Chasing Aphrodite (38 page)

Since Debbie Gribbon's disastrous trip to Rome in 2002, talks with the Culture Ministry had gone nowhere, leaving the Getty and its antiquities curator to struggle against Paolo Ferri in the crocodile jaws of the Italian criminal justice system. Brand concluded that the Getty had become too legalistic in its negotiations. This approach, focusing on technicalities and loopholes at the expense of the larger message, infuriated the Italians. Source countries were tired of being ripped off and belittled by museums in rich collecting countries that eagerly snapped up the fruits of illicit digs while deriding foreign officials as being stooges or corrupt. They wanted respect and control over their own cultural narratives, Brand saw. The fight over antiquities had become the perfect proxy war.

Before arriving at the Getty, Brand had had little or no experience with ancient Greek and Roman art. He had come to appreciate how looting devastated native artworks through his studies of Southeast Asian and Indian art. As director of Asian art at the National Museum of Australia, Brand had mounted a 1992 exhibit on the treasures of Angkor Wat, the twelfth-century Khmer temple complex in Cambodia that had been ravaged by plunder. Yet this introduction had done little to prepare him for what was awaiting him at the Getty. The Greeks and Italians were hopping mad, and the Getty seemed to be doing its best to egg them on.

Brand got a glimpse of this during a get-acquainted trip to Brentwood shortly before he was to take over as museum director. His meetings included a background briefing about the antiquities problem from Peter Erichsen. As the Getty general counsel went down the list of suspect artifacts and foreign claims against them, Brand shuffled through a pile of background documents, then stopped.

He was looking at a letter dated November 14, 2005, from Lazaros Kolonas, the Greek director general of antiquities and cultural heritage. The Greek official wanted to know why no one at the Getty had responded to a letter sent six months earlier demanding the return of the funerary wreath and three other objects, including a marble relief purchased by J. Paul Getty himself in 1955. As Brand looked through the file, it was clear to him that as far back as the mid-1990s, the Greeks had furnished evidence suggesting that the pieces had been looted. The last they had heard from anyone at the Getty was in 1998, when True had promised to forward the request to museum lawyers. Since then, nothing—not a peep.

Whoa, thought Brand. Not even a courtesy reply to the Greek director of antiquities? No wonder he thinks we're stonewalling.

By the time Brand sent off a reply in December 2005 suggesting that he and Kolonas speak face-to-face after the New Year, rapprochement was even more remote. Between Kolonas's letter and Brand's reply, the
Los Angeles Times
and Nikolas Zirganos, a crack investigative reporter at the Athens newspaper
Eleftherotypia,
had written several stories about the funerary wreath and Greece's failed diplomatic attempts to secure its return. Greek cultural officials looked hapless compared to their Italian counterparts. Thoroughly embarrassed, the Greeks had now abandoned their diplomacy and opened their own criminal investigation of the museum and its former curator.

In a late December reply to Brand, Kolonas claimed that Greece had been "deceived" by the Getty's smooth talk about protecting cultural heritage. "Indeed, Mr. Brand, what evidence do you have in order to persuade us that the Greek antiquities which we claim for years now, as well as dozens of others which presumably are kept in storerooms of the Getty Museum, are not products of clandestine activity in Greece?"

With two foreign courts now gearing up to take on the Getty, Brand decided that something had to change—something fundamental. And perhaps he was the perfect person to make that change. Unburdened by the sins of the Getty's past, the new museum director wanted to reopen the diplomatic and academic channels with foreign officials—to engage them as cultural colleagues, not courtroom foes.

His trip to Rome on the eve of the Getty Villa opening was the first test.

A
S THE WINDS
whipped Rome on a cold, wet day in early January, Brand entered the Ministry of Culture building from a side entrance to avoid a clutch of reporters lying in wait at the front door. He was accompanied by a small contingent of Getty representatives, including Luis Li, an MTO partner assigned to look into the antiquities claims.

