In the early afternoon of September 13, 1995, Italian and Swiss police quietly entered a warehouse in Geneva's Port Franc, the special commercial zone near the airport where international goods can be stored, bought, and sold, discreetly and tax-free. Their destination was a suite of offices leased by Editions Services, an obscure company registered in Panama whose owner was an Italian named Giacomo Medici. Earlier that year, Italian investigators from the Tutela Patrimonio Culturale, or TPC—the arm of the carabinieri charged with protecting Italy's cultural heritage—discovered that the company had sold three ancient marble sculptures that turned out to have been stolen from an Italian collection. They suspected that Medici might have connections to the underground art market and persuaded the Swiss to let them raid the premises to see if other stolen works might be identified.
What the agents actually found was far more shocking. There were hundreds of pieces of ancient Greek, Roman, and Etruscan art —including a set of Etruscan dinner plates valued at $2 million—stuffed into cabinets; voluminous sales records and correspondence between Medici and dealers in London and New York; and finally, binders and boxes containing thousands of photographs and Polaroids of ancient objects, much of which appeared to have originated in Italy. Improbably, the archive included sequential photographs of single pieces from the moment they came out of the ground, in disrepair and covered in dirt, to their finished, reconstructed appearance at the time they entered the art market and were sold for tens of thousands, and occasionally millions, of dollars. In a few cases, there were even subsequent photos of the same objects inside the display cases of well-known museums.
Clearly this was no small-time operation. The TPC had stumbled upon one of the largest and most sophisticated antiquities networks in the world, responsible for illegally digging up and spiriting away thousands of top-drawer pieces and passing them on to the most elite end of the international art market.
A decade later, the shock waves of the Geneva raid are still being felt: In 2004, a Rome court sentenced Medici—whom the TPC had formally arrested in 1997—to ten years in prison and fined him 10 million Euros, the largest penalty ever meted out for antiquities crime in Italy. (He is currently appealing the verdict.) Then, last fall, the TPC used evidence from Geneva to bring two Americans to trial for conspiracy to traffic in illegal antiquities—Marion True, the distinguished former antiquities curator at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and Robert E. Hecht Jr., a top dealer based in New York and Paris. It remains unclear how this high-profile legal battle, which is still underway, will play out. True and the Getty vigorously maintain her innocence, Hecht maintains his, and some of the evidence presented by the prosecution has been called into question.
Still, thanks to the TPC, Italy has persuaded some of the world's most prestigious cultural institutions, including the Getty and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, to turn over numerous prized pieces of Greek and Roman art, many of them traced to Medici. According to Italian law, all cultural objects found in Italian soil belong to the state and cannot be exported. In returning works, the museums are not admitting any intentional wrongdoing, but they are recognizing Italy as the rightful owner. This alone has dramatically colored how the public—and much of the art world—thinks about collecting antiquities: What once was viewed as a culturally salutary pursuit is now likened to hunting endangered species or to smuggling narcotics.
