Chasing Aphrodite (35 page)

Muntoni asked for any invoices or documentation from the couple's purchases over the years. Fleischman acknowledged that she had never supplied any to the Getty but said that she had recently located them all. "Up until a short time ago, I am ashamed to say, I had forgotten all of these files," the Getty trustee explained. "And when my lawyers had said to me, 'You know, you should look and see what there is' of course I went into another room where I had very carefully put them away, and found all the files that related to the sale of the objects, plus a little black book of my husband's which I had never noticed before or seen before."

The book, she added, listed the price of every object, the check number, even the banks on which the checks were drawn. The idea that Fleischman had never mentioned or supplied the information to the Getty aroused Ferri's prosecutorial suspicion. But when he tried to press further, Muntoni reined him in—ordering him to rephrase his questions, forbidding him to ask others, and bickering with him during long sidebars.

During the next day's questioning, John Walsh said that the Getty was especially cautious about buying antiquities because it knew the market contained illicit objects. He portrayed True as the institutional conscience behind the 1987 and 1995 acquisition policies, which he described as "radical" for their time. With no hint of irony, he said that the handful of times the Getty had been forced to return objects were proof that the policies worked.

"In my time, I think I never presented to the board an object whose circumstances, provenance, were such as to make me worry about the propriety of the acquisition," Walsh said. It was a bold statement, omitting two decades of internal handwringing over Frel's sins, the kouros, the Aphrodite, the funerary wreath, and his own handwritten notes from his September 1987 conversations with Harold Williams. When Ferri attempted to bore in, Muntoni once again held him back, summarily dismissing his questions.

Two days later in Los Angeles, Ferri suffered what he considered his most embarrassing run-in with Muntoni. During the deposition of Karol Wight, the prosecutor became irked by Wight's constant requests to speak to her attorneys before answering questions from him and others. One response in particular revealed how heavily Wight had been coached. When Muntoni asked what had prompted the Fleischmans to donate their collection to the Getty, the associate curator turned to her attorneys and asked, "Is this the time for the story?" Then she launched into the anecdote about how the Fleischmans had been charmed by a group of kids admiring the antiquities during their 1994 exhibit.

Muntoni drew Wight out about the Getty's procedures for accepting the collection. Under his persistent questioning, Wight conceded that the museum had accepted the pieces before receiving any information about their provenance—an exception from the usual practice. When Muntoni asked what the Getty had relied on for the provenance, Wight cited the museum's own 1994 exhibit catalogue.

"So, basically, the only documentation you had was the information that was—produced in the catalogue, but you didn't have actual documentation of the ownership, the chain of ownership of each individual art piece or object?"

"No..."

During a break, a fed-up Ferri tangled with Richard Martin over Wight's constant consulting with her attorneys in the midst of the deposition. Ferri claimed that it was a violation of Italian procedures, but when he appealed to Muntoni to intervene, the judge deferred to the American rules. Ferri felt betrayed.

Muntoni's repeated rebuffing of Ferri gave hope to Getty officials. Erichsen advised the trustees at their February 2005 meeting that Fleischman, Walsh, and Wight had "hit the ball out of the park." Muntoni appeared to be leaning toward the Getty, but he was still under pressure to indict the curator. Erichsen suggested that the museum should do something to give him a nudge, a "Hail Mary pass" to save True. "I think we're going to get this but we need to give back something," he said.

T
HE DEPOSITIONS AND
Muntoni's steely contrariness had rattled Ferri. Back in Rome, the prosecutor decided to do a painstaking review of his nearly decadelong investigation. He needed something that would convince Muntoni that the Fleischman collection was a front, or his case against True would be precariously thin. The collection accounted for about half of the items traced from Medici's warehouse to the Getty. Ferri began writing a lengthy memo to Muntoni laying out a road map of the evidence.

On a Sunday afternoon in October 2004, Ferri was sitting in his office surrounded by reams of documents from the case when his gaze fell upon the invoices Fleischman claimed to have recently unearthed. One showed that her husband had bought a certain Greek vase in 1988 for $400,000. But something was curious about the handwriting on the document. Ferri recognized the distinct style as belonging to Robert Hecht.

