Chasing Aphrodite (43 page)

Countless others helped us in ways large and small during our various trips across Europe looking for answers, and we thank them.

At the
Los Angeles Times,
we are indebted to our editor, Vernon Loeb, who pushed us to keep chasing Aphrodite when we thought we were done, as well as Dean Baquet, Marc Duvoisin, and Doug Frantz, who saw the potential of this story and championed our pursuit of it through trying times for the newspaper. We also thank Robin Fields and Louise Roug, who with Jason wrote the original articles about Barry Munitz's spending that started a three-year run of stories about the Getty. All but Marc have moved on from the
Times
but remain valued colleagues.

Our indefatigable early readers helped us understand where the manuscript resonated and where it fell flat, where we had failed to pick up threads and where we had unnecessarily buried the reader under mountains of facts. They were Sandy Tolan, a journalism professor and author of the best-selling book
The Lemon Tree;
an expert on the law who asked not to be identified but was both rigorous and thoughtful; and the husband-and-wife team of Paul Schnitt and Virginia Ellis, former
Sacramento Bee
business writer and former
Los Angeles Times
Sacramento bureau chief, respectively. Attorney Jonathan Kirsch, an accomplished author, helped craft our collaboration agreement, which, mercifully, was never invoked.

Finally, we salute our agent, Jay Mandel, at William Morris Endeavor Entertainment, and the excellent team at our publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt—editor in chief Andrea Schulz, who exhibited unflagging patience and optimism, as well as Lindsey Smith, Lisa Glover, Christina Morgan, and legal adviser David Eber. Our copy editor, Barbara Jatkola, was both patient and thorough. Any shortcomings of this book fall entirely on the shoulders of the authors.

O
F COURSE, NO
book would have been possible without the critical support and inspiration offered by our loved ones.

Jason thanks his wife, Anahi, whose love sustained this project for years, and Nicolas, whose birth marked its halfway point. Jason also thanks his grandfather, Dr. William C. Felch Sr., the family's first writer and a constant source of inspiration; his parents Will, Ginny, Carol, and Sue, and his sister, Kristin, who never stopped asking for updates; and Alfonso and Maria Carrillo, who were generous in so many ways.

Ralph thanks his father, Carl J. Frammolino, who inspired his career in journalism; his brother, Carl L. Frammolino, who is his best friend and was chief cheerleader during difficult moments of writing; his sisters, Janice and Kathy; and Julia Stenzel, who patiently let the creative process take precedent over plans for traveling through India. Finally, Ralph thanks the two most important people in the world to him, the ones who never stopped believing the book would come out—his daughters, Allyson and Anna. If this makes you proud, girls, it was worth it.

This book is the culmination of five years of reporting. Its origin was a series of investigative stories in the
Los Angeles Times
between 2005 and 2007. The articles revealed that the J. Paul Getty Museum had bought looted Greek and Roman antiquities from the black market while holding itself out as a model of reform. The series was a finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting and provoked an international debate about the role of American museums in the illicit antiquities trade.

Given the limitations of newspapers, much of the important context for the Getty scandal was never explored in those articles. Three decades of evolving legal standards were blurred by hindsight, and several important questions remained unanswered. How much did museum officials know about the objects they were buying? How could such intelligent and sophisticated people follow a path that led to this scandal? And why didn't they heed the warnings? For those reasons, we continued our research between 2007 and 2010. The result is this account, which reconstructs the Getty scandal, tracing the crisis from its roots in the 1970s to its recent resolution.

American museums have a public mission, but in many ways they are secretive institutions. They conduct their business in private, and even the most basic facts about each acquisition—where it came from and how much the buyer paid for it—are rarely revealed. As a result, the public has very little idea of how these institutions are run and what values guide them. This book pierces that secrecy and provides an unparalleled view inside one of America's leading museums.

