CHAPTER SIX
The Getty and its antiquities chief, Jiri Frel, were honored to have Euphronios’s previously unseen Sarpedon chalice—along with the newly surfaced fragmentary krater—because they knew it enhanced the prestige of their fledgling museum. And Bunker Hunt knew that having a cultural institution like the Getty give the vases its stamp of approval enhanced the value of his investment; from then on, the chalice and fragmentary krater would have “J. Paul Getty Museum” as part of their provenance. Bruce McNall simply got points for arranging a loan that pleased both his client, Hunt, and the museum whose prestige he needed to maintain his image in the art trade.
And there was more. One of the antiquities world’s odd rituals is the process of publishing an object. If an artifact has never been written about in a scholarly journal—either because it has just been excavated by an archaeologist or has suddenly surfaced on the market—some lucky academic gets to be the first to describe the thing. Such articles usually involve detailed technical data such as the object’s dimensions and a systematic accounting of all its decorations. If an artifact is unsigned by its maker, the scholar who publishes the object gets the first shot at saying which artist he or she thinks most likely painted, potted, or carved the thing. If an artifact is signed—particularly by a superstar like Euphronios—this person gets to bask in the glory of a new masterpiece. In the case of the Sarpedon chalice and the fragmentary krater, the lucky man was Martin Robertson, a former Oxford don who had held the title of the university’s Lincoln Professor of Classical Archaeology, Sir John Beazley’s old post.
Professor Robertson, who had followed in the footsteps of von Bothmer’s mentor, had the good fortune of being a Visiting Scholar at the Getty from January through May 1980. He was present in Malibu when Bunker Hunt’s two Euphronioses arrived, and he set about preparing the academic article that would mark their official debut. He soaked up every detail of the Sarpedon chalice, which until then had been described only in vague and sometimes contradictory terms by von Bothmer and Hoving.
He made measurements. The cup stood 11.5 centimeters high, had a diameter of 33.0 centimeters at its rim, and was 11.8 centimeters at its foot. While heavily restored—particularly on the B-side of the cup, opposite the Sarpedon A-side—the chalice was largely intact, missing just half of one of its two handles. Contrary to one of Hoving’s descriptions, the kylix was not missing its base. In fact, that was where Euphronios had signed his name. As for who had potted the streamline wine vessel, the Getty’s Frel told Robertson that, in his expert opinion, a clay-working contemporary of Euphronios, named Kachrylion, had molded the chalice. Robertson would go with that in his article.
Just as McNall’s arrangement to display the chalice at the Getty benefited everyone involved, so would Robertson’s publication of the pieces. Not only did he get the scoop, but he published it in the J. Paul Getty Museum Journal, handing the museum another bit of the glory. Bunker Hunt surely benefited, too, for now his Euphronios vases had an additional pedigree: an association with Oxford, via Robertson’s imprimatur, similar to that which the Oxford archaeology lab gave when it tested the Sarpedon krater for the Met. The two new Euphronioses, previously lacking any publicly known life stories, gained some history with the article’s publication. The value of modern paper trails for objects missing their ancient origins cannot be underestimated. Robertson’s article in the Getty journal scored Bunker Hunt a prestigious bibliography entry for an auction catalog if he ever needed to sell off the pieces.
In all, Bunker Hunt’s two Euphronioses spent just less than a year in Malibu. On December 9, 1980, the Getty shipped off the chalice and fragmentary krater together, presumably to Hunt’s home in Texas, although to this day the Getty will not say where they sent them.
A few months later, in 1981, the Getty published Robertson’s article, showing pictures of the chalice for the first time. The black-and-white photographs couldn’t fully depict the red blood oozing from Sarpedon’s wounds, just under his right breast and left collarbone. But they did present the drama of the bearded Death, heaving the fallen son of Zeus over his shoulder as the similarly bearded Sleep lifted Sarpedon’s legs. The world could finally see an image of the Sarpedon krater’s missing twin—even if the cup’s ownership was still listed in the article as “anonymous” and the chalice’s location was again unknown.
