13
ABOUT A MONTH AFTER THE RAID on Hecht, in the second week of March 2001, a Swiss magistrate, two Swiss police, together with two investigators from Conforti’s Art Squad and Public Prosecutor Ferri himself, raided the premises of Phoenix Ancient Art, S.A., at 6 Rue Verdaine, in Geneva, and also the premises of Inanna Art Services at the Freeport.
Of course, the Italians were already aware of the close links between Medici and Phoenix Ancient Art because of the documentation found in Corridor 17, including checks made out to Phoenix by Lawrence Fleischman, a partnership contract with Editions Services, and a series of monthly invoices made out to Phoenix by Medici, for his expertise.
At the premises on Rue Verdaine, only the manager of the company, Jeffrey Suckow, was there, so none of the Aboutaams were interrogated, either then or later. Suckow handed over to the Italians a list of auctions at which the Aboutaams had bought objects being sold by Medici and in which, in at least two cases, those objects had ended up back with him in Corridor 17. Apart from this, five vases were seized, all of which had been temporarily imported into Switzerland by Ariss Ancient Art and which, Suckow said, were owned by Noura Aboutaam, sister of Ali and Hischam. Two of these objects came from Medici, as shown by the seized Polaroids.
The details about the laundering, and about Noura’s involvement, were steps forward, but small ones, so far as Ferri’s investigation was concerned. He had higher hopes for what he might find later that day in their warehouse in the Freeport.
The Carabinieri, of course, were by now more than familiar with the Freeport, its gray-painted structures, its green stairwells, its forbidding metal doors. After lunch, as they reached the doorway to Inanna, there was a slight hiccup when the Swiss judge expressed reservations that Inanna actually had anything to do with Phoenix Ancient Art and the Aboutaams. Ferri explained again the links between Medici and the Lebanese, and the references in the seized documents to Inanna. The judge remained doubtful, but after still more discussion in the corridor outside the offices, she agreed to let one of the Swiss police go inside the warehouse and see who was there. He came back to say that inside were Jeffrey Suckow, whom they had met earlier, and Ali Aboutaam. Reassured, the judge allowed the raid to go ahead. Whereupon Ali Aboutaam—six foot three, balding, heavily built—left.
As they had approached the Inanna warehouses, on the floor directly below Medici’s, there had been nothing to suggest that the rooms inside would be any different from his. The gallery at Rue Verdaine was plush and elegant.
Not at the Freeport. There is a word in Italian—“raccapricciante”—which is not easy to translate but means, basically, “it makes your flesh crawl.” And this was the universal reaction of the Italians as they entered Inanna’s offices. “There was a sea of objects everywhere,” says one of Conforti’s men. “It was distressing to see so many objects of culture treated with such violence.” What he meant was that, far from being packed away in cupboards, as Medici had done with his objects in Corridor 17, at Inanna there was absolutely no respect for anything to be found there. “There were gold rings strewn on the floor, in envelopes; there was a wooden Egyptian sarcophagus that had been sawn into pieces; there were glazed ceramics just lying everywhere, jumbles of coins, glass and jewelry; there were mummies leaning against the wall, even mummies of cats; there was material from Iraq, Iran, India, and South East Asia—all scattered over the floor in a huge mess.”
In the outer rooms, most of the material—the objects just lying around—were not of Italian origin. But in the room farthest away from the door, there were some cupboards, and all the material inside them was Italian. And what did they find among these objects? Two boxes of ceramics from Scrimbia.q
The Italian objects were photographed, replaced in the cupboards where they had been found, and the cupboards—but not the warehouse—sealed with wax. Whatever their personal opinions of where the non-Italian material had come from, the Carabinieri had no professional interest, and no competence or jurisdiction to take any action in connection with it. When the Carabinieri returned two months later, with the archaeologists, for the technical assessment of the Italian material at Inanna, the rest of the warehouse was empty. Everything else—the Iraqi, Iranian, and Indian material—had all been removed.
As the Italian cupboards were unsealed and opened, it was now the archaeologists’ turn to feel “raccapriccio.” On closer examination, one of the boxes in the cupboards was found to contain gold rings with the finger bones of the dead still attached to them. Clearly, when the tombs had been looted, the hands and fingers of the long-dead had simply been broken off by the tombaroli, to save time. To Conforti, nothing in his long career showed the sheer barbarity of Medici’s cordata so much as this.
Suckow said that the warehouse had existed since 1992 and had been created by Sleiman Aboutaam, the father of Ali and Hischam. Suckow had been employed as manager after he had worked on the computers at Phoenix. Suckow said that, in fact, neither Inanna nor Phoenix owned any of the objects in the Freeport warehouse. He said the company existed solely to buy and sell on behalf of others. Its most important clients, he said, were Ariss Ancient Art, Tanis Antiquities Ltd., Sekhmet Ancient Art, and the Galerie Weber of Cologne. Many objects, he said, were sent to Inanna for restoration. The company issued passavants and would send material principally to two restorers in London, Martin Foster and Colin Bowles, and one in New York, Jane Gillies.