He began searching through the photographs seized from Medici's warehouse and found a Polaroid showing the vase. Medici had written along the border, "Okay con Bo, tutta mia, 1991"—Okay with Bo [Medici's shorthand for Bob Hecht], all mine, 1991. A second Polaroid showed the vase in Medici's warehouse. More printing on the border: "Da Bob"—From Bob.

How could a Greek vase that the Fleischmans purchased in 1988 still be in Medici's warehouse in 1991? The receipt, Ferri concluded, was either backdated or a fake. Given the handwriting, it had almost certainly been concocted by Hecht.

Ferri began jumping around the room with the forged receipt. Then he dashed to the phone and called his investigator, Maurizio Pellegrini. "I got them!" he shouted. "I got them!"

Ferri was convinced that Fleischman's recent "discovery" of the receipt was a cover-up, a way to deflect suspicion from the fact that True had been guiding their purchases. In her deposition, Fleischman claimed she had not met True until 1991. Pushing the purchase date back to 1988 would blur any link to True and avoid another embarrassing question: how could Larry Fleischman afford the pricey antiquity after 1991, the same year he had sold the Getty objects because he was supposedly experiencing financial difficulty? Either the Fleischmans had been lying about their finances, or they were acting as surrogates for the Getty, Ferri concluded. Later in court, Hecht volunteered spontaneously that Ferri's theory about the vase was right; it was not sold in 1988, as the receipt indicated. How, then, had the vase ended up in the Getty? Hecht didn't say, but he left the impression that it had gone directly from Medici to the Getty, with the Fleischmans acting only as a pass-through on paper. Hecht seemed to be purposely shredding Fleischman's story, sending a message not to the prosecutor or the judge, but to True.

T
RUE'S PRELIMINARY HEARING
dragged on for a year and a half. By early 2005, as the proceedings lurched toward the final arguments, Ferri still had no idea whether Muntoni would rule that there was sufficient evidence to indict the curator.

In a final bid to demonstrate her innocence, True's attorneys called the curator to the stand in March to answer questions directly from the judge. Muntoni had treated everyone with respect during the proceedings, even showing a kind of admiration for Hecht, who had obviously lived his life unapologetically. But as True took the stand, Muntoni's line of questioning became unusually direct, revealing for the first time that he was leaning Ferri's way.

Muntoni had come to America mentally prepared to drop the case against True. All he needed to see was some documentation, any documentation, showing that the Getty had made some effort to check the provenance of the Fleischman collection, the most compelling part of Ferri's case. But no one—Fleischman, Walsh, Wight, their attorneys, or the attorneys for the Getty—could show him that documentation. Instead, Muntoni became dismayed at how Larry Fleischman had simply bought up what he could, regardless of its legal status, and how the Getty had later rushed to acquire the collection, ignoring its own policy about checking into the origins of the objects. Muntoni found it incredible that the Getty would accept such important antiquities without verifying their provenance. And with Ferri's subsequent discovery of the apparently backdated invoice, Muntoni's attitude toward the museum and True hardened. Over two days, he pushed the curator with questions reflecting his thorough knowledge of the case, the facts of which he appeared to have memorized.

In particular, Muntoni homed in on one transaction that Ferri had covered only in passing. It concerned the fragments of three proto-Corinthian pitchers that True had written to Medici about in 1992. The middleman had revealed in his letter to True that they had come from a tomb in Cerveteri. Medici had gone on to describe in detail the style of the tomb and other objects found in it. Clearly, he had been there when it had been illegally excavated, or he had been told about it in detail by the looters.

"When you received the communication from Medici that these objects were sold by him and were excavated from Cerveteri, why didn't you inform Itali an authorities?" Muntoni asked True. "What else did you need to know that they were looted and illegally exported from Italy?"

True looked as if Muntoni had pricked her with a pin.

"Probably nothing," she said.

As the curator stepped away from the stand, Muntoni gave her a sympathetic smile.

"I'm sorry," he said softly.

On April Fools' Day 2005, Muntoni indicted True for trafficking in looted antiquities and ordered her to stand trial in Rome. She was the first American curator to be criminally charged by a foreign government.

