[CPProt.net] Framing the Case Against Curator. Prosecutors say photos, papers prove a former Getty official knowingly bought looted items.

[MSN CPPnet (Ton Cremers)]

Framing the Case Against Curator
Prosecutors say photos, papers prove a former Getty official knowingly
bought looted items.
By Tracy Wilkinson
Times Staff Writer

December 6, 2005

ROME - Italian prosecutors in the trial of a former curator at the J. Paul
Getty Museum on Monday presented dozens of photographs and documents seized
from art dealers that they said would prove that the curator knowingly
trafficked in looted antiquities.

Marion True, forced to quit the Getty in October, is being tried here on
charges of criminal conspiracy to receive stolen goods and the illicit
receipt of archeological objects. Her co-defendant is Robert E. Hecht Jr.,
an American art dealer based in Paris. Neither was present in court Monday,
and both have asserted their innocence.

Prosecutors on Monday also described the system in which Getty suppliers
allegedly used world-famous auction houses and private collections to
launder artifacts unearthed and smuggled out of Italy.

The trial, which has implications for antiquity-collecting museums
worldwide, has been proceeding in fits and starts since the summer. Monday's
hearing included the first presentation of evidence in open court.

Most of the photographs and documents displayed Monday were seized at
Hecht's Paris home in 2001 and at a warehouse in Switzerland in 1995. The
warehouse was owned by Giacomo Medici, a dealer who was convicted last year
on the same charges that True and Hecht now face. He is appealing a 10-year
sentence.

Lead prosecutor Paolo Ferri said the evidence showed that objects looted in
Italy ended up at the Getty and other prominent institutions such as New
York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. He said that True, Hecht and Medici
conspired to make that happen.

Among the material confiscated in the raids were thousands of Polaroid
snapshots and other photographs. The prosecution presented slides of some of
the pictures, showing cracked Etruscan vases, fragmented marble Roman
statues and pieces of Greek urns, all apparently freshly excavated. Some
were still caked with dirt, others wrapped in Italian newspaper or stacked
in Italian boxes.

Each of the dozen or so Polaroids was paired with what prosecutors said was
the item in its eventually restored state and on display at the Getty or
featured in Getty catalogs.

Maurizio Pellegrini, an archeological consultant to a regional ministry who
testified on behalf of the prosecution, narrated the comparisons. Using a
red-laser pointer, he indicated similarities between an item in a Polaroid
and what he said was the same item at the Getty.

These included a black, 2,500-year-old amphora, or jug, with red athletic
figures; a kylix, or decorative cup, attributed to the Greek painter
Euphronios; and a series of frescoes believed to have been taken from
Pompeii.

True's main defense attorney, Franco Coppi, agrees that many of the objects
may have been taken out of Italy illegally. But he said his client made her
acquisitions "convinced of their legitimate provenance."

Pellegrini also showed pictures of pages from a journal that he said Hecht
had kept. It described meetings with reputed smugglers and plans to obtain
new items. Defense attorneys objected repeatedly to Pellegrini's
interpretation of the journal entries, but Judge Gustavo Barbalinardo
allowed the testimony.

In the journal, Hecht recounts flying to Rome at the urging of a reputed
smuggler and driving to Cerveteri, a site rich in looted tombs, to inspect a
newly discovered psykter, a jar used to cool wine.

"I immediately sent photographs to M. True at J.P.G.M.," the journal entry
says. "Her first reaction was enthusiastic.. She said to bring it to Malibu
as soon as it was cleaned, and she did not find unreasonable the price of
$700,000." 

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