Chasing Aphrodite (19 page)

Others at the museum also pressured True to back off. True's crusade was at cross-purposes with the basic job description of a curator—to acquire. And conceding legal ground on antiquities could lead to such concessions regarding paintings and drawings, which had their own peculiar problems.

George Goldner, the Getty's drawings curator and one of the brightest minds at the museum, expressed more personal concerns before leaving the Getty in 1993. A friend who had helped act as a go-between to keep True from leaping to the Met, Goldner began wondering whether the curator was trying to whitewash history. He recalled approaching True years earlier with his misgivings about the Aphrodite, which he felt was certain to spark the interest of Ital ian authorities. "Do you know where this thing is from?" he'd asked. "Yes, I do," she'd said mysteriously, in a way that suggested she knew more than she could say. Now she was touting a stringent antiquities policy. Goldner feared that such a policy might come across as taunting the Carabinieri, who still wanted back their "Morgantina Venus," the name Italian authorities used for the Aphrodite.

You're getting yourself in trouble here, Goldner told her at one point. You're not dealing with dumb people. They're not going to say, What a nice girl in a nice dress! She's not buying looted antiquities! They're going to say, Why is she here when no other curator is here?

True said that the Getty was doing the right thing and that she wanted everybody to know that it had a great acquisition policy.

T
RUE'S PUSH FOR
the new policy coincided with the end of construction at the Getty Center, the massive new hilltop campus in Brentwood. The center stood as Harold Williams's greatest accomplishment—nearly one million square feet of new floor space to accommodate the museum's burgeoning art collection and unite the Getty Trust's programs, long scattered throughout the Los Angeles area.

Williams and the board of trustees turned their attention back to the museum's original home, the Roman villa in Malibu. Their plan called for shutting it down right before the Getty Center opened in 1997, then giving it an extensive makeover before reopening it as the nation's first museum dedicated exclusively to classical antiquities. By moving the other art collections to "the hill," there would be more room at the reborn Getty Villa to showcase its more than 40,000-piece collection of ancient art, much of which was now in storage because of lack of space. The plans also called for establishing the villa as an international center for scholarship and conservation. Making good on his earlier promise, Williams appointed True to oversee the $275 million renovation.

True saw the project as an opportunity to heal the deep rift between the Getty's museum and conservation staff. Miguel Angel Corzo, the head of the Conservation Institute, was a member of the Getty Villa planning committee and supported True's push for the tougher acquisition policy.

Pressured by colleagues, director John Walsh eventually buckled, agreeing to the reform but only with major concessions. Instead of drawing the bright line at 1972, the revised policy drew the line at November 1995, when the board was scheduled to approve the measure. It grandfathered in the looted objects but guaranteed that going forward, the Getty would adhere to the tighter restrictions.

Even in its watered-down state, the policy represented nothing short of an institutional conversion. Long the bête noire of the archaeological world, the Getty was effectively taking itself out of the business of buying looted antiquities. Fearful of infuriating other museums, it avoided bragging about the change. The announcement of the new policy appeared in the sixth paragraph of a November 1995 press release, which otherwise touted the villa project as an attempt to "promote a deeper understanding of, and critical appreciation for, comparative archaeology and culture."

"We have bought cautiously and only after diligent research and consultation with governments in archaeological countries," Walsh was quoted as saying, almost apologetically, in the press release. "But circumstances have changed. We're more and more involved in joint projects with our Getty partners in the fields of archaeology and conservation, and we will have a broader mission at the Getty Villa. We want the overall effort not to be hindered by the issues raised in collecting undocumented material. We are willing to make this change in the interest of a common purpose."

The reaction to the change was predictably mixed. At the Met, Philippe de Montebello was furious. Curators at other institutions complained that after a decadelong binge, the Getty was now acting like a reformed alcoholic, trying to shame everyone else into sobriety. Meanwhile, former critics, such as outspoken archaeologist Ricardo Elia at Boston University, hailed the new policy as a genuine change from the old, self-serving standard that had allowed the museum to ask no questions while acquiring undocumented pieces.

