[CPProt.net] Antiquities trade story (A WEB OF DEALS. Murky World of Antiquities Trade)

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From: Felch, Jason [mailto:Jason.Felch at latimes.com] 
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Subject: Antiquities trade story


http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-dealers28dec28,1,7406923,full.story?
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A WEB OF DEALS. Murky World of Antiquities Trade
Three men once dominated the hugely profitable commerce in ancient art.
Records detail elaborate schemes they allegedly used to sell looted goods.
By Ralph Frammolino and Jason Felch, Times Staff Writers

One was an Italian who got his start peddling trinkets on the streets of
Rome. Another was an American expatriate who could close a deal for a Greek
vase in six languages. The third was a flashy British dealer whose eye for
ancient art dazzled the world's wealthiest clients.

For 40 years, these men dominated the trade in Greek, Roman and Etruscan
antiquities. Italian authorities say they were also "promoters and
organizers" of a network that spirited looted art out of the Mediterranean
and into display cases of leading museums and private collections worldwide.
For 10 years, the Italians have focused on the trio - largely unknown
outside their niche market - as they have built a criminal case that
eventually ensnared one of the men's biggest customers, Marion True, until
this fall the curator of antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum.

Court records detailing that investigation, along with internal Getty
documents and rare interviews with all three dealers, provide a clear look
at the inner workings of a $4-billion-a-year illicit trade that floods the
antiquities market.

The men - Giacomo Medici, Robert E. Hecht Jr. and Robin Symes - acquired
items that had been illegally removed from Italian tombs and used fake
ownership histories, rigged auctions and relied on frontmen to sell the
objects with a veneer of legitimacy, according to the records and
interviews.

Much of the classical ancient art sold in recent decades is believed to have
passed through their hands. Italians say they have traced more than a
hundred looted artifacts handled by the dealers to the Getty, the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and a dozen other major museums and
private collections in the U.S., Europe and Asia.

Medici was convicted last year of trafficking in looted art, and described
in his sentencing documents as being the mastermind of Italy's trade in
looted antiquities. Hecht, an American now on trial with True in Rome, is
accused of being Medici's partner and middleman.

Symes, a Briton, is identified in court records as the trio's frontman to
high-end clients. Italian authorities say they plan to bring charges against
him next year.

Italian prosecutors argue that Medici, Hecht and Symes controlled enough of
the trade to drive up prices, in part by selling to each other at auction
and sharing the inflated profits when objects were resold.

The prosecutors allege that True conspired with them to acquire illegally
excavated artifacts for the Getty. Museum officials have said they never
knowingly bought looted artworks. True's attorneys maintain that she is
innocent, but say some of the art she acquired may have been looted without
her knowing.

In lengthy interviews, each dealer boasted of his role in the antiquities
trade but denied trafficking in looted art and scoffed at the notion of a
conspiracy.

"That's ridiculous," said Hecht over lunch near his New York apartment. "I
bought from Medici, and other people bought from Medici too. I sold a couple
objects to Robin Symes. So what?"

"We're all basically competitors," he added.

Today, in part because of the Italian investigation, all three have fallen
from prominence.

Symes is bankrupt and was recently released from a London prison, where he
served seven months for an unrelated offense. Hecht continues to sell but is
on trial in Rome and busy preparing his defense. Medici's business was taken
over by competitors during his investigation and trial.


The Wholesaler

Though he claims no blood link to the famous Renaissance dynasty of art
patrons, Medici doesn't shy away from the comparison.

"I've never found out if I'm related, but I feel duty-bound to defend this
family's name," he said.

At 67, he does so with the vigor of youth.

During an interview in the lobby of a Rome hotel, the dealer spoke
unflaggingly about the injustices of the Italian judiciary, sweat pouring
from his brow as his hands sketched his defense in the air.

Italian prosecutors described Medici in court documents as a criminal
mastermind who managed "a constant flow" of illegally excavated antiquities
that were then "smuggled and distributed among the museums and collectors
around the world."