In 1982, Giacomo Medici’s sometimes mentor, the Greek dealer Koutoulakis, became enchanted with a type of vase known as a Caeretan hydria, a unique Etruscan-made pot that flourished briefly and was only made in Caere—today’s Cerveteri. At around the same time that Euphronios was starting his career in Athens, two of his faraway counterparts in Italy were potting and painting their own ceramic gems. They used a black-and-white technique, ignoring the red-figure fad coming out of Athens. The motifs took their inspiration from Greek myth, which had been adopted in part by the Etruscans for their belief systems. Heracles was a prime example. The Etruscans imported this foreign hero and his tales, and then transformed him into a god. They dedicated temples to him and popularized his feats of strength on the pots they painted.
One such vase was coming up for sale at Christie’s in London on July 2, 1982. It depicted Heracles in one of his famous twelve labors: battling the Hydra, a many-headed monster with the body of a serpent. As pots went, this one was special because its great provenance came from a legitimately old and documented European collection. Its owners had even loaned it for display at the British Museum from 1979 until deciding to sell it.
Medici and Koutoulakis struck a deal. They wouldn’t compete with each other at the sale. Instead of driving up the price in a bidding war, Medici would buy it and then trade it to Koutoulakis for other artifacts. The plan worked. Medici won Lot 252, the Caeretan hydria with a Hydra, for just 162,000 pounds. Then, according to Medici’s version of events, Koutoulakis gave Medici something he desperately wanted: a set of twenty red-figure plates, made in Athens at the time of Euphronios.
Koutoulakis told Medici that the plates came from an old, unpublished collection, that of the late Charles Gillet of Lausanne, Switzerland, whose name is cited frequently in auction catalogs as a source for antiquities. Toward the end of 1982, Medici says he and Koutoulakis made the swap: the hydria for the twenty plates.
Medici thought he had gotten the better of the deal with the twenty ceramic plates. These were no ordinary bits of dinnerware, but the twenty-five-hundred-year-old cousins of the prized work done by Euphronios and his colleagues in Athens. These twenty plates, most of which were entirely intact, were also done in the style Euphronios popularized. Though not signed by any artist, they were the only such set of plates to survive until modern times. Wiped clean, they’d be ready for a banquet today.
Medici wasn’t planning on hosting any dinner parties with his new dishes. He had been increasing his international dealings, and these Attic plates could be his ticket to a deal as big as the Euphronios krater that launched his career. For now, he was making only tentative moves onto the turf of the big dealers such as Robert Hecht. In 1982, Medici’s Swiss-based French colleague, Christian Boursaud, a man ten years his junior, started selling artifacts through Sotheby’s. He was Medici’s front man. Still, Sotheby’s wasn’t the big leagues. The auction houses did the midsized deals. Medici needed a contact at a rich, American museum.
Having closed down his shop in Rome, Medici put the finishing touches on a new gallery in Geneva, the site where he and Boursaud had settled. Medici needed Boursaud, because Medici didn’t have the Swiss residency required to legally run his own business. He also needed someone to mind the shop while he was either home in Italy or out gathering merchandise they would sell. According to the arrangement, the gallery would pay Boursaud a salary for being there during working hours, and he and Medici would split the profit from sales, fifty-fifty, after Medici made back whatever he had spent on the objects in the first place.
They opened for business in February 1983 at 12 Grand’Rue, Geneva—a modest storefront in a ritzy district. As part of Medici’s trade for the twenty plates, Koutoulakis even let Medici keep the hydria with the Hydra in the window of the new gallery, hoping to sell the vase on consignment to the gallery. Medici even named his new shop the Hydra Galerie, after the creature depicted on the vase.
To celebrate the opening, Medici hosted a reception with liquor and mixers arranged on a self-serve bar covered by a white tablecloth—Gordon’s gin and Johnnie Walker whiskey alongside rows of glass Coca-Cola, Evian, and Perrier bottles. Spotlights in the ceiling illuminated similarly displayed antiquities: marble statue fragments on pedestals along the walls, ceramics in shelved glass cases. Ashtrays and matchbooks were arranged around the room for Medici’s guests. They even printed Hydra Galerie calling cards that were subtitled “Art of Ancient Egypt, the Near East, Greece and Rome” and bore an image of the namesake multiheaded monster that graced the vase in the front window. With his business in place, Medici was ready to negotiate what he hoped would be the biggest payoff of his career. To sell the plates, he would get in touch with his old friend, Robert Hecht.
