The Medici Conspiracy (67 page)

• We may begin with the sheer scale of the looting. Medici had close to 4,000 objects in his warehouse in Geneva and photographs relating to another 4,000; Robin Symes had 17,000 objects in his thirty-three warehouses; and the woodcutter, Giuseppe Evangelisti, looted on average a tomb a week, with nine objects being unearthed per tomb. Pasquale Camera's organigram referred to a core of a dozen tombaroli but in the course of his investigations, Paolo Ferri came across hundreds of other names. If each of these were as active as Evangelisti (and why should we doubt it?), then thousands of antiquities were leaving the ground of Italy illegally each week. Ferri, of course, has by no means interviewed—or even become aware of—many other tombaroli. We have left out a lot of names encountered in the documentation. All this means that the scale of the illicit trade is enormous. No one can doubt it now, and the convenient fiction that unprovenanced antiquities have come from some ancient relative's attic must be laid to rest, once and for all. In the separate trial of Raffaele Monticelli, also mentioned in Pasquale Camera's organigram, held in Foggia in 2003, in which the defendant was found guilty and sentenced to four years, it was revealed that some tombaroli receive regular salaries rather than being paid only for their discoveries. For them, looting is a full-time job. According to one academic study, there are now as many Apulian pots in North America as there are in the museums of Italy—another measure of the “achievement” of Medici and those like him.

• Maurizio Pellegrini, Daniela Rizzo, and Paolo Ferri made calculations based on the report of Professors Bartoloni, Colonna, and Zevi, together with the activities of those names identified through Operation Geryon
and the interviews with tombaroli such as Casasanta and Evangelisti. They concluded that somewhere in the region of 100,000 tombs have been excavated since Medici and Hecht built up their cordata.

• The tombaroli, as do many “collectors,” like to pretend that they “love” antiquities, that they excavate carefully, that they preserve sites. This is false, and everyone concerned knows it. The scandal of the Pompeian frescoes shows that the likes of Medici, and those who supply him, do not care in the slightest about the damage they do. Not even Marion True, or Robin Symes, thought that these frescoes could be sold. No one thought they would be able to get away with displaying such obvious examples of loot—hacking them off the walls of the villa they had adorned had done too much damage to the structures where they had been embedded. The same applies to the capitals stolen from Ostia Antica that were deliberately damaged to “disguise” them. In our television program about Sotheby's and smuggled goods, we had filmed a nighttime “excavation” that had in fact been carried out by means of a mechanical digger—this was hardly a sensitive “dig.” It was more like a rape. Pietro Casasanta, the tomb robber who found the ivory head, liked to say that he “excavated” villas and did not “plunder” tombs, yet Daniela Rizzo has had to pick up the pieces more than once after his illegal digs have been discovered. She confirms that Casasanta did enormous damage to the sites he “excavated.” In fact, she says that he was too ignorant—archaeologically speaking—to realize the damage he was doing.

• The fiction that the traffic in illicit antiquities concerns unimportant objects has been exploded. The traffic is in fact kept in business by the interest—and demand—from some of the world's leading rogue museums and a number of rogue collectors who are interested only in very important items. The illicit traffic has provided objects for at least five of the so-called great modern collections: those of the Levy-Whites, George Ortiz, the Hunt brothers, Maurice Tempelsman, and Barbara and Lawrence Fleischman. It has also filled several of the world's leading museums. The traffic in illicit antiquities has involved hundreds if not thousands of museum-quality pieces.

• It is true that many objects of lesser importance appear at auction, but the antiquities auctions—we now know—serve several specific purposes. Apart from their legitimate function, they exist to “launder” antiquities, so that dealers like Medici can claim that they have bought (what are in fact their own) objects on open sale, providing these objects,
therefore, with a spurious provenance. These sales provide a benchmark for value—Medici (and how many others?) bid against themselves at auction to maintain the price of basic objects, against which other values can be calculated. And in offering only relatively run-of-the-mill items, the auctions helped establish the fiction that however lacking in provenance these objects are, the “antiquities trade” concerns only unimportant material.

• But far and away the most serious revelation of the Medici inquiry, and the one that supports the premise of Chippindale's Law more than any other, is the fact that the illicit trade in antiquities
is organized
. It is organized into groups—cordate, teams of people “roped” together—so as to achieve one all-important objective. This is to keep the likes of Medici, an Italian citizen who is responsible for smuggling thousands of ancient artifacts out of Italy, at a distance from the world's major museums, and collectors, so they can deny dealing directly with the underground trade. This is the tactic that in political spin-doctoring is called “deniability.” Such deniability is achieved by means of triangulations—indirect routes that camouflage the actual origin of the objects. There is no need to repeat the detail here, except to reaffirm what Judge Muntoni concluded—that this was nothing less than a criminal conspiracy.

• An aspect of this organization is delay. There will be those who object to the trials of Giacomo Medici, Robert Hecht, and Marion True on the grounds that the events concerned all took place many years ago. There are several answers to this. One is that law enforcement agencies can only deal with the material available. Although many archaeologists—such as Chippindale and Gill—have argued for years that the circumstantial evidence all points to the conclusion that the vast majority of unprovenanced antiquities in museums around the world and in almost all the modern collections have been looted, both museums and the trade have resisted this reasoning. Hecht himself has said more than once that without documentary proof, he refuses to accept that the objects he deals in are looted. The evidence of Operation Geryon shows that it required both luck and clever investigation to lay bare the
organization surrounding Medici. The documentary proof of the extent of the looting is now there for all to see.

• In an effort to put this whole matter into context, Dr. Ferri calculated that the market price of all the objects mentioned in this book total somewhere in the region of $100 million. This is an impressive sum but still considerably less than the value Robin Symes put on his holdings, which, at $210 million, is more than twice that. According to Ferri, however, Gianfranco Becchina, whose trial will follow that of Marion True and Robert Hecht, may well have been as active as Medici, so that if his trading is taken into account, along with Savoca's, then Ferri calculates that these few names were controlling illicit traffic in antiquities easily worth $500 million—
half a billion dollars
. It is an enormous, underground business.