The Medici Conspiracy (41 page)

All of which only made the prosecution of Giacomo Medici more urgent.

At that point, only one aspect of the investigation remained to be completed: the interrogations in the United States.

I
F GIACOMO MEDICI WAS enemy number one in the eyes of Conforti and Ferri, and if Hecht was number two, it was debatable who was number three. There was no shortage of candidates: Becchina, Fritz Bürki, Symes. And then there was Marion True. Medici referred to Symes and Christo as his “diaspora,” meaning that as Hecht began to age, they were the main conduit in spreading his objects around the world. In reality, of course, they were all part of a much bigger diaspora—the spread of antiquities out of Italy and throughout the world—to the United States, to Britain, to Germany, to Japan, to Denmark: all of it illicit.

It was inevitable that Conforti's and Ferri's investigation should lead to the United States. No sooner had the Swiss decided not to proceed against Medici—and the documentary and photographic evidence, together with the 4,000 or so antiquities, had been transferred to Italian soil—that True's lawyer proposed a meeting with Ferri. This interview was not as quickly accomplished as Hecht's but still occurred a great deal earlier than some of the others. Ferri, Rizzo, Pellegrini, two of Conforti's men, and an official—an archaeologist from the Italian Ministry of Culture—flew to Los Angeles in June 2001 to interview her. The Alitalia 747 landed at Los Angeles Airport on a baking hot day, the smog haze over the downtown skyscrapers visible from the aircraft's final approach.

The Italian team was staying at a hotel in Santa Monica, a pretty town on the coast just south of where the new Getty is located. They had no chance to enjoy its amenities, however. After the long, twelve-hour flight they were all tired, and Ferri had ordered a meeting at eight the next morning,
before they boarded their people-carrier for the rendezvous at the museum. The reason for Ferri's strict regime was a response to the way those on the American side had conducted themselves. Eleven months earlier, the Italian public prosecutor had issued letters rogatory, asking for several documents, to interview True, Dietrich von Bothmer, and Ashton Hawkins. Ferri had been told that von Bothmer was “not available” unless the Italians decided to bring charges against True, and he never received any response at all to his request to interrogate Hawkins. In addition, the U.S. attorney involved, Daniel Goodman, had argued that Ferri's original request to the Getty was “too vague, too wide” and that unless he could be more specific, the museum could offer no assistance.

Then, ten days later, a knock was heard on Ferri's door at the Palazzo di Giustizia in Rome—and there stood Richard Martin, the Getty's lawyer. He had with him a bunch of documents.

By handing over some of the paperwork voluntarily, the Getty was not compelled to provide all of the pertinent documents, and it faced no penalty for what looked like cooperation. The Getty knew that letters rogatory are cumbersome instruments and Ferri would have little choice but to accept what was offered. The Getty also knew that its voluntary gesture would avoid the formal process of discovery, which would have compelled it to reveal all.

And so, that morning in Santa Monica, Ferri wanted one last meeting to make sure his people were all on their toes ahead of a crucial encounter. They would get only one bite from this particular apple. It was June 20.

The meeting began at 9:30 AM in the conference room of the museum, which rests on the top of a hill overlooking the Sepulveda Pass and Highway 405, the San Diego Freeway. The meeting room is large, with windows along one side and a long, oval-shaped, blond-wood table. The Italians sat down one side, the Getty people down the other, with Ferri directly opposite Marion True. On the American team, besides True herself, there were ranged: Daniel Goodman, the U.S. attorney, representing the U.S. Department of Justice; Deborah Gribbon, then director of the Getty, representing the museum; Richard Martin, the Getty's lawyer; Lodovico Isolabella, True's elegant Italian lawyer; and interpreters and official stenographers, there to record proceedings.

True is a handsome woman who, over the years, has been both
brunette and blond. She spent her early career at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, in the Greek and Roman Department. She transferred to the Getty Museum in 1983 and became curator two years later.

The interrogation lasted for two whole days, and at first, the meeting was tense. True was being interviewed on serious charges in front of her colleagues and superiors; there was bound to be a fraught atmosphere.

Ferri's aim was to relax True, and to get her talking—at least to begin with—about others. If she would incriminate others, he could use that against them, perhaps to get back at True. It was a classic fencing match, but carried out via the unwieldy form of translation. Ferri had mixed feelings: He was angry at what True had done, but he was also fascinated by a woman who was undoubtedly strong, was well versed in her subject, and had, he felt, been led astray.

