The Looters (4 page)

What made this type of illicit trade so easy for criminals was having no recorded history of the piece. Since it wasn’t stolen from a place that had a record of it, like a museum or art gallery, prior to being dug up by the tomb robber, no one had seen the piece since its burial a couple thousand years ago.

Italy, of course, was one of those countries with so much “ancient history” that even excavations for new construction often uncovered ancient sites. Many other Mediterranean regions rich in undiscovered sites—especially Greece, Turkey, Egypt, and Israel and the Middle East in general—also fell victim to people who became aware of a potential site in their backyard or around the corner and sneaked out at night with a shovel. These tomb robbers inadvertently end up destroying priceless pieces as they probe with metal bars and dig with picks and shovels, cheating the entire nation out of their cultural heritage.

Some of these countries have thought of offering substantial rewards for discovering such sites but don’t because it would only start a gold rush stampede.

In the case of the controversy between the antiquities buyers and the Italian authorities, the claim was made that several Italians had come across the antiquity site and surreptitiously dug up the pieces. Years later, when their homes were raided, the police discovered photographs of the items. It was impossible for the tomb raiders to claim that they had acquired the pieces legitimately because they took the photographs with dirt still on the dug-up pieces….

I had questioned the provenance of the Hellenistic vase because of a bulletin I received that mentioned Turkish police had busted workers who had come across an antiquity site while digging an agricultural ditch in a rural area. Turkey was a rich source of antiquities because much of its coastline figured prominently in ancient Greek history. The men had confessed.
Wouldn’t we all to the Turkish police?
I thought.

The vase that Neal was auctioning fit the description in the bulletin. Of course, its provenance showed it had been in the collection of a German family for a hundred years.

Eric, in fact, had argued that we should bid on the vase. “It’s worth at least three million and it’ll sell for half that because of the questions.”

Neal told me that the reserve on it was $700,000.

A reserve was usually about 80 percent of the lowest estimate. The reserve was supersecret, known only to the seller and the auctioneer. Neal revealed the reserve amount during pillow talk. After sex, while he was still basking in the masculine glory of my faked orgasm, he liked to “talk shop,” boasting about how he could manipulate items being auctioned. I didn’t sleep with him for insider information. I sincerely liked Neal and his titillating conversations.

It went without saying that if I wanted to acquire a large number of pieces for a new museum, I had to grab what was offered. But being eager didn’t mean I would knowingly buy an antiquity that entered the market through the back door. With the word on the street that the piece was under investigation, you could bet that someone from the Turkish Department of Antiquities would come snooping around soon after the sale.

Besides, the vase didn’t fit our collection. If it had, I would have bid on it. It did have a provenance attached. And I wasn’t a police officer—my job wasn’t to investigate whether the provenance was a fraud. Not unless there was something about it that was inherently suspicious. When it came to provenances, if I had acquired pieces in the past from the dealer and a degree of trust existed, I usually took the dealer’s word that the paperwork was legit.

Neal had few bids for the Hellenistic vase even though it was a lovely piece. Not that anyone would know by his facial expression—auctioneers had to be good actors. And Neal knew how to work the audience. He was capable of making people give away more of their money than they had planned. When Neal didn’t meet his reserve price, he showed no fear. He just moved right along.

He had a high bid of $690,000 with the reserve at $700,000. There had only been three bids. The room was going cold and he needed an extra $10,000 to meet the seller’s reserve. With whispers that the piece had dirt on it, if he didn’t meet the reserve, Rutgers would sell it privately to avoid the public exposure and they would never see a commission off of it.

If the piece went by auction, the auction house earned both a “seller’s commission” and “buyer’s premium,” with the lion’s share coming from the buyer.

In other words, the house got money from both ends.

I did a quick calculation in my head as to what the auction house would earn if the piece sold for its $700,000 reserve: On that amount, the seller would pay a commission of $35,000 and the buyer would pay a “premium” to the auction house of about $100,000, for a total of $135,000 going to Rutgers.

