Chasing Aphrodite (20 page)

A sales receipt in the file, also sent after Guarnieri's retirement, showed that the Aphrodite had emerged from that murky world. Scrawled on a piece of stationery from a Swiss money exchange house, the one-page note was dated March 1986 and acknowledged the receipt of $400,000 from the London dealer. It said, "I am the sole owner of this statue which has belonged to my family since 1939. Sincerely, Renzo Canavesi."

Who was Renzo Canavesi? Had anyone questioned him?

Canavesi's name didn't appear anywhere else in the case file. A quick check by Morando revealed Canavesi to be a former Swiss police officer who owned the money exchange shop named on the stationery. He also owned a cigarette and pipe shop in nearby Chiasso, called Tabaccheria Canavesi. A more perfect profile for a smuggler was hard to imagine. The receipt's reference to 1939, the year Italy's Mussolini-led government passed its strict patrimony law, struck Morando as no coincidence. Canavesi's assertion conveniently legalized the statue by putting it on Swiss soil at the time.

The documents had the potential to crack the Aphrodite case open. But years had elapsed since Canavesi had sold the object to Symes in 1986. The statute of limitations for trafficking was ten years. It was now 1994. Morando had less than two years to build a case against Canavesi. It might be possible for a prosecutor to argue that the offense was aggravated, tacking on another five years to the deadline. Even then, it would require authorities in Italy, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States to move with unprecedented speed.

Morando faxed a copy of the Canavesi receipt to Raffiotta in Enna. That same day, Raffiotta wrote two requests for foreign judicial assistance. The first went to Swiss authorities, asking them to arrange an interview with Canavesi. The second went to American authorities, asking them to have the Getty provide a sample of the Aphrodite's limestone for testing.

M
ORANDO REPRESENTED A
new breed of detective recruited into the art squad by General Roberto Conforti. A highly respected Neapolitan Mafia investigator, Conforti had won distinction by pursuing the Red Brigades and other terrorist groups before taking over the Tutela Patrimonio Culturale in 1992. He inherited an anemic, politically impotent appendage to the Carabinieri. In the two decades since its founding, the art squad had become a retirement queue, filled with aging investigators who had one eye on their work and the other on the calendar. Their methods were so haphazard and their record so spotty that they were considered the Keystone Kops of the art world.

In a short time, Conforti turned things around. He played on national pride—and the potential for votes—to coax Italy's venal politicians into loosening public purse strings. With the extra funding, he opened offices in Sicily, Florence, Naples, and beyond. Taking a page out of Italy's successful Mafia prosecutions of the early 1990s, he centralized the reporting of all art crimes so as to track the overall pattern. He built the first database to catalogue Italy's vast artistic treasures and hired younger, more agile investigators who were comfortable with technology and steeped in sophisticated techniques. Many were also multilingual and had traveled extensively overseas, where Conforti hoped to take the squad's investigations.

A slight, dapper man with a pencil mustache, Conforti inspired their devotion with a stern but generous style. His mantra became,
Tell me what you need to do your job, and I'll get it.
Helicopters to patrol remote archaeological sites? Done. A suitcase full of cash for a sting? Done. He also led by example. Shortly after taking over the unit, he and two of his investigators were jailed for a week for obstruction of justice. They refused to give up a confidential informant who led them to the recovery of Saint Anthony's jaw, a Christian relic stolen from a church in Padua. When pressed, Conforti remained tight-lipped, saying the informant's life was in danger. A lengthy investigation led to Conforti's vindication and the transfer of the investigating magistrate. When the general emerged from jail, the art squad lined the street, all standing at attention, some with tears in their eyes.

More important than the man, however, was his approach to attacking the illicit antiquities trade. He wanted to snare the big bosses, not just the tombaroli scraping up ancient vases at night to feed their families. Conforti encouraged his men to think beyond Italy's borders. They were to conduct international investigations aimed at apprehending the top dealers, who had long been untouchable in Basel, Zurich, London, and New York. The new art squad made extensive use of surveillance, including wiretaps, to reach higher in the chain of command. He also had his men comb through auction catalogues for suspect pieces, then work their way backward through the supply chain. At the same time, Conforti played the good cop by launching his own brand of diplomacy, reaching out to foreign judges, prosecutors, and academics to help close the enforcement loopholes that allowed the illicit trafficking to thrive.