For the first time since the Getty shipped off the chalice at the end of 1980, the elusive Euphronios surfaced again—and it was going on tour. Along with Bunker Hunt’s fragmentary Euphronios krater, the chalice would headline a traveling exhibit of the antiquities collections that Bunker and his brother, William Herbert Hunt, had bought, mostly from Hollywood dealer McNall. The tour of the exhibit, which they dubbed Wealth of the Ancient World, began practically in the Hunts’ backyard, at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, where the vases, statues, and coins went on display from June 25 through September 18, 1983. From there the Sarpedon cup went to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond from October 19 through December 11, 1983, followed by the Detroit Institute of Arts from February 1 through March 22, 1984. The chalice’s travels wrapped up nearly a year after they began, landing back near Bunker Hunt’s home at the Dallas Museum of Art from April 25 through June 10, 1984.
To promote the exhibit—and to promote the Hunts’ investments—McNall also orchestrated a glossy, color catalog, published in 1983 by the Kimbell Art Museum, and featuring essays by scholars including the Met’s Dietrich von Bothmer. The Kimbell published the catalog in association with Summa Publications of Beverly Hills—the publishing arm of Summa Gallery, the antiquities shop that McNall ran with Robert Hecht. The catalog deftly managed to take advantage of the boost that the Sarpedon chalice and fragmentary krater had gotten from passing through the Getty and being published by a former Oxford professor; the entries for each of the two Euphronios vases cited Robertson’s J. Paul Getty Museum Journal article in the bibliographies for the objects. The catalog entry for the Sarpedon chalice even said that von Bothmer had cited the cup in his publications of the speeches he gave in Berlin and Troy, New York, in which he had mentioned that the Met’s krater had a missing twin. Suddenly, this chalice of mysterious origin seemed to have an illustrious and well-documented past.
To celebrate the last leg of the exhibit’s journey, the Hunt brothers wore black tie, accompanied by their wives in elegant eveningwear, to an event marking the Dallas installation. The vases stood on white pedestals protected with glass cubes while their owners basked in the ancient glory of respectability of the masterpieces they owned. It would be their last chance. Wealth of the Ancient World made one more visit to a public gallery—the High Museum in Atlanta—from December 10, 1985, through February 9, 1986, and then the Hunts saw the chalice slip from their hands.
By now, the Hunt brothers had pretty much retired as the country’s highest-rolling buyers of antiquities. That left the Getty alone at the top, which was its good fortune when another Euphronios popped up on the market. No, this one wasn’t in the same league as the Sarpedon krater and chalice, which were two of just nine known vases painted and signed by Euphronios. Rather, this giant kylix wine cup bore his signature as the potter, a more common and less valuable find. Euphronios spent the last years of his career potting, rather than painting, vases, likely because he suffered from failing eyesight. Another artist, named Onesimos, had painted this cup with the sprawling scene of the sack of Troy by Greek forces at the end of the Trojan War. Only a portion of the cup had seemed to survive into modernity—the center, base, and a broad section that included part of the kylix’s rim—and a dealer named Frieda Tchacos of the Galerie Nefer in Zurich had offered it to the Getty curator, Jiri Frel. Frel jumped at the chance to pay her $180,000 for the nucleus of the cup, which comprised about two-fifths of the original vessel.
The Met’s Dietrich von Bothmer took notice of this purchase and realized that in his own personal collection, he had a missing portion of the Getty’s new Onesimos-Euphronios kylix. Now that the Getty had a big chunk of the cup, it made no sense for him to hold on to the piece. So he dug it up, like a boy going through his baseball cards for a player whose team he’ll never get to compete anyway. He found the shard. It was just as he had gotten it, so many years before: labeled with a slip of paper that read “B.H. ’68.”
This was the same fragment the Met curator had bought two decades earlier from Robert Hecht, hoping to find it a home in a broken vase. Measuring just 4 centimeters by 3.4 centimeters, the piece bore an image from the cast of characters in the sack of Troy. The Getty curators thought it might even be Helen herself, the face that launched a thousand ships. The fragment portrayed a woman in profile, from just below the nose, up through the steely gaze of her eye, an impeccably plucked eyebrow, and a wavy head of hair. The flip side, which originally decorated the outer surface of the cup, had a warrior’s helmet. In 1984, von Bothmer donated the shard to the Getty, reuniting it with the other remains of the giant cup, and taking a tax deduction for his generous contribution to the rival museum.