Suckow said he had continued to manage the warehouse even after Sleiman Aboutaam and his wife had been killed in the SwissAir plane crash off Nova Scotia in 1998. Ali Aboutaam came to the warehouse once a week to view the objects that had arrived in the interim and to give instructions about sales. The Italian objects found in the Freeport belonged, he said, to Ariss Ancient Art. He said he knew the names of Fritz Bürki, Giacomo Medici, and Editions Services but had never worked for them. He knew the name of Marion True at the John Paul Getty Museum but couldn’t remember if he had ever met her. He didn’t know the names Christian Boursaud, Hydra Gallery, or Xoilan Trader.
The raids on the Aboutaams had, in reality, raised more questions than they had answered. What, actually, was their business? If Suckow was to be believed, they owned nothing but just operated a holding company. As the Fleischman checks found in Medici’s warehouse seemed to indicate, they were in reality just a convenient “front” for other people. Their part in the laundering of objects at auction seemed to support such a role, too. The state of their warehouse, and the grisly business of the finger bones inside the rings, seemed to show that they had no real regard for art or ancient artifacts. In their exploitation of the archaeological world, the Aboutaams were just about as cynical as you could get.
Ferri was aware that the role of the Aboutaams was mysterious, and all the more interesting for that. But, as he put it, “There was no time to follow all the rivers.” He had his priorities and time was passing. His next target was Fritz and Harry Bürki, the restorers in Zurich.
The raid on their premises took place some months later, in October 2001. This time there were present two of Conforti’s men, four Swiss police, and a Zurich magistrate. The Bürkis’ apartment was on the fourth floor of a tall anonymous building near the main railway station. Once the raiding party had gathered outside the apartment, the senior policeman rang the bell. No reply. They rang again. Still no reply. It was decided not to bludgeon the door open, but instead to send for a locksmith. One of the local Zurich police pulled out his mobile phone and dialed someone the police had used before. As he was dialing, however, the door to the apartment suddenly opened, and Harry Bürki—tall, thin, pale, with black hair and a black mustache—stood there. Had he been listening just inside the door, waiting for them to go away, only to realize that they weren’t going away?
“Yes?” he said.
Inside they found a restorer’s laboratory, “even more technological than Savoca’s,” says one of Conforti’s men, who had seen both.
But what caught the eye of the investigators was a bag, a battered sports bag. It was tall, made of some kind of canvas, and it had a false bottom—it was less deep inside than it was outside. When they opened up the false bottom, the compartment below was found to contain crumbs of soil. No less interesting, the bag was decorated with the emblem for an Italian football team, Mondragone, a town very near to Casal di Principe. Casal di Principe, it will be remembered from Chapter 1, was where the burst of telephone activity occurred among the tombaroli after the theft at Melfi. Casal di Principe was where Pasquale Camera had a house.
Was this bag the device used to smuggle objects out of Italy?
Harry Bürki shrugged his shoulders. He said he didn’t know what they were talking about. He didn’t know what the bag was used for.
He was asked who lived in the room where the search was taking place.
“I do.”
“Where is the bed?”
He had no answer. There was none.
At this point, one of the raiding party noticed a room off the entrance hall. It was small, just big enough for a spiral staircase made of wood. “Where does this lead?” asked Conforti’s man, mindful of where the (marble) spiral staircase in Savoca’s house had led.
“Nowhere,” replied Bürki.
“We’ll take a look anyway,” said the senior Swiss policeman.
Upstairs, there was another huge apartment. It had bookshelves with many books. Conforti’s man pulled out one and, by a stroke of luck, it fell open to reveal a passport, Robert Hecht’s passport as it happened, albeit out of date.
Conforti’s man looked at Harry Bürki, who now admitted that this apartment belonged to his father, Fritz, who was abroad.
They thereupon thoroughly searched the upstairs apartment, finding many archaeological objects, some with Becchina tags on them. They were all photographed and seized and, somewhat later, the photographs were sent to Rome. There they were examined by Daniela Rizzo so that she could identify whether they had in fact come from Italy. Armed with this information, Ferri and Rizzo returned to Zurich some weeks later to interrogate both Bürkis, father and son.
Neither was very helpful at first. The interrogations, which lasted three hours, took place at their laboratory.
Fritz Bürki began by conceding that he knew that most of the objects he had been asked to restore in his career came from illegal digs, even though everyone pretended such antiquities were part of their “family heritage.” When shown photographs of the Guglielmi tripod,r he said he had never seen it, only heard about it five or ten years before. After being shown the J. P. Getty documents relating to the acquisition of the self-same object—which he had signed—he immediately changed his account and said that Mario Bruno had asked him to sign the document as “lender” (by the time of the interrogation, Bruno, the dealer from Lugano described in Chapter 11 was dead). Fritz Bürki didn’t know why Bruno used him as a “front,” he said, but speculated that since Bruno was known as a receiver of stolen goods, perhaps the museum didn’t wish to have direct contact with him. He didn’t know how Bruno had come into possession of the tripod, he said, and later on informed the Getty that Hecht and Atlantis (and not he himself) were the true owners of the object.
