[CPProt.net] Getty Had Signs It Was Acquiring Possibly Looted Art, Documents Show

[Ellie Bruggeman]

Getty Had Signs It Was Acquiring Possibly Looted Art, Documents Show
Museum attorneys say half the masterpieces in its antiquities collection
can be traced to suspect dealers. Italy seeks return of 42 items.
By Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino
Times Staff Writers

September 25, 2005

Attorneys for the J. Paul Getty Museum have determined that half the
masterpieces in its antiquities collection were purchased from dealers now
under investigation for allegedly selling artifacts looted from ruins in
Italy.

Italian authorities have identified dozens of objects in the Getty
collection as looted, including ancient urns, vases and a 5-foot marble
statue of Apollo.

The Italians have Polaroid photographs seized from a dealer's warehouse in
Switzerland that show Getty artifacts in an unrestored state, some
encrusted with dirt — soon after they were dug from the ground, Italians
officials say.

In response to the Italian investigation, Getty lawyers combed through the
museum's files and questioned staff members over several months in 2001,
trying to assess the legal exposure of the world's richest art
institution.

The Times recently obtained hundreds of pages of Getty records, some of
them related to the museum's internal review.

Those documents show that Getty officials had information as early as 1985
that three of their principal suppliers were selling objects that probably
had been looted and that the museum continued to buy from them anyway.

In correspondence with the Getty, the dealers made frank, almost casual
references to ancient sites from which artifacts had been excavated,
apparently in violation of Italian law, the records show. The Getty's
outside attorney considered the letters "troublesome" and advised the
museum not to turn them over to Italian authorities.

Although Italy is seeking the return of 42 objects, the Getty's lawyers
did their own assessment and determined that the museum had purchased 82
artworks from dealers and galleries under investigation by the Italians.

They include 54 of the 104 ancient artworks that the Getty has identified
as masterpieces.

The internal Getty documents include memos, purchase agreements,
correspondence and other records going back 20 years. They paint a picture
of a young, aggressive institution determined to build a world-class
collection as governments were placing tight restrictions on the
antiquities trade.

Among the findings:

•  A 1985 memo shows that Getty officials learned from dealer Giacomo
Medici that three objects the museum was acquiring had been taken from
ruins near Naples decades after Italian law made it illegal. The Getty
completed the $10.2-million acquisition anyway.

•  An acting curator accused the Getty in a 1986 resignation letter of
turning a blind eye to problems in the antiquities department. With eerie
prescience, he said the museum's "curatorial avarice" would someday lead
to an external investigation and demands from a foreign government for the
return of looted artifacts.

•  In 1987, Harold Williams, then chief executive of the Getty Trust, and
John Walsh, then director of the museum, discussed the "prevailing
assumption" that antiquities with no documented ownership had probably
been looted, according to Walsh's handwritten notes. Williams referred to
one of the Getty's main dealers, Robin Symes, as a "fence," according to
the notes, and asked his staff: "Are we willing to buy stolen property for
some higher aim?"

Williams and Walsh say they were speaking hypothetically and that the
museum never knowingly bought looted artworks.

•  In correspondence with Marion True, the Getty's curator of antiquities,
Medici and another dealer, Robert E. Hecht Jr., described artifacts they
were offering for sale in terms that suggested they were illegally
excavated. In one letter, Hecht told True that an ancient urn was being
sought by Italian police. The Getty later purchased the object.

•  In 1993, the Getty bought an ancient gold funerary wreath despite
True's initial misgivings that the piece was "too dangerous" to acquire.
The Getty later received a copy of an Interpol cable describing the item
as having an "illicit origin."

Italian authorities have charged True, Hecht and Medici with conspiring to
traffic in looted antiquities. Medici was convicted last year and
sentenced to 10 years in prison. He has remained free while he appeals.

The trial for True and Hecht began in July and is scheduled to resume in
November in Rome.

Medici, Hecht and Symes deny knowingly selling looted art.

The Italian legal offensive poses a threat to one of the Getty's most
important collections as the museum prepares to reopen the Getty Villa in
Malibu as a showcase for antiquities after a six-year, $275-million
renovation.

True and her attorneys declined to comment for this article, beyond
asserting her innocence.

In a statement, the Getty said Friday that it had "never knowingly
acquired an object that had been illegally excavated or exported
. "

Although dealers under investigation "have been discredited," the Getty
statement said, that "does not mean that any object acquired from one of
them was illegally excavated or exported."