The backbone of this account is a trove of thousands of pages of confidential Getty records provided by half a dozen key sources at various levels of the institution. They include a confidential institutional history of the Getty as narrated by two generations of its leaders; a complete list of art purchased by the museum from 1954 to 2004, with the price paid for each piece; the private correspondence and contemporaneous handwritten notes of several top Getty officials; museum files on the contested antiquities and suspect dealers; and records detailing several internal investigations conducted over the years by various teams of Getty lawyers. These records were provided by sources who risked their careers and reputations for the public's right to know the truth. This account would not have been possible without them.

We also tapped other archives, both public and personal. Court records in Rome provided a road map of the illicit trade, captured in hundreds of pages of sworn depositions of dealers, looters, and Getty staff; original Carabinieri case files detailed decades of looting investigations; and the 650-page sentencing document for Giacomo Medici laid out the results of the decadelong Itali an investigation. The personal archives of former Getty acting antiquities curator Arthur Houghton and the late Thomas Hoving, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, were also particularly useful.

In time, the Getty itself opened up and gave us limited access to its institutional archives. Although most reportorial gems had been carefully excised by the Getty's lawyers, the archives nevertheless provided an essential context to understand the Getty's origins and evolution, a central subplot of the story.

But documents are like shards of an ancient vase—some dull, some beautiful, all lacking context. To bring these records together, we conducted thousands of hours of interviews with more than three hundred people in the United States and Europe. They included virtually every central player in the drama (with the few key exceptions noted below). Some sat for hours and bared their souls; others answered reluctantly and only when presented with uncomfortable facts. Many requested anonymity, citing the ongoing criminal investigations into the events we describe. Before using information from anonymous sources, we carefully considered their motives and reliability.

The Getty generously made key staff members available for interviews, in particular former museum director Michael Brand, spokesman Ron Hartwig, and outside legal counsel Luis Li of Munger, Tolles & Olson of Los Angeles. Italian authorities also were generous with their time and records, in particular prosecutor Paolo Ferri; Judge Guglielmo Muntoni; Culture Ministry officials Maurizio Fiorilli and Giuseppe Proietti; investigators Maurizio Pellegrini and Daniela Rizzo; and Carabinieri art squad members Maximiliano Quagliarella, Angelo Ragusa, and Salvatore Morando. Antiquities dealers Giacomo Medici, Gianfranco Becchina, Frieda Tchakos, Robin Symes, and, in particular, Robert Hecht shared what they could about their exploits over the years.

Three key people were not available for interviews: J. Paul Getty, who died in 1976; Jiri Frel, the Getty's first antiquities curator, who died in Paris just as we were knocking on his door in Rome; and Marion True, the Getty's antiquities curator for two decades and a central character in the scandal.

Over five years of reporting, True declined more than a dozen interview requests, including several made through her attorneys in the United States and Italy. Shortly before our deadline, she agreed to participate in a written exchange for fact-checking purposes. She terminated the arrangement when the authors submitted a second round of questions. Nevertheless, her brief responses to our initial round of questions were helpful, and we thank her. Some of the gaps left by True's silence were bridged by the hundreds of pages of depositions and written statements she gave to Italian and Greek authorities; the single press interview she gave to a sympathetic writer for
The New Yorker;
her Getty correspondence and expense accounts; interviews with her friends and colleagues; and the lengthy investigations into her actions by the Getty, Italy, and Greece.

Throughout the book, direct quotes and internal thoughts are based on firsthand accounts or reconstructed from contemporaneous written documents. Otherwise, we paraphrased.

Before publication, the story's principal players were offered an opportunity to correct the record during verbal fact-checking sessions in which we detailed our conclusions. Some—including John Walsh and Debbie Gribbon—chose not to participate.

Where there were contradictions or diverging accounts, we have favored contemporaneous documents over fading memories. In most cases where a significant dispute persisted, a dissenting view is reflected in the notes that follow.

