The Medici Conspiracy

by Peter Watson

  By Horiuchi’s own admission, very little of what he acquired was bought at auction—in what is perhaps the only full interview he has given, he said he bought from “top dealers” at “top prices.”

  Speaking of his first meeting with Mihoko Koyama in 1991, in that same interview, Horiuchi said, “Destiny brought us together,” though there may be more to it than that.

  Among the Becchina documents is an agreement signed after a creditors’ meeting held in Geneva in 1991. This was a meeting held between four creditors—all Swiss antiquities dealers, of which Becchina was one—called because Horiuchi owed each of them substantial amounts of money and showed no prospect of paying. According to the agreement drawn up at the end of the meeting, and signed by all those present, the decision taken was for Horiuchi to become the agent for his creditors in Japan. In other words, so far as these four Swiss dealers were concerned, from then on Horiuchi was not allowed to buy directly from them, and sell on; instead he could only take a percentage of whatever price they chose to put on their objects.

  The close proximity of this creditors’ meeting and Horiuchi’s meeting with Mihoko Koyama was therefore extremely fortuitous, to say the least, destiny bringing together not just these two individuals but placing the antiquities underworld cheek-by-jowl with one of the greatest sources of art funding the world has ever seen. In time, as the Becchina documents reveal more and more, we will no doubt find out just where so much of the Miho material originated.

  After the raid on the first three warehouses, Rosie Becchina refused to cooperate with the Swiss and Italian authorities and she was held in prison. This produced the desired effect, to some extent, and she did admit, for example, that one of their main suppliers was Monticelli, invaluable confirmation of that cordata, from the horse’s mouth. She also contacted a lawyer, Mario Roberty—the same attorney used by Frida Tchacos and Robin Symes—and Roberty called Becchina to tell him his wife had been arrested. (It was during this call that Becchina asked if the police had discovered his “other” warehouse.) Learning that his wife had been arrested, Becchina asked Roberty to tell Rosie that he was immediately leaving Sicily for Basel.

  Neither Alitalia nor any other regular airline flies directly from Palermo to Basel, so Becchina had to change planes at Milan. At Malpensa airport, at the gate where the Palermo flight arrived, he was arrested and immediately taken to Rome. Before he could be interrogated, Becchina claimed that he was mad—pazzo in Italian—and clinically incapable of either being held in jail or of being interviewed. Once again, this well-known maneuver interested Ferri because such a claim is in Italy a standard tactic. Becchina was seen by a psychiatrist who concluded that although he did have some problems with his memory, he was quite sane enough to remain in jail. He was held for six months, after which, under Italian law, he was automatically released.

  Ferri interrogated him for eight hours but didn’t get very far. Becchina admitted knowing many of the people mentioned in this book—Frida Tchacos, Medici, Symes, Hecht, Cottier-Angeli, True (“a very nice woman”), and Dietrich von Bothmer—but he could scarcely deny it since their names were all over his documentation. But he admitted nothing incriminating, as his wife had admitted receiving material from Monticelli. “All he did was fare salotto,” says Ferri. In Italian, salotto means “sitting room” and the phrase means that the interrogation had all the significance of a fireside chat.

  But in the course of the eight-hour interrogation, further differences did emerge between Becchina and Medici. Psychologically, whereas Medici is “spaccone,” a bit of a show-off, given to letting off steam, Becchina is a classical Sicilian—reserved, calm, a closed book. Small, slightly built, with straight lank hair and a sharply pointed nose, Becchina is physically very different from Medici, too. He makes no gesticulations and, while admitting nothing, Ferri says, “Unlike Medici, he has never tried to convince me he is innocent.”

  Robert Hecht, Giacomo Medici, Gianfranco Becchina, Robin Symes, and Marion True—all in court or in the prosecutor’s sights, all involved (or alleged to be involved) in smuggling, receiving, conspiracy. This is a major event in the history of archaeology, in criminology, in the politics of cultural heritage, and in the foreign policy of the Mediterranean countries. It is a major indication of the way the world’s attitudes and ethical beliefs are changing in this area. However, there is a sense that the legal fate of these figures is, if not an incidental matter, no longer the main event. The sheer scale of the illicit trade in looted antiquities, its organized nature, the routine deception, the superb quality of so much of the material, the close proximity of museum curators and major collectors to underworld figures—that is now there for all to see. Whatever verdicts are handed down, other, lesser figures in the underground network have already stood trial and been convicted.

  Irrespective of the verdicts in the outstanding court cases, in November 2005, American museums started to return antiquities to Italy. The Getty set the ball rolling with the return of the Asteas vase, a photograph of which had been found in the glove compartment of Pasquale Camera’s overturned Renault near Cassino (see pp. 11–13). At the same time, the museum returned two other objects, the bronze candelabrum from the Guglielmi Collection (pp. 84–86), and a stone stela with inscriptions from the archaeological site of Selinunte in Sicily.

  But this paled alongside the announcement, in February 2006, that the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York was returning the Euphronios krater, together with twenty other objects, to Italy. That transaction, and its implications, are considered in the Epilogue, because it was, and is, a special case. But the Met’s move did presage several ripple effects that may be considered here.

