17

THE FALL OF ROBIN SYMES

IN SOME WAYS, the oddest set of events—the parallel plot that interested Ferri the most—began in the summer of 1999, while he was waiting for the Swiss to make up their minds about whether or not they were going to prosecute Medici. Of course Ferri was interested in prosecuting Medici, Hecht, and Marion True, but the other individual he had most in his sights was the British dealer Robin Symes. Ferri was convinced that Symes did a large amount of business with Medici and had a major role in the triangulations that facilitated smuggling illicit material to the Getty, the Shelby-Whites, Tempelsman, Berlin, and elsewhere. And a major break in the case was imminent: Symes was about to suffer a series of setbacks and disasters that would see his business, his fortune—his entire life—implode in the most devastating way.

On July 4, 1999, Robin Symes and Christo Michaelides were guests at a dinner in Terni, near Arezzo in Italy, given by the American collectors Leon Levy and Shelby White. Toward the end of the dinner, Christo went in search of some cigarettes—and didn’t come back. When another guest went to look for him, she found he had slipped on some steps and had hit his head on a portable radiator. He died in hospital in Orvieto the next day.

It is difficult to say who was more distraught, Christo’s close-knit blood relatives, or Symes, his constant companion of more than thirty years. Even today, members of Christo’s family have difficulty putting into words what they feel was the exact relationship between their favorite son and Symes. The dealer, for his part, says that “Christo loved me, for 32 years” but insists that despite living together since 1970, and widely accepted from Gstaad to Los Angeles as a social couple, referred to as “the Symeses,” theirs wasnot a homosexual liaison but a long-term Platonic friendship. At sixty-four, Symes is a stolid figure, with pale skin and silver hair swept back off his forehead, with eyes that are magnified behind wire spectacles. Thirty years ago he suffered a double brain hemorrhage and his movements are deliberate: He doesn’t rush things. Christo was six years his junior.

Symes acquired a lifestyle to match his success in the antiquities business. With Christo he had homes in London, New York, Athens, and Schinnoussa, a small island in the Cyclades, across the water from Naxos. The house in London, on Seymour Walk, on the fringes of Chelsea, boasted an underground swimming pool, decorated with classical statues, and an art deco room, filled with Eileen Gray furniture, valued, according to one estimate, at $20 million. Symes, who doesn’t drive, was always chauffeured either in a silver Rolls Royce or a maroon Bentley. Their house on Schinnoussa had a studio for Robin to paint in, and a pastry kitchen for Christo, who liked to cook.

According to an interview Symes gave, the two men met in the 1960s when Christo visited Symes’s shop, then on the King’s Road, London, and offered him some antiquities. This contradicts what Symes said to Ferri, whom he told during interrogation that he had met Christo in a warehouse in Switzerland. Christo had a girlfriend and Symes was married, with two sons. After he was divorced, however, Symes lived in Christo’s flat for a while and after that they became inseparable. Symes, with his full, baritone voice, clipped way of speaking, and tailored fawn suits, cut a more formal figure than the charismatic and handsome Christo, who was thinner, taller, and altogether more casual and relaxed. A man used to wealth (he comes from a shipowning family), who spoke six languages, Christo would think nothing of spending $100,000 on a Ferrari speedboat for his nephew, or buying him a Porsche for Christmas.

Following Symes’s hemorrhage, he and Christo ran the antiquities business together. The older man found the objects, and the buyers, while the younger one organized the financial side (again, he told Ferri the exact opposite). It was a successful arrangement, and by the 1980s, they were following the calendar of the very rich: Gstaad in February; Bahamas in March; La Prairie, a spa-cum-clinic in Montreux in Switzerland, where they had their annual check-up, in the spring; London in June; Greece for the summer; New York for the sales in November. It was a near-perfect lifestyle.

