The Medici Conspiracy (17 page)

Although Giacomo Medici was the main target of the public prosecutor, and despite the fact that the sheer quantity and quality of antiquities found in Geneva confirmed that he was indeed a major trafficker in the illicit trade, the Italian authorities knew that he was by no means the only important figure in the underground network. Many years of experience, Pasquale Camera's organigram found in Rome, and the Sotheby's documentation leaked by James Hodges all underlined that Medici was just one figure—albeit the most important—in a much larger network. From the start, therefore, Pellegrini was most concerned to sift the documents for other names, other powerful names, people who might link Medici with the international antiquities world: the great auction houses, dealers, galleries, collectors, and museums in Switzerland, Germany, Japan, Paris, London, and New York that as often as not seemed to turn a blind eye to the shady origins of this trade. Would the Medici documentation throw any light on this?

Spurred on by the evidence of the Vesuvian-Pompeian villa frescoes, Pellegrini's next move was to reexamine the documentation from London, reminding himself that Medici had consigned substantial amounts of unprovenanced antiquities to Sotheby's in London over many years; that other people, Christian Boursaud and then Serge Vilbert, had acted as “fronts” for Medici (although Medici was the beneficial owner of the antiquities,
his name never appeared in the documentation or written record; the closest he came was to use the term “Guido's,” Guido being his father's name). Pellegrini also recognized that Sotheby's personnel were aware of Medici's involvement and knew that he was the beneficial owner but that his name never appeared in their documentation and that he shared an administrative address in Geneva—7 Avenue Krieg—with another antiquities dealer, Robin Symes, who had earlier been shown to deal in both stolen and smuggled antiquities.

Pellegrini also discovered that the Hydra Gallery had discreetly morphed into Editions Services, not only because of unwelcome press coverage but because when Boursaud and Medici fell out over who owned what in Hydra, their argument led to a court case, held in 1986, over ownership of the Hydra Gallery, a court case that Medici won. The existence of the court case nicely confirmed Medici's interest in both Hydra and Editions Services.

Delving further into the documentation, Pellegrini found that the Hydra Gallery and Editions Services were not the only companies through which Medici consigned antiquities to Sotheby's. There were at least three others—Mat Securitas, Arts Franc, and Tecafin Fiduciaire, which each sold and bought unprovenanced antiquities at Sotheby's in London. Headed notepaper, consignment notes, and invoices for each of these companies were found among the folders seized in the Freeport warehouse.

Moving beyond Sotheby's, and Medici's Geneva-based companies, Pellegrini sifted another range of names, those of fellow dealers, well known in the antiquities world, all of whom seemed to have an especially close relationship with Medici. Besides Robin Symes and his Greek partner, Christo Michaelides, he found more names. Zurich-based dealers included Frederique (“Frida”) Tchacos-Nussberger, an Alexandrian Greek, and Fritz and Harry Bürki, a father-and-son team of restorers. Also in Zurich were Ali and Hischam Aboutaam, of Lebanese extraction; it appeared they also had a warehouse in the Geneva Freeport. Finally, there were two men in Paris: Nikolas Koutoulakis, a Cretan dealer; and Robert Hecht, who was the joint owner of Atlantis Antiquities in New York, with his partner there, Jonathan Rosen.

