The Medici Conspiracy (46 page)

The case is also interesting because the phiale was eventually acquired by Robert Haber, an art dealer from New York and owner of Robert Haber & Company. Haber acquired the phiale on behalf of a client of his, Michael Steinhardt, a financier. Haber told Steinhardt that the phiale was a twin to a piece in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and charged Steinhardt $1.2 million. Steinhardt had the piece authenticated by scholars at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and thereafter the phiale was displayed in his home from 1992 until 1995.

It was seized after an inquiry by the Italian authorities—and here it gets
murky. The U.S. government claimed that the forfeiture was proper because the phiale was stolen property and because there were false statements on the customs forms—for example, it was valued at $250,000, when its real value was much higher. In the subsequent court case, the decision to seize the phiale was upheld, as it was on appeal, which was decided in July 1999. The gold platter was subsequently returned to Italy and is now on display in Palermo.

But how did the authorities first come by the information that led to this prosecution?

The episode is mentioned by Robert Hecht in his memoir: He considered the phiale a forgery, naming the Sicilian forger and some of his other fakes. Was it he who alerted the authorities, because he was jealous of Haber's links to a prosperous client such as Steinhardt? This is what Frida Tchacos told Ferri at her interrogation. Hecht's trial in Rome, which began in late 2005, may clarify this point.

In April 1997, two carved wall reliefs surfaced in London. Shlomo Moussaieff, of Grosvenor Square, London, had applied for permission to export one of these antiquities but was stopped by the government's official adviser, John Curtis at the British Museum. Curtis had spotted that the relief had been looted from Iraq—it belonged in the throne-room suite of the Sennacherib Palace in Nineveh, across the Tigris River from Mosul.
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The identification was made because of the work of Dr. John Russell, an archaeologist from Massachusetts College of Art, who excavated at Nineveh before the first Gulf war, as part of a University of California team, and took 900 photographs of the site.

Inquiries by Scotland Yard established that Mr. Moussif had bought looted antiquities from Nabil el Asfar, then based in Brussels. This is the same Asfar who had, allegedly, provided Robert Hecht with the Morgantina silver.
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Mr. Moussif had been told that the reliefs had been “in Switzerland for years.”

At the time, Dr. Russell made it known that some ten other looted reliefs had appeared on the market. Generally, he said, he was approached by a lawyer, claiming to act on behalf of a “prospective buyer.” In another case, however, involving yet another looted Iraqi relief, he had been approached by someone from the Metropolitan Museum in New York. He was able to establish that in this instance, the individual offering the relief to the museum—or who at least had provided a photograph of the proposed acquisition—was Robin Symes of London. This time the relief came from the palace of Tiglath-pileser III at Nimrud. (Tiglath-pileser III, 744–727 BC, was the real founder of the Assyrian empire.) This object was identified as loot by Richard Sobolewski, who led a Polish expedition to excavate Nimrud in 1975.

Only Mr. Moussif's objects were recovered. According to Sobolewski, the throne room in Tiglath-pileser's palace originally contained 100 stone slabs similar to those offered to the Met. Many of them are still missing.

In the late spring of 1998, Robert Guy chose not to renew his fellowship in classical archaeology at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. This brought to an end a curious set of events that was never fully explained.

In 1990, nearly a decade before, Claude Hankes-Drielsma had approached the college with a proposal that would fund, in perpetuity, a senior research fellowship in classical archaeology. Hankes-Drielsma has been a banker, a director of Robert Fleming, and chairman of the management committee of Price Waterhouse. In 1985, he masterminded the South African debt crisis; he was an adviser to the Iraqi government and did much to bring the Oil for Food scandal before the United Nations. He was one of those tasked with going through the Saddam Hussein documents after the fall of Baghdad. He is currently in charge of the appeal for the chapel at Windsor Castle (which was gutted by fire in the 1990s). An amateur antiquities collector, he is a member of the Getty Villa Council, a charity that benefits the Getty Museum's Antiquities Wing, and is himself an honorary fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he has dining rights.

His 1990 proposal to Corpus Christi College had just two conditions: The fellowship was to be called the Beazley-Ashmole Fellowship, and the first incumbent had to be Robert Guy.

This was highly unusual. The normal practice is for fellowships to be advertised; then scholars apply, and ideally, the best candidate is appointed. When, in discussions about the fellowship, it further emerged that it was to be funded, at least in part, by the antiquities trade and that one of the dealers involved was Robin Symes, the Corpus Christi Council turned down the proposal, on the grounds that it was “inappropriate” to accept funds from such a source.

