CHAPTER EIGHT
Though the Italian art police were unaware of this, their investigation of stolen antiquities had led them northward to Switzerland and Sotheby’s at the very same time that British journalist Peter Watson’s investigation of Sotheby’s was leading him southward to Italy. Watson had been looking into this story for a decade. In December 1985 he had reported in the Observer about Sotheby’s auction of Apulian vases, which the British Museum’s Greek and Roman curator Brian Cook said were certainly from recent illicit excavation; practically all of the known vases of that type had already been cataloged, and these were not in those catalogs. More recently, Watson had obtained a trove of internal Sotheby’s documents in 1991 from a disgruntled former employee of the auctioneer’s London office.
The documents gave Watson an unprecedented view of what had really been going on inside Sotheby’s. He discovered, for instance, that the newly surfaced Apulian vases Cook had complained about in 1985 had been put up for sale at Sotheby’s by Christian Boursaud of Geneva’s Hydra Galerie—one of the auction house’s biggest clients, who had supplied hundreds of Italian antiquities to the London saleroom. The documents also showed that soon after the 1985 controversy over the Apulian vases, the Hydra Galerie and Boursaud stopped putting antiquities up for sale—and that another company, called Editions Services, later consigned some of the exact same objects that had failed to sell in the earlier auctions. Watson had figured out by 1995 that the mystery man behind the Hydra Galerie was the same person behind Editions Services. His trove of documents held a clue.
Among the papers was the letter Dietrich von Bothmer sent to Sotheby’s, warning that Lot 540 from the July 1985 sale was a match to a vase he had seen in the magazine Epoca, in the article about a tomb robber. Now, ten years later, Watson was working on a television documentary about Sotheby’s, and his team, including researcher Cecilia Todeschini, tracked down the tombarolo from the article who said he had dug up the vase. His name was Luigi Perticarari. When Watson and his crew interviewed the confessed tomb robber on camera, he demonstrated his digging techniques and even said he remembered Lot 540. He had sold it to a man who lived in a big house and was “worth millions.” But when asked who this man was, Perticarari refused to answer on camera. They switched off their camera, and he revealed the name of the man to whom he sold the vase: Giacomo Medici.
The camera was off, but as Watson later wrote, “We had left our tape recorder running.” He had figured out who the man behind the vase trade was at the exact same time as the Italian police were closing in.
The Italian art squad’s attempt to crack open Editions Services with cross-border paperwork seemed to be working. Judge Jean-Pierre Trembley in Geneva agreed to the request, and on September 12, 1995, Inspector Alain Baudin and Inspector Lovo of the Swiss police interviewed Jacques. This time, the administrator of the Panamanian shell company had to cooperate fully, and two Italian Carabinieri would be in the room at Baudin’s office to take notes.
Jacques explained again that he was just the administrator of the company, which had been established in 1981, and he reiterated why he hadn’t been more helpful during his initial questioning eight years earlier. “At the time of my previous deposition, I essentially refused to reveal the owners of the three pieces consigned to Sotheby’s because there wasn’t any official criminal case,” he said. This time was different.
“Editions Services S.A. still exists. On February 24, 1986, it was bought by Mr. Giacomo Medici,” Jacques said, according to his written deposition. That meant that after the de Marchi robbery—and also after Hydra Galerie’s kerfluffle with Lot 540 at Sotheby’s—Medici had found himself a new vehicle for doing business. Medici’s purchase of Editions in 1986 also made him the owner of the company when it put the three alleged de Marchi objects up for sale at Sotheby’s in 1987.
But most important, the Carabinieri finally had the name they were looking for behind Editions: Medici.
And Jacques wasn’t finished talking. “The aim of this company consists solely of putting antiquities up for sale at Sotheby’s. Medici puts them up for sale in the name of the company. The income from the sales goes to Mr. Medici,” he said. He even gave the investigators Editions Services’ bank account number at UBS in Geneva. If that weren’t enough, Jacques, seemingly afraid of getting dragged into the case, coughed up an invaluable detail.
“I can also add that in 1991 Editions Services S.A. rented room number C 4.17.6 at the Geneva Free Port,” he said.