He said he knew Medici, but the latter had never been to his laboratory and he, Bürki, never bought anything from Medici, nor did he restore objects for him. Ferri then showed him some photographs of vases before restoration that had been found in Medici’s Geneva warehouse. Fritz Bürki claimed not to recognize them. Ferri paused, for effect, then pointed out that the furniture and the wallpaper shown in the background of the photographs were exactly the same as that in the room where the interrogation was taking place.
Grudgingly, Bürki admitted to having some dealings with Atlantis Antiquities and to having restored the Euphronios krater, for which he’d made out a regular invoice, but he refused to answer further questions on the grounds that he had already been questioned (thirty years before, however). Ferri noted that there was a photograph of the Euphronios krater on Bürki’s desk. Bürki could not explain how Medici’s name and details were in his agenda, or why his were in Medici’s. He claimed that what Medici said with regard to his—Bürki’s—delivery of objects to the Freeport for sale was untrue; Medici was lying. He had no memory of specific antiquities or what he might have been paid for working on them.
He did admit to having acted as a “front” for Hecht, who was his most important client, but denied acting as a “front” for anyone else. He knew Becchina but said he had never been to his laboratory, and Bürki could not explain why some of the objects in his laboratory at the time of the raid had tags with Becchina’s name on them.
He admitted that his son and he had restored the Pompeian frescoes, of which he was shown photographs. He said that he had never seen the photographs of the frescoes on the clandestine dig, but that the frescoes themselves arrived cut into eleven pieces. The restoration had lasted twelve to eighteen months, and the objects were on his premises for at least three years.
His son was no more forthcoming. Harry Bürki knew Medici, he said. He had seen him at Sotheby’s auctions but did not store objects in Medici’s warehouse, did not buy anything from him, and claimed that where his name was included in Medici’s documentation, it was false. But he did admit that in restoring the Pompeian frescoes with his father, he had seen the photographs taken in Pompeii by the tombaroli and admitted it was possible Marion True might have seen the frescoes in the Bürkis’ laboratory. He knew Becchina, he said, but the objects on the Bürkis’ Zurich premises bearing Becchina tags had been bought in Munich about five months previously, from someone now dead. He too could not explain why the tags were there and had Becchina’s name on them.
He admitted that “[p]erhaps he sold some objects to the Getty but he does not remember.” Harry Bürki did not remember from whom he had bought the Etruscan tripod, sold to the Getty for $65,000, but he excluded Medici. Over the years, he said, he sold about ten objects to the Getty, using Hecht as intermediary.
The Bürkis admitted as little as possible, but even so their dissembling was quite obvious.
Frida Tchacos was interrogated in rather dramatic circumstances that came about partly by accident. The route to her went via the statue of the Artemis, a photograph of which had been found in the glove compartment in Pasquale Camara’s Renault, the one that overturned on the Autostrade del Sole near Cassino and killed him. The Artemis was important partly because three other versions of it were known, all of which were in Italian museums, and partly because it might be the Greek original of those Roman copies. Even if it were a Roman copy itself, it was still valuable and it would be important to find out where it had been excavated.
Danilo Zicchi, Camera’s colleague, in whose apartment the Artemis had been photographed after it left the butcher shop, said that he thought Frida Thacos was involved with the statue. Walter Guarini, the Puglia tombarolo we met in Chapter 11, was known to be one of the main suppliers to Frida, so pressure was now put on him to help with the return of the Artemis.
Sure enough, the statue was returned. It was left in a field near Bari and the local police alerted by an anonymous telephone call. That seemed to have concluded the matter—except that one day while going through the transcripts of some telephone taps, Ferri happened to notice that members of the cordata were still referring to a statue of Artemis. A frightening thought occurred to Ferri: Was the statue that had been returned a fake? The sculpture returned in Bari had been examined by experts and declared genuine, and its measurements conformed exactly to the other three known works. But still . . .
Ferri had other experts look at the Artemis, and they made an unusual observation. The measurements of the “Bari” Artemis, if we can call it that, were indeed exactly what they should have been, except that in the case of the recovered statue, its height was the same as all the others including the base. Clearly, the forger had designed his work using good photos and had been given the dimensions. However, he had misunderstood that the height of the statue referred to the Artemis without its base. The Bari figure, if not the entire ensemble, was a good few inches shorter than it should have been.
It was clear that the Bari statue was a serious attempt to mislead the law enforcement authorities—it took money, time, and not a little skill to create such a forgery. All this was confirmed when Conforti found the forger and he confessed. Conforti and Ferri were both incensed. Yet more pressure was put on Guarini, and he admitted that the real Artemis was still with Frida Tchacos in Switzerland, whereupon Ferri issued an international warrant for Tchacos’s arrest and initiated the legal process for her extradition to Italy. Now she couldn’t travel—the minute she crossed any international border, she would be arrested and held.
