The Medici Conspiracy

by Peter Watson

  Frida Tchacos agreed to this deal and, on September 17, 2002, she was convicted of handling stolen and smuggled goods, and of failing to notify the authorities of the antiquities that came her way. She was given one year and six months’ imprisonment, suspended, and fined 1,000 euros (approximately $1,000). But, so far as Ferri was concerned, there was more to it than that. Tchacos, he knew, was very friendly with Robin Symes—and the public prosecutor was anxious to interview Symes. Symes had residences in New York and Greece, and businesses in Switzerland, but he spent most of his time in London, where the police and judicial authorities did not cooperate at all well with the Italians. Thus, Ferri’s deal with Tchacos was more than it seemed: It was designed to put pressure on Symes. He knew that Tchacos would discuss her treatment in Limassol with Symes, for the unvoiced subtext to the encounter was that Ferri believed that Symes had the ivory head, bought from Savoca. He therefore believed that what Tchacos had in fact promised, without actually saying as much, was that she would put pressure on Symes to return the head.

  So far as Ferri was concerned, Symes was a much more important link in the chain. He shared the same address with Medici at Avenue Krieg in Geneva, he was an active member of the cordata that supplied the Getty, the Levy-Whites, Maurice Tempelsman, and several others. So Ferri wasn’t about to do a deal with Symes, as he had done with Tchacos, but he was prepared for Symes to think that he might. Because of the poor cooperation offered to the Italians by the British (more like noncooperation, in fact), there was little chance that Ferri would ever be able to raid Symes’s premises in London, or interrogate him there. The deal with Tchacos, therefore, had as one of its aims that it would lure Symes to Rome, in search of something similar.

  It took a year, but it worked. At the end of March 2003, Symes offered to travel to Rome voluntarily to be interviewed at the Palazzo di Giustizia by Ferri. He had with him his Italian lawyer, Francesco Tagliaferri. (This name was a source of much amusement for everyone: in Italian “Tagliaferri” means “cut Ferri,” in the sense of a “shortened Ferri” or “Ferri cut down to size.”) Tagliaferri was also Tchacos’s lawyer.

  Unsurprisingly, Symes was uptight about everything and Ferri had to squeeze information out of him. It was like being with the Bürkis all over again. Symes said he had known Medici for a very long time, since the 1980s, when the Italian would go to London for Sotheby’s sales. However, at the time he was interviewed, Symes claimed that he and his partner, Christo, hadn’t met Medici in more than ten years. Symes insisted that Medici was an expert in vases, that he had a very important collection and that “since they were famous and published vases, he did not need to certify their origin.” In particular, Symes confirmed that Medici could distinguish the painters who had painted particular vases. This was of course in direct contradiction of what Frida Tchacos had said and what others would say.

  Xoilan, Symes said, was the company in whose name objects that he intended to collect (keep) were purchased, whereas for dealing he used another company, Robin Symes Limited. (This is directly contradicted by evidence we detail in Chapter 15.)2

  Symes claimed there was nothing unusual or incriminating about the Polaroids found at Medici’s warehouse, even though they showed objects in fragments and covered in dirt. “Conserving the photos of an object which still has to be restored is simply to show the client the original condition of the object and how much and what kind of restoring work had been done. Many dealers give the purchaser the photos of the object before its restoration.” (Again, this is directly contradicted by Ferri’s later interrogations.) He confirmed that Felicity Nicholson was a great friend of his (he found her “molto simpatica”), and they frequently went out to dinner together. “She was incredibly honest and reserved in her work at Sotheby’s,” a description that hardly squares with her behavior in regard to the Lion Goddess, Sekhmet,s when she had asked Symes to smuggle it out of Italy. In fact, Symes rather spoiled his argument by admitting it was Nicholson who had prevailed on him to take part in the exercise.