This gave the Italian art squad the lead they needed. The Geneva Free Port is a modern warehouse complex with special customs status. Companies that rent space there can bring goods into Switzerland and then store them or sell them at the Free Port without paying import taxes. Buyers can export the goods, also duty-free. For merchants that used Switzerland as a transshipment point, the arrangement was ideal. They didn’t pay tax, and anything they exported appeared to have originated from Swiss soil, as opposed to, say, Italian.
The Carabinieri wasted no time. They knew Jacques could easily let Medici or his associates know he had told them that Medici was behind Editions Services and that Editions had a warehouse space. Immediately after the interrogation, the officers contacted the Latina magistrate, Riccardo Audino. The next day—September 13, 1995—Audino sent another urgent judiciary assistance request to Judge Trembley. “In the course of the investigation,” he wrote, “it emerged that the company Editions Services S.A. has used some rooms in the Geneva Free Port.
“Because these rooms could be holding works of art trafficked from the home of Alessandra de Marchi, it is requested that you please issue a search warrant, and that police from Rome’s Carabinieri art squad be present for the search,” the Latina magistrate wrote.
The Swiss agreed to the search.
Medici was on vacation in Sardinia with his family at a hotel on the Costa Smerelda when the phone rang. A colleague at the Geneva Free Port had bad news. The police had come to the facility and were inside Medici’s warehouse. He should come as soon as possible. But it was far too late.
The Swiss-Italian police team entered the Geneva storerooms, four of which were inside the Free Port’s duty-free cordon, and one that was outside. In all, the space occupied two hundred square meters, the size of a huge three- or four-bedroom apartment. The police found thousands of artifacts, many of them still bearing Sotheby’s labels, and a trove of documents. Most important, in an office space they found photo albums chock-full of evidence: pictures of pots and statues. They also found a fireproof safe.
They did not, however, stick around long enough to make a full inventory of the warehouse’s stash. Inspector Baudin took note of a few details he gleaned from the paperwork: that Medici had been a partner with a certain Christian Boursaud in the former Hydra Galerie antiquities shop in Geneva’s historic center; that Medici often did business under the name “Guidos” (which Medici would later explain was a way to disguise his identity in business transactions while also honoring his father, Guido); and that Medici had some connection to a Zurich man named Fritz Bürki, whose credentials the police had found inside Medici’s desk.
After the Swiss police, including Baudin, scooped up the photo albums and some other documentation, the officers left the warehouse rooms, locking and sealing them as evidence. Nobody could enter again without a Swiss court order. And nobody did for the next two years.
Medici was driving south into Rome from his house on the coast in Santa Marinella on January 17, 1997—a Friday—when his mobile phone rang. On the other end of the line was an officer from the Carabinieri art squad with whom Medici had dealt before.
“Where are you now?” the officer asked him.
Medici told him, and the Carabinieri asked if he was coming into the center of town, could he stop by the art squad command to sign some papers relating to Sotheby’s. Medici, who was driving with his wife, said sure, and headed for the building on the Tiber River near the Porta Portese street market where his brother, Roberto, had worked until his disappearance two decades earlier.
As he was approaching the police palazzo, Medici’s phone rang again. The officer wanted to know where he was. That’s when Medici knew something wasn’t right. “They’re going to arrest me,” he told Maria Luisa. “Take the car.” Medici’s wife told him not to be silly, but he insisted. Making sure he had his Italian identity card and phone with him, Medici got out and walked in alone.
Inside the Carabinieri greeted him with stern looks. Ferdinando Musella stared Medici down and, tugging at his right ear, asked, “How come I can’t hear you with this ear?” Medici wasn’t sure what Musella was getting at. If he was trying to tell him something, he should tell him directly, Medici said.
“How come you haven’t cooperated?” the officer asked. “How long has it been since the Geneva raid?” Medici had failed to give the police any information on the illicit antiquities trade over the previous year and a half, and now he was being punished. “We have a warrant for your arrest.”
The investigation of the de Marchi robbery had finally caught up to him. He wasn’t being charged, yet, but was officially a suspect, subject to questioning. “Take me out of here now,” he demanded of the Carabinieri, who seemed eager to see what they could wrest from him now that they had a warrant. “I don’t want to spend any more time in here.” If they were going to arrest him, they should do it and get it over with, he said. Medici called his daughter, Monica, to come and get his mobile phone. When Monica arrived, she saw her father handcuffed, a humiliation that burned him inside.