While the extradition process was working its way through the Swiss legal system, Ferri received a visit in Rome from Tchacos’s lawyers, seeking agreement. After several hours of discussion, Ferri agreed that he would drop the charges against her if she complied with two demands. First, the real Artemis must be returned, and second, she must write a detailed memoir, setting out what she knew about the antiquities underworld in general, naming names and giving particulars about Medici’s and Hecht’s and Symes’s operations. And here there arose a misunderstanding that, eventually, would work to Ferri’s advantage.
Tchacos agreed to Ferri’s conditions and, before long, the Artemis was returned to Italy. At this point, Ferri rescinded his extradition request. But Tchacos never complied with the second request, and never sent Ferri a memoir. Maybe she didn’t think it mattered, that what Ferri really wanted all along was the Artemis. But the public prosecutor is a stickler for the rules of fairness, and to him a deal is a deal. And so, although he withdrew the extradition request, he did not withdraw the international warrant for Tchacos’s arrest.
Therefore, when Tchacos—believing that there were no legal impediments hanging over her—next took a trip abroad, she was in for a surprise. She had a brother who lived in Cyprus, and in the second week of February 2002, she landed at Limassol airport. At passport control, she was recognized, arrested, and held. The Italians were informed, and she was kept in jail overnight, before being placed under house arrest at her brother’s. It took three or four days before Ferri and two of Conforti’s senior men could get to Limassol, and the intervening period was clearly a distressing experience for her and may help explain why, during her interrogation, when it came, she was so cooperative. It may also have had something to do with the fact the Ferri, normally so mild-mannered, now saw his chance and, sensing Tchacos was vulnerable in Cyprus, agreed to hurry only if she agreed, in his words, to “amply cooperate.” She agreed, he hurried, and she was interviewed over two days on February 17 and 18, 2002.
What he wanted from her was what he had originally asked for—a memoir, her view of the way the underworld really worked, and the part played in it by Medici, Hecht, Symes, and the others. She did not disappoint this time, immediately confirming the existence of the cordate. She said Symes had told her Hecht was a dangerous man, that she too found him “vindictive” and was afraid of him. She confirmed that Medici was Hecht’s “right-hand man,” that Hecht was writing a book to be published after his death, for the benefit of his wife, and that he had once photographed Symes when he was holding something “compromising”—in other words, looted.
She went on to say that the Aboutaams were replacing the older dealers. In 2001, Harry Bürki had told her he no longer restored—only traded. Medici was not an expert, she said: “[H]e really couldn’t recognize one painter from another, just as I can’t.” But he was well aware of when he was selling fakes. The Symeses (i.e., Robin Symes and Christo Michaelides) had sold a marble Venus by Doidalses (one of the more famous classical Greek sculptors) to Jiri Frel at the Getty. It was fake and originated, she thought, with Medici. She had met Medici in the 1970s “and at that time he was already a person of intres . . . an important person.” He already had premises in the Freeport in Geneva and asked her there to see some marbles. Among these marbles was a Venus by Doidalses (a Venus “acoupis,” crouching), but most of the objects there that day were fake. She said the Getty had already bought one like it: “It was already known that these fake Venuses were on the market.”
She confirmed that Medici was known as the biggest dealer, “that he had contacts with all . . . with all the big dealers, the biggest dealers . . . with Hecht mainly, [but] not with Gianfranco Becchina—they hated each other.” She knew that Medici had the Hydra Gallery and that Christian Boursaud fronted for him. Then this exchange followed:
FERRI: Was Hecht already famous at that time? [They were talking about the 1980s.]
FRIDA TCHACOS: He was already famous. Hecht was in Paris, he was known to be the biggest, he always lost money on . . . on . . . the Casinos. Then . . . yes, of Medici I can say that once I’d been struck by him when I saw him at Sotheby’s, this in ’85 . . . in ’90, when he was buying vases, red-figure or black-figure vases, but at very high prices and I didn’t understand how someone like Medici could have the money to buy these vases. And I tried to find out, but no-one could tell me why he bought these vases. At the time I thought he bought them to have . . . to have a collection of vases for himself, then I understood . . . that he did . . . did all these movements with Sotheby’s, to put vases . . . to sell his vases and then buying them so as to have a provenance, which I didn’t know at the time. And in the last . . . in the last years I learnt that he was in partnership or worked with the Aboutaams, the Arabs of Freeport, Geneva.
FERRI: These last years, what does this mean?
FRIDA: Hmm . . . since they opened at Freeport, it’s not yet ten years . . .
FERRI: Yes.
FRIDA: And first there was the father . . . and also on the Aboutaams, afterwards I’ll repeat this, that at a certain point at Sotheby’s the Aboutaams were seen buying vases next to Medici. They were both standing at the back, they weren’t sitting down, and the Aboutaams were buying very important vases at very high prices.
She further confirmed that Medici sold “quite a lot” to Robin Symes, that Symes “undoubtedly” bought vases from Medici, and she agreed that Symes bought the Morgantina Venus from Orazio Di Simone. “That was what was always said.”1
Returning to Hecht, she said that “he was a scholar, but a terrible character, who made one afraid . . . he was an old man, an old nasty man. I was always afraid of him . . . What else can I tell you? Hecht was called ‘Mister Percentage’ . . . because he took a percentage . . . I think from Medici as well . . . his great clients in Los Angeles were the Hunts, the Hunt brothers . . . I knew though that Medici was behind him . . . yes, yes.”
