CHAPTER FOUR
The Seventy-fourth General Meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) seemed as routine as the previous seventy-three such meetings. Excavators, classicists, curators, language experts, art historians, and the other practitioners of ancient-world study gathered in Philadelphia from December 28 through 30, 1972. Before the conference was over, the members would elect new members to the institute’s board of directors. The vote would be a formality, as only six nominees had been put up for the six open seats. One of the candidates was von Bothmer.
But first, the attendees got down to the core of the conference, the presentation of 111 papers—ranging from copper smelting in Cyprus to neutron activation analysis in Near Eastern archaeology to the role of ancient Egyptian tomb robbers in confusing the archaeological record of neighboring Crete through the export of their loot.
Von Bothmer, who had come down from New York, was already taking heat from his colleagues. One faction was angry that the Met was selling its coin collection to pay for the purchase of the Euphronios krater. Although the museum didn’t have much use for the coins, the collection had been on loan to the American Numismatic Society in Manhattan, on Broadway between 155th and 156th Streets, where scholars used it for research. Neither the Met nor the society had ever made copies of the coins—which would soon go back into circulation, unavailable for study.
The other faction lined up against von Bothmer believed the Met had bought a vase whose lack of published provenance pointed to probable origins in a sacked tomb. They were less concerned with how the museum raised the funds than they were with the tremendous sum paid. They figured that the rumored million-dollar price tag would only encourage more such tomb robbing.
When things looked like they couldn’t get worse for von Bothmer, it was time for him to make his presentation. The title of his paper was “The Death of Sarpedon.” And it read, in part, “One Corinthian and two Attic vases, all unpublished, add considerably to our iconography and help in the correct interpretation of other vases.”
One of the unpublished Attic vases—meaning it hadn’t been written up in an academic journal—was the now-famous krater. As von Bothmer spoke, he illustrated his talk with slides depicting the death of the Lycian prince. To nobody’s surprise, he showed images of his triumphant, career-capping acquisition, which the museum had made just three months earlier. There was Sarpedon, being lifted by Sleep and Death, on the towering krater.
The second unpublished Attic vase also depicted Sarpedon. And von Bothmer had a slide of that one, too. Up it flashed on the screen, in black and white: a kylix wine cup, signed by Euphronios as its painter.
How strange it was that the death of Sarpedon, an obscure event rarely depicted in Greek art, had somehow suddenly surfaced on two different vases by the same artist. For that matter, the appearance of any signed work by Euphronios was incredible. To archaeologists, this coincidence was further evidence of a freshly unearthed tomb. Even worse, von Bothmer’s knowledge of this unpublished, probably looted chalice—and possession of a photograph of it—proved to his colleagues that the Met curator had become involved in the illicit trade.
Von Bothmer didn’t realize that he had just ruined his career in archaeology.
Behind the scenes, the highest levels of the AIA—the country’s oldest archaeology group, with some seven thousand members—was moving against von Bothmer in the upcoming vote for the board of directors. The institute’s president, Rodney Young, famous for his excavations of the legendary King Midas’s city of Gordion in Turkey, asked James R. McCredie, the young director of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, to place his name in for election as a seventh candidate for the six open seats.
Arthur Steinberg, an archaeology professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, stepped forward as a spokesman for the two factions bent on censuring von Bothmer. Steinberg delivered a speech before the election, artfully leaving out any direct mention of von Bothmer’s name or the Met, but making it clear that many fellow archaeologists were displeased with what the curator and the museum had done.
“The grave robbers hear about those prices and ransack the tombs even more feverishly,” Steinberg said later. “The vase should have been treated as a scholarly specimen, not as a spectacle for publicity.” A root of the problem, he said, was that museum curators were not as qualified to guide the AIA as archaeologists who work in the field. “They don’t care if archaeological contexts are destroyed in the wanton despoliation of tombs,” he said.
The MIT professor then nominated McCredie. Von Bothmer, a member of the group since 1946, didn’t stand a chance. He was the only losing candidate.
“They don’t like me,” von Bothmer said afterward. “And I don’t like them.”
“He was angry for years,” says McCredie, the man who defeated him.
The krater was out of Italy’s grasp, but investigators in Rome—unaware of von Bothmer’s Philadelphia speech—turned up evidence that there was another vase related to the Met’s Euphronios that they might still be able to save from the global illicit antiquities market. Not only were they convinced that the Euphronios krater had been taken from an Etruscan tomb, but they had information that the tombaroli had found a second vase in the same burial. The search for this second vase was urgent because the Carabinieri hoped to track it down before it was sold and lost to the market like the krater had been.
Around February 1, 1973, the chief of the Carabinieri art squad, Colonel Felice Mambor, called Robert Hecht’s home, looking for the American dealer. Hecht was out at the time, and his wife took a message. When he heard that Mambor was looking for him, Hecht didn’t bother phoning him back. He just went directly to his office.
The headquarters of the art command—known as the Tutela Patrimonio Culturale, or TPC—occupies a baroque, jewel box of a building on Piazza Sant’Ignazio in central Rome, with an elegantly curved façade that looks up at the more imposing Jesuit church of Sant’Ignazio, or Saint Ignatius. The Jesuit church, in turn, is part of an impressive block of buildings that includes the very chambers in which Galileo faced the Inquisition in the seventeenth century—and the rooms in which the fate of the Met’s krater would eventually be determined in the twenty-first.
