The Medici Conspiracy (58 page)

True bought her Greek vacation home in 1995, on the island of Paros. She had trouble financing the purchase because American banks wouldn't lend money on Greek property and Greek banks refused to give loans to foreigners. Christo Michaelides stepped in and introduced her to a lawyer who arranged a loan through an entity called Sea Star Corporation and deposited the funds in a Swiss bank. True repaid the loan a year later. Her attorney said, “To Ms. True's knowledge, neither Mr. Symes nor any member of the Michaelides family was involved in obtaining the loan for her, save Mr. Michaelides' introduction to Mr. Peppas [the lawyer].”

Three weeks later, the
Los Angeles Times
reported that Marion True had received a
second
loan, of $400,000, this time from Barbara and Lawrence Fleischman, which she had used to repay the first one. Furthermore, the loan was made on July 17, 1996, only three days after the Getty had agreed to acquire the Fleischman Collection. True was charged 8.25 percent interest by the Fleischmans, though the loan was unsecured. The special committee set up by the Getty to examine the affair discovered that neither Fleischman nor True had disclosed the loan in annual conflict-of-interest statements. At the time, Barbara Fleischman said she had no intention of leaving the board of the Getty. Speaking of her late husband's action, she said, “The reason he didn't hide the loan was because it was an honorable loan to a friend, with interest. There's nothing sneaky about this.” She added that True had played no part in the financial negotiations over the Getty's acquisition of the Fleischman Collection.

During our research on the fall of Robin Symes, Dimitri Papadimitriou told us that Christo, his uncle, lent Marion True the money to buy her house on Paros. Christo had, he said, advanced her $360,000, plus $40,000 for legal fees and stamp duty and a Panamanian company had been set up for the purpose by a Mr. Peppas, who had been the family's lawyer until they fell out “in '96–'97.” The Panamanian company made the loan to
Mrs. True, he said, but the money was “disguised,” meaning that it came from Christo but was made to look as if it came from elsewhere. In the same way, he said, Christo had “bought” Felicity Nicholson's house on the Fulham Road in London.
¹
Felicity Nicholson, it will be remembered, was the head of Sotheby's Antiquities Department.
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Robin Symes told us that
he
had helped her pay for her house—which cost £20,000—by buying the studio in her garden for £18,000.
²
The whole setup between Christo Michaelides, Robin Symes, Felicity Nicholson, and Marion True was very cozy. Our attempts to reach Felicity Nicholson were rebuffed.

As the trial date got closer, the relationships among the various parties became strained and difficult. At one stage, Richard Martin, the Getty's lawyer, went so far as to argue to Daniel Goodman, the U.S. attorney, that Dr. Ferri had conducted his inquiry improperly. He was referring to “the efforts of the Italian prosecutor to force the Getty to de-accession from its collection a number of antiquities and send them back to Italy in order to avoid having the Curator of Antiquities be prosecuted.... As we have explained, the prosecutor has repeatedly used his criminal power to exert pressure on the Getty to accept a civil resolution.” As in the United States, Martin said, “police and prosecutors in Italy are not permitted to use the threat of a criminal prosecution to pressure a party to reach a civil agreement.” He thought there had been a breach of ethical standards and that in theory the only redress would be to initiate a criminal proceeding “in this case against Dr. Ferri.” Practically speaking, though, he thought that would be futile.

At the same time, Paolo Ferri's disenchantment with Marion True had grown steadily since he heard Frida Tchacos's evidence in Limassol, when she said that the Fleischman Collection was more or less a “front” for the museum, by means of which it could still collect objects while at the same time saying that it would only acquire antiquities with a “provenance.” The status of the Fleischman Collection will constitute the most dramatic focus of the evidence against Dr. True.

Back in 1994, when his Renault overturned near Cassino and Pasquale Camera was killed, a number of photographs of antiquities were found in the car's glove compartment. These included a picture of a vase by Asteas, one of the most important artists of Paestum in southern Italy in the fourth century BC.

The principal figure in a large workshop and one of only two southern Italian painters to sign his work, Asteas may have invented the freestanding half-palmette motif as a frame to an image. He liked myth and theatrical scenes, often explaining his compositions by means of inscriptions, and he had a biting sense of humor—for example, he delighted in showing the gods behaving in far from heroic ways. The lekythos shown in the photograph in the Renault's glove compartment was very important.

It took a while to locate the vase—because the discoveries in Medici's warehouse in the Geneva Freeport consumed most of the energies of Conforti and Ferri—but eventually, sometime in 1998, Pellegrini discovered that the Asteas lekythos was in the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Ferri immediately wrote to the Getty, asking who had sold the museum the vase. This time, the supplier wasn't Medici but his arch-rival, Gianfranco Becchina, of Basel.

By then, of course, Camera's organigram had been discovered in Danilo Zicchi's apartment, showing that Medici and Becchina were the most important Italians in the whole underground network.
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The fact that a photograph of the Asteas vase was found in the glove compartment of Camera's wrecked car, with the real thing in the Getty, gave Ferri sufficient reason to target Becchina's Basel premises—his gallery, Antike Kunst Palladion, and a warehouse in the city's Freeport—the way he had targeted Medici's warehouses in Geneva. A rogatory letter was sent to the Swiss authorities.

