Chasing Aphrodite (23 page)

Hoping for a foothold, Ferri turned the Sotheby's files over to the archaeologist assigned as technical adviser to the Medici case. That was Daniela Rizzo, an attractive, middle-aged government archaeologist with a supple mind. She was working at the Villa Giulia, a sixteenth-century papal palace that served as the nation's premier, if seldom visited, museum for Etruscan antiquities. Rizzo set about analyzing Sotheby's records with her museum colleague, Maurizio Pellegrini. A former photojournalist who couldn't stomach shooting human tragedies, Pellegrini was in charge of children's programs at the museum and made amusing educational films explaining the ancient world. For Ferri's purposes, his eye for detail was an invaluable asset.

Rizzo and Pellegrini combed through the auction house's documents, familiarizing themselves with the blizzard of images and numbers. They spent weeks making various lists of the objects. What did they show chronologically? What about the companies involved? Why were many objects offered again and again? As time slipped away, they sensed that Ferri was becoming impatient.

The breakthrough came late one afternoon in Rizzo's office, after everyone else had gone home. Under the light of a small desk lamp, Rizzo and Pellegrini were flipping once again through Sotheby's documents. Something clicked.

"Stop!" Pellegrini cried as Rizzo leafed past a photocopied picture of a hydria, or water jug. "I've seen that vase before. It was in Medici's warehouse."

Rizzo checked the photo in Sotheby's records. The vase was one of hundreds that Medici had sold at auction in London. The records showed that it had been offered for sale several times but never purchased. Then, on November 12, 1994, the vase, lot number 295, had finally sold.

"It can't be in his warehouse," Rizzo said. "It says here he sold it a year before the raid."

But Pellegrini was already pawing through photos of Medici's warehouse taken by investigators during the 1995 raid. "Here!" He pointed at a photo showing the same vase. It had a small tag around its neck that read
SOTHEBY'S
11/12/94
LOT
#295.

The light went on for both of them. Medici must have sold the object to himself, perhaps through a frontman. But why?

They called Ferri and told him that they had found something but didn't know what it meant. The next morning in his office, they carefully walked him through their discovery.

Ferri looked up from the records, a boyish grin on his face. "It's laundering!" he said. "It's wonderful!"

I
N ALL, RIZZO
and Pellegrini found twelve vases that were presumably sold at the November 1994 auction by Medici and seized at his warehouse a year later. Swayed by that evidence, the Geneva court agreed in February 1998 to unseal Medici's warehouse suite and let a panel of three prominent Italian archaeologists study the thirty-eight hundred objects and fragments inside. Pellegrini accompanied the experts to the Geneva Free Ports to help review the thousands of documents and photographs sequestered there.

The rules established by the Swiss court for the inspections allowed the Italians to take notes, but not to take pictures or to remove any of the objects or documents. It took six visits over two years for the Italians to slowly digest the contents of the warehouse.

The Italian archaeologists were horrified at the scope of the inventory. They had spent their careers conducting painstaking excavations in which any one of these objects would have been a noteworthy find. They calculated that thousands of tombs must have been destroyed to produce such a cornucopia of ancient treasures. Based on the cultures represented in the objects, those tombs had spanned all of Italy, from Sicily to Genoa. In some cases, the experts were able to identify precisely where the objects had been looted from because matching fragments were left behind and now resided in Italian museums. The survey of objects in the warehouse shattered any illusion that looting in Italy was limited either to a particular region or to archaeologically important objects.

Pellegrini focused his attention on the boxes of documents and photographs found in the back office of the warehouse. The documents filled 173 binders—tens of thousands of letters, receipts, bills of lading, and auction results. But it was the photos that caught the former photographer's eye. Medici had kept thirty albums of Polaroids, plus another thirty or so envelopes with negatives, prints, and undeveloped rolls of conventional film. Pellegrini guessed that there were some thirty-six hundred images in total. Taken together, they formed an inventory of the thousands of objects Medici had trafficked during his career.