Two other groups of people were also highlighted as Pellegrini went through the seized paperwork. One was a group of collectors, or collectordealers,
whose collections it appeared Medici had helped to form. These names included the Hunt brothers—Nelson Bunker Hunt and William Herbert Hunt. In the 1970s, this colorful pair had attempted to corner the world's silver market. They had begun buying silver in 1973, when an ounce cost $1.95; by 1980 it had reached $54.00, when the Hunts and their colleagues owned 200 million ounces, equivalent to
half
the world's deliverable supply. Then the government intervened and by March that year the price was down to $10.80. The Hunts (and many others) went bankrupt, in their case to the tune of $2.5
billion
. Eight years later, in August 1988, they were convicted of conspiring to manipulate the world's silver market. During the 1980s, however, while awaiting trial, they had amassed a formidable collection of Greek and Roman coins and Greek and Roman vases. A second couple was Leon Levy and Shelby White, whose collection had been displayed in an exhibition called Glories of the Past at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, from September 1990 to January 1991. A third couple was Barbara and Lawrence Fleischman, whose collection had been displayed in the exhibition titled A Passion for Antiquities at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, in 1994–1995, and at Cleveland, in spring 1995. There was Maurice Tempelsman, a Belgian-born mining and minerals magnate, chairman of Lazare Kaplan, the largest cutter of diamonds in the world, who was a Visitor in the Department of Classics at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and best known as the companion of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, the twice-bereaved widow of President John F. Kennedy and Aristotle Onassis. And there was George Ortiz, a collector-dealer who lived in Geneva, an heir to the South American Patiñho tin fortune whose collection had been displayed at the Royal Academy in London in 1994 in an exhibition called In Pursuit of the Absolute. Finally, there was Eli Borowksy, a Pole, who had spent many years in Canada but by then had his own museum in Jerusalem, the Bible Lands Museum, filled with antiquities from the civilizations of the eastern Mediterranean. Pellegrini found it most interesting that this set of six names comprised the most valuable antiquities collections formed since World War II. If the documents were to be believed, Medici seemed to have had a hand in all of them.

Finally, Pellegrini came across a set of names that was the most surprising of all. This was a list of museum curators, as often as not professional
archaeologists or art historians, who appeared to have been in regular touch with Medici. Among this group were Dietrich von Bothmer, at the Metropolitan Museum in New York; Jiri Frel, Arthur Houghton, and Marion True, all of the Antiquities Department of the Getty Museum in Los Angeles; Robert Guy, of Princeton and Oxford; Fiorella Cottier-Angeli, an archaeologist and art expert who worked for Swiss customs in Geneva; and Professor Jacques Chamay, head of archaeology at the Geneva Museum.

Some of the documentation was relatively easy to follow. For example, although the vast majority of the material seized in Geneva concerned unprovenanced material—that is, antiquities for which there were no records because they were discovered by tombaroli in the ground, Medici was also involved with several straightforwardly stolen objects. These antiquities had been stolen from specific sites, such as churches, archaeological displays, museums, or even private collections. This, of course, is how the Carabinieri had targeted Medici in the first place.
^c
But, as Pellegrini was soon to find out, this was by no means an isolated instance. Among the masses of paperwork was a catalog, number thirteen in a series published by the Carabinieri Art Squad itself, showing objects that had been stolen from various locations in Italy. Medici's copy of the catalog had a bookmark in it, at a page reporting the theft of two Roman capitals (the decorated and carved top portions of stone columns) that had been stolen from the Villa Celimontana and from the archaeological site of Ostia Antica, the vast archaeological park covering the entire area of the ancient city of Ostia, Rome's onetime thriving port. The entry showed a photograph of one of the capitals.

Both the capitals were there, in the warehouse in Geneva, but—and this also incensed Pellegrini—they appeared to have been altered, by abrasion and other damage, in a crude attempt to disguise what they actually were. The bookmark, slipped in at the appropriate place, gave the game away and confirmed that Medici not only had stolen objects on his premises but that he must have known they were stolen.

In line with this was a folder marked “IFAR Reports,” inside which was a set of magazines called
Stolen Art Alert
, the publication of the International
Foundation for Art Research, a not-for-profit organization in New York. Each month,
Stolen Art Alert
publishes a list of photographs, a record of art that has been stolen. It is not unlike the Carabinieri list but covers thefts worldwide, not just in Italy. Medici not only had these records but some of the contents were marked with felt-tip highlighting. These included a second-century AD sarcophagus, stolen from the Villa Taverna in Frascati in 1987, and a second sarcophagus, undated but Roman, stolen in Rome in 1986. Pictures of both these objects were among Medici's Polaroids. He could not have been unaware that the objects he had were stolen.

