Sacred and Stolen

by Gary Vikan

  Greg knew he was going to be caught, and he wanted to get caught. The sheer volume of the works he was taking and the notoriety of the Peach Bloom Vase guaranteed that. And when he was caught, he would get those ammo-less pistols and blow his brains out. But if he was not caught, which on some level he thought might be the outcome, he would use that glob of gold to get out of the country and build a Chinese-style hut somewhere in South America. (I saw his rendering of that hut, with a deep porch and a wide bench for relaxing, which was straight out of a Chinese ink painting.) Greg would then enjoy the Peach Bloom Vase in perpetuity, all by himself.

  But Woody came back and the FBI showed up. And then the raid occurred with his mom thinking her son was being framed. “So, Greg, why did you do it?” I asked. The answer was simple, crisp, and as fresh, twenty-six years after the fact, as if it had just popped into his head. He said he would go down into his parent’s basement where he stored the loot (the guns were in the rafters), unwrap a piece, and then he would hold it because he “just loved to fondle it.” I thought of Dominique de Menil, who “fell in love” with the looted Lysi frescoes. And I recalled a passage in Dan Hofstadter’s book, Goldberg’s Angel, where Michel van Rijn describes his reaction upon receiving the Dumbarton Oaks Saint Peter icon from a Greek thief:

  I asked him if I was able to sleep with it in my room for a night—one must sleep with the things one loves, no?

  I’m pretty certain that each of the acquirers-of-things-stolen shares that same infatuation, the same compulsion. And perhaps I shared Michel van Rijn’s infatuation with Saint Peter, and maybe that’s why when I was in the conservation lab at Harvard and figured out that Peter had been painted over and that the place he was stolen from was untraceable, I was happy. I felt he now seemed to belong to me. But why is it that some of us get caught and some do not? Maybe it’s because some among us get to set the rules we play by—and the others do not.

  Chapter Nine

  “All the Red Flags Are Up”

  The next chapter in my saga of things sacred and stolen began in the third week in April 1989 when I received a hand-delivered envelope at the Walters with a story clipped from the March 31st edition of The Indianapolis Star. Cyprus was now taking legal action in Indianapolis to force the return of four Byzantine mosaics looted from Kanakaria, which had been confiscated by the court and were secured in the basement vault of a local bank. There was to be a trial. In a second article on April 9th, Walter Hopps, now Director of the Menil Collection and a perceived expert in repatriation because of his role with the Lysi frescoes, expressed high-minded notions about stolen art that must be returned. This piety seemed odd to me, given the nature of our midnight telephone conversation of June 1983 when he went into some detail about the Kanakaria Apostle mosaic he had just seen in the Munich apartment of a Turk and then, insofar as I knew, did nothing. But then, of course, neither did I.

  Accompanying the newspaper clippings was a letter from Thomas Starnes of Manatt, Phelps, Rothenberg, & Phillips, a law firm on New Hampshire Avenue in Washington, DC. The letter asked whether I would consider being an expert witness for Cyprus at the upcoming trial and urged me to give him a call, which I did, though I had no idea what an expert witness was. My phone conversation with Starnes left me with the impression that neither he nor any other lawyer in his firm had any idea what was going on. I gathered that they were retained by the Embassy of Cyprus to handle routine legal matters that any embassy would encounter from week-to-week. And now there was this big trial coming up centered on looted Byzantine mosaics, and they were scrambling to catch up on Byzantine history, Byzantine mosaics, the theology of icons, and cultural property law.

  This is what I learned. The plaintiff was the Autocephalous Greek-Orthodox Church of Cyprus and the Republic of Cyprus. It was a civil action to be heard before Judge James Noland in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Indiana. The complaint was filed in March to force a local art dealer named Peg Goldberg of Goldberg & Feldman Fine Arts, Inc. to return to Cyprus four mosaic fragments from the Church of Panagia (“All Holy”) Kanakaria in the little town of Lythrankomi in the occupied northern sector of the island. These included two Apostles in roundels, the upper part of an Archangel, and the head and upper torso of a youthful Christ.