Colonel Mambor greeted Hecht in his office and began their chat by talking about a well-known antiquities connoisseur. Mambor told Hecht that he should have been helping the Carabinieri recover stolen works, and Hecht responded that if he had ever suspected there were stolen objects in museums or private collections, he would have told the owners to give them back. The American, wanting to make himself perfectly clear, added that he was in the business of dealing in art objects, not being an informant.
With those matters out of the way, Mambor said he wanted to discuss a Euphronios vase. Hecht, whose role in the Met’s acquisition had remained a closely guarded secret between him and the museum, tiptoed around the question. He said he had seen the Euphronios on exposition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and in the newspapers, and that he thought it was a real “capolavoro,” a masterpiece.
But then Mambor interrupted, according to Hecht’s version of events, and said he wasn’t asking about the Met’s Euphronios. He wanted to know about another vase—a kylix wine cup—decorated with the same subject and painted by the same artist. This chalice “had never been seen,” the colonel said.
“I’ve never seen such a thing,” Hecht responded with a straight face.
Within two weeks, and an ocean away, Hecht would reveal how untrue that statement was.
Thomas Hoving’s office at the Met sat on the mezzanine level of the museum’s south wing, facing Fifth Avenue. Among the perks was a private bathroom, but the view wasn’t great. If he bent over to look out the half-arch window, he could see the awning of the Stanhope Hotel. He could have seen the M1, M2, M3, and M4 buses heading downtown while sitting down at his desk, if he had one. Hoving didn’t have a desk—he’d had his predecessor’s removed—but rather worked at a round wooden table toward the center of the room. It was ideal for doing what he liked best: negotiating with art dealers, meeting with pesky curators, and, quite often, doing both at the same time.
Around Valentine’s Day 1973, an excited Dietrich von Bothmer arrived at Hoving’s door with a guest, Robert Hecht. The American dealer had something to offer the Met. Hoving invited them in, and the three men stood around the wooden table. Hecht pulled out a photograph that was just bigger than three by five inches. And it was in black and white. But even without the color, when Hecht handed Hoving the picture, the director could tell what it was.
“How the hell can you possibly be offering this after the stink we’re going through with the krater?” Hoving said. And more crucially, he asked, how much did Hecht want for it?
“Seventy thousand dollars,” Hecht said.
Hoving was mightily tempted.
The object was an Athenian red-figure kylix wine cup, signed by Euphronios. And it bore the image of Sleep and Death carrying the dead body of Sarpedon. This moment finally revealed the owner of the mysterious chalice—it was Robert Hecht, the same man who had sold the matching Euphronios krater to the Met.
To Hoving’s eye, this kylix was an earlier work by Euphronios—von Bothmer said it was the earliest work he’d seen by the master. The proof was in the artistry; Hoving later recalled that in the single photo he saw that day, Sarpedon looked like a log of wood, a stiff attempt by a developing painter who would achieve his full fluency on his Sarpedon krater. As a set, owning the Sarpedon chalice and krater would be like having both a young and a mature painting by Leonardo da Vinci of the same subject. Imagine displaying two versions, side by side—two Last Suppers or Mona Lisas, done by a young and an old Leonardo. This is what von Bothmer and Hoving could have for just $70,000.
Perhaps Hecht had gotten the cup from the same place he’d gotten the krater. To Hoving, whose “near-sexual pleasure” at acquiring the bigger Euphronios was turning into the pain of scrutiny over its recent history, buying another such vase with dubious origins would not be a good thing.
“This had better be a big, solid provenance,” Hoving said.
“It’s a private collection in Norway,” Hecht responded. Hoving was not amused.
“Get the hell out of here,” Hoving said. The entire meeting lasted no more than five minutes.
Hoving knew the pressure over his krater purchase was only going to increase. On February 14, 1973, he granted an interview to Richard Walter, a reporter for the Observer of London. Hoving blabbered on about the kylix that Hecht had offered him, even as he wondered about the reporter’s strange look and his odd fiddling with his coat. Hoving wasn’t surprised to learn later that the reporter had been wired with a microphone, which captured Hoving’s impromptu ode to the chalice.
“Funny thing is, I was offered today a kylix thing, shaped like that, a wine jug, whatever you call it, kylix, by Euphronios, signed by him, in bad fragments in pieces but many great lumps missing, and the subject is the carrying off [of] the dead body of Sarpedon by Sleep and Death done about twenty years before this, the krater, by the same man—totally different, stiff, awkward looking in the old tradition—so we hope maybe we can acquire it….
“The price is not very high, it’s just minuscule compared to the price of the calyx krater, but it still is, for the fragmentary condition of the thing, well, it’s a bit, well, off the record, it should be around….” Here the reporter’s published notes go off the record; he would later speak with Italian authorities who took note of the number: Hoving could see paying just $15,000, perhaps a lowball sign that he was trying to bargain with Hecht—and that perhaps he was still interested in buying the cup.
Hoving told the Observer’s Walter that the chalice’s seller wanted a higher price. “He’s not trying to go gaga on it, but it’s just a little bit off so, because it is, if I had the photograph, which I don’t, I sent it back. It is really ripped apart. Maybe we get someone to divide and give it to us.”
