by Peter Watson
So far as the Italians were concerned, their journey had already been more than worthwhile, but the day and the surprises weren’t over. The raiding party climbed back up the marble staircase. Above the ground floor, on the first floor, were the bedrooms, but above them, there was another floor set into the mansard roof, a room with sloping walls. When the raiding party reached this top floor, yet another discovery awaited them. All around the walls there was shelving that, like the floor space in this room, was packed with antiquities—hundred and hundreds of vases and stelae, or stone slabs carved with inscriptions. There were bronzes, statues, mosaics. There were frescoes, jewelry, silver. The vast majority of objects were of Italian origin but here, too, there was Bulgarian and Greek material. And in the middle of the room were the remaining Melfi vases.
Also in the middle of the mansard room, next to the Melfi vases, was a small writing desk. On examination, this was found to contain Savoca’s personal archive. And what an archive it turned out to be. Savoca had the meticulous—the obsessive—habit of recording every transaction he had ever made on cards. These five-by-eight-inch cards contained the name of every object he had acquired, the date of the transaction, the price he had paid, and the name of the individual he had acquired it from—with their signature. For the investigators, of course, this was pure gold.
The raiding party spent the rest of the day photographing the contents of Savoca’s Pullah villa, and he was told that all those contents were being seized. The Italians identified the Melfi vases as stolen, as well as some others from a town called Scrimbia, another out-of-the-way place in the deep south of Italy.b But the Italians also spent several hours that afternoon searching the card index archive for the name of the individual who had supplied Savoca with the Melfi vases. At about 4:30 PM, they finally found what they were looking for. The signature was unmistakable, and it was a name they knew: Luigi Coppola. There were two things that Conforti’s men already knew about Coppola, in addition to his name. First, he came from Casal di Principe. Second, he was a capo zona who worked alongside the man whose phone they had been tapping, Pasquale Camera.
Back in Casal di Principe, the surveillance of Camera was stepped up, and Coppola was added to the phone-tap list. But as often happens in investigations, the breakthrough in Munich did not prove anywhere near as fruitful as it had promised to be at the time. Camera was still tight-lipped on the few occasions when he did use his home phone, and Christmas came and went without any further advances. Early in 1995, following a certain amount of legal wrangling, the Melfi vases were returned and there was an elaborate ceremony to mark the occasion, attended by the local mayor, the local MPs, the local police chief, and Conforti. Luigi Maschito briefly became a minor celebrity in his hometown all over again, photographed by the local paper.
The phone taps at Casal di Principe were left in place, but nothing much was revealed, nothing that would enable Conforti to act. Once again the investigation appeared to have stalled. Spring passed and summer arrived. Half of Conforti’s men were on vacation when fate intervened.
Pasquale Camera was a big man, weighing in at a little under 400 pounds, and as this suggests, he liked his food and he liked his drink. On August 31, a Thursday, he took his lunch at Luciano’s Restaurant in Santa Maria di Capua Vetere, a small town north of Naples and very near Casal di Principe. He then set out on the A1, the Autostrada del Sole, Italy’s main north-south freeway, to drive to Rome.
The Carabinieri didn’t follow him. They knew where he was headed—his apartment in Rome—and there was no need. Following people can be costly in terms of manpower and risky when using cars. Conforti had also learned long ago, when he was head of the investigative unit in Naples, that cars can be a giveaway. It happened the hard way when, one morning, he arrived at the scene of a crime, in plainclothes and in what he thought was an unmarked car, only to have someone approach him and say, “Ah, you came with the 820!” He didn’t know what the man meant until he noticed that those were the last three digits of the license plate. Thereafter, in the Art Squad, Conforti only used rented cars for tailing jobs—from Hertz, Avis, Europcar—anonymous models that were changed every day. In undercover “sting” operations, he would rent more expensive models—a Mercedes, for example—when having his men pose as wealthy collectors. This helped them to look the part.
