Chasing Aphrodite (29 page)

"He offered a bribe, basically," True volunteered. "The ... fragment was presented to me, that this was for me, if I wanted it personally..."

"Personally?"

"Personally."

Ferri sat stone-faced. He simply didn't believe her. His investigation showed that by 1989, Medici was already the museum's major supplier of antiquities, although his name never appeared on museum records. Why did he have to bribe her? Why risk offending the curator if he already had her business?

"Was Medici an expert for the J. Paul Getty Museum?" Ferri asked. It was a trick question. He knew from letters captured at Medici's warehouse that True had sought the dealer's "expertise" on where certain Getty objects had been found.

"Absolutely not," True said. "Was he an expert for anybody?...I wouldn't have considered Medici an expert."

Ferri settled back in his chair. Another contradiction.

While discussing her dealings with Hecht, Ferri raised her earlier, off-the-record revelation about von Bothmer.

"He confided in you in a major way...," Ferri said. "Can you tell me what that is?"

"At one point, I was in his office, and he had a photograph, an aerial photograph, which showed the Necropolis of Cerveteri. And looking at the Necropolis, he pointed to a certain spot on the photograph and said, 'This is the place where the Euphronios krater was found.'"

The betrayal was complete.

F
ERRI STARTED THE
second day of the deposition by raising the stakes. He put on record that True was now being considered a "person of interest" in his investigation.

"We'd like to state to Professor Marion True that this office will be taking action against her for these charges," Ferri said, before laying out his theory. True, along with Medici, Hecht, and Hecht's Swiss restorer, Fritz Bürki, had trafficked in objects taken from illegal excavations, resulting in archaeological damage. They had conspired to hide the origins of these objects by making false declarations to customs officials.

Ferri's maneuver was a technical one. Under Italian law, True could have legally disavowed what she had said the day before. Now, with the official warning, her words were part of a court record that could be used against her.

Throughout the remainder of the deposition, True responded with a studied detachment. Yet Ferri knew that she must be roiling inside, and he sharpened his attack. True had said that the Getty didn't buy from Medici. But the prosecutor produced a letter that True had written to Medici in 1992, after the attempted bribe. "During one of these visits I hope we'll be able to get together and have some further discussions about future acquisitions," the letter said.

If Medici had tried to bribe you, Ferri demanded, why were you making plans to buy from him? "It's very important that you clarify this," Ferri said menacingly. "Because if Medici is interrogated on this point and he says something different than what you're telling me, it would be very unfortunate, a very unfortunate piece of evidence against you."

"That may be but ... I am not going to be rude to a person who has tried to do something helpful. The reality is I was writing a letter to him trying to be appreciative of the help he had given."

"Yesterday you told me that Medici was not an expert."

"He's not an
expert
..."

"And how come that in this case he gave you information on the provenance of proto-Corinthian olpae [pitchers]?"

Ferri was referring to a letter True had written to Medici asking for information about certain pitchers in the Getty's collection. An assistant curator was writing a Ph.D. dissertation on the olpae, and True had queried the middleman on her behalf, asking where they were from. Medici had written back, informing True that the objects had been found in Monte Abatone, a necropolis in Cerveteri. He'd described the type of tomb in detail and offered her other objects found there.

True struggled to explain the exchange. "The main thing we were trying to find out was where the person who gave the objects to the museum had gotten them. That was the answer. They had come from Giacomo Medici. And Giacomo Medici offered the additional information that they came from Monte Abatone."

True's attempt to downplay the letters was particularly galling to Ferri. Here, in black and white, Medici was informing the Getty that the objects were looted. And he was offering more objects from the same tomb. Yet True was trying to spin it as some prosaic exchange of academic information.

"Hiding oneself behind somewhat calculated answers might be useful to your defense, but only up to a certain point," Ferri warned, the strain evident in his voice. "Because it leaves certain areas of shadow that might be illuminated by other people. And that could be dangerous for you. Giacomo Medici is not the person you met only five times. He's a very important character that is behind a lot of various transactions and I need to know from you, if you had even any suspicion that he was behind these transactions."

