The Medici Conspiracy

by Peter Watson

  Below these were still more names, written in smaller letters. Below Becchina was Elia Borowsky, an M. Bruno, of Lugano, Cerveteri, and Torino, though with other words in brackets (“north Italy, Roma, Lazio, Campania, Puglia, Sardinia, Sicily”)—indicating his areas of competence. Below him was Dino Brunetti of Cerveteri, followed by Franco Luzzi of Ladispoli, a small town on the coast, just north of Rome, and below him the words “Tombaroli di . . . ” and then a list of places including Grosseto, Montalto di Castro, Orvieto, Cerveteri, Casal di Principe, and Marcenise. Also under Becchina was “Raffaele Monticelli (Puglia, Calabria, Campania, Sicilia),” and under him Aldo Bellezza (“Foggia,” and elsewhere). Under Medici, dotted lines linked him to “Alessandro Anedda (Roma)” and Franco Luzzi (again), of Ladispoli, with a solid arrow linking him to “Elio—stab. of Santa Marinella” (“stab.” is short for stabilimento, meaning “factory”), “Benedetto d’Aniello, of Naples,” and “Pierluigi Manetti, of Rome.” (See the Dossier section for a facsimile of the chart.)

  By itself of course the chart proved nothing, and a number of people included worked in the business of restoring antiquities and may well have been doing no more than carrying on their lawful activities. But it was very circumstantial evidence against many of those cited. It contained some names that the Carabinieri knew, and a few that they didn’t. But most important of all, the chart showed the various levels of involvement, the role of Switzerland in the clandestine trade, and the links between the various participants. In other words, it was the underground network’s view of itself . Nothing like this had ever been found before. Within days, the chart was being referred to by the few aware of its existence inside the Art Squad—and in the offices of the public prosecutor—as the “organigram.”

  “The moment I saw that scribbled sheet of paper,” says Conforti, “I thought back to 1977, in Naples, when we found in very different circumstances the organigram of the Camorra. Organized criminals are strange from this point of view—after all, the Red Brigade made the same mistake as well. And that is, they write about themselves, they put it on paper. So organized delinquency doesn’t change, it merely varies. And this time it was the same. It gave us the chance to move into terrain where, although we weren’t floundering, we didn’t have certainties.”

  From the point of view of the Carabinieri, the organigram (see p. 362) was most immediately useful for its identification of the two most senior Italian figures in the network. Among the international dealers, Hecht was an American resident in Paris; “Frida” was Frederique Tchacos-Nussberger, an Egyptian-born Greek resident in Zurich; Nicholas Goutoulakis was Nikolas Koutoulakis, a Greek-Cypriot resident in Paris (now dead); George Ortiz was in fact an heir to the Ortiz-Patiñho tin fortune, of Bolivia, not Argentina, and he resided in Geneva. Elia, or Eli, Borowsky was a dealer-collector of Polish origin who had lived in Canada for many years and by then was living in Israel; the network was nothing if not international. But the chart identified two Italians, Gianfranco Becchina and Giacomo Medici, as being senior figures, and the lines and linkages shown below their names made it clear that these two men were primarily responsible for bringing antiquities out of Italy.

  Operation Geryon had recovered the Melfi vases and had resulted in nineteen arrests. It was therefore wound up in the fall of 1995. This allowed Conforti to turn his attention to what appeared to him to be the bigger fish—to Gianfranco Becchina and Giacomo Medici.

  From Camera’s organigram, the man whose name interested Conforti the most was Giacomo Medici. The colonel had known about the dealer for years, and the Carabinieri had even paid surprise “visits” to his houses several times. A property he had owned in Vulci, attached to a protected archaeological area, had been purchased compulsorily by the state, on the advice of archaeologists.