The August day was hot and sultry, though traffic on the Autostrada del Sole was light. Sometime between 2:30 and 3:00 PM, just as he was approaching the exit for Cassino, with the great stone hill of Monte Cassino and its historic Benedictine monastery looming above, Camera’s car, a beige Renault 21, left the road, smashed into the guardrail at the edge of the autostrada—and overturned. Camera was killed instantly, pronounced dead by the side of the road by the paramedics without being taken to hospital. There were rumors, later, that his car had been interfered with in some way, but Conforti discounts this. He thought it more likely that Camera fell asleep at the wheel after a heavy lunch. He was too big to fit into his seat belt, which wasn’t fastened around him, and the impact at speed—and when the Renault overturned—was fatal.
In Italy, road accidents are the responsibility of the Polizia Stradale, and they were brought in on this occasion. However, when accidents occur in small towns such as Cassino, the local Carabinieri are also informed. In addition to being told that a fatal accident had occurred, they were told on this occasion that a number of photographs had been found in the glove compartment of the car, showing archaeological objects. It so happened that the commander of the Carabinieri in Cassino at that time had himself been a member of the Art Squad not long before. On being told about the contents of the glove compartment, he immediately telephoned his former colleagues in Piazza Sant’Ignazio, who passed the message along the line to the men on the ground.
The information was timely. About an hour before, the men manning the phone taps in the procura, the prosecutor’s office in Santa Maria di Capua Vetere, had begun picking up cryptic messages being exchanged between tombaroli to the effect that “The captain is dead,” and they hadn’t known what to make of it. The information from their colleagues in Cassino clarified the situation—Pasquale Camera had been a captain in the Guardia di Finanza, Italy’s financial and customs police.
Conforti now saw his chance—an opportunity that might never come again. Within an hour his men had contacted a magistrate in Santa Maria di Capua Vetere and obtained a search warrant, in Italian a decreto di perquisizione, which entitled them to raid and search Camera’s apartment in Rome.
Naples to Rome is normally a two-hour drive. That night, owing to traffic, they didn’t reach Camera’s apartment in the San Lorenzo district in northeast Rome until 9:00 PM. They had stopped to pick up the equipment that would enable them to break down the front door. In the event, however, a neighbor saw them as they huddled around the entrance, and when he understood who they were, he offered a key to the apartment. Even so, under Italian law the Carabinieri weren’t allowed to search the premises until a relative had been contacted and given the chance to be present. The helpful neighbor had the phone number for Camera’s mother in Naples.
It was an awkward call to make: Only hours after her son had been killed, the police were asking the old woman to be a witness, in a search of her dead son’s apartment. Camera’s brother-in-law agreed to drive up from Naples, and only after he had arrived could the search go ahead. It was by then after 11:00 PM.
It was a big apartment, located between the Piazza Bologna and La Sapienza, Rome’s oldest university, an area with a mix of old and new buildings. The apartment, in a relatively new building, had a squareshaped sitting room, a large study leading off it, and a balcony running along the south side that looked down on streets crowded with students. Any one of the Carabinieri would have given his eyeteeth to be able to afford such an apartment. The furniture was a little on the flamboyant side, with the decoration—wallpaper, curtains, lampshades—in pastel shades. Beyond that, however, the contents of the s
econd-floor apartment were incredibly untidy—papers were strewn all over, uneaten food was turning moldy, dirty laundry appeared to have been dropped anywhere. Eight men took part in the raid, and their first aim was to put order into the chaos. There were hundreds of photographs, Polaroids mainly, and pages and pages of documentation, together with scores of antiquities, some of which were genuine but many of which were obviously fake.
The investigators spent a few hours that night sifting through the contents of the apartment and then sealed the door. They called Conforti, who was at home but still awake. He is one of those people who needs little sleep, and they knew he would be anxious for news.
Over the next few days, as they assessed the material they had seized, they made a number of discoveries. First, they found phone bills for five different cell phones. These bills showed that they were all registered in the name of a certain Wanda d’Agata. Second, utility bills and mortgage payments further showed that the apartment was also registered in the same name, Wanda d’Agata. It didn’t take the investigators long to deduce that Wanda was a convenient “front” for Camera. As he moved around, buying and selling looted or stolen antiquities, he and his contacts used only the cell phones registered to her. All that ever showed up on the official records, therefore, was that Wanda was calling herself. This is why Camera didn’t appear to be using his own phone very much—he was using one of Wanda’s. The apartment was in her name to keep him off the radar of all official bodies. This was a highly suspicious—and highly effective—modus operandi.