Some of the photos showed objects encrusted with dirt, as if they had just been hauled out of the ground. Others captured priceless antiquities wrapped in newspaper, stuck in the trunk of a car, laid out on a cheap carpet, sitting on a tile floor, or propped up on a kitchen table. Some of the photos were of objects now locked up in the warehouse. Pellegrini was aghast. He thought the album looked like a murder book—a voluminous catalogue of archaeological corpses stripped of their context.

After the initial shock wore off, he began to notice details. Many of the photos were low-quality Polaroids taken with a 1970s model camera. Two such cameras were found in the warehouse. Pellegrini knew that looters and middlemen liked using Polaroid cameras, which spit out self-developing photos. It was far safer than using conventional film, which had to be developed by an outsider, who might tip off police. The cameras themselves were essential pieces of evidence, proving that the objects had been excavated and photographed sometime during the 1970s, long after Italy's 1939 patrimony law had gone into effect. Each picture had a serial number on the back that indicated more specifically when the film had been manufactured.

Medici had scrawled notes in a primitive code along the white borders of some of the Polaroids. Pellegrini eventually deciphered the markings. "V" stood for
venduto,
"sold"; "12" meant $12,000; "CRO" was Christo Michaelides, Robin Symes's partner; "Bo" was Robert "Bob" Hecht.

Pellegrini went home from his first day at the warehouse stunned by what he had seen. Aching to talk about it, he called Rizzo in Rome.

"It's—it's incredible," he stuttered. "It's terrible."

"What is? What did you see?" Rizzo asked.

"You have no idea what there is here..." Pellegrini's voice trailed off.

"Look, whatever you see, look for the auction tags and write down the lot numbers and dates. We can use them to trace the objects."

During his return visits to the Geneva warehouse, Pellegrini constructed a written record of what he saw in the Polaroids. One scene in particular sucked the wind out of him. The photos showed an underground room half-filled with volcanic ash. The walls were covered with intricately painted frescoes in deep reds, blues, and ochers. The room obviously belonged to an undiscovered Roman villa in Pompeii or Herculaneum, ancient cities buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in
A.D.
79. Subsequent photos showed the same frescoes cut into dozens of suitcase-size squares and laid out carelessly on a table, ready for export. Still other photos depicted the squares after they were roughly plastered back together, ready for restoration. The end product was in the warehouse room next door. Pellegrini recognized two of the frescoed walls, packed in bubble wrap, ready for shipment. One was already gone. Where was it today? The question hung in the air.

Ferri and his investigators recognized the significance of the Polaroids. For decades, Itali an efforts to recover looted antiquities had been stymied by the fact that it was almost impossible to find definite proof that an object had been illicitly excavated. By the time the Carabinieri caught up to a smuggler, the plundered piece had been wiped clean through restoration or was gone altogether. Looters in Italy were, for the most part, too careful to keep detailed records of their wares. By the time the piece showed up on a museum's doorstep, there was no way to trace its progression through the trade.

Now, in the warehouse of one of the principal middlemen, authorities had stumbled upon an archive filled with that kind of proof. The Polaroids detailed the step-by-step process, from fresh find to clumsy restoration, when the object's value could be discerned by academics or collectors. Finally, they depicted the object at its most glorious—professionally restored and in a museum display case.

One task remained. Ferri's team needed to figure out just where the looted artifacts had ended up. Who were the end buyers?

That job required matching pieces from Medici's photo albums to those in glossy publications of the world's greatest antiquities collections. But until Swiss officials let Italy have Medici's Polaroids, it had to be done by memory and notes.

Pellegrini burned the images into his brain, then returned to Rome and retreated with Rizzo to her home to search through the museum catalogues. It became an obsession, a high-stakes game of Concentration. The search required an amazing ability to distinguish subtle variations in vases that, to untrained eyes, all looked alike.

As Rizzo and Pellegrini painstakingly linked Medici's objects to museums, the scope of the investigation grew far beyond anything they had previously imagined. Looted artifacts had ended up on museum shelves in Germany, Switzerland, France, Spain, Japan, the Netherlands, and Denmark. But by far, the most had gone to American museums. There were Medici objects at the Met in New York City, Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, and smaller but significant museums in Cleveland, Tampa, Minneapolis, Princeton, San Antonio, and Fort Worth. Not surprisingly, the single biggest buyer of Medici's antiquities appeared to be the world's richest cultural institution—the J. Paul Getty Museum.