The Getty said it could not comment further on issues raised by
"privileged and confidential information" from the Getty's files without
jeopardizing True's right to a fair trial.

"Based upon the information and evidence that it has seen, the Getty
continues to believe that Dr. True's trial should result in her
exoneration," the statement said.

In a separate statement, Williams, the former chief executive, said that
it "had been common practice for decades for reputable museums and
collectors to acquire" artifacts with no documented ownership history,
particularly when "possible countries of origin were doing nothing to
protect their sites or enforce their laws."

Walsh, the former museum director, said: "We all agreed — and the
acquisition policy is clear — that nothing would justify buying an object
that we knew or strongly suspected was stolen."

Countries Outlaw the Plundering of Antiquities

For centuries, the Mediterranean's ancient ruins had been plundered by
invading armies and touring colonialists, amateur collectors and
farmers-turned-tomb raiders. When oil magnate John Paul Getty began buying
antiquities in the 1930s, collectors were more interested in whether
artifacts were authentic than in whether they had been legally excavated
and exported.

In 1939, the Italian government declared that all ancient objects
uncovered from Italian soil after 1902 were state property and could not
be sold or exported without government permission. But the restriction,
like other so-called patrimony laws, was not widely recognized by other
countries, and illegal trafficking continued.

That was changing by the time Getty died in 1976, leaving his fledgling
museum $700 million to build on his collection.

In 1970, a UNESCO convention called on governments to make it illegal to
"import, export or transfer ownership" of cultural property without
permission from the country of origin. Italy ratified the convention in
1979. The U.S. Congress followed in 1983.

By then, American criminal law was already getting tough on antiquities
trafficking.

In 1977, five American dealers were convicted in Texas of conspiring to
sell looted artifacts from Mexico. The case recognized the foreign
government's ownership claim and established that the artifacts were
stolen property under U.S. law.

By the early 1980s, "people were on notice that if they knowingly dealt in
archeological artifacts illegally removed from a country with a national
ownership law, they were committing a crime in the United States," said
Patty Gerstenblith, a law professor at DePaul University in Chicago and
co-chairwoman of the American Bar Assn.'s international cultural property
committee.

The Getty and other museums faced a dilemma. One choice was to limit their
purchases to antiquities held by established collections and accompanied
by documents showing they had been legally excavated and exported. But the
pool of such objects was small.

The alternative was to take a chance on objects without documented
ownership history, or provenance. Although it is difficult to prove that
such objects have been looted, the consensus today among archeologists and
legal experts is that most were probably removed without the source
country's permission.

In recent years, court rulings have demolished what had been a common
defense among curators and collectors: that they did not know artworks had
been looted.

In 1999, the U.S. government reclaimed a golden libation bowl and returned
it to Italy at the request of Italian authorities. A wealthy New York
collector who paid $1.2 million for the item said he didn't know it had
been smuggled. A federal appeals court upheld the seizure.

In 2002, a New York jury convicted a prominent dealer of conspiring to
sell a stolen sculpture of an Egyptian pharaoh. The defendant claimed he
didn't know it had been stolen. The judge told jurors that they could
consider the dealer's deliberate avoidance of knowledge the equivalent of
knowing it had been stolen. Higher courts upheld the conviction.

Despite the changing legal environment, looters have remained active. They
descend on archeological sites, searching for buried objects with long
metal probes. In Italy, they have been known to dig up tombs with
backhoes.

The looters work in concert with smugglers who spirit items out of the
country, usually to Switzerland, where lax laws have until recently
allowed smugglers to flourish.

Publicly, the Getty and True have decried looting.

In a 2000 speech in Denver to the Assn. of Art Museum Directors, True
argued against the practice of presuming that antiquities without
provenance are "innocent until proven guilty."

"Experience has taught me that in reality, if serious efforts to establish
a clear pedigree for the object's recent past prove futile, it is most
likely — if not certain — that it is the product of the illicit trade, and
we must accept responsibility for this fact," she said.

Four months after the speech, Italian officials informed the Getty that
True was a target of their investigation.

The case stemmed from a breakthrough in Italy's long-running effort to
curb trafficking, a 1995 raid by Swiss police on a warehouse in Geneva
used by Medici, the Italian who supplied many of the Getty's dealers.

Authorities found nearly 4,000 artifacts in various stages of restoration,
as well as neatly organized albums with Polaroid photos of thousands of
other objects already sold.

The photos depicted what appeared to be freshly excavated objects: ancient
pots still in pieces, marble statues covered in dirt. The Italians were
very eager to know what had become of them.

