Chasing Aphrodite (15 page)

The Aphrodite was the perfect example, Walsh concluded. If Italian cultural officials ever mounted a credible claim for the piece, they'd "find the Getty to be more reasonable and generous than a dealer would be, since we're obligated to return the piece regardless of the statute of limitations."

Monreal saw Walsh's response as merely another smokescreen. He simply couldn't countenance what the Getty had done and began making plans to leave.

M
EANWHILE, ITALIAN ART
squad investigator Fausto Guarnieri was just beginning his investigation into the Aphrodite's origins. After receiving Fiorentini's files, he inquired among his Sicilian sources, showing them photos of the Getty's new goddess. Was this the same statue of soft stone found at Morgantina in the late 1970s? It was, the local diggers assured him—but it had been found without the head now attached to it. The goddess's delicate marble face was the missing third marble head, they claimed. It had been found separately at the same time as the two smaller heads and only later placed on the statue. Mascara, the boss of the local looters, took Guarnieri to the site in Morgantina where the statue had been found, not far from where the three heads had been discovered.

From Morgantina, the statue had followed a similar path to the market as the silvers and two marble heads, Guarnieri's sources told him. After its discovery, middlemen had sold it to Orazio di Simone. Some had seen the body of the statue—without the head—in three pieces at the house of a looter in Gela, di Simone's hometown. The huge statue had been toppled over onto a blunt object, breaking it cleanly into three pieces that would be easier to hide during transport. The clean breaks also would make the statue easier to reassemble. The pieces were then driven to Milan, buried under a load of carrots in the back of a Fiat truck, and transported north across the border to Chiasso. The smugglers used a carrot truck because the vegetables were transported loose, rather than in crates, making it difficult for customs agents to dig through the pile. Guarnieri's sources said that the statue was later put back together in Switzerland and topped with the marble head.

Unknown to Guarnieri, the account he pieced together from his sources matched an anonymous tip that had been passed on to the Carabinieri by Interpol. A confidential source told Interpol authorities in Paris that the statue had passed through the hands of Nicolo Nicoletti, a reputed looter from Gela who worked with di Simone. The tipster maintained that di Simone, who had a second residence in Geneva, had sold the statue in December 1987 to Robin Symes through a Swiss front company called Xoilan Trading.

The Italians believed that they had enough to prove that the Aphrodite had been taken out of Italy illegally. In June 1989, Raffiotta filed criminal charges against di Simone, Nicoletti, and others. Nearly all of the evidence came from confidential sources. Hoving refused to divulge the name of the antiquities dealer who had initially tipped him off about the statue's origins. Those who had cooperated with Guarnieri were silenced by omerta.

To fill in the gaps, Raffiotta began the tedious task of issuing a series of requests for judicial cooperation to the various foreign governments where other witnesses lived. He asked the U.S. Customs Service to interview the New York dealers who Hoving said had been offered the statue. After a year's delay, the Customs Service conducted brief interviews with the dealers and informed the Italian authorities that all of them denied Hoving's account. At Raffiotta's request, Scotland Yard interviewed Robin Symes in London. The dealer claimed to have purchased the statue from a family in Lugano, Switzerland. Asked to name the family, Symes demurred, saying it would be "a breach of professional ethics and confidence."

Guarnieri eventually managed to track down di Simone in Switzerland. In an interview, the alleged smuggler described himself as an expert in ancient coins and denied having ever sold an object of significance, including the marble heads or the statue. He claimed not to know anyone at the Getty, although he admitted visiting the museum in 1979.

Desperate, Guarnieri shut off the tape recorder and asked di Simone for his help. "You only made a little money on this deal, but they made millions," the investigator pleaded. "Help us. It would be a shame if the statue didn't come back to Sicily."

Di Simone appeared sympathetic and offered to "look into it."

"Tell me one thing," Guarnieri said. "Did the statue come from Sicily?"

Di Simone nodded his head yes, while mouthing a different message: "I can't tell you ... I don't know."