While Brand was there to set a new tone, Li was on hand to gather information. A former assistant U.S. attorney, Li had cut his teeth on prosecuting racketeering rings and white supremacists. Now the lead attorney for the firm's delicate antiquities probe, Li played the conciliator, with an easy smile and breezy, loquacious style. His team—which included several associates, paralegals, and Getty curators—had carefully vetted each of the objects being demanded by the Italians and Greeks—examining museum files, translating Italian court records, and interviewing Getty experts, including Marion True, over two days in Rome. Li's task was to present to Getty trustees the most definitive report on the legal status of the objects and, once a decision had been made about what to return, help craft a deal.

Italy's Culture Ministry is housed in the old Collegio Romano, a sixteenth-century university where the Jesuit order was founded. Brand, Li, and the rest of the Getty team were ushered into the ministry's conference room—a large, two-story, dark-wood-paneled library with fluted wooden columns and a long, highly polished conference table in the middle. Waiting for the visitors was an array of Italian officials, many of whom had long memories of the Getty's missteps. Leading the group was Maurizio Fiorilli, a bespectacled senior government attorney with small blue eyes and the frazzled air of a mad genius. Even among the more demonstrative Italians, Fiorilli was known for launching into rambling, circuitous speeches and Chaplinesque pratfalls. But for all the snickering behind his back, Fiorilli commanded respect for his tireless defense of Italian cultural property.

True to his character, Fiorilli began the meeting with a long discourse on the criminal case, hinting at new indictments and expressing contempt for the Getty's fallen curator. "Marion True! The character of this woman!" he scoffed. Brand brushed aside the prosecutorial thrust, assuring his hosts that the Getty took Italy's patrimony claims seriously—seriously enough for him to miss the opening of the villa to attend this meeting. A cultural official then delivered a stone-faced soliloquy that portrayed the Getty as a rogue institution that had gorged on the fruits of looting ancient sites. The head of the Carabinieri art squad was deferential but made it clear that Italy still wanted the Getty Bronze.

Li pushed back gently, saying that his law firm had been hired to conduct an independent investigation of the patrimony claims. He was in Rome to get evidence from the Italians to further that investigation. After a break for lunch at La Fortuna, a favorite haunt of politicians and businessmen across from the Pantheon, the session ended with no new information exchanged. Brand and Li were then delivered to the culture minister himself, Buttiglione. A conservative Catholic whose campaign for European Union commissioner had been derailed by his opposition to abortion, Buttiglione was soft-spoken but equally self-righteous about the objects in question. As he puffed on a cigar, he sprinkled his comments with words such as "looted," "illegal," and "stolen," which set the jaws of the Getty's attorneys.

The Italians left their visitors to twist over the weekend before delivering any particulars. By then, Brand had departed, leaving Li in charge. On Monday, January 30, the Italians presented a three-hour, often chaotic slide show in a marble lecture hall, going over their evidence on each of the contested objects, which now numbered fifty-two. As the slide show continued into the next day, the Getty's lawyers saw scores of Polaroids seized from Giacomo Medici's warehouse. The images were clearly significant, some downright devastating. One showed the Getty's Apollo, now occupying the portico of the villa's basilica room, lying broken on a wooden packing crate, apparently fresh out of the ground. Getty vases were shown standing on someone's rug or kitchen table, or propped up against flocked wallpaper, presumably in a looter's house. For the first time, Getty representatives saw the Etruscan roof ornament that graced the cover of the Fleischman collection catalogue—broken, dirty, standing on a discarded pipe in some refuse yard, against the background of a broken chainlink fence. The worst pictures were of the griffins, lying dirty and broken on a crumpled Italian newspaper in the trunk of a car.

Besides the visceral impact of the photos, Li immediately recognized their legal import. He was impressed with archaeologist Daniela Rizzo, who made her presentation in measured, academic tones. "See that hole there?" she said, stopping at one slide of a piece of pottery now on display at the Getty Villa. "That was likely caused by a
spillo,
" one of the iron rods looters used to probe for ancient tombs.

Li convinced the Italians to give him a CD containing their dossier on the objects, his major objective for the trip. But the Italians weren't done. As the second day wound down, Giuseppe Proietti, of the Culture Ministry, insisted on issuing a joint press release saying that the ministry had presented "overwhelming evidence" that the Getty pieces were looted and that the museum was contrite.

"Signore Proietti, we're building a relationship here," Li pleaded.