It was a busy time for the Getty’s antiquities department as it worked hard to spend the fortune left by its founder, J. Paul Getty, who had died in 1976. The aim was to build a collection, practically from scratch, that would rival those of the Met and the great European museums. The Malibu museum even got its hands on the namesake vase of Medici’s Hydra Galerie. Toward the end of 1983, Medici, acting at an agent for Koutoulakis, sold the hydria decorated with the Hydra to the Getty for $400,000.
Through the early 1980s, the Getty bought several more items from Medici’s shop, from a Greek amphora to a Roman marble sarcophagus decorated with angels. Some material, however, was not up to the Getty’s standards. Starting in 1985, Medici became a good client of Sotheby’s London auction hall, putting increasing numbers of vases up for sale.
In June 1985, the weekly Italian magazine Epoca published an article titled “Tombarolo offresi per consulenza,” or “Tomb Robber Offers Himself as Consultant,” in which an admitted tombarolo, Luigi Perticarari, talked about his trade. The article ran with a color photograph of a vase and the caption, “A splendid Attic vase with red and black figures. Patiently reconstructed from a mosaic of fragments found in a field, at a burial devastated by a plough, it was ‘saved’ by a tombarolo of Tarquinia, and then sold to an antiquarian for 4 million lire,” the equivalent then of about $2,100.
At around the same time, Sotheby’s published its catalog for a July 17, 1985, antiquities sale in London. Lot 540 was a red- and black-figure vase from Athens, dating to the sixth century B.C., around the same time that Euphronios was working there, and it drew the attention of the Met’s von Bothmer. He knew he’d seen it somewhere, and he soon recalled the Epoca story. The Met curator immediately sent a letter to the auction house’s London antiquities chief, warning her to pull the vase from the auction.
“In keeping with the usual policy of Sotheby’s, I withdrew Lot 540 from the sale,” Felicity Nicholson, who was the head of Sotheby’s antiquities department in London at the time, later told Italian prosecutors. “This wasn’t because the owner didn’t have title (which hasn’t been proved),” she said. “I couldn’t be sure that the vase in the article wasn’t Lot 540, and enough doubt and preoccupation was expressed by an eminent authority.”
As Italian police and the British art media hunted for the source of the tainted Lot 540, these revelations set off a chain reaction that doomed Medici’s career and led to upheaval in the art market and museum world. A British journalist, Peter Watson, started digging into the Lot 540 affair, and uncovered evidence that Medici was supplying hundreds of undocumented objects to Sotheby’s. He was even using the auction house to launder vases, buying most of his pieces back himself through the front man at his Geneva gallery. With the Sotheby’s pedigree, Medici could provide clear, legal titles for the pots and statues he owned. Sotheby’s turned a blind eye to this practice, and because the auction catalogs provided anonymity, nobody in the market knew Medici was both the buyer and seller of some lots.
While the police and press were getting closer to figuring out Medici’s methods, the Hydra Galerie did what would become one of its last important deals, selling missing fragments from the huge Onesimos-Euphronios kylix to the Getty. The October 28, 1985, invoice signed by Christian Boursaud shows that the museum paid $100,000 for Attic red-figure kylix fragments, “Onesimos painter—Circa 490 B.C. Dimensions: appx. 26 x 16 cm.” They were formerly of the “Zbinden” collection of Geneva—a name Medici had used before.
From Medici’s point of view, business was booming—and it was time to quit while he was ahead, or at least to change his business model. The brisk trade was attracting too much attention. On March 25, 1986, a lawyer named Charles-Henri Piguet conducted an inventory of the Hydra Galerie’s property as part of dissolving the company and settling the accounts between Medici and his partner, Boursaud. After they disbanded the business, the artifacts became Medici’s property. But instead of changing his ways, Medici just took the operation underground.
The antiquities world had its Watergate break-in on April 3,1986, in San Felice Circeo, a seaside town south of Rome. Like the bungled burglary that toppled Richard Nixon, it didn’t seem like much when it happened. But for the mighty to fall, all investigators needed to do was follow the money.