After a brief run around Rome to get him processed for jail and his mug shot taken, the police drove Medici to Latina, south of the capital, where prosecutors and Carabinieri had been investigating the de Marchi break-in. Medici’s timing was terrible. It was a Friday afternoon and the judge was gone. Medici would have to spend the weekend in jail before he could argue for bail. This ordeal was the first time Medici had ever spent the night behind bars. On Monday he finally went free, and he spent the following week under house arrest.
On October 17 and 18, 1997, the Getty’s Marion True attended a conference at the University of Viterbo, just north of Rome, that was a follow-up to the 1995 Antiquities Without Provenance roundtable at the American Academy in Rome. As True sat in the audience, Italian archaeologist Maria Antonietta Rizzo, who had made the connection between the inscription on the bottom of the Getty’s Onesimos-Euphronios cup and the temple to Heracles in Cerveteri, dug even deeper. She presented two papers: one on the details of the cup’s “recontextualization” through her archaeological finds, and another on the massive kylix itself.
And then she laid down her challenge: “Will the P. Getty Museum, here represented in the person of Marion True…give back to Italy a work that has been trafficked in such an obvious way?” True, who had no warning that she would be put on the spot like this, stood up. If Rizzo would send her the information about the kylix, True said, she would start the process of returning the object to Italy.
True’s willingness to cooperate with the Italian demand was one of many signs in 1997 that the artifact trade was undergoing unprecedented change. The year was a turning point, as prestigious institutions—from museums to universities and auction houses—that had enabled the traffic in undocumented objects faced growing embarrassment and legal troubles and decided to get out of the racket. After Peter Watson aired his investigations into Sotheby’s links to Medici and smuggling, the auction house discontinued its London antiquities sales.
In a sign of how quickly the legal and academic world was turning against the antiquities trade, Oxford’s lab—which had authenticated the Sarpedon krater for the Met and many artifacts for Medici as a private client—came under pressure and ended its commercial testing of artifacts, also in 1997. And a University of Cambridge archaeology professor who had helped shame Oxford into cutting its authentication ties to the trade-Colin Renfrew (aka Lord Renfrew of Kaimsthorn)—began operations of the Illicit Antiquities Research Centre, a new unit at the university’s archaeology department, in October 1997.
Medici’s case also began to get serious. On October 27 of that same year, the court in Latina ruled that it was no longer the proper jurisdiction for the de Marchi case, which had gone from a burglary investigation to a cross-border production involving Italy’s national art police. Paolo Ferri, the prosecutor handling the case of Sotheby’s Lot 540, won the transfer of Medici’s case up to Rome, and had the two files combined. Medici would no longer face trial in a small town court. He was now the target of a seasoned investigative prosecutor based at the central courthouse of Italy’s capital city.
Ferri, whose red beard made him stand out among the lawyers at the Rome Tribunal, knew what he was doing. A graduate of Rome’s La Sapienza university, he had hunted murderers and drug traffickers in his previous trials. By bringing the Medici case under his wing, Ferri could take control of the vast body of evidence gathered in the Geneva raid. This might not only implicate Medici, but the dealers, restorers, curators, museums, and universities with whom Medici had done business. The real treasure trove—the photos, the documents, and the objects under seal in the Swiss warehouse—would be within Ferri’s reach.
Only a month after he took control of Medici’s case, Ferri traveled to Switzerland to try to get his hands on the contents of Medici’s warehouse. He had already petitioned the Swiss courts to hand over the Medici haul to Italy—or at least to allow Italian experts to closely study the collection—but had been rebuffed. On December 17, 1997, the Rome prosecutor tried again, meeting face-to-face with the top Swiss prosecutor and federal police officer involved in the case. Ferri was accompanied to the meeting at the justice palace in Geneva by Chief Marshals Salvatore Morando and Serafino Dell’Avvocato from the Carabinieri art squad. Marshal Morando, a thirty-six-year-old native of Ragusa in Sicily, had already spent half his life in the Carabinieri, including the previous ten years with the art squad in Rome. Morando, with his medium build, thick black hair, and mellow demeanor was a quiet presence at almost every step in the Medici investigation, starting with the 1995 raid. The men made their case that, as the prosecutor in Medici’s Italian case, Ferri should get a firsthand look at the consistency and quantity of the material in the Free Port. At the end of the meeting, the Swiss officials agreed.