  The first of these occurred at the end of September 2006, when, after months of negotiations, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston announced that it was returning thirteen archaeological treasures to Italy. “We are committed to seeing the end of illegal excavations and illicit trade in archaeological works of art,” said director Malcolm Rogers at a formal ceremony in Rome. “This is a new era of legality.” He added that his museum and the Italian authorities now had a “collegial relationship.”

  One of the artifacts to be returned, a two-handled amphora from the fourth century BC attributed to the Darius painter, was donated to the museum in 1991 by Shelby White. Another, a statue of Vibia Sabina, wife of the second-century emperor Hadrian, was acquired in 1979 from Fritz Bürki, with Hecht as intermediary. Several other pieces were acquired through Robert Hecht. Still others were acquired through Palladion Antike Kunst, Becchina’s gallery in Basel.

  Rogers insisted that the museum had acquired the objects in good faith but added that “the balance of evidence” presented by Italy now “favored the return of the objects,” though he did not expand on what he meant.

  The return of the objects is to be welcomed, as was the Getty’s decision, a month later, to return twenty-six ancient antiquities to Rome. Those negotiations, however, did not go as smoothly as those with the Boston museum. (One observer described the Getty negotiations as “tempestuous.”) The objects to be returned included many referred to in this book—for example, the Attic Red-Figured Mask Kantharos (p. 90), the Two Griffins Attacking a Fallen Doe (p. 124 and the photo section, where Medici is standing alongside the Griffins), the Douris Phiale Fragments (p. 226), and the Antefix in the Form of a Meanad and Silenos Dancing (p. 373 in the Dossier section)—but the Italians were less than satisfied. The reason for their dissatisfaction lay in the fact that by that stage they had identified no fewer than forty-six objects in the Los Angeles museum that they maintained had been illegally excavated from Italian soil. Following John Walsh’s tenure at the Getty, he had been followed by Deborah Gribbon, but she had resigned abruptly, after disagreements with Barry Munitz, president of the Getty Trust (see below). She, in turn, had been succeeded by Michael Brand. Brand now said that the museum had made “substantial compromises” during the negotiations but that Italy’s position “stood in the way of
reaching a comprehensive agreement.” Relations deteriorated still further in December, with a sharp exchange of letters and rebuttals, in which the main bone of contention was Italy’s claim for a Greek bronze statue that the Getty insisted had been found in international waters. Italy rubbed in its attitude by agreeing to lend several antiquities to both the Met in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, as an act of friendship and in response to those museums’ willingness to return objects.

  In the epilogue, we will make the point that the Metropolitan Museum in New York is not quite the whiter-than-white institution it makes itself out to be, but for now we will concentrate on the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, for there is rather more to say about Boston’s return of those thirteen objects than they have so far said themselves. Thanks to the research of two British academics—David Gill and Christopher Chippindale—who published their report in the International Journal of Cultural Property, Boston’s collection comes into focus almost as much as those of the Getty and the Met. Gill and Chippindale point out that there is much more to Boston’s return than meets the eye.

  In the first place, they say, some of the material returned by Boston was originally said to have been in old collections—i.e., in collections formed before 1970, the Unesco cut-off date (as discussed in Chapter 2). Furthermore, one object that was returned, an Apulian bell-krater, was said to have been in the Holger Termer Collection in Hamburg. But, Gill and Chippindale say, this “collection” may be no more than the stock of the Galerie Neuendorf in Hamburg: They have reconstructed the collection from the archives and find that more than half of the objects passed through the Neuendorf Gallery. Earlier (p. 95), we referred to the Zbinden Collection in Switzerland and the S. Schweitzer Collection in Arlesheim, which appear to have been used as false attributions to deflect suspicion from a number of objects which would otherwise lack a history. Must we now add the Holger Termer Collection to this list?

  Their second point is to question whether the thirteen objects returned so far can be an end to the matter. They identified a list of ninety-two more important items acquired through Hecht.3 What will be the ultimate fate of this group of antiquities?

  In September 2006, Giacomo Medici, awaiting his appeal, offered Paolo Ferri a deal. Although he would not talk to us, he told Vernon Silver, of Bloomberg News Service, that he was willing to return “a previously unknown masterpiece,” known only as “Object X,” in exchange for the abolition of his fine and a reduction in the jail time he was facing, should he lose his appeal. Medici told Silver the object he was referring to was by a famous artist from the ancient world, “whose work compares to that of Michelangelo or Leonardo da Vinci.” It was, he said, “worth millions,” and compared in value with the Euphronios krater.

  There were other reports that, in exchange for “Object X,” Ferri was willing to reduce Medici’s sentence to six years, but the prosecutor was wary. “It could be a bluff,” he said, adding that he would rather lose Medici’s masterpiece than get duped.

  Medici’s offer, of course, sat oddly with his defense during his trial, or one of them anyway, that he was amassing antiquities in Geneva in order to return them to Italian museums. “To bring them to Italy and donate them all to a museum. I repeat: gift . . . ” (see p. 272). Where had this “masterpiece” been in the interim? Why hadn’t he donated it before, if he was so sure such objects belonged in Italy? As this book went to press, “Object X” was still in limbo.