  Symes knew Hecht and had visited him when the latter lived in Rome. He had never visited him in Paris, and although he hadn’t done much business with him, Symes did confirm that in 1971 or 1972, he’d purchased a large bronze eagle from Hecht for $70,000–$75,000, then sold it to the Getty Museum. This, of course, is an important confirmation of an episode that Hecht had mentioned in his memoir, in his first “Medici version” of the route by which the Euphronios krater had arrived at the Met. Symes also said that an acquaintance of his, Peter Wilson, CEO of Sotheby’s, had shown him a photograph of a Euphronios vase that had been offered to Sotheby’s at that time, and Symes had noticed that it was identical to the one purchased by the Metropolitan. This too confirms the “Medici version” in Hecht’s memoir, where he said that he had considered selling the vase at Sotheby’s but had been disappointed by Felicity Nicholson’s estimate of $200,000. Felicity Nicholson, who had no professional training in antiquities but had begun life at Sotheby’s as a secretary, was a protégé of Peter Wilson’s, who took a great interest in her department. She would certainly have shown Wilson any photographs of a major vase that Hecht sent in. This is presumably how Wilson (who died in 1984) came to show the photographs to Symes. Symes also said that he had thought the Euphronios was perhaps a fake, without knowing that in the “Medici version” in his memoir, Hecht had written about just this—that Robin and Christo (and Sir John Pope-Hennessy) had cast doubt on the authenticity of the vase. So, in at least three ways, and without realizing it, Symes confirmed the “Medici version” of the way the Euphronios krater had reached the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

  Symes said Hecht had told him, twenty-five years earlier (not five or six years before, as Hecht said to Ferri), that he was writing a book for his wife. He thought that Hecht was an excellent scholar but an unstable character, saying he drank too much and was unreliable, the “proof” being that he had sold a statue to Symes only to tell the Getty—to whom Symes had sold the statue—that it was a fake.

  Symes had bought fragments of Greek vases from Medici. Medici had given him some fragments to donate to the Metropolitan since, as an Italian, it might raise a few eyebrows should he donate them directly. At the Getty, True could not purchase from a person like Medici, otherwise the object could not have a valid provenance. Symes said he would have been “amazed” if Marion True had ever purchased anything directly from Medici. Here then, from the horse’s mouth, is confirmation of triangulation and the reasons for it.

  Both Symes and Christo had excellent relations with Marion True, “more personal on the part of Christo since he did not sell objects,” whereas Symes did. Marion True, Symes said, had a house near his in Greece, and they would see each other during the summer. Symes said he had met Jiri Frel when the latter became curator at the Getty, meeting him in London, in Los Angeles, and also in Greece. He considered Frel a bit crazy and not entirely reliable. He (Frel) had gone to Symes in Greece to show him photographs of a kouros that he wished to purchase, and Symes told him that he thought it was fake and had said the same thing to John Walsh, director of the Getty, who had consulted him in London before the purchase. Medici had told Symes in London that he owned something “very similar to the Kouros,” and Christo had told Marion True.

  This fitted with one set of Getty documents we haven’t yet mentioned in any detail. It will be recalled from Chapter 7 that the Getty acquired a kouros in the mid-1980s but that when it was unveiled, the statue provoked a furor over its provenance (or lack of one) and over its authenticity. t This kouros was sold to the Getty by Gianfranco Becchina, following which Medici sent to Los Angeles a statue that, he said, was fake and yet had very many features similar to the kouros.u Here then, the two bitter rivals, members of different cordate, were attacking one another.

  Lawrence Fleischman, Symes said, had put together a collection in a very short time, in order to sell it to the Getty. He had heard from an American dealer, he said, that in order to sel
l an object to the Getty, one had to sell it to the Fleischmans.

  Symes confirmed that he had sold various objects to Tempelsman, who had sold them to the Getty, and that he had sold various works to Shelby White, “who would never have bought directly from someone like Giacomo Medici.” This is yet another confirmation of triangulation, again from the horse’s mouth. Symes confirmed that Koutoulakis was supplied by Medici “since at Koutoulakis’ he had seen objects he’d previously seen at Medici’s.” He had bought the ivory head from Savoca for $850,000.

