The Medici Conspiracy

by Peter Watson

  This scenario could only be proved if the Getty had made available all the documentation the Italians had requested, so that important acquisitions could be compared, alongside the arrival of fragments. But that didn’t happen. As a result, the full picture regarding the sale of the orphans remains murky.

  Although this picture is murky, two pieces of information have been made available since the original publication of this book which render the situation less so. In an interview in New York on November, 17, 2006, Thomas Hoving, former director of the Metropolitan Museum, confirmed that our interpretation of the market in fragments is substantially correct—that fragments are used in the way we suggest. And Dr. David Gill, classicist and archaeologist at Swansea University in Wales, whose work is discussed in the conclusion, drew our attention to another vase in the Getty, an Apulian storage jar or pelike attributed to the Darius Painter and showing Perseus with Andromeda (see pp. 89–90). An illustration on the Getty’s own website shows a pattern of cracks in this vase, in the form of a “starburst” so regular that one is prompted to wonder whether this breakage wasn’t deliberate (see the Dossier).

  16

  THE “CORDATA” CONTINUES—IN EGYPT, GREECE, ISRAEL, AND OXFORD

  THE AMOUNT OF PAPERWORK generated by the prosecution of Giacomo Medici was immense. Ferri had four secretaries working for him in his fourth-floor offices in Piazzale Clodio, and it was sometimes easy to feel overwhelmed by the sheer scale of Medici’s activities, the vast reams of documentation to be analyzed, the objects to be traced, the numbers of people to be questioned. Keeping track of who had handled what and when; who had covered for whom and when; who had donated what and where; who had told which lies, when, about what, and to whom—it was all daunting. Ferri’s office was decorated with colorful posters of archaeological exhibitions but they were an ironical joke. No one had time to visit any museum other than the Villa Giulia, which had become an extension of the prosecutor’s office.

  And yet, from time to time, the load was lightened. Attitudes, and laws, have been changing across the world in regard to issues of cultural heritage. And this is true not only in the “archaeological countries” but in the market countries, too. Over the ten years since the Carabinieri’s first raid on Corridor 17 in Geneva in 1995, new laws governing the trade in antiquities have been passed in Great Britain and Switzerland; and the United States, moving in its own way, has concluded bilateral agreements with several countries—among them Guatemala, Peru, Mali, Canada, and Italy—under which the importation into the United States of certain types of ancient objects is prohibited.

  In recent years these new laws and agreements have begun to take effect. On top of that, countries such as Egypt, Greece, Jordan, and China have become more assertive in their attempts to prevent the illicit trade and in this regard they have adopted a common stance: It is, in the long run, more effective to stem the demand in the market countries—Western Europe, North America, Japan—than try to catch and convict the thousands of tomb robbers, who in any case make far less money than the better-heeled middlemen who are the chief culprits in the eyes of the likes of Paolo Ferri and Roberto Conforti.

  This argument is substantiated by a number of other cases, parallel plots—stretching from Bombay to Cairo to Stockholm to London and Oxford to New York and Los Angeles—that have come to light in the last few years, and in each of which the names and “business practices” are only too familiar.

  Ferri, Conforti, and the others were reassured by these other episodes that real change was now in the air.

  In November 1995, two months after the raid on Corridor 17, a gold phiale of Sicilian origin and dating to the fourth century BC was seized in New York. The provenance of the phiale was largely unknown. It is said that sometime between 1976 and 1980, when an Italian utility company was laying cable in Sicily, workers dug up a golden platter, about the size of a pie plate. This phiale was decorated with acorns, beechnuts, and bees, and it matched one sold to the Met in 1961—by Robert Hecht. The new phiale interests us because although it was first acquired by Vincenzo Pappalardo, a private antiquities collector living in Sicily, he traded it in 1980 to Vincenzo Cammarata for artworks worth about $20,000. Cammarata, it will be remembered, was questioned by Frank di Maio, the Sicilian public prosecutor investigating the provenance of the Morgantina silver.

  The case is also interesting because the phiale was eventually acquired by Robert Haber, an art dealer from New York and owner of Robert Haber & Company. Haber acquired the phiale on behalf of a client of his, Michael Steinhardt, a financier. Haber told Steinhardt that the phiale was a twin to a piece in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and charged Steinhardt $1.2 million. Steinhardt had the piece authenticated by scholars at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and thereafter the phiale was displayed in his home from 1992 until 1995.

  It was seized after an inquiry by the Italian authorities—and here it gets murky. The U.S. government claimed that the forfeiture was proper because the phiale was stolen property and because there were false statements on the customs forms—for example, it was valued at $250,000, when its real value was much higher. In the subsequent court case, the decision to seize the phiale was upheld, as it was on appeal, which was decided in July 1999. The gold platter was subsequently returned to Italy and is now on display in Palermo.

  But how did the authorities first come by the information that led to this prosecution?