Some time afterward, Hankes-Drielsma approached the college again. This time, he said he had an alternative source of funds. The name of the donor was revealed only to the president of Corpus, but the fellows were assured that the source had a history of philanthropic giving to universities and had no links to the antiquities trade. This time, the proposal received publicity within the archaeological profession. As a result, Corpus was inundated with letters from archaeologists all over the world, protesting its proposed course of action. Almost the entire archaeological “establishment” was against the proposal—including Sir John Boardman, the distinguished author of many books on Greek vases; Donna Kurtz, the curator in charge of the Beazley Archive in Oxford; Martin Robertson, an authority on classical vase painting and professor of classical archaeology at Oxford (and an old adversary of Hecht); and Dietrich von Bothmer himself. All felt that the college should not accept funds anonymously, whatever Hankes-Drielsma said ($1.2 million was believed to be on offer), all felt the name of the fellowship was wrong and tendentious—neither Beazley nor Ashmole had anything to do with Corpus—and all felt that the fellowship should be advertised in the normal way. Those who objected to the proposal also suspected that what had originally been envisaged had been a “tame” fellowship. Funded by the trade, with the “Beazley-Ashmole” name, this fellowship would always carry the risk that the incumbent would feel obliged to satisfy dealers' commercial needs and attribute their vases to major Greek vase painters. Though commercially valuable, such a practice would be an abuse of scholarship. One of the few people who wrote in support of Guy was Marion True, at the Getty.

A college committee was set up to make a recommendation about the fellowship. The committee, however, could not agree. The members
did
agree to changing the name to the Humfrey Payne Fellowship, after a brilliant
director of the British School in Athens, who had died young. Other than that, however, the divisions were fairly basic. In the end, a majority report was prepared, in favor of Guy's appointment, and a minority report was prepared by Robin Osborne, a noted classical archaeologist, who was against it. The governing body of the college then considered the issue and the whole matter was fully aired. The president of the college, Sir Keith Thomas, was in favor, and the proposal—with the name change—was eventually accepted.

Robert Guy was duly elected and served for the next seven years, as is normal, as a fellow of Corpus Christi. However, after seven years, when his renewal came up—a renewal that is usually automatic—he said he did not wish to stay, and the post was reoffered with no strings attached.

It was a curious episode, in some ways reminiscent of von Bothmer's treatment by the American Institute of Archaeology, when he failed to be elected to the board of trustees because of his actions in acquiring the Euphronios krater.
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Even Robin Osborne, who was against Guy's appointment, agrees that he is a brilliant connoisseur of vases. But the original involvement of the trade in the fellowship, the anonymous nature of the money, and with the Getty in the background—all this left a nasty taste.
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In 1998, the Harvard Museum system put on display a 1995 purchase of 182 fifth-century BC Greek vase fragments. James Cuno, the director of Harvard's art museums, argued that the pieces had probably been removed from Italy before 1971, the date at which Harvard's acquisitions code took effect, in the wake of the UNESCO convention. The Harvard code forbids the acquisition of material of questionable provenance. The fragments were bought on the advice of museum curator David Mitten from a New York dealer who had acquired them from Robert Guy, then at the University of Oxford.
Culture Without Context
, the newsletter of the University of Cambridge Illicit Antiquities Research Centre, disagreed with Cuno.

Referring to the fragments, the newsletter concluded that Guy “could only have obtained them after 1971.”

In the summer of 1999, Frida Tchacos-Nussberger acquired an ancient manuscript that had been circulating in Europe and North America for some time. The so-called Gospel of Judas—thirteen codices in a Coptic translation of the ancient Greek—dates from the second century AD and is a good example of early Christian literature that was excluded as heretical from what the church had preserved in its early Greek form. The codices were allegedly found buried in the desert sand at Muh Zafat al-Minya in Egypt and had first appeared on the market in the early 1980s, via Nikolas Koutoulakis, but, proving difficult to sell, vanished again. Their resurfacing in 1999 appears to have been another attempt at a sale, for Mrs. Tchacos offered them to the Beinecke Library of Yale University for $750,000. But again there was no sale, so the manuscript was taken into a specially created Swiss foundation, which is to oversee publication, after which the codices will be returned to the Coptic Museum in Cairo.