16
THE AMOUNT OF PAPERWORK generated by the prosecution of Giacomo Medici was immense. Ferri had four secretaries working for him in his fourth-floor offices in Piazzale Clodio, and it was sometimes easy to feel overwhelmed by the sheer scale of Medici’s activities, the vast reams of documentation to be analyzed, the objects to be traced, the numbers of people to be questioned. Keeping track of who had handled what and when; who had covered for whom and when; who had donated what and where; who had told which lies, when, about what, and to whom—it was all daunting. Ferri’s office was decorated with colorful posters of archaeological exhibitions but they were an ironical joke. No one had time to visit any museum other than the Villa Giulia, which had become an extension of the prosecutor’s office.
And yet, from time to time, the load was lightened. Attitudes, and laws, have been changing across the world in regard to issues of cultural heritage. And this is true not only in the “archaeological countries” but in the market countries, too. Over the ten years since the Carabinieri’s first raid on Corridor 17 in Geneva in 1995, new laws governing the trade in antiquities have been passed in Great Britain and Switzerland; and the United States, moving in its own way, has concluded bilateral agreements with several countries—among them Guatemala, Peru, Mali, Canada, and Italy—under which the importation into the United States of certain types of ancient objects is prohibited.
In recent years these new laws and agreements have begun to take effect. On top of that, countries such as Egypt, Greece, Jordan, and China have become more assertive in their attempts to prevent the illicit trade and in this regard they have adopted a common stance: It is, in the long run, more effective to stem the demand in the market countries—Western Europe, North America, Japan—than try to catch and convict the thousands of tomb robbers, who in any case make far less money than the better-heeled middlemen who are the chief culprits in the eyes of the likes of Paolo Ferri and Roberto Conforti.
This argument is substantiated by a number of other cases, parallel plots—stretching from Bombay to Cairo to Stockholm to London and Oxford to New York and Los Angeles—that have come to light in the last few years, and in each of which the names and “business practices” are only too familiar.
Ferri, Conforti, and the others were reassured by these other episodes that real change was now in the air.
In November 1995, two months after the raid on Corridor 17, a gold phiale of Sicilian origin and dating to the fourth century BC was seized in New York. The provenance of the phiale was largely unknown. It is said that sometime between 1976 and 1980, when an Italian utility company was laying cable in Sicily, workers dug up a golden platter, about the size of a pie plate. This phiale was decorated with acorns, beechnuts, and bees, and it matched one sold to the Met in 1961—by Robert Hecht. The new phiale interests us because although it was first acquired by Vincenzo Pappalardo, a private antiquities collector living in Sicily, he traded it in 1980 to Vincenzo Cammarata for artworks worth about $20,000. Cammarata, it will be remembered, was questioned by Frank di Maio, the Sicilian public prosecutor investigating the provenance of the Morgantina silver.
The case is also interesting because the phiale was eventually acquired by Robert Haber, an art dealer from New York and owner of Robert Haber & Company. Haber acquired the phiale on behalf of a client of his, Michael Steinhardt, a financier. Haber told Steinhardt that the phiale was a twin to a piece in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and charged Steinhardt $1.2 million. Steinhardt had the piece authenticated by scholars at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and thereafter the phiale was displayed in his home from 1992 until 1995.
It was seized after an inquiry by the Italian authorities—and here it gets murky. The U.S. government claimed that the forfeiture was proper because the phiale was stolen property and because there were false statements on the customs forms—for example, it was valued at $250,000, when its real value was much higher. In the subsequent court case, the decision to seize the phiale was upheld, as it was on appeal, which was decided in July 1999. The gold platter was subsequently returned to Italy and is now on display in Palermo.
But how did the authorities first come by the information that led to this prosecution?
The episode is mentioned by Robert Hecht in his memoir: He considered the phiale a forgery, naming the Sicilian forger and some of his other fakes. Was it he who alerted the authorities, because he was jealous of Haber’s links to a prosperous client such as Steinhardt? This is what Frida Tchacos told Ferri at her interrogation. Hecht’s trial in Rome, which began in late 2005, may clarify this point.