Walter had been investigating the Met’s Euphronios dealings for nearly three months, ever since the museum had announced the krater purchase. Now he had a revelation that took his probe in a fresh direction. Like the Carabinieri who were also trying to track down the cup, he had a missing chalice to pursue. The next step in Walter’s investigation was to talk to von Bothmer about the kylix.
When he interviewed him on February 16, von Bothmer confirmed the existence of the cup. He said the vase was ten years older than the matching krater, not twenty as Hoving had said, and he expressed unmistakable passion for the cup.
“I very much want to buy it,” von Bothmer said.
“I don’t want to have an exclusive on Sarpedon,” he said. “On the other hand, it would mean so much more to me.”
Walter had already figured out that Hecht had sold the Euphronios krater to the Met, and he was still confirming that Hecht was also the seller behind the newly surfaced chalice. “I thought I understood that both came from the same—that they were both being handled by the same person?” Walter said.
“That is one of those extraordinary coincidences, but it is literally, once again a coincidence,” von Bothmer said, pausing a moment. “There are circumstances in life and I want to make the most of them. In this case, I really do want to get this piece.”
“Isn’t it a good fortune for Robert Hecht as well, that he manages to have first the vase and then the cup?” the reporter asked.
“The other way round—the cup has been owned for a couple years,” von Bothmer said. “I saw this cup in July 1971,” he continued. “I stopped in Zurich and I saw the cup and I have my notes and my dates.”
If this were true, then the chalice had been out of the ground at least five months before the krater, upending the Italian art squad’s theory that tomb robbers had excavated the two vases together from the same grave. If von Bothmer were trying to throw investigators off, then such a date would be a perfect story to make up.
All the same, this was the first time since the Philadelphia talk that von Bothmer had gone on the record about the cup. And for the first time, he revealed where the chalice had been. Since von Bothmer’s purported viewing of the kylix in Switzerland in 1971, his museum had purchased the matching krater—making the cup that much more desirable to him. “When you have two of a kind, it takes on greater significance,” he said.
While the Observer chased its Euphronios story in New York and Europe, the New York Times covered some of the same turf. Reporter Nicholas Gage, who specialized in Mafia coverage, had traced the krater’s trail back from its arrival at the Met on August 31, 1972, to Kennedy Airport, where he uncovered the U.S. Customs declaration that Hecht had made on the same day—revealing not just the dealer’s name but that he had valued the vase at $1 million—and then back to Zurich, which Hecht had listed as his place of residence. In Switzerland, Gage cultivated sources in the art world and came up with the rumors that tombaroli near Rome had uncovered the krater in late 1971 and sold it to Hecht. That led the reporter to Rome, where on Saturday, February 17, 1973, Hecht agreed to meet Gage over a dinner of pasta, wine, fruit, and brownies at the Hecht home on the Aventine Hill.
Hecht was his usual cagey self. When Gage asked him if he had seen the Euphronios krater, Hecht said he had seen it at the Met.
But was that the only time he had seen it?
“No, I’ve seen it before,” Hecht said, and then changed the subject. Gage soon let on that he knew much more—including the date Hecht had brought the krater to New York, and on which TWA flight.
“Have you seen my tax returns, too?” Hecht said, and then did his best to convince Gage that the stories about the vase being smuggled out of Italy were lies. Hecht asked the reporter not to print that he’d been the seller, a plea that Hecht’s wife repeated when she drove him home after dinner. Hecht feared the Italians would expel him from the country if they learned about his role.
The following day—a Sunday—Hecht left Italy, heading to the Middle East. That same day, Gage filed his story, and the Times ran the front-page scoop on Monday, February 19, 1973, under the headline “How the Metropolitan Acquired ‘The Finest Greek Vase There Is,’” publicly naming Hecht for the first time as the seller of the vase. An accompanying piece by art reporter David L. Shirey was devoted to an interview with von Bothmer, who defended the purchase—and belittled the concerns of archaeologists who feared that tombs had been robbed and archaeological material lost in pursuit of a work of beauty with a high market value.
To von Bothmer, all that mattered was what the vase could tell the world about Euphronios and Greek vases. “I want to know where it was made, who did it and when,” he told Shirey. The rich journey it had taken since—from Greece to Italy, to an Etruscan tomb, and all the steps between—seemed irrelevant to the curator. “I want to know whether it is genuine or fake. Its intermediate history is not important to archaeology. Why can’t people look at it simply as archaeologists do, as an art object.”
When Shirey asked him if he was concerned that the krater had been smuggled from Italy, von Bothmer replied: “I am not suspecting anything. The thing I was concerned about was whether the object was genuine, whether it was worth the money we spent on it.”
Hoving knew better and told von Bothmer to stop talking with reporters. But then Hoving the showman couldn’t keep his mouth shut either. He granted a television interview while standing next to the krater at the museum. By then the vase was spotlighted in its own vitrine in the round, its own circular gallery designed by a retail display expert whom Hoving had hired from his father’s store farther down Fifth Avenue, Tiffany & Co. As Hoving defended his purchase in front of the TV camera, he couldn’t resist clowning around, and he coined a nickname for the krater that would stick for years.
He called it the “Hot Pot.”