Medici himself had marked the trail to Malibu. He tagged some of the Polaroids with "PGM," shorthand for Paul Getty Museum, as the Italians called the Getty. There was also a batch of conventional negatives that Medici had labeled "Trip to LA," which included snapshots of Medici and Hecht visiting the Getty and posing before several of the museum's masterpieces.

In one, Medici stood smiling in front of the Getty's griffins, which had been purchased from the Tempelsman collection. Sure enough, Polaroids in Medici's binders showed the sculpture broken into three sections, one of which was sitting on an Italian newspaper, another lying on a blanket in the trunk of a car. The progression from archaeological contraband to museum showpiece appeared incontrovertible.

As they raced through the catalogues, making match after match over pizza late at night, Rizzo and Pellegrini also felt an adrenaline rush of a different kind. Bound by a common purpose, working closely together, they found themselves falling in love.

I
N FEBRUARY
1999, the Getty announced that it was returning three more antiquities to Italy, including the vase painted by Onesimos that had caused the skirmish at the Viterbo conference nearly a year and a half before. The public confrontation had forced the museum's hand. The Getty decided to give back the vase and two other pieces that had troubled True for some time. One was a torso of the Roman god Mithra, a limbless second-century
A.D.
sculpture acquired in 1982. A graduate student had recently alerted the antiquities department that the torso bore a striking resemblance to a piece that was once pictured in a private eighteenth-century Italian collection. When True called the collection's curators, they discovered that the sculpture was indeed missing. The second object was a bust of the famous Greek athlete Diadumenus, acquired as part of the Fleischman collection. A German scholar had notified the Getty that the stone head had once been in the inventory of a government-sanctioned dig at Venosa, in southern Italy.

In February 1999, the
Los Angeles Times
called the return of the three pieces "a graphic illustration of the Getty's continuing attempt to position itself as a model of ethical behavior in the notoriously shady world of collecting antiquities." It quoted a Greek vase expert as saying that the Getty's decision to return the Onesimos vase was a "courageous move." Assistant museum director Debbie Gribbon gave all the credit to True, who told the paper, "Reliable sources in the market confirmed the allegations to be true. And once I had that information, I felt the best thing was to return it."

As she had with the return of the tripod three years earlier, the curator personally accompanied the objects back to Italy for the repatriation ceremony at the Villa Giulia. She was signing paperwork when a member of the Carabinieri art squad standing nearby called over a smallish man who seemed to be browsing the collection. It was Paolo Ferri.

"I would like to talk to you about several objects in your museum," Ferri said to True after introducing himself.

True was silent, taken aback. It was the reaction Ferri had been looking for. He wanted True to know that he was watching the Getty.

"Securing the repatriation of the Onesimos is only a starting point," he continued with a smile. "The Getty must do more."

"I'm sorry. I can't..." The curator blanched, then scurried around Ferri and the Carabinieri and started walking away.

"Maybe next time," Ferri called, "you'll bring back the Venus of Morgantina."

"Maybe next time," True snapped, "you'll have evidence it came from there."

T
HE RETURN OF
the Onesimos vase galvanized a growing resentment toward Marion True.

Most American museums would have returned the two objects that were obviously stolen from documented collections. But the Onesimos vase was not stolen in the traditional sense—it was the product of looting, like thousands of other ancient objects in museums across the country. By giving back the Onesimos, True and the Getty were suggesting that looting was the moral equivalent of theft, a notion museums had fought for generations. And given the growing severity of the Italians, many colleagues thought it was like waving a red cape in front of an angry bull.

Inside the Getty, the return aggravated a nasty feud between True and Debbie Gribbon, True's immediate boss. Still stung that True had been given control of the Getty Villa renovation, Gribbon began complaining to Getty CEO Barry Munitz about True's crusade against looted antiquities. She argued that it was dangerous, given the Getty's past acquisitions, and put the museum at odds with the rest of the museum community.