The Medici Conspiracy (4 page)

That was not quite the end of the affair. Muscarella was reinstated, as he had to be, but the trustees didn't approve the action until December that year, and it was not until May 1977 that the museum put in writing that he was “an Associate Curator in the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art in good standing.” Moreover, the following March, in 1978, Muscarella was notified that he was being “promoted” to “Senior Research Fellow.” He was told that this was the equivalent of being a full curator, but in fact he was being sidelined. Since 1978, Oscar White Muscarella has never received a salary raise, or any other promotion, except cost-of-living increases, and even those stopped in 2000.

Criticizing Thomas Hoving and his policies, in particular with regard to the acquisition of the Euphronios krater, has exerted a heavy toll. But Muscarella, like the vase, is still—as we write—at the Metropolitan Museum. Over two decades later, events in Italy are vindicating him, and in more ways than even he could think possible.

I
T ALL BEGAN WITH A ROBBERY, deep in the south of Italy. Melfi is a small town in the mountainous Basilicata region—east of Naples and north of Potenza. It is a savage landscape, cracked with dried river beds, the scars of distant earthquakes, the soil baked pale by the Mediterranean sun. Though Melfi is sleepy and nondescript, its medieval castle is spectacular. It is said to contain 365 rooms—one for every day of the year—and its nine forbidding square brick towers, the oldest built in 1041, mark an imposing outline, like large jagged teeth, against the sweep of Mount Vultura, a looming mass of dark red rock that rises up more than 4,000 feet. In the time of Frederick the Second, Melfi was the Norman capital of the south (before Palermo assumed that honor), and it was from here that Pope Urban II called the First Crusade, to conquer the Holy Land.

Thursday, January 20, 1994, was a cold, brilliantly sunny day in Melfi. There was a faint smell of olives in the air, as the pickers in the fields below the castle ate their lunch in the shade of the trees. It was 1:45 PM.

There were no visitors to the castle that day. The building had been given to the Italian state back in 1950, and three rooms had been turned into an archaeological museum. One of the main attractions of the museum was the so-called Melfi vases. These are eight terra-cotta pots, each 2,500 years old, brilliantly decorated in white, red, and brown, with stories from the Greek classics—goddesses playing lyres, athletes being crowned with garlands, scenes of dancing and feasting.

Luigi Maschito was bored. He had been a guard at Melfi Museum for nearly three years now and he had often been bored, but on brilliantly sunny days like this one it was worse, and he would much rather have been out in the fields or exploring the lower slopes of Mount Vultura with his dog. Maschito had with him a new book of crossword puzzles that he
had been given for Christmas. It was a gift he had asked his mother for, precisely to help relieve the tedium of just such a day as this. Even so, and despite the rudimentary wooden chair he was perched on, he couldn't help dropping off to sleep every now and then. He had already eaten his lunch and that invariably made him drowsy. His crossword book, open on his knee, fell to the floor.

He opened his eyes and bent to pick it up.

His forehead struck something hard—and when he looked up he gasped.

He was staring at the barrel of a pistol.

The man holding the gun didn't say anything but held a finger to his lips. Maschito knew what that meant—who didn't? He didn't resist as another man tied him to his chair. “
Merda! Cazzo!
” he thought. “Is this really happening?”

How had they gotten in unnoticed? The castle could only be entered via an old stone bridge, and it had not one but two protecting walls. The men must have known that at lunchtime the castle came to a standstill.

Maschito's shoulders were pulled back, hard, by rope. He sat mute, terrified, as three men, all dark-haired, all in their thirties, all wearing sunglasses, took a huge metal lug wrench and attacked the glass case protecting the Melfi vases.

The glass of the case shattered immediately and fell in a shower of fragments on to the tile floor. The sweat of fear ran down Maschito's forehead and into his eyes as he watched the three men reach forward and snatch at the eight precious vases. The men still didn't speak—the entire operation was carried out in complete silence.

One man took three of the smaller objects. The second man lifted the smallest vase, a jug, and placed it inside one of the others, a larger bucketshaped vase with handles. He slipped these under the arm of the man with the gun, so he still had one hand free for his weapon. Then the second man took the remaining vases, one of which had a narrow neck, making it easier to hold, and hurried out of the room. They had obviously rehearsed this procedure beforehand.

The man with the pistol pointed it again at Maschito. The robber lifted the barrel so that it was vertical and touched it to his lips—another warning to keep silent. Then he too was gone.

Maschito was no fool. He struggled to free his hands before starting to shout and scream. In no time, two of his colleagues appeared. In fact, they had heard the alarm go off when the glass of the protecting case had been smashed but assumed that the alarm had malfunctioned. Never dreaming there was a real robbery in progress, they hadn't hurried.