She confirmed that there was “a precise triangle”—Hecht, Becchina, Monticelli—and that the latter mainly supplied “[e]verything that could be found in the south of Italy; I think Apulian [vases], I think terracottas, I think bronzes. . . .” She later amended this cordata to include George Ortiz and Mario Bruno. She said that Mauro Morani was part of the Savoca cordata, and he had provided the kylix by Onesimos, or at least some of it. She met Morani through Guarini and knew him to be “a very able creator of fakes.”
She gave evidence that before Marion True was married, she had a lover in Rome in the early 1990s, one Enzo Constantini.
Aha, aha. She frequently went to Italy to see this lover. And it was interesting because after the visits of Marion True in Italy, in Rome, the Romans knew a lot more about the Getty—the Romans in general knew more than the Paul Getty itself . . . all the Italian market knew that the Getty was buying or not buying, from whom.... And every time I showed her something she . . . she said to me: “Beautiful, interesting, I can speak to Fleischman about it. . . .” So, later we understood how the Fleischman-True things went. . . . Dealers offered Marion True some things, and she, just as with me, refused or bought, I don’t know. But with me she refused and then she received a phone call from Fleischman who said to her: “What have you got for me?” and then, after you’d waited many months, perhaps years, reserving something for Marion True, Fleischman would come into the game . . . Fleischman was in relationship with Medici. . . . But it was Marion True who got them together . . . Fleischman was a dealer, Tempelsman was not.
Tchacos confirmed that the Levy-White Collection was purchased from Symes, and the routing was: “Mainly from Hecht; I don’t know if from Medici but if we say Hecht we say Medici; recently she [Shelby White] was buying a lot from the Aboutaams.”
She described von Bothmer and Robert Guy as academic “enemies,” that if one attributed a vase to one painter, the other would attribute it to someone else. She said that George Ortiz was the biggest collector in Europe and that his collection was made by Becchina but that he also had links with Savoca. She confirmed that Becchina sold a great deal at Sotheby’s and that Borowsky had had contact with German museums.
One of the things that came over strongly in Tchacos’s interview was how bitter the rivalry was at times between the different cordate. She herself heartily disliked Hecht. Elsewhere in her interview, she referred to an occasion when several of the Swiss-based antiquities dealers were on the same plane, traveling to Japan for the opening of the exhibition of the George Ortiz Collection at a museum there in 1993. During the flight, she said, Becchina had come up to her and said, as she put it, “We mustn’t allow certain people to work.” When asked who Becchina meant, she replied that he had been talking about Savoca.
Tchacos also confirmed that Fiorella Cottier-Angeli, the Swiss expert and customs official who “has this collection of Etruscan vases,” had told her that she had a key to Medici’s warehouse. After beginning as an adviser to Medici, for customs appraisals, “there began this activity of knowing Swiss collectors, to whom she then also supplied objects, which undoubtedly came from Medici . . . she was connected to the Director of the Geneva Museum, who was a rather weak character and did what she wanted of him.”
Ferri asked: “Which means?”
“. . . means that if she wanted to do . . . to sell something to a collector, she had an expertise drawn up by this guy of the Geneva Museum, this . . . [Jacques] Chamay.”
Tchacos was astonishingly forthcoming. Perhaps it was her character, perhaps it was the fact that she was, at the time, under arrest in Cyprus.
Ferri’s instincts about Tchacos’s mood in Limassol were correct. While they were there together, they arrived at a deal. There were certain objects that the Italians were anxious to recover, and chief among them was the ivory head discovered by Casasanta and sold to Savoca. The life-size head of Apollo, which had once formed part of a Chryselephantine statue in antiquity, was quite possibly the most important archaeological object to be unearthed since the Euphronios krater in 1971 (many people think it is even more important than the vase). In Limassol, Tchacos let it be known—without actually saying so—that she could help in the recovery of this object. In view of her cooperation, Ferri now let it be understood that in return for her help with the ivory head, he would limit the charges he would bring against her. He said the charges would be confined to offenses that carried penalties of two years or less (with a good chance that the prison terms would be suspended) and, most important, Tchacos would not be joined in the conspiracy charges that he was planning to bring against Medici, Hecht, Robin Symes, and perhaps Marion True.
Frida Tchacos agreed to this deal and, on September 17, 2002, she was convicted of handling stolen and smuggled goods, and of failing to notify the authorities of the antiquities that came her way. She was given one year and six months’ imprisonment, suspended, and fined 1,000 euros (approximately $1,000). But, so far as Ferri was concerned, there was more to it than that. Tchacos, he knew, was very friendly with Robin Symes—and the public prosecutor was anxious to interview Symes. Symes had residences in New York and Greece, and businesses in Switzerland, but he spent most of his time in London, where the police and judicial authorities did not cooperate at all well with the Italians. Thus, Ferri’s deal with Tchacos was more than it seemed: It was designed to put pressure on Symes. He knew that Tchacos would discuss her treatment in Limassol with Symes, for the unvoiced subtext to the encounter was that Ferri believed that Symes had the ivory head, bought from Savoca. He therefore believed that what Tchacos had in fact promised, without actually saying as much, was that she would put pressure on Symes to return the head.
