Priceless (11 page)

Most pilfered antiquities follow the same path—discovered and dug up by poor, indigenous grave robbers from the Third World, smuggled to unscrupulous dealers in the First World.

Except in rare cases, namely antiquity-rich Italy and Greece, the flow of stolen artifacts largely moves from poor to rich nations. Artifacts looted from Northern Africa and the Middle East are usually smuggled to Dubai and Abu Dhabi, from there to London, and ultimately to shops in Paris, Zurich, New York, and Tokyo, the cities where consumer demand is greatest. Artifacts pilfered from sites in Cambodia, Vietnam, and China are smuggled through Hong Kong to Australia, Western Europe, and the United States.

This slippery, largely unregulated world is considered a “gray” market because the legal market is largely supplied by an illegal one. Unlike smuggled drugs or weapons, an antiquity’s legal status may change as it crosses international borders—and once “legalized,” a looted antiquity can be sold openly by the likes of Sotheby’s and Christie’s to the likes of the Getty and the Met. While the United Nations has designed international protocols to discourage looting, every nation has its own priorities, cultural interests, and laws. What’s forbidden in one country is perfectly legal in another. It is illegal in the United States, for example, to sell bald and golden eagle feathers; and I spent a chunk of my career trying to stem this illegal trade. Yet whenever I visit Paris and wander through its finest antique shops along the Seine, I marvel at the American Indian treasures displayed openly for sale. I’ve seen full headdresses with eagle feathers selling for $30,000 or more.

The most visible criminals in the antiquity theft trade—the grave robbers doing the digging and the thieves swiping objects from religious shrines—fare poorly compared with the brokers at the other end of the smuggling chain. On average, looters earn only 1 or 2 percent
of the ultimate sale price. The Sicilian men who illegally excavated a collection of Morgantina silver illegally sold it for $1,000; a collector subsequently bought it for $1 million, and resold it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for $2.7 million. Chinese grave robbers who came across a significant Song Dynasty sculpture sold it for $900; an American dealer later resold it for $125,000.

The world’s finest museums have not escaped this distasteful cycle. The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles became ensnared in such a scandal after it purchased scores of looted antiquities from renowned Italian art dealer Giacomo Medici, including a statue of Aphrodite, purchased for $18 million in 1988. Senior curators at the Getty met with top officers from Italy’s Carabinieri and denied that they knew or should have known that the antiquities they’d purchased were looted. (Years after the backflap case, the Getty-Medici dispute would widen further and Italian officials would file criminal charges against an American curator and an art dealer.)

Illicit antiquity trading is said to be on the rise, and there’s little doubt the technology revolution that sparked the global economy made it easier to loot, smuggle, and sell antiquities. Looters employ global tracking devices, smugglers bribe low-paid customs officials, and sellers post items on eBay and clandestine chat rooms. If a piece is valuable enough, an antiquity can be smuggled out of a country on a passenger plane in a matter of hours, arriving in London, New York, or Tokyo less than twenty-four hours after it was unearthed by looters.

How big is the problem? It’s hard to say. Only a handful of countries collect reliable statistics on looting. The Greeks report 475 unauthorized digs in the past decade and say they’ve recovered 57,475 looted pieces, primarily in Peloponnese, Thessaly, and Macedonia. But Greece is an exception—the nation declared looting illegal as early as 1835, and its constitution specifically directs the government to protect cultural property. In most countries, looting is largely documented in unofficial ways, through anecdotes and
extrapolation. Claims are made but unverified. Turkey says illegal looting is the fourth most lucrative (legal or illegal) job in the nation. Niger reports that 90 percent of its most significant archaeological sites have been stripped bare. A few criminologists have mingled these statistics and news accounts and drawn wild conclusions—for example, that organized crime figures and terrorists are major players in the illicit antiquities trade. I’m skeptical of such claims. Certainly mobsters have looted artifacts, and yes, there were reports that 9/11 ringleader Mohammed Atta tried to peddle Afghan antiquities in Germany. But a few isolated anecdotes do not a conspiracy make.

One thing is clear. As with cocaine and heroin, the buyer’s market in developed nations drives supply. When demand soared for Southeast Asian artifacts after the Vietnam War, looters decapitated almost every statue at Angkor Wat. When pre-Columbian antiques became all the rage in American collecting circles in the 1980s, grave robbers targeted virgin sites in Peru.

Generally, looters prefer small, relatively anonymous pieces. Coins are best—easy to smuggle, nearly impossible to trace. Antiquities, if smuggled in small quantities, can be disguised or mixed with souvenirs. Slap a cheap price tag on centuries-old flatware or jewelry and the average customs officer isn’t likely to catch on.

