The Medici Conspiracy (31 page)

Then there were a number of tombaroli whom Ferri interrogated as part of Operation Geryon. On occasion, their information—backed up by phone taps—confirmed the emerging picture of the organization of the cordate. One was Walter Guarini, interrogated several times in March 1999. Guarini was a tombarolo from Puglia who had stepped up the ladder and become an important middleman-dealer in his own right. The Carabinieri had had their eyes on him for some time, and Guarini, no fool, had several times given them tip-offs and information when—of course—these didn't directly jeopardize his own activity. Guarini confirmed that Hecht has “always been Number One in the world, for many years.” Here is the next exchange:

Guarini also set down the names of those in the various cordate, specifying who was linked to whom. He listed a raft of tombaroli names from Puglia, Sicily, Campania, and Lazio who supplied Savoca, including [Vincenzo] Cammarata; he listed the people in Naples and Rome who supplied Frida Tchacos, including Pasquale Camera; he said that “Frida's contacts abroad are [Michael] Steinhardt [a New York dealer], Leon Levy, Jiri Frel, and Marion True.”

Then came this next exchange. It appears that during Ferri's discussions with Guarini about Robert Hecht, Guarini happened to mention a
memoria
(memoir) that Hecht was writing. (Remember that this interrogation took place in 1999.)

Ferri leaped on this reference because in their phone taps, the Carabinieri had more than once heard mention of a
“memoria,”
yet hadn't been able to make sense of what they heard. Was it something written? A tape? And what was its purpose?

Another tombarolo was Pietro Casasanta. Among tomb robbers in Italy, Casasanta is notorious. A rough, portly chain-smoker in his late sixties who lives in Anguillara, north of Rome near the shores of Lake Bracciano, he began digging in 1960 and told us that he has discovered “about a hundred villas” (he does not, he says, “plunder tombs”). He is notorious for making three extraordinary discoveries. In 1970, he found L'Inviolata, a large settlement, a temple cult that he says contained sixty-three statues, twenty-five of them life-size. Many of these, he says, he sold to Robin
Symes. He returned to L'Inviolata in 1992 and discovered the famous Capitoline Triad, a six-ton marble statue of three seated gods—Jupiter, with a sheaf of lightning in one hand and an eagle at his feet, Juno, with a scepter and a peacock, and Minerva, with a shaft and an owl. Made of Lunense marble, this sculpture is unique, the only example depicting this triad that is intact. After a two-year Operation Juno, the piece was recovered by the Carabinieri and is now displayed in the Palestrina National Archaeological Museum in Palestrina, a town southwest of Rome (L'Inviolata is in Palestrina municipal district). Casasanta was jailed for twelve months. Then, in 1995—that is, within a year of his release from prison—he discovered an ivory head of Apollo, dating from the fifth century BC, and three Egyptian statues of goddesses, two in green granite and one in black. He found these, he says, in a field not far from a well-known archaeological landmark, the Baths of Claudius, and he believes he discovered a luxurious villa that belonged to the family of the first-century Roman emperor Claudius.

The ivory mask in particular was very valuable. Ivory sculptures, even in antiquity, were extremely rare. They were known as Chryselephantine sculptures, after the Greek for gold and ivory. (Great sculptures—such as the Athena Parthenos in the Acropolis in Athens, had their head, hands, and feet made of ivory, and their wooden or stone bodies covered in gold leaf.) Ivory was so expensive in antiquity that only emperors and other important figures could afford such statues. They were so rare that only one other life-size figure is known to have survived in Italy, found at Montecalvo (again, near Rome) and now in the Apostolic Library in the Vatican. And only one set of life-size Chryselephantine sculptures survives in Greece.

Casasanta smuggled the ivory and the three statues out of Italy himself and sold them to Nino Savoca. They agreed on a fee of $10 million.