So far as Ferri was concerned, Symes was a much more important link in the chain. He shared the same address with Medici at Avenue Krieg in Geneva, he was an active member of the cordata that supplied the Getty, the Levy-Whites, Maurice Tempelsman, and several others. So Ferri wasn’t about to do a deal with Symes, as he had done with Tchacos, but he was prepared for Symes to think that he might. Because of the poor cooperation offered to the Italians by the British (more like noncooperation, in fact), there was little chance that Ferri would ever be able to raid Symes’s premises in London, or interrogate him there. The deal with Tchacos, therefore, had as one of its aims that it would lure Symes to Rome, in search of something similar.
It took a year, but it worked. At the end of March 2003, Symes offered to travel to Rome voluntarily to be interviewed at the Palazzo di Giustizia by Ferri. He had with him his Italian lawyer, Francesco Tagliaferri. (This name was a source of much amusement for everyone: in Italian “Tagliaferri” means “cut Ferri,” in the sense of a “shortened Ferri” or “Ferri cut down to size.”) Tagliaferri was also Tchacos’s lawyer.
Unsurprisingly, Symes was uptight about everything and Ferri had to squeeze information out of him. It was like being with the Bürkis all over again. Symes said he had known Medici for a very long time, since the 1980s, when the Italian would go to London for Sotheby’s sales. However, at the time he was interviewed, Symes claimed that he and his partner, Christo, hadn’t met Medici in more than ten years. Symes insisted that Medici was an expert in vases, that he had a very important collection and that “since they were famous and published vases, he did not need to certify their origin.” In particular, Symes confirmed that Medici could distinguish the painters who had painted particular vases. This was of course in direct contradiction of what Frida Tchacos had said and what others would say.
Xoilan, Symes said, was the company in whose name objects that he intended to collect (keep) were purchased, whereas for dealing he used another company, Robin Symes Limited. (This is directly contradicted by evidence we detail in Chapter 15.)2
Symes claimed there was nothing unusual or incriminating about the Polaroids found at Medici’s warehouse, even though they showed objects in fragments and covered in dirt. “Conserving the photos of an object which still has to be restored is simply to show the client the original condition of the object and how much and what kind of restoring work had been done. Many dealers give the purchaser the photos of the object before its restoration.” (Again, this is directly contradicted by Ferri’s later interrogations.) He confirmed that Felicity Nicholson was a great friend of his (he found her “molto simpatica”), and they frequently went out to dinner together. “She was incredibly honest and reserved in her work at Sotheby’s,” a description that hardly squares with her behavior in regard to the Lion Goddess, Sekhmet,s when she had asked Symes to smuggle it out of Italy. In fact, Symes rather spoiled his argument by admitting it was Nicholson who had prevailed on him to take part in the exercise.
Symes knew Hecht and had visited him when the latter lived in Rome. He had never visited him in Paris, and although he hadn’t done much business with him, Symes did confirm that in 1971 or 1972, he’d purchased a large bronze eagle from Hecht for $70,000–$75,000, then sold it to the Getty Museum. This, of course, is an important confirmation of an episode that Hecht had mentioned in his memoir, in his first “Medici version” of the route by which the Euphronios krater had arrived at the Met. Symes also said that an acquaintance of his, Peter Wilson, CEO of Sotheby’s, had shown him a photograph of a Euphronios vase that had been offered to Sotheby’s at that time, and Symes had noticed that it was identical to the one purchased by the Metropolitan. This too confirms the “Medici version” in Hecht’s memoir, where he said that he had considered selling the vase at Sotheby’s but had been disappointed by Felicity Nicholson’s estimate of $200,000. Felicity Nicholson, who had no professional training in antiquities but had begun life at Sotheby’s as a secretary, was a protégé of Peter Wilson’s, who took a great interest in her department. She would certainly have shown Wilson any photographs of a major vase that Hecht sent in. This is presumably how Wilson (who died in 1984) came to show the photographs to Symes. Symes also said that he had thought the Euphronios was perhaps a fake, without knowing that in the “Medici version” in his memoir, Hecht had written about just this—that Robin and Christo (and Sir John Pope-Hennessy) had cast doubt on the authenticity of the vase. So, in at least three ways, and without realizing it, Symes confirmed the “Medici version” of the way the Euphronios krater had reached the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
Symes said Hecht had told him, twenty-five years earlier (not five or six years before, as Hecht said to Ferri), that he was writing a book for his wife. He thought that Hecht was an excellent scholar but an unstable character, saying he drank too much and was unreliable, the “proof” being that he had sold a statue to Symes only to tell the Getty—to whom Symes had sold the statue—that it was a fake.