The Torre Paola was an obvious target. Pope Pius IV had the round fortress built in 1563 atop a rocky outcrop. More than five hundred years later, the tower and its more modern living quarters overlooked the busy beach resort of Sabaudia and were often unoccupied. The property’s noble-titled owner, the Marchesa Alessandra de Marchi, made her permanent home in Rome on Via Livenza. The stone landmark was in many ways just a storehouse for the family’s riches. With a little planning—and a truck—it would be easy pickings for professional burglars.
Sometime between Thursday night on April 3 and the following Friday morning, the men forced open the property’s huge doors by sawing through a heavy padlock. Once inside the vacant building complex, they smashed inner doors with axes and set about stripping the interior of its furnishings.
The burglars went out to a patio where they found a two-thousand-year-old treasure: a Roman child’s sarcophagus carved from a solid block of white marble. This was the sort of artifact that had made its way into private collections, legally, over the previous centuries. The owners had supported the sarcophagus on two halves of an Ionic capital, the scroll-topped classical columns found in Greece and Rome. The burglars took those, too.
In an entryway, they ripped a marble Roman bust of a man from the wall and tore down other decorations. Using their pickax, they detached a fireplace, removing the front of what had probably been an adult’s coffin made of white marble. Unlike the child’s coffin, which was incised with a simple geometric pattern, this one bore a carved bas-relief of a dramatic maritime scene depicting sea horses and, near the center, a huge head of Neptune, god of the seas.
The burglars also scooped up carpets, antique furniture, paintings, and two large Roman capitals, one done in the Ionic and the other Doric style. They carted those out along with a collection of twenty-four crystal glasses and a half-dozen bottles of whiskey. They even took cannonballs from the upper fortress of the tower itself. In all, it was an incredibly heavy load and a hard night of labor. It must have taken at least one truck and a team of men to pack up and drive away down the stone-paved access road. And they had worked quickly. By the time the Marchesa’s trusted custodian, Giuseppe Borsa, arrived for work at 7:30 A.M., there was no sign of the burglars except the shattered doors, empty rooms, and scarred walls. The best stuff was already headed north, and some of it would soon cross the border.
When Sotheby’s published the catalog for its May 18, 1987, London antiquities sale, at least three items set off alarms among the Italian art police who routinely scanned auction offerings: Lot 268, “A Roman Marble Column Capital, circa 3rd Century A.D.”; Lot 291, “A Roman Marble Strigilated Child’s Sarcophagus”; and Lot 354, a fragmentary front of a Roman marble sarcophagus, decorated with carvings of sea creatures and the god Neptune’s head. Comparing the Sotheby’s catalog with descriptions of stolen art in their database, the Carabinieri officers in Rome concluded they had found a match to three artifacts taken from Marchesa de Marchi’s country home only a year earlier. The art squad contacted Interpol, the international crime-fighting cooperative, to communicate a request to the British police asking them to block the sale in London.
Just two hours before the sale was to have happened, Felicity Nicholson, chief of Sotheby’s London antiquities department, called the man whose company had put the pieces up for sale, telling him that the Italian authorities said they were stolen. The artifacts never made it to the auction block. Sotheby’s pulled the column capital and two sarcophagus pieces from the offerings, placing them in storage at its facilities in London.
It may have seemed like a small victory for the Italians. In financial terms, they had taken just a minuscule bite out of the antiquities market; the auctioneers had estimated that the capital and the baby’s coffin would sell for little more than 2,000 pounds each, and the carving for 1,000 pounds. But the operation yielded a piece of information that proved to be several thousand times more valuable.
During Scotland Yard’s inquiries on behalf of the Italian art police, Sotheby’s gave investigators the name of a Geneva-based company that had consigned the three antiquities for sale. Although it was just a name, it gave the Carabinieri a place to look—Editions Services S.A. Even so, it would take them a decade to figure out what Sotheby’s already knew: the name of the man behind Editions.
“Bob, let’s make a contract,” Giacomo Medici said to his old colleague, Robert Hecht. Medici was pitching him on his plan to sell the twenty red-figure plates he had traded for the hydria jug with the Hydra monster.
Hecht jumped at getting a cut of what would also be one of his biggest deals. The two drew up a contract, dated May 29, 1987, which stipulated that Hecht would get 5 percent of the sale of the plates and also some red-figure fragments of Athenian pottery dating to 490 to 480 B.C. The target price for the plates was $2 million, meaning Hecht would earn an easy $100,000 for brokering the deal. And there was one buyer who had that kind of cash to throw around on ancient dishes: Marion True at the Getty Museum.