Christo’s family, the Papadimitrious, originated in Alexandria, Egypt, and moved to mainland Greece in 1962. They say that following Christo’s death they naturally assumed that since he and Symes were equal business partners, the assets would be divided at some point on a 50–50 basis. They are a close family, so much so that they all live side by side in the same street in the fashionable Psychikos suburb of Athens. In particular, Christo was close to his sister Despina (“Deppy”), who married Nicolas Papadimitriou in 1965. Christo and “Deppy,” they say, spoke to each other twice a day throughout their lives. With their experience and knowledge of shipping, they were adept at setting up offshore companies, registered in Panama, which help both ships and antiquities firms avoid paying tax. At times, they say, Despina personally guaranteed Christo and Robin’s business to the tune of $17 million (shipping people talk only in dollars). In other words, the family—via Despina and Christo—was intimately involved in funding the antiquities business.

Once that summer of 1999 was over, which they all—Symes included—spent on Schinnoussa, grieving, Dimitri Papadimitriou (Christo’s nephew, who was now leading the family business) told Symes that even though the business should be divided equally, Symes could keep the family’s share and sell it off, over three to five years, after which time they would withdraw. Symes could live in the Seymour Walk property for the rest of his life and would always be welcome on Schinnoussa.

Privately, Symes didn’t see it like that. Back in London, on his own now, he nursed the feeling that he had founded the business, that he had the “eye”—the ability to distinguish a fine object from a dud one—and that it was he who had found the customers who had produced the income that had caused the business to thrive. (This too was contradicted by what Symes told Ferri, that it was in fact Christo who had the “eye.”)

Then there were the things that go on in all businesses but are rarely talked about. The onshore business was called Robin Symes Limited, and Symes himself was the only shareholder. Officially, Christo was an employee but, says Symes, “This was a ruse, to divert the attention of the tax people.” In reality, Symes felt, “Christo and I were partners, not in the business sense, but in the husband and wife sense. While we were both alive, we shared equally in the assets and profits and debts of the company, but after death they all passed to the survivor, to me.” This flatly contradicted the Papadimitrious’ view.

The first inkling that Dimitri Papadimitriou had that things were not going according to plan—to his plan, anyway—did not come until May 2000, when he had a meeting at the Dorchester Hotel in London with Edmond Tavernier, Symes’s Swiss lawyer, to discuss the partnership. At the lunch, Tavernier said that if there were a partnership between Symes and Christo, it was 70–30 in his client’s favor. In a melodramatic gesture, he leaned across the table and, under Papadimitriou’s nose, broke off a grissino, an Italian bread stick, in those proportions.

Not long after, in July 2000, Symes traveled to Athens for a commemoration service, twelve months after Christo’s death. After it was over, Papadimitriou took Symes to one side and, ignoring Tavernier’s outburst, reminded him that no inventory of the business had yet been prepared on which a 50–50 split could be based. At the same time, Papadimitriou handed Symes a letter from Christo’s mother, Irini, pleading for her son’s personal belongings to be returned. She was eighty-four, she said, and wanted to redistribute his things around the family before she died. These effects, though personal, were substantial. They included several Cartier watches made before World War II and valued at between $50,000 and $80,000 each, a Rolex made by hand in the 1950s, and a pair of Cartier cufflinks, also hand-made, inlaid with sapphires and baguette diamonds.

Although he didn’t show it at the time, Symes was doubly affronted by these approaches. He had arrived to pay his respects to his former companion but instead he had, as he saw it, been ambushed and made to feel an outsider. The business was his, as were Christo’s personal belongings. And in any case, Irini’s demands were fanciful. “Christo didn’t possess a shirt that took cufflinks,” he says with a shudder, as if the family should have known this.

But this exchange had a catalytic—and catastrophic—impact on subsequent events. In November 2000, Symes finally sent a briefcase containing Christo’s personal effects from London to the Papadimitriou “compound” in Athens. When Deppy scanned the contents, she could scarcely believe her eyes. Far from containing Cartier and Rolex watches and hand-made cufflinks set with sapphires and diamonds, as she had expected, the briefcase contained: a plastic cigarette lighter, a half-burned candle, Christo’s birth cross, a plastic Swatch, a box of playing cards, refills for his pens, a cushion with a teddy bear on it, a cheap camera, some photographs.

