Was it that I was the only Byzantinist that Marios Evriviades knew, and so the only one he could think to recommend to Tom Kline’s team? Or was it because he knew that I was already in the circle of the compromised myself, thanks to the Saint Peter icon and Walter Hopps’ midnight phone call?
Michel van Rijn, in that rant of a website of his, and in his confessional, Hot Art, Cold Cash, said something that I at first thought was totally nuts. He said that “the Greeks” protected Gary Vikan from embarrassment over his role in buying the Dumbarton Oaks Saint Peter icon because Vikan had an important role to play on the propaganda stage of the Indianapolis trial. Now I think maybe that’s true.
At the end of August 1988, I welcomed the Greek Minister of Culture, Melina Mercouri, to the Walters. She was on a quest at the time to get back the Elgin Marbles for Greece, and she seemed to be making some progress. But she had no interest then in pursuing the Dumbarton Oaks Saint Peter icon that was among the highlights of the exhibition she had come to Baltimore to inaugurate, Holy Image, Holy Space. Was that because she didn’t know that it was hot or because she had been advised to leave Vikan alone? Perhaps some people in high places had already scripted me into the happy solution to another “thorny problem,” whose name is Peg Goldberg.
There is a subtlety that I figured out only very late in the game: that there are Greeks and there are Greeks. This is obvious, I suppose, but initially not to me. When Yanni Petsopoulos sells a looted Cypriot icon to a Greek aristocrat, and I see it in that aristocrat’s penthouse apartment, I take comfort in the fact that they both are Orthodox, and they share a common love of their Hellenic cultural heritage. It somehow justifies and cleanses things. It is rather like the green light that the Greek scholar Manolis Chatzidakis gave us at Dumbarton Oaks when we bought the Saint Peter icon. But what I for the longest time did not consider is that neither Chatzidakis nor Petsopoulos nor that Greek aristocrat can speak for the members of the parishes, typically poor, from which the icons, frescoes, and mosaics were stolen. Nor can they speak for the looted artworks’ legal owner, as introduced to us all in court by Father Pavlos.
These artworks are all, in technical legal terms, “immovable assets,” and only the Church (the official Church, with a capital “C”) can authorize their removal. This makes much of the religious art in secular settings, specifically museums, works without title, which means that many of them are, technically, stolen property. As for people like Chatzidakis, Petosopoulos, and the Greek aristocrat with the penthouse, they are the academic, economic, and social elites who live in a world much closer to mine than that of a local parish in the countryside of Greece or northern Cyprus.
Yes, these two categories of Orthodox gravitate toward the same icons, but in the case of the elites, not for communal veneration in the churches for which they were created centuries ago, but rather for aesthetic and art-historical delectation on the walls of their houses or apartments, or maybe for the museum in Nicosia. It was for this group, de facto, that I was working for hire in Indianapolis; and this is the group I have always chosen to side with. I do this because I understand them and think like them, and I find comfort and support in their endorsement of my ethical values and actions. And the outcome I want is the outcome they want—the movement of first quality sacred works of art into private collections and ultimately into museums.
I NOW ASSUME THAT MANY (perhaps all) of the mosaic fragments looted from the Church of Panagia Kanakaria were in Munich with Aydin Dikmen, perhaps as early as 1978. I also assume that many players in Cyprus, London, and Amsterdam were aware of this. The Kanakaria mosaics are a big rung above the Lysi frescoes in importance, by virtue of their early date and their exotic medium, and because they were studied and published by Dumbarton Oaks. Perhaps this explains why that merchandise did not move. It was simply too hot. But then, in the summer of 1988, after ten years, things suddenly changed. Why?
While the tail-end-Charlie narrative that emerged in Indianapolis is neat and tidy, and got the Kanakaria mosaics back where they belonged, I think it is an incomplete narrative. I now suspect that there was a grander initiating force that set this van Rijn-Fitzgerald clockwork in motion. This scenario, the “Dikmen chapter two
” scenario, is ultimately driven not by Dikmen’s health or Goldberg’s greed, but by events unfolding during the spring of 1988 in Houston in connection with that other great rape of Cypriot art, the Lysi frescoes. And it answers the puzzling question: “Why then?”
That spring the Lysi frescoes were finally delivered to the Menil Foundation from the London studio of conservator Larry Morroco after four years of meticulous restoration work. Plans were taking shape for their coming out party for the American Byzantine scholarly community in November as the highlight of the annual Byzantine Studies Conference. I believe that as all of this was unfolding in Texas in the spring and summer of 1988, it must have occurred to more than one inquiring Byzantine art-dealer mind that now was the time to move on from Dikmen’s first horde of stolen art, the Lysi frescoes, to his second, the Kanakaria mosaics. Could something as elegant as the laundering and eventual return to Cyprus of the Lysi trove be duplicated?
I learned an interesting detail during my paid pretrial reading that apparently no one in Indianapolis on either side found compelling, but I did. A passage in the Von Hapsburg deposition describes a meeting in Houston toward the end of August 1988, shortly after the Lysi fresco press release and celebratory article on Dominique in The International Herald Tribune. It took place in a social setting, which I recall was a bar, and involved Yanni Petsopoulos, Géza von Hapsburg, and Walter Hopps. The two out-of-towners had come to Texas to see Walter with the idea that Dominique de Menil might now wish to buy the Kanakaria mosaics from Peg Goldberg, restore them, show them for a time in her museum, and eventually return them to Cyprus. Lysi redux. The deposition does not reveal whether that idea in any way resonated with Walter or would have worked for his boss Dominique de Menil. The conversation never got that far. The issue was money, and money took this idea off the table. Whatever price may have been quoted to Walter, it probably made no difference. There was a recession going on, the oil industry was especially hard hit, and Houston was suffering. Plus, the Menil Foundation was just then opening its spectacular new museum and had a $35 million tab to pay. Pretty much end of story.