Page 13 - Bloomberg Businessweek July 2018

“HE’S DOING TERRORISM TOWARD THE AUCTION HOUSES”

that provides services for construction projects. He’s work together to get suspect antiquities pulled from
also advised law firms on provenance research. In June, auction and repatriated. He emailed the photos of the
Denmark’s Aarhus University awarded him a fellowship vase to the chief of Interpol’s art squad, French police-
to study material confiscated from Symes. woman Françoise Bortolotti. “I have just made two new
Tsirogiannis persists because the auction houses identifications at the antiquities catalogue of the forth-
won’t submit photos from their prospective sales for coming Christie’s auction on 18 April 2018 in New York,”
vetting by authorities in countries such as Greece. he wrote, describing the boar and the pot. “Please, for
The houses consider such vetting to be unfairly time- both cases, forward the information and the relevant
consuming. Someone has to do the work, he said, evidence to the U.S. authorities.”
because the market is failing in its responsibility to prove He also sent that email to Matthew Bogdanos, a pros-
that ancient objects haven’t been illegally removed from ecutor in the Manhattan District Attorney’s office who
tombs, temples, and sanctuaries where people dedi- runs a new unit dedicated to antiquities investigations.
cated them to memorialize ancestors: “I cannot stand A colonel in the Marine reserves, Bogdanos handled
that there is such disrespect to the most sacred things the U.S. investigation of the 2003 looting of the Iraqi
and beliefs we have as human beings.” National Museum in Baghdad. In New York he’s repeat-
After I left his home on that March day, Tsirogiannis edly used research that Tsirogiannis has offered as inves-
told me later, he found a match for a bronze Roman fig- tigative leads, including, last year, in the confiscation of a
urine of a boar among the 15 suspect 2,300-year-old vase at the Metropolitan
lots in the Christie’s catalog. It was in Museum of Art that matched a photo in
the Symes files. That evening, after put- the Medici archive.
ting his daughter to bed, he returned to The next morning, Tsiro giannis was

his list. By 11 p.m., he’d vetted 13 more indignant and thrilled at having paired
objects without a match. Tiring, he Lot 26. “It’s profoundly illicit,” he said.
checked Lot 26, the erotic amphora. “It’s all incriminating. It’s pure proof. It’s

66 The pot was Etruscan, made by the pre- quite straight forward, and the Italians
Roman civilization from which Tuscany should get it back today. Not even tomor-
gets its name. He knew it wasn’t in the row.” The boar was a different story.
Symes archive, which he’s practically There was nothing about the photo
memorized. He opened the Medici that indicated recent excavation. The
files, turning to a folder of Italian vases, boar sparkled in what appeared to be a
which held a subfolder of Etruscan showroom. Although Tsirogiannis sees
material and a sub-subfolder of ampho- his work in black-and-white terms, the
rae. Although he initially suspected he’d boar was more gray, raising the question
find it here, there was no match. of whether an ancient object is loot just because it shows
Tsirogiannis had arranged the photos from the up in a disgraced dealer’s archive.
Becchina seizure in Switzerland in the same configu-
ration as the Medici trove. He clicked through. What he family that Giacomo Medici comes from could
appeared on his screen was a picture of a piece of paper Thardly be confused with its Renaissance name-
to which two Polaroids were affixed. It was the erotic sake. Born in Rome, he grew up poor, almost starved
scene in fragments and covered with encrustations, sit- in World War II, and then followed his father into the
ting on a wicker table or chair. On the paper were dates artifact trade, climbing from the family street stall to
from 1993 and a handwritten code that he deciphered as supply museums. After his 2004 conviction, he served
price information—it appeared that Becchina bought it two years under house arrest at his seaside villa. He
for 30,000 Swiss francs (about $20,400 at the time) and paid a €10 million ($11.6 million) fine by renouncing titles
sold it for 47,000. (Becchina was convicted of trafficking to antiquities the Italian police seized from the Geneva
in 2011, but he appealed, and the case ended when the warehouse that weren’t part of his conviction.
statute of limitations expired. He didn’t reply to requests On a recent afternoon in Rome he sat down, smiling
for comment for this story.) and tanned, for an aperitivo, a gold Cartier Tank watch on
Tsirogiannis activated his network, an informal team his wrist. After ordering a nonalcoholic Crodino, Medici,
of police, prosecutors, journalists, and bloggers who who turns 80 in July, ripped into the man he refers to only

A Sardinian idol that was to be sold at Christie’s until Tsirogiannis published this photo from a smuggler