  Naturally, Conforti started tapping Medici’s phone. This eavesdropping proved enlightening because it quickly established that one of the capi zona (the senior figure among the tombaroli) in the Naples area, one of the men they had targeted after the Melfi theft—a certain Roberto Cilli—was observed from his phone calls to have particularly close links with Medici. Cilli was a gypsy, from a family of gypsies who had become Italianized. He lived in Montalto di Castro, a small town on the Via Aurelia, just north of Tarquinia, one of the most famous Etruscan centers, in a celebrated street of run-down shacks—the Via dei Grottini—to which the authorities turned a blind eye. Cilli’s father had been a well-known tombarolo, and his wife was even better known, as a fortune-teller who numbered several rich socialites and TV stars among her clients.

  Conforti’s tried and tested procedure in the Carabinieri, when targeting a senior criminal, is to pressure first his less-important colleagues. If the Art Squad can offer inducements to persuade the supplier of a bigger fish—the less well educated, the less sophisticated, the less protected—to confess or give away crucial details, these details can be used against the more important figures.

  Before the investigators could move against Cilli, however, another unexpected twist occurred. In London, Sotheby’s catalog for its antiquities sale that year showed a photograph of a sarcophagus that was on the Art Squad’s list of stolen works. It had been taken from the church of San Saba on the Aventine, one of the seven hills of Rome. For any investigator, a stolen object is always easier to deal with than looted works. There are records of stolen works, whereas looted objects almost by definition leave no trace when they are dug up in the middle of the night by a tombarolo. So, once Sotheby’s had been presented with the evidence confirming that the sarcophagus was stolen, the company had no choice but to tell the Carabinieri that it had been put up for sale by a Geneva-based company called Editions Services and that the company was run by a French-speaking Swiss, Henri Albert Jacques. The address of Editions Services was given as 7 Avenue Krieg. An official request was immediately sent to the Swiss by the Italian authorities, seeking permission to question Jacques and to inspect the premises of Editions Services.

  Since there was no question that the sarcophagus was stolen, permission was quickly granted. When approached, however, Jacques said that he was only the administrator of the company in question, a “fiduciary,” in effect a minion who looked after the finances and acted as an official “face.” Furthermore, he said, the address at 7 Avenue Krieg was little more than an accommodation address. The company was actually based at the Freeport, just outside Geneva, and the real owner—the “beneficial owner,” in English legal terminology—was an Italian named Giacomo Medici.

  Coming after the raid on Savoca and the accident that had killed Camera, together with the subsequent discovery of the organigram, this was an extraordinary stroke of luck, and for the moment, all thought of using Cilli to put pressure on Medici was put on hold. Another official request was dispatched to the Swiss, seeking permission to raid the premises of Editions Services in Geneva Freeport.

  Geneva Freeport (“Port Franc” in French) is a massive set of warehouses to the southwest of the city, where goods may be stored without officially “entering” Switzerland, the point being that no tax is paid on these goods unless and until they do officially cross the border. The advantage for Switzerland is that the hundreds—if not thousands—of personnel associated with the Freeport, who live in Geneva, bring with them a busy commercial life and considerable foreign currency.

  Once again, the Swiss complied quickly and, on September 13, 1995, the raid took place. Medici had been contacted, at the last minute, but was on holiday in Sardinia and couldn’t get back that day. This time the raiding party consisted of a Swiss magistrate, three Swiss police, headed by an inspector, three of Conforti’s men, an official photographer, and the deputy director of the Freeport. The offices of Editions Services were located on the fourth floor of the plain, steel-built warehouse, on Corridor 17, Room 23. Seventeen is an unlucky number in Italy, the tradition deriving from ancient Rome and its use of Latin numerals. In Roman numerals, seventeen is spelled XVII, which is an anagram of VIXI, m
eaning “I lived” or, in other words, “I am now dead.” Medici’s warehouse was henceforth invariably known as “Corridor 17.”