In April 1997, two carved wall reliefs surfaced in London. Shlomo Moussaieff, of Grosvenor Square, London, had applied for permission to export one of these antiquities but was stopped by the government’s official adviser, John Curtis at the British Museum. Curtis had spotted that the relief had been looted from Iraq—it belonged in the throne-room suite of the Sennacherib Palace in Nineveh, across the Tigris River from Mosul.ab The identification was made because of the work of Dr. John Russell, an archaeologist from Massachusetts College of Art, who excavated at Nineveh before the first Gulf war, as part of a University of California team, and took 900 photographs of the site.
Inquiries by Scotland Yard established that Mr. Moussif had bought looted antiquities from Nabil el Asfar, then based in Brussels. This is the same Asfar who had, allegedly, provided Robert Hecht with the Morgantina silver.ac Mr. Moussif had been told that the reliefs had been “in Switzerland for years.”
At the time, Dr. Russell made it known that some ten other looted reliefs had appeared on the market. Generally, he said, he was approached by a lawyer, claiming to act on behalf of a “prospective buyer.” In another case, however, involving yet another looted Iraqi relief, he had been approached by someone from the Metropolitan Museum in New York. He was able to establish that in this instance, the individual offering the relief to the museum—or who at least had provided a photograph of the proposed acquisition—was Robin Symes of London. This time the relief came from the palace of Tiglath-pileser III at Nimrud. (Tiglath-pileser III, 744–727 BC, was the real founder of the Assyrian empire.) This object was identified as loot by Richard Sobolewski, who led a Polish expedition to excavate Nimrud in 1975.
Only Mr. Moussif’s objects were recovered. According to Sobolewski, the throne room in Tiglath-pileser’s palace originally contained 100 stone slabs similar to those offered to the Met. Many of them are still missing.
In the late spring of 1998, Robert Guy chose not to renew his fellowship in classical archaeology at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. This brought to an end a curious set of events that was never fully explained.
In 1990, nearly a decade before, Claude Hankes-Drielsma had approached the college with a proposal that would fund, in perpetuity, a senior research fellowship in classical archaeology. Hankes-Drielsma has been a banker, a director of Robert Fleming, and chairman of the management committee of Price Waterhouse. In 1985, he masterminded the South African debt crisis; he was an adviser to the Iraqi government and did much to bring the Oil for Food scandal before the United Nations. He was one of those tasked with going through the Saddam Hussein documents after the fall of Baghdad. He is currently in charge of the appeal for the chapel at Windsor Castle (which was gutted by fire in the 1990s). An amateur antiquities collector, he is a member of the Getty Villa Council, a charity that benefits the Getty Museum’s Antiquities Wing, and is himself an honorary fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he has dining rights.
His 1990 proposal to Corpus Christi College had just two conditions: The fellowship was to be called the Beazley-Ashmole Fellowship, and the first incumbent had to be Robert Guy.
This was highly unusual. The normal practice is for fellowships to be advertised; then scholars apply, and ideally, the best candidate is appointed. When, in discussions about the fellowship, it further emerged that it was to be funded, at least in part, by the antiquities trade and that one of the dealers involved was Robin Symes, the Corpus Christi Council turned down the proposal, on the grounds that it was “inappropriate” to accept funds from such a source.
Some time afterward, Hankes-Drielsma approached the college again. This time, he said he had an alternative source of funds. The name of the donor was revealed only to the president of Corpus, but the fellows were assured that the source had a history of philanthropic giving to universities and had no links to the antiquities trade. This time, the proposal received publicity within the archaeological profession. As a result, Corpus was inundated with letters from archaeologists all over the world, protesting its proposed course of action. Almost the entire archaeological “establishment” was against the proposal—including Sir John Boardman, the distinguished author of many books on Greek vases; Donna Kurtz, the curator in charge of the Beazley Archive in Oxford; Martin Robertson, an authority on classical vase painting and professor of classical archaeology at Oxford (and an old adversary of Hecht); and Dietrich von Bothmer himself. All felt that the college should not accept funds anonymously, whatever Hankes-Drielsma said ($1.2 million was believed to be on offer), all felt the name of the fellowship was wrong and tendentious—neither Beazley nor Ashmole had anything to do with Corpus—and all felt that the fellowship should be advertised in the normal way. Those who objected to the proposal also suspected that what had originally been envisaged had been a “tame” fellowship. Funded by the trade, with the “Beazley-Ashmole” name, this fellowship would always carry the risk that the incumbent would feel obliged to satisfy dealers’ commercial needs and attribute their vases to major Greek vase painters. Though commercially valuable, such a practice would be an abuse of scholarship. One of the few people who wrote in support of Guy was Marion True, at the Getty.
