The Medici Conspiracy (29 page)

But, and this is what was confusing to begin with, some of the objects seized in Geneva had Sotheby's labels on them. These small white cards, tied to the objects with thin white thread, had written lot numbers on them and dates from the sales where they had been sold. So Medici was buying as well as selling at Sotheby's. Ferri and Pellegrini asked themselves why he would do that when he made his money by acquiring illicitly dug vases and other antiquities from tombaroli in Italy, where the markups were so much greater than they ever could be with objects bought openly at auction, where anyone interested could look up the prices paid.

It was late one afternoon in November 1999 when Pellegrini finally saw the light. He was sitting at his desk in the small office he shared with Daniela Rizzo, chief investigative archaeologist, on the second floor of the administration building at the back of the Villa Giulia Museum, in Rome's elegant Parioli district. It was drizzling and already dark, and the only light came from his Anglepoise lamp. He was looking at the Sotheby's catalog for its auction of antiquities in December 1994, five years before. There are usually 400–600 lots in an average sale, and as he leafed through that particular volume, he had reached Lot 295, a Gnathian-style hydria. This object, he knew by then, had been sent for sale by Medici some two to three years before, and it had been in other sales but hadn't found a buyer. That November afternoon, however, Pellegrini had a strange sensation: He had seen Lot 295 before, and very recently. But where? It could only have been among the objects seized in Geneva. The vases and statues themselves were of course still in Switzerland, but good-quality photographs had been taken of everything. So Pellegrini found himself back among the photos. And what he found was that Lot 295 featured in the photographs not once
but twice
. It was shown in the Polaroids, as dirty and fragmented, before restoration; and it was shown in the high-quality photographs taken by the Swiss expert—
with a Sotheby's label attached to it
.

The penny dropped. Lot 295 had been sent to Sotheby's for sale by Medici and, after one or two unsuccessful sales,
it had been bought back
. This explained the odd pattern that had been haunting them all—Paolo
Ferri, Conforti's men, and Pellegrini himself. It explained how Medici could have in his possession in Geneva many objects that, according to the records, he had sold.

Armed with this insight, Pellegrini now looked at Medici's documentation under a new light. It didn't take him long to find other examples. In the Dossier section, we give the complete and detailed list he prepared for the prosecution against Medici. In each case the pattern was the same. In the first instance, Pellegrini identified twenty-nine objects, in four sales between 1987 and 1994, in which Medici bought back objects he had sent for sale at Sotheby's in London. There was, for example:

Each of these objects—twenty-nine in all—was received at Medici's Geneva warehouse, where it was originally dirty, incomplete, and fragmented, as the seized Polaroids confirm. Later, these same objects, now restored, were sent to Sotheby's for sale, and after sale they were returned to Medici's warehouse, bearing Sotheby's labels.

In other words, this was an extensive laundering operation, “extensive” because Ferri and Pellegrini had documents that related only to the 1987—1994 period, and Sotheby's, though cooperative to an extent, did not cooperate fully. Even so, the documentation that Pellegrini did manage to
trace showed that, in one sale, dated December 8, 1994, Medici bought back twenty-four objects, paying £34,250 for the privilege. Except that he didn't have to pay all that since he was, for the most part, paying himself. What he actually had to pay was the commission on the sales, twice over—once as seller, and once as buyer. Assuming the commission was somewhere between 10 and 15 percent, both on buying and on selling, the December 8, 1994, sale would have cost Medici between £6,850 and £10,275. To this would have to be added the cost of shipping these goods to and from London, and costs for illustrations in the catalog, but the above sums are almost certainly exaggerations since Medici, as a valued and regular customer of Sotheby's, would have been able to negotiate rates more favorable to himself. (Different documents show that, on other occasions, Medici paid Sotheby's between 6 and 10 percent commission, which means that this particular transaction probably cost him between £4,110 and £6,850—hardly bankruptcy level.) But obviously, whatever the cost, the existence of the objects back in Geneva showed that Medici judged it worth his while.

Ferri asked Sotheby's for its cooperation, which it offered, providing information only in regard to Editions Services, and concluding that, between 1985 and 1994, each of the few clients who bought large numbers of Editions Services goods “were established and well known dealers, who generally bought large numbers of items at Sotheby's. We do not believe that there are any grounds for believing that any of them was buying on behalf of Editions Services. To have been laundering any significant number of works of art, Editions Services would have needed to use dozens of different agents and/or pseudonyms none of which were known to us. None of the information we have suggests that this was the case.”

Sotheby's did, however, identify what it called “two areas of difficulty.” The first was a small number of instances (fewer than ten), all relating to pre-1986 sales, when Boursaud appeared to have been buying items he was selling. “This practice is (and was at the time) forbidden by Sotheby's contracts and internal policy but can be difficult to spot, prove and/or prevent.” Second, Sotheby's established that at the December 1994 auction, “a known and, so far as we are aware, legitimate Geneva based transportation company, Arts Franc, purchased 14 of the 34 items sold by Editions Services . . . we have now identified circumstantial evidence to indicate
that this company may have been acting on behalf of Editions Services in making these purchases.”
^j
Finally, Arts Franc had acted for Editions Services “in relation to the transportation of and payment for” certain items purchased by Editions Services in relation to an earlier sale, in London on July 7, 1994, and subsequently, in a Sotheby's sale in New York on June 1, 1995.