Guarnieri took the mixed message to be a signal. It was as close as anyone in Sicily ever came to making a confession. Di Simone couldn't admit it out loud, but he was telling Guarnieri that he was on the right track.

After four years of investigation, Raffiotta and Guarnieri had exhausted their leads. The results were disappointing. They believed they knew where the statue of Aphrodite and the marble heads had been found, how they had left the country, and who was responsible for the crime. But no one involved would agree to come forward.

In June 1992, a Sicilian judge dismissed the case against di Simone and the others, ruling that there was insufficient evidence. Soon after, Guarnieri retired. His file on the Aphrodite was tagged for the archives, where it sat with hundreds of other unsolved art cases.

S
LOWLY, THE WORLD
was changing. Even as the Getty was acquiring the Aphrodite, a group of European museum and cultural officials took the first steps toward repudiating such purchases.

At the 1988 International Congress of Classical Archaeology in West Berlin, a conclave of archaeologists, museum officials, and cultural attachés from the primary collecting countries—Germany, France, and Britain—and the major source countries—Cyprus, Greece, Turkey, and Italy—deliberated over the pressing dilemma created by the illicit antiquities trade, which now dominated the market. How could conscientious museums stop buying from the market but continue to build their collections and educate their patrons?

Leading the discussion was Wolf-Dieter Heilmeyer, chief of antiquities for West Berlin's Museum of Classical Antiquities. A contemporary of Marion True's, Heilmeyer was among the leaders of a new generation of curators filling key positions in Europe's cultural institutions. They had come to authority with a broader vision than their mentors, one that favored international cooperation over colonialstyle domination. They were also closer to the damage being wrought by looting. And unlike their American counterparts, which were by and large running private collecting institutions competing against one another, European curators were managing state-run institutions often closely affiliated with archaeologists and researchers. Heilmeyer, for one, had begun to question the basic premise that had sustained museums from the beginning: did museums really need to own art?

Heilmeyer's radical thoughts grew out of legal necessity. He had joined the West Berlin museum in 1978 and was well acquainted with the shady corners of the antiquities trade. In the 1980s, a well-known antiquities dealer had sold him sections of an ancient sarcophagus that was supposedly part of a nineteenth-century Swiss collection. The sarcophagus turned out to have been recently looted. An Italian museum in Ostia, just outside Rome, notified the West Berlin museum that it had located some adjoining pieces of the object. Heilmeyer saved face by convincing his board to make a long-term loan of the object to the Ostia museum, where it was reunited with its other portion. In return, Ostia loaned Heilmeyer's museum two invaluable second-century
A.D.
frescoes featuring large griffins.

Heilmeyer saw the exchange as the path to resolving similar disputes between collecting countries and source countries, which had grown increasingly hostile. But when he asked to put a discussion of his ideas on the agenda for the archaeological conference, the organizers refused, fearing the topic was too "political" and would invite nationalist sentiments to taint the scientific proceedings. As a compromise, they offered him the use of an empty room on the afternoon after the conference had concluded.

A standing-room crowd of more than one hundred people packed in as Heilmeyer led a panel of twelve prominent museum and archaeological officials in a sometimes charged discussion, perhaps the first of its kind to tackle the thorny political issues of national identity and the illicit antiquities trade. When he presented a statement of principles, there were heated exchanges over the wording. Vassos Karageorgis, the director of antiquities from Cyprus, refused to sign the statement because it did not explicitly condemn the rampant looting in the Turkish-occupied part of Cyprus. "We will never give a loan to Turkey!" he declared. But he eventually backed down, signing only the portions of the document he agreed with.

Europe's most influential antiquities curators—including Brian Cook of the British Museum and Alain Pasquier of the Louvre—affixed their signatures to the entire document, which became known as the Berlin Declaration.