What really pushed the investigation forward and confirmed Camera’s importance and involvement in trafficking antiquities were the photographs of the archaeological objects that had been found in the glove compartment of his Renault. They arrived at the investigator’s offices a day after the raid on the Rome apartment. There were about fifty pictures, and among them was one of a calyx krater by Asteas, a fourth-century BC Italian vase painter, and another of a very striking statue of Artemis. In Greek mythology, and according to Hesiod, one of the earliest Greek writers after Homer, Artemis was the daughter of Zeus and the sister of Apollo. She loved hunting and dancing, and was one of the three virgin goddesses of Olympus. She was also notorious for her anger and jealousy, which led her to kill many others—humans, gods, and goddesses.
To Conforti and his men it was immediately obvious that this statue was an exceedingly rare and valuable object indeed. All investigators in the Art Squad are given lessons in art history—in painting, sculpture, and drawing—by the superintendency of Italy’s Culture Ministry, and because they handle a lot of objects, and see a fair proportion of fakes, they quickly develop an “eye” for the quality of artifacts. The white marble Artemis was about four feet high and showed the goddess with hair braided across her forehead and falling down the side of her neck, striding out in a fulllength tunic and sandals. The tunic fell down her body in triangular folds, and there was a hunting strap across her breasts. Her features showed a slight smile as she looked directly ahead. Her arms were cut off at the elbows, but otherwise she was intact.
The investigators knew she was Artemis for one simple reason—it was a classical image and three other near-identical versions were known, one in Naples, one in Florence, and one in Venice. All were in museums, and all were Roman copies, dating from the first century AD, of a lost archaic Greek original that dated to the fifth or sixth century BC. Since none of the statues in the three museums was missing, this Artemis was a major find. It might even be the original Greek Artemis. Given Camera’s links with the Naples area, in particular with Santa Maria di Capua Vetere, the photograph found in his car strongly suggested that the statue had perhaps been excavated in that area. Who could say what else had been purloined during the illegal dig of what was clearly a very important site? And so recovering this Artemis now became a major focus of the Art Squad. The photograph recovered from the glove compartment had some meat hooks in the background—the Artemis had been transferred from the ground to a butcher shop. Shortly afterward, however, in Camera’s apartment, the Carabinieri came across another photograph of the Artemis, against a different, and less striking, background. Clearly, Camera was intimately involved in trading this valuable and beautiful object.
The second breakthrough as a result of the raid on Camera’s apartment came via the other names mentioned in the paperwork the Carabinieri confiscated. These names led the investigators in two directions. In the first place, they led eventually to no fewer than seventy other raids, which unearthed hundreds of looted vases and other objects—and to the arrest of nineteen individuals, all of whom were found guilty at their subsequent trials.
From our point of view, however, the second direction is more interesting. For among the names in the documentation in Camera’s apartment was that of Wanda d’Agata’s son, a man named Danilo Zicchi.
He was raided toward the end of September, still as part of Operation Geryon, and in his apartment two very important discoveries were made. First, from the furniture, wallpaper, and other decorations, Conforti’s men realized that Zicchi’s apartment was the very place where the statue of Artemis had been photographed after it had left the butcher shop. Faced with this evidence, and the threat of some very fulsome and unpleasant Carabinieri attention, Zicchi decided to talk—up to a point. He admitted that his apartment had been used “for years” as a “warehouse” for looted antiquities, many of them from Sicily. The objects would be stored in his apartment, he said, for months or longer, and then, acting on instructions, he would pack the antiquities into boxes and mail them abroad from the post office on the ground floor beneath his apartment. (The man in charge of the post office below confirmed later that Zicchi had indeed been sending packages abroad “for years.”) The objects were almost always sent out in fragments, Zicchi said. That way they occupied less space, drew less attention to themselves, and should the package break open for any reason, a collection of untidy pieces looked much less suspicious. Zicchi also said that he had met Pasquale Camera when the latter had been a captain in the Guardia di Finanza and had been tipped off about him. Instead of prosecuting Zicchi, the two men had become close colleagues.