The next morning, the Italians presented themselves at the Geneva Free Port, where the Swiss police inspector, Alain Baudin, who had been the local point man for the raid two years earlier, joined them. First they headed up to the fourth floor, and then to Corridor 23. At 10:05 A.M. they opened Room 6. What they found was a laboratory for storing and processing artifacts, “surely from clandestine digs, a certainty coming from the fact that these objects—a great many in fragments—were found covered in soil residue,” the two art-squad officers wrote in their report.
The room included a minilab for printing photos, and a wooden fruit crate, labeled “Coop. Ort. Cerveteri,” or Cerveteri Garden Cooperative. It was filled not with tomatoes and zucchini, but with what appeared to be frescoes from an Etruscan tomb, wrapped in a copy of Rome’s Il Messaggero newspaper, dated January 11, 1994. Nearby they found a bronze helmet, also wrapped in pages from the same newspaper. The Italian police also discovered various suitcases, which they hypothesized could have been used to transport the archaeological material found in the room. After just seventeen minutes, the group finished their quick look around and closed the door behind them, which the Swiss sealed again as crime-scene evidence.
Staying on the fourth floor of the Free Port, Ferri and the police officers walked over to Corridor 17, the main site of Medici’s operation. Opening Room 4, they found even more archaeological riches: marble statues, ceramics, and bronzes. This wasn’t an official inspection by the Italians of all the material, just a look around, so after five minutes they moved on to the next space, Room 6. This was the showroom. It had cabinets on the walls filled with every kind of archaeological artifact, as well as armchairs, sofas, coffee tables, a desk, and other furnishings that made it seem to the visitors like the sort of place where Medici might bring potential buyers. Many of the objects still had little blue labels from Sotheby’s on them, an assurance to any potential buyer that the works had licit origins. The investigators spent most of their time in this room, enough to get a look through what appeared to be an archive with some five thousand photos of artifacts, and documentation, including a check written by Robert Hecht for $400,000, dated September 4, 1995, and apparently for the purchase of frescoes from Pompeii—the last deal that the two old colleagues did before the Geneva raid crippled Medici’s business.
But in addition to the photos and documents, which would prove to be the prosecutor’s most important find from a legal standpoint, the Italians saw something else. “We also note there was a large safe containing very important archaeological vases,” the Italian police wrote in their report. Alas, time was short. At 10:55 A.M. they started closing and sealing the doors behind them. As they did, two of Medici’s Swiss lawyers, Henri Nanchen and Jacques Roulet, came onto the scene, protesting that they hadn’t been advised of the Italians’ visit to the warehouse. Inspector Baudin explained to Medici’s lawyers that the visit had been authorized and was just a superficial overview, not a search. Then the Swiss inspector finished sealing the room.
In the twenty-four minutes they had spent inside Room 6, the Italians never got a chance to see exactly what those “very important archaeological vases” were in the safe—the very same fireproof safe Medici had bought in 1990. Had they known what was inside, they might have lingered.
On December 23, 1997, Ferri sent a cross-border inquiry to the Swiss authorities requesting a full examination by Italian experts and investigators of the contents of Medici’s warehouse at the Free Port. The Swiss magistrate handling the case, Judge Jean-Pierre Trembley, agreed to Ferri’s request. But before he could allow them inside to handle the artifacts, the Swiss judge needed someone to inventory the warehouse’s contents. In March 1998, the judge put Inspector Baudin, who had been present at the original raid, in charge of the task.
The decision set off alarm bells for Medici, who wanted to make sure he could be in the rooms at the Free Port during Baudin’s inspection and to ensure that the people handling his precious goods—especially the Sarpedon chalice—knew what they were doing.
Medici had his Swiss lawyer Henri Nanchen write a long letter to Judge Trembley explaining why he should be able to attend. For one, the lawyer wrote, many of the items were actually counterfeit, and it would be a help for Medici to be able to point out which ones were fake. But his client was mainly concerned with the genuine, expensive artifacts and their fragility. “Some objects are very fragile and difficult to handle. In the best case, the inventory should be conducted by an expert with the necessary experience to handle this kind of work,” Medici’s lawyer wrote. “An inventory of this type should be assigned to an archaeologist with a background in museum work or the art market.