Casasanta admitted to knowing Medici, having met him once in the “antiquities warehouse” (as he put it) of Franco Luzzi in Ladispoli. (Luzzi, it will be recalled, was mentioned in the organigram, where his area of influence is given as Ladispoli, on the coast north of Rome.) Casasanta said he had never done business with Medici—he didn't like to deal with “Roman” dealers—but he had always known his name “because in their world he is a well-known figure.” He said that he had on a couple of occasions
met Robert Hecht in Basel but that he'd not had “work” dealings with him, nor with Gianfranco Becchina. He had instead concluded a few “deals” with Ali Aboutaam abroad, for which he had “undergone penal procedures.” Casasanta's problem was that the market “relative to his activity” was dominated by groups (the “cordate”), so he couldn't even approach “certain milieus.” Casasanta, whose interrogation overlapped with Guarini's, was the first person to use the word “cordata,” and he indicated that, for him, there were three groups, not two—one out of Italy via Savoca in Munich, one via Becchina in Basel, and one via Medici in Geneva. In his milieu, he said, “it was commonly believed by all that Medici was ‘
il boss dei boss
' [the boss of bosses],” even though he, Casasanta, had no knowledge of specific facts. Casasanta believed that it had been Medici who had gotten him into trouble, putting the Carabinieri on to him when he had found the Capitoline Triad (and had left Medici out of the deal). Casasanta said it was rumored that “Medici was at the head of traffickings, a ‘general' both in Italy and abroad, in London just as in Basel and Cerveteri.” (He meant Geneva, not Basel; it was all the same to him—Switzerland.) In particular, Franco Gangi, to whom Casasanta had sold the objects he dug up for fifteen years—from the end of the 1960s to the end of the 1980s—had told him that when he came into Etruria, “he would find ‘Giacomino' Medici, because everything in Etruria went through Medici and one could not ‘work' because Medici would always take everything and controlled the market through his many contacts and relations in the area.”

Casasanta gave an interesting account of Medici's early years—how, for example, his parents had a stall at the Fontanella Borghese, where they sold small objects. For many years, Casasanta said, Medici had a man, Ermenegildo Foroni, known as “Scotchwhisky,” who acted as his shipper and sold goods abroad for him. This name, Ermenegildo Foroni, was of course one of the names on Pasquale Camera's organigram. (Casasanta didn't know about the organigram at the time of his interrogation.) It was common practice, he said, to use Swiss shippers to temporarily store objects on their way abroad. He confirmed that Pasquale Camera would organize thefts from museums and churches and that he had a close relationship with Nino Savoca in Munich—he was part of that cordata. To quote the official record of the interrogation, “Right back at the time when Camera was a lieutenant of the Finanza [Guardia di Finanza], Savoca
and his wife would come to Etruria and would sleep at Casasanta's house because they didn't want to go to hotels [where they would have to register, showing their passports], thus avoiding being noticed and leaving their names around; then they [Casasanta and Savoca] would go together with Lello Camera [Lello is a nickname for Pasquale]—it was the early sixties—to get frescoes in Paestum.”

Broadening out, Casasanta said that the Euphronios krater had been found by a certain Renato, whose nickname was “Roscio.” He had been identified but had died. “Franco Gangi used to say he had given 180 million [lire, or $150,000] to Giacomo Medici to buy the Euphronios krater and Medici had ‘nicked' the money and had sold the vase to others.” Through Nino Savoca, Casasanta had met a “lady, about 35—40 years old in 1995,” introduced as the deputy director of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, who had come to see a Roman head at Casasanta's home; afterward Nino Savoca had bought the head “following the indications of the woman.” In 1970, he had made a fabulous find, much more important than the Capitoline Triad; he had found over sixty sculptures. He had sold them for not very much to Roman dealers, and the greater part of these had later been bought by Robin Symes and Christo Michaelides. In the autumn of 1970, they came to Rome and often bought objects excavated by Casasanta.

Mario Bruno, he said, was a friend of his, a dealer who operated in Etruria and Puglia, where everybody worked, and he would sell the archaeological material abroad. “He lived in Lugano where he had a villa on the lake. He knew Giacomo Medici and Bruno used to speak badly of him since they were competitors in trafficking archaeological material from Italy, both busy trying to buy the best objects that came to light.” He (Casasanta) had given the Triad to Bruno. Becchina had a fabulous gallery in Basel. It was some years since he had retired to his villa in Sicily, though he had been very active for fifteen or twenty years before. “Becchina used to buy archaeological material principally in Sicily where he had some good suppliers who had also got him some valuable pieces. In Etruria he used to buy from tombaroli who would bring him the merchandise to Basel. Becchina, from being absolutely nothing, from being an emigrant with a small suitcase, had gone to Switzerland, had in some way begun his work in Basel and had become a multimillionaire. Becchina bought himself
a large estate in his hometown, he bought a baronial palazzo where he lives alone with four to five servants. . . .” Casasanta knew Frida Tchacos well. He'd also sold her a small head in Zurich in 1990–1993. “Tchacos was powerful and tied to the Symeses and had noteworthy means at her disposal.”