A college committee was set up to make a recommendation about the fellowship. The committee, however, could not agree. The members did agree to changing the name to the Humfrey Payne Fellowship, after a brilliant director of the British School in Athens, who had died young. Other than that, however, the divisions were fairly basic. In the end, a majority report was prepared, in favor of Guy’s appointment, and a minority report was prepared by Robin Osborne, a noted classical archaeologist, who was against it. The governing body of the college then considered the issue and the whole matter was fully aired. The president of the college, Sir Keith Thomas, was in favor, and the proposal—with the name change—was eventually accepted.
Robert Guy was duly elected and served for the next seven years, as is normal, as a fellow of Corpus Christi. However, after seven years, when his renewal came up—a renewal that is usually automatic—he said he did not wish to stay, and the post was reoffered with no strings attached.
It was a curious episode, in some ways reminiscent of von Bothmer’s treatment by the American Institute of Archaeology, when he failed to be elected to the board of trustees because of his actions in acquiring the Euphronios krater.ad Even Robin Osborne, who was against Guy’s appointment, agrees that he is a brilliant connoisseur of vases. But the original involvement of the trade in the fellowship, the anonymous nature of the money, and with the Getty in the background—all this left a nasty taste.ae
In 1998, the Harvard Museum system put on display a 1995 purchase of 182 fifth-century BC Greek vase fragments. James Cuno, the director of Harvard’s art museums, argued that the pieces had probably been removed from Italy before 1971, the date at which Harvard’s acquisitions code took effect, in the wake of the UNESCO convention. The Harvard code forbids the acquisition of material of questionable provenance. The fragments were bought on the advice of museum curator David Mitten from a New York dealer who had acquired them from Robert Guy, then at the University of Oxford. Culture Without Context, the newsletter of the University of Cambridge Illicit Antiquities Research Centre, disagreed with Cuno.
Referring to the fragments, the newsletter concluded that Guy “could only have obtained them after 1971.”
In the summer of 1999, Frida Tchacos-Nussberger acquired an ancient manuscript that had been circulating in Europe and North America for some time. The so-called Gospel of Judas—thirteen codices in a Coptic translation of the ancient Greek—dates from the second century AD and is a good example of early Christian literature that was excluded as heretical from what the church had preserved in its early Greek form. The codices were allegedly found buried in the desert sand at Muh Zafat al-Minya in Egypt and had first appeared on the market in the early 1980s, via Nikolas Koutoulakis, but, proving difficult to sell, vanished again. Their resurfacing in 1999 appears to have been another attempt at a sale, for Mrs. Tchacos offered them to the Beinecke Library of Yale University for $750,000. But again there was no sale, so the manuscript was taken into a specially created Swiss foundation, which is to oversee publication, after which the codices will be returned to the Coptic Museum in Cairo.
There is a lesson here. Because no one would touch such an important—but unprovenanced—object, it is going to be properly published, and then returned to where it belongs.
In February 2000, Staffan Lunden, a Swedish journalist who was also an archaeologist, was researching a Roman funerary relief that had recently been acquired by the Museum of Mediterranean Antiquities in Stockholm. Lunden was interested in the object because, judging by stylistic criteria, it must have come from Ostia, outside Rome—but how and when?
Tracking the object back, he found that the Stockholm Museum had acquired it from Galerie Arete in Zurich in 1997. Before that, it was auctioned at Sotheby’s in New York in December 1992, and before that, in 1991, it had belonged to Numismatic Fine Arts, Bruce McNall’s gallery in Los Angeles. Before that, however, it was mentioned in Guntram Koch’s Roman Funerary Sculpture: Catalogue of the Collections, published by the Getty. In the catalog, Koch said that the Stockholm relief had been on the “New York art market” in 1986 but didn’t specify which gallery. However, also published in the catalog was a very similar one, which was in the Getty itself. Koch’s text made it clear that this relief, the Getty’s object, was acquired from the Summa Gallery, another of McNall’s firms. Being aware of the close links between McNall and Robert Hecht, and of Hecht’s reputation, Lunden wondered whether McNall-Hecht had anything to do with the Stockholm relief.