True had kept her word to Papadopoulos; she was pushing the Getty to reform. But Papadopoulos soon learned that his boss still had a few blind spots.

W
HEN THE FLEISCHMAN
exhibit completed its Cleveland run in the spring of 1995, Getty experts packed up the objects and transported them back to the couple's Manhattan apartment, where each piece was returned to its original place. Despite the falling-out with the Fleischmans, the Met still held out hope of receiving part of the collection, as did the Cleveland and even the British Museum, where the Fleischmans had joined fundraising groups. But now most assumed that the Getty, with its first-rate exhibit, had an inside track on landing most of it. Barbara Fleischman would later claim that it was not until a year later, around his seventy-first birthday, that Larry came home from his art gallery one day and asked, "How would you feel about giving the collection to the Getty? You know, we don't have as good a relationship with the Metropolitan Museum as before—in that department—and their collection is so vast that they really don't need a big collection to be added. They may want it, but they don't need it." By contrast, the Getty had a "small, choice" collection that could use the help. Why not help a West Coast institution improve its inventory of ancient art? Barbara agreed, and the couple called True to share the news of their decision.

The offer, which could not have come as a total surprise, nevertheless put True in a terrible bind. Aside from J. Paul Getty's founding gift, the Fleischmans' would be the largest the museum had ever received. The collection perfectly rounded out the Getty's antiquities holdings, especially in the weak areas of bronzes and Etruscan art. For any other curator, at any other time, the gift would have been a career capper. But for True, who had just pledged the Getty to stop buying looted antiquities, it was cause to agonize. The Fleischman collection was filled with suspect pieces.

True's internal strife was obvious to Papadopoulos, who was with his boss at a meeting in Rome soon after she received the call from the Fleischmans. Arriving on a separate flight, Papadopoulos found True sitting at a breakfast table in the Hotel Raphael early in the morning, her face glum.

"What's wrong, Marion?" he asked. "It looks like your best friend just died."

Ashen, True told Papadopoulos about the Fleischmans' offer. Both knew that by taking the gift, True would be undermining the new antiquities policy she had championed. "What should I do?" she asked.

"What do you want me to say, Marion?"

True was silent.

S
HORTLY THEREAFTER, WALSH
and True flew to New York and, under the gaze of a silversmith etched on an ancient sarcophagus, worked out the rough outlines of a deal with the Fleischmans that covered all the items in the 1994 exhibit. The Fleischmans were not offering their entire collection as a gift. Ever the hard bargainer, Larry said that they would donate 288 items to the museum, but only if the Getty bought 33 others for $20 million. With the terms broadly defined, the small group toasted the transaction with wine.

Word of the deal bubbled through the Getty for months, creating a huge rift between those who rejoiced in the museum's good fortune and those who, like Papadopoulos, considered the transaction a grand hypocrisy. Eventually, True convened a meeting of her staff in a tiny annex to the museum kitchen. With her hands shaking slightly and her words coming quick and clipped, she announced that the Getty would, in fact, accept the Fleischmans' gift. The acquisition did not violate the new policy, she said, because the collection had been published before the 1995 cutoff date—by the Getty itself in the 1994 exhibition catalogue.

Papadopoulos was appalled. The thin rationalization would make the Getty look as if, expecting the gift all along, it had written a loophole into its policy. After the meeting, he pulled True aside and said, "What do you think this does to our reputation in terms of our new acquisition policy? Look, if you come out and accept this, this is something that is going to live with you and haunt you for the rest of your days. You can't get around that."

"Don't rub it in," she said.

Papadopoulos began looking for another job. True had done much to lead the way in reforming the antiquities market, including pushing for the Getty's new policy. But the Fleischman acquisition was a giant step backward and exposed the museum as being duplicitous. He was disappointed and a bit angry, but he didn't blame True. It was the nature of the job. But he didn't want to stay in a profession so riddled with temptation.