To disguise larger, higher-profile pieces, black market brokers sometimes engage in antiquity laundering. It’s a scheme similar to money laundering—a broker uses the good name of an unwitting museum to help wash an illicit piece by creating misleading paperwork. In one scam, the shady broker uses a simple query letter to prey on the professionalism and politeness of reputable museum curators. The broker offers to loan artifacts that he expects a prestigious curator will not accept. What the broker really wants is a rejection letter on the stationery of the prestigious museum, with boilerplate language that appears to acknowledge the importance of the pieces offered, but regrets that for space, budgetary, or other reasons, the museum is not currently accessing new works. The rejection
letter becomes part of the illicit piece’s provenance, one more document for the disreputable broker or dealer to display. For the buyer—dimwitted or not—such a letter adds an air of legitimacy. If a famous museum considered a piece, but rejected it for space reasons, it must be clean, no?

But when an antiquity is as well known as the backflap, the black market is the only choice.

M
ENDEZ CALLED ME
a few days after we met on the Turnpike.

He seemed suspicious and spoke slowly. “Bob, I checked and you’re not a lawyer.”

He had me.

I shouldn’t have blurted out the lawyer bit without arranging for a proper cover. I’d screwed up. All I could do was bluster, rely on the old adage that the best defense is a good offense.

I jumped in strong, nearly shouting into the phone.
“You’re
checking up on
me?
You didn’t call the state bar, did you? Now they’re going to call me, ask me what I’m doing practicing law in Jersey. Shit. You’re screwing it all up—drawing attention to me!”

“Bob, I—”

“Jesus, you really, really—you wanna know why I’m not freakin’ listed?
I’m disbarred
, Orlando.
Disbarred.”
Before he could ask how or why, I said, “I got into a thing with my wife. Let’s just say there was violence. And boom! They took my license.”

There was silence on the other end of the line. The new lie worked. It shut him down, backed him off. Mendez was like most guys: He was reluctant to press for personal details about another man’s marriage, especially anything related to domestic violence.

There was nothing left to discuss. Mendez even apologized.

Garcia called back two weeks later. His voice betrayed his excitement. “Bob, I’m in New York. We’ve got it.” The backflap was stored safely at the Panamanian consulate in Manhattan, he said,
and Garcia wanted to make the exchange there. “It’s perfect. It’s good,” he said, because the consulate offered the same protections as an embassy. The building and grounds were the sovereign territory of Panama, outside U.S. jurisdiction and American laws. What’s more, Garcia revealed, the top man at the consulate was in on the deal. In fact, Garcia bragged, the consul was the mule. He’d used his diplomatic status to smuggle the backflap from Panama to New York.

“It’s good, then,” Garcia reassured me. “When can you come up?”

I stalled for time. “That’s great, great. Good news.”

But it wasn’t. I couldn’t arrest anyone inside a foreign consulate, much less have backup agents tail me. I needed to draw Garcia out, and I knew I still held an ace: Garcia and his crew were already committed. They’d invested a great deal of time and money, made a down payment in Peru, and arranged to sneak the backflap into the United States. They might be cautious, but I knew they were also hungry.

“Look, I understand you want to do it up there, at the consulate,” I said. “But here’s the deal: My authenticator, he’s an old guy. Not in such good heath. Doesn’t like to travel. So I think you’re going to have to bring the backflap down here.”

Garcia didn’t say anything for a few seconds. Then he said, “You have the money?”

Bingo. He was hooked. I said, “We’ve got the money, we got the money. One point six mil. What’s your fax number? I’ll send you a bank statement.”

Garcia gave me the number, and I asked him how he wanted the $1.6 million. I wanted him thinking about the money, not about where he could meet me or whether he could trust me. He asked for $665,000 cash and $935,000 in wire transfers to bank accounts in Miami, Peru, Panama, and Venezuela.

I jotted down names and numbers.

“Got it—see you tomorrow.” With the sale closed, I got off the line as quickly as possible, before he could think of anything else.

I called Goldman and filled him in: I would meet Garcia and Mendez at the same Turnpike rest stop at noon, then we’d drive to Philadelphia to meet the Gold Man.

T
HIS TIME
, G
ARCIA
and Mendez arrived even earlier—11:24 a.m., according to the surveillance team—and in style, inside a dark green Lincoln Continental with diplomatic tags, a third man behind the wheel. They backed into a spot, positioning the trunk only a few yards from the picnic tables. Mendez and the third man, a strapping, gray-haired gentleman in a dark suit, grabbed a table and scanned the crisp October sky. Garcia walked over to the Burger King and returned with two coffees.