Now, was Symes being provocative at this point? Was he deliberately trying to tease or irritate the Papadimitrious because of the pressure he felt they were putting him under? Was he trying to rub in the fact that he, and not they, was Christo’s rightful heir? Or did he genuinely believe that these were the personal effects they were expecting? Deppy was too upset to let her mother know that the briefcase had even arrived. But the “insulting” contents hardened Dimitri Papadimitriou’s heart. He had already discussed the situation with a London lawyer, Ludovic de Walden, of Lane and Partners, whose offices are near the British Museum on Bloomsbury Square. De Walden is well known in the London art world. Among his clients is the Getty Museum in Britain.

Before Papadimitriou and de Walden could decide what action to take, the family received two more shocks. In early December 2000, Symes mounted an exhibition in New York in which 152 objects—mainly antiquities—were offered for sale with a collective value of $42 million. Second, when Papadimitriou visited Seymour Walk toward the end of January 2001 to pick up some chairs that were his, he found that the entire collection of Eileen Gray art deco furniture had disappeared. Thanks to the work of a private detective nimbly hired by de Walden, they soon found out that the Gray furniture had been sold the previous September, at the Paris Biennale, for—they were told—$20 million. Far from preparing an inventory, as the family was expecting, it now seemed that Symes was selling off many of the company’s assets, for cash.

Symes saw it differently. As the survivor who had inherited the business, he felt he was entirely within his rights to mount whatever exhibitions he deemed necessary; and the New York show was held in Christo’s honor, with a tribute printed in the catalog, written by Symes. “It was a public exhibition,” he says. “There was no question of me trying to sell things in a sneaky way—how could there be?” As far as the Eileen Gray collection was concerned, here is yet another flat contradiction. The family says they bought the furniture in the first place, but Symes says he did, and he produced a 1987 article in the New York Times that appears to support his claim. “In any case,” he says, “it didn’t fetch $20 million, but $4 million, and I told Dimitri as much on the day I made the sale.” Dimitri Papadimitriou has no recollection of this conversation.

The deteriorating relations between the two sides collapsed completely in February 2001 when Symes did something that no one who was “family,” in the Greek sense, would dream of doing.

Late on the morning of February 23, a Friday, the doorbell rang at Deppy’s house on Diamantidou Avenue. When she went to the door, she was astonished to be served with court papers from the Athens Multi Member First Instance Court. While the family had dithered about taking Symes to court, he had got in first. He was suing them.

From their point of view, Symes’s claims in his lawsuit were distressing and, yes, insulting. Far from accepting that Christo and he were partners, Symes now claimed that:

• Christo had only ever been an employee and had never participated in the business with any share, “hidden or shown”;

• Neither Christo nor “any member of his family” had contributed financially to Symes’s business;

• Symes had no obligation to return any property to Despina or any other Papadimitriou.

But Symes didn’t stop there. Arguing that in their approaches and letters to him, Irini and Despina were interfering in his legitimate business interests, he called for them to be fined or imprisoned (for up to six months), or both, if they continued to interfere. He had inherited Christo’s share of the business and that was that.

This was to seriously misread Dimitri Papadimitriou. He called de Walden in London. From now on, he said, it was war.

De Walden was ready. Just four days after Deppy received her court papers in Athens, he obtained an ex parte injunction in London to raid all Symes’s premises and freeze his assets. The next day, Wednesday, February 28, 2001, at 11:30 in the morning, while Symes was in Geneva, solicitors acting under de Walden’s leadership simultaneously broke into five of Symes’s premises, changed the locks, and seized all documentation. As part of the same injunction, Symes was now not allowed to trade without permission of the court and his bank accounts were also frozen.

As an aggressive and successful shipowner, Dimitri Papadimitriou relishes a good scrap, and in being rich, he was able to attack his opponent in ways less well-heeled litigants could only dream of. After their successful maneuver in freezing Symes’s assets and bank accounts, the next move was to have Symes followed. This was wildly expensive (the legal costs in this case amounted in the end to around $16 million). But, for Papadimitriou, the money was well spent. Using an organization run from Brighton by an ex-Scotland Yard detective, Symes was followed in no fewer than six countries—Switzerland, Britain, Germany, Italy, the United States, and Japan. The effort engaged up to fifty people and at times involved highly unorthodox methods. When Symes attended a conference in Geneva, the men following him posed as police allegedly searching for illegal immigrants; on another occasion, they pretended to be firemen; in a third case, they searched his hotel room disguised as cleaning women.

