The Medici Conspiracy (32 page)

The fact was, the paperwork discovered in Geneva was beginning to work. The details revealed in the Freeport, plus the organigram, convinced the smaller fry at least that their interests lay in cooperating with Conforti and Ferri. The public prosecutor was encouraged. But he would be much more encouraged if he could find that memoir by Hecht that Savoca had mentioned to Guarini, and which had been referred to, so tantalizingly, in the phone taps. Did the memoir exist?

I
N THE NEXT PART of the investigation, Ferri relied initially on what are known in English as “letters rogatory.” These are, essentially, requests for help in investigations from the judicial authority in one country to the judicial authority in another country. They are cumbersome and unwieldy. A public prosecutor like Ferri will prepare the paperwork, showing the legal grounds and a prima facie case for the investigation, which is passed from the Italian Ministry of Justice to the ministry of justice in France or Britain or the United States. The ministry in the receiving country then passes on the written request to whatever judicial office or police force the proposed investigation might concern. Any reply goes via the same route in reverse. Such a rigmarole can and does take months. It is not unknown for answers to be more than a year in coming back. Often, there is no reply at all. It was a matter of considerable regret, on Ferri's part, that while he secured prompt and willing cooperation from the French, slower but still willing cooperation from the Swiss and Germans, and grudging cooperation from the Americans, the British and the Danes were totally unhelpful.

Fortunately, the man whom Conforti and Ferri were interested in above all others, Robert Hecht, now lived in Paris and the French police were more cooperative than most. Following the arrival of the material from Geneva in Rome at the end of June 2000, Ferri immediately issued a letter rogatory for a raid on Hecht's apartment in the Boulevard Latour Maubourg, in the Seventh Arrondissement of Paris, near the Invalides and Napoleon's tomb. Even though the French were totally cooperative, permission for the raid didn't come through for some months. The raid was finally scheduled for February 16, 2001.

Two of Conforti's most experienced men and four French police officers
took part. Hecht, they knew, had an apartment in New York. The Americans had already denied them permission to raid that address because, the Americans said, the information the Italians had about him was “not recent.” The fact that the Swiss had held on to the documents for so long was already taking its toll. Furthermore, technically the Paris apartment was in the name of Hecht's wife—in other words, it wasn't his. Fortunately for the Italians, the French were not as persnickety as the Americans. “In Paris, we had zero difficulty,” says Conforti.

Robert Hecht's family founded the Hecht chain of department stores and he grew up in Baltimore. Born in 1919, he attended Haverford College, outside Philadelphia. He learned Latin in high school, started Greek at college, and had begun graduate work in archaeology when he was called up in World War II. After serving in the navy, he spent a year at Zurich University working on a Ph.D., then won a two-year fellowship at the American Academy in Rome. In 1950, he turned from the academic life to dealing art and made his first sale, an Apulian vase of the fourth century BC, which he sold to the Metropolitan in New York. Balding, with a fringe of white hair, Hecht walks with a limp now, though he has never allowed an artificial hip to stop him from playing tennis, one of his passions. The others—besides antiquities—are his two daughters, claret, and backgammon. He is an inveterate gambler.

The Paris apartment was on the second floor. The senior French officer knocked on the door. Hecht's wife, Elisabeth, opened it. At first she tried to resist the incoming policemen. She said Hecht wasn't there and, moreover, that he did not live there, and hadn't for fifteen years. The police—both French and Italian—were expecting this (it was a familiar delaying tactic) and presented her with a simple ultimatum: Either she could let them in willingly, in which case they promised not to enter her own bedroom; or they could do it the hard way, break down the door if she barred them, when they would go through the entire apartment.

She let them in.

Inside, it was “[n]ot luxurious, but elegant,” says one of the men who was there. A spacious hallway featured an impressive chandelier, and the apartment had two bedrooms. The furniture was antique rather than modern. There was a study on the left, but Elisabeth led them to one of the bedrooms, which, she indicated, was Hecht's. The two Carabinieri in the
raiding party had often enjoyed a joke that in the movies, police searching an apartment always look first under the bed. In real life, no one ever hides anything under the bed. Well, on this occasion—at the very moment they entered the bedroom, they could see some white plastic shopping bags
wedged under the bed
. They placed them on top of the covers, and reached inside. The first things they took out were some ancient vases—Attic, Apulian, Corinthian—full of earth. Then they found a bronze helmet, and a bronze belt, both dusted in soil. Next they came across a number of vase fragments, in the same dirty condition.

The rest of the discoveries that day were mixed. There were several folders with photographs packed inside. One contained thirteen Polaroids, all marked with the same serial number. These showed an oinochoe with a wild boar, the base of a large vase, possibly Apulian, a bronze mirror with two warriors, a winged figure—and one showed a sculpture-antefix with two horses' heads. Polaroids of an identical object were found among Medici's documents in Geneva (which by now, of course, were in Rome).

Another file had fifteen color photographs showing female busts, “very dirty with earth,” according to the official report on the raid. They were ready to be cleaned and restored. Then there were photographs of the twenty red-figure Attic plates, the same as had been found in the safe at Geneva, and exactly the same set of photographs as Medici had, including the one with the tag on it that said “21 pieces 2,000.”
^m
These were in a folder with a copy of the letter that Hecht had sent to the Getty in which he informed the museum that he had the plates on consignment from Medici. A final folder of photographs showed twenty-three objects, each of which had been found in Medici's photograph albums seized in Geneva.