“In fact, if these objects are badly handled, it could cause them to break. If this were to happen, the value of these objects, equivalent to many hundreds of thousands of francs, would be reduced by at least 50 percent,” the lawyer warned.
To prepare for the inventory, first Inspector Baudin had to undo what Medici would later contend had been a crucial irregularity in the handling of the evidence against him. As part of the investigation, the Swiss police had removed Medici’s photo archive from his rented rooms at the Free Port and took the pictures to the police offices in Geneva without first cataloging the archive’s contents. On May 8, more than two and a half years after the 1995 raid, Baudin finally numbered the albums, 1 through 83, and made notes of their contents. Three weeks later he shipped the whole archive back to the Free Port, to Room 6 up on Corridor 17 of the fourth floor.
With everything back where it should have been, Baudin was ready to take a closer, hands-on look at the riches inside Medici’s warehouse.
To conduct the inventory, which started on May 26, 1998, Baudin brought with him Inspector Nicole Jaulin and classical archaeologist Michelle Jauguin. They spent two days there comparing the photos taken of the objects during the raid with the actual contents of the warehouse and examining the paperwork found in the offices. They numbered everything, starting where they’d left off with the photo albums, at 84. As they worked their way through the storerooms and gallery space, everything matched what they’d expected—until they found an unopened drawer that had originally escaped their attention. Like tombaroli finding a sealed tomb, Baudin and his helpers pulled it open.
Inside they discovered a dazzling assortment of jewels. Realizing that they needed to protect themselves against any claims by Medici of foul play—and needing to add the thirty-one precious objects to the official record—Baudin stopped the inventory and called in a police photographer. Baudin recalled that Medici had complained after the 1995 raid that he hadn’t heard any news about the fate of some missing jewelry, which he insisted was in the warehouse. The officer compared his new findings to the documentation of Medici’s complaint, and it appeared he had a match. When the photographer arrived, he took photos of each object and the inspection team added new numbers to their inventory. When he finished, the photographer decided to stick around. It was a wise choice. Tragically, his services would be needed again.
As Baudin continued to work his way through the collection he came to Medici’s fireproof safe. Inside he found the vases from the 1990 Hunt auction, including the chalice by Euphronios. With the safe door open, Sarpedon’s dying face practically stared up at him. And then Baudin did what anyone might do when reaching for a wine cup.
He put his hands on the handles and lifted.
Had Baudin known what others familiar with such works know, he wouldn’t have made that mistake. Just eight years ear-lier, journalist Suzan Mazur, given the rare chance to lift the cup backstage at Sotheby’s before the Hunt auction, knew she should support the fragile vase by its rounded underside. And her tour guide, Sotheby’s antiquities expert Richard Keresey, confirmed her trepidation. But Baudin didn’t have such luck.
The weight of the cup, which had been repaired before, came out right from under the handles. The problem was that the cup had been previously broken and repaired, and it couldn’t handle the load. The clay vessel landed on the wooden parquet floor. As Baudin wrote in his report of the incident, “We should point out that while moving a plate (Kylix-photo No. 435.436), it practically disintegrated.”
The Sarpedon chalice had shattered. Its hundreds of pieces, including flakes, grains, and slivers of pottery, littered the floor at Inspector Baudin’s feet.
Baudin may or may not have been to blame for shattering the oldest known work by the greatest vase painter of ancient Greece—but he did his best to explain that it wasn’t wholly his fault. “This object had been restored and glued in various places,” he wrote in his report, pointing out that he was dealing with previously damaged goods. “We have noted that the cracks correspond to parts that were badly glued.”
One whole side of the cup entirely shattered. Unfortunately, it was the front side—the one depicting Sarpedon, the slain son of Zeus, being carried off by Sleep and Death. A handle, which should never have been used in the first place, broke off and lay on its own. The sturdy stem and the back side of the kylix, depicting a funeral dance, fared better, surviving the fall practically intact. But the most important half seemed ruined. If a vase by Euphronios can be compared to a painting by Leonardo da Vinci, this was as if someone had repeatedly slashed the face and torso of the Mona Lisa, leaving the background and frame intact. In essence, Euphronios’s Sarpedon cup was destroyed.