"Everyone knew that Giacomo Medici was the boss of the bosses," Pietro
Casasanta, a self-described tomb raider, told Italian authorities during
their investigation. "Medici was head of the whole trafficking operation. He
was like a commander in chief both in Italy and abroad."

The foot soldiers in the underground antiquities trade are tombaroli like
Casasanta, who specialized in excavating Roman temples across northern
Italy. The tombaroli fan out at night and use shovels, backhoes, even radar,
to excavate the tombs that honeycomb Italy's countryside.

Medici's contacts with the tombaroli allowed him to buy almost everything
dug up in northern Italy, and he kept competitors at bay by turning them in
to Italian art police, Casasanta told Italian officials. Medici's eventual
partnership with Hecht made the two the "pinnacles of international
archeological trafficking since the early 1960s," according to Italian court
records.

Medici dismissed Casasanta's statements as an attempt to win leniency.

"To accuse someone, you have to create a monster, and in 2001, [Italian
prosecutors] built a monster," he said. "All the world trade now accuses
Giacomo Medici of being the monster. But where is the proof that I am that
monster?"

Medici grew up surrounded by antiquities. His father and mother owned a
kiosk in Rome's Piazza Borghese, for decades a market for old books and
prints, and sold small archeological finds to tourists.

Medici worked at the shop as a boy but had his eye on a bigger future,
according to Hecht's handwritten memoir of his decades in the antiquities
trade. The journal - seized by Italian authorities in 2001 - is a major
piece of evidence in Medici's trial. Court documents in Medici's trial quote
extensively from the memoir.

"GM was more ambitious and, having bought a secondhand Fiat 500 for $400,
rose early each morning and toured the villages of Etruscia visiting all the
clandestine diggers," Hecht wrote, using the ancient name for the
antiquities-rich region north of Rome.

Medici became aware of the trade's pitfalls in 1963, when at 25, he had what
he calls "a little incident" involving some Etruscan vases he was selling.
He was convicted of smuggling and said he spent three months in jail.

After several years running his own shop in Rome, Medici moved his business
in the mid-1970s across the border to Geneva, where he set up shop in a
warehouse in the Swiss city's duty-free zone.

"At that time the antiquities market was flourishing," Medici said in the
interview. "I had a thought, an intuition, that it was a favorable moment."

He attributes his subsequent success to his eye for quality and his
"bravery" at auctions.

"I'm not full of myself, but I know the quality of the objects," Medici
said. "I know the objects that would be of interest to museums."

His peers and competitors in the trade - most of whom deny doing business
with him - agree.

Medici recalls making a name for himself in the auction houses of Europe,
describing one of the times he outbid some of the heavyweights of the art
world.

"I was the big player at this auction, and I got a lot of attention because
an unknown dealer had beat the Met and the Getty," he recalled.

According to records of his conviction, however, Medici was often buying
from himself.

He would put antiquities up for auction through shell companies, Italian
authorities say. Then he would enter the bidding, drive up the prices and
acquire his own objects. Having established an inflated market value for the
items, he could resell them at considerable profit, according to the
Italians, who have evidence that he did this with 900 objects.

Italian authorities say the scheme had another benefit: laundering looted
art. At the time, an auction house's stamp of approval was widely seen as
proof that the object had a legitimate ownership history, or provenance, and
had not recently been dug out of the ground. If he was ever questioned,
Medici could point to the auction catalog as evidence of an object's value
and pedigree.

When Swiss and Italian police raided his warehouse in 1995, they found a
wealth of ancient art, some of it still bearing tags from Sotheby's.

Roughly stacked on the floor and filling the room's felt-lined bookshelves
were ancient pots, bronze figurines, marble statuary, and mosaics, about
4,000 objects in all. In front of Medici's desk sat several ornate marble
capstones from ancient Roman columns. They served as stools for customers.

Sotheby's shut down its London antiquities sales in 1997 after an
investigation by British journalist Peter Watson alleged that the auction
house had accepted hundreds of looted antiquities from a frontman for Medici
while suspecting their illicit origin.

Medici also advanced his own interests by disparaging his competitors'
products.

