The Medici Conspiracy (5 page)

But Conforti had no idea what was about to unfold.

Italian police (to use the term loosely, since the Carabinieri are in fact part of the army) have one advantage over similar authorities elsewhere. Because the looting of antiquities is such a widespread problem, at any one time the Art Squad has a number of people under surveillance. In particular, phone tapping is routine. The taps are voice activated, and the legal permissions to operate them have to be renewed every fifteen days. In the wake of a big theft like that at Melfi, however, they are essential, for the telephone traffic tells the police who to focus on.

Long experience had taught the investigators what to look out for. At the lowest level, the tombaroli, or tomb robbers, are invariably laborers or farm workers, who don't make many calls. Above them come those the tombaroli call the
capo zona,
the head of a region. The tomb robbers normally sell their finds to a capo zona, frequently a man with a white-collar job, meaning he has some sort of education, and whose telephone records as often as not show that he regularly makes calls abroad. In this case, following the Melfi raid, there was a burst of telephone traffic centered on the Casal di Principe area. Casal di Principe is a small town north of Naples, in the center of the region that produces the delicious buffalomozzarella cheese.

Analysis of the telephone records in Casal di Principe showed that four men in particular had recently been making a lot of international calls. One of these, a certain Pasquale Camera, was particularly interesting, for a check on his background produced the arresting information that he had been a captain in the Guardia di Finanza, Italy's finance and customs police. He was careful not to use his home telephone very much, but the calls that he did make were to Germany, Switzerland, and Sicily.

This early burst of telephone activity didn't last, however, and it seemed that the investigation had stalled. Spring came and went; so did summer. Then, quite by chance, Art Squad headquarters in Piazza Sant'Ignazio received a call from the German police in Munich. The Germans said they had received a request from the Greek police, asking them to raid and search the home of a certain dealer in antiquities who lived in Munich. This man was an Italian named Antonio Savoca, known as
“Nino,” and he was believed to be involved in the illegal traffic of antiquities out of Greece and Cyprus. In view of the fact that Savoca was Italian, the Germans said, were the Carabinieri interested in taking part in the upcoming raid? Colonel Conforti didn't need to be asked twice. He selected two officers, a lieutenant and a marshal, who took the first Alitalia flight to Munich. The raid was scheduled for October 14, 1994.

At the briefing on the morning of that day, twelve people were gathered in Munich police headquarters—two Italians, two Greeks, the rest German. Savoca, they were told, lived in a three-story villa in the Pullah suburb of the city, a prosperous area in the south, wooded and quiet. The villa had been under discreet surveillance for some time, and the raiding party was shown a sketch of the house and its surrounding garden. There was a high hedge, enclosing some mature trees and a well-kept English-style lawn, bordered by flowers. Four people were detailed to surround the house, which left eight to take part in the raid proper. Each of these was given a room to inspect as soon as entry had been effected.

The squad arrived in Pullah at about seven in the morning. The weather was overcast and it was threatening to rain. Savoca's home was on a quiet, dead-end street and had a sloping Mansard roof. All the men were in uniform, which made them appear more intimidating. The villa was quickly surrounded, and the German captain in charge of the operation rang the doorbell. Savoca himself answered. A small, round-faced, dark-skinned man of forty-four, Savoca had spiky hair and was wearing a blue shirt and jeans. (His family originally came from Messina in Sicily, but he had been born in Cernobbio on Lake Como in the far north of Italy.) He was read his rights and told he could telephone a lawyer if he wished, though the police did not have to wait for the lawyer to arrive. He seemed nervous but was relatively calm in comparison with his wife, Doris Seebacher, a small blond from Bolzano. She was furious, which Conforti's men interpreted as an auspicious sign.

There were three other people in the villa besides Savoca and his wife: their two children, and Savoca's mother. She remained with the children while the police searched the rooms. The laws of evidence demanded that Savoca or his wife be with the raiding party at all times.

The search did not begin well. Just inside the front door, to the right, there was a huge study, with a central desk, bookshelves with books, and
below them, a display cabinet with lights and antiquities on display. To the Italians this was no more than normal. People mixed up in the illicit traffic in antiquities often pose as collectors—they keep the loot in properly lit display cases, as a “collector” would, to deflect suspicion. The police spent several minutes tapping the walls and floors and ceilings for hidden compartments but discovered nothing. Beyond the study was a huge kitchen, and beyond that a monumental spiral staircase, made of marble, that led both up and down. They tried downstairs first.

The basement was divided into three sections. The first room they came to was a storeroom, a
magazzino
in Italian, which contained scores of boxes, each containing fragments of antiquities, many with dirt on them, and each carefully classified—“red-figure,” “black-figure,” “Attic,” “Apulian,” and so on. The police found this promising. There were also a few complete objects in this room, vases mainly. The second feature of the basement was a huge laboratory, spotless and laid out like a medical pharmacy, with scientific instruments, lancets, magnifying glasses, jars of chemicals, paints, brushes, and other equipment with which fragile antiquities could be cleaned and restored to their former glory. This was even more promising than the magazzino.