Baudin had the police photographer set up what was essentially a crime-scene shot. They swept the tiny fragments and flakes onto a piece of white tissue paper and turned the bigger shards face up so that all the painting could be seen. The photographer made a picture of the assorted fragments, and two others of the half that didn’t shatter.
Then the team scooped the loose shards into the kind of plastic bags normally used for sandwiches or other food. They placed the bags in a cardboard box and the box on Shelf 2 of Cabinet 15 in Room 6 of Corridor 17 on the fourth floor of the Geneva Free Port. And there they would sit, lost again to the world.
The reason the Swiss conducted the inventory in the first place was to prepare for the Italian experts’ pending visit to Medici’s warehouse. They arrived on July 15,1998, and that afternoon conducted their survey. The cast of more than a dozen cops and archaeologists assembled represented most of the interested parties. Marshal Salvatore Morando of the Carabinieri art squad was there, along with Anna Maria Moretti Sgubini, the daughter of Mario Moretti, the celebrated archaeologist under whose watch the Euphronios krater and chalice had been looted from Cerveteri, and who had ultimately been in charge of the salvage excavation on Medici’s property. Now she was the head of Etruscan archaeology and came as a consultant for one of the victims of Medici’s alleged crimes, the Italian Culture Ministry.
As thorough as the Italians were, their documentation does not indicate that any of the experts or officers visiting that day knew about the accident or noticed a box that contained the remains of what had been, by far, the finest work among the thousands of artifacts piled high in Medici’s warehouse.
They were not the only ones in the dark. Medici still had no idea that his chalice had been smashed. It wasn’t until November 18, 1998, six months after the cup had shattered, that Medici received a packet of photocopied papers as part of a routine filing in his Swiss case. Leafing through them, he saw photocopies of the photographs the Swiss police had taken. Without any explanation, Medici had been left to discover, by chance, pictures of what had happened to his cup.
For the moment, all Medici could do was order his lawyer to write angry letters. “The financial loss is extremely important, but it cannot compare with the loss in cultural terms, this being a world-renowned, extremely rare work of art,” Medici’s lawyer Nanchen wrote to the Swiss judge, Trembley, on November 26, 1998. “This is the destruction of a portion of the world’s archaeological heritage.” For the first time in his career, Medici could credibly take the moral high ground on the handling of antiquities. He liked the approach so much that he tried using it to fend off pending criminal charges by offering his help to prosecutors in the case of the Getty’s huge Onesimos-Euphronios kylix.
After the Getty’s Marion True examined the evidence that the Onesimos-Euphronios cup with the Etruscan inscription had been looted from Italy, she decided to send the kylix back to Italy. In February 1999, True brought the cup, along with two Roman sculptures, to Italy. She arrived at Rome’s Villa Giulia museum late at night to drop off the shipment and returned the next morning to be present when the Italians opened the crates. Ferri, the prosecutor, said the cup was worth an estimated 20 billion lire—more than $11.5 million at the time. Even if a bit exaggerated, that meant the even more important works by Euphronios had become worth many, many millions of dollars in the booming art market. The Sarpedon krater and its matching chalice—if there were any chance at saving and fixing it—were worth a fortune.
As the Italians unpacked the Getty’s returned antiquities in True’s presence, members of the press were also there to record the event, just a taste of the attention that she and the works of Euphronios would get in the coming decade.
Medici had been paying close attention to the Getty’s move to send back the huge cup, portions of which his former gallery had sold to the museum. He saw a chance to be a hero, and to help himself a bit in the process. Two months after the repatriation, Medici somehow located three pieces that fit into the newly reclaimed cup—the same three pieces Dyfri Williams of the British Museum wrote in a Getty publication that he’d seen in 1990. Medici’s plan was to exchange the fragments, and his cooperation in the case, for dropped charges. Ferri the prosecutor was interested.
According to Medici’s version of events, he called in a favor from a contact in the antiquities trade who agreed to sell the shards to him in Switzerland. Medici packed up the pieces in Geneva, swaddling them individually in white paper and bubble wrap, and closing the entire package in another layer, sealing it with Scotch tape. With the bundle in his hands, Medici boarded a flight to Rome on the morning of April 17, 1999. He landed at Leonardo da Vinci Airport, the capital’s main airport, in the coastal town of Fiumicino, and took a taxi into town, where the men from the Carabinieri art squad were expecting him.
