11
IT WILL NOT HAVE GONE UNNOTICED that several earlier investigations into the illicit traffic in antiquities by the Italian authorities had foundered because, once the alleged tombaroli or smugglers had been arraigned in court, they denied what they had earlier told undercover police, confided to journalists, or admitted on arrest. In most cases, the Italian authorities were unable to make the charges stick because, as Hecht—among others—noted several times, it was always impossible to prove that the objects under scrutiny really had been excavated illegally inside Italy. Independent and incontrovertible photographic or other documentary evidence didn’t exist.
But in Medici’s case, of course, all that had changed. This time there was an amazing richness of material: some 4,000 photographs, tens of thousands of documents, 4,000 looted antiquities. Not only was this material evidence invaluable in its own right, but it also gave Ferri a crucial advantage over some of his earlier colleagues: It provided him with ammunition he could use to search and interrogate other suspects in the Medici network. It was clear that Medici was the biggest quarry the Italian authorities had ever had in their sights in this particular area of underworld activity and that the biggest trial of its kind was envisaged. Serious resources were being thrown at the problem. The photographs, invoices, and letters, not to mention the spread of Italian antiquities in the museums of the world, meant that Ferri could confront a whole raft of tombaroli, dealers, auctioneers, academics, and curators with hard evidence of their culpability, something no one had really been able to do before in this field. The situation was unprecedented.
Conforti recognized it. “After the material arrived from Switzerland, I took satisfaction in holding the Polaroids in my hands. The pleasure of finding myself with something solid, something substantial . . . knowing that we could now put the prosecutor to work on real evidence, on proof.” But Conforti wasn’t going to sit back. He recalled his time in Naples, fighting the Camorra. Then there had been a special Carabinieri unit, battling against the Red Brigade. Conforti had learned a thing or two from these operations, and he now adapted those earlier tactics in the field of antiquities looting.
“I said to the chief public prosecutor, look, at this moment we have 270 proceedings against various individuals. They are all separate. Why don’t we create a pool of magistrates, just as there is with the Anti-Mafia Pool in Palermo, the Clean-Hands Pool [anti-corruption] in Milan, a pool of magistrates who will deal with this kind of criminality, who can work together, exchange information, and become expert in the field they are prosecuting. And so, over time, the same thing was done—in Bari, Turin, Florence, and Palermo.” Paolo Giorgio Ferri, part of the Rome pool, became expert in the laws, not just of Italy but of Switzerland, Britain, Germany, and the United States. Between them they worked out the order of trials, designed to put increasing pressure on the culprits, beginning at the bottom and working up. This book appears partway through that process, and readers may judge for themselves how successful the Italian tactics have been.
We have said that the turning point in the investigation, so far as the interrogations were concerned, came when the Swiss decided to take no action against Medici but instead turned all the evidence over to the Italians. That is true. However, for a variety of reasons, Ferri was able to conductsome interviews before the Swiss decision. For example, the documentation taken from Sotheby’s by James Hodges was not in Switzerland and, as soon as we realized that Sotheby’s was not going to take any legal action against us, we made our material available to Ferri. He was able to act on this well before 2000.
In fact, he was able to interrogate Henri Albert Jacques as early as September 11, 1995, two days before the raid on the Freeport. He could do this because Editions Services—for which Jacques was the administrator—in addition to consigning for sale at Sotheby’s a stolen sarcophagus from the San Saba church in Rome,l had also handled an object stolen from an Italian citizen living in the Latina area, a few miles south of Rome. The movement of stolen objects that have crossed international borders has always been easier to investigate than the smuggling of looted antiquities.
In his interrogation, Jacques confirmed that Editions Services was a Panamanian company created in 1981 and bought in 1986 by Giacomo Medici. In 1991, he said, the company had rented rooms in the Geneva Freeport, from Mat Securitas SA. He said that “the only purpose of the company was that of collecting the proceeds deriving from antiquities sales at Sotheby’s in London, and that purchases were made exclusively through Sotheby’s.” It was Medici, he said, who managed these sales and kept the proceeds, and he observed that “no bookkeeping of any kind had ever been maintained.” He also gave it as his view that “very many objects, also of great value, had been handled through Sotheby’s.” He insisted that he was only the administrator and that Medici had all the “economic rights” in the company. But Jacques did admit that he was the administrator of other companies, including Tecafin S.A. and Xoilan Trader, Inc. He had administered Xoilan since 1976. He himself had started this company for an English citizen, Robin Symes.
