1
IT ALL BEGAN WITH A ROBBERY, deep in the south of Italy. Melfi is a small town in the mountainous Basilicata region—east of Naples and north of Potenza. It is a savage landscape, cracked with dried river beds, the scars of distant earthquakes, the soil baked pale by the Mediterranean sun. Though Melfi is sleepy and nondescript, its medieval castle is spectacular. It is said to contain 365 rooms—one for every day of the year—and its nine forbidding square brick towers, the oldest built in 1041, mark an imposing outline, like large jagged teeth, against the sweep of Mount Vultura, a looming mass of dark red rock that rises up more than 4,000 feet. In the time of Frederick the Second, Melfi was the Norman capital of the south (before Palermo assumed that honor), and it was from here that Pope Urban II called the First Crusade, to conquer the Holy Land.
Thursday, January 20, 1994, was a cold, brilliantly sunny day in Melfi. There was a faint smell of olives in the air, as the pickers in the fields below the castle ate their lunch in the shade of the trees. It was 1:45 PM.
There were no visitors to the castle that day. The building had been given to the Italian state back in 1950, and three rooms had been turned into an archaeological museum. One of the main attractions of the museum was the so-called Melfi vases. These are eight terra-cotta pots, each 2,500 years old, brilliantly decorated in white, red, and brown, with stories from the Greek classics—goddesses playing lyres, athletes being crowned with garlands, scenes of dancing and feasting.
Luigi Maschito was bored. He had been a guard at Melfi Museum for nearly three years now and he had often been bored, but on brilliantly sunny days like this one it was worse, and he would much rather have been out in the fields or exploring the lower slopes of Mount Vultura with his dog. Maschito had with him a new book of crossword puzzles that he had been given for Christmas. It was a gift he had asked his mother for, precisely to help relieve the tedium of just such a day as this. Even so, and despite the rudimentary wooden chair he was perched on, he couldn’t help dropping off to sleep every now and then. He had already eaten his lunch and that invariably made him drowsy. His crossword book, open on his knee, fell to the floor.
He opened his eyes and bent to pick it up.
His forehead struck something hard—and when he looked up he gasped.
He was staring at the barrel of a pistol.
The man holding the gun didn’t say anything but held a finger to his lips. Maschito knew what that meant—who didn’t? He didn’t resist as another man tied him to his chair. “Merda! Cazzo!” he thought. “Is this really happening?”
How had they gotten in unnoticed? The castle could only be entered via an old stone bridge, and it had not one but two protecting walls. The men must have known that at lunchtime the castle came to a standstill.
Maschito’s shoulders were pulled back, hard, by rope. He sat mute, terrified, as three men, all dark-haired, all in their thirties, all wearing sunglasses, took a huge metal lug wrench and attacked the glass case protecting the Melfi vases.
The glass of the case shattered immediately and fell in a shower of fragments on to the tile floor. The sweat of fear ran down Maschito’s forehead and into his eyes as he watched the three men reach forward and snatch at the eight precious vases. The men still didn’t speak—the entire operation was carried out in complete silence.
One man took three of the smaller objects. The second man lifted the smallest vase, a jug, and placed it inside one of the others, a larger bucketshaped vase with handles. He slipped these under the arm of the man with the gun, so he still had one hand free for his weapon. Then the second man took the remaining vases, one of which had a narrow neck, making it easier to hold, and hurried out of the room. They had obviously rehearsed this procedure beforehand.
The man with the pistol pointed it again at Maschito. The robber lifted the barrel so that it was vertical and touched it to his lips—another warning to keep silent. Then he too was gone.
Maschito was no fool. He struggled to free his hands before starting to shout and scream. In no time, two of his colleagues appeared. In fact, they had heard the alarm go off when the glass of the protecting case had been smashed but assumed that the alarm had malfunctioned. Never dreaming there was a real robbery in progress, they hadn’t hurried.
Seeing Maschito tied to the chair, one guard ran toward him while the other, Massimo Tolve, turned and gave chase out of the room. He rushed from the building, through the two arches set into the two protecting walls, and out along the stone bridge, the only way in and out of the castle.
The road fell away sharply beyond the bridge, and there was a parking lot farther down. As Tolve turned off the bridge, he saw a car reversing in the lot. He watched it pause while it changed gear, and then it moved forward, accelerating down the remainder of the hill, heading west for the road to Calitri.
Thanks to that pause, he was later able to tell the police just two things about the car. That it was a Lancia Delta—and that its license plate was Swiss.
An ornate, four-story, ochre-and-white baroque palazzo, a small jewel on the Piazza Sant’Ignazio in the center of old Rome, lies just across from the Jesuit church of Sant’Ignazio, famous for its trompe l’oeil cupola painted by Andrea Pozzo (1642–1709). This splendid edifice is the public face and headquarters of the Carabinieri Art Squad, the Italians’ way of showing the value they put on their heritage. The squad also has twelve regional units and one of these, in Naples, now became the operational headquarters for the Melfi investigators. One of the vases that had been stolen in the Melfi theft showed Hercules carrying a circular shield and in combat with Geryon, a three-headed monster. Because the monster with three heads resembled the antiquities underworld, which manifested itself in many different guises, Colonel Conforti—the man in charge of the Art Squad—code-named the Melfi investigation “Operation Geryon.”