While he was awaiting their reply, background checks on Becchina by the Carabinieri established that in the mid-1990s, he had moved back to Castelvetrano. Becchina is Sicilian. Now in his mid-sixties, he was born and grew up in Castelvetrano. Situated in the west of the island, inland from the port of Marsala, Castelvetrano is a small town but figures large in Sicily's criminal history. It was here that the body of Salvatore Giuliano—the legendary “bandit”—was left in 1950. His killing was a mystery. Officially, he was shot by the Carabinieri, attempting to escape. However, Giuliano was well informed and this may be the reason he was killed—he knew too much. And Castelvetrano is very near the wine-growing Belice Valley, scene of a massive earthquake in 1968, which became the subject of a major scandal when the local Mafia creamed off so much of the rescue money that was raised to help the victims that, twenty years afterward, thousands of people were still living in shacks. Castelvetrano is Cosa Nostra country.

The reality of life in Sicily is that the illicit excavation of potentially valuable antiquities cannot take place without at least the tacit permission of organized crime. This does not, of course, mean that Becchina was or is a member of the Mafia, only that any goods he received from Sicily would, in the nature of things, have come with Cosa Nostra's blessing.

Becchina appears to have moved back to Castelvetrano for two reasons. One was that he was also involved in the building materials business—he had two companies, one in Greece called Heracles Cement and one in Sicily called Atlas Cement. These companies provided building materials for the Athens subway, then under construction. The second reason for Becchina's move was the raid on Medici, which suggested to him that Switzerland was no longer the safe haven it had been.

But though Becchina had transferred back to Sicily, his wife hadn't. Becchina's wife is German. Her full name is Ursula Juraschek, but she is known as “Rosie.” She remained in Basel, and her telephone calls with her husband were monitored by the Carabinieri. In fact, for eight months solid, says Ferri, he tapped all calls in and out of Becchina's Castelvetrano home. These showed that Rosie visited Sicily frequently but that Becchina—a prudent man—visited Basel only two or three times a year. All the same, the content of the phone taps confirmed that he still maintained close control over his antiquities business in Basle.

The phone taps also proved useful for what they revealed about the
Becchinas' business practices, in particular that they had more than one set of premises. And so, this time, when permission to raid the Freeport warehouse finally came through from the Swiss, and bearing in mind Ludovic de Walden's experience with Symes, rather than carry out the raid immediately, Conforti and Ferri decided to have Rosie Becchina followed.

Sure enough, she led them to two other warehouses, one inside Basel Freeport and one outside. She was observed coming and going freely in and out of these warehouses, but it also attracted the interest of both the Italian Carabinieri and the Swiss police that these other warehouses were registered not in the Becchinas' name, but in that of a well-known Mafioso.

In May 2002, the raids took place. Between the three warehouses, the raiding party discovered approximately 5,000 objects, many broken in pieces, many still dirty with soil on them, many restored. Becchina had fewer photographs than Medici, but he still had a great many, about 30 percent of which were Polaroids.

The documents found showed that one of Becchina's main suppliers was Raffaele Monticelli—another name from the organigram, a man who was convicted of trafficking in illicit antiquities in July of that very year, 2002, and sentenced to four years in prison.
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Becchina had four entire folders devoted to his dealings with Monticelli, each containing long lists of objects and many Polaroids.

One interesting difference between Becchina and Medici lay in the quality of the items in the Basel warehouses. Later on, Ferri sent a small team of experts to examine the material in Basel, just as he had done in Geneva. This time it was two archaeologists and Maurizio Pellegrini, as document expert. They produced a two-volume report, physically matching on each page the photographs to the documentation, and linking them to specific sites in Italy, as had been done with the objects in Medici's warehouse. From this, one of their conclusions was that the overall quality of objects at Becchina's warehouses was, if anything, higher than in Geneva. “Medici was more
selective
than Becchina,” says Ferri. “Becchina did not have the ‘peaks,' the objects of world importance that Medici had, though he did have some things that were significant. But the
average
level of his objects was very high. Whereas Medici was selective,
Becchina bought the whole
raccolto
[the whole harvest].” This may have been to encourage capi zona to sell to him rather than to others. The Monticelli trial showed that some of his tombaroli were paid regular wages, and perhaps this approach—employing tomb robbers full-time and buying all they unearthed—is how Becchina assured he would receive the high-quality material that was found on his premises in Basel.

The documents revealed that Becchina sold mostly through Sotheby's in London, though he did have one folder showing what he had sold at Christie's, also in London. These folders contained many photographs of what was auctioned and when, meaning that in due course, archaeologists will be able to follow the Becchina trail through the world's salesrooms.

Just as Medici used Editions Services as the main company through which he consigned material to the auction house, keeping his own name off the records, so Becchina sold 10–15 percent of his material through Mrs. Anna Spinello. This was the married name of his sister (in colloquial Italian,
“spinello”
means a cannabis “joint”). The documents seized in Basel show Becchina's handwriting alongside the lists of articles sold in Spinello's name, as he notes which objects have been sold, or bought-in (failed to sell), or withdrawn. But Becchina also used at least one other name, with an address in Buenos Aires, which may have had to do with the fact that Anna Spinello's husband is Italo-Argentinian.