True was the rare woman who had made it to the top of the academic antiquities world, which had been dominated by the old boys’ club of Beazley, von Bothmer, and their crowd. She had earned her spot there, researching her Harvard PhD in art history while working at the Getty. She also made the right connections, studying under the Met’s von Bothmer, who had an additional post at New York University. In 1986, when she completed her Harvard doctorate, the Getty appointed True the new chief of the museum’s antiquities department. Hecht decided he and Giacomo Medici should pay her a visit.
In the spring of 1987, Medici gathered some bubble wrap at his Geneva shop and started to pack up the Attic red-figure plates, one by one, in an oversized, hard-shelled briefcase. The plates fit into the carry-on bag sideways, in two stacks often. In case he hadn’t packed them well enough, Medici bought insurance to protect his $2 million investment. He also affixed a tag on the side of the case: “Fragile.” This trip would be a turning point for Medici, and an adventure he wanted to share with his son, Marco, who was twenty years old at the time. Marco would accompany his father on a whirlwind tour organized by Robert Hecht. They had tickets not just to Los Angeles, but on the way home they planned to stop in New York. For Medici, making this deal for the twenty plates would let him earn the kind of money Hecht had made for himself fifteen years earlier when he resold Medici’s Euphronios krater to the Met for nearly a $1 million profit.
With the briefcase always in his sight, Medici and his son boarded a Swiss Air flight from Geneva to Zurich, where they met up with Hecht, their tour guide and translator. Until this trip, Medici had almost never dealt directly with a museum. He was strictly a middleman. That’s how the business worked. It wasn’t just that Medici didn’t speak English. Dealers such as Hecht had the relationships with curators and museum directors. Hecht, as an American who traveled the world, could credibly say that he’d gotten a vase from an old Lebanese collection or found a statue that had been hidden in a Swiss vault by an old Scandinavian family. And museums liked to buy antiquities that way. Medici, on the other hand, wasn’t the sort of fellow a museum wanted to have on its acquisition records. Even though he had a gallery in Geneva, the man lived in the heart of Italy’s tomb-robbing country. To pull off the sale of these twenty plates to the Getty on his own account, he needed Hecht, even though he could somewhat account for the provenance of the merchandise in this case. Hecht would hold his hand the whole way. And it would be fun.
After meeting up in Zurich, the trio connected to a Swiss Air flight to Frankfurt. In Germany, they switched to a Lufthansa flight direct to Los Angeles, where Medici would have to clear U.S. Customs with a briefcase filled with dishes five hundred years older than Jesus.
But first Giacomo and Marco had to survive a flight halfway around the globe with Robert Hecht and his infamous temper—which, combined with his love for drink, resulted in a scene that would play out several times during the weeklong road trip. When Hecht asked for a beer, he wanted it so cold that frost would form on the can or bottle. Inevitably—especially on the long flight—it wouldn’t come that way. When the chilled yet not frosty can arrived, Hecht unleashed his anger at a hapless stewardess and refused the beer. Medici just kept watch over the bag of ancient plates, and hoped they wouldn’t run into any turbulence.
Some twelve hours later, the jet touched down at LAX, where it was almost nighttime. Medici gripped the bag and wondered what Hecht would do to get them across the border. They stepped off the plane, cleared immigration, and headed for customs. The federal agents had been waiting for them. But in a good way. The Customs Service men were joined by another, private customs agency man from a service hired by Hecht. Before they had even left Europe, the American dealer had forwarded all of Medici’s information to the private service—including a description of the plates, their value, and an explanation that they were destined “for study” at the Getty. The service, in turn, had already obtained a clearance from the border guards to let the plates into the country. Giacomo, Marco, and Robert whizzed through like VIPs. At the curb, they were met by a Rolls-Royce loaned by one of Hecht’s friends in Los Angeles—none other than Bruce McNall, through whose hands the Sarpedon chalice had once passed. Hecht traveled in style when he could. A creature of the great pedestrian cities of the world, the resident of Paris and New York normally got around Los Angeles in taxis. The chauffer drove them to their hotel, where they rested before their mission to the Getty the next morning.