At the time of the Melfi theft, Roberto Conforti was fifty-seven and had been in charge of the Art Squad for a little over four years. He is old-fashioned, experienced, round faced, with a small mustache and the gravelly voice of a man who smokes two packs of Marlboros every day. He was born in Serre, near Salerno, and still speaks with a distinctive southern Italian accent despite his many years in Rome. His father was a civil servant, his mother was—and his sister still is—a schoolteacher, and his wife was in the same class as his sister at school. He grew up at a time when it was normal for him to address his father as “voi,” the Italian equivalent of the French “vous.” In those days, the commander of the local Carabinieri would cuff children over the head if they were out on the streets too late, when they should have been home eating dinner with their parents. He studied law at Naples University but preferred law enforcement as a career and joined the Carabinieri when he was nineteen. In the nearly forty years between then and Operation Geryon, Conforti was involved in one tough assignment after another. He was in Sardinia in the late 1960s, the years of Sardinian banditry, during which time his wife and first daughter needed bodyguards. In 1969, he moved to Naples to become commander of the Poggioreale area, with its notorious Poggioreale prison. This area Conforti himself describes as “fetente,” fetid—nasty and stinking—a place where his wife had to lock herself and their daughter in their bedroom, with water and emergency medicines, refusing to come out until he arrived home. He was promoted to run the investigative unit in Naples, a critical time when the Camorra (the Naples region version of the Mafia) and the Sicilian Cosa Nostra were beginning to consolidate, as they began their foray into drugs. One of the main Mafia figures escaped from prison at that time and, as Conforti puts it, “Homicides just happened in repetition.” It was gang war. His successes there resulted in further promotion, this time to Giuliano, probably the most Camorra-infested area in the Naples hinterland, after which he was given command of the entire Naples area. He was moved to Rome in the late 1970s and given command of the operational unit there, at a time when terrorism was growing, in particular groups like the Red Brigade.
Conforti has been involved in all the hard, intractable problems of Italian crime. He has learned the tricks of the trade, has spent long parts of his career working undercover, against the most formidable, well-equipped, determined, and organized criminals that Italy has produced. Despite the pressures on his wife and daughter early in his career, he and his wife had three more girls, and Conforti is now a grandfather five times over. Such is his commitment to law enforcement, and the need to uphold Italy’s institutions, that it has rubbed off on two of his daughters, who are themselves magistrates and, moreover, are married to magistrates.
In 1990, Conforti was given command of the Carabinieri Art Squad. He was charged with “reviving” it. The squad then consisted of just sixty men, who occupied the palazzo in Piazza Sant’Ignazio—and nowhere else. Within two years, Conforti had established a branch in Palermo, two years after that in Florence. Next, newly opened at the time of the Melfi theft and Operation Geryon, came Naples. Bari, Venice, and Turin lay in the future.
Conforti himself had no special training in art. At his liceo, or high school, there had been a Professoressa Prete, an art teacher he always remembered because she wore a different hat every day and taught him that, in Italy, one is everywhere surrounded by art. So, for as long as he can remember, Conforti has loved Caravaggio as much as he has loved Beethoven and Chopin, the three artists he most admires.
He learned early in his time in the Art Squad that though Italian art museums are well guarded, their archaeological treasures are the poor relation. They have less money spent on them and rank lower down in the government’s priorities. And so he took the theft at Melfi especially badly. There was only one aspect of the theft that gave him hope.
Spectacular thefts, like the one at Melfi, are always carried out with an international angle. The Swiss number plate in this case proved it but I would have suspected an international angle anyway. There is no need to risk an armed robbery just for a local theft. When thieves steal important, high profile objects, they do so either because they already have a buyer, or they think they have a buyer ready. Many times we have tracked thefts and lootings as far as the Swiss border, but usually our inquiries stop there. Our jurisdiction goes no further, the Swiss laws are helpful to the criminals and it was always my hope that one day we could extend our investigations beyond Italy’s border, to show the international side of the traffic in antiquities. When the vases at Melfi were stolen, and we learned that the thieves drove a Swiss car, I remember thinking, “This could be the springboard that takes us into Europe.”
But Conforti had no idea what was about to unfold.
Italian police (to use the term loosely, since the Carabinieri are in fact part of the army) have one advantage over similar authorities elsewhere. Because the looting of antiquities is such a widespread problem, at any one time the Art Squad has a number of people under surveillance. In particular, phone tapping is routine. The taps are voice activated, and the legal permissions to operate them have to be renewed every fifteen days. In the wake of a big theft like that at Melfi, however, they are essential, for the telephone traffic tells the police who to focus on.
Long experience had taught the investigators what to look out for. At the lowest level, the tombaroli, or tomb robbers, are invariably laborers or farm workers, who don’t make many calls. Above them come those the tombaroli call the capo zona, the head of a region. The tomb robbers normally sell their finds to a capo zona, frequently a man with a white-collar job, meaning he has some sort of education, and whose telephone records as often as not show that he regularly makes calls abroad. In this case, following the Melfi raid, there was a burst of telephone traffic centered on the Casal di Principe area. Casal di Principe is a small town north of Naples, in the center of the region that produces the delicious buffalomozzarella cheese.
Analysis of the telephone records in Casal di Principe showed that four men in particular had recently been making a lot of international calls. One of these, a certain Pasquale Camera, was particularly interesting, for a check on his background produced the arresting information that he had been a captain in the Guardia di Finanza, Italy’s finance and customs police. He was careful not to use his home telephone very much, but the calls that he did make were to Germany, Switzerland, and Sicily.
This early burst of telephone activity didn’t last, however, and it seemed that the investigation had stalled. Spring came and went; so did summer. Then, quite by chance, Art Squad headquarters in Piazza Sant’Ignazio received a call from the German police in Munich. The Germans said they had received a request from the Greek police, asking them to raid and search the home of a certain dealer in antiquities who lived in Munich. This man was an Italian named Antonio Savoca, known as “Nino,” and he was believed to be involved in the illegal traffic of antiquities out of Greece and Cyprus. In view of the fact that Savoca was Italian, the Germans said, were the Carabinieri interested in taking part in the upcoming raid? Colonel Conforti didn’t need to be asked twice. He selected two officers, a lieutenant and a marshal, who took the first Alitalia flight to Munich. The raid was scheduled for October 14, 1994.