Acting Curator Investigates Provenance of 3 Objects

On learning of the Italian investigation in 2000, the Getty hired a New
York criminal defense attorney, Richard Martin, to conduct an internal
review.

Among the documents Martin and his colleagues found was a memo showing
that the Getty had purchased items excavated from an Italian site long
after Italian law prohibited it.

In the confidential October 1985 memo, Arthur Houghton, acting curator of
antiquities, told Deborah Gribbon, then deputy director of the museum and
later its director, that he had looked into the origins of three objects
the Getty was acquiring from New York businessman Maurice Tempelsman, a
private collector.(SEE DOCUMENT)

They were a ceremonial marble basin with a painted scene from Homer's
"Iliad," a sculpture of two mythical griffons attacking a fallen deer and
a marble statue of Apollo. The Getty paid $10.2 million for the objects,
which date back 2,300 years.

Houghton had been asked to comment on another expert's theory that the
artworks were found together. In the memo, he wrote that he had contacted
Medici and learned that the dealer "had bought all three objects from the
excavators."

According to the memo, Medici told Houghton that two of the artifacts had
been unearthed from a tomb in Southern Italy in 1976 or 1977 and the third
from the ruins of a villa nearby.

"The fact that the dealer is asserting that he got them from excavators —
that is important," Ricardo Elia, a Boston University associate professor
of archeology and an expert on the antiquities trade, said in an
interview. "It means that the buyers at the Getty would be knowingly
buying looted and smuggled antiquities."

The Houghton memo identified Hecht and Symes as middlemen in the sale of
the artworks to Tempelsman.

The records contain no indication that Houghton or Gribbon reconsidered
the purchase based on what Medici had revealed. All three objects remain
in the collection.

Years later, the Polaroid photos found in Medici's Swiss warehouse
revealed more about their origin. One of the photos shows the Apollo lying
on a board, unrestored and dirty.

The Italian Carabinieri, or paramilitary police, later posted the picture
on its website, calling it an example of "looted art that needs to be
returned."

Asked for comment earlier this month, Gribbon sent an e-mail denying that
she or anyone else at the Getty engaged in illegal behavior, adding that
patrimony laws "were little known and seldom enforced" at that time.

The information in the Houghton memo was "unverified" and did not prove
that the artworks had been illegally excavated, said Gribbon, who resigned
last year as director of the Getty Museum.

Houghton, who declined to comment, resigned from the Getty in 1986. His
resignation letter said he was fed up that his attempts to investigate a
predecessor's conduct had been stifled.

That was the letter in which Houghton criticized the museum for
"curatorial avarice" and said Getty leadership had chosen "a path of
self-enforced ignorance of fact." He predicted that the Getty could face
"the demand by another country or institution for the return of material
in the museum's collection."

Failing to deal with these issues, he warned, would be "catastrophic" for
the Getty's reputation.

'Troublesome' Letters About 'Illegal Excavations' Cited

On April 30, 1986 — the date of Houghton's resignation — True was named
curator of antiquities.

True had held positions at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Harvard
University's Fogg Art Museum and a London antiquities dealership. She was
completing her doctorate at Harvard, where she specialized in ancient
Greek vases.

True had met Hecht in 1972 or 1973, when she was a curatorial assistant at
the Boston museum. Hecht is the scion of an East Coast department store
family who has lived in Europe for decades, nursing a passion for coins
and antiquities.

In 1972, Hecht sold New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art an urn painted
by Euphronious, the master painter of ancient Greece. Allegations that the
artifact had been recently looted from Italy sparked an international
controversy. The allegations were not proved, and the Metropolitan kept
the urn.

True also knew Medici. She was introduced to him at an auction in
Switzerland around 1984, she has told Italian officials. Medici used four
Geneva warehouses with showrooms.

In letters to True uncovered during the Getty's internal review, Hecht and
Medici made little effort to hide their involvement in selling items of
suspicious origin.

In one undated, handwritten letter, Hecht informed True that an ancient
vase, or pelike, he had offered to the Getty might not be available
because Italian authorities were looking for it. (SEE DOCUMENT)

"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," Hecht wrote. "Perhaps others may
acquire it. Sorry. Best wishes, Bob."

The Getty purchased the pelike for $42,000 in July 1986.

Museum files list the seller as Fritz Burki, Hecht's Swiss antiquities
restorer. Italian court records say Burki has admitted that he frequently
"possessed, restored and transferred as dummy — in particular to the J.
Paul Getty Museum — various objects of illegal provenance received by
Medici and Hecht."

