Chasing Aphrodite (30 page)

"Dr. True is anxious to start a systematic campaign of promotion" of her innocence, Martin had written. "I have told Dr. True that we cannot begin that process until we have completed our review of all of the files ... It is important that we be certain of what our position is before we undertake such a campaign."

There was no evidence to suggest that True had been acting as a rogue curator. Indeed, documents unearthed in the internal review suggested that Gribbon, Walsh, and Williams had been fully aware that the museum was buying looted art and had approved all of the objects around which the Italians were building their case. Cobey and Martin considered these documents to be "radioactive."

There was Houghton's 1986 resignation letter, eerily predicting dire consequences if Walsh failed to deal with problems in the antiquities department, including the potential for "a sweeping external investigation of the Getty Museum's records." The impact of such an investigation on the trust's reputation would be "catastrophic."

There were the funerary wreath documents, in which True declared the object "too dangerous" to buy, only to mysteriously reverse herself and recommend its purchase—a recommendation endorsed by Walsh.

Finally, and most damaging, there were Walsh's own handwritten notes of two 1987 meetings with Williams to discuss the antiquities acquisition policy on the eve of the Aphrodite purchase. In languid script scrawled across yellow legal paper, the museum director had recorded his boss's troubling words: "We are saying we won't look into the provenance ... We know it's stolen, Symes a fence." Walsh and Williams knew very well whom True was dealing with. A few days later, Walsh's notes quoted Williams again laying the issue on the table: "Are we willing to buy stolen property for some higher aim?" Also, "We knowingly buy stolen goods. We knowingly deal with liars by accepting their warranties."

The notes not only implicated True's bosses; they also appeared to destroy a key element of the Getty's defense: that it had acted in "good faith" while buying the suspect antiquities. Even if Italy was able to prove that several of the artifacts had been looted, it was important that the Getty be able to argue that it had had no knowledge of the fact at the time. If revealed, these documents could be used to prove that the Getty had violated not only Italy's cultural patrimony law but American criminal law as well, specifically the National Stolen Property Act.

As the full implications of the documents became obvious, Martin sent an e-mail to Cobey. "When we were speaking yesterday about our unfortunate documents, a line from T. S. Eliot kept coming back to me," he wrote. "It's from 'Gerontion':

"'After such knowledge, what forgiveness?'"

I
N MARCH
2002, eight months after being deposed by Ferri, True proposed a remarkable purchase to her superiors at the Getty. It was a magisterial third-century bronze statue of Poseidon, god of the sea. Valued at $4 million, the one-half life-size figure was to take its place next to the Getty Bronze as one of the most valued antiquities ever found.

True had seen the statue at the 2002 Winter Antiques Show in New York, an annual event sponsored by the nonprofit East Side House Settlement and featuring the wares of dozens of exhibitors. She immediately put it on reserve. As she detailed in a draft acquisition proposal, the Poseidon was the first full-figured bronze to appear on the market in a long time. It was being offered by Rupert Wace, a reputable London antiquities dealer, on behalf of the British Rail Pension Fund, which had owned the statue since the late 1970s. It had been exhibited at the Royal Museum of Scotland and the Detroit Institute of Arts, as well as the antiquities fair in Basel in November 1999. Wace had even published the statue in 2001. The Poseidon appeared to meet all the stringent requirements of the Getty's 1995 acquisition policy. Missing from True's draft proposal, however, was the name of the statue's original owner: Robin Symes. William Griswold, the museum's deputy director, noted the omission and alerted the Getty's lawyers.

Martin responded with some alarm. "What we have learned about Symes since June of last year means that we can not place any reliance on anything he says as to provenance ... We have been put on notice that he is part of a group which has dealt in stolen objects and systematically falsified provenance documents. The story Symes has given us about this object fits exactly the profile of stories used to cover objects which were, in fact, recently looted from Italy."

