[CPProt.net] Getty trial spotlights Italy tomb raiders

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Getty trial spotlights Italy tomb raiders
Wed Dec 7, 2005 8:07 PM ET

By Rachel Sanderson

ARPI, Italy (Reuters) - Say 'tomb raider' to Francesco Racano and he doesn't
think of a Hollywood action movie hero. He fights the real thing.

The 51-year-old archaeologist has worked for more than half his life at
Arpi, a sprawling Greco-Roman necropolis in Italy's deep south that is
bigger than most small villages.

Arpi has the kind of embarrassment of riches few countries can boast --
hundreds of tombs buried close to the surface and brimming with treasures.

But Racano rarely gets to discover these riches. By the time he reaches many
of the graves, they have been ransacked.

"This is one of the most brutalized digs in Italy. The tomb raiders are here
almost every day," he said, looking across the arid site in the Puglia
region in Italy's heel.

"For every 90 holes we dig, they dig 300."

Tomb raiding is an ancient crime in Italy and it has gone largely unchecked
for centuries. Sites like Arpi have become giant lucky dips for criminal
gangs who steal its gold, alabaster and vases for well-heeled collectors and
dealers.

The trial in Rome of a former leading U.S. museum curator has revealed
archaeology's dark underbelly to the wider world.

Marion True has appeared once in the dock in Rome, accused of buying and
knowingly receiving dozens of looted Italian antiquities to embellish one of
the world's richest art institutions, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los
Angeles.

She denies the charges.

Italy says the plague is widespread and has released what it says is photo
evidence linking more U.S. museums to stolen art, among them New York's
Metropolitan Museum of Art, unearthing a trail of deception and pillage that
leads back to Arpi.

DAWN RAIDERS

Racano says that when he arrives for work at 8 a.m. he can see the tomb
raiders leaving. They usually return around 4 p.m., at the end of his shift:
as many as eight gangs of four people with steel spikes, cables and metal
detectors.

Sometimes he sees them crouched among the vineyards that ring Arpi, a site
10 km (6 miles) in diameter and pocked with holes from legal and illegal
digs.

Under a 1939 Italian law, ancient artifacts from digs belong to the state.
Antiquities excavated after 1939 can only leave the country on loan.

But proof that the law hasn't stopped the raiders is everywhere in Arpi.

One 3rd century B.C. column lies splintered across a tomb entrance. Racano
says thieves brought a crane at night to tear it from its base, but they
botched the job and smashed it.

Frescoes are popular among wealthy homeowners and robbers are reopening
tombs long emptied of their other contents and stripping them off the walls
in chunks.

"The great shame is Americans will buy anything," Racano said.

Art experts say the international trade in stolen antiquities is worth
billions of dollars every year and that the buying practices of many
museums, particularly in the United States, are highly questionable.

Italy and France are two top targets for looters and traffickers, accounting
for more than 12,000 stolen pieces of art every year.

A slight man with wire-rimmed spectacles, Racano carries his mobile phone in
a holster by his hip. He sometimes stays behind after work, hiding in his
car, ready to draw the phone like a revolver to call the police when the
gangs start digging.

But he has to be careful.

"I wouldn't be alive if they saw me," he said.

"The farmers once called the police. But the tomb raiders found out and they
burned their crops. They didn't call again."

Paolo Giorgio Ferri, the Rome magistrate prosecuting Marion True, calls Arpi
"Italy's great shame".

He says a middleman organizes the gangs that mostly come from a run-down
town on the outskirts of Foggia, one of the few industrial cities in a
region of olive groves and vineyards.

Ferri, Racano and local police -- who in October arrested two men plundering
a tomb -- say the robbing began decades ago when many southerners were
hungry and needed money for food.

MAFIA LOOT

But organized crime, not poverty, is now the driving force.

Italy's art and antiquities police says it monitors Mafia networks in looted
antiquities leaving Europe and the Middle East, especially Iraq, bound for
the United States.

"We have 6,000 open archaeological sites in Italy," said General Ugo Zottin,
head of the corps. "How can we protect all of them? We can't. It's
impossible."

Inside the Medusa tomb, Arpi's largest, it is damp and difficult to see. The
greatest damage done to the 3rd to 4th century B.C. tomb are two large holes
where raiders kicked in the ceiling to lower themselves down.

Racano says each tomb at Arpi had an average of 30 art works, treasures left
as gifts for the dead. The Medusa tomb had more than 90 art works but now
most are mere memories.

Racano's children, a teenage girl and boy, don't want to follow in his
footsteps. They don't see the point.

"You have to have passion for this," he said. "It can't be just a job.
Otherwise how would you go on?"

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