In 1991, True wrote to Medici asking for information about the origins of
three pottery fragments in the Getty's collection on behalf of a staff
member who was studying them.

In handwritten Italian, Medici replied that the fragments came from a
"chamber-type tomb" at Cerveteri, one of the most heavily looted sites in
Italy.

Martin, the Getty's attorney, wrote a memo to Getty chief executive Barry
Munitz in 2001 describing the letters as "troublesome" because they
"support the conclusion that Medici and Hecht were involved in dealing
with objects which appeared to be from illegal excavations in Italy."

Although the dealers' letters do not amount to proof, Martin wrote, True's
responses do not address the "questionable provenance of the items" or
"raise any objections to the plain suggestion that the Getty would be
interested in such items."

In a recent interview, Hecht denied that his letters implied the objects
were looted. Asked if he ever sold looted art, he said: "It depends on
what you call looted. I will believe it's looted when I see the documents
that prove it's looted."

The Getty's 'Single Greatest Piece of Ancient Art'

In June 1986, True visited Symes at his London office and learned that he
was selling a remarkably preserved statue of Aphrodite, the Greek goddess
of love.

The towering sculpture depicts the goddess draped in a wet, windblown
gown, her right arm extended toward her worshippers. Part limestone and
part marble, the piece probably dates to 400 BC and was the centerpiece of
a Greek temple in south Italy or Sicily.

True later told the Getty's acquisition committee that the Aphrodite could
become "the single greatest piece of ancient art in our collection. It
would be the greatest piece of classical sculpture in this country and any
country outside of Greece and Great Britain."

Symes said the statue came from an unnamed collector in Switzerland. He
offered little else to establish a legitimate provenance, records show.

The statue was unknown to the academic world, leading some scholars and
Italian authorities to conclude it almost certainly had been recently
looted and smuggled out of Italy.

The Getty had outside attorneys send a notice to foreign governments,
including Italy, that an unnamed "major American institution" was
considering buying the statue and asking for any information about its
provenance.

While the Getty waited to see if the Italians would respond, Williams,
then the chief executive, met with Walsh, then museum director. Walsh took
handwritten notes of the conversation and a subsequent meeting. (SEE
DOCUMENT)

"We are saying we won't look into the provenance," Williams said,
according to Walsh's notes of a meeting on Sept. 2, 1987.

"We know it's stolen," the notes quote Williams as saying. "Symes a fence."

The notes also indicate that the men anticipated that a foreign government
would demand the return of antiquities in the Getty's collection. Williams
is quoted as suggesting that the museum ask Symes about the origin of
other items he was offering for sale.

Williams then posed a question: "If he doesn't defend, do we surrender to
the government?"

The Times reviewed the notes separately with Walsh and Williams, who
confirmed their authenticity.

Both men said their remarks were strictly about a new acquisition policy,
not about the Aphrodite. Williams said he used Symes as an example because
he was a prominent dealer.

"I was going through various hypothetical situations: What if we receive a
stolen object? What if it turns out one of our dealers — say someone like
Symes — turns out to be a fence?" said Williams, a lawyer who has served
as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, dean of the UCLA
business law school and board member of Times Mirror Corp., former parent
company of the Los Angeles Times.

Walsh said: "He was not talking about a specific object. Neither he nor
any of us had information that any work we were considering buying was
stolen."

Two days after their Sept. 2, 1987, meeting, Williams and Walsh met with
True and Bruce Bevan, then a Getty lawyer, to discuss "antiquities
ethics," Walsh's notes show. (SEE DOCUMENT)

Williams told the group that the "prevailing assumption" about artifacts
with no documented ownership was the "likelihood that they are stolen — in
violation of laws," the notes say.

He left the group with this question:

"Are we willing to buy stolen property for some higher aim?"

In a recent interview, Williams said he "probably" overstated the question
to provoke his staff to reflect on the implications of the Getty's
acquisitions.

With Williams' question in mind, Walsh said, he went back to his office
and jotted the outlines of a new policy (SEE DOCUMENT). First, he
described the ethical challenge facing the Getty, as Williams had summed
it up:

"1. We knowingly buy stolen goods.

"2. We knowingly deal with liars by accepting their warranties."

Walsh then sketched what would become the museum's first formal
antiquities policy in 1987. It called for the museum to ask for
information from dealers about objects they were selling and, before
making a purchase, to ask the country of origin whether there was proof an
item had been stolen.