At the briefing on the morning of that day, twelve people were gathered in Munich police headquarters—two Italians, two Greeks, the rest German. Savoca, they were told, lived in a three-story villa in the Pullah suburb of the city, a prosperous area in the south, wooded and quiet. The villa had been under discreet surveillance for some time, and the raiding party was shown a sketch of the house and its surrounding garden. There was a high hedge, enclosing some mature trees and a well-kept English-style lawn, bordered by flowers. Four people were detailed to surround the house, which left eight to take part in the raid proper. Each of these was given a room to inspect as soon as entry had been effected.
The squad arrived in Pullah at about seven in the morning. The weather was overcast and it was threatening to rain. Savoca’s home was on a quiet, dead-end street and had a sloping Mansard roof. All the men were in uniform, which made them appear more intimidating. The villa was quickly surrounded, and the German captain in charge of the operation rang the doorbell. Savoca himself answered. A small, round-faced, dark-skinned man of forty-four, Savoca had spiky hair and was wearing a blue shirt and jeans. (His family originally came from Messina in Sicily, but he had been born in Cernobbio on Lake Como in the far north of Italy.) He was read his rights and told he could telephone a lawyer if he wished, though the police did not have to wait for the lawyer to arrive. He seemed nervous but was relatively calm in comparison with his wife, Doris Seebacher, a small blond from Bolzano. She was furious, which Conforti’s men interpreted as an auspicious sign.
There were three other people in the villa besides Savoca and his wife: their two children, and Savoca’s mother. She remained with the children while the police searched the rooms. The laws of evidence demanded that Savoca or his wife be with the raiding party at all times.
The search did not begin well. Just inside the front door, to the right, there was a huge study, with a central desk, bookshelves with books, and below them, a display cabinet with lights and antiquities on display. To the Italians this was no more than normal. People mixed up in the illicit traffic in antiquities often pose as collectors—they keep the loot in properly lit display cases, as a “collector” would, to deflect suspicion. The police spent several minutes tapping the walls and floors and ceilings for hidden compartments but discovered nothing. Beyond the study was a huge kitchen, and beyond that a monumental spiral staircase, made of marble, that led both up and down. They tried downstairs first.
The basement was divided into three sections. The first room they came to was a storeroom, a magazzino in Italian, which contained scores of boxes, each containing fragments of antiquities, many with dirt on them, and each carefully classified—“red-figure,” “black-figure,” “Attic,” “Apulian,” and so on. The police found this promising. There were also a few complete objects in this room, vases mainly. The second feature of the basement was a huge laboratory, spotless and laid out like a medical pharmacy, with scientific instruments, lancets, magnifying glasses, jars of chemicals, paints, brushes, and other equipment with which fragile antiquities could be cleaned and restored to their former glory. This was even more promising than the magazzino.
Beyond the laboratory, however, the raiding party was in for a real surprise, something that none of the police there that day had ever come across before—not the Italians, nor the Germans, nor the Greeks who had flown in from Athens. It was a pool. At first glance it looked like a swimming pool. It was five feet deep, more than sixty feet long, and some thirty feet wide. It was lined in tiles, with skimmers to ensure the efficient circulation of water. But this pool wasn’t used for swimming. Standing in the water, in rows, like so many giant chess pieces, was a score or more of ancient vases and jars. This was Savoca’s way of cleaning the bigger antiquities—they were dipped in the pool, then left for a few days, and the chemicals in the water removed the encrustations and other blemishes that they had acquired down the ages. The police were dumbfounded. This was restoration on an industrial scale. The great majority of the vases were of Italian origin, though there were some from Bulgaria and some from Greece. Next to the pool were a number of plastic vats, containing stronger chemicals used to clean the vases with really difficult encrustations. The smell from the chemicals in the vats was quite strong, and no one risked putting his fingers in the liquid to reach for the artifacts. Savoca was silent. There was no hiding what the pool room was used for.
For the Carabinieri, however, the pool and its contents were just the first of several surprises that day. Alongside the pool, standing in a neat row next to the vats, and in a very clean state, were three of the magnificent vases stolen from Melfi. They varied from about nine inches to more than two feet high. One showed a naked youth crowned with a diadem and holding a phiale (a plate) with sweetmeats on it. Another showed a woman with a crown, dancing and playing an ancient tambourine. A third showed a warrior, in armor, with a shield and spear, relaxing and talking to a maiden. They didn’t seem to have been damaged during their journey north across the Alps.
So far as the Italians were concerned, their journey had already been more than worthwhile, but the day and the surprises weren’t over. The raiding party climbed back up the marble staircase. Above the ground floor, on the first floor, were the bedrooms, but above them, there was another floor set into the mansard roof, a room with sloping walls. When the raiding party reached this top floor, yet another discovery awaited them. All around the walls there was shelving that, like the floor space in this room, was packed with antiquities—hundred and hundreds of vases and stelae, or stone slabs carved with inscriptions. There were bronzes, statues, mosaics. There were frescoes, jewelry, silver. The vast majority of objects were of Italian origin but here, too, there was Bulgarian and Greek material. And in the middle of the room were the remaining Melfi vases.
Also in the middle of the mansard room, next to the Melfi vases, was a small writing desk. On examination, this was found to contain Savoca’s personal archive. And what an archive it turned out to be. Savoca had the meticulous—the obsessive—habit of recording every transaction he had ever made on cards. These five-by-eight-inch cards contained the name of every object he had acquired, the date of the transaction, the price he had paid, and the name of the individual he had acquired it from—with their signature. For the investigators, of course, this was pure gold.