But, says de Walden, it paid off. “We discovered that Symes stored his antiquities not at five sites but at thirty-three. The number of objects comprising the stock of the business has snowballed to 17,000, with a value, according to stock lists, of £125 million.”

Symes denies any suggestion that he has been hiding his assets. “They are my assets, no one else’s. The question of ‘hiding’ doesn’t arise.”

But Papadimitriou’s campaign didn’t stop at surveillance. Private detectives staking out Symes’s premises at Ormond Yard observed his staff disposing of several garbage bags containing shredded documents. The detectives helped themselves to the bags—twenty-three in all—which were locked away at Lane and Partners.

Symes dismisses this as scaremongering: “It was routine shredding.” But Dimitri Papadimitriou and de Walden went so far as to obtain an estimate from a firm in Birmingham, England, which said it would cost £350,000 ($500,000) to reconstruct that amount of shredded paperwork. Even Papadimitriou balked at this price, but in sifting through the paper strips, de Walden noticed some that had come from a bright yellow American legal pad. Aided by this color code, he was able to reconstruct a single sheet of paper. And he struck it rich. The document was an aide-mémoire handwritten by Symes, accepting that Christo’s family had given much financial help to the business in “funding many purchases and in guarantees for bank loans.” In the most revealing sentence, the aide-mémoire referred to Despina Papadimitriou as a silent partner.

Although the surveillance reports make gripping reading, Symes was also photographed, dining in restaurants across Switzerland. His companions were often identified from their vehicle registration numbers, or they were followed home and identified from their addresses. This surveillance showed that Symes was regularly meeting people involved in the antiquities trade, and it convinced Papadimitriou and de Walden that Symes had assets they still didn’t know about and that he was continuing to trade. On one occasion Symes was followed all the way to Japan, where he visited the Miho Museum, well known to archaeologists for its acquisitions of controversial (unprovenanced) antiquities (see Chapter 20). Symes was also followed when he was driven from Geneva to Venice, where he left a box with an acquaintance.

Symes is appalled by what he sees as a gross infringement of his privacy and insists he was doing nothing wrong. He was outside the jurisdiction of the British courts and pursuing his legitimate business interests.

As each new address of Symes was discovered, however, de Walden applied to the court to force him to reveal the contents. There were nearly thirty “interlocutory” hearings, and eventually Dimitri Papadimitriou’s campaign began to pay off. Partway through 2002, the judge in the case, Justice Peter Smith, so lost patience with Symes, and what he saw as his delaying tactics in revealing all his warehouses, that he changed the burden of proof in the case. Instead of the Greeks having to prove that there was a partnership, Symes would now have to prove there was not. Partly as a result of this, in January the following year Symes dramatically changed tack. In Greece, on the eve of the trial in his own lawsuit, he dropped his action. In London, he performed what the judge later described as a “remarkable somersault” in his defense. He obtained permission to abandon his suggestion that Christo was a mere employee. Now he reverted to the view he had really held all along, that he and Christo were partners in the husband-and-wife sense and that, at Christo’s death, the entire assets of their partnership, including the house in Seymour Walk, the house on Schinnoussa, their cars and boats, passed to Symes by survivorship.

This incensed the Papadimitrious even further. Whatever fond feelings they retained for Symes (and Deppy retained some, she said), they had no intention of letting him get his hands on their yachts, still less Schinnoussa.

However, though he had allowed the “remarkable somersault” in Symes’s defense, the judge was in no mood to allow him much more leeway. The trial was set for June 2003.

It never happened. At the time he had allowed Symes to amend his defense, the judge had set a deadline of March 31, 2003, for him to disclose all the documents on which he based his new arguments. Symes failed to comply. The reason, he said, was that he ran out of lawyers. He had chopped and changed solicitors quite a bit, and due to the requirement to clear all his business transactions with the court, he wasn’t always as flush with funds as he might otherwise have been. The judge was not convinced by this, again lost patience with Symes, and due to this latest noncompliance, threw out his amended defense.

This meant that the Papadimitrious had won. So far as the court was concerned, there was a partnership and the family was entitled to half the assets of Symes’s business, as they had always maintained.