  Ferri and his colleagues were more concerned with others in and around the cordate. At the end of November 2006, the Italians asked Shelby White to consider returning twenty ancient artifacts that she and her late husband had collected. Maurizio Fiorilli, the lawyer for the Italian Culture Ministry, hastened to say on this occasion that Ms. White was not being accused of any crime and that his government was relying on “moral suasion.” He said he thought the evidence spoke for itself and that the Italians hoped that her “sensitivity” to the situation would influence her to return the objects.

  White insisted to us that neither she nor her late husband had ever met Medici, and had only ever bought from auction houses and dealers “considered reputable at the time.” White’s communications counselor, Fraser P. Seitel, said that White had always been very open about her and her late husband’s collection, always making “their collection available to scholars and for public exhibition purposes.... In fact, you could argue that it is precisely because Shelby White and Leon Levy were so willing to share their collection with the public, that they have attracted attention.” He said that White had, herself, initiated discussions with the Italians.

  The timing of the Italians’ move in connection with Shelby White was interesting. Only a few days before, the Metropolitan Museum had released its advanced publicity in connection with the opening, in April 2007, of its new Greek and Roman Galleries, which are named for and financed (to the tune of $20 million) by Mr. Levy and Ms. White. It was not clear, as this book went to press, whether any objects from the Levy-White collection would be displayed in the new galleries. Harold Holzer, a spokesman for the Met, declined to comment on the matters raised in this book.

  At the Getty, there was good and bad news. One piece of good news was that, in January 2006, the Getty Villa, the original Getty Museum in Malibu—just north of Los Angeles on the Pacific coast—re-opened after a $339 million renovation, to display 1,200 of the museum’s 44,000-piece collection of Greek, Roman, and Etruscan antiquities. The renovation, designed by architects Rodolfo Machado and Jorge Silvetti and featuring a bronze staircase and reflecting pool, was judged a success, described as “vibrantly splendid” by one critic and “an exquisite work of architecture” by another. It was a success with the public, too: by the end of January, the museum had sold all available tickets until the end of July.

  Another piece of good news was that, in December 2006, the Getty Trust—the body that oversees the museum—announced its replacement for Barry Munitz, the president. Munitz had resigned the previous February, after eight years in the job that had been dogged by controversy. Among the charges leveled against him—mainly in the Los Angeles Times—were that he had lavishly spent Getty funds on himself and his wife, buying a $72,000 Porsche Cayenne, staying in $1,000-a-night hotels, traveling first class on airplanes, and even ordering his assistant to express-mail umbrellas to him where he was on his travels. (The Internal Revenue considers excessive pay, travel, and perks to be “self-dealing,” the illegal use of tax-exempt resources for private benefit. Under the tax code, non-profit organizations must use their resources for the public good.) Munitz, without admitting any wrongdoing, paid the Getty Trust $250,000 “in order to resolve any continuing disputes with him” and gave up severance pay and benefits that would have exceeded $1.2 million. He was replaced by James N. Wood, an art historian and former president of the Art Institute of Chicago.

  By then, the museum had specifically addressed the problem of its dealing in antiquities. At the beginning of October 2006, it was announced that the California attorney general had appointed an independent monitor to oversee reforms. It was the first time the California attorney general’s office had imposed an overseer in an enforcement action against a charitable trust. At the end of the month, the museum announced that it had strengthened its rules for buying or accepting ancient artifacts. Under the new policy, the museum said it would not consider any object whose provenance did not reach back to at least 1970, the date of the landmark Unesco convention. Michael Brand said that the new rule was adopted “even though it will make it much more difficult for the museum to continue to buy antiquities.”

  And so, finally, the Getty—and with it, surely, most other American museums—had been dragged kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century, after months and months of scandal.

  Just over a week later, Marion True, in a written “clarification” addressed to the Rome court, described the market for ancient art as probably “the most corrupt” of art markets. “I knew,
in fact, that the antiquities market was filled with risks for those who wished to purchase objects, as it included many unscrupulous dealers, who had no qualms about selling fakes or objects that had been stolen or exported illegally from their country of origin,” she said in a nineteen-page memo seen by Vernon Silver of Bloomberg News. “The museum had to accept the premise that the majority of antiquities available on the market had, in all probability, been exported from the countries of origin illegally.” This was damning, but the rest of her statement sought to cast herself and the Getty as reformers in a corrupt market. (This had been John Walsh’s argument in his depositions to the Italian court—see pp. 218–219). When she took the job of curator at the Getty in 1986, she said she had helped draft a memo to the Getty board exploring whether “it was possible to continue to collect antiquities in a tainted market.” As this book had shown, the Getty did continue buying, but among the steps True took to battle the illicit trade, she said, was the ban on buying objects that hadn’t been part of a known collection or been documented in a publication before 1995. This of course refers to the acquisition of the Fleischmann Collection (which is discussed on pp. 114–123, 193, 198, and 220), from where it will be seen that Dr. True’s version of events is not the only possibility.