"I can't say it better than that," True replied weakly.

After the lunch break, True came back with a different version of her relationship with Medici. The curator said that she had continued contact with Medici for "opportunistic" reasons. Despite her personal distaste, she needed Medici's cooperation to prove whether the kouros was fake or real. She never told anyone about Medici's bribe attempt because she was worried that he might exact revenge by badmouthing her in the market. "I just want to make clear that my intention is not to protect Giacomo Medici," she said.

Unconvinced, Ferri turned the floor over to his experts, Maurizio Pellegrini and Daniela Rizzo, who spent the next hour with True reviewing more than seventy images from the Medici Polaroids. She helped place them at museums in Toledo, Boston, Richmond, New York, Minneapolis, and Cleveland; in Sydney and Copenhagen;—and at the Getty. When asked if she would be willing to draw up lists of other items that Medici, Hecht, and others had sold to her museum peers, True didn't hesitate to say yes. By the time she was done, she had helped the Italians trim months, if not years, off their investigation by identifying where they could find the looted pieces in private collections and museums.

At 6:04
P.M.
on the second day, the deposition ended. The two sides shook hands, and Ferri took a last look at True. The curator gave the prosecutor the faintest of smiles before disappearing out the door.

Once the van was safely away from the Getty and swallowed up in freeway traffic, the Italians relaxed. True had resisted initially, but in the end she had cooperated, saving the investigators untold hours and grief.

"I guess there's no reason to prosecute Marion True now," Daniela Rizzo said later, at dinner. Ferri was uncharacteristically solemn. Except for True's help identifying where the suspect antiquities were now exhibited, he felt that his trip to the Getty had produced no more leads than if he had come as a tourist.

"True still isn't telling us everything she knows," he said. "I think I have no choice but to bring her to trial."

T
RUE'S DEPOSITION CHANGED
things inside the Getty.

Getty officials were already nervous before Ferri showed up. Prompted by Richard Martin's gloomy memo months before, the board had formed a three-member committee to monitor the crisis. The board members hoped it would go away once Ferri came to Brentwood and realized that True would be helpful and sincere.

But True's easy betrayal of museum colleagues and surprising revelations startled even her own attorneys. Martin and Cobey left the first day of the deposition dumbstruck. They had spent two days prepping True, peppering her with questions, asking her if there was anything—
anything
—that they should know about. She had insisted there wasn't. As a result, her disclosure about von Bothmer and the Euphronios krater had blind-sided them. Why would she volunteer that? How many times had they told her only to answer what was asked? And what else had she kept from her own attorneys? "The Met's never going to speak to us again," Cobey groaned.

By the second day, it was also painfully obvious that the Getty had underestimated what it was up against. Rather than the usual myriad of disorganized regional officials, the Itali an cause was now represented by a single, focused man: Ferri. He was obviously smart, cagey, and startlingly well informed. He had grilled True for hours without once consulting his notes. He had asked questions to test the curator's honesty, to trap her, and had exhibited intimate knowledge of the antiquities trade, showing clearly that these "competitors" had acted in concert to take the Getty for more money. And he wasn't easily impressed. By volunteering what she knew about von Bothmer, True may have miscalculated. Instead of impressing Ferri, it may have left him with the idea that she knew far more than she was telling. Hope faded among Getty officials that the Italians merely wanted to consult with True. The prosecutor had her firmly in his sights.

Worse, the curator's evasiveness during the deposition began a slow, creeping realization among some Getty officials that over the years, the Getty had come to believe its own lies. It had glossed over the messy details in its files and embraced the reformist story line it had eagerly peddled in press releases and at professional conferences. True's performance now had some beginning to ask uncomfortable questions: Could the Italians be right? Did the Getty knowingly buy looted art?

