The Medici Conspiracy

by Peter Watson

  A separate note said that both Xoilan and SESA were owned by Christo’s parents, through the fiduciary Henri Jacques. The note went on to say that Xoilan was established in the mid–1970s to receive the family’s collection, and to do so confidentially.

  This was as a result of unfortunate publicity surrounding one particular sale which had been made through Robin Symes Limited of an item to the British Rail Pension Fund. This had led to an investigation by Interpol. The piece in question had in fact belonged to Christo Michaelides’s aunt.

  These notes, it transpired, had been prepared in connection with two meetings Symes held with Britain’s Inland Revenue in June 1991. During the interview, the tax inspectors asked: “How is the collection built up?” The reply was: “When RS/CM see an item, CM will tell his parents who will ask RS and/or CM to attend the auction. His parents will then instruct Henri Jacques to make arrangements. RSL will arrange for shipment.”

  In March 2000, Nonna Investments, another of Symes’ companies, negotiated a “rolling facility” with Citibank of $14 million, later increased to $17 million—the loan guaranteed by Despina Papadimitriou. There was a letter from the Getty agreeing to buy various objects but setting off these purchases against a Diadoumenos head—part of the Fleischman Collection—and a torso of Mithras, which were being returned to Italy. In October 1992, there was paperwork in connection with a Greek statue being sold to the Getty for $18 million.

  How important was all this? Neither Nikolas Zirganos nor we could be certain. The Papadimitriou family were eager just then to prove that Symes and Michaelides were business partners, not in a “marriage,” and Christo’s ready access to serious money—via his family—certainly seemed an important aspect of the running of their companies. That supported their argument in the London trial, but if Symes were the kind of dealer Ferri thought he was, wasn’t this financial involvement by the Papadimitrious also incriminating of them?

  We did not discuss it in any detail just then. Too much was going on elsewhere. Over a last lunch before Zirganos left for the airport—eaten near Symes’ now-closed gallery in Mason’s Yard, where we had been filming—Watson mentioned that the Symes archive, in addition to a roomful of documents, consisted of seventeen green binders showing photographs of antiquities. We didn’t discuss that in any detail either. Not then.

  On March 19, 2003, at a press conference, the Italian Ministry for Cultural Affairs announced that what was then the world’s rarest and most important looted antiquity had been recovered by the Italian Carabinieri in London. The object, a unique life-size ivory figure, thought to be of Apollo, the Greek god of the sun, and perhaps dating from the fifth century BC, was valued at close to £30 million ($50 million) on the open market.

  The ivory was of such a superb quality that Italian archaeologists who examined the head on its return believed at first that it might have been carved by Phidias, one of the greatest of classical Greek sculptors, whose carvings graced the Parthenon and the Temple of Zeus at Olympia. Pliny, Pausanias, and Lucian all sang Phidias’s praises, but not a single work of his has survived. This discovery was therefore astounding to the worlds of archaeology, art history, museums, and classical scholarship.

  The head was seized, partly with the help of the authors, from Robin Symes. Because relations between the Carabinieri and Scotland Yard were so poor, we served as a conduit for information between Ferri and Conforti, on the one hand, and Christo’s family, and their attorneys in London, on the other, to help speed the negotiations. A fragment of a fresco, stolen from a villa near Pompeii, was also recovered at the same time. Besides the ivory head, which has its eyes, straight nose, and sensual lips intact, a series of fragments was also recovered—fingers, toes, an ear, some curls of hair. In antiquity, it was the practice for exceptionally important statues to have ivory heads, hands, and feet, with bodies of stone or wood, which were covered in gold sheets.

  The ivory head and other fragments were originally discovered in 1995 by Pietro Casasanta, who showed the authors of this book the field where he says he discovered the statue, a few hundred yards from a well-known archaeological landmark, the Baths of Claudius. Casasanta told us that he believes the statue came from a large, luxurious villa that belonged to the family of the first-century Roman emperor Claudius. At the time he found the head and fragments, Casasanta also discovered three Egyptian statues of goddesses, two in green and one in black granite. He also had some pieces of mosaic, not necessarily from the same site. “This was obviously the residence of a very rich, very important family,” he said. Photographs of the three statues were found by the Carabinieri at Casasanta’s home when he was raided. These statues are still missing, though Casasanta believes one is in London.