During the course of her questioning, True said she had first met Giacomo Medici in 1984 in Basel, Switzerland, at the sale of the Bolla Collection of Greek amphorae. (The Bolla family lived in Lugano.) They had been introduced by Robert Hecht and Dietrich von Bothmer. Later, she said, she saw Medici in Geneva, Rome, and Malibu, California. In Geneva in 1988, she saw him together with Robert Hecht, at the Freeport. On that occasion, she was offered a bronze Etruscan tripod and a candelabrum, and at the same time Medici showed her some photographs of a collection of red-figure Attic plates attributed to the Bryn Mawr Painter. They were intact and not in fragments, she remembered, though one plate had an edge missing. She met Medici again one or two years later in a bank in Geneva where he showed her, among other things, a late-Hellenistic sculpture of the Goddess Tyche, already cleaned. (This was the statue eventually sold by Symes to the Fleischmans, who then sold it on to the Getty.) Later still, Medici came to see her in Malibu, when again he was with Hecht. It was a courtesy visit and Medici had his son with him. True, crucially, contradicted Symes, insisting that she did not consider Medici an expert.

True said she knew that certain things purchased by her predecessor, Jiri Frel, had been acquired from the Hydra Gallery, and she knew that both that gallery and Editions Services were owned by Medici. Through Frel she had also met Gianfranco Becchina, in his case at the Getty in 1983—1984, “when there was beginning to be talk of the statue that was to become known as the Getty Kouros.” She confirmed that, so far as she knew,
Becchina and Medici hated each other. Becchina, she said, had at that time already sold the Getty a dinos krater and some fragments of frescoes.

She had known Robert Hecht since 1972 or 1973 when she worked at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. “He was a good friend of the curator of the museum, Cornelius Vermeule and his wife, Emily.” (Emily Vermeule had been Marion True's professor.) True confirmed that Hecht was in partnership with Bruce McNall in the Summa Gallery but that he had also been in partnership with Fritz Bürki in Zurich and kept various objects in Bürki's shop. This contradicted Bürki's testimony.

She was, she said, good friends with Dietrich von Bothmer at the Metropolitan. He too had been her professor. True's nerves seemed to intensify when the subject of von Bothmer was raised, and she asked for a break. Daniela Rizzo noticed that the heel on one of True's sandals was broken and, after the break, she had changed her shoes.

The interrogation proceeded, and Ferri returned to the matter of Dietrich von Bothmer.

This was sensational testimony, of course, and Ferri would dearly have loved to take a break there and then, to savor what Marion True had admitted. But, for the moment, he kept going. He then read the relevant extract from Hecht's memoir, the “Medici version” that related how Medici had turned up one day at Hecht's Rome house with photographs, how they had flown to Milan and taken a train to Lugano, and so forth. But Marion True said she knew nothing of this. She was aware of the Dikran Sarrafian version she said, and that was all.

She described Hecht as a very intelligent and fascinating man, but an “incurable gambler” and a “chronic alcoholic.” She confirmed that Robin Symes had confided to her Hecht's threats to libel his rivals in a book after his death.

She agreed that Hecht specialized in selling fragments of vases that had already been bought by museums. Hecht was still active, she thought. She had bumped into him in Athens about two years before, when they were staying in the same hotel, and he was trying to sell something to the Benaki Museum (a museum of Greek culture, from antiquity to the present day, part of which is in the Kerameikos district). She confirmed that although he could be charming, he “could also turn, be very hostile, very sarcastic, very sinister. He was a person who had a very peculiar personality.”

Later:

She confirmed—and this was important—that when objects were offered to the museum, Polaroid photographs were never sent by the vendor, since they lacked the precision to show the real quality of the object on offer. This did not fit with the claim by Robin Symes that Polaroids were used, routinely, to show prospective clients the original state of an object.

She also confirmed that she knew all the key figures in the cordata. She said she had met Bürki many times in Zurich (Fritz Bürki, remember, could not recall having many dealings with the Getty.) Then came this exchange:

She said she could not really explain why she had written the letter she did, on June 10, 1987, to Medici, telling him that the two objects would be bought by the museum, since according to her, she knew that the bronzes belonged to Bürki and then Hecht.