The raiding party spent the rest of the day photographing the contents of Savoca’s Pullah villa, and he was told that all those contents were being seized. The Italians identified the Melfi vases as stolen, as well as some others from a town called Scrimbia, another out-of-the-way place in the deep south of Italy.b But the Italians also spent several hours that afternoon searching the card index archive for the name of the individual who had supplied Savoca with the Melfi vases. At about 4:30 PM, they finally found what they were looking for. The signature was unmistakable, and it was a name they knew: Luigi Coppola. There were two things that Conforti’s men already knew about Coppola, in addition to his name. First, he came from Casal di Principe. Second, he was a capo zona who worked alongside the man whose phone they had been tapping, Pasquale Camera.
Back in Casal di Principe, the surveillance of Camera was stepped up, and Coppola was added to the phone-tap list. But as often happens in investigations, the breakthrough in Munich did not prove anywhere near as fruitful as it had promised to be at the time. Camera was still tight-lipped on the few occasions when he did use his home phone, and Christmas came and went without any further advances. Early in 1995, following a certain amount of legal wrangling, the Melfi vases were returned and there was an elaborate ceremony to mark the occasion, attended by the local mayor, the local MPs, the local police chief, and Conforti. Luigi Maschito briefly became a minor celebrity in his hometown all over again, photographed by the local paper.
The phone taps at Casal di Principe were left in place, but nothing much was revealed, nothing that would enable Conforti to act. Once again the investigation appeared to have stalled. Spring passed and summer arrived. Half of Conforti’s men were on vacation when fate intervened.
Pasquale Camera was a big man, weighing in at a little under 400 pounds, and as this suggests, he liked his food and he liked his drink. On August 31, a Thursday, he took his lunch at Luciano’s Restaurant in Santa Maria di Capua Vetere, a small town north of Naples and very near Casal di Principe. He then set out on the A1, the Autostrada del Sole, Italy’s main north-south freeway, to drive to Rome.
The Carabinieri didn’t follow him. They knew where he was headed—his apartment in Rome—and there was no need. Following people can be costly in terms of manpower and risky when using cars. Conforti had also learned long ago, when he was head of the investigative unit in Naples, that cars can be a giveaway. It happened the hard way when, one morning, he arrived at the scene of a crime, in plainclothes and in what he thought was an unmarked car, only to have someone approach him and say, “Ah, you came with the 820!” He didn’t know what the man meant until he noticed that those were the last three digits of the license plate. Thereafter, in the Art Squad, Conforti only used rented cars for tailing jobs—from Hertz, Avis, Europcar—anonymous models that were changed every day. In undercover “sting” operations, he would rent more expensive models—a Mercedes, for example—when having his men pose as wealthy collectors. This helped them to look the part.
The August day was hot and sultry, though traffic on the Autostrada del Sole was light. Sometime between 2:30 and 3:00 PM, just as he was approaching the exit for Cassino, with the great stone hill of Monte Cassino and its historic Benedictine monastery looming above, Camera’s car, a beige Renault 21, left the road, smashed into the guardrail at the edge of the autostrada—and overturned. Camera was killed instantly, pronounced dead by the side of the road by the paramedics without being taken to hospital. There were rumors, later, that his car had been interfered with in some way, but Conforti discounts this. He thought it more likely that Camera fell asleep at the wheel after a heavy lunch. He was too big to fit into his seat belt, which wasn’t fastened around him, and the impact at speed—and when the Renault overturned—was fatal.
In Italy, road accidents are the responsibility of the Polizia Stradale, and they were brought in on this occasion. However, when accidents occur in small towns such as Cassino, the local Carabinieri are also informed. In addition to being told that a fatal accident had occurred, they were told on this occasion that a number of photographs had been found in the glove compartment of the car, showing archaeological objects. It so happened that the commander of the Carabinieri in Cassino at that time had himself been a member of the Art Squad not long before. On being told about the contents of the glove compartment, he immediately telephoned his former colleagues in Piazza Sant’Ignazio, who passed the message along the line to the men on the ground.
The information was timely. About an hour before, the men manning the phone taps in the procura, the prosecutor’s office in Santa Maria di Capua Vetere, had begun picking up cryptic messages being exchanged between tombaroli to the effect that “The captain is dead,” and they hadn’t known what to make of it. The information from their colleagues in Cassino clarified the situation—Pasquale Camera had been a captain in the Guardia di Finanza, Italy’s financial and customs police.
Conforti now saw his chance—an opportunity that might never come again. Within an hour his men had contacted a magistrate in Santa Maria di Capua Vetere and obtained a search warrant, in Italian a decreto di perquisizione, which entitled them to raid and search Camera’s apartment in Rome.
Naples to Rome is normally a two-hour drive. That night, owing to traffic, they didn’t reach Camera’s apartment in the San Lorenzo district in northeast Rome until 9:00 PM. They had stopped to pick up the equipment that would enable them to break down the front door. In the event, however, a neighbor saw them as they huddled around the entrance, and when he understood who they were, he offered a key to the apartment. Even so, under Italian law the Carabinieri weren’t allowed to search the premises until a relative had been contacted and given the chance to be present. The helpful neighbor had the phone number for Camera’s mother in Naples.
It was an awkward call to make: Only hours after her son had been killed, the police were asking the old woman to be a witness, in a search of her dead son’s apartment. Camera’s brother-in-law agreed to drive up from Naples, and only after he had arrived could the search go ahead. It was by then after 11:00 PM.