Pietro Casasanta, the most successful tomb robber of all time, in terms of the important objects he has looted. He is shown in front of the field where he discovered the ivory head of Apollo (shown below).
The ivory head of Apollo, the world’s rarest and most valuable looted antiquity, valued at $50 million. Looted by Casasanta, who sold it to Savoca, who sold it to Robin Symes, from whom it was recovered with the assistance of the authors.
Corridor 17: the interior of Medici’s showroom in the Geneva Freeport. Even the stone capital supporting the glass table top was stolen.
Colonel—later General—Roberto Conforti, head of the Carabinieri art squad.
Public Prosecutor Paolo Ferri who, with Conforti, led the Italian investigation.
Gianfranco Becchina, Medici’s bitter enemy and leader of the rival “cordata.” He operated out of Basel but retired to Sicily.
Polaroid found in Medici’s warehouse in Geneva. The central vase of the three was later in the Hunt collection, and the one on the right in the Metropolitan Museum.
Shown alongside the restored plates is Dottoressa Daniela Rizzo, archaeologist at the Villa Giulia Museum in Rome, who helped Conforti and Ferri with technical expertise.
The statue of Artemis, a photograph of which was found in the glove compartment in Pasquale Camera’s crashed car. This photograph was found in Robin Symes’ archive. The object itself is now on display in Rome.
Kantharos by Euphronios, partially restored, partially broken, in Medici’s warehouse in the Geneva warehouse.
Kantharos by Euphronios, totally restored, on display in the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.
Murky Polaroid of the Griffins, sitting on an Italian newspaper with encrusted soil, found in Medici’s warehouse in Geneva.
Medici shown alongside the restored Griffins in the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.
Giacomo Medici, photographed alongside the Euphronios krater in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. This photograph was found during the police raid on his warehouse in Geneva Freeport. He was photographed several times with objects he had handled, after they went on display in museums around the world.
Marion True, with Christo Michaelides, in Greece, 1998
Robert Hecht photographed alongside the Euphronios krater in the Metropolitan Museum. This, too, was found in Medici’s warehouse in Geneva.
Two of the fresco walls Medici dealt in. These are shown in situ, as they were found, photographed by the tomb raider, and show small balls of lapillæ, volcanic ash, filling the room to a depth of several feet and even adhering to the ceiling.
The female figure from fresco wall 1, shown partially reassembled after the looting. The joins between the pieces have been covered with plaster prior to re-painting.
Another fresco wall, showing the pieces cut into lap-top size fragments, reassembled and laid out on the restorer’s trestle table in Zurich, like a large jigsaw, prior to total restoration. The photo was found in Geneva.
Another wall, reassembled and framed, almost ready for market. The upper panel is fresco wall 2. Beneath it is fresco wall 3. Was this entirely covered with volcanic lapillæ in illustration on page 6, or is it a separate wall entirely?
Christo Michaelides (left) and Robin Symes at a black-tie dinner in Monte Carlo, July 1999. The following evening, in Italy, Christo fell down some stairs, hit his head on a radiator, and died in hospital. His death triggered the fall of Robin Symes.
Bronze boy, showing the exceptional quality of the antiquities in the Symes’ archive. Various Polaroid photographs showed this object both before and after restoration. Its present whereabouts are unknown.
He wrote to Koch, asking which New York dealer possessed the Stockholm piece in 1986. Koch replied that he didn’t know, and that the information about the object being on the New York market in that year had actually been added to the catalog manuscript by Karol Wight of the Getty, who edited the manuscript. According to Koch, the Getty had been offered the piece but had declined.
Given this information, Lunden e-mailed Karol Wight, introduced himself, and asked if she could help him with the identity of the dealer in New York who possessed the Stockholm relief in 1986.
Then something very odd happened. He got an e-mail in return later that day, but it wasn’t from Karol Wight and it wasn’t meant for him.
It was from Marion True, and it read:
Karol,
On second thought, I would say that we do not have this information. I am concerned about his interest in the trade and getting Bob Hecht drawn into something that could be unpleasant for us as well. Just say “New York Market.” M.
A few hours later, Lunden heard from Karol Wight, who said that “they” (the Getty’s Antiquities Department) were looking into his request. Five days after that, Karol Wight wrote again, to say that she had to consult Marion True, who was out of town. Then, on March 9, she wrote a third time to say that Marion True did not want to release the information, “to protect the confidentiality of the dealer and our relationship with them.”
