The Medici Conspiracy (57 page)

On Robin Symes: The judge found that Symes initially lied, trying to support Medici's “line of defense,” but when faced with the Polaroid photographs, “Symes ended up by admitting some facts” and indicated as coming from Medici objects dealt with through Hecht and Fleischman.

On Wolf Dieter Heilmeyer: The evidence from Berlin, Muntoni concluded, confirmed the existence of the “criminal sodality,” or cordata, between Hecht, Medici, and Symes, and that the Leon-Chamay-Cottier version of events was “pure fantasy,” that the vases were restored “under Medici's watchful eye.”

On Marion True: The judge thought that she had covered up her own
responsibilities in these matters but had confirmed the cordata: Hecht-Bürki-Medici-Symes, and of several triangulations in connection with von Bothmer and Robert Guy, and in connection with the Hunt and Tempelsman Collections and with the Getty Museum.

Given all this, given all these uncompromising and definitive statements from Judge Muntoni and all his pithy comments and asides, showing that he had not been taken in for a moment, it came as no surprise that at the end of a massive 659-page judgment, delivered on May 12, 2005, he found Giacomo Medici guilty of the following charges: illegal export (smuggling), receiving stolen goods, and, most seriously, conspiracy. For these offenses, Muntoni sentenced Medici to ten years in prison (equivalent to fifteen years, had he not chosen the
rito abbreviato
), ordered the forfeiture of nearly all the antiquities in his possession, fined him 16,000 Euros, plus 10 million Euros as restitution of damages to the Ministry of Culture, towards payment of which his villa at Santa Marinella (the large one, with the G-shaped window, not the seaside one) and his Maserati were seized, plus another 16,000 Euros as reimbursement of legal expenses for the Civil Plaintiff (the Ministry). Medici's passport was impounded, together with other travel documents, and he was forbidden to leave the country. The judge also announced a list of Medici's objects that were to be confiscated and returned to Italy. These included objects that he was acquitted of smuggling but were seized to help offset the 10 million euros ($12 million) damages.

This was by far the heaviest punishment ever handed out in Italy to someone involved in the clandestine trade of illicit antiquities trading. As he was entitled, under the Italian system, Medici appealed. This appeal had not been heard as this book went to press.

T
HE YEAR 2007, like 2006, represents the high point of Conforti's and Ferri's achievement. Marion True and Robert Hecht are on trial in Rome, and all the world is watching. Medici's appeal will be heard and a definitive verdict obtained. But that is not all. In parallel with these events, Prosecutor Ferri is preparing to initiate proceedings against the central figure in the rival cordata—Gianfranco Becchina. And so, after ten long years since the theft at Melfi, since Operation Geryon, since the discovery of the organigram, the three figures at the top of that extraordinary piece of paper—Robert Hecht, Giacomo Medici, and Gianfranco Becchina—are all facing the music.

The trial of Marion True and Robert Hecht began on Wednesday, November 16, 2005, and is expected to last for at least two years—owing to the practice in Italy of limiting court appearances to one or two days a month.

As the trial date approached, stories began to leak out from the Getty Museum itself that were unlikely to have been helpful to Marion True. Most of these leaks came out via the
Los Angeles Times
, where two reporters—Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino—had been working on the turbulence at the Getty since the spring. Felch had earlier worked on money laundering and political corruption, and Frammolino had exposed a scam at the L.A. County Morgue (involving the removal and sale of eye tissue from cadavers). The reporters began by looking at the troubled tenure of Getty CEO Barry Munitz, who was later forced to resign. In the course of their investigations, they were leaked more than a thousand
pages of internal Getty documents that provided the basis for several stories over the following weeks and months. As a Getty spokesperson bluntly noted, these documents had been stolen. The thrust of the leaked documents fell into three categories. In the first place, they showed that, if anything, the situation inside the Getty was even worse than Ferri and Conforti had feared. The documents appeared to show that the museum was aware as early as 1985 that three of its principal suppliers—Hecht, Medici, and Symes—were selling objects that had almost certainly been looted, yet the Getty did nothing about it. There was one note from Hecht, in his handwriting, beginning “Dear Marion,” which read: “Yesterday my friend called me and said that since the carabinieri were looking for the pelike with the arms of Achilles he abandoned negotiations. So I will not have it. Perhaps others may acquire it. Sorry.” Then there was a memo written by John Walsh, relating to a meeting held in September 1987 and attended by Harold Williams, then chief executive of the museum, and Marion True, which was headed, “ANTIQUITIES ETHICS.” Walsh said it was a note of a meeting to consider ethical questions and only considered the problem hypothetically. Nonetheless, his memo contained the lines:

Whether this is as bad as it looks is hard to say, but in any case it paled in comparison to a third document, a long, tightly spaced three-page memo marked “Confidential” and written in October 1985 by antiquities curator Arthur Houghton and addressed to the Getty's deputy director, Deborah Gribbon. Houghton had been asked to comment on an article Cornelius Vermeule had prepared on three objects in the museum that had been acquired from Maurice Tempelsman—a statue of Apollo, a ceremonial table with griffins, and a votive basin.
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Houghton wasn't too impressed with Vermeule's article, which considered whether the three objects had been made or assembled as a cohesive group. As Houghton saw it, this question could only be settled, not on grounds of
connoisseurship but by going back through the chain of individuals who had possessed it. This he had done. His third paragraph read:

Ironically, less than a year later, Houghton resigned from the museum because he thought it was burying its head in the sand as far as illicit antiquities were concerned, not properly addressing the problems. It was Houghton who had been the person at the Getty who discovered that the Lebanese export licenses for the Sevso silver were forged. He seems to have suffered a change of heart around this time and was unable to stomach what was happening in the antiquities underworld. His resignation letter, which we have seen but were not allowed to copy, was strongly worded.

The documents leaked to Felch and Frammolino also showed that the Getty's questionable acquisitions may have been even more extensive than Ferri knew. An internal review of the documentation in connection with its holdings established that as many as half of the museum's antiquities masterpieces are of dubious origin. One case cited concerned a gold Greek funerary wreath. An Interpol cable had been turned up in the Getty files indicating that the wreath had been looted and another in which True
expressed misgivings when it was first offered to the museum in 1992. During a trip to Switzerland that year, however, True arranged to view the wreath and meet its owner. For some reason, she determined that the man she did meet was an “impostor” and the prospective deal was canceled. “I am afraid that in our case it is something that is too dangerous for us to be involved with,” True wrote in June 1992, to Christoph Leon, the Basel dealer who was acting as an intermediary.

Six months later, she appeared to change her mind. She asked to borrow the wreath from Leon for study, then won approval from the Getty board to buy it for $1.15 million in 1993. In 1998, Interpol sent a query to the FBI, asking the agency to interview True about her relationship with Leon, among other things. Leon declined to comment beyond confirming that he was the intermediary.

The paperwork revealed an internal note arguing that the documentation that had been turned up by the review, though “troublesome,” did not need to be handed over to Ferri “because [the] Italian authorities had not specifically asked for them.” The author of the note concluded: “We should point out that, while these letters are troublesome, none of them amounts to proof of Dr. True's knowledge that a particular item was illegally excavated or demonstrates her intent to join the conspiracy.”

This of course takes us back to that moment when Richard Martin, the Getty's attorney, arrived at Ferri's office with a bundle of documents under his arm.
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By volunteering documents, as noted earlier, the Getty did not need to provide all relevant papers, which would have been mandatory had the letters rogatory gone through. Ferri had been right to be wary of the American tactics.

Nevertheless, the Getty stood by Marion True and said that in her upcoming trial, they expected her to be exonerated. Not long after, she resigned her position as curator in the Antiquities Department. This was especially hard, for in January 2006, the original Getty Museum—the one in Malibu based on the replica of the Villa dei Papiri—was scheduled to reopen after several years; it had been closed for a $275-million renovation, redesigned specifically to represent its antiquities—including the Fleischman Collection—in more suitable surroundings.

Dr. True explained that her resignation was not directly related to the leaked documents but was because it was revealed that she had bought a vacation home in the Greek islands after Christo Michaelides—Robin Symes's Greek partner—had arranged a loan of nearly $400,000. This was in violation of the museum's ethical policy, though the museum had been aware of the loan for three years without taking any action. The museum set up a committee to examine True's behavior.