The Medici Conspiracy (68 page)

It is in this sense that Chippindale's Law comes into its own. Over the past thirty years, many archaeologists, policemen, and other law enforcement officials have known—in their bones—that trade in illicit antiquities was rife. But no one has guessed, even for a moment, that this trade is organized at the level it is, or that a number of rogue collectors, and a certain number of rogue museums, have been hand-in-glove with the network that surrounded Medici and, moreover, that these collectors and museums
actively cooperated
in the cordate. This is surely the most worrying revelation of all: that ostensibly honest, well-educated, highly qualified professional people—scholars, some of them—should involve themselves in such dishonest and deceitful practices, in secret and in long-term collaboration with known smugglers, fences, and tomb robbers. Christopher Chippindale is right: However bad you feared this state of affairs was, the truth is worse.

According to Paolo Ferri, it is very unlikely that we will ever again have the level of detail in regard to antiquities looting that we have in the Medici conspiracy. The set of circumstances that gave rise to Operation Geryon, the discovery of the organigram, of the Polaroids and their related correspondence, the leaks from inside Sotheby's by James Hodges—all these are the sort of episodes that are unlikely to occur together again. Furthermore, the publicity associated with the prosecution will surely
change attitudes and practices—both above and below ground, as it were. Collecting habits must change, museum acquisitions policies must change, especially in the United States and Japan, and no doubt trade patterns and practices will change (fewer Polaroids, probably), though we shouldn't expect much publicity on that score.

Before we sum up, therefore, we must make it clear that Operation Geryon and its subsequent developments have lifted only one stone in the garden. What is true about the Italian antiquities-looting underworld is equally true in many other areas of the world. In parallel with the inquiries for this book, one of us (Peter Watson) has been involved in a not dissimilar investigation in Greece—with much the same results: widespread looting and not a little violence in the process. Given the other court cases described in Chapters 16 and 17, we can say with some confidence that the predicament facing Italy, Egypt, and Greece is shared by Turkey, Afghanistan, India, Pakistan—and several other countries. In Chapter 16, we described how the actions of the cordate extend to Egypt and Israel. Peter Watson worked undercover in Guatemala and Mexico, and we know that similar looting and smuggling of ancient artifacts is rife there, too, as it is in Peru, where there is even an underground trade in ancient human remains.

The Illicit Antiquities Research Centre, at Cambridge University in England, is the only outfit of its kind in the world. Its researchers have concentrated their activities outside the traditional countries of the Mediterranean, determined to show the worldwide nature of the problem. For example, Neil Brodie has conducted a longitudinal study of the London auction market in Iraqi antiquities, from 1980 through 2005. He has shown that large numbers of unprovenanced antiquities were sold, particularly after the first Gulf war of 1991. He writes: “These unprovenanced antiquities largely disappeared from the London market after UN trade sanctions were imposed through a strong new law in 2003.” UN sanctions, so far as antiquities are concerned, were implemented in Britain as Statutory Instrument 1519, which crucially
inverts
the burden of proof that normally applies in a criminal prosecution. That is, it prohibits trade
unless
it is known that the objects left Iraq before 1990—in other words, objects are presumed “guilty” if there is nothing to indicate otherwise. Brodie also notes that large numbers of cuneiform tablets have been
offered for sale over the past ten years with a certificate of authenticity and translation provided by one emeritus professor of Assyriology. “Presumably, if a tablet needs authenticating and translating in this way, it is because it has not previously come to the attention of the scholarly community. The alternative explanation that large numbers of previously unseen tablets have begun to surface from forgotten collections is possible, but hardly credible.” The Assyriologist concerned, Wilfred Lambert, has admitted that when he authenticates an object, he does not necessarily know its origin “and he suspects that very often the dealers themselves don't know either.” Brodie concludes that all this shows that those objects without provenance in the auction catalogs “really don't have one, despite trade protestations to the contrary.” No less interesting, Brodie also told us: “It is also clear that through the 1990s Iraqi and Jordanian antiquities were being moved through Amman and London by means of a trading chain very similar to the cordate described here for Italy.” The names are known to police forces in the countries concerned.

Brodie has also examined what he calls the “baleful effects” that the commercial market exerts on African heritage. The plundering of Africa's past, he says, is “intimately related” to the demand of Western museums and collectors. He notes the author's comments in a 1960 book, for example, that “African clay sculptures are very delicate, and are rarely to be found in museums.” By 1984, all that had changed, probably brought about by an exhibition at the Zurich Kunsthaus in 1970, which sparked “a collecting frenzy.” Bura statuettes from Niger were only discovered in 1983, in an official dig. But after a show toured France in the 1990s, widescale looting of Niger followed. Many were on sale at the Hamill Gallery in Boston in 2000, together with 44 Nok terra-cottas. Many of these latter came with a thermoluminescence date from the Bortolot Daybreak Corporation. Brodie said, “Bortolot's Web site makes for interesting reading. It claims that before 1993 most Nok terra-cottas appearing on the market were fake, and that genuine objects were usually poorly preserved fragments. Then, in 1993, a consortium of European dealers organized systematic looting of the Nok area, whereupon there was a flood of genuine heads and the fakes all but disappeared.” The threat posed to the archaeology of West Africa became so serious that the International Council of Museums felt constrained to publish in May 2000 a “Red List” of African
antiquities under imminent threat of looting or theft. Among the eight most threatened types of antiquity were Nok terra-cottas and Bura statuettes. In a mere seventeen years, the latter had gone from being first discovered to an “endangered species.”