In 1986, the Getty paid one of Medici's principal rivals, Gianfranco
Becchina, nearly $10 million for what is widely believed to be a fake
kouros, a statue of a Greek warrior. Becchina, an Italian dealer based in
Basel, Switzerland, had long been a major supplier of the Getty's. The
relationship had kept Medici from doing more business with the museum, then
one of the world's biggest buyers of antiquities.

Medici was so enraged by Becchina's success that he commissioned a second
fake - similar to the Getty's but smaller - to discredit Becchina's kouros,
True told Italian authorities in a 2001 deposition.

When word spread that a second kouros had appeared bearing the same "unique"
features as the Getty's, it was widely believed that the museum had been
duped. The Getty now describes its kouros as dating to "circa 520 BC or
modern forgery." 

The Getty rarely did business with Becchina again.

"One of the things I have learned in this market is that the dealers can be
incredibly vicious," True told Italian authorities.

Today, Medici lives an hour north of Rome in a sprawling villa, a temple of
Mediterranean kitsch and a testament to his success. Located a short drive
from one of Italy's most notorious looting sites, the Etruscan necropolis of
Cerveteri, the seven-hectare compound is painted with faux frescoes and
Doric columns. A high wall surrounding the estate hides its 15 horses, 120
palms and 280 olive trees.

But for all his savvy and success, Medici, as an Italian said to have close
ties to looters, could never get direct access to high-end clients, who
worried about appearances.

He needed a partner.

'Mr. Percentage'

Medici met Robert Hecht in 1968, when the two sat in Hecht's car - parked in
front of Rome's Palace of Justice - and admired a red figured kylix, or
drinking cup, that Medici had recently purchased.

In his unpublished memoir, Hecht writes that Medici had bought the cup for
$2,400 from "the squad," an apparent reference to looters. In the car that
day, Hecht said, he offered Medici $3,500.

"He jumped for joy and said 'yes.' ... GM soon became a faithful purveyor,"
wrote Hecht, who has since repudiated his own account, saying he fabricated
it to sell the memoir to a publisher.

Today, it is hard to recognize the swashbuckling dealer described by one
former Getty official as a legend of the antiquities trade, "an intellect
and adventurer at the same time."

At a recent meeting, the shrunken 87-year-old shuffled out of his apartment
on Manhattan's Upper East Side, his head bowed under its own weight. But a
spry smile suggested that the sharp intellect was intact.

Besides English, Hecht speaks fluent German, French and Italian and "can
also order a meal or swing a deal in Turkish or Greek," he said. He is fond
of answering questions by quoting Tennyson or Gilbert and Sullivan.

But those who have done business with him speak of a harder side.

"Hecht was a menace to all, since he knew a lot about all the different
traders, and it was common knowledge that he had been writing a book since
the '80s," Freida Tchakos Nussberger, a Swiss antiquities dealer, told
Italian investigators. "He even attempted, often successfully, to photograph
different characters while holding some compromising pieces."

Hecht earned the nickname "Mr. Percentage" because he always took a cut when
connecting sellers to buyers, Nussberger said.

For a man who has dropped thousands on a rare coin and sold Greek vases
valued in the millions, Hecht is known by his colleagues to be perennially
broke.

"We're all not Gettys," he said. "Sometimes you make purchases of objects
you don't sell, and you have no cash."

True offered another explanation in her deposition, describing Hecht as "a
compulsive gambler and a serious alcoholic."

He could be "charming, very, very intelligent, but he could also turn, be
very hostile, very sarcastic, very sinister," she said.

"I don't drink any more wine than she does," Hecht retorted over lunch at an
Italian restaurant. "Gambler? In my club we play backgammon for small
stakes."

Of True, once his friend, now his co-defendant, he said, "She doesn't live
up to her name."

When not preparing for his Rome trial, he said, he still occasionally sells
art and coins, the twilight of a career that has lasted more than 50 years.

An heir to the fortune of the Washington, D.C.-area department store chain
that bears his family name, Hecht served in the Navy Reserve in World War
II.

