The Medici Conspiracy (53 page)

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Authors: Peter Watson

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beginning, which showed Xoilan to be selling scores of objects in the sales for which we had inside records. This picture was amplified in the documents and inventory we inspected in London.
2
One part of the inventory consisted of 105 pages of lists of objects, with approximately thirty-four items per page, a total of 3,570 artifacts. Xoilan Trader, which accounted for approximately 300 objects, made up nine pages of this list, but elsewhere there were pages and pages of objects dealt in by Xoilan through Sotheby's. There were also many dealings with Galerie Nefer (Frida Tchacos), and thirty-four numbered transactions with Giacomo Medici. Between 1979 and 1986, Robin Symes Limited, Symes's other company, conducted at least twenty-nine deals with Medici. The names Getty, Leon Levy, Kimball Museum in Texas, Naji Asfar, Koutoulakis, Savoca, Tempelsman, R. Guy, Orazio Di Simone, Sotheby's, and Christie's appeared throughout the inventory, in one context or another.
Symes's claims about Xoilan were also flatly contradicted by the copies of marked Sotheby's catalogs that James Hodges made available to us and by the documents found in Medici's warehouse. The fact is: When Symes said he didn't use Xoilan to trade under, he wasn't telling the truth. For Symes, as Justice Peter Smith discovered and observed, truth is a malleable commodity. Not one of the objects in the inventory we saw was listed with a provenance.
During the time we were going through the Symes/Michaelides archive, Peter Watson was working on the Greek television investigation referred to earlier (p. 245). The Greek journalists traveled to London and Cambridge to interview, and during their visit the conversation turned to the Symes/Michaelides partnership. Watson mentioned that he had seen several references to Michaelides' Greek family in the documentation, which did seem to suggest that the Papadimitriou family had a financial interest in the antiquities business. In particular, Watson said, there were six documents that he thought relevant.
The first was a handwritten memo by Symes, which began:
While I accept the help given by the family of the late C.M. [Christo Michaelides], both in funding many purchases and in guarantees for
bankers, nonetheless I must point out that the business which ran so successfully for many years is now virtually finished; [f]or the reason that international law prohibits the export of w/art [works of art] from most host countries and it is now not possible to fragrantly [flagrantly?] disregard them. Old coll[ectors']. material does not provide suff[icient]. Funds to cont[inue]. Also there have, unfortunately, been multiple problems arising [from] four pieces which have proved to be either stolen or illegally exported. These losses over the past two years have amounted to considerable sums and have been borne by RS [Robin Symes] Ltd. In many of these instances the family should share the cost and because of their involvement be prepared for further liabilities should they occur. Many pieces were consigned to RS Ltd for sale and the costs involved should therefore the [be?] applicable to the consignors. To date they amount to $7 million and Mrs. Despina Papadimitriou was involved in all of them. Also her sleeping partnership with the firm makes her liable to the J. Paul Getty Museum for the 8 m $ paid for the half share of the limestone figure of Aphrodite should a problem arise with Italian government, who have actively been seeking its return. It is therefore a possibility and a risk I am not prepared to shoulder alone.
This was interesting on a number of grounds. It dispelled—from the horse's mouth—the convenient fiction that “old collections” provide much of the material that suddenly appears on the market. It confirmed that Symes had a hand in supplying the Getty with the Aphrodite statue. But it was interesting most of all because it detailed the intimate involvement, the “sleeping partnership,” of the Papadimitriou family—Christo's sister, Despina, in particular—in financing transactions.
A separate note said that both Xoilan and SESA were owned by Christo's parents, through the fiduciary Henri Jacques. The note went on to say that Xoilan was established in the mid–1970s to receive the family's collection, and to do so confidentially.
This was as a result of unfortunate publicity surrounding one particular sale which had been made through Robin Symes Limited of an item to the British Rail Pension Fund. This had led to an investigation by Interpol. The piece in question had in fact belonged to Christo Michaelides's aunt.
These notes, it transpired, had been prepared in connection with two meetings Symes held with Britain's Inland Revenue in June 1991. During the interview, the tax inspectors asked: “How is the collection built up?” The reply was: “When RS/CM see an item, CM will tell his parents who will ask RS and/or CM to attend the auction. His parents will then instruct Henri Jacques to make arrangements. RSL will arrange for shipment.”
In March 2000, Nonna Investments, another of Symes' companies, negotiated a “rolling facility” with Citibank of $14 million, later increased to $17 million—the loan guaranteed by Despina Papadimitriou. There was a letter from the Getty agreeing to buy various objects but setting off these purchases against a Diadoumenos head—part of the Fleischman Collection—and a torso of Mithras, which were being returned to Italy. In October 1992, there was paperwork in connection with a Greek statue being sold to the Getty for $18 million.