Hecht, in the meantime, was in Beirut on the same day that the Times exposed his role in the krater affair. He needed to see Dikran Sarrafian, and fast. Not only had the Italians started a probe weeks before, but now this media attention was going to force him to come up with as much paperwork as possible to explain the vase’s licit origins. If he could convince the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s director that there was nothing to the Italian theory that the krater had been looted, then his problems would be solved. And maybe, if he could persuade the Carabinieri that the krater was from an old collection and not a fresh excavation, then he could return to his family in Rome without fear of arrest.
During the one-day visit to Beirut, Hecht found Sarrafian and had him sign an official-seeming affidavit, dated February 19 and decorated with plenty of stamps and seals. It attested to the origins of a Euphronios vase acquired by his father in 1920 and consigned by Sarrafian to Hecht for sale in Zurich in 1971. “Mr. Robert Hecht was warned that I was not responsible for any missing pieces,” it said.
Hecht got what he’d come for. But the document, meant to clear the krater’s name, would also raise more doubts. Why had the Met said the vase had been in a private collection since before World War I, when Sarrafian was now saying his father bought it years later, in 1920? And why did Sarrafian write about missing pieces when the Met’s krater was virtually intact?
Hecht didn’t have time in his frantic, rear-covering globetrot to iron out such details. The American dealer flew to Zurich, where he checked into the Hotel Savoie. It was no coincidence that Zurich was where he had restored the Euphronios krater, and also where he still stored his most valuable unsold merchandise. Soon the public would learn of the second Euphronios vase that had been buried, many centuries before, not far from the Met’s krater.
As Hecht was gathering his paperwork in Lebanon, Nicholas Gage had been working police contacts in Rome, picking up clues to the existence of the missing Euphronios chalice. “Sources close to the investigation” told him of the efforts to track down a second ancient pot, and he published a brief mention of this in a story published on Tuesday, February 20, 1973. “The police, convinced that the vase came from an Etruscan tomb, believe that the second vase, comparable in importance to the Euphronios krater, was also smuggled out of Italy,” he wrote.
The tidbit was all but lost in the sensational stream of revelations about the Met’s better-known krater purchase. Later that day, the Met’s von Bothmer and Hecht’s lawyer in Rome disclosed the name of seller of the vase—Lebanese collector Dikran Sarrafian—for whom Hecht claimed to have acted as a middleman. The Met even gave the Times copies of letters said to be from Sarrafian to Hecht, discussing the vase sale. One was dated July 10, 1971—nearly half a year before the Cerveteri dig—and it spoke of wanting to sell a “red-figured crater which I have had so long” for a million dollars. Was the misspelling of krater as “crater” an honest error by Sarrafian or another example of Hecht’s coded language? If so, what was the American dealer trying to say?
For the Times’s Gage, finally having the name and location of the alleged seller of the krater was enough to get him on a plane to Beirut, as he followed Hecht’s path just two days behind. The reporter found Sarrafian, who told him about Hecht’s earlier visit (“He came to tell me newspaper people would be calling me”), which added to the muddled picture of contradictions. Among them, he said he never expected the krater to bring him much money, even though one of the letters purportedly from him to Hecht said he wanted a million dollars for it. He said he had never seen the vase intact and had simply sent the hatbox full of fragments to friends in Zurich who had turned them over to Hecht.
Gage’s story also included reporting from Rome, which added a tantalizing detail to the slowly emerging picture of a mysterious second vase.
Not only had the Carabinieri art squad chief, Colonel Mambor, finally confirmed that the police were seeking a second pot, but, “The Italian police have said they had information that Mr. Hecht had offered two separate vases for sale last year in Europe and the United States,” Gage wrote. The Carabinieri commander was also steamed that Hecht had lied under questioning at his office about knowing nothing about the Euphronios vases. The press and the police were closing in on Hecht and a missing cup.
Sarrafian’s comments contradicting Hecht’s official story of the pot’s origins raised alarms at the Met. Hoving, battered by the bad publicity and needing to coordinate a defense for the krater’s legitimacy, demanded that Hecht explain the inconsistencies. Hecht checked out of the Hotel Savoie in Zurich and flew to New York. In just five days, Hecht covered at least four countries on three continents to put out the Euphronios fire.
When Hecht arrived in New York, he got together with Hoving at the museum director’s apartment near the Met, along with Hoving’s number two, Ted Rousseau, in-house counsel Ashton Hawkins, von Bothmer, and the Met’s registrar, John Buchanan. Although the men from the Met were tense, Hecht was “jauntier than I had ever seen him,” Hoving recalled. Hecht told the men he had just returned from Beirut with a piece of paper that would solve their problems. He handed over the affidavit, which the Met director read.
Hoving thought Sarrafian’s disclaimer about any missing fragments was odd, considering that the Met’s krater was complete. Only decades later he would solve the mystery of what Sarrafian meant. For the moment he was happy to have the paperwork, as dubious as it might be.
The men took a lunch break, and Hecht asked Hoving if he could use a “secure phone” in another room to call his lawyer. Hoving, who not for the first time was short on scruples, practically put his ear to the door. Hecht spoke Italian, but Hoving, who had learned Italian when he dug in Italy as a Princeton graduate student, followed along as the dealer asked his lawyer about the suspected tombaroli, both their names and, repeatedly, when the alleged dig had occurred.
“Hanno le fotografie?” Hecht asked. Do they have photographs? “No? Bene,” Hecht said. Great!
