The Medici Conspiracy (51 page)

It is difficult to say who was more distraught, Christo's close-knit blood relatives, or Symes, his constant companion of more than thirty years. Even today, members of Christo's family have difficulty putting into words what they feel was the exact relationship between their favorite son and Symes. The dealer, for his part, says that “Christo loved me, for 32 years” but insists that despite living together since 1970, and widely accepted from Gstaad to Los Angeles as a social couple, referred to as “the Symeses,” theirs was
not
a homosexual liaison but a long-term Platonic friendship. At sixty-four, Symes is a stolid figure, with pale skin and silver
hair swept back off his forehead, with eyes that are magnified behind wire spectacles. Thirty years ago he suffered a double brain hemorrhage and his movements are deliberate: He doesn't rush things. Christo was six years his junior.

Symes acquired a lifestyle to match his success in the antiquities business. With Christo he had homes in London, New York, Athens, and Schinnoussa, a small island in the Cyclades, across the water from Naxos. The house in London, on Seymour Walk, on the fringes of Chelsea, boasted an underground swimming pool, decorated with classical statues, and an art deco room, filled with Eileen Gray furniture, valued, according to one estimate, at $20 million. Symes, who doesn't drive, was always chauffeured either in a silver Rolls Royce or a maroon Bentley. Their house on Schinnoussa had a studio for Robin to paint in, and a pastry kitchen for Christo, who liked to cook.

According to an interview Symes gave, the two men met in the 1960s when Christo visited Symes's shop, then on the King's Road, London, and offered him some antiquities. This contradicts what Symes said to Ferri, whom he told during interrogation that he had met Christo in a warehouse in Switzerland. Christo had a girlfriend and Symes was married, with two sons. After he was divorced, however, Symes lived in Christo's flat for a while and after that they became inseparable. Symes, with his full, baritone voice, clipped way of speaking, and tailored fawn suits, cut a more formal figure than the charismatic and handsome Christo, who was thinner, taller, and altogether more casual and relaxed. A man used to wealth (he comes from a shipowning family), who spoke six languages, Christo would think nothing of spending $100,000 on a Ferrari speedboat for his nephew, or buying him a Porsche for Christmas.

Following Symes's hemorrhage, he and Christo ran the antiquities business together. The older man found the objects, and the buyers, while the younger one organized the financial side (again, he told Ferri the exact opposite). It was a successful arrangement, and by the 1980s, they were following the calendar of the very rich: Gstaad in February; Bahamas in March; La Prairie, a spa-cum-clinic in Montreux in Switzerland, where they had their annual check-up, in the spring; London in June; Greece for the summer; New York for the sales in November. It was a near-perfect lifestyle.

Christo's family, the Papadimitrious, originated in Alexandria, Egypt,
and moved to mainland Greece in 1962. They say that following Christo's death they naturally assumed that since he and Symes were equal business partners, the assets would be divided at some point on a 50–50 basis. They are a close family, so much so that they all live side by side in the same street in the fashionable Psychikos suburb of Athens. In particular, Christo was close to his sister Despina (“Deppy”), who married Nicolas Papadimitriou in 1965. Christo and “Deppy,” they say, spoke to each other twice a day throughout their lives. With their experience and knowledge of shipping, they were adept at setting up offshore companies, registered in Panama, which help both ships and antiquities firms avoid paying tax. At times, they say, Despina personally guaranteed Christo and Robin's business to the tune of $17 million (shipping people talk only in dollars). In other words, the family—via Despina and Christo—was intimately involved in funding the antiquities business.

Once that summer of 1999 was over, which they all—Symes included—spent on Schinnoussa, grieving, Dimitri Papadimitriou (Christo's nephew, who was now leading the family business) told Symes that even though the business should be divided equally, Symes could keep the family's share and sell it off, over three to five years, after which time they would withdraw. Symes could live in the Seymour Walk property for the rest of his life and would always be welcome on Schinnoussa.

Privately, Symes didn't see it like that. Back in London, on his own now, he nursed the feeling that
he
had founded the business, that
he
had the “eye”—the ability to distinguish a fine object from a dud one—and that it was
he
who had found the customers who had produced the income that had caused the business to thrive. (This too was contradicted by what Symes told Ferri, that it was in fact Christo who had the “eye.”)

Then there were the things that go on in all businesses but are rarely talked about. The onshore business was called Robin Symes Limited, and Symes himself was the only shareholder. Officially, Christo was an employee but, says Symes, “This was a ruse, to divert the attention of the tax people.” In reality, Symes felt, “Christo and I were partners, not in the business sense, but in the husband and wife sense. While we were both alive, we shared equally in the assets and profits and debts of the company, but after death they all passed to the survivor, to me.” This flatly contradicted the Papadimitrious' view.

The first inkling that Dimitri Papadimitriou had that things were not
going according to plan—to his plan, anyway—did not come until May 2000, when he had a meeting at the Dorchester Hotel in London with Edmond Tavernier, Symes's Swiss lawyer, to discuss the partnership. At the lunch, Tavernier said that
if
there were a partnership between Symes and Christo, it was 70–30 in his client's favor. In a melodramatic gesture, he leaned across the table and, under Papadimitriou's nose, broke off a
grissino
, an Italian bread stick, in those proportions.