In the immediate aftermath, things got quickly worse for Symes. Following the original raids and the freezing of his assets, he had applied to the court to be able to carry on his business, so that he could live and pay his legal costs. The judge allowed this, provided Symes agreed to sell only with the permission of the court, that he agreed not to remove any “relevant chattel” from his premises without the court’s permission, and that he agreed to sell objects only for “full consideration.”

It had come to de Walden’s notice, however, that one particular antiquity, a Granodiorite Egyptian statue of Apollo, which Symes said he sold in April 2002 to an American company, Philos, with offices in Cheyenne, Wyoming, had in fact not been sold to that company at all, which had a fictitious address. Further inquiries revealed that Symes had also lied about the price. Instead of being sold to Philos, for $1.6 million, the statue had gone to a certain Sheikh Saoud Al-Thani, in the Gulf Emirates, for $4.5 million.

For the third time in the case, the judge hit the roof. If this were true, he said, it appeared to him that Symes had committed a contempt of court and he ordered a trial in which the full circumstances of the sale of the statue would be explored. But this was a very different trial from the original case. So far, the whole business had been a matter of commercial litigation, a civil matter. Now, Symes had crossed the line and had possibly committed fraud, a criminal offense. If convicted, he could face jail.

Before the matter came to court, Symes suffered a further indignity. Eversheds, one of the seven British lawyers he had used, but not paid, finally lost patience with him and, on March 27, 2003, made him bankrupt. This meant that in addition to losing his house and full control of his business, he could now no longer be a director of any company, even his own. Then, two months later, in May 2003, Leon Levy, the American collector who had been supporting him financially, died. Symes’s world was closing down around him.

Symes’s defense in the contempt case was that the Granodiorite statue had indeed been sold to the sheikh for $4.5 million but that he only had one-third interest in it, which he had forgotten to mention, and that the other two-thirds were held by dealers in Switzerland, Jean Domercq and Frida Tchacos-Nussberger. Although Mr. Domercq and Mrs. Tchacos-Nussberger were joint defendants in this action, neither appeared in court to defend themselves, though a Swiss lawyer representing both did appear. The court found against the defendants and concluded that Symes owned the statue in its entirety. He was adjudged to have misled the court, to have broken the conditions of the “interlocutory regime,” which forbade him to trade without the knowledge or the permission of the court, and, in July 2004, he was given a one-year suspended jail sentence. What had begun as civil litigation had resulted in something far worse.

The original action continued. The Greek relatives of Christo were still not convinced that Symes had disclosed all the assets of the business that the two partners had owned. In the course of further researches, they found that Symes appeared to have lied to the court about two other sets of objects. One was the set of art deco furniture by the designer Eileen Gray, and the second was a statue of Akhenaten. The Eileen Gray furniture, Symes said, had been sold to a Parisian dealer for $4 million. Lane and Partners eventually traced this sale and found that Symes had actually sold it for $14 million, with most of the money being lodged in a bank in Gibraltar. The statue of Akhenaten, which Symes said he had sold for $3.6 million, had in fact been sold for nearer $8 million, again to Sheikh Al-Thani, with the money this time being lodged in a bank in Liechtenstein. These sums were located, and recovered.

While Lane and Partners had been pursuing these investigations, Symes had tried to forestall further court proceedings by claiming, extraordinarily, in the autumn of 2004, that he was mentally incapable of instructing solicitors, and therefore of standing trial. This action failed and Symes was ordered to appear in court again in January 2005.

Until Christmas he had been living at an inn, in a small village near Basingstoke, about fifty miles west of London. Just before Christmas, however, he moved into the Savoy Hotel in London. Though bankrupt, Symes has a number of friends who still support him financially. When he appeared in court, however, he was unrepresented. He produced a witness statement in which he now admitted that he had lied in court, in relation to both the Eileen Gray furniture and the statue of Akhenaten. The judge took a very severe view of these (now admitted) lies to the court, which involved sums totaling $14 million. In his judgment, Justice Peter Smith concluded that Mr. Symes had committed “a serious and cynical contempt of court,” designed “to conceal that he had deliberately taken the proceeds [and] used them for his own purposes.” He said Symes “has told numerous lies on oath” and repeated “a false story.”