Conforti's multipronged approach soon paid off during an investigation of Pasquale Camera, a corrupt former captain in the Naples section of the Guardia di Finanza, Italy's finance and customs police. In August 1995, Camera crashed his Renault into a guardrail, flipping the car and killing himself. Searching through the wreckage, agents found Polaroids in the glove compartment depicting dozens of recently excavated antiquities. That led to a raid of Camera's house and a major coup. Stashed inside the dead man's dresser was a single sheet of lined paper on which he had sketched a diagram of the key players in the flow of illicit antiquities out of Italy.

The graphic showed a wide base of tombaroli spread across Italy's boot, with arrows pointing up to two key middlemen. One was Giacomo Medici in Rome, the other Gianfranco Becchina in Sicily. Arrows from these middlemen branched off to the European dealers and collectors they supplied—Elie Borowski, Nikolas Koutoulakis, George Ortiz, Frieda Tchakos. Atop the pyramid, most prominent of all, was Robert Hecht, whose name was written in large letters. From Hecht, arrows pointed to American museums and collectors. This was an organizational chart confirming the level of sophistication that Conforti had suspected in the looted antiquities trade.

Meanwhile, the squad was pursuing a separate investigation that helped unlock the secret workings of the trade. In a catalogue for an upcoming Sotheby's auction, the Carabinieri had discovered a sarcophagus stolen from a museum on Rome's Aventine Hill. When agents contacted the London auction house for details, Sotheby's directed them to the Swiss holding company, Edition Services, that had consigned the object. At the address listed for Edition Services in Geneva, a dozen unrelated companies were listed on gold nameplates outside the door. It was, in fact, a bookkeeping service that served as the "headquarters" and mail drop for all the firms. Its proprietor was a large, pokerfaced man with a mustache named Albert Jacques. After some prodding, Jacques disclosed that the real owner of Edition Services was an Italian, Giacomo Medici, one of the middlemen named in Camera's diagram.

Jacques directed the agents to a three-room warehouse that Medici rented in Geneva Free Ports, a five-story, jagged-roofed fortress of anonymous storage suites a few miles away. As its name suggests, Geneva Free Ports had been carved out as a tariff-free zone, allowing merchants of all types to move their inventory in and out of the country without paying taxes.

In September 1995, Italian and Swiss officers raided Medici's premises on the fourth floor of Sector D. They were taken aback by the treasure-trove of looted antiquities they found.

The front room of the warehouse served as a small exhibit space, featuring a wood floor and velvet-lined shelves containing dozens of neatly arranged Etruscan, Villanovan, Corinthian, Rhodian, Boeotian, Mycenaean, and Cypriot vases, grouped loosely by style and age. Many of the objects bore tags from Sotheby's that showed the date and lot number of the auction at which they were bought. The coffee tables were made of pieces of thick glass set on sections of ancient Greek capitals.

The backroom was a large, unfinished storage space with white walls and concrete floors. It held dozens of artifacts in their raw state, before restoration. Large marble fragments of statuary and architectural pieces, many broken and still dirty, lay on the floor or rested atop wooden pallets. There were many large vases and, in one corner, sizable chunks of Roman wall mosaics. Packing material was scattered about. The shelves contained wooden fruit boxes from Cerveteri, home to the famous Etruscan archaeological site north of Rome. The boxes were crammed with shards and architectural fragments still covered with dirt and wrapped in Italian newspapers dating from the mid-1990s.

A middle room, which served as Medici's private office, included a walk-in safe and a desk. Its drawers were jammed with plastic-sleeved photo albums containing thousands of Polaroids. They showed antiquities, apparently fresh from the ground, in various stages of restoration.

The Swiss court ordered the warehouse sealed. Word of the raid spread quickly through the antiquities trade. After all, Medici was the source of many of the museum world's most prized classical antiquities.