It was a big apartment, located between the Piazza Bologna and La Sapienza, Rome’s oldest university, an area with a mix of old and new buildings. The apartment, in a relatively new building, had a squareshaped sitting room, a large study leading off it, and a balcony running along the south side that looked down on streets crowded with students. Any one of the Carabinieri would have given his eyeteeth to be able to afford such an apartment. The furniture was a little on the flamboyant side, with the decoration—wallpaper, curtains, lampshades—in pastel shades. Beyond that, however, the contents of the second-floor apartment were incredibly untidy—papers were strewn all over, uneaten food was turning moldy, dirty laundry appeared to have been dropped anywhere. Eight men took part in the raid, and their first aim was to put order into the chaos. There were hundreds of photographs, Polaroids mainly, and pages and pages of documentation, together with scores of antiquities, some of which were genuine but many of which were obviously fake.
The investigators spent a few hours that night sifting through the contents of the apartment and then sealed the door. They called Conforti, who was at home but still awake. He is one of those people who needs little sleep, and they knew he would be anxious for news.
Over the next few days, as they assessed the material they had seized, they made a number of discoveries. First, they found phone bills for five different cell phones. These bills showed that they were all registered in the name of a certain Wanda d’Agata. Second, utility bills and mortgage payments further showed that the apartment was also registered in the same name, Wanda d’Agata. It didn’t take the investigators long to deduce that Wanda was a convenient “front” for Camera. As he moved around, buying and selling looted or stolen antiquities, he and his contacts used only the cell phones registered to her. All that ever showed up on the official records, therefore, was that Wanda was calling herself. This is why Camera didn’t appear to be using his own phone very much—he was using one of Wanda’s. The apartment was in her name to keep him off the radar of all official bodies. This was a highly suspicious—and highly effective—modus operandi.
What really pushed the investigation forward and confirmed Camera’s importance and involvement in trafficking antiquities were the photographs of the archaeological objects that had been found in the glove compartment of his Renault. They arrived at the investigator’s offices a day after the raid on the Rome apartment. There were about fifty pictures, and among them was one of a calyx krater by Asteas, a fourth-century BC Italian vase painter, and another of a very striking statue of Artemis. In Greek mythology, and according to Hesiod, one of the earliest Greek writers after Homer, Artemis was the daughter of Zeus and the sister of Apollo. She loved hunting and dancing, and was one of the three virgin goddesses of Olympus. She was also notorious for her anger and jealousy, which led her to kill many others—humans, gods, and goddesses.
To Conforti and his men it was immediately obvious that this statue was an exceedingly rare and valuable object indeed. All investigators in the Art Squad are given lessons in art history—in painting, sculpture, and drawing—by the superintendency of Italy’s Culture Ministry, and because they handle a lot of objects, and see a fair proportion of fakes, they quickly develop an “eye” for the quality of artifacts. The white marble Artemis was about four feet high and showed the goddess with hair braided across her forehead and falling down the side of her neck, striding out in a fulllength tunic and sandals. The tunic fell down her body in triangular folds, and there was a hunting strap across her breasts. Her features showed a slight smile as she looked directly ahead. Her arms were cut off at the elbows, but otherwise she was intact.
The investigators knew she was Artemis for one simple reason—it was a classical image and three other near-identical versions were known, one in Naples, one in Florence, and one in Venice. All were in museums, and all were Roman copies, dating from the first century AD, of a lost archaic Greek original that dated to the fifth or sixth century BC. Since none of the statues in the three museums was missing, this Artemis was a major find. It might even be the original Greek Artemis. Given Camera’s links with the Naples area, in particular with Santa Maria di Capua Vetere, the photograph found in his car strongly suggested that the statue had perhaps been excavated in that area. Who could say what else had been purloined during the illegal dig of what was clearly a very important site? And so recovering this Artemis now became a major focus of the Art Squad. The photograph recovered from the glove compartment had some meat hooks in the background—the Artemis had been transferred from the ground to a butcher shop. Shortly afterward, however, in Camera’s apartment, the Carabinieri came across another photograph of the Artemis, against a different, and less striking, background. Clearly, Camera was intimately involved in trading this valuable and beautiful object.
The second breakthrough as a result of the raid on Camera’s apartment came via the other names mentioned in the paperwork the Carabinieri confiscated. These names led the investigators in two directions. In the first place, they led eventually to no fewer than seventy other raids, which unearthed hundreds of looted vases and other objects—and to the arrest of nineteen individuals, all of whom were found guilty at their subsequent trials.
From our point of view, however, the second direction is more interesting. For among the names in the documentation in Camera’s apartment was that of Wanda d’Agata’s son, a man named Danilo Zicchi.
He was raided toward the end of September, still as part of Operation Geryon, and in his apartment two very important discoveries were made. First, from the furniture, wallpaper, and other decorations, Conforti’s men realized that Zicchi’s apartment was the very place where the statue of Artemis had been photographed after it had left the butcher shop. Faced with this evidence, and the threat of some very fulsome and unpleasant Carabinieri attention, Zicchi decided to talk—up to a point. He admitted that his apartment had been used “for years” as a “warehouse” for looted antiquities, many of them from Sicily. The objects would be stored in his apartment, he said, for months or longer, and then, acting on instructions, he would pack the antiquities into boxes and mail them abroad from the post office on the ground floor beneath his apartment. (The man in charge of the post office below confirmed later that Zicchi had indeed been sending packages abroad “for years.”) The objects were almost always sent out in fragments, Zicchi said. That way they occupied less space, drew less attention to themselves, and should the package break open for any reason, a collection of untidy pieces looked much less suspicious. Zicchi also said that he had met Pasquale Camera when the latter had been a captain in the Guardia di Finanza and had been tipped off about him. Instead of prosecuting Zicchi, the two men had become close colleagues.