The judge further said that he was not impressed by Symes’s attempts to suggest that he was confused and muddled by what was going on in court. “The admitted contempts show calculated, cynical and well understood acts of deception.” And he concluded: “Mr. Symes must appreciate that he will not be able, if it is his belief, simply to do his time, get his passport back and leave the jurisdiction. There remains a large number of outstanding questions to be answered. Until those questions are answered and dealt with in a meaningful way the possibility of him obtaining his passport back to enable him to leave the jurisdiction is remote.... I perceive [that it is] a long and necessary road that Mr. Symes still has to go down before this litigation will come to an end.” On January 21, 2005, at the High Court in the Strand in London, Symes was sent to prison on two counts for contempt of court—fifteen months and nine months, to run consecutively, two years in all. He was transferred that day to Pentonville Prison, in North London.

In the early part of the litigation, the Papadimitriou family had had their lawyers freeze Symes’s assets and seize all his documentation. The lawyers made photocopies of everything, and because they were then hoping to prove that Symes and Christo Michaelides were business partners, not just “husband and wife,” the authors of this book were given a unique opportunity to inspect Symes’s records, so we might see for ourselves that the two men really did manage the business together. In the course of this inspection, we couldn’t help but take note of a number of other matters that, because of our cooperation with the Italian authorities, meant more to us, perhaps, than to the Papadimitrious or their lawyers. The section that follows is based on this access.¹

In his thirty-three warehouses (and not five, as he originally admitted), Symes had 17,000 objects worth an estimated £125 million ($210 million). The average auction sale of antiquities usually numbers somewhere between 400 and 600 lots. There are eight auctions a year, at Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Bonhams, in London and New York, making between 3,200 and 4,800 lots sold annually. Between them, in stock, Medici and Symes had some 21,000 objects, or roughly four to five years’ worth of auction supply, if we take these figures at face value. Additionally, Symes’s 17,000 objects were given a collective worth of £125 million, meaning that, on average, “his” antiquities were valued at £7,353. It is notoriously difficult to value antiquities (as the “markups” discussed throughout this book show) and, indeed, when the Papadimitriou lawyers had an independent expert look at some of the Symes objects, she valued them very differently (usually lower). But even if Symes’s estimates on “his” objects were twice what they should have been, that would still have valued them, on average, at £3,677 (say $5,000). This compares with an average price of £600 ($1,000) for antiquities sold at auction.

Symes had said on several occasions, in his interview with Ferri, that Xoilan Trader, his company that shared an “administrative address” with Editions Services at 7 Avenue Krieg in Geneva, was not a trading company, despite its name, but a holding company for his own collection. This was belied by the marked Sotheby’s catalogs Hodges had leaked to us in the very

beginning, which showed Xoilan to be selling scores of objects in the sales for which we had inside records. This picture was amplified in the documents and inventory we inspected in London.² One part of the inventory consisted of 105 pages of lists of objects, with approximately thirty-four items per page, a total of 3,570 artifacts. Xoilan Trader, which accounted for approximately 300 objects, made up nine pages of this list, but elsewhere there were pages and pages of objects dealt in by Xoilan through Sotheby’s. There were also many dealings with Galerie Nefer (Frida Tchacos), and thirty-four numbered transactions with Giacomo Medici. Between 1979 and 1986, Robin Symes Limited, Symes’s other company, conducted at least twenty-nine deals with Medici. The names Getty, Leon Levy, Kimball Museum in Texas, Naji Asfar, Koutoulakis, Savoca, Tempelsman, R. Guy, Orazio Di Simone, Sotheby’s, and Christie’s appeared throughout the inventory, in one context or another.

Symes’s claims about Xoilan were also flatly contradicted by the copies of marked Sotheby’s catalogs that James Hodges made available to us and by the documents found in Medici’s warehouse. The fact is: When Symes said he didn’t use Xoilan to trade under, he wasn’t telling the truth. For Symes, as Justice Peter Smith discovered and observed, truth is a malleable commodity. Not one of the objects in the inventory we saw was listed with a provenance.