B
Y CHANCE, SIXTEEN
days after the raid, an assistant U.S. attorney from the Los Angeles office drove out to the Getty Museum to depose Marion True. The federal prosecutor was there to question the curator on behalf of the Italian government about an Etruscan bronze tripod the museum had purchased in 1990.

The visit was not unexpected. Count Guglielmo of Florence had reported the tripod stolen from his family's collection. The object had been previously photographed and registered with Italian authorities, so it was only a matter of time before the Italians contacted the Getty. True took the initiative and invited the Culture Ministry to examine the piece, indicating her willingness to send it back. The Italians asked the U.S. attorney's office to question the curator first.

In a museum conference room, True testified under oath that she had first seen the tripod and its companion candelabrum at the Zurich restoration shop of Fritz Bürki. When asked about Bürki, she described him as one of the "world's leading suppliers of world-class antiquities." Both statements were false.

In fact, True had first seen the objects in 1987 during a tour of Medici's Geneva Free Ports warehouse, where Medici and Hecht had personally offered them for sale to the Getty. And while True made it appear that Bürki was the source of the suspect pieces, Bürki, a former university janitor, was actually well-known as Hecht's antiquities restorer and frontman. Medici and Hecht had used his name often to ship objects to California. Indeed, when the tripod had arrived in Los Angeles, True had written to Medici, not Bürki, to confirm its receipt.

Before True's testimony could boomerang, the Getty announced that it was giving the tripod back to Italy. True personally carried it to Rome the following year, using the occasion to meet senior cultural officials for Italy and the Vatican. On the Getty expense form, True stated the purpose of the trip as "public relations."

T
HE ITALIANS' REQUEST
for samples from the Aphrodite went unheeded for more than a year. When True responded, she did so informally and in the most favorable context: during discussions with cultural officials over returning the Francavilla Marittima material. Pietro Guzzo, the archaeological head of Pompeii and a close friend of True's, was visiting the Getty when she handed him a baggie with some fingernail-size chips from the back of the statue.

Italian authorities hoped that science might be able to accomplish what their criminal investigators had not. A team of University of Palermo geologists examined the specimens under an electron microscope and found an abundance of nanofossils—microscopic organisms that had become entombed when the stone was formed. Using the fossils like a geological fingerprint, the scientists eventually matched the sample to limestone found in an ancient quarry near the Irminio River, fifty miles south of Morgantina. The sample was also strikingly similar to the limestone of another acrolithic sculpture discovered in Morgantina in 1956 and on display in the city's small museum. The team delivered its conclusion to Italian investigators: the Aphrodite's stone could be linked with near certainty to a location half an hour's drive from Morgantina, where rumors about the statue had first sprouted.

But as one evidentiary door opened for Italy, another closed. The Swiss end of Morando's criminal investigation hit a dead end.

The Carabinieri had waited two years to receive permission from Swiss authorities to interview Renzo Canavesi, now retired and living as a recluse in his mountain home in Segno. An imposing, barrelchested man with a mane of thick hair, Canavesi showed up for his interrogation alone and refused to say anything. His silence brought the Aphrodite investigation to a halt. Time was running out.

Morando conferred with Raffiotta, who by now had been chasing the statue for eight years. The prosecutor knew that the statute of limitations would expire before Canavesi's trial could be completed, but he hoped to convince the court that the Getty's delays in providing the limestone had stopped the clock. If the argument bought him time, he and Morando might be able to squeeze out more evidence as the case ground its way through the Italian courts. It was a gamble.

The government of Italy indicted Canavesi for trafficking in stolen property.

A
S ITALIAN INVESTIGATORS
were closing in on Canavesi in 1996, the Aphrodite's former owner sent a letter to Getty CEO Harold Williams introducing himself and offering to provide the museum with several missing pieces of the statue. He also wanted to supply information about the original position of the statue's missing right hand—information that had the potential to solve the central mystery of the figure's identity.

Was this Hera, the wife of Zeus? Was it Aphrodite, as True had long suggested? Or was it Demeter, holding a torch aloft to find her kidnapped daughter? If it was Demeter, Canavesi's offer could point once again to Morgantina, where an ancient cult devoted to the goddess had thrived.