Symes had bought fragments of Greek vases from Medici. Medici had given him some fragments to donate to the Metropolitan since, as an Italian, it might raise a few eyebrows should he donate them directly. At the Getty, True could not purchase from a person like Medici, otherwise the object could not have a valid provenance. Symes said he would have been “amazed” if Marion True had ever purchased anything directly from Medici. Here then, from the horse’s mouth, is confirmation of triangulation and the reasons for it.
Both Symes and Christo had excellent relations with Marion True, “more personal on the part of Christo since he did not sell objects,” whereas Symes did. Marion True, Symes said, had a house near his in Greece, and they would see each other during the summer. Symes said he had met Jiri Frel when the latter became curator at the Getty, meeting him in London, in Los Angeles, and also in Greece. He considered Frel a bit crazy and not entirely reliable. He (Frel) had gone to Symes in Greece to show him photographs of a kouros that he wished to purchase, and Symes told him that he thought it was fake and had said the same thing to John Walsh, director of the Getty, who had consulted him in London before the purchase. Medici had told Symes in London that he owned something “very similar to the Kouros,” and Christo had told Marion True.
This fitted with one set of Getty documents we haven’t yet mentioned in any detail. It will be recalled from Chapter 7 that the Getty acquired a kouros in the mid-1980s but that when it was unveiled, the statue provoked a furor over its provenance (or lack of one) and over its authenticity. t This kouros was sold to the Getty by Gianfranco Becchina, following which Medici sent to Los Angeles a statue that, he said, was fake and yet had very many features similar to the kouros.u Here then, the two bitter rivals, members of different cordate, were attacking one another.
Lawrence Fleischman, Symes said, had put together a collection in a very short time, in order to sell it to the Getty. He had heard from an American dealer, he said, that in order to sell an object to the Getty, one had to sell it to the Fleischmans.
Symes confirmed that he had sold various objects to Tempelsman, who had sold them to the Getty, and that he had sold various works to Shelby White, “who would never have bought directly from someone like Giacomo Medici.” This is yet another confirmation of triangulation, again from the horse’s mouth. Symes confirmed that Koutoulakis was supplied by Medici “since at Koutoulakis’ he had seen objects he’d previously seen at Medici’s.” He had bought the ivory head from Savoca for $850,000.
Ferri’s final “encounter” in this phase of the investigation was an international rogatory for an interrogation carried out by one of Conforti’s men, directed at Professor Wolf Dieter Heilmeyer, the director of the Museum for Classical Antiquities in Berlin. This rogatory concerned the museum’s acquisition of seven vases, all of which were among the photographs seized in Geneva.
In May 2003, at an international conference in Berlin, titled “Illegal Archaeology,” Heilmeyer, organizer of the conference, announced that Berlin State Museums would no longer acquire, display, or restore any objects that did not have clear provenances. “If there is any doubt about provenance,” he said, “we don’t go further.” Archaeologists have been watching.
According to Professor Heilmeyer’s response to the rogatory, the seven vases in Berlin were acquired on four different occasions. The first acquisition concerned a skyphos of the Trittolemos Painter, which had been sold to the museum in 1970 by Koutoulakis, in Geneva, for $60,000. The curator for the purchase was Dr. Adolf Greifenhagen, now dead. In addition, four fragments of the skyphos were later donated by Robert Hecht, who said he had purchased them in Geneva.
The second acquisition was made in 1980. This was an Attic kylix, bought for £16,000 from Robin Symes. Heilmeyer went to London to view this acquisition and said he couldn’t remember whether he had seen a photograph beforehand or not. He added that no investigation was made into the provenance of the kylix.
The third acquisition was the most important and took place in 1983. It concerned four Apulian vases. They came from a much larger group of twenty-one vases, all acquired at the same time, but Polaroids of only four of them were found in Medici’s albums. All twenty-one had been offered to Berlin by one Christoph Leon of Basel on behalf of a Basel family, the Cramers. Professor Heilmeyer examined the vases on the premises of the head of archaeology at Geneva Museum, Jacques Chamay. “Chamay had pronounced himself to be the discoverer of the vases, specifying that his research had begun after he had examined a fragment of one of the vases in the Cramer family’s old library.” Professor Heilmeyer had spoken to the person who declared she had restored the vases, Fiorella Cottier-Angeli, who told him that the vases had been in very old chests and had reached Geneva “in the nineteenth century.” Cottier-Angeli also said that she did not wish her name to appear in the museum’s publications. All the vases came from Puglia, and the museum officials had believed what Leon, Chamay, and Cottier-Angeli had told them about the provenance. The overall price of 3 million marks had been paid to Leon.
The fourth acquisition, an Attic krater, had been left to the museum in 1993 as an inheritance from the Brommer Collection. In the donor’s documentation there was no indication of provenance.
In other words, in this case too, the usual suspects—in the usual triangular relationships—are in evidence. And the usual falsehoods were told about provenance.