Lunden pressed her as to why the information was being withheld—was it the museum’s general policy or was there something “special” about this case. She replied, “I think I’d have to put this in a ‘special’ category.” Lunden pressed her again: “One wonders if these ‘non-public’ [dealers] are hiding something? Are these people not reputable dealers?”
Wight replied: “Well, I think you’ve hit the nail on the head (to use an old expression) regarding the nature of dealers. Some are very public and appreciate recognition, others are not, usually because they’ve got something to hide or an unsavory past. This dealer had a spot of trouble in the past and prefers to keep a low profile with his arrangements.”
What happened here? Following Lunden’s original e-mail, Wight must have contacted Marion True, who replied to her via e-mail, but somehow he received a communication never meant for his eyes.
In January 2002, Frederick H. Schultz Jr. appeared before the South District Court of New York, charged with conspiracy, and receiving and dealing in stolen antiquities. His appearance was a sensation for three reasons. In the first place, he was not just any antiquities dealer—until 2000, when he had been indicted, he was president of the National Association of Dealers in Ancient, Oriental and Primitive Art, arguably the most powerful individual in the antiquities world, a man who had advised the U.S. government on its policy toward the heritage of other nations. The NADAOPA has been active for more than twenty-five years in representing the interests of dealers, particularly in opposing U.S. ratification and implementation of the 1970 UNESCO convention.
The second reason for the sensational nature of the trial was Mr. Schultz’s partner in crime, a man who had smuggled countless looted objects out of Egypt. Jonathan Tokely-Parry was an English restorer with a made-up name (he was christened Jonathan Foreman), who referred to himself in correspondence with Schultz as “006½” and called the other man “004½.” Tokely-Parry’s smuggling technique was to cover stone or terra-cotta antiquities in liquid plastic and paint them garish colors so that they looked like modern tourist trinkets. The Englishman’s own trial in London in 1997 had itself been a sensational affair, with witnesses being threatened and with the defendant himself taking hemlock at one stage and having to be hospitalized, so that proceedings were delayed. Eventually, however, he was convicted of the dishonest handling of antiquities and given a six-year jail term.
But the most important aspect of the Schultz trial was the verdict. Having been indicted in July 2001, he filed a motion to dismiss the government’s prosecution, essentially on the grounds that it did not accord with U.S. law and that the Egyptian law that had been contravened was not really an ownership law. According to an amicus curiae brief submitted to the U.S. court by Christie’s, the National Association of Dealers in Ancient, Oriental and Primitive Art, and the Art Dealers Association of America, “This indictment has sent shock waves through the art world.... The inevitable effect of subjecting U.S. citizens to the risk of imprisonment for violating foreign patrimony laws is that dealers, collectors and museums will be forced to abandon the trade and collection of any objects that any foreign government may unilaterally claim as its ‘cultural patrimony.’”
In early January 2002, however, the U.S. court issued a landmark decision, ruling that foreign governments do own even undiscovered antiquities, provided they have laws such as Egypt has. That ruling meant that, in this case, unprovenanced antiquities that left Egypt since 1983 are, in the eyes of U.S. law, stolen. And importing stolen goods into the United States contravenes Section 2315 of the U.S. Penal Code. Since the court’s ruling, at least one major country now accepts that objects looted and smuggled from countries with strict heritage laws are, in effect, stolen property. The organization that Schultz led succeeded for years in holding up U.S. endorsement of the 1970 UNESCO protocol that outlawed dealing in unprovenanced antiquities. Where the United States leads, other countries are sure to follow.
Moreover, at the end of the case, the judge gave the jury some instructions that are of particular interest. Schultz had claimed in his defense that the government had failed to prove that he knew or believed that he was engaging in theft. The judge took care to instruct the jury that
a defendant may not purposely remain ignorant of either the facts or the law in order to escape the consequence of the law. Therefore, if you [the jury] find that the defendant, not by mere negligence or imprudence but as a matter of choice, consciously avoided learning what Egyptian law provided as to the ownership of Egyptian antiquities, you may [infer], if you wish, that he did so because he implicitly knew that there was a high probability that the law of Egypt invested ownership of these antiquities in the Egyptian government. You may treat the deliberate avoidance of positive knowledge as the equivalent of such knowledge, unless you find that the defendant actually believed that the antiquities were not the property of the Egyptian government.