Beyond the laboratory, however, the raiding party was in for a real surprise, something that none of the police there that day had ever come across before—not the Italians, nor the Germans, nor the Greeks who had flown in from Athens. It was a pool. At first glance it looked like a swimming pool. It was five feet deep, more than sixty feet long, and some thirty feet wide. It was lined in tiles, with skimmers to ensure the efficient circulation of water. But this pool wasn't used for swimming. Standing in the water, in rows, like so many giant chess pieces, was a score or more of ancient vases and jars. This was Savoca's way of cleaning the bigger antiquities—they were dipped in the pool, then left for a few days, and the chemicals in the water removed the encrustations and other blemishes that they had acquired down the ages. The police were dumbfounded. This was restoration on an industrial scale. The great majority of the vases were of Italian origin, though there were some from Bulgaria and some from Greece. Next to the pool were a number of plastic vats, containing stronger chemicals used to clean the vases with really difficult encrustations. The smell from the chemicals in the vats was quite strong, and no
one risked putting his fingers in the liquid to reach for the artifacts. Savoca was silent. There was no hiding what the pool room was used for.

For the Carabinieri, however, the pool and its contents were just the first of several surprises that day. Alongside the pool, standing in a neat row next to the vats, and in a very clean state, were three of the magnificent vases stolen from Melfi. They varied from about nine inches to more than two feet high. One showed a naked youth crowned with a diadem and holding a
phiale
(a plate) with sweetmeats on it. Another showed a woman with a crown, dancing and playing an ancient tambourine. A third showed a warrior, in armor, with a shield and spear, relaxing and talking to a maiden. They didn't seem to have been damaged during their journey north across the Alps.

So far as the Italians were concerned, their journey had already been more than worthwhile, but the day and the surprises weren't over. The raiding party climbed back up the marble staircase. Above the ground floor, on the first floor, were the bedrooms, but above them, there was another floor set into the mansard roof, a room with sloping walls. When the raiding party reached this top floor, yet another discovery awaited them. All around the walls there was shelving that, like the floor space in this room, was packed with antiquities—hundred and hundreds of vases and
stelae,
or stone slabs carved with inscriptions. There were bronzes, statues, mosaics. There were frescoes, jewelry, silver. The vast majority of objects were of Italian origin but here, too, there was Bulgarian and Greek material. And in the middle of the room were the remaining Melfi vases.

Also in the middle of the mansard room, next to the Melfi vases, was a small writing desk. On examination, this was found to contain Savoca's personal archive. And what an archive it turned out to be. Savoca had the meticulous—the obsessive—habit of recording every transaction he had ever made
on cards
. These five-by-eight-inch cards contained the name of every object he had acquired, the date of the transaction, the price he had paid,
and the name of the individual he had acquired it from—with their signature
. For the investigators, of course, this was pure gold.

The raiding party spent the rest of the day photographing the contents of Savoca's Pullah villa, and he was told that all those contents were being seized. The Italians identified the Melfi vases as stolen, as well as some others from a town called Scrimbia, another out-of-the-way place in the
deep south of Italy.
^b
But the Italians also spent several hours that afternoon searching the card index archive for the name of the individual who had supplied Savoca with the Melfi vases. At about 4:30 PM, they finally found what they were looking for. The signature was unmistakable, and it was a name they knew: Luigi Coppola. There were two things that Conforti's men already knew about Coppola, in addition to his name. First, he came from Casal di Principe. Second, he was a capo zona who worked alongside the man whose phone they had been tapping, Pasquale Camera.

Back in Casal di Principe, the surveillance of Camera was stepped up, and Coppola was added to the phone-tap list. But as often happens in investigations, the breakthrough in Munich did not prove anywhere near as fruitful as it had promised to be at the time. Camera was still tight-lipped on the few occasions when he did use his home phone, and Christmas came and went without any further advances. Early in 1995, following a certain amount of legal wrangling, the Melfi vases were returned and there was an elaborate ceremony to mark the occasion, attended by the local mayor, the local MPs, the local police chief, and Conforti. Luigi Maschito briefly became a minor celebrity in his hometown all over again, photographed by the local paper.

The phone taps at Casal di Principe were left in place, but nothing much was revealed, nothing that would enable Conforti to act. Once again the investigation appeared to have stalled. Spring passed and summer arrived. Half of Conforti's men were on vacation when fate intervened.

Pasquale Camera was a big man, weighing in at a little under 400 pounds, and as this suggests, he liked his food and he liked his drink. On August 31, a Thursday, he took his lunch at Luciano's Restaurant in Santa Maria di Capua Vetere, a small town north of Naples and very near Casal
di Principe. He then set out on the A1, the Autostrada del Sole, Italy's main north-south freeway, to drive to Rome.

The Carabinieri didn't follow him. They knew where he was headed—his apartment in Rome—and there was no need. Following people can be costly in terms of manpower and risky when using cars. Conforti had also learned long ago, when he was head of the investigative unit in Naples, that cars can be a giveaway. It happened the hard way when, one morning, he arrived at the scene of a crime, in plainclothes and in what he thought was an unmarked car, only to have someone approach him and say, “Ah, you came with the 820!” He didn't know what the man meant until he noticed that those were the last three digits of the license plate. Thereafter, in the Art Squad, Conforti only used rented cars for tailing jobs—from Hertz, Avis, Europcar—anonymous models that were changed every day. In undercover “sting” operations, he would rent more expensive models—a Mercedes, for example—when having his men pose as wealthy collectors. This helped them to look the part.