As soon as Hecht finished, he came out, said he had to catch a flight to Zurich, and left.
On Friday, February 23, the day of Hecht’s meeting with Hoving, the Times dished out one more clue about the missing, second vase. The detail was buried in a front-page story that said Italian police had identified the tomb robber who delivered the krater to Hecht after digging it up at Sant’Angelo in Cerveteri. “The loot was reported to include the Metropolitan’s krater and a Greek cup, smaller but perhaps more precious…,” the story said.
This was enough information to jar the memory of an archaeologist who just happened to know of a cup that matched that description. He’d seen a slide of it at a lecture in Philadelphia by the Met curator who had just bought the controversial krater. Maybe, the archaeologist wondered, there was a connection between the black-and-white slide von Bothmer had shown and the missing vase the Italians were now seeking. He decided to find out. He phoned John L. Hess, a reporter at the Times who was helping Gage investigate the krater. Hess had been a Paris correspondent and was about to take up a short stint as acting food editor, writing on restaurants and cuisine. He jumped on the tip.
The archaeologist told Hess about von Bothmer’s lecture on Sarpedon on ancient vases, and how it had included slides not just of the Met’s Euphronios krater, but an earlier Euphronios depiction of Sarpedon on a “lovely little kylix cup.” Following the tip, Hess called von Bothmer, who confirmed the story, “sadly and wearily,” Hess recalled. Von Bothmer said he had a photo of the cup but declined to comment on where it had come from and “wouldn’t know” who owned it. “There is no source to a cup,” he said. “A cup is a cup.”
In that case, Hess asked, where was it?
“It’s supposed to be in Norway,” von Bothmer said. This was a new version of the cup’s whereabouts that seemingly contradicted the story he had told the Observer just days earlier, saying he had seen the cup in Zurich.
Von Bothmer was in no mood to play it straight with reporters. He wouldn’t give Hess a copy of the photograph of the kylix, and he complained about the harassment from the press, which had been focusing on the provenance of the Euphronios pots—and not the vases as artworks. “Nobody ever asks me about style,” the curator said. In his world, what was important was the decoration on a vase. On that basis, he added his own analysis of the modern Euphronios firestorm, using an ancient source.
“Euphronios had only one serious rival, Euthemydes,” he said. “He once wrote on a vase, ‘unlike anything Euphronios ever did.’ I tell myself that somewhere behind this is Euthemydes, trying to get even.”
On February 24,1973, a Saturday, the Times ran Hess’s report on the second Euphronios, which he described as a kylix about four inches high. He wrote, “It was rumored that the cup was on the market for $15,000, that the photograph had been shown to visitors in the Metropolitan and that another museum had refused to buy it.”
Hess’s colleague Gage, who had flown back from Beirut to Rome, worked to move the story forward. Italian prosecutors had already said that four alleged tombaroli were under investigation in the krater case, and he needed to find out who they were. Acting on a tip, he drove to Cerveteri with an interpreter and went door-to-door looking for a man named il Ciccione—“fatty.” They found him in a two-room stone house, barefoot and with a day’s growth of beard. The New York Times had tracked down none other than Armando Cenere, one of the lookouts from the dig. Still feeling underpaid for his efforts in uncovering a million-dollar vase, Cenere talked and talked as he sat by the stove in the house.
He told of the eight days it took to clear the tomb, of his work as a lookout, and of the fragment of a vase—bigger than a man’s hand—on which he saw the picture of “a man who was bleeding.”
Gage showed Cenere a photo of the Met’s krater, fully restored. The farmhand picked out the portion with Sarpedon as what he had seen. With crayon he even drew a line, right above Sarpedon’s knees, where the fragment had ended. The location of his line was a perfect match to the actual fissure on the vase.
The next day, after having their scoops nibbled away at by the New York Times, the reporters from the Observer finally came out with the results of their fourteen-week investigation. They splashed photos of the krater, Hecht, Sarrafian, and a scene of “illegal digging” in Etruria across the top of the front page under a headline: “The Million-Dollar Vase…The Men Who Sold It to the Met…And Where It May Have Come From.”
But reporters Richard Walter and Peter Deeley led their story with the revelation about the smaller twin of the Met’s vase.
“Police in New York and Rome are being given by the Observer a full description of an important Ancient Greek cup that is being offered for sale to the Metropolitan by Robert Emanuel Hecht,” they wrote. The cup, like the Met’s krater, had been painted by Euphronios with the scene of Sarpedon’s death. As a result of their findings, a Rome prosecutor, Domenico Sica, had on the previous day summoned four men to his office who could be charged in the looting of the krater and perhaps the chalice, too. “Until recently the cup was known to be in a safe-deposit box in Zurich in Hecht’s name,” they wrote.
Unlike the Met’s krater, “the cup is not in near perfect condition, lacking base and handles. For this reason, says the museum, the price being asked for it is only ‘something in excess’ of $15,000,” the Observer reported, adding other details that would become crucial in tracing the work: the kylix was signed by Euphronios, was about ten inches in diameter, and had its “base stem and handles missing.” Unlike the Met’s krater, “Sarpedon is bearded and being borne on the shoulders of Sleep and Death.” Neither of those two deities was depicted on the cup having wings, also in contrast to the larger vase in New York.