T
HE NEWS PROMPTED
amazement and anger within the Getty, but the secrecy surrounding the investigation kept word from leaking out for weeks. American newspapers, unaware of the agonizing back-and-forth with the Italians or the preliminary hearing, picked up the story late. The
Los Angeles Times
ran a front-page article about True's indictment nearly two months after Muntoni handed down his decision. Public reaction was muted, even puzzled, seeing as the matter involved arcane legal arguments in a faraway courtroom. Getty officials called the indictment a mistake, predicted that True would be exonerated, and reaffirmed that the museum had never knowingly bought looted art.

Within the art community, the indictment provoked an odd sense of cognitive dissonance. True was widely known (and often quietly criticized) as the country's most outspoken proponent of reform, an ally of Italy in its quest to end the illicit trade. No one had done more to end the practices she was now being accused of engaging in. More than two dozen of her colleagues at Los Angeles area museums signed an open letter lambasting the charges as politically motivated and calling on Munitz to spare no effort in defending the Getty curator. Marion True didn't lack supporters as she braced for an unprecedented legal fight.

A
FTER DEBBIE GRIBBON
abruptly resigned her post, a team of reporters at the
Los Angeles Times
began investigating the troubles at the Getty. In December 2004, a series of investigative stories detailing Munitz's misuse of Getty resources began hitting the front page. With $1.2 million in total compensation, he was one of the highest-paid nonprofit executives in the country and had demonstrated his "grand appetite" for lavish perks—even as he imposed budgetary austerity on the rest of the trust. A June 2005 story detailed Munitz's use of Getty staff for personal errands, his purchase of the Porsche Cayenne amid layoffs, the Getty grants he steered to friends, his first-class flights around the world with his wife on what appeared to be thinly disguised vacations—expenditures that seemed to violate IRS rules against self-dealing.

For those inside the Getty, the series displayed an alarming level of access to the Getty's confidential records, including transcripts of Munitz's dictation pool and years of expense records from the CEO's office. More than once during the back-and-forth with reporters, the Getty denied something, only to be confronted with follow-up questions citing specific details about the transaction. At one point, Munitz's top staffers made a list of the most damaging things the reporters could find. Over the course of the next year, the reporters asked about almost all of them.

Publicly, Munitz dismissed the stories, saying the complaints about his behavior came from a few disgruntled employees angry over the necessary institutional changes he had made. John Biggs, the board chairman, defended the CEO and his spending. But the June story drew a notably tart remark from U.S. senator Chuck Grassley, the Republican from Iowa who chaired the Senate Finance Committee and was moving legislation to overhaul laws governing tax-exempt organizations for the first time in thirty years. "Charities shouldn't be funding their executives' gold-plated lifestyles," Grassley said in the June 23 issue of the
Los Angeles Times.
"I'm concerned that the Getty board has been spending more time watching old episodes of 'Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous' than doing its job of protecting Getty's assets for charitable purposes."

The comment caught the eye of attorney Ronald Olson, a tightly wound, square-jawed litigator. Olson was a partner in and principal rainmaker for Munger, Tolles & Olson (MTO), a boutique Los Angeles law firm brimming with former federal prosecutors and attorneys who had clerked for the U.S. Supreme Court.

He had become one of the most powerful lawyers in California by riding to the rescue in some of the most controversial corporate cases in recent history. He had helped Merrill Lynch atone for its role in Orange County's 1994 bankruptcy—the largest municipal failure in U.S. history—with only the glancing blow of a $400 million settlement. And he had brokered an agreement that allowed Salomon Brothers to avoid criminal charges by paying a $290 million civil penalty for its 1990 bond fraud scandal.

Now that the Getty was beginning to bleed in public, Olson paid special attention, and not just because of the trust's deep pockets. The Getty board had recently tried to recruit him, and he and his wife were close friends with vice chair Louise Bryson and her husband, John, CEO of Edison International, where Olson was on the board. Olson saw trouble coming for his friend. Grassley was known for his public investigations of errant nonprofits, and after landing a blow on Munitz, it was unlikely the
Los Angeles Times
would stop digging. Olson placed an urgent call to Louise Bryson. "You're in trouble here," he told her.