The Medici Conspiracy (62 page)

They brought the statue ashore secretly and put out feelers among the antiquities underworld, looking for a buyer. Unfortunately for them, they approached the wrong people. When they met the middlemen with whom they thought they had arranged a sale, they were held up at gunpoint and forced to give up the statue—for nothing.

Subsequently, the bronze was hidden under boxes of grapes in a fruit truck and driven north to Germany. (These details were pieced together later by Christos Kotlidas, who was serving in the Greek Art Squad at the time.) The statue changed hands before its journey across Yugoslavia so that it was several weeks before it arrived at the town of Saarbrücken, in Saarland, on the border with France and Luxembourg. The Greek smugglers then contacted the Austrian archaeologist-turned-dealer Christoph Leon, who was operating out of Basel in Switzerland (see pp. 199–200 and 287–289 for Leon's other activities).

Nothing more was heard for several months, not until George Tzallas, the acting chief of the police department that investigates illicit antiquities, received a tip-off. It was May 21, 1998, and Tzallas learned from his informant that Christoph Leon was about to sell the bronze statue to Marion True. True, he was told, was offering $7 million on behalf of the Getty Museum, though there was believed to be another customer in the wings, a Japanese individual who had offered $6 million. Tzallas was told by his informant that Dr. True had viewed the statue “lying on a carpet at Leon's house.”

Tzallas and Kotlidas immediately left for Germany, where they managed to persuade the Saarbrücken police to help them raid a hotel room occupied by a Greek immigrant, Michael Kotsarides. There was nothing incriminating in the room but, in the open-air parking lot of the hotel, they found his car, and, in the trunk, a wooden crate. Across the crate were stenciled the words, in English, “FOR EXPORT TO USA.” Inside, when they opened it, were 115 small archaeological items of ancient Greek origin, 312 ancient coins—and the bronze boy from Preveza.

So far, so good. The follow-up to the raid, however, was—to say the least—unsatisfactory. The Greek government never at any point asked for a statement from either Christoph Leon or Marion True. But, at the request of the German police, the FBI did question Dr. True. According to this report, she confirmed that she had indeed “seen the statue, displayed on a carpet in Leon's residence, but turned down the sale when she realized he was acting on behalf of a third party. Having serious doubts concerning the
legal status of Leon's dealings, she became suspicious as to the artwork's provenance. She never went so far as to make an offer, refusing to buy it.”

Interpol sent the FBI report to the Germans, who passed it on to the Greeks, adding a note of their own: “Please inform us if further investigations are deemed necessary.” They never got an answer from Athens.

Nonetheless, Kotsarides was extradited from Germany, tried, convicted, and sentenced to twelve years in prison. The statue of the youth was repatriated in 1998, restored at the National Archaeological Museum of Greece, and went on public display for the first time in an exhibition helping to celebrate the Olympic Games in Athens in the summer of 2004.

So the bronze boy did not get away. A very different story, also involving Marion True and Christoph Leon, had its beginning elsewhere in Germany in February 1992. On the twentieth of that month, the small “OHM” Gallery in Munich was packed with people. It was the opening night, the “
vernissage
,” of an exhibition by a promising young Greek painter, Athanassios Seliachas. The son of an Orthodox priest, “Celia,” as he was known in artistic circles, had finally managed to hold his first one-man show.

During the evening, and when his mind was obviously on other things, Celia was approached by three strangers—two Greeks and a Serb, people who appeared to have invited themselves to his show. Fourteen years later, he described what happened next.

Apparently, Leon was willing to buy the wreath but the amount he offered—200,000 marks, according to Tzallas—was much too low. Celia continued:

Marion True was sent photos of the wreath that depicted it in the condition it was found. “I have kept copies of these photographs to this day,” Seliachas said. And he showed them to me.

It appears, on this account, and in view of what happened later, that True would not buy from strangers. Did she prefer the security of trading with an established name, an intermediary who could distance her and the museum from the smugglers and/or the tomb robbers? At any rate, the two Greeks and the Serb went back to Christoph Leon who this time doubled his initial offer—to 400,000 marks.

What happened next isn't clear but we do know that Marion True traveled to Switzerland to inspect the wreath, where it was being held in the vault of an unknown bank in Zurich. She saw the wreath in the company of Leon and the Serbian member of the trio who had approached Seliachas. He showed these photographs to me.

Nothing was settled then. True returned to Malibu and wrote to Leon that she refused to buy the golden wreath. Yet the wreath was to prove overpoweringly enticing. Six months later, True changed her mind and decided to propose the wreath's acquisition.