  Casasanta told us that the minute he set eyes on the ivory head he knew it was the most important object he—or any other tombarolo—had ever found. Only one other life-size ivory head is known to have survived in Italy, found at Montecalvo (again, near Rome) and now in the Apostolic Library in the Vatican. And only one set of life-size Chryselephantine sculptures survives in Greece. Casasanta smuggled the head and fragments, and the three statues, out of Italy himself and sold them to Nino Savoca. They agreed a fee of $10 million. Savoca, he says, showed the head to the experts or curators of two American museums, one of whom attributed it to Phidias, but neither of them was willing to risk buying such an obviously looted object. Following this, Savoca stopped paying him after $700,000, and they fell out.

  Savoca died in 1998, and during a (second) raid on his premises, the Carabinieri discovered documentation that helped them close in on a number of important looted antiquities. Partly because Savoca had reneged on payment, and possibly calculating that the Carabinieri had him in their sights again, Casasanta volunteered to Conforti’s men that Savoca had sold the ivory head to a London dealer, who, he told us, was “a homosexual whose partner died recently.” This was clearly Robin Symes. The Carabinieri already knew this, of course, from Frida Tchacos.

  Professor Antonio Giuliano, of La Sapienza University, who has examined the statue, which is now at the Museo Nazionale Romano in Rome, provisionally dated the ivory to the fifth or fourth century BC. Later studies changed this: It is now dated to the first century BC—that is, 300-plus years after Phidias. Giuliano considers the main head to be of Apollo, but he thinks that the associated fragments are from a second, somewhat smaller statue, possibly Artemis or Atona (the toe, for example, is on a smaller scale than the head).

  Should we need further confirmation, there can now be no doubt of the importance of the objects that the Medici-Tchacos-Symes cordata dealt in. The ivory head now has an entire room to itself in a major museum in Rome. Antiquities don’t come more important than that.

  Robin Symes left the medical wing of Pentonville Prison, North London, after securing time off for good behavior, in September 2005. The civil action with the Papadimitriou family is still not resolved. He still has a one-year suspended sentence hanging over him. That’s in Britain. In Italy, Ferri is still reviewing future cases and the fall of Robin Symes may not yet be complete.

  18

  THE WOODCUTTER’S ARCHIVE

  WHEN OPERATION GERYON BEGAN, when Pasquale Camera’s organigram was discovered, there were some new names in the frame, but not many. The organigram confirmed the general picture, so far as Conforti and his men understood it, but it primarily resulted in their focusing on the Italians who were masterminding the export of illicit material out of Italy—Medici, Becchina, and Savoca. The Melfi theft had led them to Savoca; then Hodges’s documents leaked to us confirmed the importance of Medici; and the more Conforti and Ferri looked at Medici, the more they heard about Becchina. No one had hitherto grasped Medici’s great importance, or his intimate links with Sotheby’s, or the very organized nature of the trade and the way it was designed to protect the world’s rogue museums. These were the main things to come out of the investigation.

  In a sense, the organigram was a symbol of the wh
ole exercise. As Conforti had noted, criminals invariably write things down. The same was true in the antiquities underworld. Camera had left his diagram to be found and, in Munich, Savoca’s meticulous record keeping had led the Carabinieri farther forward. Medici’s own records were copious, and Hecht’s memoir likewise had proved to be gold dust. Thanks to Conforti’s idea for a pool of magistrates, thanks to some excellent and diligent detective work among the Polaroids, thanks to Ferri’s ability to use the information from Geneva to persuade other members of the cordata to cooperate, Medici’s trial was at long last about to begin.

  But then, one morning just before Christmas in December 2003, days after the trial had opened, the phone taps suddenly turned up trumps—and yet another archive fell into Ferri’s lap. Listening in on a conversation involving one of the more familiar names, the eavesdroppers suddenly encountered someone who was entirely new, a man who was to be a revelation. They heard him talking on the phone taps, they learned that his name was Giuseppe Evangelisti, and they found that he had a nickname, “Peppino il taglialegna”—Peppino the woodcutter. They subsequently discovered that the nickname derived from what we might call Evangelisti’s “day job”: He provided wood to two whole villages. But that was not his only activity, not at all. There was also his “night job.”