Danilo Zicchi, of course, was interrogated immediately after his premises were discovered in February 1996. He fleshed out the general picture given here in two ways. He confirmed—and this was very important as evidence—that the organigram was indeed in Pasquale Camera’s handwriting, and he revealed that sometime around the end of 1994 or beginning of 1995, Camera had told him about a treasure of more than 100 Roman silver pieces that had been found in the Vesuvian area. (This is by no means improbable. In July 2005, a 2,000-year-old silver dining service—twenty goblets, plates, and trays—buried in volcanic ash in Pompeii when Vesuvius erupted, went on exhibit at the archaeological site, after being unearthed by workers digging a new highway that will pass near the Pompeii ruins.) Zicchi said the treasure was of such a quality that it could only be compared to two similar ones, the Pisanella Treasure at the Louvre (this 109-piece silver hoard was excavated in 1895 at the Villa Pisanella in Herculaneum and given to the Louvre by Edmond de Rothschild), and that of the House of the Menandro, discovered in the basement of the home of the Pompeian poet Menandro, in 1930, and now at the National Archaeological Museum in Naples. Together with the clandestine silver, Zicchi said that a few hundred gold and silver coins had been found, also from the Roman era, of the Julius Claudian dynasty (which ruled in the first century BC and the first century AD). This treasure, “found in about 1990 by an elderly person,” had, he said, been bought by a Benedetto D’Aniello of the Naples area (named in the organigram), who had sold it to Giacomo Medici. Camera had revealed all this to Zicchi because he was furious that the treasure had been “dismembered.” This had happened, apparently, after Medici took the hoard to Switzerland and sold part of it to “the Symeses.” Other parts had been sold to a Persian (whom Zicchi named), a man living in Switzerland but with a warehouse in London.
Then there were a number of tombaroli whom Ferri interrogated as part of Operation Geryon. On occasion, their information—backed up by phone taps—confirmed the emerging picture of the organization of the cordate. One was Walter Guarini, interrogated several times in March 1999. Guarini was a tombarolo from Puglia who had stepped up the ladder and become an important middleman-dealer in his own right. The Carabinieri had had their eyes on him for some time, and Guarini, no fool, had several times given them tip-offs and information when—of course—these didn’t directly jeopardize his own activity. Guarini confirmed that Hecht has “always been Number One in the world, for many years.” Here is the next exchange:
PUBLIC PROSECUTOR [DR. FERRI]: Do you know if Hecht is the person to whom all of Europe turns to launder these objects, or not?
GUARINI: A large part turns to him.
P. P.: To launder them?
G.: Yes, to sell them. But not only Italians, also foreigners: Turks, Lebanese, Syrians . . .
P. P.: “Launder” is quite a scientific term in this field. You see, I wanted to be precise about this.
G.: Put them on the market.
P. P.: And why did he [Medici] not, for example, go directly to the Paul Getty Museum?
G.: I think that the Getty uses a filter to buy certain artifacts.
P. P.: Why do they use a filter?
G.: Because I believe Bob Hecht is highly accredited for his profession, which he has been practicing for forty years, almost fifty years.
P. P.: So this filter is in charge of buying and selling?
G.: He’s certainly the reference point.
Guarini also set down the names of those in the various cordate, specifying who was linked to whom. He listed a raft of tombaroli names from Puglia, Sicily, Campania, and Lazio who supplied Savoca, including [Vincenzo] Cammarata; he listed the people in Naples and Rome who supplied Frida Tchacos, including Pasquale Camera; he said that “Frida’s contacts abroad are [Michael] Steinhardt [a New York dealer], Leon Levy, Jiri Frel, and Marion True.”
Then came this next exchange. It appears that during Ferri’s discussions with Guarini about Robert Hecht, Guarini happened to mention a memoria (memoir) that Hecht was writing. (Remember that this interrogation took place in 1999.)
Ferri leaped on this reference because in their phone taps, the Carabinieri had more than once heard mention of a “memoria,” yet hadn’t been able to make sense of what they heard. Was it something written? A tape? And what was its purpose?
P.P.: What is this memoria of Bob Hecht? Bob Hecht’s memoria—what is it?
G.: I heard about it in Savoca’s house, at Nino’s . . .
P.P.: In what year?
G.: Last year, or two years ago.
P.P.: And where is this memoria?
G.: This memoria is . . . it appears that Bob has it, that he wrote all . . . all his trafficking [“traffico”] in the last years with all the characters . . .
P.P.: It’s not that Nino Savoca had the memoria of . . .
G.: No, no. He didn’t have it nor did he know . . . in fact, at the time he was afraid of this memoria.
P.P.: Savoca was afraid of this memoria? Why?
G.: Probably because they too were in this memoria.