Sotheby's was adamant that it was not aware of these practices until after the Medici investigation was begun, and that it would not have permitted them had it known. The company did admit, though, that such practices were difficult to identify and to prevent. This seems to be confirmed by the fact that Sotheby's own inquiry identified an “area of difficulty” with fourteen items in its sale of December 8, 1994, whereas Rizzo and Pellegrini found twenty-four items in that sale that had been bought back. In other words, not only Arts Franc was acting that day on Medici's behalf—at least one other buyer or company was as well. To that extent, the laundering was a sophisticated conspiracy.

It seems then that
some
buying back, or laundering, did occur and is accepted by all sides. The list originally given above (and completed in the Dossier section) refers to five separate sales, which all took place at Sotheby's in London. But Sotheby's in London may not have been the only laundry for antiquities. Sotheby's, in its report, mentioned a suspicious sale at its own New York branch.

During the raid on Phoenix Ancient Art, Jeffrey Suckow, the manager for Inanna Art Services, the company that owns the warehouses at the Freeport where the seized materials were being held, handed over photocopies of auction house catalogs relating to fourteen other sales between June 1995 and October 2000 in which objects seized from Medici had been sold and bought by the Aboutaams. These sales took place at Sotheby's and Christie's, both in London and New York, and at Bonhams in London. In at least two of these cases, the objects had started out with Medici, as proved by the Polaroids. They had then been “sold” at auction, bought by
the Aboutaams, and ended up back with Medici. That confirms laundering in seven sales, and possibly as many as twenty-one, stretching from 1987 until 2000.

What was the purpose of these activities? Since they occurred on such a scale, it was obviously worth Medici's time and trouble—but how, and in what way?

There are three possible answers, though one does not rule out the others. First, and most obviously, the fact that some of the antiquities on display in the outer room in Corridor 17 at the Freeport had Sotheby's labels tied to them gave them a spurious provenance: The labels were visible “proof” that these objects had been bought on the open market and were therefore “safe,” or “clean,” and could be sold—even in Italy—because at this point they had an “official” provenance. The paper trail put together by Pellegrini in this case (paragraphs 1 to 20 in the relevant section of the Dossier) proves that such a presentation was totally misleading. But even without that, wasn't Medici's practice in itself curious, even suspicious? A moment's reflection will show what we mean. A good proportion of the art, furniture, and jewelry on sale at dealers' galleries around the world—in New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, Milan, Munich, Zurich, Hong Kong, Sydney, Rio de Janeiro—has been bought at auction, but the dealers never advertise that fact, for the simple reason that, were they to do so, enterprising prospective customers or collectors would simply look up the records of the sale at which the painting or necklace or vase had been auctioned and find out what the dealer had paid for it. This would give them an inside track in any negotiations when it came to a potential sale. Therefore, Medici's behavior, in advertising that a good number of his objects for sale had passed through Sotheby's—even to the extent of showing the lot number—was a giveaway, evidence of a kind that what he was offering for sale in Geneva was, in fact, the very opposite of what he was pretending. The objects were not “clean”—far from it: A minority was stolen, the rest looted.

A second reason for the Sotheby's rigmarole was revealed by Medici's selling pattern. That is, he would submit things for sale and buy some
of them straight back, but with others he would leave them at the auction houses, to see how well they sold—or didn't sell. Those that didn't sell immediately were reentered in subsequent auctions; in some cases, he bought them back after repeated failures. This suggests that he was using the auction houses to rig prices. When he consigned material to Sotheby's, he naturally had some idea of what he wanted them to fetch. The consignment notes invariably had reserve prices attached, the minimum sum a consignor will allow an object to be sold for. If they fetched that price, all was well and good and he would let them go. However, if they didn't sell at the price he wanted, and if they didn't sell after being offered at auction several times, that could only mean either that they were on the market at too high a figure or that for some other reason the demand for that type of item simply wasn't there. In either case, buying back a certain proportion of his own objects helped resolve the problem. To the uninformed observer, the vases or statues had “sold” at the target price, “confirming” their value. If enough of a certain type of object “sold” in this way, that must mean there was a healthy taste for it and other collectors would take note.

There was a third way in which Medici would have benefited from his “buyback” operation in the salesrooms. In fact, the whole antiquities trade would have benefited, in an indirect way. An argument often heard from those who oppose any stringent restrictions on the trade in unprovenanced antiquities is that when you look at the auctions, much of the unprovenanced material that passes through the salesrooms is neither very rare nor very important. Therefore, this argument runs, the whole problem is much less grave than the archaeologists say it is. As far as Medici's deception is concerned, one aspect of his behavior was to “salt” the salesrooms with less-important material. In the list above, and in the Dossier section, the highest price that any “laundered” object sold for was £17,000 ($30,600) and the average sum was £2,105 ($3,790), considerably below the average price of the antiquities the Fleischmans sold to the Getty, which was more than $100,000. In salting the salesrooms with less expensive items, Medici accomplished two important objectives. By buying back—and therefore propping up the price of—basic objects (ordinary vases, routine marble heads, not uncommon capitals), he maintained the gold standard in antiquities. Provided that ordinary, garden-variety objects
have a certain minimum price level and can be seen to have that price level, everything else above them will be multiples of that basic value. At the same time, by ensuring that the auctions were salted with “ordinary” material, he could help maintain the fiction that the antiquities market is primarily made up of such items.