After the war, he said, he briefly investigated war crimes in Germany before
accepting a scholarship to study classics and archeology at the American
Academy in Rome.

It was while there that he first excavated Roman and Etruscan ruins. By the
time his two-year term ended in 1949, he was already buying ancient art.

"I lived in Rome and enjoyed life, buying and selling antiquities," Hecht
recalled. "The thing is, I love objects. Since I couldn't afford to keep
every object, I bought and sold."

He stayed in Italy until the mid-1970s. Curators and dealers tell of seeing
Hecht in markets in such cities as Istanbul and Beirut, prowling for ancient
coins, his passion.

In 1962, on a Turkish flight from Izmir to Istanbul, a stewardess saw him
examining newly purchased ancient coins. Waiting for him when the plane
landed were Turkish authorities, who believed he intended to smuggle the
coins out of the country. Hecht was barred from reentering Turkey until
1980.

He was also caught up in an Italian bust of antiquities dealers accused of
trafficking in looted art in the early 1960s, but the highest court in Italy
eventually exonerated him for lack of conclusive evidence.

By that time, Hecht had become entangled in another scandal: his 1972 sale
to the Met of the Euphronios krater, an ancient bowl considered a
masterpiece of Greek pottery and widely believed to have been looted.

Suspicions that the bowl had been illegally excavated and exported were
never proved in legal proceedings in New York and Rome. Still, the scandal
led Hecht to relocate to Paris, which has been his primary residence.

He has since stayed largely in the shadows of the trade, relying on a string
of business partners to represent him.

His most faithful is Fritz Burki, a former janitor who took an interest in
antiquities conservation as he swept the classroom of an archeology
professor at the University of Zurich, court records show.

Burki eventually became a full-time restorer, working mostly for Hecht,
whose pottery shards he would carefully reassemble like pieces of an ancient
puzzle. It was in the garden of Burki's home that Met officials first saw
the Euphronios krater in an early stage of restoration.

Burki was often identified in museum purchase records as the owner of
objects sold by Hecht. When questioned by Italian authorities, Burki
admitted that he had acted as a "straw man" for Medici and Hecht in sales of
looted art.

Another of Hecht's partners was Bruce McNall, a Los Angeles entrepreneur and
passionate coin collector who owned the Summa Gallery on Rodeo Drive. In the
1980s, they sold to wealthy collectors, with Hecht supplying the antiquities
and McNall securing the capital, court records show.

When the partnership eventually fell apart, Hecht found another partner,
Jonathan Rosen, who owned Atlantis Antiquities in New York. McNall went on
to acquire the Los Angeles Kings hockey team, produce Hollywood movies and
serve four years in federal prison for his role in a $236-million bank
fraud.

Italian authorities allege that Hecht also conspired with other dealers in a
scheme to drive up the price of vase fragments. The dealers would distribute
the fragments of an important vase among themselves - at times by breaking
up an intact vase, the Italians say.

After one dealer donated a "seed" fragment to a museum's curator, other
dealers would approach the curator with a matching piece, authorities say.
Because the curators were desperate to complete objects in their
collections, each fragment became more valuable than the last.

True told Italian prosecutors she also had concluded that dealers were
working together to extract higher and higher prices for matching fragments.

The fragments she was being sold had sharp edges that fit neatly with other
fragments being sold, not the worn edges one would expect from an ancient
fracture, she said.

"I came to realize we were being blackmailed," she said. "Clearly the pieces
seemed to be smashed.... It was clear these fragments had been dispersed
over a huge market."

She told of a specific incident in which she said Hecht tried to sell her a
piece missing from a cup in the Getty's collection.

"Bob had once called and offered me a fragment that he said he had ... at
some outrageous price," True told the Italians. "I never saw the fragment,
but I told him, 'You're crazy.' "

Hecht, like other dealers, called the Italian theory "silly," saying ancient
vases are always more valuable intact than broken.

But the allegation is supported by the Getty's records, which show that
several of its vases were pieced together with fragments bought over several
years from a handful of dealers.