They had scheduled a rendezvous at Piazza Risorgimento, a square choked with bus and tram traffic on the edge of the Vatican City walls, just around the corner from the entry to the Vatican Museums. Among the officers waiting for him was Marshal Salvatore Morando, the soft-spoken, tanned, and not particularly tall investigator who had been on the Medici case for years, slowly exposing the illicit trade. Along with his colleague, Marshal Renato Saitta, the three got into Morando’s car—a blue, four-door Alfa-Romeo painted with the Carabinieri logo down the side—and drove to Piazzale Clodio, the vast traffic circle where the vast, modern Rome Tribunal complex sits. They drove through the steel gates of the drab complex and parked on the courthouse’s cobblestoned grounds.
With Medici still holding his precious package, they rode the elevator up to the fourth floor and Ferri’s office, one of dozens that line a long corridor housing prosecutors in cramped quarters. Medici walked through the doors of his prosecutor’s tiny study at 11:35 A.M., bearing his gift to the Republic of Italy—and what he hoped would be his ticket to leniency. Medici placed his offering on Ferri’s desk, but the prosecutor wouldn’t touch it. “I don’t want the responsibility,” Ferri said. “You open it.”
Medici undid his packing job and laid out the fragments together on the desk where they formed a picture on one side of the outstretched hands of Helen of Troy and the head of her long-lost husband, Menelaus, shining figures in ocher, done in fine lines against a black background. On the other side, forming part of the cup’s outer rim, the three fragments came together to show the head and chest of the Greek Trojan War hero Ajax, bearded and with lush eyelashes, next to the head of the god Apollo.
“They’re marvelous,” Ferri said. But the prosecutor did not let his guard down as he admired the pieces. After all, he was dealing with Giacomo Medici. “Are they fake?” he asked.
“No, these are real,” Medici said.
Ferri turned to Marshal Morando. “Call Moretti, immediately,” Ferri barked. He wanted Anna Maria Moretti Sgubini to verify the fragments. Like her father she had become the government’s leading expert on all things Etruscan. But Morando didn’t want to get her involved yet in what was a coup for the police and prosecutors.
“We need to enjoy these,” Morando said. “Let’s call her later.”
Ferri agreed. He had a better idea. It was time to reward Medici for his cooperation. “Let’s write a letter to the judge,” he said.
With Medici sitting nearby, Ferri turned to his computer and typed. In one document, Ferri happily took down for the record the “spontaneous declaration” that Medici made when he came into the office. “Having learned that the cup had returned to Italy, I felt the duty to respond to the solicitations of the scientific world and to activate all my connections in the sector to recuperate the missing parts,” Medici said. He concluded his statement by saying he had spent his own money to acquire the fragments, and, “I have embarked on this, I repeat, only to do a favor for my Country.”
In another letter, this time by Ferri about the Onesimos-Euphronios kylix, the prosecutor wrote that Medici, “worked to recuperate the fragments in question, only for scientific ends, honoring archaeological science with the restitution of the said artifacts that were previously unattainable.” Observing also that “it is undoubtable that Medici—as he has asserted—has also faced economic sacrifices all for the benefit of the State of Italy,” and there was no proof Medici had violated the 1939 antiquities law, it is “REQUESTED,” Ferri typed, “that the case be closed.”
The signs were good for Medici. The dropped charges applied only to the one Onesimos-Euphronios kylix, but Medici sensed he could be finding a way out of his overall case. Ferri, who was prepared to celebrate the event, brought out sparkling wine, popped the cork, and poured the bubbly into four glasses for the men in his office. The prosecutor even let Medici sit in the high-backed chair behind his desk as they toasted and ate from a small platter of sweet breadsticks.
More than a year after Inspector Baudin had shattered the Sarpedon chalice, Medici still hadn’t seen exactly how bad the damage was—or under what conditions the broken kylix languished. But with his storerooms sealed by the Swiss police, there was no way for him to take a look. Oddly, however, the slow collapse of his antiquities business and finances would provide Medici a literal foot in the door.
Just before the 1995 raid, Medici had taken delivery of some ancient Roman frescoes. He had stored them in a special depot at Arts Franc, the company that had subleased the warehouse rooms to him. Since the bust, Medici’s trading had mostly dried up, and paying rent on multiple storage spaces was eating into his cash. The solution, he decided, was to consolidate, and he petitioned the Swiss police for permission to move his frescoes into his main rooms, the ones under seal.