Conducting interrogations through cumbersome letters rogatory, in foreign languages, with suspects who have the opportunity to be as uncooperative as possible and the time to decide what they will do with any incriminating evidence in the months before they are interviewed, is far from ideal from the point of view of the law enforcement authorities. Almost all the cards are stacked against them from the word go. In this instance, however, Dr. Ferri had quite a bit to work with, and perhaps the single most important result to come out of these raids and interrogations was that he discovered nothing to refute or contradict the picture that Pellegrini, Rizzo, Conforti’s team, and he himself had been able to build in the months and years since the discovery of the organigram and Medici’s first arrest. Indeed, they had added considerably to their understanding, despite the reluctance of some witnesses to be fully open. And on the all-important role of Medici, Hecht, Symes, Becchina, and Savoca, the picture had been amply corroborated. The existence of triangulation and the cordate was confirmed, together with the fact that it was “business as usual.” Hecht’s memoir really existed, it contained a version of the Euphronios krater story that was very different from that given at the time (that is, in 1972), and yet was itself corroborated by some of the new information vouchsafed by others who were in a position to know.
There remains one raid to mention, the second one conducted on Medici. This time, however, the location was not the Geneva Freeport but Medici’s house at Santa Marinella, north of Rome, near the coast. It took place in 2002, and by far the most interesting discovery was an album of photographs in which one of the most prominent images was the Euphronios krater. The album, a ring binder, contained not one but several images of the krater. But on closer inspection, when the photographs were back at his office in the administration block of the Villa Giulia Museum, Pellegrini observed that two of the images of the krater were in fact fake. The main scene of the genuine Euphronios krater—the one in the Met—is of the dying Sarpedon with blood flowing from three wounds on his body. He is held by the gods of Sleep and Death, each of whom has wings, beautifully rendered, that stick out at either side of the composition. On either side of this main motif are guards, each man holding a spear.
These spears are important. Both are held upright, and the tip of the left-hand spear touches the tip of the god’s wing. The right-hand spear, in contrast, is held a short distance away from the tip of the wing belonging to the god on the right. In the fake vases, or copies, the arrangement is different. In one, the tip of the spear is behind the wing of the god on the left-hand side of the composition, covered by it, and in the other the spear is behind the wing of the god on the right-hand side. At first sight, the images are the same, but on closer inspection the fake images are in fact very obvious—no connoisseur or professional archaeologist or art historian would be taken in for long. On a subsequent visit to Santa Marinella, Ferri actually saw one of these fakes or copies—the one where the spear was behind the wing of the right-hand god—and he says this vase was about half the size of the real Euphronios krater, and much less moving. “It was cold and stiff,” says Ferri.
But the quality is not really the point. The existence of the two other kraters—whether they were copies or deliberate fakes—doesn’t prove anything, one way or the other, about Medici’s involvement in the Met’s controversial acquisition of the original vase, any more than the organigram proves that the people named in the document are members of the organization that is suggested. But, as with the organigram, these images are highly suggestive. When asked why he had them, Medici said that he was fascinated by the Euphronios krater, by its quality and iconography, and the copies were merely a measure of that fascination and passion for vases by masters such as Euphronios. But why this vase and no others, why two copies rather than one, why were there deliberate mistakes introduced?
He had no answer.
Ferri asked who had made the copies, but Medici wouldn’t answer that question either. The prosecutor paid a visit to the most prominent faker of Greek and Roman vases, but he denied having anything to do with Medici. Stalemate.
It was frustrating, but it only made Ferri more certain that he had the right man in his sights and that the Metropolitan’s acquisition of the Euphronios krater marked a turning point in the whole underground trade of looted antiquities.
Across a twenty-year period, from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, no fewer than five vases by Euphronios surfaced on the market. Prior to that, nothing new by him had been discovered for more than a century. In terms of classical archaeology, this was a miracle. Miracles of this kind inspire some people but they don’t satisfy the methodological skepticism of scientists. The five objects comprise the fragmentary vase which Hecht sold to the Munich Antikensammlung in 1968, the Sarpedon krater which Hecht sold to the Metropolitan Museum in 1972, the Euphronios and Onesimos kylix which Frida Tchacos sold to the Getty in 1983, the krater which the Hunt brothers bought from the Summa Gallery (owned by Bruce McNall and Robert Hecht) in the 1980s, and which was bought by Robin Symes for Leon Levy and Shelby White in 1990, and the kylix bought by the Hunts from the Summa Gallery in the 1980s, and which was acquired by Giacomo Medici at the Hunt sale in 1990. We now know from Pellegrini’s paper trail that four of these vases involved Robert Hecht, and that three involved Giacomo Medici. The appearance of these five vases on the market so close to one another is either a freak coincidence or, to more skeptical minds, an indication of a sudden epidemic of fakes in the art world.
Put all that alongside the fact that Medici had, in his house at Santa Marinella, near Cerveteri, a photograph of the Met’s Euphronios krater, photographs of two copies or fakes, and one of the copies or fakes itself, and then put all that alongside the fact that a cult building dedicated to Hercules—the iconographical subject of many of these vases—was discovered in Cerveteri in 1993, and the suggestion becomes overwhelming that the five Euphronios vases scattered over Europe and north America came from this one source—Cerveteri, via Medici and Hecht.
All of which only made the prosecution of Giacomo Medici more urgent.
At that point, only one aspect of the investigation remained to be completed: the interrogations in the United States.