Not long after, in July 2000, Symes traveled to Athens for a commemoration service, twelve months after Christo's death. After it was over, Papadimitriou took Symes to one side and, ignoring Tavernier's outburst, reminded him that no inventory of the business had yet been prepared on which a 50–50 split could be based. At the same time, Papadimitriou handed Symes a letter from Christo's mother, Irini, pleading for her son's personal belongings to be returned. She was eighty-four, she said, and wanted to redistribute his things around the family before she died. These effects, though personal, were substantial. They included several Cartier watches made before World War II and valued at between $50,000 and $80,000 each, a Rolex made by hand in the 1950s, and a pair of Cartier cufflinks, also hand-made, inlaid with sapphires and baguette diamonds.

Although he didn't show it at the time, Symes was doubly affronted by these approaches. He had arrived to pay his respects to his former companion but instead he had, as he saw it, been ambushed and made to feel an outsider. The business was his, as were Christo's personal belongings. And in any case, Irini's demands were fanciful. “Christo didn't possess a shirt that
took
cufflinks,” he says with a shudder, as if the family should have known this.

But this exchange had a catalytic—and catastrophic—impact on subsequent events. In November 2000, Symes finally sent a briefcase containing Christo's personal effects from London to the Papadimitriou “compound” in Athens. When Deppy scanned the contents, she could scarcely believe her eyes. Far from containing Cartier and Rolex watches and hand-made cufflinks set with sapphires and diamonds, as she had expected, the briefcase contained: a plastic cigarette lighter, a half-burned candle, Christo's birth cross, a plastic Swatch, a box of playing cards, refills for his pens, a cushion with a teddy bear on it, a cheap camera, some photographs.

Now, was Symes being provocative at this point? Was he deliberately trying to tease or irritate the Papadimitrious because of the pressure he felt they were putting him under? Was he trying to rub in the fact that
he
, and not they, was Christo's rightful heir? Or did he genuinely believe that these were the personal effects they were expecting? Deppy was too upset to let her mother know that the briefcase had even arrived. But the “insulting” contents hardened Dimitri Papadimitriou's heart. He had already discussed the situation with a London lawyer, Ludovic de Walden, of Lane and Partners, whose offices are near the British Museum on Bloomsbury Square. De Walden is well known in the London art world. Among his clients is the Getty Museum in Britain.

Before Papadimitriou and de Walden could decide what action to take, the family received two more shocks. In early December 2000, Symes mounted an exhibition in New York in which 152 objects—mainly antiquities—were offered for sale with a collective value of $42 million. Second, when Papadimitriou visited Seymour Walk toward the end of January 2001 to pick up some chairs that were his, he found that the entire collection of Eileen Gray art deco furniture had disappeared. Thanks to the work of a private detective nimbly hired by de Walden, they soon found out that the Gray furniture had been sold the previous September, at the Paris Biennale, for—they were told—$20 million. Far from preparing an inventory, as the family was expecting, it now seemed that Symes was selling off many of the company's assets, for cash.

Symes saw it differently. As the survivor who had inherited the business, he felt he was entirely within his rights to mount whatever exhibitions he deemed necessary; and the New York show was held in Christo's honor, with a tribute printed in the catalog, written by Symes. “It was a public exhibition,” he says. “There was no question of me trying to sell things in a sneaky way—how could there be?” As far as the Eileen Gray collection was concerned, here is yet another flat contradiction. The family says they bought the furniture in the first place, but Symes says he did, and he produced a 1987 article in the
New York Times
that appears to support his claim. “In any case,” he says, “it didn't fetch $20 million, but $4 million, and I told Dimitri as much on the day I made the sale.” Dimitri Papadimitriou has no recollection of this conversation.

The deteriorating relations between the two sides collapsed completely
in February 2001 when Symes did something that no one who was “family,” in the Greek sense, would dream of doing.

Late on the morning of February 23, a Friday, the doorbell rang at Deppy's house on Diamantidou Avenue. When she went to the door, she was astonished to be served with court papers from the Athens Multi Member First Instance Court. While the family had dithered about taking Symes to court, he had got in first.
He
was suing
them
.

From their point of view, Symes's claims in his lawsuit were distressing and, yes, insulting. Far from accepting that Christo and he were partners, Symes now claimed that:

But Symes didn't stop there. Arguing that in their approaches and letters to him, Irini and Despina were interfering in his legitimate business interests, he called for them to be fined or imprisoned (for up to six months), or both, if they continued to interfere. He had inherited Christo's share of the business and that was that.

This was to seriously misread Dimitri Papadimitriou. He called de Walden in London. From now on, he said, it was war.

De Walden was ready. Just four days after Deppy received her court papers in Athens, he obtained an ex parte injunction in London to raid all Symes's premises and freeze his assets. The next day, Wednesday, February 28, 2001, at 11:30 in the morning, while Symes was in Geneva, solicitors acting under de Walden's leadership simultaneously broke into five of Symes's premises, changed the locks, and seized all documentation. As
part of the same injunction, Symes was now not allowed to trade without permission of the court and his bank accounts were also frozen.

As an aggressive and successful shipowner, Dimitri Papadimitriou relishes a good scrap, and in being rich, he was able to attack his opponent in ways less well-heeled litigants could only dream of. After their successful maneuver in freezing Symes's assets and bank accounts, the next move was to have Symes followed. This was wildly expensive (the legal costs in this case amounted in the end to around $16 million). But, for Papadimitriou, the money was well spent. Using an organization run from Brighton by an ex-Scotland Yard detective, Symes was followed in no fewer than six countries—Switzerland, Britain, Germany, Italy, the United States, and Japan. The effort engaged up to fifty people and at times involved highly unorthodox methods. When Symes attended a conference in Geneva, the men following him posed as police allegedly searching for illegal immigrants; on another occasion, they pretended to be firemen; in a third case, they searched his hotel room disguised as cleaning women.