The Swiss courts granted Medici onetime consent to go into the warehouse, accompanied by Inspector Lovo, a colleague of Baudin’s. Medici and Lovo brought the frescoes to Medici’s old, sealed storage space, where he was surrounded by his inventory. And he was shocked at what he saw.
During the earlier 1998 inventory, the police had stored the objects terribly. To him, it looked like they’d been crammed into a boxcar. At that moment, storing the frescoes was a second thought. “Where is the Euphronios kylix?” he demanded.
Medici poked around. Scanning a tall cabinet made of steel shelves, he found the box that contained the broken cup—or what he could recognize of its remains. The jagged fragments were stuffed into plastic freezer bags. Medici had had the foresight to bring his camera with him. His earlier propensity to document everything with photographs may have gotten him in legal trouble, but now the obsession was a good thing. He could now prove that an investigation intended to save antiquities had actually destroyed them. Medici took a few, slightly out-of-focus, snapshots, and then it was time to go.
Five years after the 1995 raid, the Swiss finally decided the case was an Italian matter. This meant the prosecutors and police in Rome could get the documentation the Swiss had seized, the core of which was Medici’s photo collection. But the volumes of evidence were more than prosecutor Ferri could digest himself, so he handed that task to Maurizio Pellegrini, a technician from the Villa Giulia museum, taking him on as a consultant. Some images popped out as obviously important to building the case: Medici posing in front of the Sarpedon krater at the Met, and, curiously, American dealer Robert Hecht doing exactly the same; Polaroids of vases in fragments, encrusted with dirt; Polaroids of a tall marble statue of a woman, taken in sections.
The photos of Medici and Hecht with the krater seemed to link both men to the vase that Italy had long given up hope of winning back. The other photos provided leads to other, less celebrated loot. Pellegrini’s task was to match each of the hundreds, if not thousands, of photos to known pieces in museums or collections around the world. To do this, he needed to cross-reference exhibit and auction catalogs and develop an eye for making connections between vases or statues in a genre of art where many objects are indistinguishable from one another.
As Pellegrini pored over the photos, he came to images of something he actually had seen before: the Onesimos-Euphronios kylix, the one that bore an inscription on its base. The shocker, however, about the pictures of different fragments of the massive cup, was that one of them—of just the central portion together with another fragment—had written on its margins, “Prop. P.G.M.” Pellegrini and the others decided that Medici’s markings meant the piece had been proposed to the Getty for purchase. This was the section of the cup that another dealer, Frieda Tchacos, had sold the museum. Did Medici, who had later sold the museum some other bits of the cup, have something to do with the original sale?
Perhaps more important, Pellegrini also found a photo of the three fragments Medici had surrendered to Ferri in a bid for leniency. Contrary to Medici’s story of heroically finding, buying, and repatriating the pieces for the sake of the Italian Republic, he had had the fragments all along, Ferri concluded based on the evidence Pellegrini uncovered.
Confronted, Medici was incredulous. If he had the fragments before 1999, wouldn’t they have been in his warehouse or his homes, which the police had thoroughly searched? “If I had them, they’d have found them,” Medici said.
Ferri didn’t buy it and reinstated the charges relating to the giant kylix.
Although the raid on Medici’s warehouse had yielded a trove of documents, it also turned up thousands of objects. When the Swiss courts ruled that they should turn the evidence over to the Italians, they turned over to the Rome prosecution anything related to Italy, but they gave Medici most of the rest. He won back hundreds of objects that appeared to be fakes or that clearly came from places such as Egypt, Syria, the Far East, and even Greece.
That could have meant the courts would give Medici the box containing the shattered, Greek-made Sarpedon chalice. Or they could have shipped it to Rome. The Swiss never said. And in all the press conferences and public pronouncements that followed in Italy, no official involved in the case disclosed the fate of the cup. Several years later when the Carabinieri posted photos from the Geneva raid on the Internet, they included some of Medici’s finest purchases from the Hunt auction, but the kylix by Euphronios was missing. Once again—and this time perhaps because it was shattered to bits—the trail of the lost chalice went cold.