Those doubts, of course, could not be spoken of openly. Getty veterans such as Debbie Gribbon and True's supporters continued to dismiss such suspicions as absurd. After all, the Getty had set the agenda for reforming the antiquities trade. True had courageously stood up against her colleagues in defense of the Italians. Wasn't she in charge of a nearly $300 million program to remake the Getty Villa into a temple to venerate the science of archaeology? They refused to entertain the notion that both things could be true, that the Getty and its curator had played both sides of the issue, never dreaming that the Italians would stumble onto a cache of photos and documents that might reveal the museum's duplicity.

As for Munitz, he seemed unwilling to get his hands dirty. He met briefly with Ferri at the start of the deposition and promised cooperation, but otherwise refused to get directly involved. The Italian problem was best dealt with by Gribbon and his bosses, the board of trustees. He also made sure that Martin, not Cobey, was the one to brief the trustees. Munitz was beginning to consider Cobey, his acting general counsel, as something of an alarmist.

Cobey had begun to raise questions not just about antiquities but about Munitz's personal use of Getty resources. She objected when he used Getty money to pay for his wife's travel. She objected when he ordered gifts for departing board members. She wrote a long memo opposing his proposal to modify J. Paul Getty's original 1953 indenture, so that board members could start being paid for their service. Such moves would likely violate IRS rules against self-dealing, she warned.

Jill Murphy, Munitz's lieutenant, began to think that Cobey was using these issues to grab some of the institutional power her position had never had in the trust hierarchy. Cobey was supposed to be putting out the legal fires, not sounding the alarm every time she sniffed smoke, Murphy complained. Board members also grew weary of what they considered the attorney's increasing shrillness. After one closed meeting in which Cobey gave a presentation, one trustee whispered to Murphy, "Time to get a new general counsel."

I
N SEPTEMBER
2001, the Getty did just that. Munitz informed Cobey that she would not be named permanent general counsel and hired Peter Erichsen to fill the post. Erichsen had been associate White House counsel under President Bill Clinton, for whom he helped select federal judges, and later general counsel at the University of Pennsylvania. He was smart, loyal, and politically astute, but he knew nothing about the complex legal terrain of the Itali an case, which now fell into his lap. On September 11, Erichsen was attending his first board meeting in Washington, D.C., where the trustees and senior staff had gathered for a tour of the National Gallery, whose massive plate-glass windows looked out over the Capitol. They were in the middle of a presentation when someone interrupted: there had been a terrorist attack in New York City, and another attack was expected soon on the Capitol.

Before scrambling to safety, members of the board watched the Twin Towers collapse into dust on a wide-screen television. For many, the attacks on the World Trade Center hit very close to home. Lewis Bernard was a board member of Marsh & McLennan, which lost all its employees and offices in Tower 1. Luis Nogales had an office in the American Express Tower, which was adjacent to the Twin Towers and sustained damage. The children of Agnes Gund, president of the New York Museum of Modern Art, lived not far from Ground Zero.

A whole year would pass before the board would hear about the Italian problem again. By then, the implications had become darker. Just weeks after 9/11, Martin flew to California to brief Erichsen on the case. New problems were emerging as Martin and Cobey, who stayed on as Erichsen's deputy, continued hunting through internal files, hoping to find some way out. It soon became clear that the Getty was entangled in a legal Catch-22.

Maurizio Fiorilli, a seni or government lawyer representing the Italian Ministry of Culture, was demanding that the contested objects be returned as a gesture of the Getty's goodwill. Yet it was almost certain that Ferri, who answered to the Ministry of Justice, would use any return as an admission of guilt in a criminal case against True. The Italians portrayed the two ministries as acting independently, but Martin knew that Ferri and Fiorilli were in lockstep. Indeed, if there was a trial, the two lawyers would sit at the prosecution table together. The Italians were whipsawing the Getty.

The dilemma paralyzed the museum. Could the Getty cut a deal with one ministry without a guarantee that it would not get burned by the other? And to what extent were the fates of True and the Getty linked? Should the Getty risk a withering legal and public relations assault by the Itali ans to protect its temperamental curator? Board members were loath to consider cutting the curator loose. Yet, as Martin's January 2001 memo to Munitz had hinted, at some point the interests of the museum and its star curator might diverge.