The second discovery in Zicchi’s apartment was Camera’s passport. Together with the fact that Camera’s own apartment was in someone else’s name, as were several of his telephones, this confirmed—if confirmation were still needed—the lengths to which Camera would go to hide from official notice. He kept his profile as low as he possibly could, consistent with being able to travel abroad to further his business interests, and to bank his profits from those interests. Otherwise, Camera didn’t exist.
The investigators took away about sixty objects at the end of that first raid on Zicchi’s apartment. They had in mind a second raid, on the grounds that, as Conforti pointed out, having been raided once Zicchi would think he was safe. Before they could do so, however, Conforti received a phone call from an archaeologist at the Villa Giulia, Rome’s Etruscan museum. This was Daniela Rizzo, an archaeologist at the museum who worked closely with the Art Squad, verifying whether allegedly looted objects were genuine or not and, if genuine, where they had most probably been looted from. This time, she was calling to say that she had been contacted by an old woman who said that her son had just inherited a collection of antiquities and was anxious to have her—Rizzo—come and see them, authenticate them, and register them, so he could possess them legally (this is how the system works in Italy). Rizzo was being so pressurized, she said, with the old woman so adamant that she verify and register the objects “at once,” that she was becoming suspicious.
What was the name of this woman, queried Conforti. More to the point, who was her son?
“His name is Danilo Zicchi,” said Rizzo.
This was interesting. “How many objects does he want to register?”
“About eighty, I think.”
Even more interesting. Sixty objects had been seized. Now, by some lucky “accident,” Zicchi had “inherited” another eighty.
The upshot was that Rizzo agreed to pay Zicchi a visit the following day to “inspect” his objects. She was accompanied by a “colleague,” who was of course an investigator from Conforti’s Art Squad, in plainclothes. More investigators remained down on the street, ready to swoop once they got the word.
In fact, that day they discovered something incomparably more important than eighty looted antiquities, something that provided one of three starting points for the overall investigation that gave rise to this book (this was the second starting point, after the theft at Melfi). This discovery was kept top secret from everybody except Conforti and the Rome public prosecutor. In Zicchi’s apartment, in a file on a desk, just sitting there, was a single handwritten sheet of lined paper, with two punched holes on the left-hand side so it would fit into a ring binder. The sheet was covered in Pasquale Camera’s handwriting, and it was nothing less than an organizational chart showing how the clandestine antiquities network was arranged throughout Italy, Switzerland, and elsewhere. It revealed exactly who was in the entire hierarchy—from top to bottom, and everyone in between—and beyond that, how they were related to each other, who supplied whom, who was in competition with whom, which areas of Italy were supplied by which middlemen, and what their links were to international dealers, museums, and collectors. The chart was breathtaking.
The handwriting, in blue ballpoint pen, was quite clear. It was an educated hand, manifestly laid out with some forethought, and Zicchi confirmed it as Camera’s script. Right at the top, in large letters, it showed “Robert (Bob) Hecht,” with two small lateral arrows pointing to “Paris and USA—museums and collectors.” Hecht’s name was underlined, and from this line other arrows went to and from his name. The lines indicated that beneath him was a series of international dealers and collectors, scattered across Europe, whose names were also written in larger letters. These were, first, Gianfranco Becchina, of Basel, Switzerland, and Castelvetrano in Sicily, and the name of his firm, Antike Kunst Palladion. Next came Nicholas Goutulakis, of Paris, Geneva, and Athens, with a two-way arrow directly linking him to Hecht. The rest of the names were: George Ortiz, of Geneva and Argentina; “Frida,” of Zurich; Sandro Cimicchi, a Basel restorer; and Giacomo Medici, of Rome, Vulci, Santa Marinella, and Geneva.
Below these were still more names, written in smaller letters. Below Becchina was Elia Borowsky, an M. Bruno, of Lugano, Cerveteri, and Torino, though with other words in brackets (“north Italy, Roma, Lazio, Campania, Puglia, Sardinia, Sicily”)—indicating his areas of competence. Below him was Dino Brunetti of Cerveteri, followed by Franco Luzzi of Ladispoli, a small town on the coast, just north of Rome, and below him the words “Tombaroli di . . . ” and then a list of places including Grosseto, Montalto di Castro, Orvieto, Cerveteri, Casal di Principe, and Marcenise. Also under Becchina was “Raffaele Monticelli (Puglia, Calabria, Campania, Sicilia),” and under him Aldo Bellezza (“Foggia,” and elsewhere). Under Medici, dotted lines linked him to “Alessandro Anedda (Roma)” and Franco Luzzi (again), of Ladispoli, with a solid arrow linking him to “Elio—stab. of Santa Marinella” (“stab.” is short for stabilimento, meaning “factory”), “Benedetto d’Aniello, of Naples,” and “Pierluigi Manetti, of Rome.” (See the Dossier section for a facsimile of the chart.)
By itself of course the chart proved nothing, and a number of people included worked in the business of restoring antiquities and may well have been doing no more than carrying on their lawful activities. But it was very circumstantial evidence against many of those cited. It contained some names that the Carabinieri knew, and a few that they didn’t. But most important of all, the chart showed the various levels of involvement, the role of Switzerland in the clandestine trade, and the links between the various participants. In other words, it was the underground network’s view of itself . Nothing like this had ever been found before. Within days, the chart was being referred to by the few aware of its existence inside the Art Squad—and in the offices of the public prosecutor—as the “organigram.”
“The moment I saw that scribbled sheet of paper,” says Conforti, “I thought back to 1977, in Naples, when we found in very different circumstances the organigram of the Camorra. Organized criminals are strange from this point of view—after all, the Red Brigade made the same mistake as well. And that is, they write about themselves, they put it on paper. So organized delinquency doesn’t change, it merely varies. And this time it was the same. It gave us the chance to move into terrain where, although we weren’t floundering, we didn’t have certainties.”
