Chasing Aphrodite (34 page)

The payoff came on January 16, 2004, when the board gathered at the Getty Center for its annual meeting. Before the board retired to closed session to consider Munitz's contract, he delivered an impassioned and carefully prepared defense, one that cleverly turned the tables on his detractors. What was considered by some to be a management problem, he argued, was in fact the board's failure to settle on a governance philosophy. At the board's direction, Munitz said, he had been focused outward, playing the hands-off visionary. Now he laid out several other options, saying it was up to the board to decide what it wanted its CEO to do.

After placing the issue squarely on the trustees' shoulders, Munitz left the room. Bernard proposed waiting to see if Munitz's performance improved before renewing his contract. Gardner countered that Munitz was making progress and that the board had its CEO's attention. During the discussion, Fleischman received a call on her cell phone from a dealer who had heard about the contract dispute and wanted to urge her to vote against Munitz. But Munitz's boardtouching had secured him a solid majority. By the time the votes were counted, Bernard had caved in to the pressure, casting his vote with ten others to give Munitz a new contract. Instead of the three-year contract he was expecting, however, they upped it to five years. The vote was 11–0. Gund abstained.

The coup had failed. By defeating the old guard led by Gribbon and Walsh, Munitz had finally wrested control of the Getty from the ghost of Harold Williams. Or so he thought.

O
NCE AGAIN, THE
other major item on the board's agenda was Italy. Peter Erichsen and Richard Martin reported that the news was grim. A month earlier, as the Getty was preoccupied with the attempted mutiny, the trial of Giacomo Medici had begun in Rome. Paolo Ferri was publicly introducing evidence that directly implicated True. The prosecutor seemed to be laying the groundwork to formally indict the curator.

Erichsen's briefing papers for the day's discussion had again been cleansed by Kaplan of references to the Getty's possible institutional culpability. But the troubling facts had not disappeared, and as Erichsen explained in his presentation, many new ones had emerged. The Getty had learned that dealer Frieda Tchakos had said in a deposition that the Fleischmans had been a "front" to launder looted antiquities bound for the Getty. Letters unearthed in the Getty's own files showed that True had urged Tchakos to sell certain objects to the Fleischmans.

The worst piece of correspondence, however, was the one that senior staff had begun referring to as the "smoking gun": Houghton's 1985 memo to Gribbon, which detailed a discussion with Medici about the illicit origins of three of the museum's most prized objects—the Apollo, marble basin, and griffins from the Tempelsman collection. Nearly twenty years later, Houghton's breezy connecting of the dots from an ancient Italian tomb to the shelves of the Getty was met with silence when projected on a screen.

If the memo were to fall into the Italians' hands, Martin delicately explained, it "could hurt Marion True at trial." The larger message was left unsaid. Problems in the antiquities department predated True and implicated her superiors, including the museum's current director.

Gribbon, clearly pained, shifted in her seat. "Do you want me to leave the room for this?" she asked. No, board members murmured. You did nothing wrong.

M
UNITZ WASTED NO
time turning the screws on Gribbon. Having been criticized for being aloof and disengaged, he was determined to show Gribbon just how engaged he could be. In the weeks following the failed coup, Munitz began a barrage of e-mails, memos, voice mails, and meeting requests. He questioned Gribbon's leadership, noting each of her shortcomings, which he described as "pending Museum leadership questions." He met with Gribbon and her staff to analyze the museum's management structure, then stripped away key people. As he had promised Fleischman, Munitz took True's side in the turf war over the Getty Villa renovation, having the curator report directly to him on the project rather than going through Gribbon. And as he had promised Cotsen, he began backing away from his commitment to spend $1 billion in acquiring new art. The acquisition fund, he informed Gribbon, needed to be pared down because of the trust's economic issues.

The unrelenting pressure had its desired effect. Gribbon could barely keep her composure, often leaving meetings in tears. In a last-ditch attempt to undermine Munitz, she once again broke with protocol and committed the institutionally treasonous act of complaining directly to the trustees during their April 2004 meeting about Munitz's new centralized procurement program. In private conversations, Gribbon's fellow directors had seemed just as dismayed as she was. But when she turned to them for support during the board meeting, they remained silent. Munitz had carefully cultivated them over the past couple of months, further isolating Gribbon, who had stumbled fatally while making a desperate lunge at Munitz.