  The episode is mentioned by Robert Hecht in his memoir: He considered the phiale a forgery, naming the Sicilian forger and some of his other fakes. Was it he who alerted the authorities, because he was jealous of Haber’s links to a prosperous client such as Steinhardt? This is what Frida Tchacos told Ferri at her interrogation. Hecht’s trial in Rome, which began in late 2005, may clarify this point.

  In April 1997, two carved wall reliefs surfaced in London. Shlomo Moussaieff, of Grosvenor Square, London, had applied for permission to export one of these antiquities but was stopped by the government’s official adviser, John Curtis at the British Museum. Curtis had spotted that the relief had been looted from Iraq—it belonged in the throne-room suite of the Sennacherib Palace in Nineveh, across the Tigris River from Mosul.ab The identification was made because of the work of Dr. John Russell, an archaeologist from Massachusetts College of Art, who excavated at Nineveh before the first Gulf war, as part of a University of California team, and took 900 photographs of the site.

  Inquiries by Scotland Yard established that Mr. Moussif had bought looted antiquities from Nabil el Asfar, then based in Brussels. This is the same Asfar who had, allegedly, provided Robert Hecht with the Morgantina silver.ac Mr. Moussif had been told that the reliefs had been “in Switzerland for years.”

  At the time, Dr. Russell made it known that some ten other looted reliefs had appeared on the market. Generally, he said, he was approached by a lawyer, claiming to act on behalf of a “prospective buyer.” In another case, however, involving yet another looted Iraqi relief, he had been approached by someone from the Metropolitan Museum in New York. He was able to establish that in this instance, the individual offering the relief to the museum—or who at least had provided a photograph of the proposed acquisition—was Robin Symes of London. This time the relief came from the palace of Tiglath-pileser III at Nimrud. (Tiglath-pileser III, 744–727 BC, was the real founder of the Assyrian empire.) This object was identified as loot by Richard Sobolewski, who led a Polish expedition to excavate Nimrud in 1975.

  Only Mr. Moussif’s objects were recovered. According to Sobolewski, the throne room in Tiglath-pileser’s palace originally contained 100 stone slabs similar to those offered to the Met. Many of them are still missing.

  In the late spring of 1998, Robert Guy chose not to renew his fellowship in classical archaeology at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. This brought to an end a curious set of events that was never fully explained.

  In 1990, nearly a decade before, Claude Hankes-Drielsma had approached the college with a proposal
that would fund, in perpetuity, a senior research fellowship in classical archaeology. Hankes-Drielsma has been a banker, a director of Robert Fleming, and chairman of the management committee of Price Waterhouse. In 1985, he masterminded the South African debt crisis; he was an adviser to the Iraqi government and did much to bring the Oil for Food scandal before the United Nations. He was one of those tasked with going through the Saddam Hussein documents after the fall of Baghdad. He is currently in charge of the appeal for the chapel at Windsor Castle (which was gutted by fire in the 1990s). An amateur antiquities collector, he is a member of the Getty Villa Council, a charity that benefits the Getty Museum’s Antiquities Wing, and is himself an honorary fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he has dining rights.

  His 1990 proposal to Corpus Christi College had just two conditions: The fellowship was to be called the Beazley-Ashmole Fellowship, and the first incumbent had to be Robert Guy.

  This was highly unusual. The normal practice is for fellowships to be advertised; then scholars apply, and ideally, the best candidate is appointed. When, in discussions about the fellowship, it further emerged that it was to be funded, at least in part, by the antiquities trade and that one of the dealers involved was Robin Symes, the Corpus Christi Council turned down the proposal, on the grounds that it was “inappropriate” to accept funds from such a source.

  Some time afterward, Hankes-Drielsma approached the college again. This time, he said he had an alternative source of funds. The name of the donor was revealed only to the president of Corpus, but the fellows were assured that the source had a history of philanthropic giving to universities and had no links to the antiquities trade. This time, the proposal received publicity within the archaeological profession. As a result, Corpus was inundated with letters from archaeologists all over the world, protesting its proposed course of action. Almost the entire archaeological “establishment” was against the proposal—including Sir John Boardman, the distinguished author of many books on Greek vases; Donna Kurtz, the curator in charge of the Beazley Archive in Oxford; Martin Robertson, an authority on classical vase painting and professor of classical archaeology at Oxford (and an old adversary of Hecht); and Dietrich von Bothmer himself. All felt that the college should not accept funds anonymously, whatever Hankes-Drielsma said ($1.2 million was believed to be on offer), all felt the name of the fellowship was wrong and tendentious—neither Beazley nor Ashmole had anything to do with Corpus—and all felt that the fellowship should be advertised in the normal way. Those who objected to the proposal also suspected that what had originally been envisaged had been a “tame” fellowship. Funded by the trade, with the “Beazley-Ashmole” name, this fellowship would always carry the risk that the incumbent would feel obliged to satisfy dealers’ commercial needs and attribute their vases to major Greek vase painters. Though commercially valuable, such a practice would be an abuse of scholarship. One of the few people who wrote in support of Guy was Marion True, at the Getty.