With his colleague Jenny Doole, Brodie also looked at the collecting of Asian antiquities by American museums. The pattern follows that disclosed in this book—namely, that older, nineteenth-century acquisitions have a much more detailed provenance than those acquired since, say, 1970. In examining the collections of such individuals as Norton Simon in California, Walter C. Mead in Denver, Sherman E. Lee in Cleveland, Avery Brundage in San Francisco, John D. Rockefeller III at the Asia Society in New York, and others, a familiar pattern emerged—the lack of provenance of most of the objects. But there was an additional and more cynical pattern—later collectors knew far less about Asian art than the nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century collectors. Brundage, for instance, would often leave his objects in storage, unwrapped and apparently uncared for. Yet the researchers found that “Brundage loved being known as an important collector.” They also noted, “In the late 1800s and early 1900s there was very little museum expertise available, and often it was the collectors themselves, men like [Ernest] Fenellosa and [A. K.] Coomaraswamy, who were hired to provide it. By the 1950s and 1960s this was no longer the case. ‘Asian Art' was a well-established museum specialty with a mature professional structure. The art museum could provide the expertise if the collector could provide the money.”

Doole and Brodie then go on to describe one of the consequences of this situation: In 1997, the Metropolitan Museum in New York returned a statue taken from Angkor Wat sometime before 1993; in 1999, the Met returned an eighth-century sculpture stolen in Bihar between 1987 and 1989; in the same year, the Asia Society returned an eleventh-century sandstone relief to a provincial museum in Madhya Pradesh; in 2000, Mrs. Marilyn Alsdorf returned a tenth-century piece that she found to have been stolen in 1967 from a temple in Uttar Pradesh; in 2002, the Honolulu Academy of Arts returned two more statues taken from Angkor Wat.

In a 1925 publication, there were only thirty-nine pieces of Khmer sculpture in U.S. museums. By 1997, what was published of the Alsdorf Collection alone contained thirty-eight archaeological pieces from
Cambodia and Thailand. Moreover, in the 1925 survey, twenty-five were stone heads and five were stone torsos. Of the Alsdorf pieces, three were stone heads and eleven were torsos. Doole and Brodie commented, “Clearly . . . it had become far easier to acquire complete statues.”

But probably the most shocking example of what Brodie and Doole call the “Asian Art Affair” (a play on the Asian Art Fair, the trade's high-profile annual jamboree) is the experience of the German photographer Jürgen Schick, who in 1989 produced a book entitled
Die Götter verlassen das Land
, published in English nine years later as
The Gods Are Leaving the Country
. In his book, Schick provided a compelling photographic record of the appalling damage that is being done to the cultural heritage of Nepal as sculpture after sculpture disappears to feed the international market. Schick reports that since 1958, Nepal has lost more than half its Hindu and Buddhist sculpture. This large-scale plunder followed the 1964 Art of Nepal exhibition held at the Asia House in New York. By 1966, the Heeramaneck Collection contained a quantity of Nepalese sculpture, and more was acquired by the Rockefeller and Alsdorf Collections. The Boston, Cleveland, and Metropolitan Museums substantially increased their Nepalese art holdings from the 1970s onward.

Schick had intended to include more photographs in the English edition of the book, but in 1996 they were stolen from his publisher's office in Bangkok, together with the original slides of the German edition. A random theft? Or as Brodie and Doole ask, did the book have someone really rattled?

The theft of Jürgen Schick's photographs, no less than the action of the consortium of European dealers in 1993 in regard to Nok terra-cottas, are actions that underline the central argument of this book: The antiquities underworld is far more determined and far more organized than anyone has ever imagined.

What is the way forward? As we write, Marion True and Robert Hecht are on trial in Italy, charged as Medici was with conspiracy. Proceedings against Gianfranco Becchina are just beginning, and Ferri has it in mind to bring charges against a number of other prominent individuals and institutions.
This will be the collective culmination of General Conforti's and Paolo Ferri's efforts over the past decade, and the world will be watching. Will Marion True be the first American curator to be convicted for doing what—one must concede—several other curators have done before her? And will Robert Hecht, after so many close shaves, finally be convicted?

The law will take its course. Meanwhile, the picture revealed in the investigation of Medici now allows us to reach certain conclusions and to make recommendations, given that we now know,
for the first time and with certainty and proof
, how the trade in illicit antiquities really works.

First, let us recall some of the people involved in the events described above. They include: Frederick Schultz, once presidential adviser in the United States and the head of a professional association of dealers; Lawrence Fleischman, once a presidential adviser and a contributor to many good causes; Barbara Fleischman, who was an adviser for President Bill Clinton; Leon Levy, who in many ways had a parallel career to Lawrence Fleischman; Maurice Tempelsman, the companion of Jacqueline Kennedy; Marion True and Dietrich von Bothmer, curators at the Getty and the Metropolitan, respectively; Ashton Hawkins, counsel and vice president of the Metropolitan Museum; George Ortiz, scion of a great family. These are not figures normally associated with a clandestine, underground network. Some of them, such as Shelby White and Leon Levy, have provided funds for archaeologists to publish their excavation reports. And that prompts a conclusion. It is that these individuals have done what they have because they have failed to adjust to the way the world has changed. Over the past thirty years, as was explained in Chapter 2, laws and attitudes and professional practices have evolved. People take cultural heritage issues far more seriously now than in the past, to the point where one can say, with the experience of this book in mind:
It is no longer possible to form a collection of classical antiquities by legitimate means.