The second discovery in Zicchi’s apartment was Camera’s passport. Together with the fact that Camera’s own apartment was in someone else’s name, as were several of his telephones, this confirmed—if confirmation were still needed—the lengths to which Camera would go to hide from official notice. He kept his profile as low as he possibly could, consistent with being able to travel abroad to further his business interests, and to bank his profits from those interests. Otherwise, Camera didn’t exist.
The investigators took away about sixty objects at the end of that first raid on Zicchi’s apartment. They had in mind a second raid, on the grounds that, as Conforti pointed out, having been raided once Zicchi would think he was safe. Before they could do so, however, Conforti received a phone call from an archaeologist at the Villa Giulia, Rome’s Etruscan museum. This was Daniela Rizzo, an archaeologist at the museum who worked closely with the Art Squad, verifying whether allegedly looted objects were genuine or not and, if genuine, where they had most probably been looted from. This time, she was calling to say that she had been contacted by an old woman who said that her son had just inherited a collection of antiquities and was anxious to have her—Rizzo—come and see them, authenticate them, and register them, so he could possess them legally (this is how the system works in Italy). Rizzo was being so pressurized, she said, with the old woman so adamant that she verify and register the objects “at once,” that she was becoming suspicious.
What was the name of this woman, queried Conforti. More to the point, who was her son?
“His name is Danilo Zicchi,” said Rizzo.
This was interesting. “How many objects does he want to register?”
“About eighty, I think.”
Even more interesting. Sixty objects had been seized. Now, by some lucky “accident,” Zicchi had “
inherited” another eighty.
The upshot was that Rizzo agreed to pay Zicchi a visit the following day to “inspect” his objects. She was accompanied by a “colleague,” who was of course an investigator from Conforti’s Art Squad, in plainclothes. More investigators remained down on the street, ready to swoop once they got the word.
In fact, that day they discovered something incomparably more important than eighty looted antiquities, something that provided one of three starting points for the overall investigation that gave rise to this book (this was the second starting point, after the theft at Melfi). This discovery was kept top secret from everybody except Conforti and the Rome public prosecutor. In Zicchi’s apartment, in a file on a desk, just sitting there, was a single handwritten sheet of lined paper, with two punched holes on the left-hand side so it would fit into a ring binder. The sheet was covered in Pasquale Camera’s handwriting, and it was nothing less than an organizational chart showing how the clandestine antiquities network was arranged throughout Italy, Switzerland, and elsewhere. It revealed exactly who was in the entire hierarchy—from top to bottom, and everyone in between—and beyond that, how they were related to each other, who supplied whom, who was in competition with whom, which areas of Italy were supplied by which middlemen, and what their links were to international dealers, museums, and collectors. The chart was breathtaking.
The handwriting, in blue ballpoint pen, was quite clear. It was an educated hand, manifestly laid out with some forethought, and Zicchi confirmed it as Camera’s script. Right at the top, in large letters, it showed “Robert (Bob) Hecht,” with two small lateral arrows pointing to “Paris and USA—museums and collectors.” Hecht’s name was underlined, and from this line other arrows went to and from his name. The lines indicated that beneath him was a series of international dealers and collectors, scattered across Europe, whose names were also written in larger letters. These were, first, Gianfranco Becchina, of Basel, Switzerland, and Castelvetrano in Sicily, and the name of his firm, Antike Kunst Palladion. Next came Nicholas Goutulakis, of Paris, Geneva, and Athens, with a two-way arrow directly linking him to Hecht. The rest of the names were: George Ortiz, of Geneva and Argentina; “Frida,” of Zurich; Sandro Cimicchi, a Basel restorer; and Giacomo Medici, of Rome, Vulci, Santa Marinella, and Geneva.