The Getty would also publicize an acquisition quickly and return it if
shown evidence that it was looted, Walsh wrote.

Asking foreign governments for evidence is unlikely to elicit information
about an object's origin because illegally excavated artifacts are by
definition undocumented, experts say.

In the case of the Aphrodite, Italian officials informed the Getty's
attorneys that they had "no information as to the origin and
authenticity."

Records show the Getty bought the statue in 1988 for $18 million, a sum
not previously disclosed. It was the most the museum had ever paid for an
antiquity. In keeping with its practice, the Getty also did not reveal the
source of the statue: Symes.

But Getty officials built stringent safeguards into the museum's contract
with Symes in case evidence surfaced that the statue had been looted. The
museum paid $9 million upfront with the balance paid after four years,
when the dealer's warranty that the piece was authentic and legitimately
acquired had expired.

As a precaution, Williams insisted that Symes store more than $9 million
in art at the Getty as collateral.

The acquisition prompted an international furor. Italian officials
launched a formal investigation into rumors that the statue had been
illegally excavated in the Sicilian city of Morgantina. But the Italians
could not find proof, and the controversy subsided.

Then in 2001, a Swiss resident was convicted in an Italian court of
trafficking the Aphrodite, based in part on statements by local residents
that the statue was illegally dug up in Morgantina three months before
Symes offered it to True.

A court later overturned the conviction, ruling that the statute of
limitations for the offense had expired. But Italian officials say the
evidence of looting remains unchallenged. They are citing it in their
request for the return of the Aphrodite.

'Something Too Dangerous for Us to Be Involved With'

In 1993, with the Getty's initial antiquities policy in place, True
pursued another problematic acquisition: a gold Greek funerary wreath.

An explosion of thin gold leaves and blooms accented by inlaid colored
glass, the piece is featured on the cover of the museum's 2002 antiquities
handbook. The object is of Greek origin and not a part of the Italian
case.

During their internal review, Getty attorneys found an Interpol cable in
museum files indicating that the piece had been looted and another
document in which True expressed misgivings about the wreath when it was
first offered to the Getty in 1992.

During a trip to Switzerland that year, True arranged to view the wreath
and meet its owner, identified as a Dr. Preis from Munich. But the man she
met was an impostor, True wrote soon after, and the unnerved curator
decided to wash her hands of the deal.

"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 art dealer Christoph F.
Leon, the intermediary in the deal, in Basel, Switzerland.

Six months later, True apparently changed her mind. She asked to borrow
the wreath from Leon for study, then won approval from the Getty board to
purchase it for $1.15 million in 1993. The purchase agreement lists the
source of the wreath as a "private collection, Switzerland."

In 1998, Interpol sent a query to the FBI, asking the agency to interview
True about her relationship with Leon, among other things. Getty lawyers
found the inquiry in museum files.

"It should be noted," the document states, "that subject Dr. Leon has
previously come to the attention of our organization in regard to a Greek
gold funerary wreath of illegal origin."

It could not be determined what, if anything, resulted from the Interpol
inquiry.

Leon, contacted by phone, said he had known True "for a very long time"
and confirmed that he was the "in-between man" on the sale of the wreath.
He declined to comment further.

Getty Revises Its Antiquities Acquisitions Policy in 1995

In November 1995, the Getty unveiled a revised policy that appeared to
raise the bar for the acquisition of antiquities.

The museum pledged to buy only antiquities that had been published in
catalogs and scholarly journals before 1995 or were part of "established
and well-documented" collections.

Eight months later, the Getty acquired more than 300 antiquities from
Lawrence and Barbara Fleischman, New York art patrons whose collection was
considered one of the finest private holdings in the world.

Known for its quality and variety, the collection included an abundance of
rare objects, including statuettes and doorknockers dating as far back as
2600 BC.

Records show the Getty paid $20 million for 33 pieces, then received the
rest as a donation valued at $40 million.

Most of the objects had no documented ownership history. Many had been
acquired from Medici, Hecht and Symes. The acquisition appeared to violate
the museum's policy requiring clear documentation. Responding to critics
in the art world, the Getty insisted that its own publication and
exhibition of the collection two years earlier had brought it in line with
the policy.

Getty staffers were "well aware of the risks of acquiring a large number
of largely unprovenanced antiquities," according to a memo written by
Getty attorney Penny Cobey.