  The phone tap had taken place just before lunchtime. That afternoon, having located Evangelisti’s address from the phone number at Capo di Monte, near Lake Bolsena, north of Rome, they paid him a visit. They found him to be a tall, robust, and muscular individual in his late fifties. He was a gentle man, with receding hair and tanned skin; he looked every inch a woodcutter. He was—not unnaturally—surprised to see them, but he didn’t appear nervous. On the other hand, according to one of the investigators who took part in the raid, the woodcutter’s wife certainly was. The investigators told the couple they had heard Evangelisti’s conversation on the telephone that day, so they knew he had looted objects and they weren’t leaving until he took them to where the antiquities were located. The Carabinieri had expected to be taken to some lockup a distance away, but in fact he took them to his garage, which was under the house. And there four surprises greeted them.

  In his garage they located hundreds of looted antiquities—still broken, still dirty with soil, all local, fragments in sacks and fruit boxes, all classified by type: Attic, Buccheri, ceramics, bronzes. In addition, they found a veritable library of archaeological books, all scientific. “This man wanted to understand the value of objects abroad—what foreign museums and collections were made up of,” said one Carabinieri.

  So far the find had been interesting but not especially sensational, the biggest surprise being that his name was new to them. That was about to change.

  In the garage there was a table for restoring, with a palette, brushes, and other technical equipment. Above the table, however, was a shelf on which were a number of other books. When the Carabinieri examined these books, they got the surprise of their lives, for these books contained two precious records. In the first place, the woodcutter was a photography buff and had photographed every object he had ever looted—hundreds and hundreds of vases, statues, stone columns, and terra-cotta tiles. Here, in other words, was a visual record to put alongside Medici’s, a visual record of what had been dug up and smuggled abroad. This record was obviously important in itself, because it means that those who traffic in illicit antiquities can no longer be sure that there is no photographic record of what they deal in, which proves that “their” objects come from Italy.

  The other batch of books on the shelf in Evangelisti’s garage included agendas and diaries for the years 1997 to 2002. (There were nine books of agendas in total, and seven albums of photographs.) Most exciting of all, it transpired that the woodcutter was obsessive and the agendas supplemented the photographs: He had recorded what he had found, when, and where. He had noted the locations he had dug at, the kind of tomb he had uncovered, even at what depth objects had been uncovered. In Daniela Rizzo’s twenty-six years experience, she told us, the woodcutter was the only person—apart from Medici—to record such specific information. This was a breakthrough, not on the size of Medici’s perhaps (or Symes’s), but it was of the first importance all the same. Not only did Evangelisti give dates and places, but he also drew little maps of where the tombs were in which fields, with drawings showing how many paces they were from this or that tree. His descriptions of the objects were also far more scientific than other tombaroli. For example, he would write “Amphoretta with three big birds and heads of horses.” It was enough for Daniela Rizzo to recognize the piece as an important Etruscan ceramic figure. “This man has a collection of figures, of Etruscan objects that the Villa Giulia dreams about—we don’t have such a thing.”

  The woodcutter’s archive named the owners of the land he dug on. The owners played an important part, because he made it clear, as Casasanta had, that the owners were paid for letting people dig on their land, and took a share of anything that was found. Occasionally, Evangelisti’s agenda even gave the percentage that the owners had received. The notations for each tomb included the fate of the pieces he found and the prices they fetched. Then, even more amazingly, at the end of the year he balanced the books. Here for instance, is the woodcutter’s record for:Anno 1998

  Scavate47 tombe

  39 tombe a cassone

  1 fossa a terra

  4 tombe a uovo

  1 tomba a pozzetto

  2 tombe a ziro

  Trovati 377 Pezzi

  Venduto 81.750.000 lire

  [excavated 47 tombs]

  [large chest tomb in stone slabs]

  [trench grave]

  [egg-shaped stone cave tomb]

  [small shaft tomb]

  [clay case tomb]

  [found 377 pieces]

  [sold 81,750,000 lire = $68,000]