Symes had given True a sheaf of documents to support his claim that the statue had been found near Alexandria, Egypt, during the early 1930s and sold soon after to a Greek collector. The statue had been transferred to Switzerland in 1956, then sold to Symes in September 1973, the documents claimed. But Cobey thought that the two affidavits looked suspicious. Some quick checking confirmed her fears. One of them had supposedly been signed at the American embassy on June 4, 1978. Cobey looked up the date and found that it was a Sunday—an unusual day to be doing business. The more recent U.S. customs forms also seemed strange. The Poseidon had been imported into the United States with a number of other objects, whose country of origin was given as "multi."

More alarming, the statue had been the subject of a major controversy in the late 1970s after the Carabinieri told the British media that the statue had been found in the Bay of Naples and smuggled out of Italy. Articles about the incident included a curious comment by Symes: "If I knew about it, I wouldn't talk. If I didn't, I couldn't." The Italian investigation had apparently petered out.

With Erichsen's approval, the Getty went ahead with True's suggestion that the museum take the statue on loan for study. No harm could come from looking more closely at the object, Erichsen felt. Others knew that once the statue arrived, there would be considerable pressure to acquire it. In the meantime, Erichsen suggested that True contact Wace with the Getty's questions about the provenance documents. Cobey and Martin objected, warning that relying on True to check out the statue's story would be a mistake.

The Getty also turned to a London attorney named Ludovic de Walden for advice about the bronze. De Walden occasionally acted as outside counsel for the Getty. A Bloomsbury Square lawyer who dressed in colored shirts with white collars and flashy cuff links, de Walden had been busy spearheading a legal attack against Symes. His clients were the family of Christo Michaelides, who had died on July 5, 1999, the day after he fell down the stairs of a Tuscan villa rented by clients Leon Levy and Shelby White. When Michaelides' family asked Symes to return Christo's valuable personal effects as keepsakes, Symes had sent them only a cheap watch and some playing cards. Irate, the family filed suit against Symes and hired de Walden to investigate the dealer's holdings across Europe, arguing that half of his assets belonged to them. De Walden's relentless pursuit exposed Symes as a pathological liar, earning the dealer time in prison for perjury. It also unearthed several caches of unreported antiquities.

When approached by the Getty, de Walden didn't mince any words. Marion True, he said, had to be "insane" to propose buying the Poseidon. If the Getty were to look into the "Greek collector," de Walden hinted, it would find that she was Michaelides' poor aunt, an eighty-year-old woman who was unlikely to have inherited any art, much less a precious Greek bronze. Symes had often used the story of an object that had "left Egypt before the Suez War" as a fake provenance, de Walden said. In short, the Poseidon was clearly hot, and Symes had used the British Rail Pension Fund to launder it.

De Walden provided another, more troubling reason for the Getty to be skeptical of the purchase. His investigation had uncovered the fact that True's relationship with the dealers had gone from professional to personal and financial. De Walden believed that Symes had loaned True money to help her buy her vacation home in Páros. If True had accepted a loan from one of the museum's dealers—be it Symes or, as was actually the case, from his partner Michaelides—she had a serious, undisclosed conflict of interest when it came to doing business with Symes. In the museum world, such an ethical breach was unacceptable.

Armed with this information, Cobey told Erichsen that if the Getty insisted on pursuing the Poseidon, True should recuse herself. Whatever benefit the museum might gain from acquiring the object would be more than canceled out by the legal risks the curator's involvement would incur. During her deposition, True had given Ferri the clear impression that she wasn't particularly close to Symes or Michaelides. But quite the opposite was true, and Ferri wouldn't take it lightly when he found out.

Martin sounded a similar alarm, expressing shock that True's draft acquisition proposal had left out any mention of Italy's attempt to re-cover the statue in the 1970s. True was making "materially misleading" statements to her superiors, he said. If the Getty went ahead with the purchase, Ferri would certainly indict her. How could True even consider the purchase knowing she was the target of an Italian investigation? It was reckless.

But Erichsen was reluctant to believe the worst. He was still new to the antiquities world and deeply influenced by Gribbon. Even if Symes had falsified the affidavit, it probably only meant that he was too lazy to do the research, he ventured. Surely, the British Rail Pension Fund had investigated and concluded that the piece was safe to buy. Erichsen likewise brushed aside suggestions that the Getty investigate the Greek collector or force True to recuse herself. The museum had a better chance of getting to the bottom of this with her than without her. Pulling True off the acquisition would signal the institution's lack of confidence in its curator.