On June 13, 1996, the Getty publicly revealed the Fleischman acquisition, calling it a "quantum leap" for the museum's antiquities collection. As Papadopoulos predicted, the news didn't sit well with archaeologists, who felt that they had been snookered by the museum's "tough" new acquisition policy, announced just seven months before. Ricardo Elia howled that the museum had gotten the collection through a loophole. Robin Symes was livid at True, feeling that she had squeezed him out of the commission he expected to receive for helping broker the sale of the collection. Somehow, True had managed to anger people on all sides of the antiquities debate.

T
HE DAY AFTER
Larry Fleischman signed the contract with the Getty, he and his wife had breakfast with True in Los Angeles. Larry brought up the subject of her house in Greece. True was still looking for someone who could refinance the loan she had received through Peppas, the Greek lawyer.

"Now that this is settled, would it help if I lent you the money?" Fleischman asked. He proposed an unsecured loan of $400,000 at 8.25 percent interest, a "wonderful gesture" toward a good friend who had been so generous with her scholarly knowledge over the years.

Days later, True signed a promissory note for the loan. In mid-July, she wrote to Peppas saying that she was prepared to pay off her original loan.

"I am happy to inform you that I have finally found an American source for a 20-year mortgage and would therefore like to repay the full amount of my remaining debt to the Sea Star Corporation," True wrote. "You must know how grateful I am to you for helping me to purchase the house in Greece, but as you can imagine the longer period of time will make the repayment process much easier for me."

On July 10, the Getty officially closed the deal with the Fleischmans, who received their first $7 million installment. A week later, True repaid her loan to the Sea Star Corporation. She had agreed to pay $3,007 a month to the Fleischmans for the next twenty years. Many years later, it was unclear whether she actually made those payments. The Getty's lawyers could find no proof that she had.

J
UST MONTHS BEFORE
the Fleischman exhibit opened at the Getty in 1994, a captain in the Rome headquarters of the Carabinieri art squad was thumbing through a stack of unresolved cases. He stopped at the file on the Aphrodite.

The lead investigator on the case, Fausto Guarnieri, had retired years earlier, leaving the matter to the few overburdened investigators in the Sicily field office. When occasional documents trickled in from forgotten judicial requests, they were stuffed into the file without so much as a glance. Eventually, the file was returned to Rome, bound for the archives.

The captain glanced through the yellowing pages. He noted that the alleged looters and smugglers of the statue had been indicted but released for lack of evidence. Despite the high-profile target, he saw little point in pursuing a case in which the statute of limitations had nearly run out. But before dumping it, he dropped the paperwork on the desk of a young investigator named Salvatore Morando. Take a look, the captain told him, and tell me if you see anything.

Morando was a dark-eyed, soft-spoken Sicilian whose bashful demeanor belied a dogged nature. Tougher than he looked, he also had an unassuming manner and the patience needed to cultivate underworld sources and to clear the complex legal hurdles blocking his ability to follow leads outside Italy's borders.

As Morando browsed through the paperwork, he paused to look at the large black-and-white photos of the statue. It had been found just an hour from Ragusa, his hometown. Reading Guarnieri's notes, he saw that the case had been foiled by omerta, the Sicilian code of silence. Guarnieri and Silvio Raffiotta, the state prosecutor, had tried to take the investigation abroad, but the trail had gone cold in Switzerland.

Morando then came upon new records that had been added to the file since Guarnieri's retirement. Some came from Mat Securitas, the Geneva-based shipping company that had transported the 1,100-pound statue to Robin Symes in London. Mat Securitas had shipped the statue from Lugano, a large Swiss city just north of the Italian border, a notorious smuggling zone that had churned for decades with an underground economy. The black market there had begun with bootleg cigarettes, smuggled over the mountains after World War II by locals who carried them in large rucksacks at night. The trade had spawned a network of tobacco shops and money exchange houses catering to Italian consumers, who drove up from Lake Como to buy cheap smokes, then smuggled them home in hubcaps and secret linings in their car doors. In more recent years, the smugglers had diversified, dealing in drugs, guns, credit cards, jewelry, rugs, diamonds, fake passports, and art.