Then the reporters revealed that von Bothmer told them he had first seen the cup in Zurich in July 1971, and that he was now keen to buy it to complement the Met’s celebrated krater.
The Observer reporters connected some of the dots. “…experts believe that both may have come from the same source—an Etruscan tomb north of Rome,” they wrote. And they backed up the suspicion, citing unnamed officials at the government’s Villa Giulia museum in Rome as having been told that tomb robbers had made a “big find” in 1971 in the Monte Abbatone area of Cerveteri. Monte Abbatone rises above the corner of Cerveteri known alternately as Sant’Angelo and Sant’Antonio—the spot where the tombaroli had uncovered the krater.
Adding another detail, the Observer said that a London archaeologist had seen a dealer’s price list circulating in Pisa in 1972 that included the kylix. Could that mean the cup was still in Italy? For the moment, the most important development was that the Italian police, having been made aware of the chalice’s existence, were now trying to recover the cup, with the Carabinieri art squad’s commander, Colonel Mambor, taking the lead. He was even asking the New York Police Department for help getting his hands on the black-and-white slides that von Bothmer had recklessly shown in Philadelphia in December 1972.
For his part, von Bothmer just hurt his archaeological reputation even more: “These objects are not found in tombs. They are found in the alluvial garbage for the most part that has been slowly working its way to the surface from hundreds of years of ploughed fields,” the Met curator said. He should have known better. All the reporters needed to do was go to Cerveteri and document any number of freshly looted tombs—which is exactly what they did, describing a half dozen such sites, scattered with shards of discarded pot fragments and other archaeological evidence that had been destroyed forever.
But von Bothmer was a man smitten by a pot. “If you took it away from me,” he said of the krater, “I would just have to go where it then is.” Maybe he was blinded by love.
In both Italy and the United States, police and prosecutors jumped on the case that the newspapers had cracked open. On the morning of February 25, 1973, the Civitavecchia prosecutor, Sica, visited the site of the allegedly looted tomb, accompanied by the Italian art squad commander Felice Mambor and some of his Carabinieri assistants. The police hoped they could find some stray fragments of the Euphronios krater that they could then use to prove that the Met’s vase had come from Cerveteri—and win the krater’s return. The prosecutor, for his part, sought to build a case against Hecht and the alleged tombaroli that he could bring to trial.
Instead, they wasted their Sunday. The prosecutor and the police failed to find the tomb, which was now beneath at least nine feet of soil, following the literal cover-up of the site, first by the tomb robbers and then by the Guardia di Finanza.
In New York, the Federal Bureau of Investigation joined the New York Police Department in the probe, interrogating von Bothmer, who told them of the other vase by Euphronios that Hecht had offered to the Met for $70,000.
But where was it? Previously, von Bothmer had only pinpointed the location as Zurich, but under the pressure of a police probe, he revealed more. He had seen the cup in 1971 at the home of Fritz Bürki, the man who had restored the Euphronios krater. “It was in a sandbox,” von Bothmer told the investigators of the chalice, describing a typical setup of vase restorers who often use a round mound of sand to support the fragments; laying them flat, without the vase’s contours, would make it harder to figure out how the shards fit together and how the object originally looked.
“Its condition was not nearly so good as the condition of the Met vase. I haven’t seen it since except in photographs,” von Bothmer said. He added that he did not know who had given the cup to Bürki to restore—or where it had ended up since.
After following Hecht around the globe for a week and a half, always one step behind, the Times finally caught up to him, reaching him by telephone at 7:30 A.M. on February 28, 1973, in his room at Zurich’s Hotel Savoie. The chat with reporter David L. Shirey began with Hecht asking, “How did you find me?” and lasted two hours. Hecht even gave up his plans for a morning round of tennis. Asked if he planned to return to Italy, he joked that it depended on whether he would be sent to jail. “I want to see if they plan to give me free room and board,” he said.
Hecht also said he was flummoxed that the Carabinieri art squad commander was calling him a liar for saying he knew nothing about the Met’s krater. “He said that he was talking about another Euphronios vase. I said I knew nothing about that,” Hecht said.
But what about the Observer report that he had offered the Sarpedon kylix to the Met—a report based on interviews with Hoving and von Bothmer?
“I have never seen a Euphronios cup,” Hecht said. “I should pressure the Observer into proving that I have a cup in my vault. I used to box and accusations of this nature can be called below the belt.”
Just when it looked like the investigations into the krater and kylix were making sense, ancient pottery fragments began to appear. The mystery of the matching vases emerged as literal puzzle pieces.
First, on March 5, 1973, Italian police said they seized shards, attributed to Euphronios, from the Cerveteri home of a tombarolo who wasn’t part of the gang that had excavated at Greppe Sant’Angelo. Then, by another account, Cenere took the prosecutor and investigators to a tomb site where they recovered some other vase fragments, supposedly on Cerveteri’s Monte Abbatone, a distinct distance from Sant’Angelo.
The flurry of fragments intensified when an anonymous phone call came in to the Cerveteri Carabinieri station on March 30. Marshal Enea Pontecorvo, the top local officer investigating the Euphronios case, listened to the man on the line.
There was a package that the police should pick up, the man said. It could be found in a church near Cerveteri. And it contained fragments of the Met’s Euphronios krater; the caller said the fragments had been found in an Etruscan tomb in 1971. Now the man “wanted to get rid of” them. He had made the drop in the chapel, rather than turning them in himself, because he didn’t want to get wrapped up in the Italian legal system.