During the time we were going through the Symes/Michaelides archive, Peter Watson was working on the Greek television investigation referred to earlier (p. 245). The Greek journalists traveled to London and Cambridge to interview, and during their visit the conversation turned to the Symes/Michaelides partnership. Watson mentioned that he had seen several references to Michaelides’ Greek family in the documentation, which did seem to suggest that the Papadimitriou family had a financial interest in the antiquities business. In particular, Watson said, there were six documents that he thought relevant.

The first was a handwritten memo by Symes, which began:

While I accept the help given by the family of the late C.M. [Christo Michaelides], both in funding many purchases and in guarantees for bankers, nonetheless I must point out that the business which ran so successfully for many years is now virtually finished; [f]or the reason that international law prohibits the export of w/art [works of art] from most host countries and it is now not possible to fragrantly [flagrantly?] disregard them. Old coll[ectors’]. material does not provide suff[icient]. Funds to cont[inue]. Also there have, unfortunately, been multiple problems arising [from] four pieces which have proved to be either stolen or illegally exported. These losses over the past two years have amounted to considerable sums and have been borne by RS [Robin Symes] Ltd. In many of these instances the family should share the cost and because of their involvement be prepared for further liabilities should they occur. Many pieces were consigned to RS Ltd for sale and the costs involved should therefore the [be?] applicable to the consignors. To date they amount to $7 million and Mrs. Despina Papadimitriou was involved in all of them. Also her sleeping partnership with the firm makes her liable to the J. Paul Getty Museum for the 8 m $ paid for the half share of the limestone figure of Aphrodite should a problem arise with Italian government, who have actively been seeking its return. It is therefore a possibility and a risk I am not prepared to shoulder alone.

This was interesting on a number of grounds. It dispelled—from the horse’s mouth—the convenient fiction that “old collections” provide much of the material that suddenly appears on the market. It confirmed that Symes had a hand in supplying the Getty with the Aphrodite statue. But it was interesting most of all because it detailed the intimate involvement, the “sleeping partnership,” of the Papadimitriou family—Christo’s sister, Despina, in particular—in financing transactions.

A separate note said that both Xoilan and SESA were owned by Christo’s parents, through the fiduciary Henri Jacques. The note went on to say that Xoilan was established in the mid–1970s to receive the family’s collection, and to do so confidentially.

This was as a result of unfortunate publicity surrounding one particular sale which had been made through Robin Symes Limited of an item to the British Rail Pension Fund. This had led to an investigation by Interpol. The piece in question had in fact belonged to Christo Michaelides’s aunt.

These notes, it transpired, had been prepared in connection with two meetings Symes held with Britain’s Inland Revenue in June 1991. During the interview, the tax inspectors asked: “How is the collection built up?” The reply was: “When RS/CM see an item, CM will tell his parents who will ask RS and/or CM to attend the auction. His parents will then instruct Henri Jacques to make arrangements. RSL will arrange for shipment.”

In March 2000, Nonna Investments, another of Symes’ companies, negotiated a “rolling facility” with Citibank of $14 million, later increased to $17 million—the loan guaranteed by Despina Papadimitriou. There was a letter from the Getty agreeing to buy various objects but setting off these purchases against a Diadoumenos head—part of the Fleischman Collection—and a torso of Mithras, which were being returned to Italy. In October 1992, there was paperwork in connection with a Greek statue being sold to the Getty for $18 million.

How important was all this? Neither Nikolas Zirganos nor we could be certain. The Papadimitriou family were eager just then to prove that Symes and Michaelides were business partners, not in a “marriage,” and Christo’s ready access to serious money—via his family—certainly seemed an important aspect of the running of their companies. That supported their argument in the London trial, but if Symes were the kind of dealer Ferri thought he was, wasn’t this financial involvement by the Papadimitrious also incriminating of them?

We did not discuss it in any detail just then. Too much was going on elsewhere. Over a last lunch before Zirganos left for the airport—eaten near Symes’ now-closed gallery in Mason’s Yard, where we had been filming—Watson mentioned that the Symes archive, in addition to a roomful of documents, consisted of seventeen green binders showing photographs of antiquities. We didn’t discuss that in any detail either. Not then.