  Ferri’s final “encounter” in this phase of the investigation was an international rogatory for an interrogation carried out by one of Conforti’s men, directed at Professor Wolf Dieter Heilmeyer, the director of the Museum for Classical Antiquities in Berlin. This rogatory concerned the museum’s acquisition of seven vases, all of which were among the photographs seized in Geneva.

  In May 2003, at an international conference in Berlin, titled “Illegal Archaeology,” Heilmeyer, organizer of the conference, announced that Berlin State Museums would no longer acquire, display, or restore any objects that did not have clear provenances. “If there is any doubt about provenance,” he said, “we don’t go further.” Archaeologists have been watching.

  According to Professor Heilmeyer’s response to the rogatory, the seven vases in Berlin were acquired on four different occasions. The first acquisition concerned a skyphos of the Trittolemos Painter, which had been sold to the museum in 1970 by Koutoulakis, in Geneva, for $60,000. The curator for the purchase was Dr. Adolf Greifenhagen, now dead. In addition, four fragments of the skyphos were later donated by Robert Hecht, who said he had purchased them in Geneva.

  The second acquisition was made in 1980. This was an Attic kylix, bought for £16,000 from Robin Symes. Heilmeyer went to London to view this acquisition and said he couldn’t remember whether he had seen a photograph beforehand or not. He added that no investigation was made into the provenance of the kylix.

  The third acquisition was the most important and took place in 1983. It concerned four Apulian vases. They came from a much larger group of twenty-one vases, all acquired at the same time, but Polaroids of only four of them were found in Medici’s albums. All twenty-one had been offered to Berlin by one Christoph Leon of Basel on behalf of a Basel family, the Cramers. Professor Heilmeyer examined the vases on the premises of the head of archaeology at Geneva Museum, Jacques Chamay. “Chamay had pronounced himself to be the discoverer of the vases, specifying that his research had begun after he had examined a fragment of one of the vases in the Cramer family’s old library.” Professor Heilmeyer had spoken to the person who declared she had restored the vases, Fiorella Cottier-Angeli, who told him that the vases had been in very old chests and had reached Geneva “in the nineteenth century.” Cottier-Angeli also said that she did not wish her name to appear in the museum’s publications. All the vases came from Puglia, and the museum officials had believed what Leon, Chamay, and Cottier-Angeli had told them about the provenance. The overall price of 3 million marks had been paid to Leon.

  The fourth acquisition, an Attic krater, had been left to the museum in 1993 as an inheritance from the Brommer Collection. In the donor’s documentation there was no indication of provenance.

  In other words, in this case too, the usual suspects—in the usual triangular relationships—are in evidence. And the usual falsehoods were told about provenance.

  Conducting interrogations through cumbersome letters rogatory, in foreign languages, with suspects who have the opportunity to be as uncooperative as possible and the time to decide what they will do with any incriminating evidence in the months before they are interviewed, is far from ideal from the point of view of the law enforcement authorities. Almost all the cards are stacked against them from the word go. In this instance, however, Dr. Ferri had quite a bit to work with, and perhaps the single most important result to come out of these raids and interrogations was that he discovered nothing to refute or contradict the picture that Pellegrini, Rizzo, Conforti’s team, and he himself had been able to build in the months and years since the discovery of the organigram and Medici’s first arrest. Indeed, they had added considerably to their understanding, despite the reluctance of some witnesses to be fully open. And on the all-important role of Medici, Hecht, Symes, Becchina, and Savoca, the picture had been amply corroborated. The existence of triangulation and the cordate was confirmed, together with the fact that it was “business as usual.” Hecht’s memoir really existed, it contained a version of the Euphronios krater story that was very different from that given at the time (that is, in 1972), and yet was itself corroborated by some of the new information vouchsafed by others who were in a position to know.

  There remains one raid to mention, the second one conducted on Medici. This time, however, the location was not the Geneva Freeport but Medici’s house at Santa Marinella, north of Rome, near the coast. It took place in 2002, and by far the most interesting discovery was an album of photographs in which one of the most prominent images was the Euphronios krater. The album, a ring binder, contained not one but several images of the krater. But on closer inspection, when the photographs were back at his office in the administration block of the Villa Giulia Museum, Pellegrini observed that two of the images of the krater were in fact fake. The main scene of the genuine Euphronios krater—the one in the Met—is of the dying Sarpedon with blood flowing from three wounds on his body. He is held by the gods of Sleep and Death, each of whom has wings, beautifully rendered, that stick out at either side of the composition. On either side of this main motif are guards, each man holding a spear.