As for the possibility that True might have obtained a personal loan from the Getty's principal antiquities dealer, Erichsen and Gribbon were skeptical, but they promised to raise the issue with True. "We may be making a mountain out of a molehill here," Erichsen said.

A
FEW DAYS
later, Erichsen called Cobey into his office. The battle over the Poseidon had been only the latest conflict between the two since Erichsen had arrived the previous September. Cobey's knowledge of the antiquities problems had kept her at the table, but Erichsen found opportunities to remind her that she was his subordinate. He scolded her for discussing a minor legal matter with Gribbon without going through him. He also pulled a month's worth of her expense accounts and questioned several of her purchases, much as she had done with Munitz, who had made it clear he wanted Erichsen to mute Cobey's shrill warnings.

When Cobey came into his office, Erichsen brought her up to speed on recent developments. Gribbon had met with True for two and a half hours to talk about the Poseidon. After consulting with her attorney, Francesco Isolabella, the curator had recused herself and asked to withdraw the acquisition proposal. In the end, it didn't matter: the Getty's questions about the statue's origins had led the dealer to withdraw the offer. It was no longer for sale. Erichsen said that he and Gribbon had asked True if she had ever taken a loan from Symes. She'd denied it. Erichsen was satisfied; there was no reason to look into the matter any further.

Erichsen now raised the real reason for the meeting. Cobey's handling of the Poseidon had been the last straw, he said. Her memos on the Poseidon had a judgmental tone, and he was "flabbergasted" over her most recent one suggesting that the curator recuse herself. "Truth or justice issues should not be prejudged," he said. Cobey had come to see the world through Ferri's eyes, he continued. Her position had become "excessively independent," and her interest in the possible legal consequences for the Getty was "hysterical."

Erichsen told Cobey to start looking for another job. Fifteen years after the resignation of Arthur Houghton, the former acting curator who had warned about an investigation by a foreign government, the Getty was once again killing the messenger.

I
N FEBRUARY
2002, Paolo Ferri's investigation got another big break when a Cyprus customs agent in the Limassol airport detained an elderly Swiss woman who had come off a plane. Antiquities dealer Frieda Tchakos had stepped into a snare set by Ferri, who had quietly issued an international arrest warrant for her based on her involvement in an unrelated looting case.

Informed of Tchakos's arrest, Ferri pulled the legal net tighter. As he and Salvatore Morando scrambled to catch a plane to Cyprus, the prosecutor refused to lift the warrant, leaving Tchakos to spend the night in a prison cell, where she slept on a wooden table, shivering under a thin wool blanket. Ferri was determined to send a message: I can make your life miserable. "I won't pull the warrant until I get a statement about Hecht, Medici, and everything she knows about the illicit antiquities market," he told the dealer's attorney.

Tchakos agreed and after her release played host to Ferri and Morando at her brother's apartment. Tchakos served her interrogators cheese sandwiches, then sat across from them at the dining room table, coolly answering questions for the next two days, her two attorneys by her side and a hairless cat in her lap.

Tchakos was a tough woman who had cracked the tight circle of men who ran the antiquities trade. A player for thirty years, she icily divulged the colorful background Ferri wanted, filling in more details about the trade's dominant characters. Hecht, she said, was a very knowledgeable but "frightful character" who dominated the market with his temper and threats to blackmail competitors with his tell-all memoir. His nickname in the trade was "Mr. Percentage," because he insisted on taking a cut of everything sold. Medici had been an important middleman as far back as the 1970s. She recalled wondering where he got the money for his aggressive purchases at auction, until she realized that he was buying items from himself.

Ferri was elated. Tchakos was confirming the very laundering scheme that Pellegrini and Rizzo had deduced from the auction records and photos. He pushed for more.

"Do you know anything about the Aphrodite?" Ferri asked.