P.P.: Of course, I imagine so . . .
G.: Just as all the dealers who had anything to do with . . .
P.P.: I understand . . .
[deletion for legal reasons]
P.P.: . . . in the end I suppose I’ll have to say thank you to good Mr. Guarini, but at the moment I can’t say thank you, because the members of your cordata have not emerged. So, this memoria of Bob Hecht’s?
G.: If I had it, Doctor, I’d give it to you immediately . . .
P.P.: And Savoca hasn’t got it by any chance?
G.: No, no. They’re all so afraid, Doctor . . .
P.P.: Who?
G.: Savoca also is afraid of the . . .
P.P.: They haven’t got it, no . . . ?
G.: . . . of the direct contacts . . .
P.P.: . . . in some floppy disk?
G.: No, no, absolutely not, because when . . . the guy who died [Savoca died in 1998] was telling me, that when this subject was touched, Bob Hecht became secretive, and then without putting . . . without recording please . . . Can I say something without recording?
P.P.: Oh no, you can’t. Better that you keep it to yourself. Not to me. Nothing doing.
G.: No, well . . . It concerned Bob, who is an extremely dangerous man. Absolutely.
P.P.: Oh, I imagine so; he’s central to international trafficking [“traffici internazionali”] for the past twenty years.
G.: Yes, but apart from this, he’s dangerous.
Another tombarolo was Pietro Casasanta. Among tomb robbers in Italy, Casasanta is notorious. A rough, portly chain-smoker in his late sixties who lives in Anguillara, north of Rome near the shores of Lake Bracciano, he began digging in 1960 and told us that he has discovered “about a hundred villas” (he does not, he says, “plunder tombs”). He is notorious for making three extraordinary discoveries. In 1970, he found L’Inviolata, a large settlement, a temple cult that he says contained sixty-three statues, twenty-five of them life-size. Many of these, he says, he sold to Robin Symes. He returned to L’Inviolata in 1992 and discovered the famous Capitoline Triad, a six-ton marble statue of three seated gods—Jupiter, with a sheaf of lightning in one hand and an eagle at his feet, Juno, with a scepter and a peacock, and Minerva, with a shaft and an owl. Made of Lunense marble, this sculpture is unique, the only example depicting this triad that is intact. After a two-year Operation Juno, the piece was recovered by the Carabinieri and is now displayed in the Palestrina National Archaeological Museum in Palestrina, a town southwest of Rome (L’Inviolata is in Palestrina municipal district). Casasanta was jailed for twelve months. Then, in 1995—that is, within a year of his release from prison—he discovered an ivory head of Apollo, dating from the fifth century BC, and three Egyptian statues of goddesses, two in green granite and one in black. He found these, he says, in a field not far from a well-known archaeological landmark, the Baths of Claudius, and he believes he discovered a luxurious villa that belonged to the family of the first-century Roman emperor Claudius.
The ivory mask in particular was very valuable. Ivory sculptures, even in antiquity, were extremely rare. They were known as Chryselephantine sculptures, after the Greek for gold and ivory. (Great sculptures—such as the Athena Parthenos in the Acropolis in Athens, had their head, hands, and feet made of ivory, and their wooden or stone bodies covered in gold leaf.) Ivory was so expensive in antiquity that only emperors and other important figures could afford such statues. They were so rare that only one other life-size figure is known to have survived in Italy, found at Montecalvo (again, near Rome) and now in the Apostolic Library in the Vatican. And only one set of life-size Chryselephantine sculptures survives in Greece.
Casasanta smuggled the ivory and the three statues out of Italy himself and sold them to Nino Savoca. They agreed on a fee of $10 million.