Italian authorities found photos in Medici's warehouse of several fragments
of a phiale, or libation bowl, later bought by the Getty. The museum's
records show that the bowl was compiled from 25 fragments purchased over 15
years from five dealers, including Fritz Burki. The first fragment was a
donation and the last was purchased for considerably more than any other.

One of them came from the British dealer, Robin Symes.

*

The Frontman

"I was a legend," said inmate NH7973, a soft-spoken man with a close-cropped
gray beard and an expressionless face.

"One time, a man came up to me in a nightclub and kissed me on the mouth. I
said, 'Why did you do that?' He said, 'Because you are Robin Symes! You're
to the world of art dealers what the Beatles are to music!' "

For Symes, once the most successful salesman in the antiquities world, the
music has stopped.

He's bankrupt. His primary residence in 2005: Her Majesty's Pentonville
prison, where an English judge sent him earlier this year for committing
perjury in an unrelated business lawsuit.

He was released in August, after serving seven months. But his troubles
aren't over.

Italian authorities say they intend to file charges next year against the
dealer. They say he and his now-deceased Greek life partner acted as
"frontmen" for the sale of millions of dollars' worth of looted antiquities
to museums and private collectors.

Symes, 67, did this in large part by faking ownership histories for illicit
merchandise, according to Getty records.

"We have been provided with persuasive evidence, by Italian police and
prosecutors, that Symes (a) dealt routinely in goods that are stolen and (b)
routinely manufactured provenances for these goods," a Getty attorney wrote
in a 2002 memo.

Of the 42 Getty items the Italians say are looted, at least 16 went through
Symes' hands.

In an interview granted before his prison release, Symes denied that he
knowingly sold looted goods but spoke at length about the global influence
he enjoyed as a dealer.

"There are very few museums in the world where you won't see something I've
had at one time or another," he said.

Symes entered the antiquities trade in the 1960s, about the same time he met
Christo Michailidis, an antiquities enthusiast whose sister married into a
wealthy Greek shipping family. Symes and Michailidis moved in together and
began building a thriving business catering to the richest clients in the
world.

One of them was J. Paul Getty, a self-confessed "art-buying addict" who
idolized Julius Caesar. Symes eventually convinced Getty that Alexander the
Great was more admirable, selling a bust of the young conqueror to the
oilman in 1973.

By the '90s, Robin Symes Ltd. and related companies were making nearly $4.5
million a year, London court records show. The Italians say Symes and
Michailidis racked up $12 million alone in 1992 by selling artifacts they
acquired from Medici.

"They built it up to probably one of the world's major antiquities
dealerships, to the extent they could influence prices worldwide," said
Anthony Russell, a former Scotland Yard art detective who was hired to
investigate Symes during the business lawsuit.

The gregarious Michailidis tended to the business, which his sister helped
prop up with cash infusions and loan guarantees, according to friends and
London court records. Symes had a discerning eye for quality antiquities, as
well as the expertise to discuss fine points of furniture and painting,
friends say.

He also had a flair for closing a deal, said Barbara Fleischman, a Getty
board member and former Symes customer. After ushering a preferred client
into a private gallery, she said, Symes would discuss the piece's history
and artistic merit as a curtain parted, revealing the antiquity on a
pedestal, bathed in lights.

The pair's allure was underscored by an "absolutely extravagant" lifestyle,
said Mario Roberty, a Swiss attorney who has represented dealers and clients
for 20 years.

Symes and Michailidis owned a house in New York City and a vacation compound
on a Greek island. Their London home was filled with $15 million in designer
furniture and featured an indoor pool surrounded by ancient busts. They
tooled around town in a maroon Bentley and a silver Rolls-Royce.

On the A-list for the 1998 Getty Center opening, Symes later sniffed that
the event had been "tacky" because it featured mariachi music, instead of
classical.

"They had an excellent mixture of taste and arrogance and whatever was
needed to cater to the biggest collectors," Roberty said.

Another expert said the sophisticated Symes offered collectors "a safety
barrier" from the dirty side of the trade.

Symes "enabled purchasers to say they bought in good faith," said Dick
Ellis, the former chief of the Scotland Yard art squad and now a consultant
with an art recovery firm.