When the Carabinieri arrived at the small church, they found a bundle wrapped in newspaper. Inside were fragments with the familiar orange glow and black shine of Euphronios’s work. Four of the bigger slivers and wedges of pottery were painted with black and gold palmettes that seemed to match the lip of the Met’s krater. Some were about as long as a pack of cigarettes, and somewhat narrower.
The Carabinieri turned the fragments over to Italian prosecutors, who decided they needed to win access to the Sarpedon krater to see if the pieces fit anywhere on the Met’s vase.
And then there were more. During the second week of May 1973, someone sent the Carabinieri a letter, accompanied by fifteen vase shards painted in Euphronios’s distinct style. The letter said the fragments had been excavated in Cerveteri a century before. Taken together, the fragments and letter were meant to give the impression that the krater, the pieces left in the church, and the new fifteen shards had all been dug up before 1939, when Italy enacted its antiquities law.
The police suspected that the person who sent the fifteen fragments had been involved in the sale of the krater to the Met and was trying to stymie the Italian probe. Whether or not that was the case, the fragments eventually became very useful.
With investigators focusing part of their probe on Greppe Sant’Angelo, it was natural that they would want to speak with one of the men who owned the plot of land, Giacomo Medici. In April 1973, as the vase fragments were surfacing, the Carabinieri art squad commander, Mambor, summoned Medici to talk at the unit’s baroque headquarters on Piazza Sant’Ignazio, the same place where Hecht had met with the officer a few months before.
Mambor started with small talk—about Medici’s family, about how the Lazio soccer squad was faring—before getting down to business. In the company of two other officers, Mambor questioned Medici as a witness, a status distinct from an interrogation as a suspect—the status that Hecht had had a few months earlier, giving him the right to have a lawyer present.
Mambor wanted to know what Medici knew about the Euphronios krater. Did Medici know if it came from Cerveteri?
“No,” Medici said.
Did he know if the vase had come from Robert Hecht?
“No.”
Had Medici seen photos of the krater?
“No,” Medici said again.
After four hours, Medici was free to go, but his legal odyssey had just begun.
As the evidence piled up, it seemed the police and prosecutors would soon be able to bring Hecht and the suspected tomb robbers to trial. By June 1973, the Italians had even won a warrant for Hecht’s arrest on suspicion that he illegally purchased and exported the krater. Hecht, for his part, was nowhere to be found in Italy.
A year after the Met bought his krater, Medici was beginning to build an international reputation among fellow dealers, having supplied the world’s most expensive pot to the Western Hemisphere’s biggest art museum. But his moment of triumph was soon spoiled.
Medici’s brother Roberto was six years older than Giacomo and owned a stall at the Porta Portese outdoor Sunday market, across the river from Rome’s slaughterhouses. He supported his wife and two children, nine-year-old Pina and four-year-old Anna Maria, mostly by selling antique furniture, and on June 7, 1973, he managed to buy a Ford Taunus 1600, the same European-made Ford that Giacomo had already upgraded to in the 1960s. To gather goods for the Sunday market, Roberto, who was forty years old, would make occasional shopping trips to outlying towns where he could find centuries-old treasures. Another merchant from Porta Portese, fifty-year-old Ferdinando Matteucci, often joined him. At most, they were away from Rome for two days. And they always called home if they were going to be late.
On Monday, August 27, with about 10 million lire on them, Roberto and his friend started their drive down to Naples. As far as their spouses knew, they were heading to the south to gather inventory. “We’ll be back this evening, don’t worry about us,” they said as they left.
At the same time, another man left Rome for Naples, an emissary of the Turin antiquities dealer Mario Bruno, named Giovanni Chiselna. Chiselna, a young man from the impoverished Brindisi province in the southern “heel” of Italy, had instructions to meet Roberto Medici to conclude the purchase of an important antiquity on behalf of Bruno—the same man with whom Giacomo Medici owned the tomb site in Cerveteri’s Greppe Sant’Angelo.
They all arrived safely in Naples and conducted their meeting around noon—presumably with Chiselna acting for the buyer, Roberto Medici and his friend acting as middlemen, and a third party supplying the artifact. Then they parted ways.
That was Monday. Tuesday and then Wednesday ticked by, and Roberto’s wife heard nothing from her husband. Concerned that his older brother hadn’t returned from his trip to the south for nearly a week, Giacomo Medici helped lead the two families’ search for the missing men. They spent their Sunday on September 2,1973, searching the two merchants’ hangouts around Rome.
The nature of the men’s work was immediately suspected as part of the mystery. “The trade in ancient goods has a clandestine market where great interests and contraband intersect,” the Rome newspaper, Il Messaggero, pointed out as it splashed the news of the disappearance on its front page.
Word eventually came. The Carabinieri left a note for Roberto Medici’s wife, Michelina Rossetti, directing her to go to a tiny town outside Rome, called San Cesareo, to pick up Roberto’s car. The police hadn’t found her husband, but they had found his Ford. When she contacted the Carabinieri to learn more, she got an even odder, and more disturbing bit of news: a farmer had found the car on a narrow country lane, almost completely destroyed by fire.