  A college committee was set up to make a recommendation about the fellowship. The committee, however, could not agree. The members did agree to changing the name to the Humfrey Payne Fellowship, after a brilliant director of the British School in Athens, who had died young. Other than that, however, the divisions were fairly basic. In the end, a majority report was prepared, in favor of Guy’s appointment, and a minority report was prepared by Robin Osborne, a noted classical archaeologist, who was against it. The governing body of the college then considered the issue and the whole matter was fully aired. The president of the college, Sir Keith Thomas, was in favor, and the proposal—with the name change—was eventually accepted.

  Robert Guy was duly elected and served for the next seven years, as is normal, as a fellow of Corpus Christi. However, after seven years, when his renewal came up—a renewal that is usually automatic—he said he did not wish to stay, and the post was reoffered with no strings attached.

  It was a curious episode, in some ways reminiscent of von Bothmer’s treatment by the American Institute of Archaeology, when he failed to be elected to the board of trustees because of his actions in acquiring the Euphronios krater.ad Even Robin Osborne, who was against Guy’s appointment, agrees that he is a brilliant connoisseur of vases. But the original involvement of the trade in the fellowship, the anonymous nature of the money, and with the Getty in the background—all this left a nasty taste.ae

  In 1998, the Harvard Museum system put on display a 1995 purchase of 182 fifth-century BC Greek vase fragments. James Cuno, the director of Harvard’s art museums, argued that the pieces had probably been removed from Italy before 1971, the date at which Harvard’s acquisitions code took effect, in the wake of the UNESCO convention. The Harvard code forbids the acquisition of material of questionable provenance. The fragments were bought on the advice of museum curator David Mitten from a New York dealer who had acquired them from Robert Guy, then at the University of Oxford. Culture Without Context, the newsletter of the University of Cambridge Illicit Antiquities Research Centre, disagreed with Cuno.

  Referring to the fragments, the newsletter concluded that Guy “could only have obtained them after 1971.”

  In the summer of 1999, Frida Tchacos-Nussberger acquired an ancient manuscript that had been circulating in Europe and North America for some time. The so-called Gospel of Judas—thirteen codices in a Coptic translation of the ancient Greek—dates from the second century AD and is a good example of early Christian literature that was excluded as heretical from what the church had preserved in its early Greek form. The codices were allegedly found buried in the desert sand at Muh Zafat al-Minya in Egypt and had first appeared on the market in the early 1980s, via Nikolas Koutoulakis, but, proving difficult to sell, vanished again. Their resurfacing in 1999 appears to have been another attempt at a sale, for Mrs. Tchacos offered them to the Beinecke Library of Yale University for $750,000. But again there was no sale, so the manuscript was taken into a specially created Swiss foundation, which is to oversee publication, after which the codices will be returned to the Coptic Museum in Cairo.

  There is a lesson here. Because no one would touch such an important—but unprovenanced—object, it is going to be properly published, and then returned to where it belongs.

  In February 2000, Staffan Lunden, a Swedish journalist who was also an archaeologist, was researching a Roman funerary relief that had recently been acquired by the Museum of Mediterranean Antiquities in Stockholm. Lunden was interested in the object because, judging by stylistic criteria, it must have come from Ostia, outside Rome—but how and when?

  Tracking the object back, he found that the Stockholm Museum had acquired it from Galerie Arete in Zurich in 1997. Before that, it was auctioned at Sotheby’s in New York in December 1992, and before that, in 1991, it had belonged to Numismatic Fine Arts, Bruce McNall’s gallery in Los Angeles. Before that, however, it was mentioned in Guntram Koch’s Roman Funerary Sculpture: Catalogue of the Collections, published by the Getty. In the catalog, Koch said that the Stockholm relief had been on the “New York art market” in 1986 but didn’t specify which gallery. However, also published in the catalog was a very similar one, which was in the Getty itself. Koch’s text made it clear that this relief, the Getty’s object, was acquired from the Summa Gallery, another of McNall’s firms. Being aware of the close links between McNall and Robert Hecht, and of Hecht’s reputation, Lunden wondered whether McNall-Hecht had anything to do with the Stockholm relief.

  Pietro Casasanta, the most successful tomb robber of all time, in terms of the important objects he has looted. He is shown in front of the field where he discovered the ivory head of Apollo (shown below).

  The ivory head of Apollo, the world’s rarest and most valuable looted antiquity, valued at $50 million. Looted by Casasanta, who sold it to Savoca, who sold it to Robin Symes, from whom it was recovered with the assistance of the authors.

  Corridor 17: the interior of Medici’s showroom in the Geneva Freeport. Even the stone
capital supporting the glass table top was stolen.

  Colonel—later General—Roberto Conforti, head of the Carabinieri art squad.

  Public Prosecutor Paolo Ferri who, with Conforti, led the Italian investigation.

  Gianfranco Becchina, Medici’s bitter enemy and leader of the rival “cordata.” He operated out of Basel but retired to Sicily.

  Polaroid found in Medici’s warehouse in Geneva. The central vase of the three was later in the Hunt collection, and the one on the right in the Metropolitan Museum.