The Medici Conspiracy (59 page)

In the late 1990s, it appeared to Pellegrini and to Ferri that Becchina was selling but no longer buying. Of course, some of his suppliers had themselves been arrested but it was as if, following the raid on Medici's warehouse, Becchina was running down his operations in Basel, confirming the earlier impression that Switzerland no longer offered the business opportunities it once did. However, Ferri kept up the phone taps and, in the wake of the raid, he heard Becchina say, in regard to the warehouses that had been targeted, “Have they found the other one?” This exchange led to the discovery of a fourth warehouse in Basel, consisting mainly of documents. Even this took time, however, and because the fourth warehouse was identified only in September 2005, those documents—about 30 percent of the total—have not yet been made available
in
Italy and so have not yet been properly assimilated. They may throw a different light on events.

Even so, it is already clear, according to Dr. Ferri, that Becchina had close relations with Dietrich von Bothmer, the Metropolitan Museum,
the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Cleveland Museum, Jerome Eisenberg, a dealer with galleries in New York and London, and the Louvre in Paris. Arielle Kozlov, a curator at Cleveland, left the museum in 1997 and joined the Merrin Gallery in New York. Among the Becchina documents was a letter from the Merrin Gallery asking Becchina not to write his name on the back of the photographs he sent them, showing antiquities for sale. For Ferri, however, the main area of activity where Becchina differed from Medici concerned Japan.

The documents show that over the years, Becchina dealt mainly with two Japanese dealers, the colorfully named Tosca Fujita, whose company was Artemis Fujita, and Noriyoshi Horiuchi, a Tokyo-based dealer who at various times has had galleries in London and Switzerland. A great deal of correspondence was generated in the 1980s over the authenticity—or otherwise—of an alabastron that Horiuchi had bought from Becchina. The correspondence relating to this underlines the close relationships among Horiuchi, Becchina, Dietrich von Bothmer, and Robert Guy.

In the 1980s, Horiuchi was unknown outside the narrow world of antiquities dealing, but in 1991 his life changed. He met Mihoko Koyama and the idea for the Miho Museum was born.

The Miho Museum is a curious institution. Opened in November 1997, the museum is the brainchild of Koyama, heiress to a Japanese textile fortune who is also a disciple of the Japanese religious philosopher Mokichi Okada (1882–1955). In the early twentieth century, Okada invented an imitation diamond, which made him rich and allowed him the leisure to study art and develop his philosophical and spiritual beliefs, the chief of which was that a divine spiritual purification would “soon occur” through a global catastrophe, unless humanity could rid itself of sickness, poverty, and discord by means of “prayer, natural agriculture and the appreciation of beauty.” It is the third aspect of Okada's belief system—the “soul-refining propensities of aesthetic experience”—that led to the creation of the Miho Museum.

After Okada's death, Mihoko Koyama founded her own religious sect, known as Shinji Shumeikai, which means “Divine Guidance Supreme
Light Organization” and has attracted thousands of adherents. She also began to collect Japanese tea ceremony objects and at first planned a museum devoted solely to Japanese antiquities. However, I. M. Pei, the architect for the museum, suggested to her during their discussions that the new museum should display antiquities from all over the world, making it unique in Japan.

The museum, which is about an hour's drive southeast of Kyoto, in the wooded mountains of Shigaraki, contains a dramatic entranceway: a steel-lined tunnel sliced through a mountain, leading to a 400-foot suspension bridge slung across a ravine. The museum may then be seen across the ravine, half hidden by trees and sometimes shrouded in mist.

It is said to have cost $250 million to design and build. When it opened, in November 1997, it had acquired more than 1,000 antiquities, 300 of them—by common consent—of outstanding significance. Over seven years, from 1991 to the opening, the responsibility for acquiring those antiquities—at the rate of around three a week—was Horiuchi's. Having first met Mihoko Koyama and her daughter in 1991, the trio soon became firm friends and Horiuchi was appointed consultant to the museum and given a huge budget—reportedly $200 million—to acquire non-Japanese antiquities.

During those years there was no shortage of controversy. Horiuchi had several acrimonious battles with I. M. Pei, who complained that he had constantly to redesign the museum to accommodate Horiuchi's acquisitions. There have been several allegations that Horiuchi, who has no formal training in archaeology or art history (he studied law), has bought fakes, that he won't admit it because of the loss of face involved, and that some of the pieces in the museum form part of the Treasure of the Western Cave, illegally excavated and smuggled out of Iran in the early 1990s.
^am
It is certainly true that most of the antiquities on display in the Miho have no provenance.

By Horiuchi's own admission, very little of what he acquired was bought at auction—in what is perhaps the only full interview he has given, he said he bought from “top dealers” at “top prices.”

Speaking of his first meeting with Mihoko Koyama in 1991, in that
same interview, Horiuchi said, “Destiny brought us together,” though there may be more to it than that.