The review also turned up notes of a phone conversation about the
Fleischman collection. The notes were made by Christine Steiner, then
general counsel to the Getty Trust, summarizing a conversation with
Gribbon, museum director at the time.

The notes include this cryptic exchange:

"How clean is this stuff?"

"Not very dirty."

Steiner, who left the Getty in 1999, declined to comment, as did Gribbon
and Cobey.

In 1999, the museum sent three items, including a marble bust of an
athlete, to Italy after an archeological publication identified it as
coming from an excavation in Southern Italy.

Documents show that the Getty didn't seek restitution from the
Fleischmans, as provided in its contract with the couple, but went to
Symes, who had sold the bust to the Fleischmans. Symes agreed to
compensate the museum with other artworks.

Based on the seized Polaroid photos, the Italians have identified 11 other
objects from the Fleischman collection as having been looted and are
seeking their return.

Barbara Fleischman, a Getty board member since 2000, denied that the
museum had laundered objects through her and her late husband's collection
and said they never thought the items they were buying could have been
looted.

Provenance, she added, was "not an issue at the time."

"We were absolute innocents," she said. "We thought we were buying it from
legitimate dealers. Looking back at it, maybe it was naive."

Symes' Guarantees About Statue Called 'Worthless'

In 2001, Italian prosecutor Paolo Ferri flew to California to question
True under oath about the Getty's acquisitions and her dealings with
Medici, Hecht and Symes.

Afterward, True sparked a debate among Getty attorneys and top officials
when she drafted a proposal to acquire a Hellenic bronze statute of the
sea god Poseidon. The Italians had long claimed the piece was looted.

The British Railway Pension Fund had bought the statue from Symes in 1976.
A controversy erupted when it was exhibited two years later: A leading
Italian scholar said it had been dredged from the Bay of Naples and
smuggled out of the country.

Symes had told the British pension fund that he legally acquired the
statue from a Greek woman who, with her late husband, had bought it in
1938 and kept it in Switzerland.

Getty attorneys learned that the woman was actually the aunt of Symes'
former business partner and of such limited means that she probably never
owned valuable art.

The discovery fueled worries that True's attempt to buy the controversial
statue would provoke Italian authorities, who had already put the Getty on
notice they were investigating Symes.

Italian authorities have interviewed Symes for a total of 24 hours about
the antiquities trade, he acknowledged in a recent interview.

Cobey, the Getty's in-house attorney, argued that True faced "substantial
risks 
 by allowing herself to be associated with this acquisition, given
the object's history and her own unresolved status with Prosecutor Ferri,"
records show.

She characterized Symes' guarantees about the statue's background as
"worthless."

Cobey declined to comment. The Getty eventually abandoned the purchase.

"Even in the absence of absolute proof of theft," Cobey wrote in one
e-mail, "when should a reasonable person see that the sirens are going
off, the red lights flashing?"

*
Safeguarding treasures

Timeline tracks reforms and legal developments in the world of antiquities.

1939: Italy passes a cultural patrimony law declaring all archeological
artifacts to be government property unless the items were in private hands
before 1902.

*
1970: A UNESCO convention calls for tighter international import-export
restrictions on cultural property.

*
1977: Several art dealers are convicted of conspiring to sell stolen
artifacts in the first American criminal case to recognize a foreign
country's ownership of archeological items under U.S. law.

*
1979: Italy ratifies the UNESCO accord.

*
1983: Congress ratifies the UNESCO accord, committing the U.S. to greater
import controls on antiquities.

*
1987: The Getty Museum announces its first antiquities acquisition policy,
which relies on the guarantees of dealers and puts the burden on foreign
governments to prove an artifact has been looted.

*
1995: In September, Swiss authorities raid Geneva warehouses, seizing
thousands of illicit antiquities and photos of thousands more. Items shown
in 42 of the photos were later identified by Italian police as being in
the Getty's collection.

In November, the Getty announces a tougher acquisition policy that allows
the museum to purchase only those antiquities held in private collections
before 1995 or with written documentation.

*
1999: Getty antiquities curator Marion True testifies on Italy's behalf in
favor of tighter U.S. imports of antiquities. The Getty returns three
items to Italy after discovering they had been stolen or looted.

*
2000: Italian authorities notify the Getty that True is a target of their
investigation into the looting of antiquities.

*
2001: The Getty's outside counsel advises Trust chief executive Barry
Munitz not to give Italian authorities several "troublesome" documents
that show True had close relationships with two art dealers, both of whom
have since been named her co-defendants.

*
2005: True trial is to resume in Rome in November.

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