  I knew that these four fragments were part of the larger group of looted mosaics that also included the Apostle’s head that Walter Hopps and Dominique de Menil had seen in June 1983 in the Munich apartment of the “Turk.” This was the one Walter dutifully told me about in our late-night conversation, noting that a photograph of it in situ had been published by Dumbarton Oaks. All of this is to say that the saga that began in August 1981 with the Dumbarton Oaks Saint Peter icon appearing on the cover of Michel van Rijn’s catalogue, and that then transitioned in April 1983 to the situation of the Lysi frescoes during my confidential meeting with Yanni Petsopoulos, had now moved into its third climactic chapter: the Kanakaria mosaics. And I was still at the center of the action.

  My job, as I initially understood it, was to show up in Indianapolis for what Starnes said would be just one day, and tell the presiding judge what Byzantium was, what church mosaics were, and how really important these mosaic fragments happen to be, given how few of such things have survived. It sounded interesting. And I thought that this would put a gloss of high-mindedness on my mostly troubling history with the Dumbarton Oaks Saint Peter icon and the Lysi frescoes. Sure, DO had gotten a green light for the icon from Manolis Chatzidakis and yes, Dominique de Menil’s “savior-scenario” news release on the Lysi frescoes the previous August had been all but universally hailed for its courage and honesty—but neither felt right. So here, by happy accident, was a case where we seemed to have an obvious culprit in Peg Goldberg, and a good chance in court to force the return of stolen art to its rightful owner. That is, those poor Cypriot Greeks whose forlorn faces I could still see in my mind’s eye in the children’s art high on the walls of the office of the Ambassador of Cyprus. So sure, Mr. Starnes, I’ll do it, but first I need to make one phone call.

  That evening I called Walter Hopps at his home in Houston. Given his accusatory tone during our June 1983 phone call and his spitting-mad “I’ll rip her tongue out” dictum during our cocktail party conversation in his museum the previous November, I thought I should check in and take his temperature on this expert witness idea. But mainly my concern centered on that midnight phone call that I assumed no one other than Walter and I knew about. Should details of that conversation (the mosaic head) come out under oath, it could leave us all—Vikan and Hopps, Dominique, the Menil Foundation, and Cyprus—immensely compromised. Should I be worried, I asked him? Walter said I should go ahead, things would be okay, and that it was the right thing to do. This was certainly good to hear. I felt Walter and I were finally on the same team.

  By the best of luck, I sat next to a lawyer friend at a Walters dinner a day or two later, and was given the chance to find out what being an expert witness was all about. In fact, I was really a witness to nothing, which made me different from someone called to court to testify about a traffic accident that he may have seen. Rather, I was an expert, and all I needed to do was to say things revealing of my expertise that would help frame the issue for its general importance and knit together the real testimony of others. All of this would be to help the judge form his opinion. This should be pretty easy, I thought, and this lawyer friend told me I would get paid. Get paid! How much would be normal, I asked, and she said perhaps $100 or $150 per hour, and that would include time on the phone. I figured that since I was a beginner at this, $100 would do just fine, and I told Mr. Starnes so.

  My official letter of appointment arrived at my house via FedEx on April 21st. With it came a stack of background papers as well as two surprises. The first was that I was to testify not only to the historical and religious importance of the Kanakaria mosaics, but was to offer my expert opinion on the question of due diligence. Specifically, was Cyprus
sufficiently diligent in getting the message out that the Kanakaria mosaics had been stolen? And then in actively seeking their return? I thought I could testify affirmatively to that since I recalled conversations at Dumbarton Oaks in the early ’80s about this theft driven by various antiquities officials from Cyprus.

  And if asked whether Peg Goldberg had been sufficiently diligent in seeking to discover whether these mosaics had been stolen, this would be even easier since I had walked the due diligence walk twice in recent years, once with the Dumbarton Oaks Saint Peter icon and the other time over the phone with Walter about the Lysi frescoes. I knew the drill, and from what I already knew about Peg Goldberg, I was pretty certain that she was anything but diligent in her investigations of the origins of the mosaics.