The statement urged museums to investigate the ownership of objects to make sure they weren't illegal and called on antiquities-rich countries to loosen their grip on artifacts in their vast inventories and make them available for long-term study. Italy was particularly supportive of the measure and vowed to double the length of its loans, which at the time were limited to six months, barely enough time for a traveling exhibition. But many American museums took the declaration as a direct attack on the values they held most dear: a deep belief in the free trade of cultural goods, the right of museums to collect, and the conviction that an object's aesthetic value is as important, if not more so, than its historical significance.

As word of the statement reached America, most museum leaders there shrugged it off. Met director Philippe de Montebello, who had succeeded Thomas Hoving in 1977, seemed amused when Heilmeyer later discussed the Berlin Declaration with him. "Well, this is a good idea," de Montebello said, "but it will never work."

Marion True did not attend the conference. But in a stroke of good timing, she was soon presented with an opportunity to wrap herself in the same mantle of reform.

I
N OCTOBER
1988, while the Aphrodite controversy was still white-hot, True took a cold call from a European art dealer she didn't know. The dealer was offering the Getty four sections of a large Byzantine mosaic.

The Getty, thanks to its famed wealth, was a favorite target of unsolicited offers. They came in as often as twice a week, often from cranks and goldbrickers offering some knickknack their grandfathers had picked up during World War II. Most of the time True ignored them, leaving her staff to fend them off with polite refusals. But this phone call intrigued her. The mosaic was a remarkable relic featuring carefully arranged chips of colored glass portraying biblical scenes in jarring detail: an archangel; the Apostles Matthew and James; Christ as a boy. True suspected that the piece had come from Cyprus, where looting was rampant in the northern part of the island, which had been under occupation by Turkish forces since 1974. Yet what really caught her attention was the price tag: $20 million. Not even the record-setting Aphrodite had cost that much.

"Holy doodle," she muttered to herself.

There was no chance of the Getty acquiring the mosaic; the museum did not collect Byzantine art. So True placed a call to Karageorgis, one of the Getty's strongest allies in the Mediterranean. Karageorgis had started out as an adversary, calling out the museum three years earlier over its display of a Cypriot idol his government believed to be looted. After lengthy negotiations, True's predecessor, Arthur Houghton, had fashioned a peace that only the Getty could afford. The Getty kept the idol and in turn underwrote a major conservation project in Cyprus. At the time of True's call about the mosaic, the Getty was about to fly Karageorgis to Malibu to be honored at a colloquium on Cypriot art—another sweetener in the deal.

Karageorgis became alarmed when he heard about the mosaic. He believed that it had been illegally removed from the Church of the Panagia Kanakaria in northern Cyprus. The government and Greek Orthodox Church had published it extensively as being stolen. He moved quickly to have American authorities seize the fragments. With True's help, investigators learned that the mosaic was not owned by the European dealer after all, but by a smalltime art dealer in Indianapolis named Peg Goldberg. The government of Cyprus and the Greek Orthodox Church filed a lawsuit against Goldberg and called on True to give a deposition on their behalf.

"I am always very concerned about being offered objects that come from countries which objects are known to be removed from illicitly because one wants to know the nature of the business this person does and credibility," True said in her deposition. "You question how that person came into possession of it."

The curator chided Goldberg for her decision not to notify Cypriot officials, as well as the dealer's cursory check with American officials—who knew nothing about the piece—before buying it from a suspicious middleman. She offered the Getty as a contrast in curatorial conscience.

"We as an institution would not want to be buying art against the wishes of the country of origin. First, it would be encouraging a traffic that we have no interest in encouraging, and [second]...we really would like to have as good relations with art-rich countries as we can develop ... We also as a matter of policy contact the countries ... and make inquiries if we think that it is appropriate."

With the Aphrodite scandal still fresh in their minds, Goldberg's attorneys sought to portray True as a hypocrite. They asked during the deposition whether she had ever been offered stolen antiquities. The Getty's attorneys blocked the questions with a series of obj ections, repeatedly threatening to end the proceeding and seek a protective order. "It is annoying, oppressive, harassing of the witness to inquire with respect to what the Getty has done or not done with respect to other acquisitions," said one. "It is simply not relevant here."