Within two weeks, the CEO brought things to a head in Gribbon's annual review. Obsessively prepared, he flogged the tearful museum director with a cat-o'-nine-tails of items she had failed to complete to his satisfaction. Then, noting that she often appeared unhappy, Munitz asked—twice—whether she was truly committed to staying at the Getty. Wouldn't she be happier at a museum that she could run as her own? As if to give her additional motivation, he continued his litany. Gribbon's relationship with True was "dysfunctional," caused by a power struggle between the two women. Gribbon was unreasonably hostile to Murphy. He offered at least half a dozen examples from recent months in which Gribbon had exhibited an "unfortunate pattern" of emotional outbursts. In fact, the trustees themselves had fretted over Gribbon's performance at their last meeting, Munitz said. "Several people subsequently remarked that if they were your colleagues, they would have murdered you," he remarked.

When Gribbon asked Munitz to meet with the trustees to discuss their differences, the emboldened CEO slapped her down. "As long [as] the Board wants me to serve as CEO, if I perceive that you are having a difficulty, then you must accept that there are problems," he snapped. In other words, you work for me.

Gribbon was shaken, but she replied to Munitz's criticisms with a lengthy memo, noting that this was "the first time in 20 years at the Getty" that she had received a negative review. Munitz responded with a nine-page letter documenting his earlier complaints for the record.

In the months that followed, a strange peace settled over the Getty. Munitz even tried to dial back some of the rancor, noodling with board members about whether to hire a professional coach to help Gribbon. Perhaps David Gardner could be a paid mentor. He was going off the board in June and had been pestering Munitz to find some way for him to earn money from the Getty afterward.

Gribbon herself seemed tamed. She and Munitz worked together on a new acquisition plan and met for a full day to discuss how Gribbon might improve her job performance. She was sanguine, almost solicitous, thanking him for his support. Munitz welcomed the change in attitude. He desperately wanted to present a unified management team to trustees at an upcoming board retreat scheduled for October at a Palm Springs resort.

Then, on September 21, a messenger walked into Munitz's office with an envelope marked
URGENT.
Munitz was out of town, so Murphy opened the package. Inside was a letter from Gribbon's attorney. The museum director was resigning her post. She threatened to sue the Getty for harassment and "constructive discharge." As one staff member later said, it was checkmate, the biggest "fuck you" Gribbon could muster.

Gribbon's attorney sent a similar letter to the new board chairman, John Biggs. Attached to it was a copy of Munitz's nine-page letter ripping Gribbon to shreds—no doubt exhibit A in what would be one very tawdry lawsuit. How could you write that in a letter, Biggs asked Munitz when they spoke. "It's her performance review," Munitz replied with a shrug.

Biggs and Bernard worked with Erichsen to negotiate a deal with Gribbon's attorney. Concerned that she would speak out about Munitz, the Getty agreed to pay Gribbon $3 million. Both sides agreed not to go to the press.

The board was asked to approve the agreement after it had already been struck. Some were enraged. It was extortion, they felt, and it was naive to think that Gribbon wouldn't go to the press. Munitz, too, was furious. As part of the settlement, the board would issue a press release attributing Gribbon's departure to "philosophical differences" with Munitz, but the settlement prevented him from speaking publicly about those differences.

In mid-October, Debbie Gribbon walked out of the Getty Museum for the last time. Unaware of the lucrative deal she had struck, many saw her as a tragic heroine, the only person who had dared to stand up to Munitz.

T
HE TRIAL OF
Giacomo Medici was a rare exception to the parade of inefficiency and bureaucratic dysfunction that is typical of the Italian justice system. Medici had invoked his right to a "fast-track" trial, a maneuver that forced a verdict at the end of an abbreviated proceeding. Medici's lawyers hoped to catch Ferri off-guard, unable to scale the mountain of evidence he had gathered since the raid on Medici's warehouse nine years before. The tactic also severed Medici's trial from that of his alleged coconspirators, Robert Hecht and Marion True, who faced preliminary hearings to determine whether there was enough evidence to indict them.