Among the Becchina documents is an agreement signed after a creditors' meeting held in Geneva in 1991. This was a meeting held between four creditors—all Swiss antiquities dealers, of which Becchina was one—called because Horiuchi owed each of them substantial amounts of money and showed no prospect of paying. According to the agreement drawn up at the end of the meeting, and signed by all those present, the decision taken was for Horiuchi to become the agent for his creditors in Japan. In other words, so far as these four Swiss dealers were concerned, from then on Horiuchi was not allowed to buy directly from them, and sell on; instead he could only take a percentage of whatever price they chose to put on their objects.

The close proximity of this creditors' meeting and Horiuchi's meeting with Mihoko Koyama was therefore extremely fortuitous, to say the least, destiny bringing together not just these two individuals but placing the antiquities underworld cheek-by-jowl with one of the greatest sources of art funding the world has ever seen. In time, as the Becchina documents reveal more and more, we will no doubt find out just where so much of the Miho material originated.

After the raid on the first three warehouses, Rosie Becchina refused to cooperate with the Swiss and Italian authorities and she was held in prison. This produced the desired effect, to some extent, and she did admit, for example, that one of their main suppliers was Monticelli, invaluable confirmation of that cordata, from the horse's mouth. She also contacted a lawyer, Mario Roberty—the same attorney used by Frida Tchacos and Robin Symes—and Roberty called Becchina to tell him his wife had been arrested. (It was during this call that Becchina asked if the police had discovered his “other” warehouse.) Learning that his wife had been arrested, Becchina asked Roberty to tell Rosie that he was immediately leaving Sicily for Basel.

Neither Alitalia nor any other regular airline flies directly from Palermo to Basel, so Becchina had to change planes at Milan. At Malpensa airport, at the gate where the Palermo flight arrived, he was arrested and immediately
taken to Rome. Before he could be interrogated, Becchina claimed that he was mad—
pazzo
in Italian—and clinically incapable of either being held in jail or of being interviewed. Once again, this well-known maneuver interested Ferri because such a claim is in Italy a standard tactic. Becchina was seen by a psychiatrist who concluded that although he did have some problems with his memory, he was quite sane enough to remain in jail. He was held for six months, after which, under Italian law, he was automatically released.

Ferri interrogated him for eight hours but didn't get very far. Becchina admitted knowing many of the people mentioned in this book—Frida Tchacos, Medici, Symes, Hecht, Cottier-Angeli, True (“a very nice woman”), and Dietrich von Bothmer—but he could scarcely deny it since their names were all over his documentation. But he admitted nothing incriminating, as his wife had admitted receiving material from Monticelli. “All he did was
fare salotto,
” says Ferri. In Italian,
salotto
means “sitting room” and the phrase means that the interrogation had all the significance of a fireside chat.

But in the course of the eight-hour interrogation, further differences did emerge between Becchina and Medici. Psychologically, whereas Medici is “
spaccone,
” a bit of a show-off, given to letting off steam, Becchina is a classical Sicilian—reserved, calm, a closed book. Small, slightly built, with straight lank hair and a sharply pointed nose, Becchina is physically very different from Medici, too. He makes no gesticulations and, while admitting nothing, Ferri says, “Unlike Medici, he has never tried to convince me he is innocent.”

Robert Hecht, Giacomo Medici, Gianfranco Becchina, Robin Symes, and Marion True—all in court or in the prosecutor's sights, all involved (or alleged to be involved) in smuggling, receiving, conspiracy. This is a major event in the history of archaeology, in criminology, in the politics of cultural heritage, and in the foreign policy of the Mediterranean countries. It is a major indication of the way the world's attitudes and ethical beliefs are changing in this area. However, there is a sense that the legal fate of these figures is, if not an incidental matter, no longer the main event. The sheer scale of the illicit trade in looted antiquities, its organized nature,
the routine deception, the superb quality of so much of the material, the close proximity of museum curators and major collectors to underworld figures—that is now there for all to see. Whatever verdicts are handed down, other, lesser figures in the underground network have already stood trial and been convicted.

Irrespective of the verdicts in the outstanding court cases, in November 2005, American museums started to return antiquities to Italy. The Getty set the ball rolling with the return of the Asteas vase, a photograph of which had been found in the glove compartment of Pasquale Camera's overturned Renault near Cassino (see pp. 11–13). At the same time, the museum returned two other objects, the bronze candelabrum from the Guglielmi Collection (pp. 84–86), and a stone stela with inscriptions from the archaeological site of Selinunte in Sicily.

But this paled alongside the announcement, in February 2006, that the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York was returning the Euphronios krater, together with twenty other objects, to Italy. That transaction, and its implications, are considered in the Epilogue, because it was, and is, a special case. But the Met's move did presage several ripple effects that may be considered here.