The Medici Conspiracy (39 page)

She confirmed that Medici was known as the biggest dealer, “that he had contacts with all . . . with all the big dealers, the biggest dealers . . . with Hecht mainly, [but] not with Gianfranco Becchina—they hated each other.” She knew that Medici had the Hydra Gallery and that Christian Boursaud fronted for him. Then this exchange followed:

She further confirmed that Medici sold “quite a lot” to Robin Symes, that Symes “undoubtedly” bought vases from Medici, and she agreed that Symes bought the Morgantina Venus from Orazio Di Simone. “That was what was always said.”
¹

Returning to Hecht, she said that “he was a scholar, but a terrible character, who made one afraid . . . he was an old man, an old nasty man. I was always afraid of him . . . What else can I tell you? Hecht was called ‘Mister Percentage' . . . because he took a percentage . . . I think from Medici as well . . . his great clients in Los Angeles were the Hunts, the Hunt brothers . . . I knew though that Medici was behind him . . . yes, yes.”

She confirmed that there was “a precise triangle”—Hecht, Becchina, Monticelli—and that the latter mainly supplied “[e]verything that could be found in the south of Italy; I think Apulian [vases], I think terracottas, I think bronzes. . . .” She later amended this cordata to include George Ortiz and Mario Bruno. She said that Mauro Morani was part of the Savoca cordata, and he had provided the kylix by Onesimos, or at least some of it. She met Morani through Guarini and knew him to be “a very able creator of fakes.”

She gave evidence that before Marion True was married, she had a lover in Rome in the early 1990s, one Enzo Constantini.

Tchacos confirmed that the Levy-White Collection was purchased from Symes, and the routing was: “Mainly from Hecht; I don't know if from Medici but if we say Hecht we say Medici; recently she [Shelby White] was buying a lot from the Aboutaams.”

She described von Bothmer and Robert Guy as academic “enemies,” that if one attributed a vase to one painter, the other would attribute it to someone else. She said that George Ortiz was the biggest collector in Europe and that his collection was made by Becchina but that he also had links with Savoca. She confirmed that Becchina sold a great deal at Sotheby's and that Borowsky had had contact with German museums.

One of the things that came over strongly in Tchacos's interview was how bitter the rivalry was at times between the different cordate. She herself heartily disliked Hecht. Elsewhere in her interview, she referred to an occasion when several of the Swiss-based antiquities dealers were on the same plane, traveling to Japan for the opening of the exhibition of the George Ortiz Collection at a museum there in 1993. During the flight, she said, Becchina had come up to her and said, as she put it, “We mustn't
allow certain people to work.” When asked who Becchina meant, she replied that he had been talking about Savoca.

Tchacos also confirmed that Fiorella Cottier-Angeli, the Swiss expert and customs official who “has this collection of Etruscan vases,” had told her that she had a key to Medici's warehouse. After beginning as an adviser to Medici, for customs appraisals, “there began this activity of knowing Swiss collectors, to whom she then also supplied objects, which undoubtedly came from Medici . . . she was connected to the Director of the Geneva Museum, who was a rather weak character and did what she wanted of him.”

Ferri asked: “Which means?”

“. . . means that if she wanted to do . . . to sell something to a collector, she had an expertise drawn up by this guy of the Geneva Museum, this . . . [Jacques] Chamay.”

Tchacos was astonishingly forthcoming. Perhaps it was her character, perhaps it was the fact that she was, at the time, under arrest in Cyprus.

Ferri's instincts about Tchacos's mood in Limassol were correct. While they were there together, they arrived at a deal. There were certain objects that the Italians were anxious to recover, and chief among them was the ivory head discovered by Casasanta and sold to Savoca. The life-size head of Apollo, which had once formed part of a Chryselephantine statue in antiquity, was quite possibly the most important archaeological object to be unearthed since the Euphronios krater in 1971 (many people think it is even more important than the vase). In Limassol, Tchacos let it be known—without actually saying so—that she could help in the recovery of this object. In view of her cooperation, Ferri now let it be understood that in return for her help with the ivory head, he would limit the charges he would bring against her. He said the charges would be confined to offenses that carried penalties of two years or less (with a good chance that the prison terms would be suspended) and, most important, Tchacos would not be joined in the conspiracy charges that he was planning to bring against Medici, Hecht, Robin Symes, and perhaps Marion True.