How important was all this? Neither Nikolas Zirganos nor we could be certain. The Papadimitriou family were eager just then to prove that Symes and Michaelides were business partners, not in a “marriage,” and Christo's ready access to serious money—via his family—certainly seemed an important aspect of the running of their companies. That supported their argument in the London trial, but if Symes were the kind of dealer Ferri thought he was, wasn't this financial involvement by the Papadimitrious also incriminating of them?
We did not discuss it in any detail just then. Too much was going on elsewhere. Over a last lunch before Zirganos left for the airport—eaten near Symes' now-closed gallery in Mason's Yard, where we had been filming—Watson mentioned that the Symes archive, in addition to a roomful of documents, consisted of seventeen green binders showing photographs of antiquities. We didn't discuss that in any detail either. Not then.
On March 19, 2003, at a press conference, the Italian Ministry for Cultural Affairs announced that what was then the world's rarest and most important looted antiquity had been recovered by the Italian Carabinieri in London. The object, a unique life-size ivory figure, thought to be of Apollo, the Greek god of the sun, and perhaps dating from the fifth century BC, was valued at close to £30 million ($50 million) on the open market.
The ivory was of such a superb quality that Italian archaeologists who examined the head on its return believed at first that it might have been carved by Phidias, one of the greatest of classical Greek sculptors, whose carvings graced the Parthenon and the Temple of Zeus at Olympia. Pliny, Pausanias, and Lucian all sang Phidias's praises, but not a single work of his has survived. This discovery was therefore astounding to the worlds of archaeology, art history, museums, and classical scholarship.
The head was seized, partly with the help of the authors, from Robin Symes. Because relations between the Carabinieri and Scotland Yard were so poor, we served as a conduit for information between Ferri and Conforti, on the one hand, and Christo's family, and their attorneys in London, on the other, to help speed the negotiations. A fragment of a fresco, stolen from a villa near Pompeii, was also recovered at the same time. Besides the ivory head, which has its eyes, straight nose, and sensual lips intact, a series of fragments was also recovered—fingers, toes, an ear, some curls of hair. In antiquity, it was the practice for exceptionally important statues to have ivory heads, hands, and feet, with bodies of stone or wood, which were covered in gold sheets.
The ivory head and other fragments were originally discovered in 1995 by Pietro Casasanta, who showed the authors of this book the field where he says he discovered the statue, a few hundred yards from a well-known archaeological landmark, the Baths of Claudius. Casasanta told us that he believes the statue came from a large, luxurious villa that belonged to the family of the first-century Roman emperor Claudius. At the time he found the head and fragments, Casasanta also discovered three Egyptian statues of goddesses, two in green and one in black granite. He also had some pieces of mosaic, not necessarily from the same site. “This was obviously the residence of a very rich, very important family,” he said. Photographs of the three statues were found by the Carabinieri at Casasanta's home when he was raided. These statues are still missing, though Casasanta believes one is in London.
Casasanta told us that the minute he set eyes on the ivory head he knew it was the most important object he—or any other tombarolo—had ever found. Only one other life-size ivory head 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 head
and fragments, and the three statues, out of Italy himself and sold them to Nino Savoca. They agreed a fee of $10 million. Savoca, he says, showed the head to the experts or curators of two American museums, one of whom attributed it to Phidias, but neither of them was willing to risk buying such an obviously looted object. Following this, Savoca stopped paying him after $700,000, and they fell out.
Savoca died in 1998, and during a (second) raid on his premises, the Carabinieri discovered documentation that helped them close in on a number of important looted antiquities. Partly because Savoca had reneged on payment, and possibly calculating that the Carabinieri had him in their sights again, Casasanta volunteered to Conforti's men that Savoca had sold the ivory head to a London dealer, who, he told us, was “a homosexual whose partner died recently.” This was clearly Robin Symes. The Carabinieri already knew this, of course, from Frida Tchacos.
Professor Antonio Giuliano, of La Sapienza University, who has examined the statue, which is now at the Museo Nazionale Romano in Rome, provisionally dated the ivory to the fifth or fourth century BC. Later studies changed this: It is now dated to the first century BC—that is, 300-plus years after Phidias. Giuliano considers the main head to be of Apollo, but he thinks that the associated fragments are from a second, somewhat smaller statue, possibly Artemis or Atona (the toe, for example, is on a smaller scale than the head).
Should we need further confirmation, there can now be no doubt of the
importance
of the objects that the Medici-Tchacos-Symes cordata dealt in. The ivory head now has an entire room to itself in a major museum in Rome. Antiquities don't come more important than that.

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