From the point of view of the Carabinieri, the organigram (see p. 362) was most immediately useful for its identification of the two most senior Italian figures in the network. Among the international dealers, Hecht was an American resident in Paris; “Frida” was Frederique Tchacos-Nussberger, an Egyptian-born Greek resident in Zurich; Nicholas Goutoulakis was Nikolas Koutoulakis, a Greek-Cypriot resident in Paris (now dead); George Ortiz was in fact an heir to the Ortiz-Patiñho tin fortune, of Bolivia, not Argentina, and he resided in Geneva. Elia, or Eli, Borowsky was a dealer-collector of Polish origin who had lived in Canada for many years and by then was living in Israel; the network was nothing if not international. But the chart identified two Italians, Gianfranco Becchina and Giacomo Medici, as being senior figures, and the lines and linkages shown below their names made it clear that these two men were primarily responsible for bringing antiquities out of Italy.
Operation Geryon had recovered the Melfi vases and had resulted in nineteen arrests. It was therefore wound up in the fall of 1995. This allowed Conforti to turn his attention to what appeared to him to be the bigger fish—to Gianfranco Becchina and Giacomo Medici.
From Camera’s organigram, the man whose name interested Conforti the most was Giacomo Medici. The colonel had known about the dealer for years, and the Carabinieri had even paid surprise “visits” to his houses several times. A property he had owned in Vulci, attached to a protected archaeological area, had been purchased compulsorily by the state, on the advice of archaeologists.
Naturally, Conforti started tapping Medici’s phone. This eavesdropping proved enlightening because it quickly established that one of the capi zona (the senior figure among the tombaroli) in the Naples area, one of the men they had targeted after the Melfi theft—a certain Roberto Cilli—was observed from his phone calls to have particularly close links with Medici. Cilli was a gypsy, from a family of gypsies who had become Italianized. He lived in Montalto di Castro, a small town on the Via Aurelia, just north of Tarquinia, one of the most famous Etruscan centers, in a celebrated street of run-down shacks—the Via dei Grottini—to which the authorities turned a blind eye. Cilli’s father had been a well-known tombarolo, and his wife was even better known, as a fortune-teller who numbered several rich socialites and TV stars among her clients.
Conforti’s tried and tested procedure in the Carabinieri, when targeting a senior criminal, is to pressure first his less-important colleagues. If the Art Squad can offer inducements to persuade the supplier of a bigger fish—the less well educated, the less sophisticated, the less protected—to confess or give away crucial details, these details can be used against the more important figures.
Before the investigators could move against Cilli, however, another unexpected twist occurred. In London, Sotheby’s catalog for its antiquities sale that year showed a photograph of a sarcophagus that was on the Art Squad’s list of stolen works. It had been taken from the church of San Saba on the Aventine, one of the seven hills of Rome. For any investigator, a stolen object is always easier to deal with than looted works. There are records of stolen works, whereas looted objects almost by definition leave no trace when they are dug up in the middle of the night by a tombarolo. So, once Sotheby’s had been presented with the evidence confirming that the sarcophagus was stolen, the company had no choice but to tell the Carabinieri that it had been put up for sale by a Geneva-based company called Editions Services and that the company was run by a French-speaking Swiss, Henri Albert Jacques. The address of Editions Services was given as 7 Avenue Krieg. An official request was immediately sent to the Swiss by the Italian authorities, seeking permission to question Jacques and to inspect the premises of Editions Services.
Since there was no question that the sarcophagus was stolen, permission was quickly granted. When approached, however, Jacques said that he was only the administrator of the company in question, a “fiduciary,” in effect a minion who looked after the finances and acted as an official “face.” Furthermore, he said, the address at 7 Avenue Krieg was little more than an accommodation address. The company was actually based at the Freeport, just outside Geneva, and the real owner—the “beneficial owner,” in English legal terminology—was an Italian named Giacomo Medici.
Coming after the raid on Savoca and the accident that had killed Camera, together with the subsequent discovery of the organigram, this was an extraordinary stroke of luck, and for the moment, all thought of using Cilli to put pressure on Medici was put on hold. Another official request was dispatched to the Swiss, seeking permission to raid the premises of Editions Services in Geneva Freeport.
Geneva Freeport (“Port Franc” in French) is a massive set of warehouses to the southwest of the city, where goods may be stored without officially “entering” Switzerland, the point being that no tax is paid on these goods unless and until they do officially cross the border. The advantage for Switzerland is that the hundreds—if not thousands—of personnel associated with the Freeport, who live in Geneva, bring with them a busy commercial life and considerable foreign currency.
Once again, the Swiss complied quickly and, on September 13, 1995, the raid took place. Medici had been contacted, at the last minute, but was on holiday in Sardinia and couldn’t get back that day. This time the raiding party consisted of a Swiss magistrate, three Swiss police, headed by an inspector, three of Conforti’s men, an official photographer, and the deputy director of the Freeport. The offices of Editions Services were located on the fourth floor of the plain, steel-built warehouse, on Corridor 17, Room 23. Seventeen is an unlucky number in Italy, the tradition deriving from ancient Rome and its use of Latin numerals. In Roman numerals, seventeen is spelled XVII, which is an anagram of VIXI, meaning “I lived” or, in other words, “I am now dead.” Medici’s warehouse was henceforth invariably known as “Corridor 17.”