Before she could do that, however, there were certain preliminaries to be complied with. In March 1993, the Getty formally notified the Greek and the Italian authorities of the museum's intention to acquire
two objects, a golden wreath and an incomplete archaic kore. They sent photocopies of photographs of both pieces.

The Greek Ministry of Culture responded, saying that it disagreed with the museum's intention to acquire the two artifacts since, in its view, they could only have originated in an illicit excavation. But it added that it was unable to provide any specific details to expand and support its claim. For Greek archaeologists, it was obvious—as it had been obvious to Daniela Rizzo, Gilda Bartoloni, and other Italian archaeologists in regard to
their
antiquities—that such an important and beautiful object, had it been legally excavated, would have been widely published and known to everyone. It followed that the two acquisitions the Getty was planning to make must be dubious.

The Greek Ministry's logic was not enough. On June 10, 1993, the Getty formally acquired the wreath, for $1,150,000 (paid to Christoph Leon), and the Kore, for $3,300,000 (paid to Robin Symes). In the curator's report, prepared for the proposed acquisitions, under the heading referring to provenance, it was written that “the dealer will provide the standard warranties concerning title, export, and import in accordance with the antiquities acquisition policy of the J. P. Getty Museum.” Leon was listed as the seller, the previous owner as a “Swiss Collector,” and Switzerland was shown as the country of origin. In the warranty it was specifically stated by Leon that “the object was legally exported from its country of origin.”

The Getty must have thought it was home-free—nothing happened for four years. Then, toward the end of 1997, Greek Interpol received, from the German police, a file of documents which showed that Greek looters—immigrant workers in Germany—had smuggled the gold wreath out of Greece into Germany and had contacted True and Leon through Athanassios Seliachas (the painter), a permanent Greek resident in Munich. The documents included a signed affidavit that Seliachas had made to the German authorities.

Early in the new year, 1998, the Greek Art Squad asked the Ministry of Culture for help in following up the investigation but the culture ministry vetoed the initiative, confirming in a confidential memorandum (I have a copy of it) that it was then engaged in diplomatic moves with the Getty aimed at securing the return of the wreath. So the police were stood down. The so-called diplomatic initiative, however, never went anywhere and, after a few years, ran into the sand. Diplomacy was tried anew every so
often but, by 2005, the wreath and the kore were still in Los Angeles.

In October of that year, an officer of the Greek police, now retired, gave me copies of a set of documents with Seliachas' testimony and the golden wreath case file. Using these documents as a basis, I published a story on the wreath in
Epsilon
magazine.

Meanwhile, without my knowing it, there was a new special prosecutor in the headquarters of the Athens magistrates who read the article and decided to investigate the case. This man, Ioannis Diotis, was in many ways a parallel figure to Paolo Ferri in Italy. He had worked on some very tough cases. In particular, he had served many years in the antiterrorist department and was the man responsible for solving the case of the radical, leftist Greek terrorist group, “November 17,” or “17N,” as it was known. (The last victim of “17N” was Brigadier Stephen Saunders, defense attaché at the British Embassy in Athens, shot dead on his way to work in June 2000.)

Diotis, fifty-two years old, with a thick gray moustache and a strong voice, was an admirer of Giovanni Falcone, the Sicilian magistrate who was blown up by the mafia in 1992. Diotis began to look into the case of the golden wreath and it was he who realized that the Greek situation paralleled to an extent the situation in Italy—which was making news just then because, a few months before, in May 2005, the verdict against Medici was handed down. Diotis's office was on the second floor of a hundred-year-old neo-classical building inside the compound of the Athens law courts. He began burning the midnight oil, catching up with all the documents that the Greek art squad had amassed in their files.

His first move was to meet Ferri. He and Gligoris traveled to Rome together in January 2006. For four hours they compared notes and exchanged information—about True, Hecht, Medici, Symes, and Christo Michaelides. And they decided to move forward on a cooperative basis. Two months later Gligoris decided to raid Marion True's house at Glyssidia on Paros, in which those eighteen antiquities were found and confiscated. But that is not all they found.

The Greek police are old-fashioned. They rely very little on the surveillance technology the Italians use so much, but get most of their information from “sources” and tip-offs. And, during their raid on Paros, they were approached by a local informer who had something interesting to say about a nearby island and a family who had a vacation home there. The island was called Schinoussa and the family were the Papadimitrious. The
informer said he had seen many antiquities “scattered around the yard” of the Papdimitirous' house.

Back in Athens, after “Operation Eclipse,” Gligoris moved swiftly. His first move was to check whether any of the Papadimitriou family was legally registered as a collector of antiquities. They were not. So it seemed to Gligoris that a visit to the island might be timely.