"No," Proietti snapped, "we have to reach an agreement."

"Even in Italy you don't get married on the first date," Li replied.

Everyone laughed. They agreed to release a noncommittal statement calling the discussions "frank and productive."

It was going to be a rocky romance.

A
WEEK LATER,
the board of trustees gathered at the Getty Center over the weekend to hear MTO's report on Munitz. The report went into painstaking detail about Munitz's personal use of Getty funds. Even many of his allies on the board had been angered by his recent behavior, including his promise to give Jill Murphy a generous severance package without having secured the board's prior approval. By 9
P.M.
Sunday, it was clear that those who wanted Munitz gone had the votes. The board felt that it had uncovered enough evidence against Munitz that he could be convinced to forgo the generous severance deal he'd lobbied for over the past eight years. The trustees voted to give Munitz until Thursday to decide his own fate: quit or be fired.

In the end, the ax fell before that deadline arrived. As he had with True, Biggs felt it was his duty to deliver the message in person. This time, the board chair summoned the CEO to his room in a modest hotel near the Getty Center. The Getty had started booking trustees there as a public relations precaution since the Munitz spending scandal had hit.

Waiting with Biggs was fellow trustee Jay Wintrob, CEO of AIG Retirement Services and one of Munitz's most ardent supporters. Wintrob had stood by Munitz as the
Los Angeles Times
stories had pounded away, but he had changed his mind about the CEO after reading the MTO report. When Munitz showed up, the three sat in Biggs's hotel room as the chairman went over MTO's findings.

"Barry, the board has voted unanimously to get your resignation," Biggs said at the end.

Munitz was visibly upset. Wintrob nudged him and said, "Barry, the report was such that they didn't feel they had any choice."

Finally, Munitz agreed to resign. The conversation wasn't long. Munitz knew it was fruitless to hang on any longer. After the meeting, he and his attorneys negotiated the terms of his departure from the Getty, promising to return $250,000 for any inappropriate expenses and waiving more than $2 million in severance pay guaranteed by his contract. In exchange, the Getty would not hold him responsible for any legal liability the trust faced in the California attorney general's investigation.

T
HE GETTY WAS
not the only American museum making the pilgrimage to Rome. Met director Philippe de Montebello had long warned the Getty against capitulating to the "nationalistic" demands of Italy. But now, quietly, de Montebello had begun mounting his own rear-guard action to protect his museum from a similar fate.

Everything had begun to take its toll on de Montebello—shifting public opinion; the increasingly stern legal advice from the Met's general counsel; Ferri's growing interest in the museum and its former antiquities curator Dietrich von Bothmer. The final straw came from the
Los Angeles Times,
which in the fall of 2005 broke the news that the Italians had found confirmation of the illicit origins of the museum's famed Euphronios krater: Robert Hecht's handwritten memoir. It contained an account of how he had purchased the vase not from a Lebanese collector—the Met's thirty-year cover story—but from Giacomo Medici, whom Hecht described as having close ties to looters. Ferri was now threatening to do to the Met what he had already done to the Getty.

The Met had a strong self-interest in maintaining good relations with Italy, whose loans often helped the museum mount headline-grabbing blockbuster exhibitions. Indeed, in December 2005 the Met was preparing for an exhibit on Antonello da Messina, Sicily's renowned Renaissance painter. It was possible only because of the cooperation of Sicilian cultural officials and the Foundation for Italian Art and Culture, a New York—based nonprofit whose board members included Rocco Buttiglione. As preparations for the exhibit were being finalized, de Montebello sent a letter to Buttiglione requesting a meeting to discuss Italy's claims to the Euphronios krater and Morgantina silvers.

De Montebello had long demanded "incontrovertible evidence" of the claims. But after his general counsel pointed out that such a standard didn't even apply in capital murder cases, he sheepishly retreated from that demand. After the Italians presented their evidence regarding the krater, the silvers, and four other vases, de Montebello told Proietti, "I think we've got a deal." In return, he pressed the Italians to make long-term loans to the Met of antiquities of similar value and significance to the ones they would lose. The two sides were hammering out the agreement in January 2006, just as Brand and Li were beginning to engage the officials in Rome.