The door to Room 23 was, like the rest of the building, made of anonymous gray metal. The deputy director of the Freeport had a key and, at the magistrate’s instruction, let them all in. Room 23 in fact comprised three rooms. In the outside room—the first the raiding party came to—there was a settee, some chairs, and a glass table supported by an enormous stone capital. At the far end there was a frosted glass window, but the rest of the walls were lined with cupboards. At first sight, Room 23 was ordinary. It was a sitting room and not especially stylish, at that; there was a thin brown carpet covering the floor. However, when the Carabinieri started opening the cupboards, they quickly changed their minds. There was nothing ordinary about the room in any way. All the cupboards were shelved—and each and every one of the shelves was packed—crowded, teeming, overloaded with antiquities: with vases, statues, bronzes; with candelabra, frescoes, mosaics; with glass objects, faience animals, jewelry, and still more vases. Some were wrapped in newspapers; frescoes lay on the floor or leaning against walls; other vases were packed in fruit boxes, and many had dirt on them. Some had Sotheby’s labels tied to them with white string.
But that wasn’t all. In the outer part of Room 23, there was also a huge safe, five feet tall and three feet wide. Amazingly, it wasn’t locked.
If the contents of the cupboards had been astounding, the contents of the safe were truly astonishing. One of Conforti’s men whistled as he realized what he was looking at. Inside the safe were twenty of the most exquisite classical Greek dinner plates that anyone there that day had ever seen, plus a number of red-figure vases by famous classical vase painters. The Carabinieri immediately recognized one as by none other than Euphronios. Together, the objects in the safe must have been worth millions of dollars.
The plates and the Euphronios vase were taken out and placed on the glass-topped table. The photographer, as he had done with all the other objects in the cupboards, took several photographs from various angles. Then the team moved on into the inner room, leaving the most junior of the Swiss police, the least experienced, to return the plates and vase to the safe. He replaced the plates without any difficulty, but when it came to the vase, he lifted it, naturally enough, by the handles. It simply never occurred to him that the vase was made of fragments that were only loosely glued together. A more experienced man—one of Conforti’s men, for instance—would have known that the handles of the vase wouldn’t bear the weight. And so the body of the bowl parted company from the handles and fell to the ground, breaking into pieces along the lines where the various fragments had originally been glued together to form the whole. The sound of shattering pottery ricocheted around the room and everyone froze. It later transpired that Giacomo Medici had paid close to $800,000 for the vase.
The Euphronios pieces were picked up and, gently, returned to the safe. Then the party again moved on into the inner room. This was no less astonishing, but in a different way. It was brimming, not with antiquities but with documentation. There were thousands of photographs (later estimates put it at about 4,000)—most of them Polaroids, others negatives, all pictures of antiquities, many of which had dirt on them. There were stacks of documents—invoices, consignment notes, condition reports, letters, and checks. The letterheads on some of the invoices and correspondence told their own story: Atlantis Antiquities, New York; Robin Symes Limited, London; Phoenix Ancient Art, S.A., Geneva; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.
It was clear that the outer room was where Medici received prospective buyers, and where objects for sale were displayed in secure and discreet circumstances. It was equally clear from the way the documentation was just scattered around the inner room that Medici had never expected anyone to come calling here—everything was just lying around, with no attempt at concealment.
Everything in the inner room was photographed as well—all the documents, the albums of photographs, the contents of drawers and cupboards, together with general views so that the authorities could be certain at a later date that nothing had been taken. The final move that day was to seal the outer door to Room 23. They locked the door, put police tape across the door frame, and fixed a large wax seal over the keyhole, with the Geneva magistrate’s embossed badge pressed into it. From now on Medici couldn’t get in, unless accompanied by someone from the Geneva court.
When Conforti heard about the contents of Corridor 17, even he was astonished. He loves to garden, and that evening, when the Carabinieri called him from the departure lounge of Geneva airport—it was after 8:00 PM—he was on his terrace watering his large array of exotic plants. “We had heard talk of the Freeport often enough—Freeport this, Freeport that, Freeport, Freeport, Freeport. But we had always thought of it as a place of transit and had never imagined whole warehouses—what a discovery. When I heard the news, in that moment I thought that perhaps—perhaps—the ball of twine would now be unraveled. In that moment, I felt that the work I had being doing since I took over the Art Squad in 1990 had come to fruition, had found a reason.”
But—and it was a big “but”—the objects were on Swiss soil. Medici, on the other hand, was an Italian citizen. Would the Swiss want it known that the Geneva Freeport was being used as a way station for valuable and culturally important objects that had been looted from Italy and passed on to the salesrooms, collectors, and museums in London, the United States, and elsewhere? On this first visit of the Italian authorities to the Freeport, Medici had not been present. What arguments would he use, what arguments couldhe use, to make it appear that the antiquities in his warehouses were legitimate? Would the Swiss, in the interests of a quiet life, just let the matter drop, or might they choose to believe the man who was bringing in business to Switzerland? These were not trivial or rhetorical questions—a good lawyer could have a field day.
Back in Italy, and as a result of what had been found in Geneva, an investigative public prosecutor, Dr. Paolo Giorgio Ferri, was appointed to pursue Medici and his Geneva operation. It was clear from what the investigators had found in Switzerland that Medici was the biggest “catch’” the Carabinieri had ever had, so far as looted antiquities were concerned. How close would they get to him?
Paolo Giorgio Ferri, forty-eight when the investigation began, is a small, precise man. Bearded, with a soft voice and a ready smile, he had a law degree from La Sapienza, Rome’s oldest university, and was a highflier in the public prosecutor’s office, having previously worked on heavyduty criminal cases—mostly murder and drug trafficking. But as he set to work, thinking how best to pursue Medici, there was another twist of fate in store for him. While the Carabinieri had been at the Freeport, another set of investigators had also been there at the same time. Their paths had never crossed, but that was about to change.