  These spears are important. Both are held upright, and the tip of the left-hand spear touches the tip of the god’s wing. The right-hand spear, in contrast, is held a short distance away from the tip of the wing belonging to the god on the right. In the fake vases, or copies, the arrangement is different. In one, the tip of the spear is behind the wing of the god on the left-hand side of the composition, covered by it, and in the other the spear is behind the wing of the god on the right-hand side. At first sight, the images are the same, but on closer inspection the fake images are in fact very obvious—no connoisseur or professional archaeologist or art historian would be taken in for long. On a subsequent visit to Santa Marinella, Ferri actually saw one of these fakes or copies—the one where the spear was behind the wing of the right-hand god—and he says this vase was about half the size of the real Euphronios krater, and much less moving. “It was cold and stiff,” says Ferri.

  But the quality is not really the point. The existence of the two other kraters—whether they were copies or deliberate fakes—doesn’t prove anything, one way or the other, about Medici’s involvement in the Met’s controversial acquisition of the original vase, any more than the organigram proves that the people named in the document are members of the organization that is suggested. But, as with the organigram, these images are highly suggestive. When asked why he had them, Medici said that he was fascinated by the Euphronios krater, by its quality and iconography, and the copies were merely a measure of that fascination and passion for vases by masters such as Euphronios. But why this vase and no others, why two copies rather than one, why were there deliberate mistakes introduced?

  He had no answer.

  Ferri asked who had made the copies, but Medici wouldn’t answer that question either. The prosecutor paid a visit to the most prominent faker of Greek and Roman vases, but he denied having anything to do with Medici. Stalemate.

  It was frustrating, but it only made Ferri more certain that he had the right man in his sights and that the Metropolitan’s acquisition of the Euphronios krater marked a turning point in the whole underground trade of looted antiquities.

  Across a twenty-year period, from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, no fewer than five vases by Euphronios surfaced on the market. Prior to that, nothing new by him had been discovered for more than a century. In terms of classical archaeology, this wa
s a miracle. Miracles of this kind inspire some people but they don’t satisfy the methodological skepticism of scientists. The five objects comprise the fragmentary vase which Hecht sold to the Munich Antikensammlung in 1968, the Sarpedon krater which Hecht sold to the Metropolitan Museum in 1972, the Euphronios and Onesimos kylix which Frida Tchacos sold to the Getty in 1983, the krater which the Hunt brothers bought from the Summa Gallery (owned by Bruce McNall and Robert Hecht) in the 1980s, and which was bought by Robin Symes for Leon Levy and Shelby White in 1990, and the kylix bought by the Hunts from the Summa Gallery in the 1980s, and which was acquired by Giacomo Medici at the Hunt sale in 1990. We now know from Pellegrini’s paper trail that four of these vases involved Robert Hecht, and that three involved Giacomo Medici. The appearance of these five vases on the market so close to one another is either a freak coincidence or, to more skeptical minds, an indication of a sudden epidemic of fakes in the art world.

  Put all that alongside the fact that Medici had, in his house at Santa Marinella, near Cerveteri, a photograph of the Met’s Euphronios krater, photographs of two copies or fakes, and one of the copies or fakes itself, and then put all that alongside the fact that a cult building dedicated to Hercules—the iconographical subject of many of these vases—was discovered in Cerveteri in 1993, and the suggestion becomes overwhelming that the five Euphronios vases scattered over Europe and north America came from this one source—Cerveteri, via Medici and Hecht.

  All of which only made the prosecution of Giacomo Medici more urgent.

  At that point, only one aspect of the investigation remained to be completed: the interrogations in the United States.

  14

  INTERROGATIONS IN LOS ANGELES AND MANHATTAN