At this point Neal had a choice: He could “buy-in” the vase—auctioning parlance for failing to sell an item—and return the vase to the seller because it didn’t meet the reserve. Or he could accept the $690,000 high bid. If he accepted that bid, Rutgers would have to pay the seller the $10,000 shortfall on meeting the reserve. But even after paying the shortfall to the seller, the auction house would make about $120,000 on the sale.

Having seen Neal in action many times, I knew exactly what he would do: take the high bid.

“It went cheap,” Eric said. “We could have bought it for a few dollars more.”

I just made a listening response.
Weasel.

My father had a piece of advice for me when I got my first job: When the boss is right, he’s right; when the boss is wrong, he’s right. I didn’t think much of the advice at the time, but since I’ve had to zip my lip to stupid statements from bosses over the years, I’ve realized it was sage advice.

I was saved from having to alibi to Hiram, falling on the sword to save Eric, by our lot coming up, the piece I was bidding on.

“What do you read with Hamad?” Hiram asked.

Ahmad ibn Hamad was a Saudi billionaire. I never really understood the source of his wealth, only that he was immensely wealthy. Someone told me ibn Hamad made his fortune selling bottled water, and that didn’t sound too far-fetched for a country that I imagined to be a desert floating on a sea of oil.

He wore sunglasses for the indoor evening auction, probably because he didn’t want other bidders reading his body language. He saw me looking at him and gave me a smile and nod. I returned his smile and nod, secretly wishing he’d drop dead. He’d come off on me once, at a gallery, intimating that I would find an evening in bed with him a trip to paradise. I told him to save it for his camels. It was a rude remark on my part, but he hadn’t approached me as a man interested in a woman but as a superior willing to share his loins with an underling for a short time.

I hate guys who think their cock is an amusement park and every woman who rides it is going to get the thrill of a roller coaster.

“He’s wearing sunglasses,” I whispered into the mike draped down from my ear. “He wouldn’t hide behind them if he didn’t plan to bluff. He’s interested, but I’ve heard he lost a bundle when the Russian government seized a chemical factory he owned. I don’t think he’s buying to collect. The piece has a connection to the Muslim world even if it predates Islam. I’m reasonably certain he plans to resell it to Saudi royalty at a profit.”

“What about the Getty?”

That was our other serious competition. The J. Paul Getty Museum was the most richly endowed cultural institution on the planet. All reaped from oil. They could write a check for anything they wanted.

“I believe ibn Hamad will stick longer than the Getty. Getty’s own preference runs toward Renaissance and Baroque paintings and French furniture. Their collection of Roman and Greek antiquities is smaller. Their interest in the Babylonian piece is for its rarity. They’d want to trade it off someday for pieces that enhance their main collections.”

As any good curator would do, I had had someone staked out in front of Rutgers with a camera to record people coming and going in order to track who was really serious… and really counted. Only the Saudi and the Getty would be serious bidders. Unless some dot-com billionaire with bushels of Internet IPO dollars made a call-in bid.

I had tried to get Neal to do a little pillow talk about who would be making telephone bids, but he had been more reticent than usual when we got together two days ago.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, Rutgers is pleased to offer you the next lot for bid.”

The attention in the room was intense. All eyes went to the mask that was brought in.

“Almost three thousand years old, the Mask of Semiramis is a great prize of Babylonian art. Just as the
Mona Lisa
defines the Renaissance painting and
Venus de Milo
defines the Hellenistic sculpture, this queen’s golden mask defines the ancient world of Babylon, when it was the richest and most powerful nation on earth.”

He looked at the audience and let the words sink in for a moment before he continued.

“Because of its value, we’ll start the bidding at ten million dollars and mark it up by increments of one million thereafter.”

The increment bidding was up to the auctioneer. Standard increments were usually 10 percent, but Neal could also change them if he saw the need. “Who will give me the opening bid?”

Two minutes and forty-eight seconds later, the bidding had reached $50 million. I had Hiram’s permission to push the envelope a littler further.