Frida Tchacos agreed to this deal and, on September 17, 2002, she was
convicted of handling stolen and smuggled goods, and of failing to notify the authorities of the antiquities that came her way. She was given one year and six months' imprisonment, suspended, and fined 1,000 euros (approximately $1,000). But, so far as Ferri was concerned, there was more to it than that. Tchacos, he knew, was very friendly with Robin Symes—and the public prosecutor was anxious to interview Symes. Symes had residences in New York and Greece, and businesses in Switzerland, but he spent most of his time in London, where the police and judicial authorities did not cooperate at all well with the Italians. Thus, Ferri's deal with Tchacos was more than it seemed: It was designed to put pressure on Symes. He knew that Tchacos would discuss her treatment in Limassol with Symes, for the unvoiced subtext to the encounter was that Ferri believed that Symes had the ivory head, bought from Savoca. He therefore believed that what Tchacos had in fact promised, without actually saying as much, was that she would put pressure on Symes to return the head.

So far as Ferri was concerned, Symes was a much more important link in the chain. He shared the same address with Medici at Avenue Krieg in Geneva, he was an active member of the cordata that supplied the Getty, the Levy-Whites, Maurice Tempelsman, and several others. So Ferri wasn't about to do a deal with Symes, as he had done with Tchacos,
but he was prepared for Symes to think that he might
. Because of the poor cooperation offered to the Italians by the British (more like noncooperation, in fact), there was little chance that Ferri would ever be able to raid Symes's premises in London, or interrogate him there. The deal with Tchacos, therefore, had as one of its aims that it would lure Symes to Rome, in search of something similar.

It took a year, but it worked. At the end of March 2003, Symes offered to travel to Rome voluntarily to be interviewed at the Palazzo di Giustizia by Ferri. He had with him his Italian lawyer, Francesco Tagliaferri. (This name was a source of much amusement for everyone: in Italian “Tagliaferri” means “cut Ferri,” in the sense of a “shortened Ferri” or “Ferri cut down to size.”) Tagliaferri was also Tchacos's lawyer.

Unsurprisingly, Symes was uptight about everything and Ferri had to
squeeze information out of him. It was like being with the Bürkis all over again. Symes said he had known Medici for a very long time, since the 1980s, when the Italian would go to London for Sotheby's sales. However, at the time he was interviewed, Symes claimed that he and his partner, Christo, hadn't met Medici in more than ten years. Symes insisted that Medici was an expert in vases, that he had a very important collection and that “since they were famous and published vases, he did not need to certify their origin.” In particular, Symes confirmed that Medici could distinguish the painters who had painted particular vases. This was of course in direct contradiction of what Frida Tchacos had said and what others would say.

Xoilan, Symes said, was the company in whose name objects that he intended to collect (keep) were purchased, whereas for dealing he used another company, Robin Symes Limited. (This is directly contradicted by evidence we detail in Chapter 15.)
²

Symes claimed there was nothing unusual or incriminating about the Polaroids found at Medici's warehouse, even though they showed objects in fragments and covered in dirt. “Conserving the photos of an object which still has to be restored is simply to show the client the original condition of the object and how much and what kind of restoring work had been done. Many dealers give the purchaser the photos of the object before its restoration.” (Again, this is directly contradicted by Ferri's later interrogations.) He confirmed that Felicity Nicholson was a great friend of his (he found her
“molto simpatica”
), and they frequently went out to dinner together. “She was incredibly honest and reserved in her work at Sotheby's,” a description that hardly squares with her behavior in regard to the Lion Goddess, Sekhmet,
^s
when she had asked Symes to smuggle it out of Italy. In fact, Symes rather spoiled his argument by admitting it was Nicholson who had prevailed on him to take part in the exercise.

Symes knew Hecht and had visited him when the latter lived in Rome. He had never visited him in Paris, and although he hadn't done much business with him, Symes did confirm that in 1971 or 1972, he'd purchased a large bronze eagle from Hecht for $70,000–$75,000, then sold it to the Getty Museum. This, of course, is an important confirmation of an episode that Hecht had mentioned in his memoir, in his first “Medici version”
of the route by which the Euphronios krater had arrived at the Met. Symes also said that an acquaintance of his, Peter Wilson, CEO of Sotheby's, had shown him a photograph of a Euphronios vase that had been offered to Sotheby's at that time, and Symes had noticed that it was identical to the one purchased by the Metropolitan. This too confirms the “Medici version” in Hecht's memoir, where he said that he had considered selling the vase at Sotheby's but had been disappointed by Felicity Nicholson's estimate of $200,000. Felicity Nicholson, who had no professional training in antiquities but had begun life at Sotheby's as a secretary, was a protégé of Peter Wilson's, who took a great interest in her department. She would certainly have shown Wilson any photographs of a major vase that Hecht sent in. This is presumably how Wilson (who died in 1984) came to show the photographs to Symes. Symes also said that he had thought the Euphronios was perhaps a fake, without knowing that in the “Medici version” in his memoir, Hecht had written about just this—that Robin and Christo (and Sir John Pope-Hennessy) had cast doubt on the authenticity of the vase. So, in at least three ways, and without realizing it, Symes confirmed the “Medici version” of the way the Euphronios krater had reached the Metropolitan Museum in New York.