Seeing Maschito tied to the chair, one guard ran toward him while the other, Massimo Tolve, turned and gave chase out of the room. He rushed from the building, through the two arches set into the two protecting walls, and out along the stone bridge, the only way in and out of the castle.

The road fell away sharply beyond the bridge, and there was a parking lot farther down. As Tolve turned off the bridge, he saw a car reversing in the lot. He watched it pause while it changed gear, and then it moved forward, accelerating down the remainder of the hill, heading west for the road to Calitri.

Thanks to that pause, he was later able to tell the police just two things about the car. That it was a Lancia Delta—and that its license plate was Swiss.

An ornate, four-story, ochre-and-white baroque palazzo, a small jewel on the Piazza Sant'Ignazio in the center of old Rome, lies just across from the Jesuit church of Sant'Ignazio, famous for its trompe l'oeil cupola painted by Andrea Pozzo (1642–1709). This splendid edifice is the public face and headquarters of the Carabinieri Art Squad, the Italians' way of showing the value they put on their heritage. The squad also has twelve regional units and one of these, in Naples, now became the operational headquarters for the Melfi investigators. One of the vases that had been stolen in the Melfi theft showed Hercules carrying a circular shield and in combat with Geryon, a three-headed monster. Because the monster with three heads resembled the antiquities underworld, which manifested itself in many different guises, Colonel Conforti—the man in charge of the Art Squad—code-named the Melfi investigation “Operation Geryon.”

At the time of the Melfi theft, Roberto Conforti was fifty-seven and had been in charge of the Art Squad for a little over four years. He is old-fashioned, experienced, round faced, with a small mustache and the gravelly
voice of a man who smokes two packs of Marlboros every day. He was born in Serre, near Salerno, and still speaks with a distinctive southern Italian accent despite his many years in Rome. His father was a civil servant, his mother was—and his sister still is—a schoolteacher, and his wife was in the same class as his sister at school. He grew up at a time when it was normal for him to address his father as
“voi,”
the Italian equivalent of the French
“vous.”
In those days, the commander of the local Carabinieri would cuff children over the head if they were out on the streets too late, when they should have been home eating dinner with their parents. He studied law at Naples University but preferred law enforcement as a career and joined the Carabinieri when he was nineteen. In the nearly forty years between then and Operation Geryon, Conforti was involved in one tough assignment after another. He was in Sardinia in the late 1960s, the years of Sardinian banditry, during which time his wife and first daughter needed bodyguards. In 1969, he moved to Naples to become commander of the Poggioreale area, with its notorious Poggioreale prison. This area Conforti himself describes as
“fetente,”
fetid—nasty and stinking—a place where his wife had to lock herself and their daughter in their bedroom, with water and emergency medicines, refusing to come out until he arrived home. He was promoted to run the investigative unit in Naples, a critical time when the Camorra (the Naples region version of the Mafia) and the Sicilian Cosa Nostra were beginning to consolidate, as they began their foray into drugs. One of the main Mafia figures escaped from prison at that time and, as Conforti puts it, “Homicides just happened in repetition.” It was gang war. His successes there resulted in further promotion, this time to Giuliano, probably the most Camorra-infested area in the Naples hinterland, after which he was given command of the entire Naples area. He was moved to Rome in the late 1970s and given command of the operational unit there, at a time when terrorism was growing, in particular groups like the Red Brigade.

Conforti has been involved in all the hard, intractable problems of Italian crime. He has learned the tricks of the trade, has spent long parts of his career working undercover, against the most formidable, well-equipped, determined, and
organized
criminals that Italy has produced. Despite the pressures on his wife and daughter early in his career, he and his wife had three more girls, and Conforti is now a grandfather five times over. Such
is his commitment to law enforcement, and the need to uphold Italy's institutions, that it has rubbed off on two of his daughters, who are themselves magistrates and, moreover, are married to magistrates.

In 1990, Conforti was given command of the Carabinieri Art Squad. He was charged with “reviving” it. The squad then consisted of just sixty men, who occupied the palazzo in Piazza Sant'Ignazio—and nowhere else. Within two years, Conforti had established a branch in Palermo, two years after that in Florence. Next, newly opened at the time of the Melfi theft and Operation Geryon, came Naples. Bari, Venice, and Turin lay in the future.

Conforti himself had no special training in art. At his
liceo,
or high school, there had been a
Professoressa Prete,
an art teacher he always remembered because she wore a different hat every day and taught him that, in Italy, one is everywhere
surrounded
by art. So, for as long as he can remember, Conforti has loved Caravaggio as much as he has loved Beethoven and Chopin, the three artists he most admires.

He learned early in his time in the Art Squad that though Italian art museums are well guarded, their archaeological treasures are the poor relation. They have less money spent on them and rank lower down in the government's priorities. And so he took the theft at Melfi especially badly. There was only one aspect of the theft that gave him hope.