  The second surprise was the very big size of that FedEx box that was filled with various legal background papers on the case. And I was going to get paid to read them: five hours meant $500. That sure beat preparing lectures on Byzantine art for adults in my Smithsonian Resident Associates’ classes at $55 a shot.

  I was flying high that spring. Not only did I have this expert witness gig, I had just been retained by a Greek PR firm to provide a series of radio and television interviews in and around San Francisco to help promote Holy Image, Holy Space, which was opening at the Legion of Honor there on April 25th. I was staying at the grand old St. Francis Hotel on Union Square and was being driven from interview to interview in a sports car by an attractive Greek-American woman.

  The opening festivities were wonderful. All the rich Greeks of San Francisco were there on a beautiful, very warm spring evening, with the ladies in their minks. I took the red-eye flight home the Friday after the opening and, as the taxi pulled up at my house, I saw that the FedEx van was already there. For me, I asked? Yes, and the guy in the uniform started to unload box after box of depositions. I’m rich I thought, and how lucky I’m a slow reader. It was about that time that I bought a red Acura Integra, and later that summer we had the house painted. The stack was as tall as I am. And only later, during the trial, did I learn that among all the lawyers of the four firms involved in the trial, two for the plaintiff and two for the defense, not one needed to read all the depositions. I was the only person whose job it was to read everything. Time was short, the trial was pressing, and all the high-paid legal talent was assigned to their individual segments of those boxes. But not me.

  ON MAY 26TH, A FRIDAY, I was in New York and on the clock. I was there with one of the DC lawyers whom I didn’t know very well named Tom Kline, who soon became my hero. We were in the Solow Building, that modernist skyscraper from the ’70s with a sloping base just south of the Plaza Hotel, on a very high floor looking out a huge north window in the direction of New Jersey. (New York in general and buildings like this particular one were very hard for me in those days, as I had a profound elevator phobia.) I was standing next to Tom Kline’s father, a lawyer who had a huge office on that floor, and he was pointing in the hazy distance toward where he lived in what I assumed was a big fancy house. Tom was about my age, and I learned that after graduating from Columbia he went to teach in an inner-city school. That, I truly admired. So when Tom disappeared around the corner for a second, I asked his father if this Kanakaria thing was a big deal, and his answer was immediate and surprised me: “It’s the case of a lifetime.”

  As it turned out, this case of a lifetime was intense for the legal teams to an extent I did not initially understand. A few among them on both sides totally wilted under the pressure to prepare and perform. I recall specifically a handsome, very suave lawyer in the Indianapolis firm retained by Cyprus. He was the lead guy one morning of the trial and he did poorly. He kind of stuttered and wandered. I don’t recall why I was in his office over the lunch break, but there I was. He was greenish-gray and slumped in his chair. I thought he was going to be sick. The reason I recount this is that during this trial I witnessed a kind of metaphor of life, fast and in real time: the pressure of it, and people who rise and people who fall. Tom rose, and maybe that’s why, in that photo in The Saturday Evening Post article on the trial, he is seated at the center of the legal team, and he alone among them all is looking into the camera and seems totally assured.

  Tom loves cookies, and there were warm chocolate chip cookies in the kitchenette next to his father’s office. So he had a few, and then next to the cookie table he flexed his legs like he was going to do the high jump or pole vault. Tom was wired, and for good reason. We were in town to depose André Emmerich in a conference room not far away on the Upper East Side. Emmerich had been retained by Peg Goldberg as her expert witness, but unlike me, he was not going to Indianapolis nor did he read any depositions. At that point he was in his mid-60s, elegant, articulate, and refined. André Emmerich was the third generation of a German-Jewish art-dealing family and had fled the Nazis via Amsterdam with his parents in 1940. There we were, a kid lawyer and a kid Byzantinist, hoping that somehow we could make this truly great dealer in all things from Morris Louis and David Hockney to Aztec stone gods flub up—but of course, we could not. For a while that day, André Emmerich just made me feel sort of small.