  The door to Room 23 was, like the rest of the building, made of anonymous gray metal. The deputy director of the Freeport had a key and, at the magistrate’s instruction, let them all in. Room 23 in fact comprised three rooms. In the outside room—the first the raiding party came to—there was a settee, some chairs, and a glass table supported by an enormous stone capital. At the far end there was a frosted glass window, but the rest of the walls were lined with cupboards. At first sight, Room 23 was ordinary. It was a sitting room and not especially stylish, at that; there was a thin brown carpet covering the floor. However, when the Carabinieri started opening the cupboards, they quickly changed their minds. There was nothing ordinary about the room in any way. All the cupboards were shelved—and each and every one of the shelves was packed—crowded, teeming, overloaded with antiquities: with vases, statues, bronzes; with candelabra, frescoes, mosaics; with glass objects, faience animals, jewelry, and still more vases. Some were wrapped in newspapers; frescoes lay on the floor or leaning against walls; other vases were packed in fruit boxes, and many had dirt on them. Some had Sotheby’s labels tied to them with white string.

  But that wasn’t all. In the outer part of Room 23, there was also a huge safe, five feet tall and three feet wide. Amazingly, it wasn’t locked.

  If the contents of the cupboards had been astounding, the contents of the safe were truly astonishing. One of Conforti’s men whistled as he realized what he was looking at. Inside the safe were twenty of the most exquisite classical Greek dinner plates that anyone there that day had ever seen, plus a number of red-figure vases by famous classical vase painters. The Carabinieri immediately recognized one as by none other than Euphronios. Together, the objects in the safe must have been worth millions of dollars.

  The plates and the Euphronios vase were taken out and placed on the glass-topped table. The photographer, as he had done with all the other objects in the cupboards, took several photographs from various angles. Then the team moved on into the inner room, leaving the most junior of the Swiss police, the least experienced, to return the plates and vase to the safe. He replaced the plates without any difficulty, but when it came to the vase, he lifted it, naturally enough, by the handles. It simply never occurred to him that the vase was made of fragments that were only loosely glued together. A more experienced man—one of Conforti’s men, for instance—would have known that the handles of the vase wouldn’t bear the weight. And so the body of the bowl parted company from the handles and fell to the ground, breaking into pieces along the lines where the various fragments had originally been glued together to form the whole. The sound of shattering pottery ricocheted around the room and everyone froze. It later transpired that Giacomo Medici had paid close to $800,000 for the vase.

  The Euphronios pieces were picked up and, gently, returned to the safe. Then the party again moved on into the inner room. This was no less astonishing, but in a different way. It was brimming, not with antiquities but with documentation. There were thousands of photographs (later estimates put it at about 4,000)—most of them Polaroids, others negatives, all pictures of antiquities, many of which had dirt on them. There were stacks of documents—invoices, consignment notes, condition reports, letters, and checks. The letterheads on some of the invoices and correspondence told their own story: Atlantis Antiquities, New York; Robin Symes Limited, London; Phoenix Ancient Art, S.A., Geneva; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

  It was clear that the outer room was where Medici received prospective buyers, and where objects for sale were displayed in secure and discreet circumstances. It was equally clear from the way the documentation was just scattered around the inner room that Medici had never expected anyone to come calling here—everything was just lying around, with no attempt at concealment.

  Everything in the inner room was photographed as well—all the documents, the albums of photographs, the contents of drawers and cupboards, together with general views so that the authorities could be certain at a later date that nothing had been taken. The final move that day was to seal the outer door to Room 23. They locked the door, put police tape across the door frame, and fixed a large wax seal over the keyhole, with the Geneva magistrate’s embossed badge pressed into it. From now on Medici couldn’t get in, unless accompanied by someone from the Geneva court.

  When Conforti heard about the contents of Corridor 17, even he was astonished. He loves to garden, and that evening, when the Carabinieri called him from the departure lounge of Geneva airport—it was after 8:00 PM—he was on his terrace watering his large array of exotic plants. “We had heard talk of the Freeport often enough—Freeport this, Freeport that, Freeport, Freeport, Freeport. But we had always thought of it as a place of transit and had never imagined whole warehouses—what a discovery. When I heard the news, in that moment I thought that perhaps—perhaps—the ball of twine would now be unraveled. In that moment, I felt that the work I had being doing since I took over the Art Squad in 1990 had come to fruition, had found a reason.”