What little remained of the steel shell included the front license plate, “L94867 ROMA,” from which the Carabinieri had traced the car to Roberto Medici. But that plate was the only sign of Medici or his friend. Investigators found no trace of any human remains in the charred chassis.
The police sorted through the possible explanations. If this had been a kidnapping, there would have been a demand for ransom. Highway robbery was a more likely explanation. But the police had another idea of what might be going on. They focused their investigation on “all the area targeted by tombaroli who feed the clandestine traffic in Etruscan objects.” The speculation was that Euphronios had something to do with this—and that Roberto had been murdered by Giacomo Medici’s rivals who were jealous of the younger brother’s sale of the million-dollar krater.
The connection to Euphronios wasn’t pure speculation, either, because Roberto had disappeared on a trip to do an antiquities deal that involved Bruno, the co-owner of the plot of land where tomb robbers had found the Met’s krater, and where the police also suspected a smaller, matching kylix had been clandestinely excavated. The Carabinieri showed all signs of taking the krater into consideration, extending their probe to Turin, the home of Mario Bruno, and Civitavecchia—the jurisdiction that covers the necropolises of Cerveteri.
On Friday, September 7, 1973, the police flew Bruno from Turin to Rome, where they began questioning him at a Carabinieri station near the Vatican. The interrogation lasted late into the night, but Bruno proved to be a dead end at explaining the missing men and the burned-out car.
Nobody has ever found Roberto Medici or his remains. And since then Giacomo Medici has never traveled south of Rome, except for one trip to the antiquities museum in Naples.
In New York, the krater scandal that had led to von Bothmer’s ostracizing by the members of the American Institute of Archaeology had the opposite effect on his career at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. On September 18, 1973, the museum announced his promotion, changing his title from “curator” of the Greek and Roman art department to “chairman.”
Von Bothmer’s promotion was practically a footnote to a longer list of hirings and retirings in which a generational change in the museum’s leadership began to take shape. Theodore Rousseau, the vice director and curator in chief who had been at Hoving’s side for the krater purchase—including that sunny morning in Zurich when they first saw the vase—was stepping down at the end of the year. To take over some of his duties, the Met had hired the director of Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts, Philippe de Montebello.
De Montebello, a thirty-seven-year-old who would hold the title of vice director of curatorial affairs, was to start on February 1, 1974. He was no stranger to the Met and its acquisitional adventures, having started his career there in 1963 in the European paintings department, and working for two years under Hoving’s directorship until he took the Houston job in 1969. The stint in Texas had been a fine way for the French-born, New York-reared, Harvard-educated curator to get the management experience he would need to help lead the Met. One day he would even get a chance to guide the museum out of the Euphronios mess that had developed while he was away. The incredible thing was how long it would actually take for de Montebello to undo the damage.
As much as the mystery of Roberto Medici’s disappearance captured the attention and imagination of Romans and the local newspaper reporters during the summer of 1973, the episode was one in a long string of murders, kidnappings, and other violent crimes that plagued Italy at the time. In 1973, Italy was more like a third-world country than the tourist magnet it has since become. A cholera outbreak in Naples pushed Roberto Medici’s disappearance from the front page.
And the kidnapping in Italy of seventeen-year-old Paul Getty—the grandson of the oil billionaire J. Paul Getty—was even more sensational. In the prolonged ransom negotiations, the elder Getty refused to pay up, fearing it would endanger his other grandchildren. Then the Italian kidnappers cut off the young Getty’s ear and mailed it to Il Messaggero. The same newspaper that had tried to solve the mystery of Roberto Medici’s burned car had turned instead to publishing, on November 11, 1973, a photograph of the severed ear, plus attached hair and blood, in the plastic bag in which the kidnappers had sent it. “We Have Received the Ear of Paul Getty” the headline screamed.
It was no wonder that the Italian police didn’t have time or resources to crack down on every tomb robber or smuggler.
After the shock of the severed ear, J. Paul Getty won his grandson’s freedom by paying a ransom estimated to be some $2.8 million. And then the billionaire set about building a museum that would be filled with antiquities and make headlines again for the names Medici, Getty, and, of course, Euphronios.
Nearly a year had passed since Medici and Bruno had bought the Cerveteri land. Not surprisingly, they hadn’t made any applications to the archaeological authorities to carry out official excavations on the site. They had, however, begun construction there—spending what they claimed was some 40 million lire, or $67,000—to transform the plot into a farm for raising free-range boar.
Was it just a coincidence that two antiquities dealers suddenly decided to invest in pork production on a site that had yielded the world’s most expensive work of ancient art? Or were they establishing an elaborate cover story for their interest in the Etruscan necropolis?
The ruse couldn’t last. Medici received a registered letter at his home on Viale Vaticano in Rome, sent by the Ministry of Public Instruction. To Medici’s surprise, the ministry had put a block on the land before he bought it, and now it was going a step further. As of October 30, 1973, the ministry exercised its right to “preempt” the property, starting the process of seizing the Cerveteri plot under the 1939 antiquities law. Making matters worse, the government would reimburse Medici and Bruno based on a fake purchase price of just 2.8 million lire, a lowball figure they had declared to avoid taxes on the 21 million lire that they had actually paid.
If the two antiquities dealers wanted to recoup some of the money they were about to lose on their investment in the land, they would need to find a way to profit from the treasures still buried there.