But under Italy's creaky Napoleonic court system, even the fast-track trial, which began in December 2003, proved to be a lurching slog. What would have been a two-week case in an American court stretched into a year. Hearings were scheduled once a month. When not delayed by holidays or lawyers' strikes, the sessions degenerated into procedural tussles between Ferri and Medici's lawyers. Outside the courtroom, Medici provided a colorful counterpoint, prowling the hallways carrying paper bags filled with his own "evidence," complaining loudly to the handful of reporters following the trial that he was being railroaded. The Polaroids weren't even his! He had met Marion True only four or five times! He'd never sold her a thing! "They are trying to make a monster out of Medici!" he bellowed in raspy Italian, his hands shooting through the air, spit springing from his lips.

Judge Guglielmo Muntoni showed a bemused tolerance for Medici's fiery rants about the corruption of the Itali an state and Ferri's lengthy courtroom ramblings. After both sides had had their say, he methodically plowed through the facts about each artifact implicated in the case, throwing hundreds out because there was insufficient evidence that they had been excavated after Italy's 1939 patrimony law.

In December 2004, Muntoni issued his verdict: Medici was guilty of trafficking hundreds of antiquities that had been looted from Italy. The objects had been smuggled to Geneva, laundered through auction houses, and sold via Hecht, Bürki, Symes, and others dealers to high-end clients, including True. The unprecedented decision was delivered in a 650-page ruling that had taken Muntoni five months to write. He sentenced Medici to ten years in prison and fined him ten million Euros, to be paid in part by confiscation of the dealer's rambling villa outside Cerveteri, the Etruscan site that had been so notoriously looted. It was the stiffest sentence ever given to an antiquities trafficker in Italy.

T
HE VERDICT WAS
a major victory for Ferri. In addition to being Italy's biggest looting conviction, the Medici case signaled the likely indictment of Hecht and True, whose trials would be largely based on the same evidence. As alleged coconspirators, they were not required to attend Medici's hearings, although Hecht often did. Outside the courtroom, he played the whole thing as a farce, answering questions from journalists with renditions of Gilbert and Sullivan show tunes. Hecht had good reason to be lighthearted. Although he could be found guilty, Italian law prevented him from ever going to prison because he was over seventy years old.

True clearly had the most to lose and stayed away from Medici's proceedings. The Getty had beefed up her defense team considerably by hiring the well-known Itali an attorney Franco Coppi, who had successfully defended the former Itali an prime minister Giulio Andreotti on Mafia charges. Yet Ferri was more worried about Judge Muntoni. Would he hesitate to order a foreign curator to stand trial in Rome, a step no country had ever taken? Muntoni had mastered the complex Medici case, educating himself not just on the facts but also on the history of the archaeological pieces. But the judge also exhibited skepticism about some of Ferri's claims when it came to True. Clearly, Muntoni was struggling to accept the notion that such a highly regarded curator, best known as an ally of Italy and critic of the illicit trade, was part of the criminal conspiracy.

In the fall of 2004, Muntoni had called Ferri over to his office in the next dreary cement block of the Piazzale Clodio judicial complex. In a last-ditch effort to prevent True from being indicted, the Getty and True's attorneys had offered for deposition Barbara Fleischman, John Walsh, and True's deputy, Karol Wight. It looked to Ferri like just another stalling tactic. But Muntoni showed interest in the Getty's side of the story and soberly informed the prosecutor that he would attend the American depositions.

On September 20, Muntoni, Ferri, and twelve other American and Italian lawyers and diplomats crammed into a conference room at the U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan for the examination of Fleischman. Muntoni was aware that Ferri's case against True rested heavily on the notion that the Fleischman collection was a front for laundering looted antiquities. The judge put the question to Fleischman directly.

"Did Marion True ever exert her influence in the purchase of antiquities from various people, and also from Frieda Tchakos more specifically?" he asked, referring to the Swiss dealer whom Ferri had deposed in Cyprus.

"Categorically no," Fleischman said.