  But—and it was a big “but”—the objects were on Swiss soil. Medici, on the other hand, was an Italian citizen. Would the Swiss want it known that the Geneva Freeport was being used as a way station for valuable and culturally important objects that had been looted from Italy and passed on to the salesrooms, collectors, and museums in London, the United States, and elsewhere? On this first visit of the Italian authorities to the Freeport, Medici had not been present. What arguments would he use, what arguments could he use, to make it appear that the antiquities in his warehouses were legitimate? Would the Swiss, in the interests of a quiet life, just let the matter drop, or might they choose to believe the man who was bringing in business to Switzerland? These were not trivial or rhetorical questions—a good lawyer could have a field day.

  Back in Italy, and as a result of what had been found in Geneva, an investigative public prosecutor, Dr. Paolo Giorgio Ferri, was appointed to pursue Medici and his Geneva operation. It was clear from what the investigators had found in Switzerland that Medici was the biggest “catch’” the Carabinieri had ever had, so far as looted antiquities were concerned. How close would they get to him?

  Paolo Giorgio Ferri, forty-eight when the investigation began, is a small, precise man. Bearded, with a soft voice and a ready smile, he had a law degree from La Sapienza, Rome’s oldest university, and was a highflier in the public prosecutor’s office, having previously worked on heavyduty criminal cases—mostly murder and drug trafficking. But as he set to work, thinking how best to pursue Medici, there was another twist of fate in store for him. While the Carabinieri had been at the Freeport, another set of investigators had also been there at the same time. Their paths had never crossed, but that was about to change.

  2

  SOTHEBY’S, SWITZERLAND, SMUGGLERS

  THE OTHER INVESTIGATION taking place in the Geneva Freeport had its origin in the fate of James Hodges, an employee of Sotheby’s, the international auction house established in 1744. Hodges, in his early thirties in 1995, had worked for Sotheby’s in a number of capacities, which included being an administrator in the Antiquities Department. This meant that so far as antiquities were concerned, Hodges was in charge of the paperwork, in regard to buying and selling, and the transfer of funds in and out of Sotheby’s—all the financial transactions between the company and its customers. He had access to the most confidential information.

  In 1991, Hodges had stood trial, accused of stealing from Sotheby’s two antiquities—a helmet and a stone head—of forging a release note purportedly giving him permission to have these objects at home, and on eighteen charges of false accounting. Essentially, in the false accounting charges, he had been accused of setting up two bank accounts in fictitious names and regularly paying himself small sums that no one else noticed for a while but which quickly added up. Hodges was found guilty of stealing the hel
met and head and of forging the release note, but he was acquitted on the eighteen charges of false accounting. He was sentenced to nine months’ imprisonment.

  Before he was prosecuted, Hodges had photocopied or stolen a number of internal Sotheby’s documents that, in his view, showed the company in a bad light, that it was behaving dishonestly or unethically in certain ways. His initial aim was to use these documents as a fallback, or bargaining tool, should his own dishonesty ever be discovered by Sotheby’s. In the event, when he did get found out, Sotheby’s refused to do any deal and insisted on a prosecution. Hodges therefore contacted one of the authors of this book (Peter Watson), seeing publication of Sotheby’s own (and more widespread) wrongdoing as fitting revenge.

  Whether or not Hodges deserved his jail sentence, and whether or not he should have stolen the paperwork that he undoubtedly did steal, these documents nonetheless appeared to show prima facie wrongdoing inside Sotheby’s in a score of areas. Among the documents he had were a set showing that there were three men in Switzerland, who between them consigned thousands of antiquities over the years to Sotheby’s salesrooms in London, none of which had any provenance whatsoever. These three men were Serge Vilbert, Christian Boursaud—and Giacomo Medici. In one notorious sale, Sotheby’s offered “a whole batch of smuggled antiquities,” according to Brian Cook, the distinguished keeper in the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the British Museum, including a dozen Apulian vases.1