In other words a sophisticated antiquities dealer cannot profess ignorance of the laws of the countries whence the objects he deals in originate.
Schultz was found guilty and in June 2002 was fined $50,000 and sentenced to thirty-three months in prison. The judge made one other comment worth recording. He said that sophisticated defendants such as Schultz were not deterred by fines and so a prison sentence formed the main part of the penalty. That verdict and penalty were upheld on appeal. Schultz left prison in December 2005.
So far as we know, Schultz was only on the edge of the Medici-Hecht cordata. It will be remembered from Chapter 15, on the matter of the orphans, that he provided one fragment of the krater by the Berlin Painter that was acquired by the Getty. The others were provided by Robin Symes, Frida Tchacos, and Dietrich von Bothmer.
In July 2002, Raffaele Monticelli, who, according to Pasquale Camera’s organigram was a member of Becchina’s cordata, was found guilty of conspiracy at the Foggia tribunal and sentenced to four years. In some ways, the dating of the verdict was appropriate. It came a few days before Roberto Conforti, now a general, retired, on his sixty-fifth birthday. His strategy of putting pressure on the lesser lights first was beginning to have an effect.
The Monticelli trial was notable for the many phone taps that were presented as evidence. Tomb robbers are usually extremely cagey on the phone, but the Carabinieri are patient and, just occasionally, the tombaroli let their guard slip. The following transcripts are not just vivid; they help remove any doubt about the scale of the looting and the quality of the discoveries. Among the taps presented in court was this exchange between Orazio Di Simoneaf and his capo zona for the Naples region, Francesco Liberatore. At first, like a lot of transcripts of phone taps, it didn’t make sense, but then it leaped into life. Apparently, the tombaroli in Campania were having problems and Liberatore was sent in to help sort it out.
LIBERATORE: No, I don’t think so. But in my opinion they need money, they’re without money. Otherwise, sorry, but at this point what could they do? That thing’s beautiful, I saw it again, it’s beautiful but . . .
DI SIMONE: We’ll see . . .
LIBERATORE: And then . . . anyway, be that as it may, anyway you must show it to them . . .
DI SIMONE: All right.
LIBERATORE: Right?
DI SIMONE: Certainly.
LIBERATORE: They’ve got an amazing job on their hands! Just amazing!
DI SIMONE: But the stuff from the walls, not even as a gift, see?
LIBERATORE: No, no, and what . . . OK, the stuff from the walls, if it’s no good it’s no good . . . It’s that they can’t . . . now, while they’ve got this job . . . There’s about eighty meters [say, ninety yards] of tunnel that you can walk inside, standing up, with a wheelbarrow . . .
DI SIMONE: Merda! Really?
LIBERATORE: With lamps . . . But things . . . they’re going to get something from another property, understand?
DI SIMONE: Yes, yes, yes . . .
LIBERATORE: They start off from the property . . . from the property on this side . . .
DI SIMONE: I see, and they walk underground . . .
LIBERATORE: . . . and they’ve got another, more or less twelve to thirteen meters [say, fifteen yards] left to go . . .
DI SIMONE: OK, let’s hope time will prove us right . . .
The other exchange is between Monticelli himself and Benedetto D’Aniello, of Campania.
D’ANIELLO: Well then, listen . . . I’ve got a small Etruscan gold cup, sixth to seventh century—that’s why I called you, understand? MONTICELLI: Eh . . .
D’ANIELLO: . . . of those which come out [of the ground, common tombarolo language] together with buccheri, that period, I don’t know . . .
MONTICELLI: And how are those decorated?
D’ANIELLO: It has its little edge . . . the little edge is all incised; it’s got handles—the two little handles . . . stuff of the sixth, understand?
MONTICELLI: It has the two . . . ?
D’ANIELLO: . . . the two handles, yea?
MONTICELLI: Hmmm . . .
D’ANIELLO: . . . of the sixth . . . and like those buccheri vases, with a little low foot which goes on the ground, an edge, and a small cup of eight to nine centimeters [3–3½ inches] in diameter; it’s about five centimeters [2 inches] high. Actually it’s a bit dented because it came out a bit dented, understand?
MONTICELLI: I understand, but it’s strange, quite a number of these are coming out . . .