An academic inquiry by the Getty showed how that worked in the case of one
purchaser, New York diamond merchant Maurice Templesman.

Symes assembled a private collection for Templesman and acted as agent when
the businessman sold it to the Getty in 1985.

Medici told a Getty official that he had bought three of the pieces in the
collection from "excavators." Two of the pieces had been dug up from a tomb
in southern Italy in the mid-1970s, according to an internal memo written by
the Getty official. Symes then acquired two of the objects directly from
Medici and bought the third from Hecht, Medici told the official.

The museum itself continued dealing with Symes, but with growing doubts over
the ownership histories he provided for artifacts he sold, records also
show.

When the museum acquired a 7 1/2 -foot statue of Aphrodite from Symes in
1988, Harold Williams, the Getty's top administrator, was wary of Symes'
claim that it came from a Swiss collector. Williams took the unprecedented
step of requiring the dealer to put up collateral in case the statue was
later found to be looted or a fake. It is now one of the objects the
Italians are demanding that the Getty return to them.

In 1999, the Getty returned two Symes-related pieces to Italy because of
"substantial evidence" that they had been illegally removed from the
country.

Getty attorneys strongly objected to the museum's plans to buy another
Symes-related statue in 2002 after discovering irregularities in the
ownership records.

Symes said the piece, a bronze statue of Poseidon, had come from a "Greek
widow" named Marika Tamvacaki, who reportedly bought it in 1938 then moved
it nearly 20 years later from Egypt to Switzerland for "safekeeping."

Getty attorneys were told that Tamvacaki was Michailidis' aunt and was poor.

The lawyers grew skeptical when they learned that the purported date of her
purchase was conveniently right before Italy's 1939 antiquities law would
have made the transaction illegal.

They became even more suspicious when they found that an affidavit
purportedly signed by Tamvacaki at the American Embassy in Athens was dated
on a Sunday, when the embassy was unlikely to have been open.

As the Getty backed away from that purchase, Italian authorities were
piecing together transactions that they said tied Symes to Medici and Hecht.

One case, Italian authorities say, shows how a looted artifact was given the
appearance of a clean provenance:

The item, a 5th century BC roof ornament, was sold to Texas billionaire
Nelson Bunker Hunt by Hecht. Hunt put the piece up for auction at Sotheby's
in 1990, and Symes purchased it. The London dealer turned around and sold it
to New York collector Lawrence Fleischman the same day, records show.

When the Getty acquired it from Fleischman with the rest of his collection
in 1996, the roof ornament had what appeared to be an unimpeachable
pedigree: It had been part of two private collections exhibited at major
museums and had been purchased by a reputable dealer from a marquee auction
house.

But the Italians say they discovered Polaroids of the ornament in Medici's
warehouse, along with several others like it. They also found that Hecht had
told Getty officials the piece had come from Cerveteri, the notorious
looting site.

The Italians discovered that other, similar roof ornaments pictured at
Medici's warehouse were later acquired by a Copenhagen museum. The catalog
for the Fleischman collection also notes that two undocumented ornaments
from the same series wound up at the Met and the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Before the Italians could catch up with Symes, however, his business was
unraveling. Michailidis fell down the stairs of a Tuscan villa and died of
head injuries in 1999. His family sued Symes for a share of the business.

In January, a judge sent Symes to Pentonville for perjury after he admitted
covering up two antiquities sales that netted him more than $2 million. The
judge called the confession a "culmination of years of deliberate lies by
Mr. Symes."

During his prison interview, Symes declined to discuss his sales to the
Getty or the source of his inventory. He said that what items he didn't buy
at auctions simply "came to me."

James Ede, a London dealer and former chairman of the International Assn. of
Dealers in Ancient Art, said Symes' fall marked more than the end of one
man's career.

"Some feel that Symes was a buccaneer," Ede said. "But the age of buccaneers
is over."


----
Jason Felch
Los Angeles Times
work:(213) 237-7061
cell: (415) 519-1596
jason.felch at latimes.com