On March 19, 2003, at a press conference, the Italian Ministry for Cultural Affairs announced that what was then the world’s rarest and most important looted antiquity had been recovered by the Italian Carabinieri in London. The object, a unique life-size ivory figure, thought to be of Apollo, the Greek god of the sun, and perhaps dating from the fifth century BC, was valued at close to £30 million ($50 million) on the open market.

The ivory was of such a superb quality that Italian archaeologists who examined the head on its return believed at first that it might have been carved by Phidias, one of the greatest of classical Greek sculptors, whose carvings graced the Parthenon and the Temple of Zeus at Olympia. Pliny, Pausanias, and Lucian all sang Phidias’s praises, but not a single work of his has survived. This discovery was therefore astounding to the worlds of archaeology, art history, museums, and classical scholarship.

The head was seized, partly with the help of the authors, from Robin Symes. Because relations between the Carabinieri and Scotland Yard were so poor, we served as a conduit for information between Ferri and Conforti, on the one hand, and Christo’s family, and their attorneys in London, on the other, to help speed the negotiations. A fragment of a fresco, stolen from a villa near Pompeii, was also recovered at the same time. Besides the ivory head, which has its eyes, straight nose, and sensual lips intact, a series of fragments was also recovered—fingers, toes, an ear, some curls of hair. In antiquity, it was the practice for exceptionally important statues to have ivory heads, hands, and feet, with bodies of stone or wood, which were covered in gold sheets.

The ivory head and other fragments were originally discovered in 1995 by Pietro Casasanta, who showed the authors of this book the field where he says he discovered the statue, a few hundred yards from a well-known archaeological landmark, the Baths of Claudius. Casasanta told us that he believes the statue came from a large, luxurious villa that belonged to the family of the first-century Roman emperor Claudius. At the time he found the head and fragments, Casasanta also discovered three Egyptian statues of goddesses, two in green and one in black granite. He also had some pieces of mosaic, not necessarily from the same site. “This was obviously the residence of a very rich, very important family,” he said. Photographs of the three statues were found by the Carabinieri at Casasanta’s home when he was raided. These statues are still missing, though Casasanta believes one is in London.

Casasanta told us that the minute he set eyes on the ivory head he knew it was the most important object he—or any other tombarolo—had ever found. Only one other life-size ivory head 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 head and fragments, and the three statues, out of Italy himself and sold them to Nino Savoca. They agreed a fee of $10 million. Savoca, he says, showed the head to the experts or curators of two American museums, one of whom attributed it to Phidias, but neither of them was willing to risk buying such an obviously looted object. Following this, Savoca stopped paying him after $700,000, and they fell out.

Savoca died in 1998, and during a (second) raid on his premises, the Carabinieri discovered documentation that helped them close in on a number of important looted antiquities. Partly because Savoca had reneged on payment, and possibly calculating that the Carabinieri had him in their sights again, Casasanta volunteered to Conforti’s men that Savoca had sold the ivory head to a London dealer, who, he told us, was “a homosexual whose partner died recently.” This was clearly Robin Symes. The Carabinieri already knew this, of course, from Frida Tchacos.

Professor Antonio Giuliano, of La Sapienza University, who has examined the statue, which is now at the Museo Nazionale Romano in Rome, provisionally dated the ivory to the fifth or fourth century BC. Later studies changed this: It is now dated to the first century BC—that is, 300-plus years after Phidias. Giuliano considers the main head to be of Apollo, but he thinks that the associated fragments are from a second, somewhat smaller statue, possibly Artemis or Atona (the toe, for example, is on a smaller scale than the head).

Should we need further confirmation, there can now be no doubt of the importance of the objects that the Medici-Tchacos-Symes cordata dealt in. The ivory head now has an entire room to itself in a major museum in Rome. Antiquities don’t come more important than that.

Robin Symes left the medical wing of Pentonville Prison, North London, after securing time off for good behavior, in September 2005. The civil action with the Papadimitriou family is still not resolved. He still has a one-year suspended sentence hanging over him. That’s in Britain. In Italy, Ferri is still reviewing future cases and the fall of Robin Symes may not yet be complete.