[MSN] Looted Tombs and Severed Fingers Fuel Art Trade, Supply Museums

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Looted Tombs and Severed Fingers Fuel Art Trade, Supply Museums 

(The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of Bloomberg.)

By Vernon Silver 

May 12 (Bloomberg) -- During a March 2001 raid on an antiquities warehouse
in Geneva, police came upon a scene that made their skins crawl. 

The Italian and Swiss officers waded through a room scattered with pots dug
up in Iraq and Italy, a wooden Egyptian coffin sawn into pieces and mummies
of humans and cats. In the back they found cupboards, and inside the
cupboards, boxes. 

``On closer examination, one of the boxes in the cupboards was found to
contain gold rings with the finger bones of the dead still attached to
them,'' write Peter Watson and Cecilia Todeschini in ``The Medici
Conspiracy: The Illicit Journey of Looted Antiquities From Italy's Tomb
Raiders to the World's Greatest Museums'' (PublicAffairs, 384 pages,
$26.95). 

``Clearly, when the tombs had been looted, the hands and fingers of the
long-dead had simply been broken off by the tombaroli, to save time,'' they
write, using the Italian word for ``tomb robber.'' 

The scene is the most vivid of many that Watson, a British journalist, and
Todeschini, a Rome-based researcher and translator, use to make their
argument that museums and private collectors are destroying archaeological
sites -- and therefore human historical records -- through purchases of
antiquities of undocumented origins. 

Wiretaps and Luck 

They tell the story as a detective adventure, following Italian police and
prosecutors over more than a decade that leads to the indictment of a
curator at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and an agreement by New
York's Metropolitan Museum of Art in February to return 21 allegedly looted
objects. 

``The Medici Conspiracy'' refers to Giacomo Medici, an art dealer convicted
by a Rome court in December 2004 of smuggling ancient pots and statues that
ended up in the Getty, Met and many other museums and private collections
around the world. 

Yet this tale isn't so much about Medici, 67, who denies the charges and is
free while appealing his 10-year prison sentence, as it is about the
delicious unraveling of the conspiracy of dealers, restorers, curators,
collectors, auctioneers and tomb robbers. Persistence, phone taps and
incredible luck (evidence is found in a car wreck and several smugglers kept
impeccable records) pave the way. 

Watson and Todeschini's delight in exposing secrets of the trade is tempered
by disgust at the discoveries themselves. 

Cataloging Loot 

In one 2003 raid of a home near Lake Bolsena, north of Rome, Italian police
find hundreds of ancient pot fragments and bronzes. More important, in seven
photo albums and nine diaries seized at the house, the robber cataloged his
loot and kept track of sales from 1997 through 2002. 

Over the four years for which records were most complete, the man excavated
204 tombs, discovered 1,764 objects and ``earned'' 185,000 euros ($235,000).


``This amounts to a tomb a week, each yielding an average of roughly nine
objects,'' the authors write. 

Watson and Todeschini make no secret of the side they take in the debate
over the antiquities trade. In their eyes, the police are the good guys,
while most dealers, collectors and curators are villains. The authors
dedicated the book to the retired general who led Italy's art police,
Roberto Conforti. 

In fact, the authors helped him crack a case they've written about. Watson's
1997 book, ``Sotheby's: Inside Story,'' which Todeschini helped research,
used internal documents from the auction house to show how loot makes its
way to the market. 

Grander Purpose 

He then turned over the papers to the Italian police and has testified at
the Rome Tribunal in the trials of Medici and Marion True, the Getty's
former antiquities curator. True, who is charged with conspiracy and illicit
receipt of antiquities, denies the charges. 

The trials, and others that Italian prosecutors plan to start in coming
months, have served a grander purpose, the authors argue. ``There is a sense
that the legal fate of these figures is, if not an incidental matter, no
longer the main event,'' they write. The Met agreed to return objects, and
the Getty, Princeton University in New Jersey and the Museum of Fine Arts in
Boston are all answering Italian claims privately. 

``The sheer scale of the illicit trade in looted antiquities, its organized
nature, the routine deception, the superb quality of so much of the
material, the close proximity of museum curators and major collectors to
underworld figures --that is now there for all to see,'' Watson and
Todeschini write. 

Nowhere is that body of evidence seen more clearly and completely than in
this one timely volume. 
 


To contact the reporter on this story:
Vernon Silver in Rome  vtsilver at bloomberg.net.
Last Updated: May 11, 2006 21:37 EDT  

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