D’ANIELLO: No, these . . . there aren’t . . . but because I’ve never seen them, never seen of . . .
MONTICELLI: I had two or three lately, but it’s strange . . . [He suspects the cup is fake.]
D’ANIELLO: Huh . . . if you’ve had them you’re lucky. I’ve never had them.
MONTICELLI: . . . very strange . . .
D’ANIELLO: This is the first time I’ve had one. Why, weren’t the others good?
MONTICELLI: . . . the others . . . well now I’m beginning to be interested. OK, carry on ...
D’ANIELLO: I don’t know . . . for me, I’m certain where it comes from, understand?
MONTICELLI: Ah, I see . . .
D’ANIELLO: Eh, well, if you have . . . start to speak of these problems, then . . . I don’t know what to say . . .
MONTICELLI: How much? How much?
D’ANIELLO: Well you don’t have to ask for much; they’re asking thirty million [lire = $30,000].
Finally, this:
DI SIMONE: Those things, those mural things . . . you know that at the moment there’s a law which has come out in America, and it has . . . [This was a reference to the bilateral agreement between the United States and Italy, under which it was agreed that the United States would look out for Italian ancient objects being brought across its borders.]
CARRELLA [yet another tombarolo]: Yea, no . . . and OK, I know what to do...
DI SIMONE: Precisely, precisely.
CARRELLA: If they come out I know where . . .
DI SIMONE: Exactly, exactly . . . I know, I know . . .
CARRELLA: . . . I know where to send them.
This was the fruit of hours of phone taps. Usually, tombaroli—and even more so the capi zona—are careful what they say on the phone but, from time to time, the beauty of their discoveries gets the better of them. It was these slips, and the concurrences between them, that convicted Monticelli.
In June 2003, Vaman Ghiya was arrested in India after a six-month undercover operation by Indian police. Mr. Ghiya (see the Note on p. 386) was an Indian equivalent of Medici. He was mentioned in the documents James Hodges had leaked to the authors as someone who smuggled Indian antiquities out of the subcontinent and imported them—via companies such as Megavena and Cape Lion Logging in Switzerland—on their way to being sold at Sotheby’s.
“Operation Blackhole” involved several policemen posing as beggars and rickshaw drivers stationed outside unguarded temples, on the lookout for thieves. Anand Srivastava, the superintendent in charge of the investigation, said that Ghiya had admitted to illegally smuggling more than 100 items that featured in catalogs of Sotheby’s auctions that were discovered in a raid on his house. In particular, Ghiya was charged with stealing and smuggling a twelfth-century red sandstone statue from the Vilasgarth temple in September 1999, which was sold at Sotheby’s in New York on September 22, 2000.
In June 2004, Ali Aboutaam was sentenced, in absentia, to fifteen years’ imprisonment in Egypt for artifacts smuggling. This was part of a large initiative by the Egyptians to curb the illicit traffic, and Ali Aboutaam was one of about thirty people rounded up—including an influential politician, customs officers, police colonels, and people in charge of antiquities. The politician was given a thirty-five-year prison term, and nine foreigners—from Switzerland, France, Canada, Kenya, and Morocco—were also convicted, several in their absence.
Ali Aboutaam considered the verdicts “totally absurd.” He had learned about his conviction, he told reporters, from the press. He had never received any communication from the Egyptian legal system, and although Egyptian magistrates had visited Switzerland three times in the course of their investigations, they had never contacted him. He said the only evidence against him, so far as he could see, was that one of his calling cards had been left at the home of the prominent politician who subsequently received the thirty-five-year jail sentence. Ali Aboutaam admitted to talking on the phone with the politician but added, “There are so many people who contact me to offer me ancient objects.” He said he had been accused by the Egyptian press of smuggling artifacts out of Egypt, but no one had specified what, when, and where such offenses had been committed. Thus, he said, “I have nothing to do with this story.”