When Neal asked for a bid for $55 million, sure that this was a defining moment in my life I raised my paddle. There was a hush in the room. My heart was beating fast. I felt like the whole world was watching me.

“I have a bid of fifty-five million in the back. Do I have another bid?”

Neal’s eyes scanned the other two competitors in the room who had been placing bids. No more bids were signaled.

“Last chance… selling for fifty-five million dollars…”

Elated but calm, as the house was millions of dollars richer in auction fees, Neal slammed his gavel down on the podium and made it the final hammer price.

“Sold to paddle one-twenty for fifty-five million dollars.”

T
HE
C
RADLE OF
C
IVILIZATION

In archeological circles, Iraq is known as the “cradle of civilization,” with a record of culture going back more than 7,000 years. William R. Polk, the founder of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Chicago, says, “It was there, in what the Greeks called Mesopotamia, that life as we know it began: there people first began to speculate on philosophy and religion, developed concepts of international trade, made ideas of beauty into tangible forms, and above all developed the skill of writing.”

—Chalmers Johnson, “The Smash of Civilizations”

Chapter 4

Village of al-Jubab, Iraq, 1958

Abdullah ibn Hussein watched as his father argued with other men of the village. Abdullah was twelve years old. His name meant “Abdullah, son of Hussein,” and his father was the headman, the sheikh, of the village.

The small village was about fifty miles south of Baghdad, near the Euphrates River, a waterway that made possible some of the great empires of the ancient world. The ruins of Babylon, the queen city of Mesopotamia, a cradle of Western Civilization, lay nearby.

The people of the village had once been a nomadic tribe of Bedouins, and though some of the tribe still roamed with herds of goats and camels part of the year, most had settled permanently after the Turks were driven out after the First World War. They were proud of their Bedouin heritage and resented being labeled fellahs, a word describing small farmers and laborers.

Abdullah and his father were watering camels at the river when the men from their village approached. When he saw the five men, Abdullah’s father went to meet them but told him to stay at the water with the camels. As the headman, his father wore the loose-fitting outer cotton garment called a djellaba, while the other men wore long shirts and pants.

He heard his father say to the men, “Salaam aleikum.” Peace be with you. The men did not return the courtesy and show respect with a reply of, “Aleikum salaam.” Also with you.

Abdullah had never seen anyone in the village fail to show respect to his father. To show disrespect to the sheikh was a deadly insult to people brought up in a close-knit, socially rigid society.

Angry words and gestures that frightened Abdullah erupted almost immediately. He knew why the men had come: A week ago the men had “found” a treasure, a relic of ancient Babylon, the city called Atlal Babil in Arabic and Bab-ilim, the “Gate of God,” in Old Babylonian. In Hebrew, it was Babel—the city of the Tower.

The men had probed with an iron rod a mound near a section of wall at the ruins and felt something solid underneath. Digging down with pick and shovel, they uncovered a mask embedded in an ancient stone altar. Scratching the mask and seeing gold, they broke the surrounding altar to free the mask.

“Tomb robbers,” his father had called them. “In minutes, they destroyed an ancient altar and crushed underfoot vases and clay figurines that have survived wars and the wrath of the elements for three millenniums. All because of their stupidity.”

His father understood their motive.

The five were not professional tomb robbers but simple men who hungered for a better life. They and their families had little more than the clothes on their backs and a few possessions in their mud huts. Their only income came from picking dates from the trees near the river and herding communal goats and camels. The amount of money they would divide between them from a Baghdad antiques dealer buying the mask was small, no more than a month’s wages for a city worker. But to these men who had so little of material value, a few coins in their pockets were a fortune.

When Hussein took the mask from them and turned it over to the authorities, he made blood enemies of the men.

“They are destroying our history,” Hussein told his son after he had notified the National Museum of Antiquities of Baghdad of the find. “Our poverty does not entitle us to become thieves and destroy our history. The Iraqi people have a proud history going back thousands of years. We have been the crossroads of the great religions and cultures of half of the world.”