Casasanta admitted to knowing Medici, having met him once in the “antiquities warehouse” (as he put it) of Franco Luzzi in Ladispoli. (Luzzi, it will be recalled, was mentioned in the organigram, where his area of influence is given as Ladispoli, on the coast north of Rome.) Casasanta said he had never done business with Medici—he didn’t like to deal with “Roman” dealers—but he had always known his name “because in their world he is a well-known figure.” He said that he had on a couple of occasions met Robert Hecht in Basel but that he’d not had “work” dealings with him, nor with Gianfranco Becchina. He had instead concluded a few “deals” with Ali Aboutaam abroad, for which he had “undergone penal procedures.” Casasanta’s problem was that the market “relative to his activity” was dominated by groups (the “cordate”), so he couldn’t even approach “certain milieus.” Casasanta, whose interrogation overlapped with Guarini’s, was the first person to use the word “cordata,” and he indicated that, for him, there were three groups, not two—one out of Italy via Savoca in Munich, one via Becchina in Basel, and one via Medici in Geneva. In his milieu, he said, “it was commonly believed by all that Medici was ‘il boss dei boss’ [the boss of bosses],” even though he, Casasanta, had no knowledge of specific facts. Casasanta believed that it had been Medici who had gotten him into trouble, putting the Carabinieri on to him when he had found the Capitoline Triad (and had left Medici out of the deal). Casasanta said it was rumored that “Medici was at the head of traffickings, a ‘general’ both in Italy and abroad, in London just as in Basel and Cerveteri.” (He meant Geneva, not Basel; it was all the same to him—Switzerland.) In particular, Franco Gangi, to whom Casasanta had sold the objects he dug up for fifteen years—from the end of the 1960s to the end of the 1980s—had told him that when he came into Etruria, “he would find ‘Giacomino’ Medici, because everything in Etruria went through Medici and one could not ‘work’ because Medici would always take everything and controlled the market through his many contacts and relations in the area.”
Casasanta gave an interesting account of Medici’s early years—how, for example, his parents had a stall at the Fontanella Borghese, where they sold small objects. For many years, Casasanta said, Medici had a man, Ermenegildo Foroni, known as “Scotchwhisky,” who acted as his shipper and sold goods abroad for him. This name, Ermenegildo Foroni, was of course one of the names on Pasquale Camera’s organigram. (Casasanta didn’t know about the organigram at the time of his interrogation.) It was common practice, he said, to use Swiss shippers to temporarily store objects on their way abroad. He confirmed that Pasquale Camera would organize thefts from museums and churches and that he had a close relationship with Nino Savoca in Munich—he was part of that cordata. To quote the official record of the interrogation, “Right back at the time when Camera was a lieutenant of the Finanza [Guardia di Finanza], Savoca and his wife would come to Etruria and would sleep at Casasanta’s house because they didn’t want to go to hotels [where they would have to register, showing their passports], thus avoiding being noticed and leaving their names around; then they [Casasanta and Savoca] would go together with Lello Camera [Lello is a nickname for Pasquale]—it was the early sixties—to get frescoes in Paestum.”
Broadening out, Casasanta said that the Euphronios krater had been found by a certain Renato, whose nickname was “Roscio.” He had been identified but had died. “Franco Gangi used to say he had given 180 million [lire, or $150,000] to Giacomo Medici to buy the Euphronios krater and Medici had ‘nicked’ the money and had sold the vase to others.” Through Nino Savoca, Casasanta had met a “lady, about 35—40 years old in 1995,” introduced as the deputy director of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, who had come to see a Roman head at Casasanta’s home; afterward Nino Savoca had bought the head “following the indications of the woman.” In 1970, he had made a fabulous find, much more important than the Capitoline Triad; he had found over sixty sculptures. He had sold them for not very much to Roman dealers, and the greater part of these had later been bought by Robin Symes and Christo Michaelides. In the autumn of 1970, they came to Rome and often bought objects excavated by Casasanta.
Mario Bruno, he said, was a friend of his, a dealer who operated in Etruria and Puglia, where everybody worked, and he would sell the archaeological material abroad. “He lived in Lugano where he had a villa on the lake. He knew Giacomo Medici and Bruno used to speak badly of him since they were competitors in trafficking archaeological material from Italy, both busy trying to buy the best objects that came to light.” He (Casasanta) had given the Triad to Bruno. Becchina had a fabulous gallery in Basel. It was some years since he had retired to his villa in Sicily, though he had been very active for fifteen or twenty years before. “Becchina used to buy archaeological material principally in Sicily where he had some good suppliers who had also got him some valuable pieces. In Etruria he used to buy from tombaroli who would bring him the merchandise to Basel. Becchina, from being absolutely nothing, from being an emigrant with a small suitcase, had gone to Switzerland, had in some way begun his work in Basel and had become a multimillionaire. Becchina bought himself a large estate in his hometown, he bought a baronial palazzo where he lives alone with four to five servants. . . .” Casasanta knew Frida Tchacos well. He’d also sold her a small head in Zurich in 1990–1993. “Tchacos was powerful and tied to the Symeses and had noteworthy means at her disposal.”
The fact was, the paperwork discovered in Geneva was beginning to work. The details revealed in the Freeport, plus the organigram, convinced the smaller fry at least that their interests lay in cooperating with Conforti and Ferri. The public prosecutor was encouraged. But he would be much more encouraged if he could find that memoir by Hecht that Savoca had mentioned to Guarini, and which had been referred to, so tantalizingly, in the phone taps. Did the memoir exist?