In the very same week, Ali Aboutaam’s brother, Hischam, pleaded guilty in New York to a federal charge that he had falsified a customs document about the origins of an ancient silver ceremonial drinking vessel that his gallery later sold for $950,000. He had been arrested the previous December for importing an Iranian object, described as “the most important representation of a griffin in antiquity” and for facilitating its sale to a private collector. The antiquity in question was alleged to have been part of the plundered Iranian Western Cave Treasure, said to have been looted in 1992 and dispersed around the world. The silver griffin, dated to c. 700 BC, was falsely stated as coming from Syria. According to the complaint filed in the court, the prominent collector began discussions about the object in Geneva, in 1999, discussions that included Hischam’s brother, Ali. Mr. Aboutaam told the buyer at that meeting that the griffin was originally from Iran. The griffin was hand-carried into the United States by Mr. Aboutaam, and the importer of record was listed as the Bloomfield Collection. The invoice declaring Syria as the country of origin was issued by Tanis Antiquities Ltd., based in the Grenadine Islands and an affiliate of Phoenix Ancient Art. The complaint noted that Syria and Iran do not share a border. The griffin was examined by three experts to attest its authenticity, two of whom had given as their opinion that it formed part of the Western Cave Treasure.ag
Coincidentally (this was a busy time for the Aboutaams), Phoenix Ancient Art was the source of a bronze statue of Apollo slaying a lizard, purchased by the Cleveland Museum of Art, which they attributed to the Greek sculptor Praxiteles. Experts were divided as to whether the statue was a Greek original or a Roman copy, but they were even more divided over the propriety of Cleveland’s acquisition because of the gaps in the statue’s provenance. Allegedly, the bronze was discovered lying on the ground when a retired German lawyer successfully reclaimed his family estate in the former East Germany in the 1990s. For some archaeologists this was just too convenient.
In early 2005, two Greek journalists, Andreas Apostolides and Nikolas Zirganos, broadcast the result of a four-year investigation carried out in conjunction with one of the authors of this book (Peter Watson) into the smuggling of ancient artifacts out of Greece. The investigation was wideranging, but in part, it focused on familiar names—George Ortiz, Elia Borowsky, Nikolas Koutoulakis, and Christoph Leon.
Yiannis Sakellerakis, one of the best-known archaeologists in Greece, said in a TV program on antiquities that a tomb robber had admitted to him to looting two bronze Minoan statuettes, one of which had been identified as being in the Ortiz Collection. The program also revealed that as long ago as 1968, a warrant had been issued in Athens for the arrest of Elia Borowsky for his part in the smuggling of Minoan antiquities but that it had never been followed through and was allowed to lapse. The program further alleged that two Cycladic figures—one in the Met in New York, the other belonging to the Levy-Whites—had been illegally exported from Greece and had passed through Koutoulakis. The source of this information was none other than George Ortiz, who had wanted both objects but failed to get them. The program’s fourth segment revealed that, in 1998, the Greek police had been alerted by the German police (in a rerun similar to the cooperation over the raid on Savoca’s villa) about an almost intact classical Greek bronze figure of a youth, by the school of Polycleitus, which was on the market in Munich. The Greek police hurried to Germany, where they found that the statue was in the possession of Christoph Leon (who had handled Medici’s vases, sold to Berlin) and valued at $6–$7 million. Leon was asking $1 million for his role in the deal, and when the police arrived, the statue was in a box labeled “U.S.A.” They subsequently learned that Marion True, of the Getty, had been to see the statue. However, although the police brought charges against a man called Kotsaridis, who had transferred the object out of Greece (and was sentenced to fifteen years), no proceedings were brought against either Leon or True. Marion True said she had wanted to see the statue out of personal interest and had no intention of buying it.
In 2000, the collection of Attic vases built up by Borowsky was sold at Christie’s in New York. This was scarcely surprising to the Greeks since the catalog text for the collection was compiled by Max Bernheimer, head of antiquities at Christie’s in New York. None of these vases had any provenance, and they were of exceptional quality. Had any of them been excavated legally, they would without question have been properly published.
Finally, in 2001, the Elia Borowksy Collection went on display at the Karlsruhe Museum (its normal home was the Bible Lands Museum in Jerusalem, where Borowsky had moved to after he left Canada). This collection, entitled Glories of Ancient Greece, consisted of a large number of superb Cretan objects, of equal quality to the Attic vases. Sakellerakis maintained that on stylistic grounds, most of the Cretan objects could only have come from a tomb in a cemetery at Poros, probably the port of Knossos, the famous site excavated by Arthur Evans. Moreover, they came from a part of the complex only discovered long after 1970.
It is depressing and distressing to see Christie’s being drawn into this business alongside Sotheby’s. But theirs is the only important new name. Despite the proceedings against Medici, the other members of the cordata are as active as ever.