  The year 2000 was a better year—sixty-eight tombs excavated, 737 pieces found, sold for 164 million lire ($135,000). In all, Pellegrini calculated that over the four years for which the records were most complete, Evangelisti had excavated 204 tombs, discovered 1,764 objects, and earned 185,000 euros ($154,000). Evangelisti himself estimated that a third of his income went in expenses so that his net gain over these four years was 130,000 euros ($108,000), or 32,500 euros per year ($27,000). This amounts to a tomb a week, each tomb yielding an average of roughly nine objects. These figures also show that, again on average, Evangelisti sold his antiquities for 105 euros (approximately $88). This compares with the average price of antiquities at auction, which is 1,000 euros (roughly $830) and the average price of Robin Symes’s 17,000 antiquities (£3,750/$5,000).

  Finally, Evangelisti recorded who, and on what dates, he had sold what to: Names included Medici, Cilli (whom he regarded as a “factotum” of Medici), the Aboutaams, who, he said, came to see him at home, and a prominent gallery in London’s Mayfair district.

  The Evangelisti discovery was almost scientific in its specificity. It removed any lingering doubt about the scale of the looting, its importance, or the role of the familiar litany of names involved.

  19

  THE TRIAL OF GIACOMO MEDICI

  THE PALACE OF JUSTICE in the quartiere Clodio of Rome is by no means a beautiful building. On the contrary, it is made of gray concrete, a brutal modernist monstrosity of six stories, disfigured by rain and as dreary inside as out. It resembles nothing so much as a beached, out-of-commission aircraft carrier left to molder in dry dock. Piazzale Clodio is a large, long square of bus terminals, plane trees, and gas stations. Off it, governing the approaches to the courts, is a small, nondescript dead end with a bank, a motorcycle repair shop, and a sad café, where attorneys, police, and defendants grab a last cigarette and cappuccino before submitting themselves to a security check. This is not the Eternal City at her best.

  The trial of Giacomo Medici began on December 4, 2003. Medici is of course one of the most famous names in all Italy, if not the world. Historians judge that t
he Florentine Medicis—“the godfathers of the Renaissance,” to quote one recent study—included no fewer than fifty-four individuals worth writing about. Besides Lorenzo the Magnificent and Cosimo, there were Garcia, Gian Gastone, Giancarlo, seven Giovannis, two Giulianos, a Giulio, and a Guccio. But there has never been, until now, a Giacomo Medici. There is no danger that anyone can confuse the godfather of the Freeport with any other Medici.

  The trial opened eight long years after the first arrests, since the discovery of Pasquale Camera’s organigram, since the first raids in Geneva and the sealing of Corridor 17 with wax, since the first revelations about Medici’s dealings at Sotheby’s. During that time, Sotheby’s had stopped selling antiquities in London (though sales at Bonhams had mushroomed) and had closed three departments; Felicity Nicholson had retired, and its chairman, A. Alfred Taubman, had been sent to jail for a year and a day in the United States for his part in a price-fixing scandal, when Sotheby’s and Christie’s had conspired to charge customers the same (increased) commission. Symes had suffered his own misfortunes, as had several others who had been Medici’s collaborators.

  The trafficking in illicit antiquities still went on, however, despite all these events and setbacks for the traffickers. Though he must have known that he would be followed, at least from time to time, Medici had still continued to meet tombaroli. Paolo Ferri himself bumped into Medici in Geneva on one of his visits there. Robert Hecht, on his visits to Rome, was also followed and he, too, met with fellow traffickers in looted objects.

  And so, for Ferri, for Conforti (even though he had retired by then), for Rizzo, Pellegrini, and the more senior officers in the Carabinieri Art Squad, the trial could not start quickly enough. They had a mountain of evidence—and nothing in the interrogations and raids had contradicted the picture they had built up via the documentation. On the contrary, it had added to and deepened their understanding of the way the traffic works, and its far-reaching extent. So far as they were concerned, this case was triply important because Medici was by far the biggest trafficker they had ever proceeded against, because they had more documentary and other evidence against him than they had ever had against anyone else, and because his links to the international trading circuit were more established, more sophisticated—and better documented—than ever before with anyone else.