At 11:54 a.m., I pulled into a nearby parking space with my undercover partner, Anibal Molina.

Garcia greeted me warmly. “Bob!”

“Hey Denis, how’re you doing, buddy?”

The third man stepped in front of Garcia and handed me his card. “Frank Iglesias, Consul General de Panama, New York.” He was a bear of a man—six-one and at least 230 pounds—but he used the buttery voice of a seasoned diplomat. “How nice to meet you,” he said.

We moved to the trunk and Mendez popped it. He opened a cheap black suitcase and pushed aside a pile of white T-shirts, revealing a large gold object ensconced in plastic bubble wrap—the backflap. Mendez reached into the suitcase, but I jumped in front of him. “Let me pull it out,” I said.

I lifted the backflap from the trunk and tried to contain my excitement as I considered its long journey—a Peruvian national treasure, buried for seventeen centuries, stolen by grave robbers and missing for a decade, now glistening in the New Jersey sun, rescued in part by a pair of unwitting Miami smugglers.

I beamed. “You really did it!” I said, my enthusiasm genuine. “Congratulations!” I laid the backflap back in the suitcase and bear-hugged Garcia. “I can’t believe it! You guys are pros.” I pumped Mendez’s hand. “This is fantastic. Fantastic!” I closed the trunk. “Let’s go see the Gold Man. I’ll drive slow so you can follow me.”

We piled into our cars and they followed us down the Turnpike, the start of an hour-long ride to western Philadelphia.

After we arrived in the parking lot of the Adam’s Mark Hotel, Iglesias popped the trunk and handed me the suitcase. “OK,” I said, walking toward the lobby, “let’s get this done.” As I crossed into the middle of the lot, reaching a spot where the bad guys had no place to hide, I gave the go-sign—I brushed my backside with my left hand. (The go-sign should always be something you rarely do, so you don’t give it by mistake.) Agents in raid jackets jumped out, guns drawn, shouting, “FBI! Let me see your hands! Down on your knees! FBI!” The agents pinned Mendez, Garcia, and Iglesias on the rough asphalt and cuffed their hands behind their backs. They led the Miamians away, but once they searched the diplomat, they un-cuffed him. Because of his diplomatic status, we had to let him go—for the time being. To prove Iglesias had been there, we shot a picture of him standing next to me. Ever the politician, the consul general managed an awkward smile.

At the FBI offices, we put Garcia and Mendez in separate interview rooms, each with one ankle shackled to a chain bolted to the floor. I brought in the prosecutor to see Garcia.

Goldman flashed his Justice Department ID, smiled, and said, “They call me the Gold Man.”

Garcia closed his eyes and shook his head.

T
HE AFTERMATH OF
every art crime case has two parts: the routine judicial process in which the defendants hopefully go to prison—here Garcia and Mendez pleaded guilty and got nine months—and
the public relations bonanza in which the press goes gaga over the rescue of the stolen art.

This always seemed to baffle supervisors who didn’t appreciate the public’s (and the media’s) love of art, history, and antiquities. To these supervisors, art crime seemed very distant from the FBI’s primary missions of catching bank robbers, kidnappers, and terrorists. Once, years earlier, after Bazin and I had recovered a painting stolen from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, we met with the brass to discuss our ideas for a big press conference. A supervisor laughed at our enthusiasm. “For this little painting?” he said. “You’ll never get anyone to come!” Oh, no, we explained, the painting is a replica of a five-dollar bill by the famous artist William Michael Harnett. It’s an important piece, we said; people will care. The supervisor just laughed louder. Thankfully, we had an ace in the room—Special Agent Linda Vizi, the spokeswoman for the Philadelphia division of the FBI and a friend who shared my interests in history and art. Vizi was tough and intellectual—she’d majored in classics in college, studying Latin, Greek, Russian, Spanish, Sanskrit, and hieroglyphics. She also understood the press in ways her supervisors did not. “I guarantee you,” Vizi told the supervisor, “the five-dollar-bill story will make the front page.” The next day, when journalists jammed the press conference, she ribbed the supervisor. An hour later, he stuck his head in Vizi’s office and announced with an odd sense of satisfaction, “Well, it looks like it won’t be on the front page after all. Waco is burning.” Indeed, the next day’s
Inquirer
front page was dominated by stories about arguably the worst moment in FBI history, the April 19, 1993, assault and subsequent inferno at the Branch Davidian compound that left eighty people dead. But at the bottom of page one, there also was a little story about a long-lost painting, rescued by the FBI.