  André Emmerich’s position on the movement of cultural property—which is invoked among collectors and dealers to this day—was well known and simple and seemed to suit Peg Goldberg’s situation perfectly. He believed in the free market, which meant that antiquities, wherever they might turn up, should go to the highest bidder since that would guarantee that they would be valued and cared for. This was the whole point, and it made sense. He was going to be videotaped saying more or less that for his presentation at the trial, and lawyers for the plaintiff had the right to be present and ask questions.

  I recall his hypothetical very clearly. It involved a Greek guy who was digging a ditch and found an ancient sculpture. Now, if this find is not his to keep or sell, but rather is illegal for him just to possess, he may think it is more trouble than it’s worth and destroy it. But if it legally belongs to him, he will care for it and, depending on its quality, the sculpture will eventually find its way to its appropriate rung on the free-market ladder of value. About that time a spectacular Cycladic head sold at auction in New York for more than $2 million and, of course, I assumed some Greek guy on the island of Paros had been digging a ditch.

  Tom and I felt pretty good about ourselves when we left the deposition, not because we had made André Emmerich say something wrong, but because what he said right was so at odds with the facts and the spirit of the Indianapolis trial. Those mosaics did not come up by chance in a ditch; they came off the walls of an important historical monument that had been photographed and studied in depth. Simply stated, they were stolen property, not so different from a painting that someone might take off the wall of a museum. We were pretty jolly as we set off down Madison Avenue. I was trying to coax Tom into a stop at the Oak Room of the Plaza Hotel for a beer, but he would have none of that. The cookies and the deposition had him all wound up, and he just wanted to walk and walk. Fine. Then it occurred to me that Tom might be ready for a life lesson, like when my father took me to the stockyards in Omaha to show me where T-bone steaks come from. So I directed him toward Ariadne Galleries on the corner of Madison and 76th with the promise that I had something interesting to show him. Torkom Demirjian, who claimed to have been in the Armenian Orthodox priesthood once upon a time, ran Ariadne, and he was always great fun to visit. Not only did he have some of the best antiquities for sale—he told great stories.

  When we were buzzed in I asked his very smart scholar-assistant if we could go downstairs and look around. She said that was fine since she knew me. We sat for a while alone in that darkened little gallery looking at a glass display case every bit as finely made and lit as anything at the Met. It had a few really big Greek export vases, the kind that are immediately identifiable as coming from southern Italy and specifically Apulia. Literally tons of such pots were coming out of Italy in those days and I knew Torkom had some
of the best. After we sat there in silence for a while, I pointed at the base of one of the pots and asked Tom what that was. Dirt he said—like fresh dirt. And I said: “Tom, where do you think that dirt comes from?” No reply. He didn’t get it, he told me, until much later: Beef cattle don’t die of old age in Omaha, and Greek pots aren’t dug up on the Upper East Side.

  I WAS WEARING THE T-SHIRT that the DC lawyers had sent me with a picture of the Kanakaria Archangel and the words: “Kanakaria Mosaics—Recovery Mission—Indianapolis 1989.” I arrived in the later afternoon of Monday, May 29th; the trial was set to begin the next day, and I figured I’d be there through Friday, which I was. I picked up my red Celica convertible, drove to the Hilton just off Monument Circle and opposite the Federal District Court House, and then stopped at the bar before our scheduled recovery-mission team meeting at the First National Bank of Indianapolis. In those days I had a modified buzz cut and was really skinny, and so I looked like a small-town Minnesota version of David Bowie. And I was wearing jeans. I can still see the face of that stuffy-looking Cypriot official who saw me as I got off the elevator, like he wanted a BB gun for Christmas and got a sweater instead. It was obvious that he thought my looks didn’t measure up either to “eminent Byzantinist” or “expert” in anything.

  The morning of the first day was all about those pesky lawyers for the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus who came to claim the Kanakaria mosaics as their property. But they were sent on their way in short order by Judge Noland for one simple and uncontestable reason. The Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus is recognized by no government in the world other than that of Turkey. This meant that it had no standing in US Federal Court to press its disingenuous case for the return of stolen art that we all knew it was complicit, on some level, in stealing.