Among the letters was one dated April 18, 1991, from Felicity Nicholson, director of Sotheby's Antiquities Department, to Editions Services at 7 Avenue Krieg, Geneva. It included this paragraph: “We also have an Attic black-figure Panathenaic Amphora which Bob Hecht asked should be put in your name. This we intend to include in our July sale.” Sotheby's, or at least Felicity Nicholson, was perfectly aware of the Medici-Hecht cordata.

In a sense, however, these photographs and letters, though very useful
as corroboration, only confirmed what Ferri and Pellegrini already knew, that Medici was responsible for bringing illicit material out of Italy and that Hecht was the main conduit between him and the world's collectors and the great museums. And that members of the cordata traded antiquities in each other's name. In contrast, the other documentation found in Hecht's Paris apartment was much more interesting for the
fresh
light it threw on the world inhabited by him and Medici.

The most dismaying was a series of letters that General Conforti, writing in his capacity as head of the Carabinieri Art Squad, had sent to William Luers, the president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, about the Morgantina silver.
ⁿ
In his letter, dated November 15, 1996, Conforti referred to some letters rogatory that were being prepared in relation to the silver that, he said, had been “unlawfully excavated,” but he raised the possibility that the Met might want to return the treasure voluntarily “with adequate publicity.” Ashton Hawkins, executive vice president and counsel to the trustees, replied, saying that the museum “remained convinced of the facts as they were given at the time of the purchase.” Hawkins was polite but firm, and Conforti was rebuffed. One is prompted to ask
why
Hecht had been sent this correspondence. What interest did Hecht have in the Morgantina silver? According to the museum's official account, the silver pieces came from Turkey and were acquired legally, in Switzerland. What role had Hecht played in the museum's acquisitions of them? The suggestion that arises from this scenario, that the Metropolitan Museum in New York is in a closer, cozier relationship with the antiquities underworld than it is with the legitimate police authorities, is disappointing, to say the least.

The nature of Hecht's close relations with museums—and theirs with him—was further reinforced by two other documents found in Boulevard Latour Maubourg. These were notices, sent to two museums and signed by Conforti, that announced that the Carabinieri was putting on its Web site 500 images of archaeological objects that had been stolen or illegally excavated in Lazio, Puglia, Campania, and Sicily; in other words, these objects had been looted and Conforti was asking the museum directors to look out for them. What did the directors do? They sent the information to
Hecht. Why? Could it be they were warning him? Once again, it seems that some of the world's museums are on more intimate terms with the sources of illicit antiquities than they are with the legitimate police authorities. One of the museums was the archaeological museum in Geneva, the other had its name obscured with white-out. One of the Carabinieri lifted the page up to the light. Held in that way, the name of the second museum was clearly visible: the Archaeological Museum in Munich (the Antikensammlung). Why did the museum want its name covered up?

There was one other document of consequence that the Carabinieri came across that February day in Paris. Ever since the discovery of Pasquale Camera's organigram in 1995, the Italian authorities had realized that Hecht was the main figure, the top man at the head of the cordate that smuggled material out of Italy. But, more than that, during the subsequent investigations, discussed in the previous chapter, they had picked up from various sources the fact that many of the lesser figures were frightened of Hecht and intimidated by him. The main reason for this, as Ferri was told, was that Hecht had let it be known—among those he dealt with regularly—that he was writing a book about the antiquities underworld. Although Hecht never actually said so (he was too clever), the implication of this was that anyone who stepped out of line, anyone who crossed him, anyone who tried to bypass him, anyone who tried to usurp his role, anyone who tried to poach his contacts would be named in the book and exposed. It was never made clear whether Hecht would publish the book in his lifetime or, as some sources appeared to have been told, after his death, to provide funds for his wife to live on. Each time Ferri, Pellegrini, or any of Conforti's men heard about this “book” or “memoir,” the more intrigued they became. By the time they obtained permission to raid Hecht's flat, on that February day in 2001, it was the main thing they were looking for.

Naturally, the discovery of the letters and Polaroids at Boulevard Latour Maubourg provoked much discussion among the raiding party, especially the Italians. Besides discussing the decoration on the vases that had been found, they naturally referred to other, related documentation found in Geneva that fitted with what they were uncovering in Paris. At this point, however, one of Conforti's men noticed Elisabeth Hecht listening in on what they were saying. This was odd because when they had entered
the hallway to the apartment, at the beginning of the raid, she had spoken French to the French policemen and, in response to a direct question, had denied being able to speak Italian. Neither of the Carabinieri gave it a thought to begin with. But then one of them recalled that among Hecht's correspondence was a letter to his wife at Via di Villa Pepoli—she
had
lived in Italy. And so he gave her a fresh ultimatum. Either he and his colleague would step away and discuss their next moves out of earshot, or they could all speak Italian.

Mrs. Hecht—wrong-footed—now admitted that she understood Italian.

Eager to press their psychological advantage, Conforti's men immediately said they were less interested in dirty antiquities than in the memoir that they had heard on the underworld grapevine that Hecht was writing.

Elisabeth Hecht stiffened but said that she knew of no memoir. Her slight hesitation was picked up on by Conforti's men.

The French policeman leading the raid also noticed. “Right,” he said, adopting the Italians' tactics, “either you lead us straight to the memoir, or we turn over the whole apartment.” He made it clear that there would be serious disruption to Mrs. Hecht's routine and that her own bedroom would no longer be off-limits.