Elsewhere, Pellegrini found a photograph of a marble head of Eirene, the Greek goddess of peace and wealth, on the back of which was written, in Italian, “Geneva 7/7/93—I hereby declare selling to Mr. Jacques Albert the object depicted in this photo exclusively owned by me and of legitimate provenance (‘
di legittima provenienza
'). In faith Luzzi Franco. Received Fr 120.” This marble head was stolen in 1993 from the archaeological site of Villa Adriana in Tivoli, Emperor Hadrian's haven near Rome, where he had a library and a theater and studied philosophy “in peace.” Franco Luzzi was a well-known art and antiquities dealer, who, as Pellegrini, Ferri, and Conforti all knew, had close ties to Medici (he featured in the organigram). In fact, by the time Pellegrini came across this photograph, with the writing on the back, the marble head had already been recovered and was back in Italy. But it was another testament to Medici's involvement.

These stolen objects were few in number compared to the unprovenanced antiquities that were Medici's main line of business, but they were important for what they revealed about his attitude and the world in which he moved. Tombaroli, and even Medici on occasions, in the proceedings against him, like to portray themselves as lovers of the arts, as “experts” or professional archaeologists in a sense, helping to “preserve” material that would otherwise be “lost” to history. How plausible is that when the same people knowingly trade in openly stolen artifacts, and deliberately damage them to disguise where they came from? Instead, their real motivation now stands out. They deal in antiquities for one reason and one reason only: the money it brings in.

Pellegrini's main contribution to Ferri's investigation was the way he used the documentation to throw light on what we might call the
strategic
organization of the antiquities underworld. Indeed, Pellegrini's discoveries in this realm are a major contribution to the history of both archaeology and criminology.

His first insight was his identification of the existence in the antiquities underworld of “triangulations.” A “triangulation” is a term originally used in arms dealing, when middlemen are trying to disguise who the ultimate “end-user” is for a particular set of weapons when general trading in them is, for one reason or another, forbidden. Or, more generally, when for political reasons one country tries to circumvent international sanctions. In this case, it is essentially a way of covering up who the real source of an unprovenanced antiquity is. “A,” the real source (Medici, for example), wants to sell to “C,” a museum or a collector. “C” does not wish to be seen buying from “A.” In this case, “A” passes the object to “B,” the “safe” intermediary (usually, but not always, a dealer in Switzerland), who then “sells” on to “C.” Of course, the intermediary is recompensed in some way for his or her role in the transaction, but the chief purpose of the triangulation is deception.

However, the practice is less obvious, and more deceptive, than the simple triangle, because Pellegrini identified a form of antiquities traffic that was quite unknown before, except to its practitioners, and revealed a new level of organization and cynicism that will prove shocking to many people. This is the practice known to insiders as “the sale of the orphans.” “Orphans” (or
“orfanelli,”
meaning little orphans) in this case refers to fragments of vases, in particular vases by well-known painters or potters, such as Euphronious, Exekias, or Onesimos. Fragments of their vases—small pieces of pottery—may be quite valuable in themselves, worth as much as several thousand dollars each.

When a vase by a well-known artist or potter is found in fragments, it is sometimes deliberately
kept
that way. The point of this tactic is that these fragments will be introduced on to the market one or two pieces at a time, over a number of years. The aim is twofold. In the first place, it is
to create, in the mind of a museum curator or a collector, a growing desire—a passion—to acquire or own a truly amazing work. By slowly building up the vase, the appetite of the collector or museum is whetted, and this is another area where triangulation comes into play. To prevent naive trustees from spotting what is actually happening, the fragments arrive in the museum over several years but also via several different routes: They may all start with person “A” and all end up with entity “C,” but they reach “C” via “D,” “E,” “F,” “G,” and so on. Trustees are expected to accept the (specious) argument that the subsequent fragments “turned up” in a later dig and this explains how they reached the market by different routes. In fact, the whole rigmarole is a setup.