P
ROLOGUE

PAGE

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 more than one hundred:
Between 2005 and 2010, American museums returned a total of 102 objects to Italy and Greece: 20 to Italy from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, including the Euphronios krater and the Morgantina silvers; 13 to Italy from Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, including its iconic statue of Sabina; 43 to Italy and 4 to Greece from the J. Paul Getty Museum, including the Aphrodite and the gold funerary wreath; 8 to Italy from the Princeton University Art Museum; and 14 to Italy from the Cleveland Museum of Art. Hundreds more objects were returned during those years by European and Japanese museums, antiquities dealers, and private collectors.
more than half a billion:
Italian authorities gave an insurance value of $700 million to fifty-six returned objects displayed in an exhibit titled Nostoi: Returned Masterpieces, which did not yet include the Aphrodite and Euphronios krater.

[>]
 
an Egyptian papyrus:
The Abbott Papyrus at the British Museum.
"
In all Sicily":
Marcus Tullius Cicero,
Against Verres,
2.4.1, in
The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero,
translated by C. D. Yonge (George Bell & Sons, 1903).
Accessed via Perseus Digital Library,
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/
.

3 "
I saw successive":
George Gordon Byron,
The Poetical Works of Byron,
Cambridge edition (Houghton Mifflin, 1975).

[>]
"
The Age of Piracy":
Thomas Hoving,
Making the Mummies Dance: Inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art
(Simon & Schuster, 1993), 217.

1: T
HE
L
OST
B
RONZE

[>]
In the predawn light:
The discovery of the bronze statue and its subsequent journey are based on the authors' 2006 interviews with Igli Rosati, the last surviving crew member of the
Ferrucio Ferri;
Sebastiano Cuva, a friend of the boat's deceased captain, Romeo Pirani, and others in Fano; Italian investigative files; Italian court documents from trials of the alleged smugglers; a 2006 investigative report on the bronze by the law firm Munger, Tolles & Olson; and Thomas Hoving's 1979
20/20
report on the bronze (see chapter 4), a copy of which was provided by producer Peter Altschuler.
For details about the bronze, see Jiri Frel's monograph
The Getty Bronze
(Getty, 1978 and 1982) and Carol Mattusch's
The Victorious Youth
(Getty, 1997). Mattusch and other experts are uncertain of the Lysippus attribution. Heinz Herzer's restoration is based on interviews with Herzer and Artemis officials and on Getty conservation reports.

[>]
Getty was a shrunken:
The description of and biographical details about J. Paul Getty are from interviews with Stephen Garrett and Burton Fredericksen and from several biographies of Getty, especially Russell Miller's
House of Getty
(Henry Holt, 1985) and Robert Lenzner's
The Great Getty: The Life and Loves of J. Paul Getty—Richest Man in the World
(Crown, 1985).
be bore a passing resemblance:
Getty's friendship with Nixon became an issue when, in the midst of the Watergate hearings in September 1973, the billionaire suggested having Nixon officiate over the opening of the original Getty Museum. His adviser Norris Bramlett gently objected, noting, "Mr. Nixon is a very controversial person at this time. While I doubt that it actually will happen, it is possible that in four to six months he might be involved in impeachment proceedings." Getty Trust archives.
Adolf Hitler:
The authors obtained, through a Freedom of Information Act request, a declassified memo on Getty from the commander of the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover dated August 26, 1942. It shows that the U.S. government considered Getty a "potential subversive," noting several links between him and the Axis powers. Just weeks after Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Getty traveled to Berlin and attended a speech by Hitler, commenting in his diaries that he found the führer's ideas "worthy of consideration." That same year, Getty spoke admiringly of the Itali an dictator Benito Mussolini, writing in his diary that "Il Duce" was "the greatest son of Italy since Augustus" and had "done great things for Italy." In 1938, Getty purchased the Pierre Hotel in Manhattan and hired former employees of the Italian and German consulates to staff it. The hotel was known as a "hang-out for pro-Axis personalities and French collaborationists." In January 1941, Getty allegedly shipped a large amount of Mexican oil to Germany via Vladivostok. Later that year, Getty was rejected for a commission in the U.S. Navy because he was "suspected of being engaged in espionage." Despite those ties, the memo concludes, "It would appear, lacking other evidence, that Getty has been indiscreet in his choice of associates and naive in his interpretation of the political scene, rather than an avowed supporter of the Nazi or Fascist regimes."