Page 11 - Bloomberg Businessweek July 2018

“I CANNOT STAND THAT THERE IS SUCH DISRESPECT TO THE MOST SACRED THINGS”
Bloomberg Businessweek
THE HEIST ISSUE

database while being observed. He’s afraid of driving The break-in set off a chain reaction that rocked the
objects underground: If dealers learn that an ancient pot biggest auction houses and museums and, ultimately,
is in Tsirogiannis’s Polaroid trove, it might never again see led to Tsirogiannis’s career. When Sotheby’s published
the light of day because it risks being seized. the catalog for its May 1987 London antiquities sale,
When he finished clicking through the last of Christie’s investigators from the Italian Carabinieri art squad
109 lots, Tsirogiannis was ready to dive into his archive. noticed that three lots appeared to match objects from
It’s meticulously organized so he can fetch images from the burglary. The Carabinieri contacted Interpol, which
one of three major dealers, including Medici, and from gal- relayed a request to the British police to block their sale.
leries and smaller dealers whose photos help him recon- Sotheby’s pulled them from auction. More important,
struct who owned what and when. Within each of these the operation yielded the name of the company that
libraries, he has folders for about 10 object types, ampho- had consigned the three antiquities for sale: Editions
rae in one, kylix drinking cups in another. Those in turn Services SA, based in Geneva and registered in Panama.
are categorized by shape and color. Figurines are sorted Medici owned the shell company, which rented stor-
by animal type—horses are with horses, boars with boars. age space at a gated warehouse complex where foreign
To vet the catalog, he’d made a list of about 15 sus- goods in transit are exempt from Swiss taxes.
pect lots. Then, one at a time, he looked for matches. In September 1995, after a lengthy standoff with the
The laptop screen was filled 14 across with thumbnails shell company’s Swiss administrator, Swiss and Italian
from the Medici folder, and Tsirogiannis’s eyes darted police searched the warehouse. Alongside thousands
left to right as he scrolled through in an intricate game of artifacts, they found Polaroids and rolls of film—more
of Memory, where players turn over two cards than 80 albums with about 4,000 photos. Some
at a time looking for a pair. depicted objects in fragments, encrusted with
He’d barely begun when he needed to run dirt. Others showed the same objects under-
to a lunch meeting. He would continue the going restoration, and yet more depicted them
search that evening; we could meet the next fully restored. In a few photos, Medici posed

64
64 day, he said. As we prepared to leave, he with the same works in American museums.
deleted the downloaded portion of the archive. Sorting out the pictures for Italian prosecu-
Tsirogiannis’s curiosity proved overwhelming. tors was a task that fell to Maurizio Pellegrini,
As soon as I left, he logged back in. “These are a technician from the Villa Giulia Etruscan
things that always have priority for me,” he told museum in Rome, and Daniela Rizzo, an
me later. What he found made him late for his archaeologist there. They sought to match
appointment. By midnight, he’d alerted law each of the thousands of photos to known
enforcement on two continents. pieces in museums and collections around the world.
The evidence they compiled helped lead to the return
he foundation for Tsirogiannis’s work began on the of more than 100 objects from museums globally, includ-
Tnight of April 3, 1986. In the seaside town of San ing New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the J. Paul
Felice Circeo, south of Rome, intruders sawed through Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and Boston’s Museum
the padlock on the massive front doors of a noble- of Fine Arts. Italy seized the objects of apparent Italian
woman’s stone fortress while she was away. They used origin at the warehouse, but many of them stayed in
axes to smash a set of inner doors and set about stripping Geneva under Medici’s control.
the furnishings. On a patio, they found a 2,000-year-old In 1998, Tsirogiannis graduated from the University
Roman child’s sarcophagus carved from a solid block of of Athens, where he’d been studying archaeology and
white marble. They took that and the top of an ancient art history. His career path had been set in 1977. When
marble column they spotted near the kitchen. Using he was a 4-year-old growing up in Komotini, a small
a pickax, they also detached a white marble fireplace town in northeast Greece, his parents had showed him
fashioned from another sarcophagus. It bore a carved news paper photos from the newly excavated royal
bas-relief of a scene depicting sea horses and the head of Macedonian tombs, which included the undisturbed,
Neptune, god of the seas, according to the police report. gold-filled burial place of Philip II, the father of Alexander
Such ancient fixtures had legally made their way into pri- the Great. “They showed me how these objects can be
vate collections through the centuries, long before Italy discovered,” he said. “I found my cause.”
passed its cultural heritage laws in the early 1900s. At university he largely skipped lectures to work on

Lot 26, the erotic amphora Christie’s pulled from auction