The next day, when the Rolls-Royce dropped them off at the museum, Medici finally let go of the plates. He handed them off to Hecht, who took care of the formalities of checking the merchandise in with the museum’s experts and obtaining the paperwork certifying the plates were on loan. Medici and his son, given visitors’ passes, were free to roam the museum’s grounds, which J. Paul Getty had designed as a copy of a Roman villa. As he and Marco toured the museum, Medici saw antiquities, many of which were new to him, and several of which prosecutors would say were very, very familiar. As they toured the galleries, Marco held on to his father’s 35 mm Minolta camera. And every so often, Medici, with a white cotton sweater draped around the shoulders of his yellow Lacoste tennis shirt, would pause in front of a display case for a snapshot. In retrospect, he probably shouldn’t have.
To cap off the day, Hecht arranged for dinner with Marion True, the antiquities curator, at an Italian restaurant in Malibu called Prego. Medici and True had met only once before, a year earlier at the Bola auction in Basel. On that occasion, they had dined with the Met’s von Bothmer. This time around, the legendary vase connoisseur was one of the main subjects of conversation. They spoke in their one common language, French.
To start the meal, Hecht took charge, commandeering the wine list for ten minutes before settling on a California red. They ate their way through a plate of antipasti, and then a pasta course. Medici had the tagliolini with a meat ragu sauce topped with basil. To finish the feast, True, Hecht, and the two Medicis shared a platter of sizzling T-bone steak, known in Italy as a Fiorentina. At the end of the meal, True said she’d take a look at the plates, which she hoped to propose to the museum’s board for purchase. Hecht paid for dinner. It looked like they might be able to close a sale within months.
For the next couple days, Medici and Hecht took a vacation of sorts, enjoying the hospitality of the American dealer’s California friends: driving around in the Rolls with its stocked bar, playing tennis at a mansion overlooking Los Angeles, and enjoying long lunches, accompanied at times by much younger women—friends of friends who had big, 1980s West Coast hair. Medici couldn’t communicate with his new acquaintances most of the time, but he had a blast. His career was about to take off, and again it was Hecht who was bringing him to the next level, just like in the old days. Plus, he got to play tennis. Life was good.
After three days, with the plates safely under study at the Getty, the party moved to New York. Hecht and the Medicis flew first class on Pan Am to JFK airport, where they boarded a helicopter that whisked them directly across the East River and into Midtown Manhattan. The chopper landed on the roof of what was still called the Pan Am Building, and the men alighted on the helipad fifty-nine stories above Park Avenue, face-to-face with the pointy spire of the nearby Chrysler Building. Again, Hecht had handled all the details. A car waiting downstairs sped them to the Upper East Side, where Giacomo and Marco checked into the Westbury Hotel on East Sixty-ninth Street—conveniently just steps from Central Park and a ten-minute walk to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Medici had only a little bit of business to conduct in his two or three days in New York. He dropped in on the Fifth Avenue antiquities gallery run by Hecht’s business partner, Jonathan Rosen. And, of course, Medici and Hecht couldn’t pass up the chance to pay a visit together to the Euphronios krater. Medici wore a necktie for the occasion.
Sarpedon awaited the men in the Greek and Roman galleries. After climbing the front steps of the museum, Giacomo, Marco, and Bob stopped at a ticket desk to get their admission pins, the Met’s signature color-coded tin circles with bendable tabs on the back and “M” logos on the front. Medici slid the tab of his pin into the left lapel hole of his jacket. Hecht affixed his to the collar of his V-neck sweater. Then they took a left turn and headed past the security guards toward a room labeled “Attic Red-Figure.” There, under glass in case 19, they found the Lycian prince, still bleeding from his torso after all these years. Sleep and Death, frozen in time on the face of the grand vase, were lifting Sarpedon’s body. Marco, holding the Minolta, waited for his father to pose.
Medici rested his left hand on the edge of the display case, where the glass met the tall base that kept Sarpedon at eye level. He planted his right fist in his waist. When Marco snapped the photo, his father was grinning. Hecht also posed.
It would be both Medici and Hecht’s bad luck that the camera and the film inside successfully made their way back to Geneva, along with Giacomo and Marco, on Swiss Air flight 111.